History’s Clouded Lens
Last week I cited an article in the Nation by William Greider, which suggested that the broad scope of current-day Republican ambitions was to return the country to the social and political conditions of 1900, when William McKinley was President. For free-market capitalists, this was a golden age of no regulation (not even anti-trust laws), no income tax, no labor movement, no federal government programs to speak of, and no environmental restrictions. From a social perspective, it was also a time when conservative Christian values enjoyed a privileged role in public policy and when white Protestant men bore the unquestioned mantle of leadership.
Politically, Republicans representing the financial interests of Wall Street and the social conservatism of the small-town West and Midwest had run the country in an almost unbroken succession since the Civil War, while the Democrats occupied themselves running one-party segregationist states in the South or corrupt kleptocracies in the ethnic districts of large Northern cities. The President was a self-satisfied simpleton fond of moral platitudes and fighting imperialist wars against straw-man opponents while his backers and cronies made off like bandits and no one really cared.
It’s easy to see why this scenario evokes such nostalgia from current-day conservatives. Not only could prosperous white Christian men go about their business without interference from any government authority, there was scarcely even the language with which to criticize them, outside of the know-nothing agrarianism of the so-called Populist movement or the threatening (and foreign-accented) radicalism of Marx, both of which could be easily mocked and marginalized. American art was safely tame and decorative, and the leading literary voice was the profoundly dull Henry James.
Fast-forward 100 years to an era where the “heroic individual” is beset from all sides. Government takes his money and tells him how to do business. Distasteful foreign and dark-skinned people present themselves shamelessly as his equals and assert all kinds of demands for rights, restitution and respect. The values that endorse his authority are under question from new-fangled educational theories, pointy-headed philosophies, ugly and unsettling art and literature. He’s not even the master of his home anymore, because someone has put ungodly ideas in the minds of his womenfolk that cause them to be competitive, aggressive and insubordinate. No wonder he longs to return to the lost Eden of the dawn of the 20th century.
The problem with the McKinley era, like any historical period, is that it was unsustainable. The cracks and contradictions that brought forth the first wave of progressive reforms in the 1900s and 1910s were already apparent. Millions of industrial workers were suffering in Third World conditions. Unregulated monopolies were squeezing out competition and stifling innovation. Boom-and-bust cycles of inflation and depression wiped out savings with alarming regularity. Talented women, minorities and immigrants (with only a few exceptions) had no avenues with which to pursue opportunities, and creative people had to leave the country to find expression in the arts and literature.
Yes, prosperous White Protestant men were maintained in power and comfort, but at a terrible cost to the rest of society. A few enjoyed unparalleled freedom, while the oppressive hand of numerous social, economic and legal restrictions fell heavily on the shoulders of everyone else. The only way to defend this status quo was (and remains) to reject any and all notion of greater social responsibility, valorize the “rugged individual,” blame the oppressed for their miserable conditions, and define the notion of government so narrowly that it precludes any mechanism for the redress of social or economic inequality. As was the case in the early 20th century, that philosophical position, while intellectually consistent, is sentimentally at odds with the basic values and common decency of most people and fundamentally short-sighted and self-defeating as well.
The majority of Americans – even those of the ruling class – quickly recognized the need for reform. Theodore Roosevelt and William H. Taft were Republicans after all, elected by the same constituency that had put laissez-faire Presidents Garfield, Arthur, Harrison and McKinley in office during the Gilded Age. The income tax was passed by Constitutional amendment – an arduous process requiring the consent of much larger majorities than simple legislation - not because people were eager to have the government reaching into their pockets, but because all other sources of public finance were recognized as regressive and insufficient. Innovations such as anti-trust laws, child labor restrictions, recognition of the right of collective bargaining and various “good government” laws that broke the power of back-room political operatives were not seen as altruistic concessions to the powerless and miserable, but as necessary measures to fix a broken system before it produced a cataclysmic revolution.
While it may be true that the responses to the problems of the Gilded Age (and, subsequently, to the excesses of the 1920s) produced problems of their own, it is vastly oversimplistic to view the political and economic situation of the early 1900s in isolation from its contradictions. Capitalism in the McKinley period wasn’t healthy – it was choking on its own sewage, starving and infecting its workers, periodically bankrupting its backers in boom-and-bust cycles, and strangling its own young through the abuse of monopoly power. The American culture of the time was riddled with hypocrisy and prejudice. Sanctimonious religiosity stifled creativity and intellectual innovation, and cemented in place a social caste system that prevented millions of talented people from reaching self-fulfillment or making greater contributions to society.
Every moment in history is a paradise for someone and hell for everyone else. If you identify with a certain narrow type of “rugged individual,” then the 1900s were indeed a golden age. But time moves on and you can’t fix the problems of today by pretending that the past 100 years didn’t exist. The things that happened in the 20th century happened for a reason. It should be the goal of responsible government to learn from the mistakes of the past and find new solutions, not promise the illusion of paradise through the clouded lens of history.
8:55:10 AM 
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