Happy 247th Birthday America
Looking back over our nation’s history at three examples of resilience through adversity
2023 America is in rough shape. Her citizen’s lives are getting shorter, inequality is at pre-Great Depression levels,and monopolies are battling democracy. Political polarization, aided by the information bubbles we inhabit, is greater than in the Vietnam-era and is probably comparable to the 1850s before the Civil War. Yet fundamental geographic, demographic, and technological factors are bright. Our global peer competitors, China and Russia, face major headwinds or domestic instability. If we can only get through the terrible 2020s, the 2030s look fantastic.
The underlying problem is that we just can’t get along, have productive debates, or compromise because we’re talking past one another. The New Deal social model, formed in the Great Depression through compromise, began to fray in the 1970s and is basically defunct today. Our two great political parties, the Democrats and Republicans, are locked in battle over what feels like generational control of the republic. In their battle, they have divided us up against ourselves along every conceivable demographic line. We’re angry, have different facts, and are unable to empathize with our fellow citizens. But all of this turmoil is superficial and underneath lies strong communities, robust government institutions, bountiful geography, and most importantly resilient people. That is why we’ll get through the 2020s and emerge stronger. This post takes a look back at similar moments in American history when the nation grew through adversity: Hamiltonian America, the Civil War, and the New Deal.
Hamiltonian America
The Revolutionary War cost a tremendous amount of money and each colony bore a portion of the debt. Some of the creditors didn’t expect to be repaid and an economic depression had set in. Alexander Hamilton proposed transferring the debt to the federal government and guaranteeing it with the full faith and credit of the US. It worked. All creditors were paid in full and the federal government was strengthened, keeping the fragile Union together.
Most economic activity was agrarian. Manufacturing could not compete with the great powers of Europe. Hamilton proposed tariffs to protect domestic industry. He persuaded enough people, the tariffs were enacted, and the country industrialized. The economy boomed and thirteen colonies on the east coast expanded all the way to California by the Civil War.
Figure 1: Alexander Hamilton
The Civil War
The Founders “punted” on the issued of slavery in the US Constitution. Slavery was more common in the South than the North but was seen as too contentious to get in the way of the many compromises that knitted a loose group of colonies together. But slavery was such a corrosive issue that it tore the country apart less than a century later. By then, the North was more industrial and the South’s agrarian economy was built on cheap slave labor. Admitting new territories as the country expanded west became a political question of whether they would be free or slave territories. When political debate could no longer postpone the resolution of the slavery question, war erupted.
More people died in the Civil War than all other US wars, combined. In some cases, families were split apart as some members joined the Union Army and others joined the Confederate Army. In the end the federal government ended slavery and kept the Union together. This is when people stopped saying “the united states are…” and began saying “the United States is…” It took a while to heal divisions between people, but they eventually healed. By the time Teddy Roosevelt was President after the turn of the 20th century, the US was one nation again.
Figure 2: US Civil War
FDR and the New Deal Revolution
By the end of the roaring 1920s, wealth inequality was at record levels. Republicans had been in power for almost 60 years since winning the Civil War. The stock market crashed in 1929 and the Great Depression followed. Unemployment soared and millions struggled to feed their families. Teddy Roosevelt’s cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, ran for president in 1932 pledging to give “the forgotten man” a “New Deal”. He won in a landslide and was reelected three more times. Democrats also did well in Congress and the “New Deal coalition” gave the Democrats a comfortable ruling majority until the 1990s.
The ”New Deal” is a term for a broad group of policies and government agencies meant to counteract the effects of the Great Depression. The New Deal saw the creation of unemployment insurance (Social Security), infrastructure projects, and jobs programs. Without the government agencies it created, our modern federal government would look radically different. Labor reforms, including the right to unionize, were part of the New Deal and FDR was very pro-union. Republicans didn’t like some of the New Deal but compromised and benefitted from it.
Figure 3: New Deal poster
Post-9/11 Era
September 11th, 2001 kicked of our present stretch of hard times. A series of foreign wars in response to 9/11, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and a once-in-a-century pandemic have ravished the homeland. Federal government spending in response to this series of events has wrecked our balance sheet. And domestic political instability due to these events has led to the worst political polarization since the 1850s.
Figure 4: US debt forecast[i]
Communications Technology
The key difference between these three historical examples and today is communications technology. In the time of Alexander Hamilton most people read newspapers and pamphlets, which typically got information from riders on horseback. During the Civil War, the telegraph was in use enabling quicker transmission of information. FDR was famous for holding fireside chats over radio, which was new at the time and enabled reaching a mass audience.
Today, smartphones, the internet, and Twitter enable on-demand access to all the worlds knowledge, anywhere, anytime. There is so much information that most of us curate personalized “feeds” that reflect our pre-existing views. Algorithms push additional, similar content our way. Compared to the past, the information we consume has never been more different from person to person. As a result, we often find other’s views incomprehensible. We often name-call or at the very least avoid the debate of important issues.
So, this Fourth of July, cut your fellow countrymen some slack. Most people are good, hardworking Americans and our radically different views are only the product of technology that’s barely a decade old.
Author’s note: I’ve posted a couple articles on the website without emailing them out (on what the government can do about labor and Russia). This is something I’ll do periodically going forward.
[i] CBO