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Today’s Turn-of-the-Century Problems

Is America in a new Gilded Age? That’s the contention of Republican political consultant Bruce Mehlman, and in a series of 35 slides, he makes a strong case.

In many ways, problems facing America today resemble those facing what we still call “turn-of-the-century” America, the 1890s to the 1910s. Just as employment shifted from farms to factories a century ago, it has been moving from manufacturing to services recently.

Financial crashes are another point of resemblance, coming precisely 100 years apart. The panic of 1907 was resolved when J.P. Morgan locked his fellow financiers in his library and required them to pony up funds to save failing banks. Something similar happened in 2007, this time with Ben Bernanke in the bowels of the Federal Reserve.

Technology’s providing new products and threatening incumbent businesses is a feature of both epochs — with huge steel mills and automobile factories then and smartphones and mouse clicks today. Monopoly power reared its ugly head then and is doing the same now. Railroads and steel and oil muscled potential regulators then; retail-dominating Amazon and political communication censors Google and Twitter are now.

Income inequality was actually greater in the 1920s (and probably earlier, but the statistics are incommensurate) than today. And immigration as a percentage of pre-existing population was three times as high in peak year 1907 than in peak year 2007.

In all these respects, the problems — or perceived problems — of Americans today more closely resemble those facing the Americans of 100 years ago than they resemble the problems of the era that is generally taken as a benchmark, especially by commentators of a certain age (including me), the two decades after World War II.

But Mehlman’s list is not exhaustive. And the items omitted are perhaps even more troubling than those already mentioned.

Consider family stability. Charles Murray’s 2012 book, “Coming Apart,” documents meticulously how the stable marriage became far less common and unmarried parenthood far more common among the lower third on the socio-economic scale between 1960 and 2010.

But if you look back to 1900 or 1910, the numbers look a lot like the numbers now. Americans then married at later ages, and more people didn’t marry at all in that period than during the postwar years. Divorce was far less common than today, but many more marriages were ended early by spouses’ deaths.

Substance abuse is another common theme. Alcohol consumption was actually considerably higher 100 years ago than it is today; Prohibition, which took effect in 1920, really did significantly reduce alcoholism and improve public health. And though oxycodone was not available then, drugs were a problem.

You can see it lurking just around the corners in the turn-of-the-century novels of Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris and even the aristocratic Edith Wharton. Respectable forces choked off the explicit narratives we are used to today, not because unrespectable behavior wasn’t common but because they knew it was.

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Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.

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