AMERICA AGONISTES

Society

A hundred years ago, the U.S. strode onto the global stage—and remained there like a colossus. If America can conquer its nostalgia for the glorious Golden Age that followed World War II, it could well own the next century too

MICHAEL ELLIOTT

In August 1974, a few days after Richard Nixon had resigned as president, I left Britain to take up a post at Northwestern University School of Law, in Chicago. That summer, for some reason now long forgotten, the cheapest charter flights to America were from Paris, not London. So on an August evening I lugged my suitcase onto the boat train at Victoria Station, took a night ferry from Dover, watched the white cliffs grow ghostly in the moonlight, and duly made my way to Orly airport.

There we were told that the flight was to leave 12 hours late. This was commonplace for charters, but for me it was little short of calamitous. Instead of arriving at Kennedy airport at two o'clock in the afternoon, to be met (I hoped) by an American friend, I would arrive at two in the morning, with nobody to welcome me.

At J.F.K. I was out of my depth: I had flown only a handful of times, so had little idea of how to handle big airports. Sensing my unease, a student who had been on the flight approached me. He had just spent his junior year of college in Paris, and invited me home for the night. It was now three A.M.; a friend had come to meet him, and so we piled into the car and headed off into the Long Island darkness.

I had no idea where we were going, but half an hour later we arrived at a big house—at least, it looked big to me. My new friend's mother welcomed her unexpected guest, and showed me to a spare room. I woke about five hours later and, following the sound of chatter, walked downstairs, through a kitchen, and out onto a patio where the family were having breakfast. I gulped; and I mean, literally, I gulped.

Excerpted from The Day Before Yesterday, by Michael Elliott, published by Simon & Schuster; © 1996 by the author.

Anyone who grew up in Europe would know why. Though Europe—Britain especially—has weather of seemingly infinite variety, there are limits. Europe doesn't have the hot, still day dripping with humidity; even on the Mediterranean coast, heat is moderated by dryness or sea breezes. But this was midAugust, and this was Long Island, and that was how it was. And so I stood on the patio and, looking over the heads of my hosts, saw a long, perfect lawn swoop down to a pool, and then to a dock, beyond which I could make out, shimmering in a heat haze, a bluegray expanse of water: Long Island Sound.

We were in Great Neck. I knew about Great Neck. I knew The Great Gatsby almost by heart, and I knew that I was now— as Fitzgerald put it—on "a fresh, green breast of the new world," looking at "the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere." The house was owned by a liberal, Jewish labor lawyer from New York. I sat down and was offered breakfast. I hate breakfasts, and mumble through them to the discomfort of anyone sharing a table with me. This was the only one in my life whose details I can remember, and I can, as if it had happened yesterday.

Coffee of a freshness and flavor unlike anything I had ever known was poured from huge pots. Orange juice came in massive jugs. This was new to me. In Britain in 1974, frozen orange juice was a rare luxury; it came in cans not much bigger than a roll of quarters. I was shown how to eat lox and bagels; I knew about cream cheese, just barely, but I didn't know you ate it with fish. Scrambled eggs, sausages—the food and the drink kept coming as if someone had tipped a giant horn of plenty into my lap.

Later, in the kitchen, I marveled not just at the gadgetry but also at the sheer, numbing size of everything. Refrigerators big enough to stand in, dishwashers, a television (in the kitchen!). There seemed to be telephones everywhere; at Oxford, I had friends whose families didn't even have one.

For years, the house in Great Neck epitomized two things for me. The first was America's generosity of spirit. My hosts displayed a neighborliness toward me, despite the fact that I was not a neighbor at all. Second, the house symbolized what it meant to be "modern." Everything in it was new, or seemed so. Everything was light; there was no stained brown furniture, no heavy curtains. Everything was big. A day later, in Chicago, the sense of wonderment continued. Most Americans grow up blase about skyscrapers. But the Sears Tower and the John Hancock building were newly finished: as I drove in from O'Hare they loomed on the hazy skyline like fat giraffes.

I didn't know it then, but the America I saw in 1974 was about to vanish, and with it a golden age in American history. The Golden Age that began in 1945 and ended in the early 1970s took its ineffable shape only because of a conjunction of circumstances which formed a society of a strength, inside and outside its borders, that had not been seen anywhere in modern times. And though that period was an aberration, it has become the great, defining standard against which Americans think everything should be measured. This has placed unbearable demands on Americans great and small, leaders and followers. It has also made it painfully difficult for them to get an adequate fix on the times in which they now live, or to understand a curious, salient fact about their lives: they are miserable.

Americans whine. More than 60 percent of them routinely tell pollsters that they are "dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States."

A whole new academic subdiscipline— the anatomy of American decline—has come into being. One best-seller of the early 1990s had the simple and arresting title America: What Went Wrong?

At first blush, this mood of national angst is hard to fathom. America is far and away the largest and richest economy on the earth. It is the only one of the "supernations"—those which cover great landmasses—blessed with a uniformly benign climate; there isn't a single state in the lower 48 where it is anything but easy to grow that staple of civilization the humble potato. America is blissfully empty. Fly from Chicago to San Francisco and great spaces of unpeopled land stretch out below—emptinesses of a kind that are simply unknown elsewhere in the developed world.

In the Rocky Mountain States, at the end of a tumultuous period of population growth, a little more than 14 million people live on a swath of land about the size of Western Europe; more than 300 million Europeans are packed into the same amount of space.

Uniquely among all the great nations, the United States is insulated by two oceans from the world's trouble spots. It has avoided any invasion of its mainland by a foreign power for nearly two centuries, and were some power foolish enough to try, the United States could swat it like an irritating fly. True, one other country—Russia—has the nuclear capability to threaten anyone it chooses. But America has a full arsenal of the really useful hardware: the spy satellites, the huge airplanes and ships that can project its strength across the world, the technological base which gives humble G.I.'s the kind of equipment that only recently was the stuff of science fiction.

In most of the key technologies of tomorrow-computers, telecommunications, advanced materials—American firms are world-beaters. In a growth industry such as entertainment, American products are so dominant that there is a genuine risk of backlash against Yankee neocolonialism. In all the ways that count, Americans are, as the historian David Potter wrote in 1954, a "people of plenty." So what makes them so miserable?

A billboard I once saw on the road from the airport into Tulsa, Oklahoma, captures the mood of the United States in the 1990s: AMERICA THE WAY YOU REMEMBER IT. That sad little phrase holds the key to understanding why America is an unhappy place.

Americans assume that the years after World War II were "normal," so that any deviation from them is rendered somehow peculiar. But there was nothing normal about the world that America inherited in 1945—unless "normality" means a state where every other nation is knee-deep in rubble. Alone among the belligerents of World War II, America avoided physical devastation: no Stalingrad, no Caen, no Coventry; no Monte Cassino, no Dresden, no Hiroshima. At the war's end, America accounted for 40 percent of the world's output, a higher proportion than a single nation had ever had before.

In the years that followed victory, American society was more cohesive than it had ever been. An external threat from Soviet Communism provided an important unifying force. In the South, blacks led a peaceful revolution which ameliorated the most bitter divisions between the races and ended legally protected discrimination. A husband could earn enough to support a family, a wife could afford to stay at home and raise a few kids, and divorce was still stigmatized and—at least by comparison with what came later—quite rare.

On the twin rocks of its economic and military might, America built a society that was the envy of the world—a society in which ordinary working people could enjoy an unmatched standard of living, with spacious homes and modern appliances. Other nations were kept at bay, like children with their noses pressed to the window, watching a party to which they have not been invited. Immigration was insignificant. America was essentially self-sufficient and scarcely bothered with the business of exporting.

One way to capture just how golden were the years after World War II is to play a little thought experiment. Think what one word—"Detroit"—meant in 1945, and what it represents 50 years later. In the 1940s, Detroit was at the center of the greatest concentration of applied science and technology that the world had ever seen. The crown jewel of that brilliance was a bomber plant built by the Ford Motor Company at Willow Run, 15 miles from Detroit along the new Industrial Expressway, which ran westward from the city across the bumpy, glaciated land that surrounds the Great Lakes. The plant was also near the town of Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan. Ground had been broken in April 1941, and the enormous factory, almost three-quarters of a mile long, was finished by January 1942.

In its first year of operations Willow Run was beset by difficulties. Though many of its workers were local, demand for wartime labor in Michigan was so great that thousands more had to be recruited in the South and Appalachia; locals still sometimes refer to Ypsilanti, the closest town, as "Ypsitucky." Some of the hillbillies couldn't adapt to assembly-line work; others, housed under spartan conditions in makeshift villages built on the edge of the plant, gambled, drank, and whored their time away. Mosquitoes swarmed through the plant until Ford imported a bug-eating fish which Mussolini had found useful in the Pontine marshes of Italy. But the kinks were ironed out: by 1943, at its peak, Willow Run was employing more than 40,000 people; by 1944 those workers were turning out a B-24 every hour. By the time production ceased in 1945, Willow Run had become an authentic American success. All told, it produced nearly 9,000 B-24s.

In al the ways that count, Americans are a people of plenty. So what makes them so miserable?

Willow Run was just the most visible manifestation of a wartime transformation of Michigan's automotive industry. As Detroit and its environs became the arsenal of democracy, the University of Michigan played its part. Ann Arbor's researchers worked on scores of government contracts; the labs hummed with work on advanced materials and on guided missiles designed to intercept enemy aircraft. In fact, when the war was done, G.I.'s from Michigan returned to tell their families that the Germans had never heard of Ypsilanti—but they knew all about Willow Run and its bombers. According to local folklore, when Stalin met Franklin Roosevelt at the Teheran Conference in 1943, the Soviet leader told the American president that Germany was being buried by Detroit's steel. He had good reason to think so; many of the engines in the Red Army's tanks had been made in Michigan.

Local people were intensely proud of the region's accomplishments. In 1946, Malcolm W. Bingay, a veteran editor of the Detroit Free Press, wrote that "for years Detroit has been the talk of the world. European writers on our civilization even coined the term 'Detroitism,' meaning the industrial age. From all parts of the globe, men have come to our doors to gain knowledge and inspiration. Detroit has been hailed as Detroit the Dynamic; Detroit the Wonder City."

The hyperbole was justified. A European visiting Michigan in those days would have stood amazed. In Europe, for example, university education had always been reserved for an elite. By 1948, while servicemen were cashing in their right to higher education under the G.I. Bill, the University of Michigan had no fewer than 21,000 students.

And a European visitor might have noticed the cars on the Industrial Expressway itself—and who was in them. When Willow Run was planned, it was assumed that new bus lines from Detroit to the plant would be needed; it was wartime, and both tires and gasoline were rationed. But the Detroit Street Railways company soon realized that the buses were uneconomical. A newspaper report in 1945 said they never carried "even a sizable fraction" of Willow Run's workers, because the workers were prosperous enough to use their own cars. In the mid-1940s there was nowhere in Europe where this would have been conceivable.

Fifty years later, the condition of Bingay's hometown would have broken his heart. Over the intervening decades, the car industry's workers and management alike got fat, happy, and lazy, thinking that they could keep their markets until doomsday, slow to invest in new models and production processes. Race relations, never great in Detroit, soured in the 1960s. After the awful riots of 1967, white flight to the suburbs left the city's core hollowed out, bereft of the middle-class incomes that would have sustained and increased white-collar employment. A range of pathologies— drugs, crime, out-of-wedlock births— gripped those who were left in the inner city, trapped in an ailing economy.

And so decline took root. In 1950, Detroit had nearly two million people; in 1995 it had barely one million. But though the population shrank by half in 45 years, the number of murders and manslaughters increased fourfold. In 1995 there were 461 homicides in Detroit. America's "crumbling infrastructure" has become one of the journalistic cliches of the age, but the concrete of Detroit deserves the adjective. A drive along one of the city's bumpy, wide boulevards—dodging the whores who stand in the streets at all hours, in all weathers—is like negotiating a minefield. Off the main roads, fine 19th-century homes are boarded up, half burned (on the night before Halloween each year, fires are set all over town). In the summer the inner-city housing reeks of decay and urine; in the winter damp the city almost visibly, drippingly, corrodes. The 73-story Renaissance Center, built at the behest of Ford Motors in 1977 at a cost of $350 million, was sold last spring for what was said to be a mere $75 million.

American journalists like to say that the frontier between San Diego, California, and Tijuana, Mexico, is a unique meeting place of wealth and poverty, of the developed and the developing worlds. That is too hard on Tijuana. For mind-boggling contrasts in the quality of life, the Mexican-American border is rivaled by the line that separates a suburb such as Grosse Pointe, with its faux chateaux and its country clubs, from the horror of Detroit.

All of this is familiar, depressingly so. What is perhaps less familiar—at least, less often remarked upon—is the psychological damage that was wrought by the recent memory of Detroit as a "wonder city." In all truth, it is hardly surprising that those who live there—and can recall the way the city once was—should conclude that America is on the wrong track.

For the men and women, who now run America—and were children or young adults when the nation was at its zenith—memories of the years after 1945 are extraordinarily powerful. An older America has been obscured by the sheer brilliance of the postwar era; understanding it is like trying to make out the shape of a distant shore through the glare of bright sunshine. But if we look at what preceded the Golden Age, we may discover what led to that unparalleled prosperity and—no less important—what the country has to do now.

The muscular bravura of America in 1945 had deep roots in a society which, since its founding, had been both aspirational and entrepreneurial. Take as but one example a small town in Kansas, almost dead on the 99th meridian. Settled in 1873 by a bunch of ne'er-do-well young Englishmen who wanted to hunt foxes among the cottonwoods (and who predictably named their town Victoria), it was saved from oblivion by a hardier bunch entirely. In 1876, Volga Germans arrived from Russia. A square-built, determined lot they must have been, if the statue in Victoria commemorating them is accurate. And they rolled up their sleeves and got to work.

Devoutly Catholic, the Volga Germans erected a cross in the center of the village, and then built a simple frame church. When they outgrew that first church, they built another one, this time of stone. When they outgrew that, they built yet another, which could seat 600 people. And in 1908, when only 1,500 people lived in and around Victoria, they started work on their communal masterpiece, the magnificent Romanesque church of St. Fidel is. Granite was brought from Vermont; Carrara marble was shipped from Italy. Each family had to cut a set amount of stone from local quarries. In just three years the church was finished. It was 220 feet long; its twin towers soared 141 feet above the plain. William Jennings Bryan, the great populist, stopped in the town in 1912 and called the church "the Cathedral of the Plains"; it still deserves the title.

There are thousands of Victorias in the United States —so many that we do not notice them. Nor do we notice the corollary: that there are so few Victorias in the developed world outside the United States—communities which, almost within living memory, have created themselves from nothing. Here lies a key source of the temptation of exceptional ism, of the sense that Americans are both uniquely blessed and uniquely capable, such that any fall from grace is greeted with cries of woe as if the world had ended. From John Winthrop to Ronald Reagan, they have always believed that they were something special. "The greatest single effort of national deliberation that the world has ever seen" was how John Adams, for example, described the Constitutional Convention of 1787; modesty when describing public achievements has never been a conspicuous American characteristic.

But then, Americans have had little to be modest about. Think, for a moment, of the marriage between brain and brawn that Detroit typified in the 1940s. Neither America's passionate commitment to education nor its entrepreneurial drive—not even the combination of the two—was a function purely of the exigencies of World War II. Americans had been founding universities by the score long before 1945. Harvard was founded in 1636, William and Mary in 1693, Yale in 1701.

This passion for higher education wasn't limited to a cosmopolitan, developed Eastern Seaboard. In eastern Kansas, for example, the Methodist Church founded Baker University at Baldwin City in 1858; in 1865, 12 miles away, the American Baptists founded a university in Ottawa; the next year the University of Kansas was opened in Lawrence, 15 miles north of Baldwin City. Three universities opened in eight years, within a little more than a day's trip by horse and buggy, yet in 1860 the total population of Kansas was barely over 107,000.

Just as higher education has a long pedigree, so does the energy of the American economy. By 1850 the National Road, financed by the federal government, stretched from east of the Appalachians to Vandalia, Illinois, linking the seaboard to the agricultural heartland. The Erie Canal connected New York to the Great Lakes. There is a famous passage in de Tocqueville worth quoting: "A stranger is constantly amazed by the immense public works executed by a nation which contains, so to speak, no rich men. The Americans arrived but as yesterday on the territory which they inhabit, and they have already changed the whole order of nature for their own advantage. They have joined the Hudson to the Mississippi, and made the Atlantic Ocean communicate with the Gulf of Mexico." In short, as early as the 1830s, capitalism in the United States was simply more big-muscled, just more damned thrilling than anywhere else.

By 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition in London, America's industry, science, and technology had shaken the Old World out of any economic complacency. Mid-19th-century American business didn't rely just on mass production (an American invention) and the application of unskilled labor. The mechanical reapers with which Cyrus McCormick broke the prairies caused a sensation in London. In the 1850s, firms in Liverpool started ordering ships for the Australian trade not from British shipyards but from those of New England. Donald McKay's yard in Boston turned out clippers—the space shuttles of their time—which could sail more than 400 miles a day. McKay's ship Champion of the Seas, in whose honor Liverpool's children still sang songs a century later, made 465 miles in the southern ocean on December 12, 1854. Europe had nothing to match it.

Sixty years later, America was the world's largest economy—accounting for a little less than a quarter of world industrial output. The United States led the world in the production of natural gas, petroleum (no less than 65 percent of world output), copper, coal, and silver. It lagged behind only South Africa in the production of gold. And it was far and away the world's largest producer of iron ore—the ore-rich hills of the Mesabi Range, deep in the frozen northeast of Minnesota, were the source, beyond any other, of America's industrial might.

This older America, the America on the cusp of World War I, is worth recalling. For today's America much resembles the country as it was at that time. Then, as now, America was a country of immigrants, and then, as now, the immigrants came from "new" countries of origin. In 1910, the number of immigrants from Germany was only a third what it had been in 1890, and the number from Ireland a little more than half. But in the same 20 years, the annual number of immigrants from Italy more than quadrupled, and from the Russian empire it grew fivefold. In those two decades, for example, the Massachusetts mill town of Lowell, which had seen earlier immigration from French Canada and Ireland, received waves of immigrants first from Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe, and then from much more exotic locations—Syria, Armenia, and elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire. In 1900, 43 percent of Lowell's population was foreign-born.

Through the rosy-hued spectacles of hindsight, the immigrants of the first years of this century look familiar: a bit like Grandma, and not at all like the Mexicans and Southeast Asians who now flock to American towns— Lowell among them. But that was not how it seemed at the time. Nativist sentiment ran rampant. Foreign agitators were blamed for labor unrest. Leon Czolgosz, a Polish anarchist, had shot President McKinley; in the recent past, political violence such as the Haymarket incident in Chicago had been laid at the feet of foreigners. During the Great Steel Strike of 1919 in the Monongahela Valley of western Pennsylvania, posters urging the workers to return to their jobs had to be printed in eight languages—English, Polish, Croatian, Italian, Lithuanian, Slovak, Hungarian, and Russian. In 1910, more than 65 percent of all laborers in mining and manufacturing were either foreign-born or the children of immigrants.

The face and sound of America were changed by the great immigration of 1890 to 1910, just as they are now being changed again. For those who are worried about today's immigration, there's a convenient myth that the earlier arrivals became painlessly assimilated into American life, as if they had learned to love baseball and apple pie within weeks of landing in New York. Yet the most cursory research on the immigrant experience shows that there was always a tension between assimilation and the maintenance of ethnic identities.

In the words of a recent study of the Monongahela Valley steel towns, "Within walking distance of Jones and Laughlin Steel Works, a Polish woman . . . could find the right ingredients for making kielbasa, golubki, or duck's blood soup; ... a Hungarian family . . . could attend either the Hungarian Catholic or Hungarian Reformed Church, both with services in their native language; a Slovak worker in Homestead could practice gymnastic routines in the Sokol, or go to a wedding reception at the Russian Hall, with music by a local Gypsy band." The jars of curry paste and piles of tortillas on today's supermarket shelves—or the Buddhist temples which dot northern Virginia—have distinguished antecedents.

The parallels with an earlier America extend far beyond immigration and all its tensions. At the beginning of the century, as at its end, the cities were thought to be strongholds of poverty and degradation. Both the photographs in Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives and the novels of Upton Sinclair conveyed that horrors lurked in the great metropolises. Those horrors (shades of today's debate on the underclass) were not assumed to be merely economic in nature. The plight of the cities was considered to have a moral content, their unhappiness a natural outgrowth of dissipation, ungodliness, and corruption. When the Prohibition amendment was ratified in 1919, the evangelist Billy Sunday made the link between clean living and the state of the cities explicit. "The reign of tears is over," he cried. "The slums will soon be only a memory."

Class divisions were stark—indeed, for all America's current troubles, they were far more vicious then than they are now. From Paterson to Lawrence, from Gary to San Francisco, strikes erupted with an intensity almost impossible to imagine today. In July 1892, Pinkerton thugs hired by Henry Clay Frick landed at the Carnegie steelworks outside Homestead, Pennsylvania, to break a strike. In one day, 12 people were killed, all within view of a national press corps housed in a building that still stands between a library, built with Carnegie blood money, and the gray, empty slab of land where the steelworks once belched.

In 1914, on a day of shame and terror, company goons and National Guardsmen invaded a mining camp in Ludlow, Colorado. Thirteen people, including women and children (many of them immigrants, naturally), were killed in one morning. And the unrest continued after World War I. Wobblies were rounded up and lynched, while in the radical shipyards of the West Coast there was seething discontent.

In the years before World War I, technology was transforming the nature of home, work, and play. Typewriters, assembly lines, and time-and-motion studies were the computers of their day. Electric lighting and water closets (and rolls of perforated toilet paper, invented just before the turn of the century) introduced light and cleanliness into what must have been dark and smelly houses. The movies took the country by storm; by 1910, says historian Thomas Schlereth, there were "ten thousand movie theaters playing to a nationwide audience of over 10 million weekly."

Today, a slew of new inventions— voice mail, fax machines, copiers—have once again changed America's workplaces and homes. For the typewriter, substitute the personal computer. The Internet has become a form of communication as revolutionary in its potential as the telephone once was. New forms of entertainment, from videos to multimedia, have transformed the way people enjoy themselves, just as the movies once did.

Standard Oil, International Harvester, New Ybrk Life-all became as familiar overseas as McDonald's, Microsoft, and Disney are today.

There is one more striking similarity between America at the start of the 20th century and at its end. In the pre-1914 analogue of today's global economy, in which commercial men with letters of credit sauntered into banks anywhere in the world and great steamships carved the oceans, the United States played a full role. The value of American exports expanded almost threefold between 1890 and 1914, and the nature of those exports changed.

British writers, having long (though mistakenly) thought of themselves as denizens of the workshop of the world, wailed about the American goods, most of tip-top quality, which were entering their markets—everything from electric motors to clothing. Arthur Conan Doyle speckled his tales of Sherlock Holmes with muscular, confident American businessmen not only because he wanted sales in America (though he certainly did) but also because such men were a commonplace in Britain.

Just as today, much of America's trade was with the developed economies of Europe. But, just as today, American firms were increasingly looking to Latin America, where Elihu Root, Teddy Roosevelt's secretary of state, had negotiated a series of bilateral tariff cuts. Standard Oil, International Harvester, New York Life—all became as familiar overseas as McDonald's, Microsoft, and Disney are now. President William Howard Taft reorganized the State Department to make it a more efficient representative of American interests abroad. (Some 80 years later, Warren Christopher would do exactly the same thing.)

Trade flowed both ways. Merchandise imports more than doubled between 1900 and 1914, and direct foreign investment in the U.S.—always important—continued its growth. In 1914, according to Mira Wilkins, an economic historian, nearly 20 percent of America's G.N.P. was accounted for by foreign investment—the overwhelming portion of it British—a level which simply dwarfs that of the 1990s.

One man can serve as a symbol of how comfortable American business once was in the wider world. After graduating from Stanford, Herbert Hoover was sent to a mining camp in western Australia. At the time of the Boxer Rebellion he was in Tientsin. He met the Dalai Lama, prospected in the Gobi Desert and Burma—in fact, just about everywhere. For two decades, he ran a mining consultancy headquartered in London, with offices in New York, San Francisco, Shanghai, and St. Petersburg. On the outbreak of war, he was offered a position in the British Cabinet. At war's end, after his faminerelief efforts had saved countless thousands of Europeans, Polish schoolchildren marched through the streets of Warsaw in his honor.

"Mr. Hoover," wrote John Maynard Keynes of the 1919 peace conference, "was the only man who emerged from the ordeal of Paris with an enhanced reputation. . . . [He] imported into the councils . . . precisely that atmosphere of reality, knowledge, magnanimity, and disinterestedness which, if they had been found in other quarters also, would have given us the Good Peace." The 1990s the great decade of global capitalism? Oh, bunk. It hasn't produced a single man who could hold a candle to Hoover.

And this illuminates a larger point. Hoover's combination of efficiency and philanthropy during and after the war illustrates the extent to which America was a great power. True, it was not militarily pre-eminent. Germany and Britain—not the United States—were the nations which had the ships and weapons that could project their military power to the far ends of the globe. (Indeed, the small and poorly equipped American army had spent most of its time since the Civil War involved in police actions against Indians.)

But by 1914, America had already proved that it could redraw the map of the world. From the time of the SpanishAmerican War and the annexation of the Philippines, through John Hay's Open Door policy toward China, and on to Teddy Roosevelt's brokering of a peace between Russia and Japan in 1905, America had shown itself to be the dominant non-Asiatic power in the Pacific, a country with which any other country pursuing sensible policies would want to be friends. The same is true at the century's end.

In key respects, then, the America of 1914 feels familiar. Then, as now, America was a society of immigrants, racked by cultural wars and troubled by an urban underclass. Then, as now, America was a great power, intimately involved in the international economy. Yet Americans today may still think that they have been stuck with an unfair bargain. For one thing, they may think that the sense of community that had seemed to be a part of America's endowment since the earliest days of the Republic has atrophied.

Of all the insights of de Tocqueville, none was more genuinely radical than the importance he ascribed to voluntary organizations. "Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition," he wrote, "are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types— religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute. ... In every case, at the head of any new undertaking, where in France you would find the government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States you are sure to find an association."

Yet by the 1990s it was common to read that such public-spiritedness was on the wane. The very word "community" had become loaded. Often it was used simply to dignify a pressure group engaged in a bit of special pleading— "the arts community" wants this, "the AIDS community" demands that.

In fact, there are reasons to think that America is entering a period when community spirit will be made fresh once more. Nothing so brings a community together as the state of its schools. The uptick of school enrollments in the 1980s was accompanied— mirabile dictu—by a rise in the membership of P.T.A.'s. Women may no longer have as much time to devote to community affairs, but the evidence of Big Brothers, mentoring, and, not least, fathers' involvement in schools suggests that men are partially filling the gap. And who has yet tracked the social significance of one of the most interesting of all contemporary voluntary groups: parentorganized soccer leagues? Take a look at America's suburbs on any Saturday and you'll see thousands of kids, from tots to teenagers, playing the global game. Fifteen years ago, the leagues didn't exist.

In economic life, too, there are signs that a time of turmoil is behind us. The wrenching transition of the American economy in the last 30 years came at a price, a price in upheaval, lost dreams, and dying towns, but it also brought with it great benefits. The foreign competition to which America was exposed as the world came to its shores was the best kind of stimulus for new investment and better design.

The messy, mixed-up kids of TV, early sex, and broken homes turned out to have a natural feel for electronics. The universities which were supposed to be mired in nothing but abstruse debates about political correctness were actually turning out tens of thousands of scientists and technologists, a disproportionate number of them children of those same immigrants whom the nativists would have kept away from America's shores.

IBM was briefly humbled not by the Japanese—much less by the Germans, who hardly have a computer business worth the name—but by Microsoft, Apple, and Compaq, and when Apple and Compaq got a bit too comfortable, they themselves were challenged by nippy upstarts such as Dell and Gateway 2000. Sensible parents despaired when the cable industry managed to push 50 TV channels (with the threat of hundreds more to come) into their living rooms, then realized the race to put something on all those channels had bred an entertainment industry that dominated the world.

Even American family life shows signs of finding a new level of stability and predictability. The shock of change from one family structure to another is behind us. In the 1950s, men were expected to work, and married women, by and large, were not. Then came a violent period in which that assumption was stood on its head. Now most families need two wage earners. In the 1960s, parents did not know if their teenage children would be sexually active or not, and this created a quite novel cultural tension. That tension has been removed; teenagers have sex, and parents know it. We may find that a society can cope with a certain level of both divorce and illegitimacy, as long as neither is growing fast.

If all this optimism about our current state is well founded, what will it do to the real and troubling divisions in modern America, those between social classes? The rediscovery of class marks a genuine decline in the state of America since the Golden Age. It's made no better by saying (though this is true) that pre-1914 America, to which we might be looking for lessons, was classbound, too.

But if the predictions of a new stability in family life are accurate, it will, in time, affect class divisions. It is reasonable to suppose, in other words, that the contribution family breakdown made to the creation of the underclass will, at the very least, not get any worse. Of course, it is not the modern American way to wait for deep social transformations to produce a benign change in behavior. Americans want action.

In the Golden Age, they looked for such action to another unifying institution, the federal government. Insofar as they still do, they look in vain. It seems highly unlikely that Washington is going to be as great a force in the next chapter of the Republic's history as it was in the last. The crises that led to the acceptance of an enhanced role for the federal government—the Depression, world war, codified racism—have disappeared. Americans for 20 years have signaled pretty firmly that they are not prepared to grant Washington additional powers to advance racial equality. Moreover, the very growth of federal government during those periods of crisis has spawned almost as much ingratitude and suspicion as thankfulness.

Yet though America may no longer be in a state of crisis, it still needs glue. The distance between the underclass in Detroit and the plutocrats of Grosse Pointe is far greater than any European country would tolerate, and utterly beyond the frame of reference of Japan. And Americans still show an attachment to local preferences that can make a mockery of national cohesion.

Of the 12 states without a death penalty, almost all are in the Northeast or Midwest. Levels of homicide in the northern tier are typically a third what they are in the South. A generation's worth of educational reform has not touched an immutable fact of American life: the states along the Canadian border graduate oodles more children from high school than the states in the South. A generation of foreign investment in the backcountry of the Carol inas has not altered the swagger, braggadocio, or old-fashioned patriotism of the mountain towns. Immigration from Southeast Asia has not changed Texas.

Of course, those differences are often a source of pride: they make America what it is. Yet the history books tell us that they can be stretched too far, in ways that once led to a great civil war, and that in more modern times stunted the lives of black Americans. Some Americans, at least, fear that they are being stretched too far again. After the House of Representatives passed a welfare bill in 1995 which converted federal programs to block grants to the states, John Lewis, a Democratic congressman who as a young civil-rights worker had been beaten nearly to death, said that "those who come from the South or from urban centers have real reservations about giving the money to states. . . . They can talk about Wisconsin, that's one thing. But in Alabama, where I grew up, or in Georgia, we lived through states' rights and we're concerned about it. . . . The glue that holds our country together—I think we're starting to pull apart."

The natural optimist takes John Lewis's words as a warning; the pessimist takes them as a prophecy. Think how a pessimist would consider a drive, in 1996, that started at Los Angeles airport. You hear a babel of languages—Spanish, Korean, Chinese—as you shove your way to the rental-car counter. You see Mexicans sweeping the floors, clipping the lawns. It's a near certainty that some of them are illegal immigrants, and you grumble inwardly that your tax dollars are paying for their health care and their children's education.

Then you set off north on 1-405 in the direction of Santa Monica, through a jumbled landscape whose features are softened by smog. Your eyes sting. After a few miles you turn right toward downtown Los Angeles on 1-10. To the north, you can make out the hills above Malibu from which the Santa Ana winds whip fires to the ocean. You think about the sheer arrogance of man, choosing to build a heaving metropolis in a place that God treats as a playground.

You drive on. To your left, you see the line of the Hollywood Hills, the houses perched on stilts, the unrepentant habitat of the showbiz moguls who shove mindless dreck into your living room. To your right, you can sense the devastation of South-Central Los Angeles, still scarred after the worst riots of the century. You reach the city center, with its towers owned by predatory Japanese banks. Then it's on through mile after mile of subdivision dropped onto pristine desert, until, after a couple of hours, you come to Palm Springs, a silly pleasure palace, expensive, thoughtless.

Now drive along exactly the same route as an optimist. Start by remembering that those Mexicans, Koreans, and Chinese in the airport are there for a reason: measured by its attraction for those who can choose where they live, Los Angeles is the world's and the century's most successful city. Ask one of those Mexican women what she intends to do when her hard shift is finished and she may say that, in the early hours of the morning, she's off to learn English at a language school. Her children, she will tell you with pride, are both at Long Beach State; they come home for a family supper each night.

Drive north on 1-405, approaching the measured curves of the junction with 1-10, and remember that in 1971 Reyner Banham, architect and critic, wrote that "the intersection is a work of art, both as a pattern on the map, as a monument against the sky, and as a kinetic experience as one sweeps through it." This is America's Louvre, its Colosseum.

Look left, to the houses in the hills of the men and women who created an entertainment industry that has conquered the world. From Penang to Paris, popular culture is fueled by a combination of breathtaking risk, technological genius, and a sense of what mankind finds amusing; the brew was patented somewhere north of Sunset. Look right, to one of the single greatest concentrations of manufacturing industry in the Western Hemisphere; spot the new, aggressive firms started by Indian software engineers, by Korean biologists.

Sweep past the downtown towers for which the foolish Japanese paid much more than their real value. Drive past the east side, where what is probably the most prosperous Spanish-surnamed population on the globe has made its home; drive past Monterey Park, majority Chinese and bursting with talent. Drive past Cal Tech, where Nobel laureates seem to grow as easily as palms, and remember that many countries would kill for a university half as good. Drive by the subdivisions in San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, where working-class families live in a level of comfort still rare in most other nations. Drive by the university campus where they send their children, so well financed by generous taxpayers that their tuition is almost free. Arrive in Palm Springs, where the San Jacinto Mountains rise to pierce a cobalt sky, and watch thousands of ordinary people enjoy themselves in the kind of luxury that their grandparents would have thought the stuff of dreams.

The mixed-up kids of TV, early sex, and broken homes turned out to have a natural feel for electronics.

Why is a glass that is half full (at least) so often described as half empty (at best)? The forces of cohesion that shaped the Golden Age are not what they were, and some of them, like the ability of the federal government to ameliorate social conditions, will be stunted for a long time, in a way that may prove dangerous. But America is not falling apart. Its new immigrants want to become Americans, while most of its black inhabitants have lives more like those of their white counterparts than all but the most optimistic would have imagined in 1945.

Drive from LAX to Palm Springs and you will see that natives and immigrants, blacks and whites display the same addiction to consumer goods and the same veneration of the TV, that they fire up the grill on the same weekend in May, junk their suits for sweatshirts at the same rate, value being a good neighbor in the same way, take the same Pledge of Allegiance, weep at the same Vietnam Veterans Memorial, admire the same Michael Jordan. That may sound a commonplace list; it is not a trivial one.

United in these ways, large and small, America is the most powerful country in the world, a cultural, technological, and military colossus. American officials are as likely to be found mediating between Greece and Turkey as they are to be organizing a change of government in Haiti. American fashion, design, sports, software, and movies dominate the earth. A period of traumatic change in American family life is ending. A vibrant corporate sector and an expanding world economy can provide the growth and shared prosperity which once brought the country together. This is not a bad prognosis for any nation.

At least, it wouldn't be if America could remember more of its history. An older America was once divided by race, class, gender, and region. It overcame those divisions and made itself into a nation that saved the world. "America," Woodrow Wilson wrote in 1889, "is now sauntering through her resources and through the mazes of her politics with easy nonchalance; but presently there will come a time when she will be surprised to find herself grown old—a country crowded, strained, perplexed—when she will be obliged ... to pull herself together, adopt a new regimen of life, husband her resources, concentrate her strength, steady her methods, sober her views, restrict her vagaries, trust her best, not her average members." All of that, and more, Americans once did. Only those who are not Americans should think that they cannot do it again.