The 20th
Century in a Nutshell
The 20th
Century
The 20th
century represents just 1 percent of the time since humanity began to
practice agriculture.
Yet there
was more novelty, more epoch making changes in human life than in the
preceding 99 percent. If humanity seems deranged, even neurotic, it
is because we are trying to cope with immense changes that go far beyond
anything our species has experienced before.
The twentieth
century reflected all the extremes of human nature. It was scarred by
some of history's most horrific examples of brutality and violence.
But it also demonstrated humanity's idealism, inventiveness, and humanitarianism.
It was the most technologically advanced century; it was also the most
ideological and most destructive.
It witnessed
unparalleled growth in knowledge, wealth, nutrition, and health. But
it was also a century of unimaginable savagery. More than 150 million
people perished in war, in concentration and reeducation camps, in government
induced famines, or in genocides.
It was
a century of mass production, mass consumption, mass media, and mass
entertainment--but also of mass murder. It was a century marked by searing
images: of trenches, the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
the death camps.
The Bad
Old Days
What was
the United States like in 1900?
For most
Americans, life was nasty, poor, and short. Life expectancy: 43 years
for whites, 33 years for blacks, about the same as a peasant in 19th
century India. The gap in life expectancy between blacks and whites
was 15 years.
Superficially
traditional family values reigned supreme. 45 percent of women had 5
or more children; 15 percent had 10 or more.
But appearances
were misleading. Single parent households were just as common as today.
20-25 percent of children grew up in single parent homes. The causes-death
and desertion.
Half of
all children lost a parent by the age of 16. Half of all parents lost
at least one child. We have milk cartons with pictures of missing children.
They had newspaper columns: Have you seen my father?
The average breadwinner made just $438 a year and earned just 2/3 of
the family's income. The rest was earned by child laborers. Most teens
were in factories or fields.A boy of 19 earned a promotion because he
had already worked in a textile mill for 11 years.
In 1900,
the average family had an annual income of $3,000 in today's dollars.
The family had no indoor plumbing, no phone, and no car.
The nation's
population was still concentrated in the Northeast. In 1900, Toledo
was bigger than Los Angeles. California was the size of Arkansas or
Alabama.
In 1900,
about 60 percent of the population lived on farms or in rural villages.
Today, just one in four Americans live in rural areas. Fully half live
in suburbs.
The top
five names in 1900 were John, William, James, George and Charles for
boys; and Mary, Helen, Anna, Margaret, Ruth for boys. The top five names
today: Michael, Jacob, Matthew, Christopher, and Joshua; Emily, Samantha,
Madison, Ashley, and Sarah. Florence and Bertha no longer make the top
10,000.
Two of
America's ten biggest industries were bootmaking and the manufacture
of malt liquor. There were only 8000 cars in the country--none west
of the Mississippi River. Dot com communication still meant the telegraph.
The World
in 1900
Certain
years stand out as historical watersheds, as turning points that foreshadow
the future. That was certainly the case with the year 1900.
Concentration
Camp In South Africa, British Commander Horatio Kitchener confined 75,000
families in prison camps. Most quickly died. They were the first victims
of one of the century's most evil inventions: the concentration camp.
Genocide
In Namibia, genocide was invented. The discovery of diamonds brought
German settlers, land grabs and lynchings. After poisoning the water
holes, the native people were driven into the desert. About 80,000 were
bayoneted, shot, or starved. 20,000 survivors were condemned to slavery.
Nietzsche
1900 was the year of Fredrich Nietzsche's death. He voiced many of the
ideas that would rock the 20th century: the death of God, the idea of
a superman who existed beyond good and evil, the will to power, and
the denunciation of slavery morality. Science would displace religion
and philosophy as the chief explanation of the natural world.
Freud Also
in 1900, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, which revealed dark storms
of irrationality beneath of serene surface of civilized order.
The 20th
century was he best, the worst, the most inventive, the cruelest, the
least religious, the most ideological, the most technologically advanced,
the most destructive. It was an epic century of human progress unrivaled
in history. It witnessed unimaginable advances in knowledge, nutrition,
health, and freedom. And also unrivaled horrors.
Century
of Revolution
The 20th
century was a century of revolution. Political revolutions, including
the Russian and Chinese revolutions; the sexual revolution; a revolution
in business organization; and a revolution in women's roles and status.
Some revolutions
are obvious. Others less so.
We usually
think of revolutions in terms of banners and barricades, and the twentieth
century certainly witnessed social and political upheavals. But many
of the twentieth century's most lasting revolutions took place without
violence.
1. Let's
begin with revolutions in technology, science, and medicine utterly transformed
the way people lived.
The scientific
revolution is perhaps the most obvious development. During the 1890s
physics and medicine radically changed our view of the world. The discovery
of X-rays, radioactivity, subatomic particles, relativity, and quantum
theory produced a revolution in how scientists view matter and energy.
Meanwhile,
physicians, during the 1890s, identified the first virus. Laboratory-based
science reshaped the practice of medicine. Beginning with a cure for
yellow fever, scientific medicine eliminated polio and smallpox.
2. A revolution
also took place in health and living standards.
The end
of the 19th century was an era of tuberculosis, typhoid, sanitarians,
outhouses, and horse manure. Each horse deposited 25 pounds of manure
on city streets each day. , It was also a time of child labor, 12-hour
work days, and tenements. In 1900, more Americans died from tuberculosis
than from cancer.
In the
space of just 25 years, life expectancy increased by 30 years and child
mortality fell 10-fold.
In 1900,
femilies spent an average of 43 percent of their income on food; now
they spend 15 percent.
At the
beginning of the century, 40 to 50 percent of all Americans had income
levels that classified them as poor. At the end of the century, that
was cut to between 10 and 15 percent. Until the twentieth centuries,
large numbers of working class men and women faced the poor house as
the conclusion of their working lives. Today, thanks to social security
and retirement plans, most Americans can expect a period of more than
a decade when they no longer have to work.
Household
incomes of African Americans increased ten fold. Although African Americans
still earn less than whites, the gap has decreased. In 1900, blacks
earned about 40 percent of whites. It is now 80 percent.
The average length of the work week decreased by 30 percent, falling
from 66 hours to 35 hours. Because of more holiday and a shorter work
week, the average number of hours worked in a year is half of what it
was in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Meanwhile the percent
of workers on the farm fell by 93 percent.
The percentage
of households with electricity went from 10 percent to near universal.
At the same time, the average American in 1900 had to work six times
as many hours to pay his electric bill than did an America a century
later.
The number of telephone calls per capita increased 5,600 percent. The
number of households with cars increased 90-fold. The percentage of
people completing college was four times higher. Today, more people
(28 percent) have bachelor's degrees than the number of Americans who
held high school degrees in 1900 (22 percent).
3. A third
revolution was a revolution in economic productivity.
Despite
depression, oil shocks, and inflation, the 20c was a century of unparalleled
prosperity. World population grew five fold; production of goods increased
14 times.
Between
1900 and 2000, the world's population roughly quadrupled, from almost
1.6 billion to 6 billion. But global production of goods and services
rose 14-fold. In 1900, the Standard & Poor's 500 index stood at
6.2. In 1998, it was 1085.
4. Another
revolution we are all familiar with is a revolutionary advance in technology.
The most dramatic involved the technologies of medicine, energy, transportation,
communication, and work.
In 1900, there were just 8000 cars in the country-none west of the Mississippi
river. Cars were playthings for the very rich. Technology shrunk the
work week a day and a half.
Women's
Liberation and the Rise of Youth Culture
Let's turn
to the really crucial revolutions, beginning with women's liberation
and the rise of youth culture Some new words entered the English language
during the 20th century: feminism, adolescence, dating, teenagers.
In 1900,
biology was destiny. Women had the vote in just four states and New
Zealand. Just 4.5 percent of married women worked for wages. Today the
figure is well over 50 percent. Women either married or had a career-not
both.
In 1900, women accounted for pone percent of lawyers and six percent
of doctors. At the end of the century, those percentages had risen to
29 percent and 26 percent, respectively.
For the
first time there was a gap between puberty and incorporation into adult
life. In 1900, less than 2 percent of young people graduated from high
school. By 1930 the figure was already over 50 percent.
Rise of
Mass Communications and Mass Entertainment
Another
crucial revolution involves the rise of mass communication and mass
entertainment.
In 1890
there were no billboards, no trademarks, no advertising slogans.
There were
also no bestselling novels, no movies, no radio, no television. No magazine
had a circulation of a million. There was no shared culture that cut
across religion, region, or class.
After 1900,
mass culture became our most influential educator: teaching us lessons
about masculinity, femininity, and glamour.
Modern
sports like football and basketball were inventions of the 1890s, but
were confined to eastern colleges. Print culture still meant genteel
magazines like Scribner's illustrated with expensive etchings.
The End
of Caste Society
In 1900,
inequality was the rule. 939 of every 1000 Americans died without any
property to their name. 90 percent of African Americans lived in the
South, 75 percent on farms, mostly as sharecroppers. 4,500 black men
and women were lynched, more than a hundred a year.
It was also the age of empire. In 1900, freedom existed only for the
upper crust. Empires dotted the globe. The British empire contained
400 million people, a quarter of the world's population.
In the span of 20 years, Europe partitioned 9/10s of Africa. France
ruled Southeast Asia and West Africa. The Netherlands ruled Indonesia
and New Guinea. Japan established a colonial empire in Korea, Manchuria,
and Taiwan. Not to be let out, the U.S. acquired the Phillipines, Guam
and Puerto Rico and annexed Hawaii.
At the
start of the twenty-first century, 88 of the world's 191 countries are
free, with 2.4 billion people--about 40 percent of the total population.
Human subjugation
was the rule, not the exception.
War, Genocide,
Terror
During
the 20th century the human capacity for evil increased exponentially
as a result of improved technology and the increased power of the state.
Ours has been a century scarred by gulags, concentration camps, and
secret police terror. It has been a century of total war. 10 million
died in WWI; 60 million in WWII. At least 100 million died in developing
countries in civil wars and famines.
Technology helped make the 20th century the bloodiest in history. WWI
introduced the machine gun, the tank, and poison gas; it killed 10 million
almost all soldiers. WWII with its fire bombs and nuclear weapons produced
at least 35 million civilian deaths. The Cold War added another 17 million
deaths to the total.
But the other force for destruction was the utopian belief in the possibility
of totally restructuring society and human personality. The old belief
was that humans would be free when the last king was strangled with
the entrails of the last priest. Radicalism in the 19th century meant
changing elites; in the 20th century it meant changing society root
and branch and transforming human nature.
A Revolution
in Government
The expansion
of government was one of the twentieth century's most striking developments.
In 1900, the U.S. government took in just $567 million in taxes. In
1999, $1.7 trillion. Government spending as a share of Gross Domestic
Product in 1913 rose from 1.8 percent to 34 percent.
What was
the driving force for change? The answer: a series of crises that were
totally unpredictable and unexpected.
The Impact
of World War I
The first
crisis was WWI, a war that no one wanted or expected. The AP ranked
WWI as the 8th most important event of the 20c. Everything that happened
in the 20c happened because of WWI: the Depression, WWII, the Holocaust,
the Cold War, the collapse of empires all trace back to WWI.
No event better underscores the utter unpredictability of the future.
Europe hadn't fought a major war for 100 years. At any point in the
5 weeks leading up to the fighting, the madness might have been averted.
The war was a product of miscalculation, misunderstanding, and miscommunication.
No one expected a war of such magnitude. No one wanted one. A continent
at the height of its success decended into senseless slaughter.
Lets take one battle. For six days British artillery bombarded German
lines. Then in a single day, 100,000 British troops plodded across no
man's land. They were met by steady machine gun fire. 60,000 British
soldiers were killed or wounded. At the end of the battle 419,654 British
were killed or wounded.
In 1918, the Germans fired shells containing tear gas and chlorine.
The tear gas forced the British to remove their gas masks. The chlorine
scarred their faces.
WWI destroyed four empires: German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Romanov.
It touched off colonial revolts in the Middle East and Vietnam.
WWI allowed two ideologies to triumph: communism and fascism. It also
paved the way for the Great Depression. For a decade, unemployment averaged
20 percent. In three years, the value of U.S. corporations fell 89 percent.
Nations responded to the depression with totalitarian communism, fascist
dictatorship, socialism, and welfare capitalism.
And finally, WWI created the grievances that produced WWII. The war
ignited mass migration of African Americans from the South. It propelled
married women in unprecedented numbers into the workforce.
Century
of Freedom
Today,
we are both freer and less free than people a century ago. We are more
harried, more stressed, our lives are more structured. Our lives are
more regulated, more supervised, more manipulated. In 1900 there were
no passports and there was little of the professional credentialing
that shapes our lives today.
The crises of the 20th century had an ironic consequence: they doomed
Europe's empires and spread new ideas of freedom. The most significant
development of the 20th century is the expansion of the concept of freedom
and its extension to ever broader groups of people.
In the
19th century, freedom's meaning was surprisingly limited. It referred
simply to equality before the law, freedom of worship, free elections,
and economic opportunity.
But in the 20th century, the meaning of freedom expanded. It now involves
a right to privacy, a right to education, a right to health care, a
right to income support, a right to a clean and safe environment, a
right to freedom from harassment and discrimination.
During WWI, Woodrow Wilson proposed universal self-determination-the
idea that each group of people should have its own government. His secretary
of state commented: "The phrase is simply loaded with dynamite.
It will raise hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost
thousands of lives."
Free speech only became a major issue during WWI, largely because of
the struggles of socialists against the war, labor radicals struggling
for the right to strike, and feminists seeking an end to restrictions
on birth control.
WWII brought a basic contradiction to a head. It underscored the discrepancy
between American ideals of equality and a reality of discrimination
and racial exclusion.
During the 1960s, notions of rights extended still further. The discourse
of rights expanded to include gay rights, abortion rights, the rights
of criminal defendants, and children's rights.
Immense
attitudinal changes took place during the twentieth century. Ecological
consciousness grew leading people around the world to recognize that
the world's resources are not limitless. New standards of human rights
transcending race, ethnicity, nationality, and gender spread.
I predict that the dominant struggles of the 21st century will be struggles
over competing and conflicting rights. Traditional freedoms were universal;
everyone could enjoy freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
But freedom now means self-fulfillment. The new freedoms of individual
rights and entitlements are exclusive. They tend to weaken a sense of
community.
Finally, in trying to export our ideals of freedoms to other societies,
we are likely to confront people who are not willing to abandon their
own cultural values.
That is the
20th century in a nutshell.
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