Kevin Baker

Having arrived in the 21st century, after surviving the millennium bug, hangovers from millennium celebrations and the protests of millennium purists who say it’s still the last millennium, perhaps we can now settle down and narrow our focus from 1,000 to 100 years. The 20th century was one in which the world was clearly dominated by the United States, which led the charge to victory in two hot wars and one cold one. Rapid advances in medicine have almost doubled our life expectancy since the beginning of the last century, and technology has altered virtually every aspect of our lives. We’re better educated, better clothed and better informed than a century ago. But it’s hard to say if we’re happier.

America at the dawn of the 20th century was a country full of promise and one which had yet to experience its potential. America at the dawn of the 21st century also seems a land of promise, but, for many, the promises are either behind us or broken. The optimism of early 20th-century Americans would be taken today as either Pollyannaish or simplistic boosterism. It’s far more fashionable now to be knowingly cynical or simply coolly indifferent. Having watched a philandering president being impeached by a Congress that had no expectation of convicting him, it’s hard to blame Americans who feel their government and institutions are something less than they should be.

Folks at the turn of the last century had reasons to be cynical as well. Corrupt political machines ran most urban governments, and robber barons and trusts controlled most of the economy. The country was foul with racism. It was a time of exploitation in the workplace, vast disparity between rich and poor and ferment over the future of capitalist democracy. Yet, it was also a era when many of the great social institutions, from the modern labor movement to the NAACP, began organizing vast numbers of Americans who were certain that, through strength of numbers, they could bring change.

Among those who have been looking back to gain some insight into where we are today is historian and author Kevin Baker. As the chief researcher for Harold Evans’ celebrated history, “The American Century,” Baker, 41, spent a decade sifting through the past 100 years. Last year he published “Dreamland,” his second novel, a rollicking tale of late-19th-century New York. It’s garnered excellent reviews, and actor Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company has purchased the film rights. In a conversation from his home in Manhattan, Baker talked about the differences and similarities between American life at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries

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Q: How would you characterize the mood and the expectations of Americans at the turn of the last century?

A: The mood was generally optimistic. I think that it is the nature of Americans to be optimistic. We had all these people who came to this country looking for a new life, and by and large they were an ambitious lot. For instance, my wife’s grandfather walked from Ukraine all the way to Rotterdam and got on a boat to America. You have to be pretty optimistic to do that kind of thing.

However, it was far from a contented optimism. In some ways, it was a lot like today. There was a lot of cynicism about the political process, about the power of concentrated wealth, and about the entire new industrial society. Many people were very discontent with the sorts of jobs they had, working at mindless assembly jobs, doing the same tasks over and over, often under horrendous conditions. So there was tremendous ferment, but the good part was that there was a real sense that this ferment would lead to change. That may be an important contrast between the end of the last century and the end of this one. Americans were much more confident in their ability, as a people and a democracy, to make changes for the better.

Q: The president who ushered America into the 20th century, William McKinley, is something of a mystery to most Americans today. Most know that he was assassinated, but that’s about it. What was he like, not only as a leader, but as a man?

A: He seemed a rather kind man. He had a wife who was an epileptic, and he expressed great care for her. When he was shot, some of his first words were to instruct that the assassin not be hurt, and then he begged that people be careful how they told his wife. Politically, he was a very traditional Republican. He believed high tariffs would keep American industry strong. He was very pro-business, although he was not a labor basher. In many ways, he was a very typical Midwestern, middle-class American.

Q: Yet if we think of a President who embodied the spirit of the new 20th century, it would be his successor, Teddy Roosevelt.

A: Yes, Teddy Roosevelt was American optimism at its most compressed. He was truly a delightful character. Once, when asked what he thought the American people’s feelings were about a particular issue, he replied, “I have no idea what they think, I only know what they ought to think.” He had come through tremendous tragedy in his own life: His mother and his wife had died on the same day. He was physically tough, once knocking out a man in a bar who called him “four-eyes.”

Q: He was also at the forefront during a period of American imperialism, when the country invaded Cuba, took over the Philippines and Puerto Rico, and supported a coup in Hawaii. What led up to this last gasp at colonialism, and what was driving America to establish an empire?

A: As imperialists go, America was easily the most just of the industrialized nations. We got into a war with Spain, and a lot of the reasons for that war were fabricated, but the fact is, Spain was mistreating the Cuban people. The war was very short and very successful, with the modern American fleet demolishing the Spanish. The worst part of the aftermath was that we betrayed the Filipino nationalists, and took over that country as our colony. This led to a horrific and little remembered war in which a larger percentage of the population in the Philippines was killed than was years later in the war in Vietnam.

There was a lot of opposition to colonialism in the country. And it came from unlikely places. For instance, many industrialists, including Andrew Carnegie, opposed these imperialist actions. Some who supported taking over the Philippines were worried that if America didn’t do it, then Germany or some other nation would. William McKinley told reporters that he had fallen to his knees and asked God what should be done. He said God told him it was our duty to take over the Philippines and to spread Christianity to the people of those islands. God apparently neglected to tell McKinley that the Filipinos had been largely Catholic for over 300 years.

Q: How much of this move to colonize was a result of the nation having achieved its “manifest destiny”? Were people thinking that we’d filled the continent, and that we should just keep going?

A: Yes, the idea of manifest destiny had been highly promoted, by people such as the publisher, William Randolph Hearst. But at the same time, much as today, there was a strong isolationist movement that had misgivings about this. Interestingly, some were powerful Southern senators, whose objections were completely racist. They didn’t want a bunch of dark-skinned people voting and sending representatives to Congress. But many Americans saw imperialism flying in the face of what America should stand for, and they didn’t want our country taking over someone else’s by force.

Q: Like today, this was a period where an elite group was creating enormous wealth. Are there parallels between the industrialists at the beginning of the 20th century and the Internet tycoons at the beginning of the 21st?

A: They were both excellent times to be rich. There were opulent private rail cars-- the equivalent of today’s corporate jet. You might have a huge estate in Newport and an enormous townhouse in New York City. The financier Jay Gould commuted to work on Wall Street via yacht from his mansion in Tarrytown. At the same time, people were living in desperate poverty. Jacob Riis estimated that the Lower East Side of New York was about twice as crowded as Dickensian London and may have been the worst slum in the history of the industrialized world. Because there were no income taxes at the turn of the century, it was very easy for the rich to hold onto their enormous aggregations of wealth.

Two men, J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, had amassed a terrifying control and power over the nation. Morgan controlled virtually all of the nation’s railroads in one way or another, and Rockefeller’s oil trust had a stranglehold on the energy supply. But the people of the time never saw this as a hopeless situation. The Progressive movement came out of this period. You have the Populists merging with the Democrats. There were more radical solutions being proposed by the Socialists, who were able to elect thousands of local officials nationwide. The people of the time demonstrated a tremendous unwillingness to just sit back and accept this.

Today we have greater access to education and more social and economic mobility. But the rich still have a tremendous advantage, and it really bothers me to see Republican candidates proposing a flat tax, which will only worsen the disparity. One interesting comparison between then and now: There was a great deal of philanthropy going on at the turn of the last century that would put to shame the efforts of today’s technology barons. Carnegie and Rockefeller gave away huge portions of their wealth, and created a vast number of institutions that remain active and important today.

It took years of organizing, and the effects of the Great Depression, for America to fully address the disparities between the rich and the poor. One can only hope that we will not require the same long, painful process to address the disparities we see today.

Q: How else can you compare the lives of Americans then and now?

A: Today, Americans are healthier, they live longer, they are better fed and better clothed. They are probably far less racist than they were then, and they are far less susceptible to abuse by their husbands, their employers and by the police and the courts. In all these things, there have been tremendous strides, and it’s been a wonderful century. At the same time, there are things that have been lost, such as a sense of community. Americans are much more likely to spend time in passive forms of entertainment and are probably less likely to go to an educational lecture or join a social-reform movement.

Q: You also seem to be saying that we’ve lost the sense that we can solve many of the problems that we face.

A: Yes, there seems to be a feeling that we are unable to foster change through our collective action. Which is very strange, since we have been able to change so many things in exactly that way. For all there faults and all there losses, things like labor unions have changed a great deal of things in this country. The women’s movement has been tremendously successful. For all the racism that still exists, the black and Hispanic liberation movements are some of the great success stories of our time.

Q: One chapter in our history that bookends the century is our involvement in building, maintaining and, just last month, ceding the Panama canal to the people of Panama. What does that say about us then and now?

A: It was something of a land grab, but not as much as it has been made out to be. Panama did very much want to be free of Colombia. Of course it was a tremendous feat of engineering. But even more than that, there was the medical achievement of conquering malaria and yellow fever, and the brilliance and courage of the doctors led by Walter Reed. I think that having returned the canal to the international community and to the country through which is was created, America has shown that we have attained a certain maturity as a nation.

Q: Finally, what are the lessons learned from the 20th century that you see as important to take with us as we begin our journey into the new millennium?

A: It’s interesting that today we feel that we are moving so fast and things are changing so completely, but people felt much the same 100 years ago. The first skyscrapers were going up, electrification was lighting up whole cities, and the telephone was changing society and the economy. There were new machines such as typewriters and cash registers, and the first automobiles were coming into production. To an American at the beginning of the 20th century, the world was changing just as fast as it’s changing now, and it’s nice to see that we could keep up with that pace of change. Maybe that bodes well for what’s going to happen in the next century. So, in that sense, I guess I still have that old-fashioned American optimism.