Fanfare For The Common Man

The 20th century has been an era of Willies and Joes (and Thelmas and Louises), whatever country they lived in and whether they wore uniforms or overalls or suits. As it draws to a close let’s sound a Fanfare for the Common Man. For this has been a century when he (and she) stepped out of the shadows of history and led the forces of change. Empires crumbled, dictators fell, colonialists let go, “great men” faded. “Elite” became a dirty word, and–for good and ill–authority in all its guises came under attack. “Liberation movements” advanced abroad (India, Africa, Vietnam) and at home (blacks, women, gays). Democracy, once a controversial form of government, became the norm to which pretty much everyone aspired. And though democracy’s definition was often vague and its operation imperfect, as 2000 approached, the world’s people had a far greater say in their own governance than they did when the century began.

It was hardly a benign century–two terrible world wars saw to that, and the word “genocide” had to be coined for state-sponsored murder on a horrific scale. But there was at least one zone of steady and astounding progress: in medicine, science and technology, there has never been a period of such rapid advance. The beneficiaries were ordinary people. Life was much longer: 79.7 years projected for an American girl born in 2000, only 48.3 for her great-great-grandmother born in 1900. And much easier, thanks to air conditioning, washing machines, refrigerators and credit cards. Americans at the end of the century were richer, better educated and blessed with more free time than they had been 100 years earlier. And American culture, once the province of the highbrow and the avant-garde, overwhelmingly became popular culture. Even sophisticates reveled in big-box-office movies, pop music, pro sports and “The Simpsons.” When Arthur Miller married Marilyn Monroe in 1956, the point was made literally: American high culture had embraced the low.

In the first decade Teddy Roosevelt–trustbuster, big-game hunter, Nobel Prize winner, best-selling author, victor of San Juan Hill–did seem a bit larger than life. In the last decade, Bill Clinton–whatever else might be said of him–does not. Great men have not stood easily on their pedestals. As the flashlights of history poke into dark corners, hardly a hero has been left unflawed. FDR and JFK were adulterers, Joe DiMaggio a bad father, Winston Churchill a heavy drinker. It has reached the point where some people–Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain, Princess Diana–are admired for their faults, as if their lapses made them more endearing. The antihero dominated the culture. Instant celebrities were our idols, and the most common man could become the great man, at least for Andy Warhol’s allotted 15 minutes.

And heroes have not been the only victims of the age. In the realm of ideas and ideology, this has been a Century of the Trash Heap. We are ending the century by tossing out most of the theories that seemed fresh and invigorating 100 years ago. Marx and Lenin, their followers told us, pointed the way to a brave new egalitarian future that worked. It was a spectacular failure. Sigmund Freud burrowed into the unconscious, purporting to discover buried motives and inner demons that could be exorcised by “psychoanalysis.” Today, his work seems less scientific than literary, and the demons of mental illness respond more readily to drugs than to talk. John Maynard Keynes raised the banner of a New Economics, based on the notion that the government should “fine-tune” the free market to achieve prosperity. Today, at least in America, government intervention has fallen into disrepute, and the markets stand supreme. In the arts, the gods of modernism have lost most of their worshipers. Figurative painting is back (Norman Rockwell lives!), James Joyce’s “Ulysses” molders unread on library shelves and T. S. Eliot is remembered for inspiring the pop-musical “Cats.”

Whatever wrong moves we have made in this century, it would be a mistake to imagine that we’ve simply wandered back to where we were 100 years ago. History has no U-turns. But many of the issues that confronted us as the new century began seem almost like premonitions of issues that are still before us. In America, women were demanding the vote, an administration was confronting the titans of industry (Standard Oil was broken up in 1911) and in the arts reality itself seemed to be disappearing–the cubist “Nude Descending a Staircase” created a shock of nonrecognition at the Armory Show of 1913. The comfortable assumptions of the late 19th century were cracking. Many of them were soon to be utterly shattered by the event that, more than any other, set the course of the century–the first world war.

That conflict cost much more than 9 million lives. It swept away four empires–the German, the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian and the Ottoman–and an aristocratic style of leadership throughout Europe. It triggered the Russian Revolution. It bled the treasuries of Europe dry, bringing the United States to the fore as the richest country in the world. It led the way, in Germany, to the advent of Adolf Hitler. It redrew the map of Central Europe but not well: while the victors mouthed lofty Wilsonian principles like “self-determination,” in practice they cooked up a messy tribal goulash that Europe has still not digested. One of their brilliant inventions was Yugoslavia.

Then, in the ’30s, the West slid into the Great Depression. The slump was, in no small measure, another outgrowth of the war, which had left France and England burdened with heavy debts to the United States that could be repaid only with draconian reparations imposed on Germany. The international trading system seized up as countries scrambled to cut back on imports to protect their own industries and their foreign exchange. As millions lost their jobs, the capitalist system itself seemed to be in peril. Among young intellectuals, the Marxist model gained luster, not so much from its achievements in Russia–where mass starvation and brutal population transplants were blissfully overlooked–as from the boom-and-bust harshness of capitalism, which the Depression made so painfully evident.

Enter the New Deal. In Washington, Franklin Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust” conjured up a swirl of government programs to try to break the country out of its paralytic gloom. They formed no coherent pattern–despite the new reverence for government “planning,” the New Deal was a frantic, haphazard affair. For the little man, it could be a godsend: the remote farmer whose house was wired for electricity, the retiree receiving his first Social Security check, the struggling artist commissioned to paint a courthouse mural all had reason to bless the government. But the new programs worked only at the edges of the sagging economy: the Depression was finally broken only by the massive arms buildup of the second world war. Still, the drumbeat of activity in Washington and FDR’s own jaunty bravado did give the country something precious–hope. The stage was set for the great burst of can-do spirit with which America went to war in 1941. As it turned out, the triumph of government planning in the Roosevelt years was not the New Deal but the war effort.

The overarching theme of the century’s first half was the rise of state power. The totalitarian regimes in Germany, Italy and Russia were only the grotesque extremes. The democracies, too–in response to the totalitarian challenge and to the economic breakdown of the ’30s–expanded central government, giving it leverage over the economy and a role in the lives of ordinary citizens that it had not had before. In America, few of the alphabet-soup agencies survived the New Deal; what did survive was a widespread assumption that it was Washington’s job to aid the needy and to guide the economy. This of course made government far more expensive. In 1950, federal spending represented 15.6 percent of the nation’s GNP; in 1900, it was only 2.8 percent. Overseas, the rise of state power was even more pronounced. The nations of West Europe, as they rebuilt after the war, erected elaborate “welfare states,” under which the government took over responsibility for education, health and basic old-age pensions. This was the high tide of what came to be called “social democracy,” capitalism operating under a heavy degree of state regulation imposed for social ends.

The theme of the century’s second half was liberation–of women, of blacks, of information, of colonies around the world, and of people living under communist regimes, most of which collapsed in the remarkable years between 1989 and 1991. Everywhere, established authority was called into question–in education, in organized religion, even in medicine and the law. State power began to recede under a thundering tide of market capitalism. Both communication and travel vastly accelerated; people and commerce were no longer prisoners of distance. A new phenomenon, the Internet, hooked up the entire planet; it existed nowhere (where exactly is “cyberspace”?) and was regulated by no one–a perfect symbol of the increasingly libertarian spirit of the time.

The second half of the century was notable, too, for something that did not happen: the world was not razed by thermonuclear war. This was widely feared–even, according to some polls, expected. The cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union stayed cold, in part because each side was grimly aware of the awful destruction that the other could wreak. The angry stalemate acted as a force for stability and prosperity, at least in the industrialized world. There was no stopping lower-level conflicts, however, in what came to be called the “Third World” as these nations struggled to free themselves from colonialism. India suffered a terrible spasm of murderous violence between Hindus and Muslims when British rule ended. Algerian rebels fought a long war against France. Perhaps inevitably, the anticolonial struggle became enmeshed in the cold war. First in Korea and then in Vietnam, the United States intervened in postcolonial battles to try to bolster the non-communist side when it came under attack. In America, the Vietnam War set off a fierce protest movement on the home front whose reverberations are still being felt as the nation tries to sort out its international role in the post-communist world.

Movements of all sorts, in 1960s America, were the order of the day. It was a decade pumped high with adrenaline (often other substances, too) and swift to embrace moral causes. Marches, sit-ins and mass rallies punctuated a gathering crusade against the segregation of American blacks. If the movement had a starting point, it was an entirely spontaneous moment on Dec. 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Ala. A bus driver ordered the black passengers sitting in the whites-only front section to move to the back of the bus to make room for a white standee. Rosa Parks, who was tired from a long day’s work at a local department store, refused to give up her seat. She was arrested. This set off a citywide bus boycott by blacks, whose spokesman became the 26-year-old pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church–Martin Luther King Jr.

Students turned against their own universities as surrogates for everything they thought was wrong with America. Non-negotiable demands filled the air. So, tragically, did assassin’s bullets. President Kennedy, his brother Robert and Martin Luther King Jr. were all shot–testimony to the power of anonymous assassins to shape history for the worse. Racial rioting broke out in big cities. The nation seemed to be consuming itself with rage.

Out of this frenzy came much that was good. The formal barriers to racial equality came down, racist attitudes became unacceptable and the black middle class grew dramatically. Gay Americans, newly assertive in their cause, gained greater acceptance and stronger legal rights. Women, too, took up the banner of liberation. Their first rallying point was a book published in 1963 called “The Feminine Mystique,” written by a suburban housewife (and former labor journalist) named Betty Friedan. Millions of educated American women, she lamented, had evidently accepted the old mystique that being a good wife and mother was the noblest role to which they could aspire. She dreamed of a world in which men and women would share both housework and access to careers. If the rhetoric of some of the feminists who followed her could be hilariously humorless (“phallocentric”), the movement’s successes rapidly became plain. In 1960, only 37.8 percent of American adult women had paying jobs; by 1990, 57.5 percent of them did. The rapid entry of so many women into the labor force was arguably the greatest social change in the United States of the last 50 years, affecting married life, child rearing, family income, office culture and–not least–national economic growth.

The exuberant ’60s also liberated music. This was the age of the Beatles, of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, of the Fillmore and Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock. With a blast of electric guitars, a new generation busted loose and leapt onstage. Lyrics and melody, those stodgy old staples of the Hit Parade and Broadway musicals, gave way to Sound. Folk music–“This Land Is Your Land,” “Blowin’ in the Wind”–may have supplied the anthems of ’60s protest, but rock supplied its marching beat. Over all this scene floated a sweet haze of marijuana smoke. The youth of the ’60s were hardly the first to introduce narcotics to America–heroin was already a problem, and Cole Porter had sung that “some get a kick from cocaine.” But the young celebrities of rock romanticized drugs, even when, like Joplin and Hendrix, they died from them. Only a decade or so later, cocaine had spread to the affluent white Yuppie set and crack to the inner city, where it started an epidemic of killing. Some of the residue of the ’60s has been dangerous to our social health.

Does sex belong in the dangerous category, too? It was part of the decade’s famous triumvirate–sex, drugs, rock and roll. The FDA approved the birth-control pill in 1960, another milestone in the path of liberation. Women, and men, too, were given a degree of control over their bodies that they hadn’t had before. But sexual freedom also meant sexual promiscuity: the Playboy Bunny became one of America’s mascots and Hugh Hefner a sort of philosopher-king of carnal abandon. In magazines, in the movies and notably on video, taboos tottered and fell. But one didn’t have to be prudish to recognize the dark side. The sexual revolution was definitely not liberating to the teenage girl who dropped out of high school to bring up her baby–or to the young man dying of AIDS.

No good deed goes unpunished, as our ironical age has learned, and we do not have to look further than our educational system to be reminded of this lesson. In the decades after World War II, America flung open the doors of college: in 1950, only 6.2 percent of American adults had four or more years of higher education; by 1997, 23.9 percent did. This meant we had a better-educated population, right? But it wasn’t as simple as that. Because the colleges started taking a much higher percentage of all high-school graduates, standards fell. According to the New York State Education Department, 81 percent of the nation’s colleges currently give remedial courses: their faculty is spending part of its time teaching what should have been learned in high school. In the public high schools, the decline of standards is even worse, because many thousands of students are promoted to the next higher grade even if they haven’t adequately mastered the material at their current level. How to repair the decline of public education is one of the most pressing problems we are handing to the next century.

So the Century of the Common Man has had both a good face and a bad. Old assumptions have been challenged right and left, but it has been difficult to replace them with any new certainties–in fact, the very notion of certainty is alien to the 20th-century cast of mind. Blame the physicists. In 1905, Albert Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity, in which he argued that time and distance were not absolutes, but could be shorter or longer depending on the relative motion between the observer and the thing observed. In 1927 Werner Heisenberg came up with his Uncertainty Principle, according to which, in subatomic experiments, the very act of observation distorts reality in such a way that one can determine either the position or the velocity of a particle, but never both at once. Reality is loosed from its moorings, and the human observer becomes an agent in determining what’s there. At the end of the century these perceptions had been carried to some wild “postmodern” extremes. In literature, “deconstructionists” held that it was readers, not authors, who create meaning in a text. In law, jurists argued that there are no set precepts but simply broad principles so malleable that they can be made to fit whatever seems the best outcome. In other words, almost anything goes.

From the start the 20th century has had a problem with authority. In its early decades, it produced, in Hitler and Stalin, two of the worst authority figures ever to walk the earth. In its final decades it has produced mostly benign ones: Margaret Thatcher (she would probably hate the adjective), Nelson Mandela, Alan Greenspan. Still, the century’s successes all seem to be trailed by a cautionary “but.” Democracy prevails as never before, but many people seem to have lost interest in politics (for one thing, it seems much too slow in a world grown accustomed to instant response). Liberation from imperialist rule or from racial discrimination has not turned out to go hand in hand with prosperity. Science and medicine have performed miracles, but particularly in the realm of genetic engineering, they may pose new ethical dilemmas for the future. The Common Man has more control over his life–new choices, but also new dilemmas. Perhaps that’s what freedom means.

title: “Fanfare For The Common Man” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-10” author: “Christi Vandenberge”

The 20th century has been an era of Willies and Joes (and Thelmas and Louises), whatever country they lived in and whether they wore uniforms or overalls or suits. As it draws to a close, let’s sound a Fanfare for the Common Man. For this has been a century when he (and she) stepped out of the shadows of history and led the forces of change. Empires crumbled, dictators fell, colonialists let go, “great men” faded. “Elite” became a dirty word, and–for good and ill–authority in all its guises came under attack. Democracy, once a controversial form of government, became the norm to which pretty much everyone aspired. And though democracy’s definition was often vague and its operation imperfect, as 2000 approached the world’s people had a far greater say in their own governance than they did when the century began.

In this century, great men have not stood easily on their pedestals. As the flashlights of history poke into dark corners, hardly a hero has been left unflawed. FDR and JFK were adulterers, Winston Churchill a heavy drinker. It has reached the point where some people–Kurt Cobain, Princess Diana–are admired for their faults, as if their lapses made them more endearing. Instant celebrities were our idols, and the most common man could become the great man, at least for Andy Warhol’s allotted 15 minutes.

Then, in the ’30s, the West slid into the Great Depression. The international trading system seized up as countries scrambled to cut back on imports to protect their own industries and their foreign exchange. As millions lost their jobs, the capitalist system itself seemed to be in peril. Among young intellectuals, the Marxist model gained luster, not so much from its achievements in Russia–where mass starvation and brutal population transplants were blissfully overlooked–as from the boom-and-bust harshness of capitalism, which the Depression made so painfully evident. The world economy was saved only by the massive arms buildup of the second world war.

The theme of the century’s second half was liberation–of women, of blacks, of information, of colonies around the world and of people living under communist regimes, most of which collapsed in the remarkable years between 1989 and 1991. Everywhere, established authority was called into question. Both communication and travel vastly accelerated; people and commerce were no longer prisoners of distance. A new phenomenon, the Internet, hooked up the entire planet; it existed nowhere (where exactly is “cyberspace”?) and was regulated by no one–a perfect symbol of the increasingly libertarian spirit of the time.

The second half of the century was notable, too, for something that did not happen: the world was not razed by thermonuclear war. The cold war stayed cold, in part because each side was grimly aware of the awful destruction that the other could wreak. The angry stalemate acted as a force for stability and prosperity, at least in the industrialized world. There was no stopping lower-level conflicts, however, in what came to be called the “Third World” as these nations struggled to free themselves from colonialism. India suffered a terrible spasm of murderous violence between Hindus and Muslims when British rule ended. Algerian rebels fought a long war against France. Perhaps inevitably, the anticolonial struggle became enmeshed in the cold war. First in Korea and then in Vietnam, the United States intervened in postcolonial battles to try to bolster the noncommunist side when it came under attack.

In the 1960s, movements of all sorts were the order of the day. It was a decade pumped high with adrenaline (often other substances, too) and swift to embrace moral causes. From Paris to Port Huron, Michigan, students turned against their own universities as surrogates for everything they thought was wrong. Nonnegotiable demands filled the air. Out of this frenzy came much that was good. Across the developed world, the formal barriers to racial equality came down. Gays gained greater acceptance and stronger legal rights. Women, too, took up the banner of liberation. The rapid entry of so many women into the labor force was arguably the greatest social change of the past 50 years, affecting married life, child rearing, family income, office culture and–not least–economic growth.

The exuberant ’60s also liberated music. With a blast of electric guitars, a new generation busted loose and leapt onstage. Over all this scene floated a sweet haze of marijuana smoke. The youth of the ’60s were hardly the first to experience narcotics. But the young celebrities of rock romanticized drugs, even when, like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, they died from them. Some of the residue of the ’60s has been dangerous to our social health. Does sex belong in the dangerous category too? It was part of the decade’s famous triumvirate–sex, drugs, rock and roll. But sexual freedom also meant sexual promiscuity; taboos tottered and fell. But one didn’t have to be prudish to recognize the dark side. The sexual revolution was definitely not liberating to the teenage girl who dropped out of high school to bring up her baby–or to the young man dying of AIDS.

So the Century of the Common Man has had both a good face and a bad. Old assumptions have been challenged right and left, but it has been difficult to replace them with any new certainties–in fact, the very notion of certainty is alien to the 20th-century cast of mind. Blame the physicists. In 1905 Albert Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity, in which he argued that time and distance were not absolutes, but could be shorter or longer depending on the relative motion between the observer and the thing observed. In 1927 Werner Heisenberg came up with his Uncertainty Principle, according to which, in subatomic experiments, the very act of observation distorts reality in such a way that one can determine either the position or the velocity of a particle, but never both at once. Reality is loosed from its moorings, and the human observer becomes an agent in determining what’s there. At the end of the century, these perceptions had been carried to some wild “postmodern” extremes. In literature, “deconstructionists” held that it was readers, not authors, who create meaning in a text. In other words, almost anything goes.

From the start, the 20th century has had a problem with authority. In its early decades it produced, in Hitler and Stalin, two of the worst authority figures ever to walk the earth. In its final decades it has produced mostly benign ones: Margaret Thatcher (she would probably hate the adjective), Nelson Mandela. Still, the century’s successes all seem to be trailed by a cautionary “but.” Democracy prevails as never before, but many people seem to have lost interest in politics (for one thing, it seems much too slow in a world grown accustomed to instant response). Liberation from imperialist rule or from racial discrimination has not turned out to go hand in hand with prosperity. Science and medicine have performed miracles, but particularly in the realm of genetic engineering, they may pose new ethical dilemmas for the future. The Common Man has more control over his life–new choices, but also new dilemmas. Perhaps that’s what freedom means.