The Good Old Days

THE VAGUE FEELING THAT THINGS are bad and getting worse is only partly due to the fact that certain things are getting worse. Much of the despair really stems from the erroneous belief that many of our problems are new.

Crime is particularly thought of as a modern problem. Yet authorities say crime was considered a major social question a hundred years ago. Crime was so feared that the Charleston News and Chronicle reported: “Murder and violence are the distinguishing marks of our civilization.” Another journal wrote: “Each day we see ghastly records of crime…murder seems to have run riot and each citizen asks… ‘Who is safe?’ “The journal which raised this issue was not the New York Post or the Daily News in the 1980’s, but Leslie’s Weekly in 1868. Statistics indicate that people had reason to be afraid. One expert has estimated that the crime rate between 1860 and 1890 rose more than twice as fast as the population.

One of the most popular current complaints is that the courts have tilted the justice system so far in favor of the defendants that no one is safe anymore. The assumption, of course, is that there existed a period when the courts were tough on criminals, a time when the sheriff got his man and the courts put the man away. Perhaps there was such a time, but when? In William Howard Taft’s day? Taft grumbled that the law so favored the criminal that trials seemed “like a game of chance.” Twenty years later Herbert Hoover complained that everybody “knows full well” that “procedures unduly favor the criminal.” In a statement that could have come from any politician alive today, he said, “In our desire to be merciful the pendulum has swung in favor of the prisoner and far away from protection of society.” In the 1930’s the Wickersham and Seabury investigations concluded, in the words of Bergen Evans, “that a criminal had about a ninety-nine-per-cent chance of escaping punishment.” Well before the Warren Court, the Chicago Crime Commission estimated that “approximately ninety-seven percent of the burglaries and ninety-one percent of the robberies committed in Chicago in 1951 did not even result in an indictment for the offense committed.” And as Evans points out, “an indictment is a long way from a conviction, and a conviction is sometimes a long way from serving a sentence.” Cold-blooded hired guns, who killed for money, had even less worry of being put away. Of some seven hundred paid assassinations in Chicago between the 1930’s and the early 1950’s, there were fewer than ten convictions.

Other mistaken notions involving crime are that fewer people seem to go to jail now than at the beginning of the century, that justice suffers because of plea bargaining, that most people who are arrested for serious crimes manage to get off scot-free.

The first of these canards is easily disproved by statistics, which clearly indicate that proportionately more convicted felons are sent to jail now than sixty years ago when, as historian Charles Silberman has pointed out, “the accused had far fewer protections.”

The belief that the justice system has been undermined in modern times by plea bargaining is based on the erroneous assumption that it is a recent innovation. In fact, as Silberman reports, “it has been the dominant means of settling criminal cases for the last century.” As for the belief that plea bargaining is being used by hard-pressed prosecutors to save time, evidence suggests it’s about as prevalent in slow rural courts as in crowded urban ones. Defenders of the practice, like Silberman, say it is being used everywhere for the very simple reason that it is a just way of making “the punishment fit the crime.”

That arrested offenders usually go free is simply untrue. It’s not even true in New York City. One respected study has shown that 88 percent of the suspects arrested for robbery there in recent years were convicted. Most were sentenced to jail.1

Poverty is another one of those problems which have longer histories than most people imagine. Critics began noticing poverty on a large scale in the United States as long ago as the early 1800’s. Observations about the paradox of poverty, the belief that poverty is out of place in a country as rich as ours, were first made in 1822. “Our territory is so expansive, its soil so prolific,” said the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism in that year, that poverty should be “foreign to our country.”2

If anything, poverty is less of a problem now than it used to be. Nothing we have today compares with the horrible conditions of tenement life common in the Gilded Age, when it was not unusual for a poor family of eight to share a living room measuring ten feet by twelve feet and a bedroom six feet by eight feet. Poverty then was so widespread it is estimated half the population of New York City lived in slums. Today people are worried because twenty thousand New Yorkers are homeless; in 1884 more than forty-three thousand families in New York City were evicted from their homes because they couldn’t make the rent.3

Things weren’t much better in the 1920’s. While a lot of people prospered, most were poor. Frederick Lewis Allen points out that according to a famous study by the Brookings Institution, 60 percent of American families in the golden year of 1929 earned less than the amount considered necessary to meet basic human needs: two thousand dollars a year. Worse, 40 percent lived on less than fifteen hundred dollars a year. In the farm states the situation was even worse. In Muncie, Indiana, in 1924, between 70 and 88 percent of the families earned annually less than the requisite two thousand dollars. In Zanesville, Ohio, in 1926, 70 percent lived below the poverty line.

Since the 1920’s, poverty has declined dramatically. To judge by one study, which took into account the minimum standards of decency established by the government at the respective times in question, the poverty rate fell from 33 percent in 1940 to 27 percent in 1950 to 21 percent in 1960 to 11 percent in 1970. Thus it appears that concern about poverty rose as the problem itself declined. Put another way, all that increased over the years was the Americans’ consciousness of the problem—in itself a positive development.4

At the same time that poverty was declining, the quality of life for most Americans was rising. Historian Ruth Cowan has pointed out that in 1940 “one out of three Americans was still carrying water in buckets, and two out of three Americans did not enjoy the comforts of central heating.” In 1980 only one million housing units out of eighty-seven million nationwide lacked running water; only three million did not have a complete bathroom. Furthermore, in 1980 only sixteen million households made do without central heating, “and the vast majority of those were in parts of the country where such comforts were not necessary.”5

It may be thought, however, that while we have made progress in one area or another, overall we’re worse off than we used to be. But the fact is many of the most characteristic troubles of recent times—high unemployment, instability, bankruptcy—mirror troubles common in the past. Even excluding the Great Depression, one can point to panics and depressions in 1837, 1873, and 1893 that were just as severe as anything suffered in the 1970’s. One expert has calculated that there were recessions in fourteen of the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century. During that period entrepreneurs learned to accept failure as part of the American way of life. It’s been estimated that 95 percent of the entrepreneurs in business at that time failed. Contrary to popular impression, the people who failed didn’t take their setbacks in stride. Even John D. Rockefeller himself later wondered how “we came through them. You know how often I had not an unbroken night’s sleep, worrying about how it was all coming out. All the fortune I have made has not served to compensate for the anxiety of that period. Work by day and worry by night, week in and week out, month after month.”

The pessimists who spoke knowingly about the plight of the country in the 1970’s frequently mentioned in particular the energy crisis, as if that in itself marked a turning point of some kind. Even historians, who should have known better, warned that the country was entering an unprecedented era of decline and limits. Writing in The New York Times, Harvard historian David Donald said economic circumstances had so changed that American history had become virtually irrelevant. He indicated it would almost be foolish to continue teaching American history since the country’s history taught the lesson of abundance, and now abundance there was no more. In the coming school term, he said, his main goal would be to disenthrall his students “from the spell of history, to help them see the irrelevance of the past, to assist them in understanding what Lincoln meant in saying, ‘The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.’ “

Upon analysis, the only thing in dangerously short supply in the seventies may have been historical perspective. As we now know, the energy crisis wasn’t as bad as it seemed. Oil eventually flowed again, Americans learned to conserve, and the inflation rate was cut. Most important of all, Americans proved they could adapt to changing circumstances—just as they had in the past.6

Pollution is another of the great modern problems that aren’t really quite so modern as we think. Nothing may match the possibly fatal consequences of the pollution at Love Canal or the dangers of acid rain, but pollution was so bad in some early industrial communities that the towns had to pick up and move to escape it. One visitor to Chicago in the late 1800’s commented that the pollution was so stifling that during his one week’s stay he “did not see in Chicago anything but darkness, smoke, [or] clouds of dirt.”

In several important ways, pollution today is less of a problem than it was a hundred years ago. New York in the late nineteenth century was so polluted one critic called it a “nasal disaster.” Sewers were often clogged, garbage was strewn about, and pigs freely roamed the streets. (In some cities there were more pigs than people.) Worst of all was the pollution produced by horses. At the turn of the century New Yorkers owned 150,000 horses, each of which produced as much as twenty-five pounds of manure a day—enough to turn even the most fashionable addresses into stink holes.7

That America used to be a more secure place is widely believed but is only partly true. From the end of the War of 1812 until World War II Americans didn’t have to worry about foreign attacks. But earlier they frequently did live in daily fear of outside aggression. In colonial times, as David Hackett Fischer observes, American life was punctuated by the recurrent cry of war. “From the beginnings of settlement to 1815,” he reports, “there was a war in every American generation, and some of these wars were cruel and bloody. It is unlikely that a civilized society, anywhere in the world, has ever survived losses in proportion to those Virginia experienced in its first half century.” New England’s history was hardly better. In the little-known King Philip’s War (1675-76), thousands were killed, more than half a dozen thriving communities were destroyed or abandoned, and several towns suffered extensive arson. Relative to population, the war caused more casualties than either Germany or Russia suffered during World War II. “The Anglo-American population, of course, was very much smaller than these great nations,” Fischer acknowledges, “but the social impact must have been comparable.” In hard numbers, one in every twenty-two Russians was a casualty in World War II; one in every twenty New Englanders was injured or killed in King Philip’s War.8

Of all of today’s social problems, none seems more modern than drug abuse. Yet even drug abuse was widespread a hundred years ago. If we leave aside the millions addicted to alcohol, it’s estimated there were a hundred thousand drug addicts in America in the late 1860’s. One doctor in Ohio insisted that in his town there were more addicts than alcoholics. Cincinnati was said to be so menaced by drug addicts that you could meet opium slaves by the score on almost any street. “They are slaves, abject slaves suffering exquisite torture,” reported a contemporary. “Once in the fetters of opium and morphia, they are, with few exceptions, fettered for life.”9

It would be as foolish to think that things are always getting better as it is to assume they’re steadily worsening. The amazing development is that we now have to be on our guard against undue pessimism. Through much of our history the problem has been excessive and mindless optimism.