Past holds key to today's tough issues
Jay Evensen
Instead, things looked pretty much the same as the morning before. The future looked a lot like the past.
Since then, I've come to learn that changes tend to be incremental and that the future is based largely on what we decide to make of it. But I've also learned that I had it right back then. The future does look a lot like the past.
Here are some reminders I've come across recently.
• Anyone who thinks candidates in the current presidential race are dealing with unique issues should step back in time. Look at the political issues of the 1880s, for instance. As author Kenneth D. Ackerman noted in his highly readable book about the brief presidency of James A. Garfield, "Dark Horse," candidates in 1880 were struggling with immigration. "The 120,000 Chinese who had come to America from 1871 to 1880 made them the fifth-largest immigrant group that decade, behind Germans, Scandinavians, Irish and English." A lot of people wanted to shut down the pipeline before cheap labor ruined the economy.
All of these, in one form or another, are relevant issues today.
• Character was an issue in those days, too. Even Garfield had skeletons in his closet, such as his affair, discovered in 1863, with a Mrs. Calhoun of New York. In 1884, Grover Cleveland was elected despite having fathered an illegitimate child, a fact that came out during the campaign. Once in office, he married a 21-year-old woman who was the daughter of his former law partner (he was 49). He had known her since birth. Apparently, America during the Gilded Age didn't consider these things to be political suicide.
• Awhile back, I found a copy of The Saturday Evening Post, dated April 30, 1960. Its cover hyped two stories inside. One was titled "The explosive Middle East." The other was, "The seamy side of college athletics." Of the Middle East, author James Morris wrote, "It is an ominous place, trigger-happy and precarious. Its tempers flare like forked lightning, its grievances grumble among the oil rigs. Its atmosphere is always tense and feverish, and it feels as though one careless political spark could fire a prodigy among explosions ..."
• The New York Times, about 100 years ago this month, devoted considerable space to a fight in Congress over a copyright bill. Composers were upset that new technologies, phonographs and perforated rolls used by player pianos, were robbing them of their intellectual property rights. Anyone watching the writers' strike in Hollywood, or recent legal negotiations with online music distributors, can hear echoes of that 1907 fight.
You can be the first to comment on this story.