One Nation Divisible: What America Was And What It Is Becoming

At the dawn of the twentieth century, two articles flanked the front page of the New York Times. One focused on South Africa and the Boer War, the other on China, the Open Door policy, the prospects for trade, and the competition among nations. The Times anticipated the new century with barely tempered optimism. The year 1899 was "a veritable annus mirabilis, in business and production." Nothing remained untouched. "It would be easy to speak of the twelve months just past as the banner year were we not already confident that the distinction of highest records must presently pass to the year 1900." American progress seemed all the more miraculous because the country was emerging from the lean years of the mid-1890s, when it had suffered its greatest yet depression. Renewed health showed in three areas, reported the Times: the remarkable growth of infrastructure, especially railroads; the great increase in foreign trade, notably in the products of industry that resulted from innovation and industrial reorganization; and in the stabilization of financial markets on account of the "practical disappearance of the issue of silver inflation" and the solidification of the gold standard. The prospect of inflation – the "rapid advance in prices" – remained the one small cloud on the Times' otherwise cloudless horizon.

The Times marveled at the changes in America in the previous century. A hundred years earlier, President Thomas Jefferson led an agricultural nation with "slight foreign commerce" that occupied only a portion of its continent. By the century's end, the products of industry had surpassed those of agriculture as an America that spanned the continent invaded the markets of Europe and the Far East. Worried about competition where they competed with America for manufacturing outlets, European countries looked for ways to counter the new American threat. France's leading economist proposed "a commercial union of all the countries of Europe to establish free trade within their borders and to protect their industries by import duties on American products."

American manufacturing required a massive increase in workers. Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe poured into America in unprecedented numbers to fill the demand for unskilled and semi-skilled labor in factories and on railroads, although legislation driven by fears of competition from cheap labor and xenophobia had virtually stopped immigration from the Far East. As America became a more diverse nation, nativist fears and calls for immigration restriction, which culminated two decades later in quotas, surfaced and helped fuel the anxieties of labor unions. Old stock Americans, worried about the nation's capacity to absorb and assimilate newcomers with different cultures, designed programs of Americanization for the nation's schools and settlement houses.

Optimistic accounts of America at the opening of the twentieth century, like the Times', elided poverty and race. As the Times celebrated American material abundance terrible poverty – soon to be documented by Robert Hunter – haunted the streets of New York City, where perhaps half the population was poor and where poverty, in the absence of a public safety net, meant hunger, malnutrition, cold, and rags. America had become more than ever a land of extremes – of wealth and poverty and of racial privilege and discrimination. The twentieth century began at the nadir of American race relations. Segregation excluded African Americans from jobs, housing, and public space. Recent legislation in many places disenfranchised them. Violent racial hatred erupted in beatings and lynchings. Respectable social science proclaimed their inherent inferiority. Social scientists and public spokespersons also worried about the future of families. Despite warnings by cultural authorities and public officials, married couples turned increasingly to birth control and concentrated resources on their smaller number of children, notably by keeping them longer in school as preparation for entering the changing world of work. They also divorced more often. Women, still largely disenfranchised, remained excluded from most paid employment and from public office, although in the century's early years affluent women pioneered in new careers and the daughters of the poor found work in the new sweatshops and factories of the industrial world. Very few women – whatever their race or class – worked for wages after they had married, unless they found themselves widowed.

At the end of the twentieth century, many of the issues on the national agenda were remarkably unchanged. Among the most important were foreign trade, relations with Europe and China, the dislocation and inequality that accompany changes in the mode of production, the management of massive immigration and heightened cultural diversity, the legacy of racial discrimination, and the redefinition of family and gender roles. These echoes across the century do not mean that America in 2000 was closer to America in 1900 than America in 1900 had been to the nation a century earlier. In fact, everything had changed. The experience of a century past gives us a benchmark against which to measure and observe the distance traveled and to assess the forces driving change. It shows, as well, how social and economic transformation reordered work, family, space, politics, and even culture.

It is the contention of this book that America is undergoing a transformation as profound as the one driven by the industrial revolution of past centuries. This great transformation began in the years following World War II; it underlay the many changes observed in the post war decades, although it was not understood very well at the time; it burst through the old structures with great force following the oil shock of 1973; and it gained a name – globalization – mainly in the 1990s. In The New American Reality, Reynolds Farley describes two revolutions: the 1960s transformation in family and sexuality and the economic polarization after 1973. Both, in retrospect, highlight the discontinuity that distinguishes the end of the millennium from earlier eras in American, indeed in world, history.

As we view America across a century, four major themes link the analysis of a vast body of data. First is inequality. Throughout its modern history, durable, overlapping inequalities have marked America's social structure. It was – and is – one nation, divisible. Despite repeated contractions and expansions in the degree of economic inequality, the income and wealth pyramid has remained durable and steep, with continuities in the distribution of rewards by work, ethnicity, and gender. At the same time, immense individual and group mobility has accompanied this structural durability. We call this coexistence of structural rigidity with individual and group fluidity the paradox of inequality. Inequality, however, has not always worked in the same way; we pay special attention to its changing expression and to its complex and intricate interactions with the history of diversity, which constitutes so large a part of the American experience.

Diversity is the second theme, and it takes three forms: demography, geography, and personal experience. Twentieth-century American history began at a moment when massive immigration from southern and eastern Europe was transforming the nation's demography and culture. Twenty-first century American history began at a similar moment, only the newcomers came largely from Latin America and Asia, and, as a century earlier, their impact on the United States remained uncertain and contentious. The story of the twentieth century is, in part, the working out of the relation between the nation and its new arrivals. The history of demographic diversity is also about race and gender. With race, the story this book tells focuses on the tortuous and paradoxical emergence of a new African-American inequality. It also traces the supersession of the black-white model of race relations by an emerging multiracial and multiethnic pattern that will characterize the nation's future. With gender, the point is not only that the experience of women underwent revolutionary change – the most, in fact, of any group. Rather, the history of gender intersects with the history of immigration and race because the work experience of women and men went at such different angles, with black and immigrant women often pioneering the route to the middle class and reaching near parity with native-born whites more quickly than men. Diversity has always had a geographic side as well. Here, too, there are paradoxes in the story: the reduction of regional diversity through the economic incorporation of the South into the rest of the nation and the hegemony of a national economy, on the one hand, and the segmentation and diversification of urban form with increased racial segregation and suburbanization, on the other. Finally, the history of personal experience exhibits the diversity theme, too. Both the stages in human lives (adolescence, old age) and the characteristics of families traveled a complicated road from diversity toward standardization and then, after about 1960, back toward diversity. All these forms of diversity – demography, geography, personal experience – have intersected with the history of inequality, this book's first theme, in myriad intimate and detailed ways.

The third theme is the role of government. Americans tend to undervalue the contributions of government to economic and social history. Especially in an age that celebrates the market, the role of government in forming the institutions that shape the experience of individuals, families, and communities is not well understood. In our analysis of social and demographic trends in the twentieth century, we found the hand of one or another level of government everywhere, played with increasing visibility and power throughout the century. The institutions of the state and labor market, we show, reduced inequalities after World War II and proved central to the economic and social progress of blacks and women. The erosion of these institutions in recent decades is a prime source of the increasing inequality that defined the history of social structure in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – a story tragically embodied in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the summer of 2005. At the same time, government policies reshaped personal experience, redefining what it meant to "grow up" and "grow old," expanding the chances of ordinary families to educate their children or purchase a home, and forcing Americans to alter their everyday assumptions about women and ethnic minorities. None of the important economic and social trends of the twentieth century can be understood apart from the role of government.

The great transformations at both ends of the twentieth century exploded existing ideas. This impact of events on the ideas that underpin public life is the book's fourth theme. At both millennia, violent, disruptive change upset patterns of work, family, and social experience. What must be grasped is that change was discontinuous. It did not simply intensify existing practices and trends. It was as much qualitative as quantitative, and at both ends of the century eventually reconfigured the nation's economy and society. Whatever the pace of revolutionary change, however, the break with the past is never clean, immediate, or total. Americans therefore lived with a tension between what their nation was and what it was becoming. Social, economic, and demographic transformation, as is often the case, proved swifter than intellectual regrouping. Americans confronted a transforming world with old ideas whose underpinnings had been exploded.

These four themes – the nature of inequality, multiple forms of diversity, the role of the state, and the intellectual impact of discontinuous change – run through the chapters that follow. It is a story with several subplots about individual and group experience, changing opportunity structures, new geographies, and the role of government. What weaves these stories into a larger narrative is their influence on one another. All are prisms refracting two great waves of economic globalization – bookends to the century. At both the start and close of the twentieth century, the reconfiguration of work registered in new patterns of inequality among women and minorities. Immigration resulted in novel social geographies. Fresh channels of mobility forced families to reconsider old strategies. Public policy rearranged the life course and rebuilt structures of opportunity. Events on the ground shattered the categories used to interpret public and private life. In both 1900 and 2000, the impact of massive economic and social change left America one nation divisible, its great fault lines redrawn but potent as ever. The story starts at the turn of the twentieth century with Americans negotiating the excruciating tensions between the local world they knew and the new age of manufacture with its great factories, industrial cities, millions of newcomers, and intimate links to a world economy.