The Consolations of History

Want to feel better now? Read Coolidge's 1928 SOTU.

One of the rewards of reading about the past — if we’re honest — is finding relief from the woes that beset us today.

(Brace yourself. This is harsh medicine.)

In 1878, a little girl caught diphtheria. The disease slowly closed her throat and she choked to death. The girl was Marie, daughter of Alice. Alice was the daughter of Victoria — Queen Victoria.

Alice wrote her mother that “the pain is beyond words.” But that was only the beginning of her suffering. Alice’s other children were also stricken with the disease and when she told her son, Ernest, of his sister’s death, the boy cried. Alice held him. In comforting the boy, Alice contracted the disease. She died.

Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of India, sovereign over one-quarter of the planet, could do nothing for them.

Today, we get a jab in the doctor’s office and never hear the word “diphtheria” for the rest of our lives. We have our troubles but thank God we live here and now.

And just like that, you feel better! There must be a German word for that feeling but I don’t know what it is.

Since the arrival of Covid 19, I’ve been leaning heavily on this crutch. Global pandemic killing millions? The Spanish flu was much worse! Russian invasion of Ukraine? Here, read this history of the siege of Leningrad while listening to Shostakovich’s seventh symphony. That will cheer you right up.

This method isn’t always available, however. When Donald Trump became president, I could find worse turns of fate in history, to be sure, but none quite so stupid. I was numb for three days.

A variation on the technique is to look at periods when things were awful but got better in ways, and at a speed, which few foresaw.

The 1990s aren’t remembered this way but read newspapers and magazines from the first half of the decade and you’ll discover profound gloom. In 1994, the big essay in The Atlantic that got the whole political class talking was entitled “The Coming Anarchy.” It started by talking about chaos and poverty in West Africa. That is coming to America and the rest of the world, it glumly argued. A couple of years later and the dot com boom was roaring, faith in a shiny technology-driven future was stronger than at any time since the 1950s, the impending bankruptcy of the US federal government was rapidly turning into budgetary surpluses, and the phrase “holiday from history” was coined. Plus the Segway was invented. Seriously. I was working in a newsroom at the time and vividly remember journalists talking excitedly about the mysterious new mode of transportation that was about to be unveiled. It was going to change everything. (Life-lesson learned: Ignore hype.)

But the titan of turnaround stories is surely the long economic boom that followed the end of the Second World War. It really was a golden age. Massive gains in productivity translated into steady increases in income and rising standards of living, first in the United States and Canada, then in one developed country after another. And none of that was foreseen. In fact, as the war approach its end, most economists saw stagnation ahead. Even a resumption of the Great Depression.

So picture people at the end of 1944. They’re winning the war. Hooray. But they’ve been through three years of hell if they’re American, five if they’re British, French, Canadian, or any of the original Allied nations. And before that? They trudged through more than a decade of the most grinding economic downturn in modern history.

If people ever had reason to be give-up-now despondent, it was these people, at that moment. And yet, these people, at that moment, stood on the cusp of the greatest era of rising living standards in human history. They just didn’t know it.

Feel better yet?

But there’s one more twist on this technique I want to suggest. It’s to look at those extremely rare moments when it was a golden era and people knew it. There aren’t many that match that description. One is 1928 in America.

It was a breathless, thrilling time of jazz and gin and soaring stock markets. And major advances in how most people lived. A decade earlier, indoor plumbing and electricity were still relatively rare in American homes. Now, they were becoming standard. Electric lights, cars, radio, and dozens of labour-saving devices — from electric fans to washing machines — were now fixtures in the lives of ordinary Americans. Life had never improved so rapidly for so many. There were aeroplanes in the sky. Movies — with sound! — in the theatres. The first, flickering images of what became known as “television” had been witnessed. It was thrilling, heady, magnificent time to be alive.

President Calvin Coolidge summed up the moment in his final State of the Union Address, delivered on the 4th December, 1928. (It was literally delivered. Coolidge didn’t like to talk much — hence the nickname “Silent Cal” — so only for the first of his SOTU addresses did he go to Congress and make a speech. The rest were typed up and couriered down the road.)

“No Congress of the United States ever assembled, on surveying the state of the Union, has met with a more pleasing prospect than that which appears at the present time. In the domestic field there is tranquility and contentment, harmonious relations between management and wage earner, freedom from industrial strife, and the highest record of years of prosperity. In the foreign field there is peace, the good will which comes from mutual understanding, and the knowledge that the problems which a short time ago appeared so ominous are yielding to the touch of manifest friendship. The great wealth created by our enterprise and industry, and saved by our economy, has had the widest distribution among our own people, and has gone out in a steady stream to serve the charity and the business of the world. The requirements of existence have passed beyond the standard of necessity into the region of luxury. Enlarging production is consumed by an increasing demand at home and an expanding commerce abroad. The country can regard the present with satisfaction and anticipate the future with optimism.”

Ten months later the stock market crashed. The Great Depression followed. And those who lived in this glorious era spent the rest of their lives looking back with wonder and regret.

History can, and will, turn on a dime.

In a grim patch such as ours, I find that thought deeply consoling.