When was America Great? A Guest Post.

Trump's message is a return to something.    What?  When?

Peter Sage's Introduction to a Guest Post:   I wrote two days ago that Trump's core supporters--working class white men, especially in the South and Appalachia--wanted a return to a time when a working man had the dignity of a middle class income, with the added status-lift of having clearly superior status to a significant blocks of people: everyone black and brown. And women.   I posited that the twelve year period between VJ day in August 1945 and the day Sputnik went up in October 1957 were the best of the best.  (Read my blog entry two days ago for more.)    

White working class men have fallen out of the middle class and they watch black and brown people gain legal equality, if not actual equality, watch new immigrants compete for the jobs they do, and watch factories move to low wage foreign countries.  They resent this. Lots of other people like Trump, but these resentful white men are the core of the core.

Today's guest post observes that Trump could look back to a variety of times as an idyllic golden age of greatness.  The history textbooks that I was given in the late 1950s and early 1960s described American history as the triumphant rise of a great American nation.  Our history was a series of successes: religious freedom seeking Puritans establishing America, the conquering a savage land replacing forests with farms and cities and having Thanksgiving dinners with the native people, a great Revolution and Constitution, and so on, great heros making a great county.   We learned the Oregon State Song: "Land of the empire builders conquered and held by free men, fairest and the best.  Onward and upward ever, forward and on and on, Hail to Thee, land of Free men my Oregon."  The whole history was the unfolding of greatness.

Maybe I was too quick to name an era.   Maybe Trump read the same history books I did in childhood and studied business instead of a more complicated and nuanced history, so he is   simply thinking of American greatness as that gauzy fantasy of greatness we teach children, stripped of problems.  The Indians welcomed whites, slaves treated well, child labor a problem quickly fixed, the wars just and good.  The return to greatness would be a return to a mood of childhood patriotism, not an actual historical era.  (That idea actually fits my Trump as Gatsby idea.)

Trump entered the political stage pointing to problems in America, problems that could be solved by a strong leader and correct identification of the source of the problem: the diminished status of regular Americans being taken advance of by foreigners, by "political correctness" by weak and ineffective leaders, by multiculturalism, by failing to fight for American interests.

Today's Guest Poster Peter Coster began a review of potential "golden eras" and immediately discovered that the issues brought up by Trump are the very concerns have been central in American politics repeatedly in the 20th Century.  , Peter Coster, posed the question to me, "Since Trump wants to make America great again, just when and what does Trump think was so great?"   He has decided to begin answering that question.

Peter Coster's Guest Post

Guest Poster Peter Coster

Donald Trump and his red hat makes me wonder.  "Make America Great Again".  I would love to.  But when?  Which decade were we the top dog?  Numero uno.  The Big Cheese.  You know, really really great.  We were in a perfect world, then something came along to screw it up.  Like the Democrats or something.  Let's take a look.  1900 sounds like a good place to start and take it decade by decade.  I'll examine each decade one by one to discover which one is Donald's favorite.  He never actually said which one, but it must be there somewhere.

So, what was going on in 1900?  We had a bombastic President in Teddy Roosevelt.  He saw the country had some problems and was determined to do something about it.  He was going to make it great.  Take the Panama Canal.  The French had tried it, thinking it would be as easy as building the Suez Canal, which they had built.  It wasn't.  It was incredible hard, but Teddy thought we could do it.  So, he offered a deal to the country of Columbia, who owned the Panama Territory, to get the project going.  Thinking they had Teddy where they wanted him, they got high handed and demanded far more than the place was worth.  So, Teddy offered then a deal they couldn't refuse.  They either gave Panama it's independence, or he'd bomb the hell out of them.  They backed down and Teddy got his canal.  A perfect Trump deal.

Roosevelt "schooling" Coal Companies

The next thing he dealt with was the big corporations.  They had a monopoly over everything from steel, to oil, to the railroads.  Using the little known Sherman Act of 1890, he forced them to break up.  As one baron said "we bought him, but he wouldn't stay bought".  Another win for the country.

To show our strength, he send a fleet of 16 battleships painted white around the world.  Look what we have.  Don't screw with us.  We're a big deal.

So, far we're looking pretty great.  But, what about the life of the workers?  Child labor was a good source of cheap labor.  Laws restricting their work to no more than 10 hours a day were largely ignored.  Children worked the coal mines in West Virginia.  Some devout Christians thought this was a good idea because idle hands were the devil's tools. Efforts to curb child labor was left to the states.  For the adults, the average work week was 12 hours a day, 6 days a week.

There was no income tax, no social security, unemployment insurance or public housing for the aged or disabled.  Life was hard and the government wasn't going to help you.  You were really on your own.  There was no minimum wage law nor laws that prevented poor working conditions.  Employers imported large number of immigrants, who would work cheap, to drive down the cost of wages.  The descendants of these immigrants are with us today.

Of course, women couldn't vote or own property.  They were considered property of their husbands.  Everything they had was legally owned by their husband.  They did start to become teachers, but the superintendents and principals were always male. In a third of the states a woman's earnings belonged to her husband.  Women active in the suffrage movement were described as neurotic, suffering from an urge to imitate men... hysterical or lesbians.

Shocking!   At the same table with a black man

Race relations were also a problem.  Many Southern whites still believed that the Bible proclaimed blacks inferior and a damned people.  Some believed that blacks were lower in evolutionary development than whites.  Many whites believed in the divine right of whites to rule and there was fear that white power would melt away. Meanwhile vigilantism still existed and lynching was common.  In the South, blacks were arrested on trumped up charges to be used by industry as cheap labor.  The victims had no amenities, no wages and beatings for discipline.  The President tried to end this, but Congress did nothing.  In the North, blacks were paid half of what whites were paid for the same work.  Their voting rights were ignored or restricted through a system of pol taxes, literacy tests, and long residency requirements.

In 1910 Jack Johnson, a black man, was the heavyweight champion of the world. A former American boxing champion, Jim Jeffries, came out of retirement to reclaim the title for the white race.  Jack Johnson knocked him out and a race riot ensued at ringside.  Later race riots broke out across the United States in which nineteen people died.

That was life early in the 20th century.  Is that the decade Trump wants to get back to?  Would you want to repeat it?  Would you want to live in it?  Were we a great country then?  If not, perhaps he's talking about a later decade.  Next up: 1910-1920.  Maybe that's the one.