Best and Worst in Post-1877 US History

U.S. History 1877-Present

America has changed so vastly since the U.S. Civil War that it is hard to single out three events that have had the most beneficial impact from the later nineteenth century to the present day. However, in terms of selecting events that have had the greatest impact on the daily lives of Americans in this time period even to the present day it is possible to nominate some specific events. The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920, the introduction of the New Deal under President Franklin Roosevelt, the passage of the Civil Rights Act during the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson are all events which continue to have a positive impact felt by all Americans.

The Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is what permits women to vote. The fact that it was only passed in 1920 is something of a scandal -- it does not often occur to Americans in 2014 that a century ago women were still not part of the political process. Yet it is arguable that, even before voting rights, women were always an essential part of the American political process. After all the Nineteenth Amendment did not come out of nowhere, but came out of a campaign for women's suffrage that dated back to before the U.S. Civil War. This was due to the heavy involvement of American women in a variety of political causes, some admirable like the Abolitionist movement and some slightly perplexing like the Temperance movement. Notable Abolitionist and Temperance leaders were women, and it is the insistence of these women in taking a stance on moral and political issues that ultimately mobilized the campaign for voting rights. But considering that women now actually comprise a majority of the population, numerically speaking, the idea that the vote was withheld for so long strikes most twenty-first century observers as frankly bizarre.

The introduction of the New Deal under President Franklin Roosevelt is crucial to this day because, in essence, Roosevelt's policies saved the American economic and financial system from collapse or even revolution. By the dawn of the twentieth century it became clear that the unrestricted capitalism practiced in America's gilded age was untenable, and resulted in monopolies and trusts which essentially made life untenable for anyone who was not a millionaire. The New Deal should therefore be considered as the culmination of a movement for social reform, to improve the lives of those less well off, and to keep the American overclass from turning American economic life into a rigged casino that operates purely for the benefit of the hyperrich.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act during Lyndon Johnson's presidency has had a beneficial impact on American life by essentially guaranteeing freedoms that were implicit from America's founding, and that were written in to the U.S. Constitution as Amendments in the Reconstruction period. Yet these freedoms promised to the former slaves were generally denied through legal trickery in the Jim Crow south, in a system of racial apartheid that persisted well into the twentieth century. What is most admirable about the Civil Rights act is that Johnson, who was from Texas, recognized the grave political consequences and yet nonetheless signed it into law, even though he believed (accurately) it meant the Democratic Party would lose its once-unshakeable hold on the South's voters.

By improving the lives of women, African-Americans, and the poor, these three events vastly improved America's civic life. They made the country a better reflection of its own stated ideals than it had been previously. It is perhaps a testament to the importance of these events that most young people today cannot imagine America without these basic principles enshrined in law.

It is hard to select three events which have had the worst impact on American history since 1877, largely because there are so many plausible suggestions. However in terms of the continued impact that is felt in the daily lives of Americans in the early twenty-first century, it is possible to make some nominations. The Spanish-American War of 1898 is certainly an obvious example, and provided the template for the twenty-first century's equally ridiculous invasion of Iraq. It would be tempting to nominate the Cold War altogether, but it is hard to see that as a specific event, so we may consider as a representative of its worst tendencies the career of Senator Joseph McCarthy. And finally the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in 2000 on Bush v. Gore was a disaster in any number of ways, but chiefly for the unresolved constitutional crisis that it represented.

The problem with the Spanish-American War is that it did not plausibly involve any realistic U.S. interests, and there was no reason to enter it. The reality is that the rest of Europe was engaged in a scramble for colonial territories, and while Spain still had a number of them (including Cuba and the Philippines) the Spanish country as a whole was weak and crumbling. Yet there was no immediate cause for war: the pretense that the battleship Maine was sunk by the Spanish has long since been debunked, and indeed serves the same function as Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction." In reality, the motives for war were purely financial, and the campaign for war was a well-managed media strategy, largely promoted by the "yellow journalism" newspapers that felt that war stories would appeal to the turn-of-the-century American public. But the long-term results of the war were disastrous, since America basically attempted to become a colonizing power just as colonialism was coming into disrepute. The fact that America had started as colonies should have meant the country was aware of the injustices of a colonial system.

The use of Communism as a fake menace was a staple of American political rhetoric well before Senator McCarthy's day -- the Haymarket Riot was an attempt to place blame on progressive political organizers, and the raids conducted after World War One by attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer were perhaps even more illegal than anything McCarthyism accomplished. However, the real function of McCarthyism was to conduct a witch hunt in American public life, and ruin the careers of people -- also effectively stigmatizing progressive politics for a long stretch afterwards. The most troubling aspect of McCarthyism, however, was that it was brought down by nobody except McCarthy himself. If McCarthy had not overreached by going after the U.S. Army -- which proved to be a crucial miscalculation -- he might have continued his red-baiting until he had effectively forced America into becoming a right-wing one-party totalitarian state, the inverted mirror image of his imaginary enemies.