The Century's Corpse

...The '90s aren't much better...

...As for the peace and goodwill the angels proclaimed, we're still waiting, some of us more cynically than others...

...Immigration was approaching its all-time peak...

...City Hall was draped in 2,000 flags, while 2,000 electric lights studded the exterior...

...Yesterday was the Nineteenth, today the Twentieth...

...A little less than 10 per cent of the present population was born outside the United States, the highest percentage since 1930...

...DOMESTICALLY, the U. S. was in the midst of a spotty but real economic boom...

...The century was one of your possessions, every minute of it—virtually a prerogative of rank—and your perspective on it was quite unlike that of anyone else...

...Thomas Hardy was more nearly right when, surveying what he called the corpse of the 19th century on its last evening, he confessed himself unaware of any reason for hope that the 20th would be better...

...International trade accounted for roughly the same percentage of total economic activity as it does today...

...There also were differing sets of priorities...

...Worst of all, for some critics on the Left, it was from beginning to end "the American Century," a phrase coined by Henry Luce in 1941...

...Ignoring a lot of evidence that was staring them in the face, they didn't expect anything like the awfulness of the century that was about to begin...

...History as such doesn't figure much in this little book, all of whose contents appeared earlier in the Washington Post, where its author is a feature-writer...

...And in what was then called the Holy Land, Jewish settlements were just beginning to cause friction with Arab inhabitants, a potential cause of wider conflict between Turkey and Britain...

...There is some point, though, in asking whether the 20th century is ending the way the 19th did, with a whimper that conceals the bang in store...

...Inevitably, anyone who thinks along these lines wonders whether the hopes expressed (in most cases a year early) for the 21 st century are likely to meet any better fate than the expectations that the Times and other organs trumpeted all those grim winters ago...

...Among other things, it established the International Court of Arbitration to settle disputes without armed conflict...

...Trying to experience the whole century in terms of what it felt like is in any case an impossible, perhaps even decadent esthetic task, like smelling the woodsmoke of 90 years ago...

...The current stack of commemorative books includes, to take just two examples, In Our Own Words: Extraordinary Speeches of the American Century, edited by Robert Torricelli and Andrew Carroll (Washington Square Press, 447 pp., $17.95) and The African-American Century, by Henry Louis Gates Jr...

...How could a century that began with such extravagant hopes have turned into a nightmare so rapidly, with an unending succession of world and regional wars, the crudest array of tyrannies in history, the continuing prospect of techno-ecological catastrophe, and an infinity of television talk shows...

...The free movement of goods and capital was a widely held article of faith, virtually a consensus, among the elites of government and business in up-to-date countries...

...Starting in 1929, the assumption that the modern capitalist system was self-regulating and selfrighting collided with the Depression...

...The first decade of the century, not surprisingly, is entitled "Good Years": "What it felt like just to walk down the street on a morning in early spring— The smell of dank, dark wool and the ragged sparking of streetcar wires, men with derbies and level stares, women holding skirts above the muck and manure, immigrants audacious with ambition, the dead, sweet smell of coal smoke, and soot on the last yellow, melting snow...

...In 1899 and 1900 the United States evolved the Open Door Policy for China —designed to open up the world's most populous country to trade on an equitable basis so that American business would not be left out of such a spectacularly promising market...

...history never repeats itself exactly...

...It was our right to do so...

...A hundred years later, some of his party's intellectuals are calling for a revived "National Greatness Conservatism" and hailing Theodore Roosevelt as their inspiration...

...When nothing is real, everything is folly...

...European borders were more open to people and merchandise than they would be again for some 90 years...

...We fled reality and ourselves," Allen concludes on his last page...

...Nonetheless, the globalism of that time was surprisingly similar to today's...

...In the 1920sand'30smuchof theOldWorld divided itself between Communism and Fascism, disproving the comfortable theory that the achievement of democracy and human rights represented irreversible progress...

...When everything is folly, things turn nasty...

...Other critics might emphasize political failures more than moral ones—it wasn'treally "the century ofthe common man" or of the people's triumph...

...But perhaps because he was there himself, he ends portentously critical even of the '60s: "When everything is possible, nothing is real...

...of the shame and guilt of thinking we're responsible for ourselves...

...An hour later you may feel hungry for another one...

...In the spirit of the book, I should explain that early in the 20th century houses had rooms called parlors where people played boring games in front of the fireplace until television was finally invented...

...Because the book is so short, the reader gets the slightly vertiginous sense of riding in a time machine whose throttle is set too high...

...For one thing, there was globalization...

...Still, if sensations are what you want, Allen has lots of them to offer...

...At the same time, an increasingly rigid set of treaties regulated a rough balance of power between a bumptious new Germany and its rivals...

...According to a lengthy article on page two, organized labor greeted the new era with similarly hopeful sentiments, "in confidence that the 20th century will be the century of the people's triumph...

...By the 1990s all of the once formidable competitors and adversaries of American-style consumerist democracy had been reduced to impotence, or had vanished altogether from the face of the earth...

...A whole century should probably not be packaged for consumption at a single sitting...

...ON the whole, people thought in 1900 that the advanced countries of the world had solved, or were about to solve, some of the worst problems that had always bedeviled humanity...

...In his Introduction he asks rhetorically, "what did it feel like to be alive back then, when everything or nothing seemed possible...

...Du Bois, a founder of what became the American civil rights movement, to a Pan-African conference in London...

...The United States in 1900 had recently won the Spanish-American War and was rapidly becoming the world's dominant economic and military power, although few people recognized it at the time...

...When you lay awake listening to train whistles that weren't so much noise as a heightening of your bedroom silence...

...In those days most people still knew the difference between 99 years and 100...

...Meanwhile a technologically innovative arms race was gathering momentum in Europe and the Far East even as the global economy grew and prospered...

...In Europe, the Hague Conference of 1899 had considered how the existing peace might be maintained and strengthened...

...Within a few years some 15 per cent of the whole population would be foreignborn, and immigrants would transform life throughout the urban parts of the country...

...The 1980s, sarcastically headed "Morning Again," are the decade of greed...

...The ambitions of Serbia in the Balkans constituted the chief source of potential disturbance, for France and Russia were Serbian allies...

...One fabled sign of the millennium and imminent end of the world has always been deadly conflict in Jerusalem...

...First it published a speech by Randolph Guggenheimer, president of the City Council, who expressed "the earnest wish that the rights of the individual man shall continue to be regarded as sacred, and that the crowning glory of the coming century shall be the lifting up of the burdens of the poor, the annihilation of all misery and wrong, and that the peace and goodwill which the angels proclaimed shall rest on the contending nations as the snowflakes upon the land...

...But of course you are not the Queen Mother and haven't lived 100 years, not yet at least...

...If you were going to choose on the basis of Allen's book, you would probably want to live in the 1960s, provided you could dodge a quintessential 20th-century male experience, the draft, and avoid Vietnam...

...With a few allowances and substitutions, the parallels between the year 1900 and the year 2000 are more striking than anyone could possibly wish...

...In America, the Civil War was a 35-year-old memory, vivid only in the South...

...Nations that traded with each other would not fight each other, at least not often or for long...

...Whatever 1900 felt or smelled like, it was a year in which the future looked a lot better than it turned out to be...

...In 1914, World War I proved that nations with open borders and lucrative trade would eagerly tear each other apart...

...In 1939...

...What you should make of these facts is less clear...

...Your memories are of a few decades, and sometimes hazy at that...

...Obviously 1930-40 is out—who wants to experience the Depression?—and 1950-60 is stereotypically presented as boring and oppressive...

...Then as now, both nationalists and people on the Left often opposed global free trade, either because it bred a cosmopolitan internationalism or because it was thought to worsen the plight of the working class...

...Allen's approach to the failures of the 20th century, woodsmoke aside, is highly moralistic...

...Not until 1942 did Henry A. Wallace, then Vice President of the United States, proclaim "the century of the common man...

...Europe had seen no wars in 30 years—Britain no major war since the battle of Waterloo in 1815...

...Needless to say, things did not quite turn out that way...

...Allen does tell us that in 1900 there were 45 states with a total population of 75 million, and that by 1910 a million immigrants arrived every year...

...By any account, the 20th century did not live up to the hopeful predictions made for it...

...What It Felt Like is bound to encourage the parlor game of deciding which decade you would most feel like living in, assuming you didn't live through it the first time around...

...In 1998 Harold Evans, an Englishman near the center of the American publishing establishment, delivered himself of a huge coffee-table history entitled (what else...

...A century apart, the McKinley and Clinton Administrations shared a great many assumptions about the world and America's place in it...

...Speaking in its own voice, the Times, in a full-page editorial reviewing the previous 10 decades, delivered itself of the conviction that "Men will cease to wonder at the workings and the progress of man in the Nineteenth Century only when the Twentieth shall have surpassed them...

...Even the expression of it seems familiar...

...In 1901 a quirky Republican of privileged birth but questionable depth and abilities—one party elder notoriously dismissed him as "that damned cowboy"—succeeded to the Presidency and set out in pursuit of national greatness through energetic initiatives by the Federal government, at home and abroad...

...The century of the common man" is nearly forgotten, while "the American Century' 'comes naturally to the lips even of many who would rather the 1980s and '90s had not turned out quite so one-sidedly...

...As we survey another century's corpse, we should keep our elation in check and our fingers crossed...

...But you get the picture...

...The similarities are disquieting, however, given that we know what happened after 1900...

...The American Century...

...An electric sign stretching across the front of the building proclaimed "welcome, 20th CENTURY...

...In fact, from its opening to its closing credits, the whole century finally sounds like a disappointment...

...The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line," declared W.E.B...

...You became queen consort of England yourself in 1936, made the world adore you during the Blitz, and spent the second half of the 20th century as Queen Mother, the most adulated royal personage of your (long, long) time...

...If you were Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, born in 1900 when Queen Victoria was on her throne, you were still on your feet 00 years later and seemed to have enjoyed almost all of it...

...And what would be the point...

...When you smelled woodsmoke, walking home in the early dark...

...The two decades with world wars in them might at least be exciting, but they both end in Red scares...

...If you like this sort of thing, there are nine more chapters in the same style...

...People who should have known better began to expect that big wars would never happen again...

...From Nixon to some 16-year-old getting high in his basement, the working paradigm was paranoia...

...asked The Times of London uncertainly on the first day of that century...

...the burdens of the poor were not sufficiently lifted...

...Take an extreme example...

...Now that the 20th in turn is about to join the 19th in oblivion, people have been writing books about what went right and wrong with it...

...Allen's emphasis throughout is on "how it felt," the book being addressed to a "you" who is simultaneously someone living through each decade and the contemporary reader who wants to get, well, a feel for the high spots of the century just past...

...A huge, public New Year's Eve bash had taken place the previous night...

...IN What It Felt Like: Living in the American Century (Pantheon, 159 pp., $20.00), Henry Allen takes his subject decade by decade in order to savor the sensations of representative (in this case fictional) Americans passing through...

...Though we should not underestimate the advances in freedom and prosperity that it eventually brought, especially after 1989, the annihilation of all misery and wrong never came close to happening...

...long live the Century...

...Not only was it believed to be good in economic terms, it also was seen as helping to guarantee world peace...

...and an escape, too, from the smell of woodsmoke and the ozone sparks of streetcars," plus a whole bunch of other sensations...

...and Cornel West (Free Press, 432 pp., $30.00...

...Naturally the Times showed an eager interest in what the new century would be like...

...The book is not totally devoid of facts...

...No one has yet published a book called The American Millennium, but I wouldn't bet it won't happen in time for the Christmas market...

...The story that followed began breathlessly, "The Century is dead...

...there were too many nasty wars...

...Will the last generation of the 20th century differ very much from the first...

...All that sex, all those groovy drugs, the collective search for freedom and justice—compared with the other decades, Allen makes it sound good, up to a point...

...What sort of a century you had really depends on who you are, where and when you were born, how you react to things...

...Of course, one century is never identical with its predecessor...

...By the end of the century, it was a tradition, this fleeing that had begun with the great escape from a Victorian gloom of patriarchal fathers and Victorian brightness of theology...