By Staff
Miraculous new communications technologies appear, transforming everyday life. Globalization accelerates. In California, fortunes are amassed overnight out of nothing. The media are sensational. Advertising and marketing exert more influence. An urban youth subculture emerges that glorifies violence. Both major American political parties seem incapable of addressing urgent issues. Christian conservatives battle cultural decadence. One sect insists end days are nigh. Anti-immigration sentiment increases. And the President harnesses patriotic rage to invade a poor desert country after dubiously claiming the enemy nation represents a clear and present military danger to America.
Sound familiar?
No reason it should.
Kurt Andersen is talking about 1848, the year of Dowagiac's birth.
Before he became a novelist ("Turn of the Century" and the new "Heyday"), I knew him from Spy magazine.
"I've become sincerely convinced that mid-19th century moment is, more than another, when modern American life really began," Andersen writes in the March 19 Time magazine.
"The future – that is, our present – came into sight. The way we live now is the way we started to live then."
The instant wealth came from the Gold Rush ignited Jan. 24, 1848. Nine days later the treaty was signed with Mexico ending our first elective war. German philosopher Karl Marx, 29, and Friedrich Engels, 27, published the "Communist Manifesto."
Nathaniel Hawthorne was writing "The Scarlet Letter." Herman Melville would soon start "Moby Dick." Henry David Thoreau was already disgusted and ready to lay the groundwork for environmentalism when he began "Walden" in the late '40s.
Revolution swept Europe, toppling the French monarch.
Photography was a novelty, but not for long. Samuel Morse had perfected the telegraph.
Train travel picked up, with four times as much railroad track laid in 1848 than the year before.
New York mushroomed from 60,000 in 1800 to half a million mid-century. Ireland's potato famine began in 1845, spurring immigration from the Emerald Isle, which today is experiencing tension from an influx of Muslims.
Charles Darwin was constructing his theory of evolution. Abolitionism was moving from the left wing into the political mainstream.
Feminism launched that August in upstate New York with suffrage demands.
Technological progress collided with large potential audiences in the new metropolises to spawn between 1845 and 1857 such magazines as Scientific American, Harper's and the Atlantic Monthly.
The New York Sun, Herald, Tribune and Times were founded between 1833 and 1851. In 1846, the first three helped form The Associated Press.
Our media today are "simply reverting to mid-19th century form," Andersen surmises, citing the "lurid, low-down, gossipy coverage of celebrities and sex and crime" served up in such scandal sheets as the Scorpion, the Sunday Flash and the Weekly Rake.
As for modern marketing, the 1840s saw the advent of national brands, including the first department store, pioneering advertising agencies and the first presidential campaigns to remake upper-crust candidates into men of the people.
The words celebrity and show business first came into vogue.
P.T. Barnum was sort of the Jerry Springer of his day, except his entertainment emporium in lower Manhattan featured vaudeville, freak shows and a museum.
By 1850, Barnum promoted the first American tour of the first international songbird, Sweden's Jenny Lind.
Andersen found that the pop theatrical megahit of 1848, "A Glance at New York," was the first play to feature rowdy, working-class characters and street vernacular. "It's hard not to see it as a forerunner of the broadcast entertainment series."
The Bowery boys and gals who saw those shows constituted the first American youth subculture. They were foul-mouthed and glorified violence. So even hip-hop's nothing new.
"History repeats itself," Clarence Darrow said. "That's one of the things that's wrong with history."
Americans, meanwhile, are dumbstruck by fifth graders. Fox ordered 13 more episodes of Jeff Foxworthy's redneck game show. The 23 million tuning in make it the top new show. It's produced by "Survivor's" Mark Burnett, our P.T. Barnum.