Contact: Tom Krattenmaker 610-328-8534 [email protected] http://www.swarthmore.edu/Home/News
For Immediate Release March 1, 1999
America at the Turn of the Century, Last Time Around
People's Concerns Similar to Today, But Not on '00 vs. '01 Question
A growing concentration of economic clout in the hands of a powerful few. Excitement, mixed with dread, about the advance of technology and where it might lead. Distaste on the part of the "respectable" elite for a popular culture geared to the masses. Concern over America's role in a changing world order. Such was the zeitgeist as Americans faced the new century -- 100 years ago.
"Although Microsoft, Iraq, Ally McBeal, and the Y2K problem were a century away in 1899, America's concerns that year had a modern ring," says Swarthmore College historian Robert Bannister. "Of course, the context was industrialism rather than today's post-industrial downsizing, and John D. Rockefeller rather than Bill Gates. Still, America on the eve of the last turn of the century had more in common with the nation today than people might guess."
Unlike today, society in 1899 generally regarded '01, not '00, as the exact date of the calendar milestone, Bannister notes. "Despite popular sentiment for the earlier date, the mainstream press, the presidents of every Ivy League school, and the Farmer's Almanack united in proclaiming New Year's Day 1901 the start of the new century, forcing the masses to postpone their partying for a year," Bannister says. "That the question before us is how Americans in 1899 (not 1900) faced the millennium suggests that popular opinion may have triumphed this time around."
Lest anyone lose perspective on Gates's billions and Microsoft's marketplace dominance, Bannister points out that Rockefeller's fortune was greater than the Microsoft chief's as a percentage of the gross national product. Americans' suspicion of tycoons like Rockefeller would be expressed in the following decade with the arrival of "trust-busting" and the regulation of banks and industries, notes Bannister, an expert on 19th century and early 20th century American history.
Note: Contact Swarthmore's Office of News and Information for more information or to arrange an interview with Prof. Bannister.
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