America’s Proud 1876 Birthday Contrasts With This Year’s Chagrin and Trepidation

‘On what principle is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?’ —Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59)In 1876, their nation’s 100th birthday, most Americans looked back with pride and ahead with confidence. In 2026, many look back with chagrin and ahead with trepidation. These milestones demonstrate that the past is colored and edited by the preoccupations of the present. And that the future is opaque.The Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia was an exercise in triumphalism, according to historian Fergus M. Bordewich’s “Centennial: The Great Fair of 1876 and the Invention of America’s Future.” Americans hoped that dwelling on sanitized memories of our First Civil War (a.k.a. the American Revolution) would heal the nation’s wounds from the Second. Actual wounds were visible, Mr. Bordewich writes, in “the maimed and shell-shocked” who were “a common sight in every American town.”The exhibition’s most popular restaurant was “Southern-themed,” advertising “old-time darkies” strumming banjos and waiters impersonating slaves. This presaged that year’s November presidential election, America’s most chaotic and corrupt. It resulted in replacing Reconstruction with untrammeled Southern suppression of black people by law and terror.Americans looked away from this unsavory present, toward a beckoning future. The nation’s largest corporation, the Pennsylvania Railroad, organized and profited from the fair, which received 10 million visitors from an American population of 40 million. This, too, was a preview — of corporations ascendant.The federal government was issuing about 100 patents a day, and machines seemed poetic. Walt Whitman’s poem “To a Locomotive in Winter” rhapsodized about “The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack/ … Type of the modern — emblem of motion and power — pulse of the continent.”Mr. Bordewich says the most transformative invention at the exhibition would “in less than a lifetime … revolutionize daily life, the course of business, the speed of public communication, and personal relationships”: It was the telephone, annihilator of distance in a continental nation. In 2026, ubiquitous “smartphones” are troubling to many Americans.The exhibition foretold the mechanization of agriculture, which produced urbanization and industrialization. Hitherto, a farmer’s scythe could harvest only an acre a day. Machines would make the vast Great Plains bountiful, and send farm labor to higher-productivity factory jobs.As the celebratory exhibition ended, an era of labor violence began. Mr. Bordewich:“Pennsylvania coal was as essential to the American economy of the 1870s as Texas oil would be to a later age. The state’s deep seams of anthracite powered the nation’s railroads and factories and warmed its homes everywhere. Extracting it was brutal work.” He adds that “miners toiled in a fog of coal dust, threatened by asphyxiation, poisoning, floods, and collapsing tunnels. ‘Breaker boys’ as young as eight broke coal with hammers for up to ten hours a day, sometimes falling onto conveyor belts or chutes to be crushed by hurtling streams of coal.”Labor organizers were cowed by the hanging of 11 of their number. A pro-business journal approvingly called this “Pennsylvania’s Day with the Rope.”In 1876, a too-exuberant America did not anticipate the next quarter-century’s wrenching social upheavals and numbing domestic violence. Or the next 100 years of life-enhancing new technologies (e.g., the internal combustion engine, radio, pharmacology, etc.).In 1976, the nation was reeling from a lost war, urban riots and a presidential resignation. Just four years later it regained the spring in its step.In 2026? Today, Americans’ low pain threshold is the result of unimagined reductions in life’s discomforts. Improvements in material, legal and moral conditions have been accompanied by national hypochondria and irrational anxieties.Unlike in 1876, there is gloominess about new technologies. Pessimists exhort Americans to fear a jobs famine caused by artificial intelligence. Yet as the Economist notes, “never in modern history has technological progress hurt the overall demand for human labor.”Optimists, equally speculative, say AI will so dramatically boost economic growth, hence government revenue, that we can continue forever our comfortable infantilism. Last week, the government announced that in just the first eight months of fiscal 2026, its spending exceeded revenue by $1.2 trillion.Fear of AI might be symptomatic that Americans, bored by a surfeit of improvements, have a thirst for the excitement of future dangers from disruptive developments. They should remember this:In terms of social and political upheaval, no subsequent technology has equaled Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th-century invention of movable type. In time, it democratized literacy, leading to democracy and freedom’s unending turmoil that we should not want to end.The Washington Post

America’s Proud 1876 Birthday Contrasts With This Year’s Chagrin and Trepidation

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