A review of Peter
Jennings and Todd Brewster’s The Century (1999)
(Rating 5 of 5)
I received this book as a Christmas present from my
parents in 1999. With six days to go
before the ‘end of the century’ I crammed in the entire book in under a week so
I could experience the twentieth century right before it went away. After that I put the book aside and had not
opened it again since my senior year of high school. However with the twentieth century over a
decade in the past I decided to open it up again and reexamine the time period
that gave to us antibiotics, Hitler, computers, and practiced communism.
In his
classical story Rip Van Winkle, Washington Irving tried to demonstrate
how life in America rapidly changes. If
a man went to sleep for thirty years he would wake up to find the world
unrecognizable. In the twentieth century
you don’t have to do a story where a man skips thirty years, if you missed five
straight weeks you would be struggling to catch up. As each year passed, society rolled out
a new piece of technology often changing life as we know it.
“The change was sudden and
dramatic, and how could it not be? The
automobile was, after all, the first significant improvement in self-guided
transportation since the bicycle (which, after its introduction in 1839, had a
similarly dramatic effect upon the nineteenth century). And by the time it became widely available to
anyone with a few hundred dollars, the car had already begun to redefine nearly
every facet of life.
The
burgeoning automobile age established a new since of freedom and individuality:
people no longer had to make their plans according to train schedules, and they
traveled not with hundreds of strangers, but by themselves or with family and
friends. At the same time, it also
established a new, wider sense of community: small towns and villages that
existed miles away from anyplace else were now connected to each other by
roads, granting people who had long lived in isolation the opportunity to enjoy
up-to-date medical care, higher-quality education, and whatever else lay ‘down
the road.’” (p.103)
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| The car becoming a device every family had to have changed the way people lived |
One of
the biggest mistakes of the twentieth century was the establishment of
prohibition. It was supported across the
political spectrum by people who were foolish enough to believe that you can
change bad personal behavior by simply making said behavior illegal. Prohibition only succeeded in making drinking
less public, led to a major crime wave, and wasted lots of money. Unfortunately prohibition goes on today, just
not with alcohol, but in this new madness called the drug war waged by
over-budgeted vice squads.
“One cause that united both
minister and Klansmen was the Eighteenth Amendment. The movement to ban the sale and distribution
of alcoholic beverages had once been led by Progressives, who cited growing
studies showing the medical risks of heavy drinking and alcohol’s destructive
influence on marriage and family. But by
the time Prohibition was enacted, its driving force was puritan, who hoped it
would beat back the forces loosing modern morals, and the nativist, who saw it
as a way of rejecting the wine-drinking immigrants of southern Europe. Of
course, it did neither.” (p. 119)
 |
| Prohibition gave wealth to mobsters such as Al Capone |
This book
also allowed me to once again appreciate the accomplishment of Charles
Lindbergh, despite that the guy personally was giant rat dressed as a man; he
was one hell of an aviator.
 |
| Charles Lindbergh |
“By the mid-1920s, the airplane
seemed to have more potential as a circus act than it did as a vehicle for
transportation. Carnivals and county
fairs featured daredevil riders performing stunts like wing-walking and
parachute jumping, and spectators bought rides at five dollars a thrill. Barnstorming pilots, evangelists for
aviation’s future, hopped from airfield to airfield, moving without maps, going
as far as their gas supplies would take them, gathering circus crowds whenever
they were alit. But while people
everywhere found the flying machines interesting, the general mood was one of
‘you’ll never get me up in one of those things.’ Then came Lindy.” (p.136)
 |
| The biggest monster in world history |
Nothing
would alter the world more than the most awful events of the twentieth century:
World War II and the Holocaust. Both the
events and their aftermath would transform the direction of the human race, and
the one who brought both these things about was tyrant Adolph Hitler. Because this man lived millions would die as
he succeeded in brainwashing a nation.
“Early in his career, Hitler had
discovered that he had an extraordinary talent for the kind of oratory that
would appeal directly to such feelings, and once the moment of public
vulnerability arrived he exploited it to the fullest. In speeches that often ran two hours or
longer, he would hold a crowd of up to half a million spellbound, taking time
first to warm up and sense the mood of his audience, then diving in to do his
work. Sweating profusely, shaking with
fury, he would build the attitude of his listeners into a frenzy, playing with
an assortment of techniques that would make them first laugh, then cry, then
explode in a fit of rage.” (p.168)
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| Allied Leadership |
While there
was a worldwide depression going on and mad men rising to power life still
went on, and before Facebook, World Wide Web and cable television (or any
television) there was Life magazine capturing the world in some of its
greatest and not so great moments.
“Among the places the New Deal
pictures appeared was a fresh new photo magazine called Life. Started in 1936 by Henry Luce, the founder of
Time, Life was an instant success. The mere idea of a photo magazine was so
exciting to thirties’ readers, it inspired more than a quarter million of them
to buy subscriptions even before the first issue had been published. And once Life hit the newsstands, its
popularity rose so quickly, Luce nearly killed it when he couldn’t raise
advertising rates fast enough to pay for the magazine’s skyrocketing
circulation.” (p.192)
One of my
favorite aspects of this book is the articles that were written by various
people who were at major historic events or were just aware they were living in
unique times. The one written by Karla
Stept about the German takeover in Austria is especially powerful.
“All of this was a complete shock
to us, because we had never heard of things like this happening in
Germany. And we found out later on, they
never did happen there. It was an Austrian
specialty. What took five years to
accomplish in Germany took them only twenty-four hours in Austria. One should not forget that. For five years in Germany they had worked up
to this by adding one thing to the next.
In, Austria they did it in just one day.
The Germans had to learn to be anti-Semitic. The Austrians always were. They must have harbored all that rage for
hundreds of years. And now suddenly they
were free to express it.” (p.200)
The
beginning of the twentieth century saw a world that was ruled by Europe but by
the century’s midpoint that was coming to fast end. The great European empires were stretched out
financially, physically, and morally. In
the modern world it was not going to be acceptable for people to be governed by
governments thousands of miles away, who were given little to know say on how it was
conducted.
“One of the most far-reaching
consequences of the Second World War was the abrupt end that it brought to
colonization. The finish came at the
urging of the United States, which had long argued that colonial empires were
inconsistent with its belief in democracy, and at the expense of the crippled
European powers, particularly Britain, whose rule had dominated the map for
centuries. But the change was
inevitable: if they had done nothing else, the century’s wars had confirmed the
legitimacy of the dusty old order and its subjugation of the masses (though the
surge in the world’s population would probably have forced the issue if war had
not). Even the Moscow-led Communist
insurgencies, seizing power sometimes with little popular support, cynically
claimed the mantel of democracy.” (p.308)
The
automobile changed the way people traveled the television changed the way
people stayed home. You could listen to
radio and work, television involved your most important sense: sight. People now had a window to the world in their
living room.
“There were something irresistible
about television, and while few understood just how important it would become
(more a new environment than a new mass medium, as inescapable as the weather,
wrote Richard Reeves), they wanted to there when it took off. In the medium’s early years there was Howdy
Doody and the World Series, but only when the rectangular cathode-ray tube was
perfected in 1950 and the price of the average DuMont and Philco dropped to $200
in 1953 did the age of television truly descend upon the nation. By 1960 more than 45 million television sets
found homes, not only in the suburbs, where their elaborate wood cabinets fit
quite nicely into the family room or the den, but also in the inner-city
taverns (where bartenders complained that patrons spent too much time watching
and not enough time drinking.)” (p. 331)
With
television’s rise came a new kind of media celebrity. Now not only would people’s work be famous
but also their image. America had always
had celebrities, you can say our first was Ben Franklin, but now the
celebrity’s image was burned into public retinas. It would give some people everlasting fame,
but they would never be normal again.
“Elvis Presley was one of two mass
media figures who came of age in the fifties.
The other is Marilyn Monroe. That
the age of television should have produced one of the biggest movie stars in
history would seem to be a paradox, but just as Elvis was more than just a
musician, Marilyn was more than a movie star.
She was Marilyn, the object of mid-century wish fulfillment for men, of
envy for women, and of fascination for quite nearly everyone with eyes.”
(p.346)
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| Do I even need captions? |
Just as the
colonial empires were falling apart internationally, at home, a new revolutionary
movement was starting that would tear down the system of Jim Crow and challenge
the very public consciousness to the injustice that nation had let go on for
centuries. The legacy of the movement
still battles on today.
“To be alive in the sixties was to
feel exhilarated, present, not necessarily happy but at least fiercely
awake. To be young in the sixties was to
be all this and more. Along with the
‘consciousness-raising’ and pleasure (particularly sexual pleasure, freed from
the fear of pregnancy when the Food and Drug Administration approved the birth
control pill in 1960), the sixties glorified youth and freedom; the years also
maligned old age and tradition, discipline, and conformity that had been the
hallmark of the most recent decade.” (p.370)
 |
| Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the primary leaders of the Civil Rights Movement and easily the most visible |
John F.
Kennedy, the second youngest president and the youngest elected, took office on
January 20, 1961 and arrived like a breath of fresh air. Kennedy had an energetic presidency that
created the P.E.A.C.E. Corps and challenged the nation to go to the moon. He had his setbacks such as the Bay of Pigs
disaster and the late response to the Civil Rights Movement, however his
greatest hour occurred during the Cuban Missile Crisis when he got the Russians
to take the missiles out of Cuba. The
nation was traumatized when the President was taken from them, on television.
“Anyone alive and aware on November
22, 1963, when the news from Dallas arrived across the radios, television, and
phone lines, in the form of frantic voices of neighbors calling over suburban
lawns and the somber tones of tearful school principals speaking to their
students from loudspeakers, remembers in sharp detail where they were and what
they were doing. More interesting is
those who can recall what they felt. For
most, the information stuck like a poisoned tipped dagger, delivering to they
system equal amounts of grief and disbelief.” (p.384)
Kennedy
didn’t live to see his moon landing, but it happened before the end of that
decade. For years some cultures had
worshiped the moon, and everyone has looked at it.
It was Neil Armstrong however, who walked on it and stuck our flag in it.
“Still, like Lindbergh’s feat in
the twenties, the astronauts’ mission had provided a balm for the pain of their
own crazy decade, perhaps most importantly in the views their lunar camera
captured when they were directed back towards earth. At home, mo matter where you stood, the sixties
looked messy and unreadable, like a painting viewed too close to make out
anything but the texture of the brush strokes and the smudge of color. Yet from out there, in the dark eternity of
the universe, the planet projected a picture of harmony, an essential beautiful
orb, ordered and still.” (p.419)
 |
| This the 20th century for me |
America saw
one president murdered on TV, and then they saw a second one fall. Richard M.
Nixon had been a major figure in politics since the late forties, served in the
House, Senate, and as Vice President to Dwight D. Eisenhower. After losing the presidency to Kennedy in
1960, then the California governorship to Pat Brown in 1962, he seemed
finished. However he would stage the
ultimate come back a take the presidency in 1968. Yet he would lose it all by 1974 in the
Watergate scandal that brought him low.
“Schlesinger called this new, more
muscular executive ‘the Imperial Presidency,’ and while he had seen its
beginnings in the administrations of other leaders, it was Richard Nixon who
seemed to him to have taken the arrogance of power to a new level. After all, it was one thing for a president
to claim executive privilege in the conduct of war, but Nixon had extended the
definition of national security to encompass much o this domestic decision-making,
indeed as a justification for any and every executive act. ‘When the president does it,’ he said,
famously, ‘that means it is not illegal.’” (p.439)
Whatever
ones personal opinion of Ronald Reagan, no one can deny he changed the
political landscape of America. The
dynamics of American politics completely changed with Ronald Reagan’s election
in 1980 more than any since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election in 1932.
“Ronald Wilson Reagan was the most
significant president in forty years.
When, in 1980, he was elected to the nation’s highest office, catapulted
by anger over Carter-era interest rates and the humiliation of the Iranian
hostage crisis, some had feared the former California governor for his
simplistic and extremist rhetoric, particularly on issues of foreign
policy. Still, most people assumed the
old maxim would apply—the one that said that the office had a tendency to
smooth the edges, turn all men into moderates—and that Reagan’s would
ultimately be a presidency like that of his two recent Republican predecessors:
conservative, yes, but unchallenging either to the long-established principles
of containment as regards foreign policy or to the consensus on social policy
that had been in place since the time of Roosevelt and the and the New Deal. They could not have been more wrong.” (p.475)
The HIV
virus was discovered the same year that I was born, I have been reminded of
that every significant birthday I have ever had. The gay rights movement less than a decade
from Stone Wall was finally gaining some strength, then a new virus that nailed
them first and practically decimated a generation.
And since it was that group that fell first, the government hesitated to
even get involved, the far right even praising the disease as god’s cure. Had the government taken action sooner who
knows how many lives could have been saved?
“By 1986, fear had even penetrated
the nation’s bedrooms. For years,
medical science had been scoring success after success, so many that there was
the feeling that disease was about to become an anachronism. Along with
technology, medicine had been society’s best advertisement for progress,
boasting an uninterrupted flow of accomplishments leading to the bettering of
human life. Then came the deadly
pandemic known as AIDS. The acronym (for
‘acquired immune deficiency syndrome’) started out from the page ominously,
like a finger of fate resurrected from the time when plagues like the Black
Death ravaged whole populations in medical Europe. Now AIDS appeared capable of wiping out as
much of a quarter of those alive in out own time, an Old Testament kind of
scourge spread primarily through sexual contact, which in itself represented a
cruel piece of irony, for now man’s most intimate act, the one that conceives
life and gives pleasure, could also take life away.” (p.494)
Now you
cannot talk about the twentieth century without mentioning computers, after all
I am word processing this on a computer and placing it on a blog. We now live in a world for computers that
humans just live in.
“To many people, the computer was a
positively magical device—not a machine in the usual sense, but something
else. It was not, after all, like a
mechanical wristwatch or a car or any of the traditional kinds of machines with
which one was familiar, the kinds that could be opened up and examined, with
their levers and gears moving. Open up a
computer and it looked nothing like what it did, for information was stored
there and retrieved from there in ways invisible to the human eye. And the computer didn’t even do ‘work’ in the
traditional sense, either. Most machines
are like slaves. The automobile, for instance, starts and is propelled forward
by its driver’s commands, but a computer is more like a partner, a collaborator—performing
functions at the behest of its user, yes, but also taking in information,
interpreting it, then delivering back recommendations that inform the user’s
next set of commands.” (p.551)
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| computers |
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| The Berlin Wall did not survive the Century |
In close, The Century is a
remarkable read about a remarkable time.
The twentieth century began with President William McKinley and ended
with President William J. Clinton, it starts with funeral for Queen Victory and
ends with one for the Princess of Wales (who just posthumously became a
grandmother). In 1900s the old world was
smashed and replaced by bi-polarization that terrified the world with the thought
of nuclear destruction. Yet, that new order did not see the end of the
century as the Cold War ends with the Berlin Wall coming down and Soviet Union
falling. Then Americans could
spend the final decade wondering who their President was having sex with,
completely oblivious to the horror that was coming in the next decade.
{Video is the 2012 CJF Honorary Tribute to Peter Jennings}
