This is taking longer than I anticipated. I guess 250 years is a long time.
1. From Revolution to Fracture
2. From Civil War to World War
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13. World War I had ground the world's optimism to a halt. Like a massive release of repressed energy, America exploded into the Roaring Twenties. We cut loose -- fast and loud. In what was really a very fragile world, we danced on the edge of a fault line.
The 1920s roared. Jazz filled the clubs. Skirts got shorter. Radios crackled in living rooms. Ford’s assembly lines put cars in every driveway. Stock prices soared. Flappers danced. Bootleggers ran liquor under the nose of Prohibition. And Wall Street promised endless returns.
It was a decade of speed and spectacle. Women had won the right to vote. Black culture exploded in the Harlem Renaissance. Technology shrank the world and expanded the future. If the Gilded Age was gold-plated, the Twenties were neon-lit.
But behind the glitter, cracks spread.
The 1920s weren’t just jazz and flappers. They were also lynchings, race riots, and immigration quotas. The Immigration Act of 1924 slammed the door shut on much of the world, especially Asia and Eastern Europe. The KKK came roaring back, larger than ever. Now it was not just anti-Black, but anti-immigrant, anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic. The fear of the “other” became political fuel.
Prohibition turned ordinary people into criminals and gave rise to organized crime. The stock market had become a casino with no rules. Everyone was gambling, and no one thought the party could end.
Until it did.
14. In October 1929, the market crashed. Fortunes evaporated. Banks failed. Unemployment exploded. The illusion of endless growth was shattered. The Roaring Twenties screeched to a halt, and the Great Depression began.
It had been a decade of wild celebration. But the bill had come due. The party was over.
Tariffs played a part. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, passed in 1930, was meant to protect American jobs by taxing foreign goods. Instead, it triggered a trade war. Other countries retaliated. Global markets froze. The crash became a global depression.
The government’s first response? Do nothing. President Herbert Hoover believed the market would correct itself if the "invisible hand" was just left alone. He refused direct aid to anyone. He called on charities and churches to step up. It wasn't the government's job to help people in need -- that was the church's responsibility.
But the church neither had the will nor the resources. It wasn’t nearly enough. People began living in tent cities they called “Hoovervilles” to mock the Republican president. The name stuck.
Then came Franklin D. Roosevelt, promising a New Deal. The federal government would now be an active player in the economy. It would help create jobs, protect workers, reform banks, and in general, try to rebuild trust. This marked the rise of a new Democratic Party. For the first time, Americans expected the government to care whether they lived or starved.
Roosevelt didn’t fix the Depression overnight. But he changed the rules. Social Security was born. Unions were able to make industry care about the people who worked for them. The government no longer just watched. It acted.
Millions of Americans today survive on Social Security -- the same program Roosevelt signed into law over loud cries of “socialism.” Medicare and Medicaid continue to save countless lives. And yet, many who rely on these programs have been convinced to distrust them simply because they come from the government. What irony! Programs are seen as threats by the very people they protect.
But jobs alone didn’t bring recovery. Something bigger happened. Something global. Something you would never dare plan.
15. The storm had been building. Germany was still bitter from the Great War and humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles. Into that resentment stepped a man who channeled their anger. To many, he was a clown -- loud, ridiculous. The rich and powerful thought they could control him, use him. But almost inexplicably, his charisma drew in the ordinary German. The German people made him unstoppable. By the time many realized the depth of their mistake and miscalculation, Germany was in ruins. And their Führer was hiding in a bunker saying the German people had failed him.
Hitler had blamed the Jews for German problems. He blamed the socialists. He blamed the "degenerates." He would get rid of homosexuals and eventually anyone who opposed him -- including Jesus followers like Bonhoeffer who didn't go along with Germany's Christian nationalism. Hitler was going to purify Germany and make it great again -- a third Reich.
He crushed dissent. He unleashed the "Brownshirts." These weren't the military or the police. No, they were his own group of loyal fanatics, eager to intimidate, beat, or disappear anyone Hitler labeled an enemy. They would round up people in the night (or the day) who would just disappear. Soon he was building camps -- first for political enemies, then for anyone he deemed impure. Out of sight, out of mind.
The whole world was tipping toward "strong men" at the time, autocrats. It made people feel better to think that someone was taking charge and getting their worlds under control. Someone was thinking of them for a change and kicking some butt.
Italy had Mussolini, Japan had militarists hungry for empire. The world watched. And waited. Hoping that his flame would burn out on its own.
America tried to stay out of it. “America First,” people said. Some were even sympathetic to Hitler's complaints about Jews and degenerates. American Nazis held a huge rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939.
But neutrality couldn’t stop war. In 1939, Germany invaded Poland. In 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. That was it. America joined the fight. Japan pushed us into taking the right side.
Factories came roaring back. This time they made planes, ships, and bullets. Women filled the assembly lines. So did African Americans, though still in segregated jobs. The U.S. became the arsenal of democracy, sending supplies to allies, turning its economy into a war machine.
And it worked. But not without cost.
120,000 Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps in America. No trials. No charges. No actual basis or benefit. Just fear and suspicion. They were an easy target for our anger. And we made the Constitution look the other way.
In Germany, we were reminded that the worst atrocities are only as far away as human beings. Hitler’s regime carried out the Holocaust, murdering six million Jews, along with millions of others. They killed the Roma, gay individuals, disabled people, and of course those who dared to speak out against what they were doing. The world was confronted with industrial genocide.
Germans were forced to see it. They had denied it. Those who believed Hitler was a savior had believed all the propaganda he had spewed as he controlled the media. They're having a good life in those camps. American soldiers forced the residents of Dachau to walk through the camp and admit with their eyes what they had let happen. In other places, we forced them to bury the dead in the camps.
America fought on two fronts: Europe and the Pacific. In Europe, it helped liberate France, marched into Germany, and crushed the Nazi regime. In the Pacific, the war was brutal. Jungle to jungle, island to island. Japan refused to surrender.
Then, in August 1945, the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs -- one on Hiroshima, one on Nagasaki. We had split the atom -- something many thought God wouldn't allow to happen. Japan finally surrendered.
The war ended. But the world had changed.
70 million dead. Cities flattened. Borders redrawn. Empires dissolved. And two superpowers emerged: the United States and the Soviet Union.
America was now a global leader. Economically. Militarily. Culturally. But also morally. That was the big question: Would we use our power for peace -- or domination? Would we remember what we fought for or just what we won?
16. The war was over. But peace wasn't simple.
Soldiers returned to parades and promises. They had fought for democracy, for freedom, for justice. But back home, Black veterans still weren't able to get a loan and were still forced to use the back door. Women who had run factories were expected to return quietly to the kitchen (yeah, that was going to happen). Japanese Americans were released from camps into neighborhoods that still didn’t want them.
America had changed. But not enough. It still fell short of those big words we wrote in 1776.
For some, the 1950s were a golden age -- suburbs, appliances, white picket fences. But it wasn’t golden for everyone. Many still lived in the shadows of that dream.
A movement began to grow. It wasn’t loud at first. It was a woman who sat down on a bus. A preacher who marched without weapons. A crowd of college students at a lunch counter, waiting to be served like human beings.
The Civil Rights Movement wasn’t just about laws. It was about dignity. Did the Declaration of Independence mean what it said? "All men (and women) are created equal."
Some people didn’t like the question. They called the marchers "communists." Called the students "agitators." Called the preachers dangerous. Maybe one day, but let's move slowly -- meaning let's just ignore the injustices. (It's often said, if you want to know what you would have done then, you're doing it now.)
The marches grew. "Those troublemakers." "Lawless." "Criminals." The dogs and fire hoses came out. The violence was televised. And the world saw what America still was.
But things began to change. Brown v. Board of Education (1954): Segregated schools were deemed unconstitutional. Was desegregation a perfect solution? No. But it finally began to move the needle in the right direction. Racists responded, "They're legislating from the bench!" There was a sudden surge in the founding of private Christian schools in the South for some reason.
Civil Rights Act (1964): No more legal segregation. Voting Rights Act (1965): No more literacy tests or poll taxes. For a moment, it looked like the country might turn a corner. It was moving toward 1776 again!
But progress always wakes up resistance. As civil rights expanded, coded backlash crept in. "Law and order" (meaning don't protest injustice). "States’ rights" (meaning the government can't make me treat black people as equals). "Family values" (meaning keep women from being equals). Make America look like it used to (nudge nudge, wink wink).
17. And then came Vietnam.
We said we were stopping communism. We had been fighting communism a long time. In 1917, we watched the Bloody Revolution in Russia, and it scared us to death. In the Soviet Union, Stalin turned out to be as brutal as Hitler -- he just did it quietly and no one ever stopped him. When the Soviets got the bomb, we saw the possibility that the world could end at our own hands.
Senator McCarthy and others exploited Cold War fear to accuse innocent Americans of being traitors. Careers were ruined, lives upended. It was a national witch hunt. Eventually he was shut down, but he was a reminder that America was not immune to hysteria. Thus far we have always managed to fix it eventually. History doesn't promise we always will.
In the 60s, the fear of communism led us to send 58,000 Americans to die in a jungle. Millions more were maimed, broken, or drafted into a war they didn’t understand. Why were we there again?
And the country cracked open.
Protests filled the streets. Soldiers came home and were blamed for decisions made far above their pay grade. A president resigned. Another pardoned him. Trust in government collapsed. The golden age faded. What was left was a country that no longer believed its leaders. Our sense that we were a morally exceptional nation was gone -- at least for a while.
The 1960s ended in fire and fatigue.
King was assassinated. So was Bobby Kennedy. The streets were full of tear gas and protest signs. The dream of the Great Society was cracking under the weight of war, inflation, and fear. The liberal consensus had overreached -- or at least, that’s what some said. Too much change too fast. It's a formula for backlash.
A new message started taking root. "We’ve gone too far. Time to reel it back in."
Enter Richard Nixon. He didn’t shout. He didn’t rage. He whispered. He spoke to the “silent majority” He soothed the people tired of chaos, change, and being told their morals were deplorable.
He didn’t say he opposed civil rights. He just said we needed “law and order.” He didn’t say Black communities were the problem. He just cracked down on “urban crime.” Use nice words to hide good old racism.
It worked. He won.
And then he wiretapped his enemies. Paid hush money. Lied to the public. Used government power to protect himself. Watergate wasn’t just a scandal. It was a revelation of who we really were. Even a president might break the law if he thought it served him. If we hadn't had the tapes, his followers would have never believed those who questioned him. Some still didn't believe he was wrong even with the tapes.
Democracy needs good laws. But it works best with people of good character -- if you can find any. The workings of the government need to be done out in the open. There need to be mechanisms of accountability. Watchdogs. "Trust but verify." But our rules are only as good as our will to enforce them.
Nixon resigned before he could be removed. He at least had some honor. He had the character to apologize to the American people. His successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him “for the good of the country.” That phrase became code for: He broke the rules, but let’s move on.
18. But the real shift came with Ronald Reagan...
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