"Looking Backward"

 This is an enormous (dare I say huge?) subject, and, in under 600 words, I have only touched on a few aspects of how the creativity and inventiveness of a few individuals have radically improved our lives over the past 150 years. I suspect many of you have had similar thoughts, especially those of you who were fortunate to know your grandparents.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Looking Backward”

April 6, 2025

 

“Backward, turn backward, O time, in your flight,

Make me a child again just for tonight!”

                                                                                                                “Rock Me to Sleep,” 1859 

                                                                                                                Elizabeth Akers Allen (1832-1911)

 

The future holds my attention, but as I get older I spend more time looking backward. While historians look to the past to gain insights for the future, I look back – mostly at my paternal grandfather – to better understand the world of 150 years ago and contrast it with the one in which I grew up (and am still growing up). While the history of man, through written records, can be traced back 5,000 years to civilizations in Egypt and what is now Iraq, it constantly amazes me to realize how much our material lives have changed in just the past 150 years. 

 

Fortune favored me, in that I knew all my grandparents, though my maternal grandfather died when I was six. But my paternal grandfather, who was born in February 1873, died in 1963 when I was twenty-two. I knew him well, and because we shared the same name I always felt a special kinship.

 

But the circumstances in which we were born reflect a vastly changed America. When he was born, the United States had a population of 40 million. Alexander Graham Bell had yet to invent the telephone, which he did in 1876. And he was nine when Thomas Edison opened the nation’s first commercial power plant, the Pearl Street Station, in New York City. The first commercially available automobile, the Duryea Wagon, would not be offered for sale until 1896 when he was two years out of college. He was thirty when the Wright Brothers took their first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The first paved road in the U.S. appeared on a one-mile stretch of Woodward Avenue in Detroit in 1909 when my grandfather was thirty-six. And it would be 1935, when he was sixty-two, before one could travel from New York City to San Francisco on a paved highway, the Lincoln Highway. 

 

By the time I was born, the population of the U.S. had more than tripled to 132 million. Thirty-six percent of households had telephones and 75% had electricity. The number of cars on American roads were about 34 million and able to drive on 320,000 miles of paved highways. By 1953, airlines were flying non-stop commercial flights across the U.S.

 

War was more of a constant for my grandfather than for me. The February 15, 1898 sinking of the battleship USS Maine in Havana Harbor, shortly after my grandfather’s 23^rd birthday was the catalyst for the Spanish American War. He joined the Massachusetts Militia but never went to Cuba. Sixty-four years later I joined the U.S. Army Reserves, a year or so before our entry into the Vietnam War. He was forty-one when World War I broke out and sixty-eight when the U.S. entered World War II. His three sons and two sons-in-law served in the War, one of whom was wounded at Okinawa.  

 

Time moves on, and my grandchildren’s lives will be different (and probably improved) from mine, in ways we can only guess. Readers will note that the title of this essay comes from Edward Bellamy’s 1888 eponymous utopian novel. The difference being that Bellamy’s principal character, Julian West, is looking backward from a futuristic world he can only envision, while I look backward on a life I have lived.

"First Out, Next In"

 Why would Biden first warn and then give time to our enemies before retaliating for the deaths of three American soldiers? It makes no sense for a Country that has responsibility for maintaining world peace. It is as though we have let our faults govern our goodness and reflects a failure to understand the presence of evil, and that power is an aphrodisiac. From Napoleon to Hitler, from Stalin to Mao, from the Iranian Mullahs to Putin and Xi Jinping individuals have wanted to control the world. The United States and the West have stood in their way. We must stop contemplating our navels and apologizing for past sins, both real and imagined. We cannot hide from our responsibilities. The United States and the nations of the West are not perfect, but they are good and certainly better than the alternatives. 

 

…………………………………………………………………………………….

 

Yesterday would have been my paternal grandfather’s 151^st birthday. Tomorrow is my daughter’s birthday. Birthdays, especially of grandparents we knew well, remind us of the past and bring it forward into the present. They tell us of how life has changed and how young is our country. I loved talking to my grandfather about his youth in Boston. He grew up in a world without cars, at a time when most homes did not have electricity or phones. When he died on February 3, 1963, a day shy of ninety, 98% of homes in the U.S. had electricity and there were almost seventy million cars on American roads. He was thirty years old when the Wright Brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. By the time he died, 58 million Americans were flying annually. Will the sixty years provide as much change? We cannot know, but with advances in technology, especially artificial intelligence, that cannot be ruled out. Medicine, communication, education, and entertainment should all benefit. And of course there will be other changes we cannot conceive. 

 

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Apologies for the long preamble. As for this essay, it is a look into the near future, so no more than a hope and a guess. 

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.bolgspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“First Out, Next In”

February 5, 2024

 

“It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards.

But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forward.”

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

Danish theologian and philosopher

Journals, 1843

 

Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward showed the difficulty of getting the future right, especially when idealism co-opts reason. National socialism proved a disaster to Germany and Italy (and the world), and state ownership of industry deep-sixed the Soviet Union. Kierkegaard suggested in the rubric above, life is best lived with an understanding of history. And as George Santayana famously wrote in Life of Reason: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

 

Divisiveness characterizes our age, like the years leading to the Civil War, the McCarthy era of the early 1950s, or the late 1960s when the Country was divided by the Vietnam War. In last Friday’s The Wall Street Journal Lance Morrow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center wrote: “Exaggeration is the traditional style of American politics, but permanent culture wars, the global pandemic, the agitations of social media and the collapse of party discipline – and, not least, the role modeling of Joe Biden and Donald Trump – have left Americans discontent with mere exaggeration.” We have, he added, “gotten addicted to apocalypse…”

 

Is there a way out? Can reason subsume emotion? Is a middle ground achievable? I think there is, but I don’t believe that either Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump will lead the way. The former is in cognizant decline and the latter has become detached from reality. There are big issues that separate the two parties, but democracy is about debate and compromise, not incoherent brawling, which is what our politics have become.

 

The title of this essay stems from my belief that the first of the two main contenders to drop out of the race for President (as unlikely as that now seems) will assure that his Party wins November’s Presidential election. At this point there is no sign that such a possibility is being considered. Neither candidate is widely admired, let alone respected, yet both appear likely to secure their Party’s nomination. In a head-to-head race, polls have them pretty much divided. As for losers, if either were to win, that would be the American public. The likelihood of a Biden-Trump rematch makes this an intractable problem for a majority of voters, as forever Trumpers battle imperious Progressives. 

 

As an amateur observer of the political scene, it seems to me that the first to drop out would likely be Mr. Biden. His lack of mental acuity becomes more visible every day, and Democrats are the more disciplined of the two Parties. Their leaders, no matter what they now say, know that Mr. Biden’s health will continue to deteriorate and that Vice President Kamala Harris is not a viable candidate to lead the world’s most powerful nation. Mainstream media, which serves as their propaganda arm, is beginning to suggest a change would be in the Party’s best interest. On the Republican side, M.A.G.A. Republicans remain vehement defenders of a man they feel has been treated badly. But the conservative media is mixed. While Fox News and Epoch Timesare all-in in their support for Mr. Trump, The Wall Street Journal takes a more muted approach, as do The New York Sun, National Review and The Spectator. And we have both the Biden and Trump nominations being supported by mainstream media. Biden’s support stems from his identity politics and his preference for Washington’s Woke bureaucracy. In contrast, mainstream media would prefer the “deplorable,” but nationally unelectable, Mr. Trump over the electable Nikki Haley.  

 

Will either man drop out of the race? I suspect not willingly. But control of the White House reaps enormous benefits – the coattail effect of elections, control over the political direction of the country and the world, and the direct appointment of thousands of jobs. Democrats, as mentioned above, are more methodical, more controlling than Republicans; they appeal to the group, not the individual. While they have extremists, like the “Squad,” the entire Party has moved left since the Obama Presidency. On the other hand, Republicans have always been a Party of individuals, of oners, where the group is less important than the person. However, “Forever Trumpers” have changed the calculus. Their backing of Trump is less about policies and more about anger as to how he and they have been belittled. To borrow an Obama line, they believe that having Trump in their corner is like bringing a gun to a knife fight. As Hoover Institute senior fellow John H. Cochrane wrote in Saturday’s The Wall Street Journal: “…there is no better way to stick it to the elites than to vote for the man who drives them most crazy.” 

 

For a conservative like me, these are sad days. This should be a Republican cycle given Mr. Biden’s low polling numbers, our moral decay, and our decline in the eyes of the world. Consider: the Country faces an out-of-control immigration crisis; a war in the Middle East that is spreading; a Russia intent on reclaiming its past empire; a China insistent on controlling the South China Sea and its trade routes; an Iran on the cusp of becoming a nuclear power; overwhelming debt and deficits; the lingering effects of inflation; and a focus on identity that has worsened race relations. There is no question of the fervor of Mr. Trump’s followers, but, as we saw in 2018, 2020, and 2020, he has no coattails. Control of the White House without control of Congress means we tread water. Difficult problems do not get resolved.

 

Predicting the future is a fool’s game, yet as the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote life must be lived forward. So, using the past as guide we make predictions. As I wrote earlier, I believe there is a chance Mr. Biden will be persuaded to give up his quest. But for Mr. Trump to do likewise is unlikely. If Republicans want a dog fight, they should go with Mr. Trump. But the best shot for Republicans to keep the House, take back the Senate and the White House is to support Nikki Haley in the upcoming primaries. She is Republicans’ best hope for victory, and for America to take back our values, families, schools, and cities.