Read up on the "Wide-Awake" movemement in the 1850s, if that isn't a Young-Adult Civic 4T social movement I'll eat my hat (and it is evidence for my belief that the Gilded were Civics).Originally Posted by Eric the Green
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism
The 1830s cohorts definitely. The 1820s cohorts come across as Nomad--especially Mex-Am War veterans.
~Chas'88
"There have always been people who say: "The war will be over someday." I say there's no guarantee the war will ever be over. Naturally a brief intermission is conceivable. Maybe the war needs a breather, a war can even break its neck, so to speak. But the kings and emperors, not to mention the pope, will always come to its help in adversity. ON the whole, I'd say this war has very little to worry about, it'll live to a ripe old age."
I have recently read James McPherson's book on the Civil War, David, and going by McPherson the 1850s just scream 4T to me, which is why I consider your comparison with that 4T to be wrong, there was no anomaly, S&H just botched their analysis of the Civil War Saeculum. There was a push towards greater protectiveness of kids in the 1830s and 1840s, and there was a young-adult-driven social movement in the North in the 1850s called the Wide-Awakes. This indicates that the Gilded were Civics, not Nomads.
We are at 1854 right now.
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism
In the south at that time there were the "Minute Men".
~Chas'88
"There have always been people who say: "The war will be over someday." I say there's no guarantee the war will ever be over. Naturally a brief intermission is conceivable. Maybe the war needs a breather, a war can even break its neck, so to speak. But the kings and emperors, not to mention the pope, will always come to its help in adversity. ON the whole, I'd say this war has very little to worry about, it'll live to a ripe old age."
I agree. Something like 1829-1847?
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism
So this isn't the first time conservative Southerners have stolen Yankee revolutionary images (Tea Party), LOL!
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism
Something like that... I haven't sat down and examined everything. Having said that, I will say that Samuel Clemens (1835) comes across more of a Nomad--while his creation: Tom Sawyer comes across as a Nomad/Civic cusper who leans more Nomad than Civic. The reason I say this is that while Tom is a hellion and a rebel, there are certain lines which he does not cross. Compare Tom Sawyer to Huck Finn--Huck is a few years older and core Nomad. Compare Tom Sawyer to Bart Simpson--another Nomad/Civic cupser who leans more Nomad than Civic. He's also a hellion and a rebel--but there are lines that even Bart doesn't cross and he's in fact terrified of--it takes a lot to get to that line, but he does have it there. He's also teamed up with Lisa to right some greater wrong in a manner which is very Civic. Lisa is another Nomad/Civic cusper, who leans more Civic than Nomad--her Nomadic self pops out every now and then when you least expect it, and it's usually when you see her rare Nomadic moment that she and Bart usually share a laugh and get along.
However that might be due to the fact that life on the frontier creates more Nomadic personalities in general--or that we as a nation hadn't solidified as a national identity enough to create a single archetype generation--perhaps North, South & West had their own fluctuations due to distance & situations.
~Chas'88
Last edited by Chas'88; 02-21-2012 at 10:03 PM.
"There have always been people who say: "The war will be over someday." I say there's no guarantee the war will ever be over. Naturally a brief intermission is conceivable. Maybe the war needs a breather, a war can even break its neck, so to speak. But the kings and emperors, not to mention the pope, will always come to its help in adversity. ON the whole, I'd say this war has very little to worry about, it'll live to a ripe old age."
But one must be careful of using a small number of individuals to define generation boundaries. S&H made that mistake with the Missionaries, starting them too early in order to put William Jennings Bryan in it.
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism
And Jane Addams (1860), and Henry Ford (1863). However someone like Laura Inglls Wilder is born in 1867 and her life experience is purely Artist--while her 1885 daughter (who inspired Wilder to take up the pen in her mid-life) is the Idealist.
~Chas'88
"There have always been people who say: "The war will be over someday." I say there's no guarantee the war will ever be over. Naturally a brief intermission is conceivable. Maybe the war needs a breather, a war can even break its neck, so to speak. But the kings and emperors, not to mention the pope, will always come to its help in adversity. ON the whole, I'd say this war has very little to worry about, it'll live to a ripe old age."
Swimming in da Nile.
“A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God.”
-Stephen Hawking
My point was that if we threw out the theory and certain things did happen then there would be little unrest left. The only way I could see more unrest is if corporate America just took things far enough to turn far right types. How the neocons sold the middle class on the benefits of favoring big business is genius. I think someone who disagreed with me would should say something like. The crisis mood would make sure some sort of equilibrium didn't happen and unrest would continue. Personally, I don't see how a crisis mood will last if Obama stops going to war (the more the millennials have power the less likely that is to happen) and the economy picks up just enough. We don't even have to go back to 5% unemployment. Our nation's expectations have been lowered so much anywhere around 7% will be considered acceptable.
Now on the civil analogy which I think is good, but flawed is what are we going to go to war with ourselves over? They had a huge issue (slavery) that caused a divide that caused the civil war. The government has been backing down when people have made their voices heard. SOPA and PIPA didn't get anywhere. I don't see the top pushing any harder like 5 years from now.
Just so you know I am trying to look at things as objectively as I can. To do that I'm throwing out the idea of a catalyst and looking at where we actually are then working back to see where the catalyst might actually be. I think some are doing id bass ackwards and deciding the catalyst then trying to make society fit where they think we should be.
“A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God.”
-Stephen Hawking
Odin, do me a favor. Take an afternoon (that's all it would take) and read Democracy by Henry Adams, which appeared, I think, in 1884, and was an international best-seller of incredible proportions (partly because he published it anonymously.) Then tell me 1) that it describes a political system run by mid-life civics and 2) that the author (b. 1837) is a civic. I'll bet you can't do it with a straight face.
"By their fruits ye shall know them."
David Kaiser '47
My blog: History Unfolding
My book: The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy
That statement has got a lot of problems with it. "Neocons" were Democrats who favored a stronger approach to foreign policy, in particular the Soviet Union, and became Republicans over that issue. They tend to be less conservative on other issues.
As far as the middle class being "sold" something, the economy was in the toilet in the late 70s. Deregulation actually began with Jimmy Carter. Everybody knew government had gotten out of control, and taxes were insanely high. Decades of Keynesianism had produced "stagflation" - runaway inflation in the middle of a stagnant economy. Trying to "stimulate" demand repeatedly got us into a ditch that that economic philosophy was unable to get us out of. Enter "supply side economics" - the goal of which is to reduce to the government burden on producers so that prices fall and employment picks up. People were "sold" on it because it worked, dramatically.
This is the kind of thing that frustrates me most about Millenials. They have opinions that they've been spoon food by the left, and they have no clue what reality is. Nobody was "tricked" or "duped". We tried one way, it was a disaster. We tried another way, it worked. That's all there is to it. But Millenials wouldn't know that because they spent their entire lives living in the prosperity produced by that period, without knowing where it came from, or how bad things were in the 1970s.
Now they know, and they're seeing the failure of those old Keynesian policies up close. But hey, maybe they'd rather worship Obama than have a job.
I do want to clarify I don't mean that anyone who disagrees with me is doing things backwards. I'm just saying that if you say things can't get better because the catalyst just happened then that is bass ackwards. The catalyst is relative to the whole crisis. I stated that IF unemployment went down as the economy got better, balance the budget and Obama was re elected then we would probably enter a 1T type environment. To objectively deal with that one must show reasons that those things cannot happen or that they won't in fact curb the unrest not based on the catalyst being 2008 or whatever, but based on the current and foreseen mood of society as a whole.
“A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God.”
-Stephen Hawking
Brian are you trollin? the crisis ending within the next 5 years doesn't mean the theory is invalidated just that you misunderstood it. Of course, the latter must be impossible.
“A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God.”
-Stephen Hawking
Civics can't be crooks? I thought the tag team of the Silents & your generation disproved that sentiment.
Not commenting on anything but this idea that Civics can't be crooked/corrupt themselves--especially of the political variety.
~Chas'88
"There have always been people who say: "The war will be over someday." I say there's no guarantee the war will ever be over. Naturally a brief intermission is conceivable. Maybe the war needs a breather, a war can even break its neck, so to speak. But the kings and emperors, not to mention the pope, will always come to its help in adversity. ON the whole, I'd say this war has very little to worry about, it'll live to a ripe old age."
Odin, after reading Battle Cry of Freedom as well as both contemporaneous texts from the 1850s and historical works, I agree. My family was in Missouri at the time, and my g-grandmother writes about what was going on in her memoirs. In a culture without mass culture such as radio and TV, the 4T was in appearance more isolated, more confined, but there nonetheless. Reading family letters from the 1850s, there was a clear sense that something was happening.
I would say Bleeding Kansas was the beginning of the 4T.
And Odin, if you're not reading Ta Nehesi-Coates' blog on theatlantic.com, I cannot recommend it enough.
Heheheh. Classic. Corruption knows no generational boundaries.
Exactly!
~Chas'88
"There have always been people who say: "The war will be over someday." I say there's no guarantee the war will ever be over. Naturally a brief intermission is conceivable. Maybe the war needs a breather, a war can even break its neck, so to speak. But the kings and emperors, not to mention the pope, will always come to its help in adversity. ON the whole, I'd say this war has very little to worry about, it'll live to a ripe old age."
No, if those things came to pass right now, we'd slide back into a 3T-like environment... bubbles and all. And that environment is not sustainable, we know. Eventually it would all come crashing down again, making 2008-10 look like the Good Ol' Days by comparison.
"Better hurry. There's a storm coming. His storm!!!" :-O -Abigail Freemantle, "The Stand" by Stephen King
Ok, I kinda get what you're saying here. But there's a paradox at play: "Turnings drive generations, and generations drive turnings." So a turning is more than the sum of generations, it is a social mood that can be viewed by all sorts of political and economic and cultural developments.
Significant economic growth with relatively balanced budgets (not that I expect to see it any time soon) would have a hard time coexisting with a crisis mentality.
Likewise, reactionary forces who fear a revolutionary crisis may strike pre-emptively to disrupt protest movements and radicals who threaten their status quo... And when enough would-be revolutionaries are hanging on the gallows, other populist agitators might be spooked in to accepting a new Gilded Age that demands conformity with the explicit threat of violence.
Further, each crisis catalyst only seems to remain a primary focus for a few years, so if people patiently adapt to a post-housing bubble world without additional economic panics or terrorist attacks for a few more years, I can imagine a sense of relief creeping in slowly - even if there is no final showdown to the scale of WW2. This is actually the kind of anti-climax I'd expect in the mega-unraveling of a rich nation. We have serious problems of economic inequality and long-term sustainability, but individuals remain relatively well-fed, distracted, and entertained. Reaching the pinnacle of history kind of has an anti-crisis undertone to it - even if that is exactly the mistake that causes vanguard civilizations to ignore their internal fault lines.
Those words, "temperate and moderate", are words either of political cowardice, or of cunning, or seduction. A thing, moderately good, is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper, is always a virtue; but moderation in principle, is a species of vice.
'82 - Once & always independent
Have you read the book? It's not just the fact of corruption, it's the entire atmosphere. I can't force any of you to educate yourselves about the Gilded Age but you won't have to look far to see that it has far more in common with the 1920s than with the 1950s or the 1800s. There was no civic rebirth, at least in the North, as a result of the Civil War. There was civic deterioration, and everyone who cared about the subject then could see it.
Last edited by KaiserD2; 02-22-2012 at 09:36 AM.
David Kaiser '47
My blog: History Unfolding
My book: The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy
I wasn't responding about the book--as I have not read it and it would be unfitting of me to comment on something I hadn't read, though I do plan on doing so when I have time (after May).
As I stated in my post, I was responding to this notion you seem to hold that civics can't possibly be corrupt--especially when they have a political bent. My critique is perhaps better concluded as thus:
Perhaps it is the occupation which is what is truly corrupt and not the generation itself. I.E. it doesn't matter what generation holds office--corruption will exist still because the office is inherently corrupt.
~Chas'88
"There have always been people who say: "The war will be over someday." I say there's no guarantee the war will ever be over. Naturally a brief intermission is conceivable. Maybe the war needs a breather, a war can even break its neck, so to speak. But the kings and emperors, not to mention the pope, will always come to its help in adversity. ON the whole, I'd say this war has very little to worry about, it'll live to a ripe old age."
The GOP seems bound and determined to bring back the insanity. Unless you think Obama is a slam-dunk for reelection, being a bit worried makes perfect sense.
Marx: Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Lennon: You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.
But I never said civics couldn't be corrupt. I would say that they at least do it discreetly and without flaunting it, and that was not the fashion in the 1880s.
David Kaiser '47
My blog: History Unfolding
My book: The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy
