This election Americans will have a clear choice: To at least maintain, if not expand, the level of government support established during the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society, or to dismantle the government programs established over the last 110 years and return to the imagined Utopa of the Gilded Age - to enable the Grover Norquists "to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." The Tea Partiers, including Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan if not Mitt Romney, have joined at one time or another in calling for returning government, Defense aside, to the days before Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt.
When we think of the Gilded Age, we think of the great disparity of wealth between the privileged few and the 99%, we think of the oppression of workers and how workers seeking better wages were slaughtered by National Guardsmen, police, and private detectives, doing the bidding of the wealthy. But what was it like to have been a boy or girl growing up in those times, that is, a child not lucky enough to have been born into the economic elite?
No one is alive today who remembers those times. But we are lucky to have a recording of the Sage of Baltimore, H. L. Mencken, who describes what it was like growing up in the 1880's in a typical American city. On June 30, 1948, fellow Baltimore Sun writer Donald Kirkley drove Mencken (who never got a drivers license) from Baltimore to Washington for a recorded interview at the Library of Congress - it is the only recording of Mencken that survives today. Starting at 5:40 into the recording, Mencken describes his boyhood in Baltimore:
The Baltimore I knew as a boy, was extraordinarily hot in the summer and filthy. It was full flies and mosquitoes, all kinds of epidemics were running simultaneously. But the people liked it. Food was cheap, houses were comfortable, although we slept under mosquito nets. And I look back on it with great affection. I realize its limitations, there were no sewers and water supply was bad, typhoid raged all summer, smallpox all winter, malaria at all times of the year. I had malaria but I escaped typhoid and smallpox, how I don't know. I think I escaped smallpox by vaccination.
Although Mr. Mencken may have "looked back on it with great affection," I think most of us today would demand a government that provides, with our tax dollars, decent sewers, safe water, and public health measures to prevent "all kinds of epidemics . . . running simultaneously."
WE MUST NOT GO BACK! WE WILL NOT GO BACK! If you haven't already done so, vote this Tuesday, and keep up the fight against the reactionaries who would take us back.