The Start of Something Big

AMAGANSETT, N.Y. —  Though we are still two years away from the new century and millennium, you can already sense the pressure they apply. These are the sorts of big partitions that divide historical epochs, and therein lies the source of pressure. Everyone wants our era to seem worthy of the moment, which gets people to thinking how the culture might rise to the occasion.

Just about 100 years ago, the country was infused with a sense of the momentous. The Spanish American War which, by any geopolitical measure, was completely unnecessary, was a symbolic success that demonstrated the nation’s might and confirmed its standing on the global severe recession stage. Economic turmoil, capped by a severe recession in 1893, triggered a major reevaluation of relations between capital and labor out of which sprung everything from antitrust laws to the populist movement. Race relations again were landing loudly on the national agenda with the Supreme Court’s Plessy vs. Ferguson decision, establishing the principle of “separate but equal.” And in entertainment, the new medium of the movies was holding out the promise of redistributing cultural power from the elites to the masses.

None of these events was directly connected to any other, and an observer might have been excused for seeing their confluence as the kind of coincidence history often throws at us. But there was, in fact, something that did connect them--something so obvious that one isn’t even likely to acknowledge it. All occurred as America was poised to cross the threshold of a new century, and the imminence of the century may have played some role in generating them.

“It was recognized by everybody as a turning point, a 100 milestone,” one contemporary journalist said of the last turn of the century. “There was a human disposition to sum things up, to say who had been the greatest men of the century just closed, what had been the greatest books, the greatest inventions, the greatest advances in science.” This was all true. Yet, there was another disposition, too. This was the disposition not only to summarize, but to aggrandize. As Americans strode into a new era they began to think in epochal terms, attempting to create a history large enough to fit the magnitude of the occasion. Hence, the events that erupted at century’s end.

What was true then may be equally true now. Millennial thinking may be beyond the mental grasp of most of us, but centennial thinking is something else. As the 21st century approaches, many of us have a sense, albeit largely subliminal, of both moment and portent. No one wants a century to end with a whimper. One wants it to end with a bang. We want big dramatic events, clean endings and new beginnings, historical landmarks. Or put another way, if events can make epochs, why can’t epochs make events?

It could be that much of what has been hyped recently in our culture as groundbreaking is a result of this sort of epochal thinking that inflates things to make them commensurate with centennial scale and to make us feel we are on the cusp of history. Take the Internet. Only the tiniest fraction of Americans regularly logs on, but we are inundated with reports about what the Internet portends for us. We all will be shopping over the Internet, learning over the Internet, communicating over the Internet, even watching TV over the Internet. One well-regarded futurist proclaimed it the most important invention since the printing press--though he may have been exaggerating simply because the idea of entering a new century without some radically new medium didn’t seem right.

Or take social relations. In the last few years, the debate over race in America, traditionally rather desultory, has taken a new dogmatic turn. With a kind of finality not heard before, conservatives are calling for, and working toward, the sudden end of affirmative action and the beginning of a new color-blind public policy--in short, for a new era in race relations. At the same time, President Bill Clinton has tried to open a dialogue on race to usher in his own era of good feelings. Why did both sides wait so long? Well, it may just be some of that epochal thinking that makes people view a new century as a perfect time for a new social contract.

Or take the idea of destiny. Not coincidentally, a bit more than 100 years ago, historian Frederick Jackson Turner propounded his famous “frontier thesis,” in which he asserted that the American frontier was the place where the American character was shaped, and declared the end of an epoch as that frontier disappeared. Ever since, Americans have been searching for new frontiers to conquer, but there seems a greater urgency now. The Sojourner probe to Mars sparked a renewed interest in space and has even led to increased calls to land people on the planet. Meanwhile, other pioneers are trudging biological frontiers with cloning and genetic engineering--again, big advances for big times.

Or even take sports. For nearly 100 years, major league baseball has honored certain traditions, especially the tradition of separate leagues, where the champions can only meet in the World Series. Now, with the new century approaching, baseball’s solons have been emboldened to, as they have said, change the game to fit the 21st century. The result has been a wholesale scrapping of traditions--interleague play, realignment of divisions--that has altered the nature of the game.

Epochal thinking can even apply to people. As they waded into the 20th century, Americans began fretting over interlocking corporate directorships--”trusts” as they were called--that threatened to wrest power from democratic government and vest it in oligarchic business overlords. As a result, J.P. Morgan, the richest and most powerful of the country’s investment bankers, became one of the most significant symbols of the age: a villain big enough for an era.

Now as we head into the 21st century, we have begun conjuring a villain and a symbol who represents a new form of terrifying economic arrogance. Microsoft’s Bill Gates is so rich, so powerful and so overweening that, like Morgan, he is larger than life. The Justice Department’s recent antitrust action against Microsoft for bundling its Internet browser with its Windows software has the same aura of epochal gravity as the actions taken against Morgan-controlled trusts long ago. It is a clash of titans large enough for a new century.

And then there is aesthetics. It is probably no accident that James Cameron’s “Titanic” is sailing into theaters as we set sail for the new century. One hundred years ago, theater impresarios like David Belasco, inspired by their own epochal thinking, began mounting huge stage extravaganzas with horses and ice floes and waterfalls, both to overwhelm the audience and demonstrate modern theatrical ingenuity that the 19th century couldn’t hope to have matched.

“Titanic” is in the same centennial tradition. Even five years ago, it might have been hooted off the screen as bloated melodramatic hokum, but new centuries demand gigantism and movies don’t get much more gigantic than “Titanic.” Like the original Titanic, the plans for which were hatched in 1907, shortly after the turn of the century, the film is an act of centennial hubris: bigger and more expensive than any predecessor.

All these things, from inventions to entertainment, are at least partly products of epochal thinking. But perhaps the single most important aspect of the last turn of the century was not any one event or set of events but a general attitude that the impending century helped fan. It was just about that time when Americans began to believe in perfectibility. They began to believe that the application of rationality to problems could solve even the thorniest of them. This became the progressive reform spirit that suffused politics, education, social services, medicine, art and dozens of other areas in American life early in this century.

There is no comparable movement today, no breeze wafting through the culture that seems to nudge us closer to perfection. We are experiencing, however, a revival of religious belief, an unprecedented emphasis on self help and the emergence of New Age spiritualism, all of which offer, in different ways, what progressivism offered: hope. We’re likely to get many more vehicles of hope in the next two years. New centuries have a way of doing that.

Of course, there is something faintly ridiculous in the effort to make ordinary events and ordinary times seem extraordinary. But there is something poignant about it, too. We want to leave our mark. We want to be remembered. We want to stake our claim on history and prove we stack up against the past. We want to live in important times. And so, as we head into the 21st century, we grasp one last chance to make ourselves big enough, great enough, to end one century and begin another, even if it takes a bit of puffery to do so.