During the last years of their lives, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams rekindled their friendship and wrote some of the most remarkable letters to one another before they both died on July 4, 1826 (yes, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence). Adams wrote to Jefferson, “Public affairs go on pretty much as usual, perpetual chicanery and rather more personal abuse than there used to be…. Our American Chivalry is the worst in the World. it has no Laws, no bounds, no definitions, it seems to be all a Caprice.” There are mixed messages across their correspondence. Some are hopeful, but the majority tend to shade the up-and-coming generation as entitled and likely to spoil the ideals the revolutionary generation fought so hard to achieve. In other words, “These darn kids today just don’t know how good they have it!” What generation were they talking about? It was the generation of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. It was the generation of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In other words, as they grew older and perhaps angrier, and then finally died, America survived. In fact, America thrived. Is American politics more divided today than then? Maybe. Everything feels worse in the moment. But, I’d remind you that Jefferson’s sitting Vice President, Aaron Burr, killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel…while in office!
Somehow America survived and then thrived.
The U.S. Senate had just adjourned on May 22, 1856, when Representative Preston Brooks entered its chamber carrying a cane. The pro-slavery southerner walked over to Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and then proceeded to beat the anti-slavery northerner almost to death on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Afterward, Brooks walked out of the chamber without anyone stopping him. Congressmen during this period commonly carried pistols or bowie knives when they stepped onto the congressional floor. In fact, by the late 1850s, some constituents actually sent their congressmen guns. This culture of violence also extended to state legislatures. A representative in the Arkansas House insulted the Speaker during a debate, and the Speaker responded by murdering him with a bowie knife right there on the House floor. “Expelled and tried for murder,” Yale Professor Joanne Freeman writes, “he was acquitted for excusable homicide and reelected, only to pull his knife on another legislator during debate, though this time the sound of colleagues cocking pistols stopped him cold.”
Somehow America survived and then thrived.
September 17, 1862 was the deadliest day in American history. On that day, Union and Confederate forces clashed during the Battle of Antietam near Sharpsburg, Maryland. Union forces under General George McClellan and the Confederate troops of General Robert E. Lee met in a daylong pitched battle. By its end, more than 23,000 soldiers had been killed or wounded. During the entire Civil War (1861-1865), an estimated 620,000 soldiers died (that’s 2% of the U.S. population or what would be 6,000,000 in today’s numbers!) according to a 2012 study by the American Battlefield Trust. This is almost twice the number of U.S. battle deaths during World War II, when the armed forces were eight times as large. Americans marched off to war…to kill other Americans. An entire generation of young men (and women) fell in the fields of Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and thousands of other places.
Somehow America survived and then thrived.
Speaking in generalities, the Great Depression began with a stock market crash on October 24, 1929. If you were to go back to October 1929, during the crash, the average American might seem unfazed. Only about 2% of Americans owned stocksin 1929. The vast majority of America read the headlines as the market collapsed, but most didn’t lose any money because they had no money invested. It wasn’t until the run on the banks two years later that Main Street was dealt the same fate as Wall Street. 500 banks failed in 1929. Around 2,300 failed in 1931. As the banks failed, regular Americans had their savings wiped out. When they lost their savings, Americans stopped spending. As liquidity dried up, businesses failed. Between 1929 and 1933, U.S. stocks fell by double-digits in 13 different months. Three times there were losses of 20% or more in a single month! The worst one came in September 1931 when the market fell nearly 30%. More than a quarter of the workforce was unemployed. Children starved. In 1938, six years after the end of the Great Depression, the unemployment rate was still as high as 20%.
Somehow America survived and then thrived.
In 1941, the children of the Great Depression marched off to the sound of the guns. Around 407,000 Americans died fighting. Government borrowing skyrocketed. By 1945, GDP was 2.4 times the size of the economy in 1939. Historian Frederick Lewis Allen called it, “the most extraordinary increase in production that had ever been accomplished in five years in all economic history.” Allen went on to write, “By the end of 1943 we were spending money at five times the peak rate of World War I. During the nineteen-thirties, critics of the New Deal had become apoplectic over annual federal budgets of seven or eight or nine billion, which they felt were carrying the United States toward bankruptcy; during the fiscal year 1942 we spent, by contrast, over 34 billion; during 1943, 79 billion; during 1944, 95 billion; during 1945, 98 billion; during 1946, 60 billion. For the last four of these years, in fact, our annual expenditures were greater than the total national debt which had been a matter of such grave concern during the Depression. That national debt had risen from 19 billion in Hoover’s last year in office to 40 billion in 1939—and here was the government, only a few years later, spending up to 98 billion per year, and thus piling the national debt up to 269 billion by 1946! These colossal sums made anything in the previous history of the United States look like small change.”
Somehow America survived and then thrived.
The year 1968 remains one of the most tumultuous single years in history, marked by historic achievements, shocking assassinations, a much-hated war and a spirit of rebellion that swept across the country. After repeatedly denying he would challenge President Johnson for the Democratic nomination, Senator Robert F. Kennedy announced he would enter the presidential race. On the night of the California primary (which he won, putting him in reach of securing the Democratic presidential nomination), Kennedy was leaving the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after addressing a large crowd of supporters when he was shot and killed by the young Jordanian immigrant Sirhan Sirhan. While in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers in that city, the civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a sermonin which he told listeners: “I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.” The following evening, Martin Luther King was assassinated while he was standing on the balcony outside his room at a Memphis motel. For much of the year and early 1970s, violent clashes between the police and protesters made the nightly news.
Somehow America survived and then thrived.
I could go on and on. Despite all of the turmoil in U.S. politics lately, history gives us a sense of proportion. As David McCullough says, “History is an antidote to a lot of unfortunately human trends like self-importance and self-pity.” So regardless of how you vote or how you think the markets will react, keep an eye on the horizon and don’t bet against America. We’ll be okay. And for those of you who prefer to see the data, let the below charts reinforce our message:
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