I’ve been watching the excellent BBC mini-series entitled, “Fall of Eagles.” Filmed in 1974, it tells the stories of the collapse of three enormous dynasties: the Hapsburgs of Austria-Hungary, the Hohenzollerns of Prussia/Germany, and the Romanovs of Russia. 
The miniseries takes place from the late 1800s until 1914. Watching these events unfold on film, one cannot help but be struck by an astonishing fact: Less than 100 years ago – my own grandparents were alive -- millions of people lived in abject poverty across vast swaths of Europe and all of Russia. Rural serfs and urban factory workers endured abysmal conditions, starving and destitute. As the nineteenth century ended and the twentieth century began, people were struggling – often by violent means – to overthrow oppressive governments that stifled every hope and possibility of a better life.
To see this is to understand anew what a remarkable, unprecedented, and utterly unique country the United States was – and is. While the European emperors pontificated, peasants starved, and revolutionaries incited to violence on the eve of World War I, the United States had already been a free nation, a democratic Republic, for nearly 140 years. Russian Tsar Nicholas II, Hapsburg Emperor Franz-Josef, and Kaiser Wilhelm II thought America a silly, frivolous, hopelessly naïve country doomed to failure. They were proven wrong when America’s entry into the Great War helped end it. They were proven wrong when their own people insisted upon the rights that Americans already had. They were proven wrong when they were toppled from their thrones.
But life remained grim after the monarchies. Germany flung itself from the brief Weimar Republic to the horrific Third Reich of Adolf Hitler, who plunged Europe and Russia into World War II. Millions more Europeans died – 20 million in Russia alone, and 6 million Jews, victim of Hitler’s “final solution.” Russians, Hungarians, Poles, and the rest of the people in what became the Soviet Union descended into the Communism of Lenin and Stalin, and tens of millions more died in privations far worse than the tsars and their okhranka could have dreamt up - famines, purges, persecutions, executions, labor camps.
While Europe was drenched in blood, what was happening in the United States? True, America lost soldiers in World War I. And even more American soldiers gave their lives in World War II. Yes, America suffered through the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. And yes, America had equality issues still unaddressed in the first half of the twentieth century.
But, even given our country’s failures, the citizens of the United States enjoyed relative peace, political freedom, personal liberty, and economic opportunities that the rest of the Western world – even enlightened Britain – could not match. This has not been the exception in American history. It has been the rule.
It is profoundly disturbing, therefore, to see Americans’ present-day responses to the current economic blip. Because that it what it ought to be – another hiccup in our history, like so many others we have faced and bested with ingenuity, entrepreneurial thinking, individual initiative, patience, sacrifice, and confidence in the superiority of our system.
Continued... |