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And so, from 1900 on, it was to be. Gompers and Morgan had the word. More wages, more capital, more machines, more dividends, more production, more leisure, more education, more entertainment, more words, more wars, more wives. Somewhat piquantly, the emphasis on quantity even turned up in a song that swept the U.S. in 1900: "Tell me, pretty maiden, are there any more at home like you?"
After All, the Politicians. 1900 did not exaggerate the prospect of material progress ; its dream was to be multiplied many times over. But in a measure that would have appalled even the pessimists of 1900, old savageries were to be reborn, also multiplied. 1900 expected the next 50 years to belong to the businessman, or perhaps the scientist, or the educator. After them, the New York Times might be right: the world would belong to the poets "reciting their verses of a Summer evening" beside a Dewey arch.
1900 would have been amazed to know that, for good & ill, the next 50 years were to belong to the politician and his uneasy stepbrother, the soldier. Change churned up elemental issues of human freedom and organization that had to be fought out in the politicians' arena. Some of the politicians were of a familiar parliamentary type: Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Clemenceau. Some were soldier-politicians: Chiang Kaishek, Kâmâl Atatürk. Some were agitators and conspirators: Lenin, Stalin, Tito, Mao Tse-tung. One, Gandhi, was a saintly organizer. Some—Mussolini, Hitler—were pure dynasts, dealing with dark power drives deep in the spirit of man.
One of the half-century's greater politicians was Winston Churchill. Sometimes wrong, often right, he fought his way toward the heart of every storm. In 1900, Churchill, like his contemporaries, looked forward to pleasant years. Like his contemporaries, Churchill was to struggle through depths and rise to heights unimaginable to 1900. No man's history can sum up the dreadful, wonderful years 1900-50. Churchill's story comes closest.
*Those celebrating the new century as of Jan. 1, 1900 were looked down upon by many well-informed citizens who pointed out that there had been no year Zero A.D.; therefore the 20th Century could not begin until Jan. 1, 1901. (Actually, the pedantic insistence on Jan. 1, 1901 has been overborne by other pedants who say that when the monk Dionysius Exiguus in the 6th Century began the fashion of counting years from the birth of Christ, he missed from one to seven years. So the year 1900 may have been really 1901 or 1907.) In pedantic Boston, the 1901 view prevailed. On Jan. 1, 1901 throngs gathered on the Common to hear a moral discourse by the Rev. Edward Everett Hale, author of the patriotic tear-squeezer The Man Without a Country. In those days the fate of Kale's pathetic character, Philip Nolan, was regarded as uniquely dreadful. The wars, revolutions and immigration restrictions of the next 50 years were to create hundreds of thousands of men & women without a country.