Nostalgia flowers naturally in worried times, which makes other eras seem better. But the contemporary fascination with nostalgia also reflects a different kind of judgment on our age. There is a discontent with the present, a foreboding of a plastic future, a looking back with longing to times that were—what? Simpler, happier, better? But were those times really better? The corny old movies, the Art Deco shapes, are now seen not critically but fondly, as shards and artifacts of times that were more sharply defined than ours (the Roaring Twenties, the Gay Nineties). Since such a view of the past is apt to be indulgent and sentimental, the nostalgia wave is hardly a fair test of past or present. A better test would be: When was the best time for most Americans to have been alive?
That is much different from asking when was the best time to have been among the rich, to have had plenty of servants, private railway cars and the seashore to oneself. It was better to have been richer earlier, when taxes were much lower, before there were so many other claimants to the best of everything. But when were the times best for most people?
Some periods are easily rejected. The Civil War, with the best of American youth dying fratricidally in the valleys of Virginia, goes out immediately; so does that war's ugly aftermath, the Reconstruction. But out, too, go the romantic Gay Nineties, when in reality Europe's "huddled masses yearning to breathe free" were pouring through Ellis Island's gates to clot the cities and the mill towns or to be herded into overcrowded tenements, where the only toilets were fetid sheds out in the dark alleys.
No, for most people the best time to have been alive in the U.S. has to be earlier than the last half of the 19th century. Or else later.
"America was promises," Archibald MacLeish once sang. Those promises were easier to keep before the American invitation was issued wholesale all over Europe to meet the nation's growing demand for labor. So consider as one candidate for the best of American tunes those earlier years before the Civil War, when the Republic was agrarian. The existence of slavery counts against that time, but in the Republic's first days even many Southerners regarded slavery as "scaffolding" to be removed when the building of nationhood was complete.
Nine out of ten Americans lived on farms, grew their own corn and potatoes, made most of their own clothes. In the not-yet-crowded countryside and seashore, the woods were full of wild game and the waters of cod, carp, shad and salmon. Life was tough and dangerous but self-sufficient. What now seems amaz ing about this hardy era was the immense national feeling of self-confidence—the feeling, summed up in the phrase still imprinted on the back of every dollar bill, that America was a "new order of the ages." Toward the impressive contemporary Europe of Beethoven, Hegel, Napoleon and Goethe, the rude frontiersman was patronizing: his own land was the democratic future, free of the Old World's privileges and wars. "Every stroke of the ax and hoe," Henry Adams wrote sardonically, "made him a capitalist and made gentlemen of his children."