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If one has to pick vintage years in this period, the early 1820s, "the era of good feelings," will serve as well as any. The quarrels with Europe were over or at least muted. Independence had survived its first trials. Yet even in that Arcadia there were dark corners. To think of how many died in childbirth or lived sickly lives, to think of diseases wrongly diagnosed or wrongly treated, is to recognize the importance of health in judging the well-being of a people. The nearer one gets to today the better health care gets.
Despite a relatively low birth rate, the U.S. population has doubled in the past 50 years. Improved health care makes the difference. In 1900 in New York City, a 70-year-old man had a better chance than a newborn infant of surviving the next year. As Dr. Walsh McDermott, recently retired professor of public health at Cornell University Medical College, says, the two great triumphs of modern health care have been 1) the victory over the "pneumonia-diarrhea complex" that once caused half the tragic wastage of early deaths, and 2) the dramatic gains since antibiotics were introduced in 1937. Dr. McDermott can remember growing up in New Haven when every respectable undertaker had two funeral hearses—the familiar black one and a white hearse for children.
To judge by such tangible measurements as health, the best of times for most people would thus he within the lifetime of people living today—that is, sometime during the 20th century. But when precisely? Here the answer becomes more subjective, a parlor game in which anyone is entitled to his own answer, so long as he remembers that the criterion is not just when his own fortunes or his own prospects were most favorable. In their own lives people are apt to choose, in retrospect, their young adult years. Perhaps this is why some people even fondly remember the Great Depression. They argue that material luxury is not the only test of wellbeing. Kenneth Clark, the black educator and psychologist, recalls that in the Depression, "for the first time there was equality in deprivation. Suffering was democratic." He remembers, too, the ferment, the "curious social and political optimism." For others, the more lasting picture of the Depression will be those haunting photographs of the gaunt faces of undernourished sharecroppers.
Another way to judge an age's well-being is to examine its shared optimism about the future. Consider that moment of new beginnings in 1945-46, when millions of veterans returned home from World War II to resume peacetime living. For many, the G.I. Bill made possible the previously elusive dream of a college education. The economy did not suffer the grave postwar slump that experts had forecast. Despite gathering doubts about Russia, most Americans had an optimistic faith in the twin security of their nuclear monopoly and the new United Nations, where the big powers would work together to guarantee the peace. That was a brief, sunny interval indeed. Just a year later came the cold war.