{"id":18185,"date":"2026-05-26T23:28:35","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T06:28:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=18185"},"modified":"2026-05-28T03:15:04","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T10:15:04","slug":"issue-of-the-week-human-rights-economic-opportunity-war-hunger-disease-environment-population-personal-growth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=18185","title":{"rendered":"Issue of the Week: Human Rights, Economic Opportunity, War, Hunger, Disease, Environment, Population, Personal Growth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Back to News<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"black-and-white<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

How America Celebrated Its 100th Birthday<\/em>, The Atlantic, June 2026. DEA \/ Biblioteca Ambrosiana \/ Getty<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the old saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Fortunately, not always true. But unfortunately, sometimes the more things change, the worse they get.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

America is about to celebrate it’s 250th anniversary of independence. In the June Issue of The Atlantic, Jake Lundberg does us the service of revisiting the 100th anniversary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The similarities between the Gilded Age and today have been made for some time. Except this gilded age is far worse than any in human history. An infintesimal percentage of people own the great majority of wealth on earth. Democracy, human rights, freedom, decency, are all challenged as never before. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the 100th anniversary, as the article points out, two American revolutions, the first, and the Civil War, had been won, then lost. The original revolution, with all it’s promise, retained slavery and other inequalities that guaranteed the Civil War would come. The victory of the Union ended slavery and promised equality, and then was betrayed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It took another hundred years for that promise to be kept more fully, and other grotesque inequalities, such as the sexism against women keeping them from voting being overcome, followed by other moves forward. And the class inequality underlying all inequality being addressed more and more with unions, pay, regulations, taxes, social security, medicare, medicaid and much more leading to the creation of the largest most prosperous middle class in history. More to be done, but headed in the right direction. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And globally, the defeat of fascism in World War Two, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the victory of democracy in the Cold War, all leading at first to better prospects, with all the terrible mistakes made along the way, for democracy, human rights, basic needs for all and an international order based on these principles. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, the great unraveling–increasing inequality, more than ever, and an incomprehensible lack of basic decency in political leadership, allowed by the disintegration of values writ large born of cynicism from lack of care, and the subsequent and circular descent into degradation, arriving at the place we are now. Yet on the razors edge as never before, with the final crash, or the cycle to repeat, or the final ascent to the better angles of our nature, all in question as the forces of freedom, democracy, equality for all, versus control by the barbaric few, play out on internal and global fields.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A good time, a necessary time, to look at where we were on the 100th anniversary of the promise of freedom and equality for all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here it is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Perfect Gilded Age Confection<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

How America celebrated its 100th birthday<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Jake Lundberg<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

June 2026 Issue, The Atlantic<\/p>\n\n\n\n

William dean howells, the editor of\u00a0The Atlantic<\/em>, wandered through Philadelphia\u2019s Centennial Exhibition of 1876 trying to make sense of a spectacle that defied description. Two wheels, one small, one large, seemed to tell the story of the great transformation on display. The small one was made of wood\u2014an old spinning wheel set up in a rude log cabin meant to conjure colonial Plymouth. As Howells related, a reenactor playing the Mayflower pilgrim Priscilla Alden paused in her work to give an old Quaker woman a turn. At first, the woman\u2019s \u201clong-unwonted fingers\u201d seemed rusty. She struggled to splice the thread, then got it tangled while Howells and others watched in breathless silence. Finally, though, her dexterity revived, and the wheel came to life \u201cwith a soft triumphant burr, while the crowd heaved a sigh of relief.\u201d\u00a0It was, Howells reflected<\/a>, \u201caltogether the prettiest thing I saw at the Centennial.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Howells and millions of other Americans went to Philadelphia as much to look forward as to look back. Far more thrilling than the wooden spinning wheel was the huge cast-iron wheel\u201430 feet in diameter and 122,000 pounds\u2014turning almost noiselessly at the center of the complex works of the Corliss Engine in Machinery Hall, driven by steam pumped in from a separate building. Howells sat, stunned, before the engine\u2019s \u201cinfinitely varied machinery\u201d working \u201cwith unerring intelligence.\u201d No Priscilla Alden or old Quaker was necessary here\u2014just a single, mostly idle attendant whose only job was to occasionally put down his newspaper and administer a few drops of oil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In\u00a0Centennial: The Great Fair of 1876 and the Invention of America\u2019s Future<\/em><\/a>, the historian Fergus M. Bordewich takes a tour of the exhibition\u2014and, venturing beyond it, takes the measure of America on its 100th birthday. At not quite 200 pages of text, the book is brisk and tightly constructed, filled with vivid characters and finely wrought, often-wrenching scenes. Along the way, Bordewich finds a country caught between the marvel of its material progress\u2014what he calls a \u201cphantasmagorical theater of national glory\u201d\u2014and the fragility of its ideals and institutions. While the fair celebrated a confident industrial future, the nation outside its gates seethed with violence, corruption, and social inequality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writing in our own anniversary moment, when historical narratives are themselves the stuff of cultural and political conflict, Bordewich largely lets the discord speak for itself. But taken together, the dizzying disorientations of 1876 can\u2019t help fueling grim conclusions. Bordewich, who has written forceful histories of the Underground Railroad, the radicalism of the Republican Congress during the Civil War, and Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan violence, presents a country turning its back on two revolutions\u2014those of 1776 and 1865. In their place, Americans embraced a third: an industrial revolution that rendered the spinning wheel a quaint relic of the past and the iron wheel an object of faith for the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The centennial\u00a0commenced on the morning of May 10, 1876, with a seemingly providential break in the rain. The program\u2014which included lengthy speeches on the marvels of American growth, and an orchestra playing an array of national anthems from around the world in addition to Richard Wagner\u2019s made-to-order \u201cAmerican Centennial March\u201d\u2014had swelled to fit the exhibition\u2019s hybrid nature. What had originally been intended as a national birthday celebration had been joined to a World\u2019s Fair displaying the material wonders of the Industrial Age. The ensuing event, which ran for the next six months, was designed to show how happily material progress and national glory could be made to blend. Financed through a mix of public and private money and enabled in no small part by the backroom maneuvering of the Pennsylvania Railroad boss Thomas Scott\u2014whose lines stood to benefit from the traffic\u2014it was a perfect Gilded Age confection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The massive glass-and-iron main building was the largest man-made structure on the planet at the time, encompassing more than 21 acres of floor space. It was just one of some 200 buildings across the site, many of them sparkling architectural showpieces dedicated to, among other things, pomology, photography, brewing, dairy processing, and glassmaking. Nations and states commissioned their own buildings\u2014a Tudor mansion for England, a residence and \u201cbazaar\u201d for Japan, a \u201ccottage\u201d for Connecticut, a Spanish-moss-fringed log cabin for Mississippi. Fairgoers could see some of the first mechanical typewriters in action, sample Charles E. Hires\u2019s root beer, hear the ear-splitting \u201cannunciator\u201d of Western Electric\u2019s new heat-sensitive fire alarm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the exhibition closed in November, at least 9,799,392 people\u2014about 20 percent of the U.S. population\u2014had visited, including a 79\u2011year\u2011old man who walked<\/em> from New Albany, Indiana, with the aid of a stick cut and carved in the 1810s. Most of those who went were delightfully overwhelmed. In a letter home, a young woman from Providence, Rhode Island, struggled to find words for what she saw: \u201cDear Mother, Oh! Oh!! Oh!!! Oh!!!! Oh!!!!! O-o-o-o o-o-o-h!!!!!! Your affectionate daughter, Mary.\u201d Even Alexander Graham Bell, whose newly invented telephone was one of the fair\u2019s sensations, said that it was all \u201cso prodigious and wonderful that it absolutely staggers one.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Behind the\u00a0unspeakable wonders\u00a0of Machinery Hall stood a world of labor\u2014dirty, dangerous, and low-paid\u2014that constituted a grave threat to the values of the republic. Such toil clashed with Jeffersonian ideals that equated independent proprietorship of farms and shops with the moral virtue necessary for honest citizenship. Just before the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln had said that men performing wage labor for more than a short stint suffered from \u201ceither a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By 1876, industrial wage labor was the permanent misfortune of a growing class of people. Their absence from the spectacle in Machinery Hall was telling. The ingenuity of those who\u2019d designed and displayed the machines fit easily on the trajectory of national greatness; the drudgery of those who did the grunt work off-site did not. The old ethos that Lincoln had believed in still had enough purchase that workers themselves bore the blame for their own miseries. \u201cHad an unfortunate accident this morning,\u201d a Pittsburgh plant manager working for Andrew Carnegie reported (one of Bordewich\u2019s many well-chosen quotes).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rope on cupola hoist broke and cage fell catching the Hoist Boy in the act of crossing under, crushing him to a jelly. It was caused by the boy\u2019s carelessness, and disobedience of order and the poor fellow paid the penalty with his life. Delayed works slightly.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Events unfolding that summer in Pennsylvania coal country, about 100 miles away from the exhibition, showed how little hope there was to at least improve working conditions through unions and other forms of labor organizing. As Bordewich narrates in an astonishing set piece, the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company had seen to that. When it sought retribution against Irish miners who had gone on strike the previous year, it didn\u2019t merely have the backing of public authority in Schuylkill County; it\u00a0was<\/em>\u00a0the public authority. With the help of a private police force, the company\u2019s president took on the powers of a district attorney and personally prosecuted a set of cases against the miners, most of whom were labor activists. In a series of show trials, the men were charged with murder and assorted acts of terror, and 20 were sent to the gallows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If industrial workers were largely absent from the centennial, Bordewich shows how Native Americans turned into a different kind of disappearing act. Assumed for decades to be \u201cvanishing\u201d before the tide of Anglo-American civilization, they had become objects of ethnological interest, their \u201cprimitive\u201d cultures underscoring the marvels of the present age. Taking the lead on the event\u2019s many Native American exhibits, the Smithsonian\u2019s director, Joseph Henry, first planned to stage a living display of several hundred Native Americans\u2014a Museum of Natural History diorama brought to life. But ongoing hostilities in the West got in the way. Instead, Henry sent expeditions to gather as many Native American artifacts as possible, in order to \u201cpresent savage life and conditions in all grades and places.\u201d For fairgoers, the juxtaposition with mechanical developments was powerful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond the exhibition, of course, the \u201cvanishing\u201d of Native Americans was not an abstraction but a policy. Writing on \u201cthe Indian question\u201d in 1873, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Francis A. Walker had asked, \u201cWhat shall be done with the Indian as an obstacle to the national progress?\u201d The answer, he hoped, would involve peaceful means, albeit with extant Western Indians coerced onto reservations, where they would be subject to a \u201crigid reformatory control\u201d while learning to adopt Anglo-American culture and practices. More often, the putative \u201cPeace Policy\u201d devolved into war, as was the case with the American campaign against the Lakotas happening during the centennial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That campaign\u2014provoked by America\u2019s violation of an existing treaty after the discovery of gold in the Black Hills\u2014produced a great shock at the fair. Just three days after the triumphant Fourth of July celebrations in Philadelphia, news arrived that the Lakotas had routed American forces under the command of General George Armstrong Custer near the Little Bighorn River, in the Montana territory. Custer, who was killed along with more than 260 of his men, had confidently predicted that \u201ccivilization in its advancing tread\u201d would \u201croll mercilessly over\u201d the Plains Indians. Only weeks before, he\u2019d been at the centennial\u2014to take in the wonders of civilization in its advancing tread.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For black\u00a0americans, the centennial posed a pressing question: What place would they have in the national future it claimed to celebrate? Some, such as Representative Josiah Walls of Florida, anticipated that the fair would blot out \u201call questions of minor differences and all hurtful recollections of past disagreements.\u201d Walls was mostly right, just not in the way he hoped. Bordewich describes how, at a moment when\u00a0political support for Reconstruction<\/a>\u00a0was ebbing, the exhibition staged a reconciliation not between races, but between regions. White northerners and white southerners restored their old bonds of friendship through symbolic gestures\u2014Union and Confederate generals seated together; a relative of Robert E. Lee reading the Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, claiming their place in both the exhibition and the nation at large remained a goal of Black Americans. Members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church commissioned a monument to Richard Allen, a prominent Black Philadelphian of the early republic and the founder of the denomination. \u201cWe intend to leave Philadelphia in 1876 as did the heroes in 1776, with a fixed resolve to achieve noble results,\u201d the group announced. \u201cAnd in 1976, we expect our progeny to gather around the Monument in question, shed tears of gratitude for the example we have left them, and call us blessed.\u201d Delayed first by a missed deadline and then by a train accident, the monument was installed just a week before the exhibition closed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Allen\u2019s absence, the most prominent \u201cmemorialization\u201d for Black Americans was a restaurant, not a monument or a pavilion. When a white Atlanta businessman proposed to open a \u201cRestaurant of the South,\u201d centennial commissioners welcomed the prospect. The waitstaff would be among the only Black employees on the fairgrounds (Black workers were mostly excluded from the centennial), and their job would include playing enslaved people on a plantation, singing \u201cquaint melodies,\u201d and strumming the banjo. Northern fetishization of southern slavery was nothing new; the minstrel show had become popular in northern cities in the decades before the Civil War. But the success of the restaurant and its apparent nostalgia for slavery seemed to complete a notable shift in national sentiment since Appomattox.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many northerners (Republicans, at least) had linked Black freedom to national progress immediately after the Civil War. That connection had all but faded by 1876, amid violent campaigns to \u201credeem\u201d southern states from Republican rule and Black voters. As Bordewich relates in a harrowing account, those efforts had turned to South Carolina in the summer of 1876. Well aware that they were in the minority in their state, South Carolina\u2019s redeemers had been waiting for a chance to \u201cprovoke a riot and teach the negroes a lesson,\u201d as the future governor and senator Ben Tillman recalled. \u201cIt was generally believed,\u201d Tillman wrote, \u201cthat nothing but bloodshed and a good deal of it could so well answer the purpose of redeeming the state from negro and carpetbag rule.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The redeemers had their opening when two white men in a carriage confronted a Black militia marching in a Fourth of July parade in the town of Hamburg. When the two men returned for a court date four days later, they came with a mob and a cannon. The militiamen did not appear at the courthouse, but took shelter instead in a nearby building that housed their weapons and ammunition. In the ensuing standoff, the mob (including Tillman and his rifle club) began shelling the building. When the militiamen were driven from the building, the mob killed six of the men, as well as the town\u2019s Black marshal, cutting out his tongue. The massacre was just a piece of what became a successful campaign to oust the Republican governor and legislature. The following month, a Black South Carolina Republican wrote to President Ulysses S. Grant begging for federal protection after another armed white group attacked a party meeting and demanded that the men \u201cgive up the flag\u201d or be shot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the\u00a0centennial\u2019s closing,\u00a0on November 10, 1876, there was no providential break in the rain. Those on hand for the ceremonies packed into Judges\u2019 Hall for valedictory reflections and final rounds of Handel\u2019s \u201cHallelujah\u201d chorus, Wagner\u2019s march, and a rendition of \u201cAmerica.\u201d Grant declared the exhibition over, and a telegrapher tapped out instructions to the Corliss Engine\u2019s operator to halt the great machine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three days earlier, on Election Day, the great machine of American self-government had also come to a halt. That year\u2019s presidential contest pitted New York\u2019s Democratic governor, Samuel J. Tilden, against Ohio\u2019s Republican governor, Rutherford B. Hayes. Neither was a man of great charisma\u2014Tilden shy; Hayes upright, teetotal, and vague\u2014but everyone knew what was at least nominally at stake in the election. In addition to taking on the widespread corruption with which the Republicans had become associated, Tilden promised an end to Reconstruction. Hayes paid lip service to the rights of former slaves, while also voicing his commitment to reconciliation between the North and the South.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though the choice was not exactly stark, the outcome was opaque. Bordewich offers a concise account of the tangled mess that followed. Tilden won the popular vote and stood on the precipice of claiming the Electoral College, but given rampant problems and irregularities, the nation \u201cteetered on the edge of a constitutional abyss,\u201d as Bordewich writes. The result came down to three southern states\u2014Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana\u2014in which both parties claimed victories in state and national races.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"black-and-white
An 1878 painting of a congressional hearing addressing the disputed 1876 election between Samuel J. Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes (Cornelia Adele Strong Fassett \/ Three Lions \/ Hulton Archive \/ Getty)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Absent the violence and intimidation visited upon Black voters, the Republicans would likely have won each state, but winners were impossible to determine. Florida ended up with three separate vote counts. In South Carolina, where the number of votes exceeded the number of eligible voters, two legislatures and two governors vied for control and haggled over the presidency. Louisiana\u2019s electoral commissioner put the state\u2019s returns up for sale to the highest bidder, while a monitoring commission tossed out the results from 15 parishes in which the fraud and violence had been particularly egregious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another civil war loomed. While the White League in Louisiana threatened to attack the statehouse, and representatives of rival governments, all heavily armed, faced off in South Carolina, former Union General George B. McClellan, a Tilden supporter, talked of marching on Washington at the head of an army. Resolution came only through shadowy negotiations and political compromises. Congress created a special Electoral Commission<\/a>\u2014composed of senators, representatives, and Supreme Court justices\u2014to determine the outcome, but its deliberations quickly broke along partisan lines. In a series of backroom dealings<\/a>, Democrats agreed to accept Hayes\u2019s election if federal troops were withdrawn from the South. Reconstruction, already heading toward a violent end in places like Hamburg, came to an official close as Hayes removed the last federal troops from the South, seven weeks after his inauguration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not long\u00a0before\u00a0the Centennial Exhibition ended, a Massachusetts man published a poem in a Washington, D.C., newspaper telling \u201cThe Story of Hamburg,\u201d just a few columns over from a grim run of headlines leading an article on continuing violence associated with the election. The poem isn\u2019t in Bordewich\u2019s book, but, like the stark contrasts in its pages, the lines speak to our moment. \u201cLet others tell of the nation\u2019s glory,\u201d the poet began; his attention would be elsewhere:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

I sound no paeans of valor and fame\u2014
My song is shadowed by strains of sadness;
I tell the tale of the nation\u2019s shame.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

On the 250th anniversary, we are no less caught between the glory and the shame than our forebears were on the 100th. Since the 1960s, the writing of American history has largely been a project of recovering and reckoning with conquest and its legacies, racism and the limits of democratic practice, and horrific events like the Hamburg Massacre. The aim of the official anniversary proceedings embodied in President Trump\u2019s 2025 executive order has been to \u201crestore truth and sanity to American history\u201d\u2014and, in the process, to recover the glory and forget the shame. That effort was vividly realized in Philadelphia earlier this year, when the National Park Service removed a slavery exhibit from the President\u2019s House in Independence National Historical Park. A federal judge\u2019s order to restore the exhibit is now being appealed, and the fight over where to look\u2014and how to look\u2014at our past remains the crux of our commemorations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though we\u2019ll mostly be looking back at 1776 this year, Bordewich has done a great service in calling our attention to 1876. The soundness of our democratic machinery is again in doubt; we, too, wonder at the power of new technology, and what it means for work; race remains a source of conflict and a tool of power. Bordewich is as cautious in drawing such parallels as he is in spelling out the lessons that might lie in the juxtapositions of fairground and background. It\u2019s up to us to hear the echoes, and to make sense of the glory and the shame.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back to News How America Celebrated Its 100th Birthday, The Atlantic, June 2026. DEA \/ Biblioteca Ambrosiana \/ Getty As the old saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Fortunately, not always true. But unfortunately, sometimes the more things change, the worse they get. America is about to celebrate it’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,54],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18185"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18185"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18189,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18185\/revisions\/18189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}