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(Posting this article has become an annual tradition ever since the grim end of 2012. It’s a reminder that the end of each year ushers in unknowns, but also opportunities for heroism. History does not stand still, and we should never assume that we know how it will come out.)
The next year sweeps around the earth like the hand of a clock, from Australia to Europe and across the great stretch of the Atlantic it rides the darkness to America. And then around and around again, each passing day marking another sweep of the hours.
While the year makes its first pass around the world, even if it doesn’t feel like there is much to celebrate, let us leave it behind, open a door in time and step back to another year, a century past.
December 31, 1912.
The crowds are large, the men wear hats, and the word ‘gay’ means happy. Liquor is harder to come by because the end of the year has fallen on a Sunday.
There are more dances and fewer corporate brands. Horns are blown, and the occasional revolver fired into the air, a sight unimaginable in the controlled celebrations of today’s urban metropolis.
The Hotel Workers Union strike fizzled out on Broadway though a volley of bricks was hurled at the Hotel Astor during the celebrations. New York’s Finest spent the evening outside the Rockefeller mansion waiting to subpoena the tycoon in the money trust investigation. And the Postmaster General inaugurated the new parcel service by shipping a silver loving cup from Washington to New York.
On Ellis Island, Castro, a bitter enemy of the United States, and the former president of Venezuela, had been arrested for trying to sneak into the country while the customs officers had their guard down. Gazing at the Statue of Liberty, Castro denied that he was a revolutionary and bitterly urged the American masses to rise up and tear down the statue in the name of freedom.
Times Square has far fewer billboards and no videos, but it does have the giant Horn and Hardart Automat which opened just that year, where food comes from banks of vending machines giving celebrating crowds a view of the amazing world of tomorrow for the world of 1912 is after all like our own.
We can open a door into the past, but we cannot escape the present.
The Presidential election of 1912 ended in disaster. Both Taft and Roosevelt lost and Woodrow Wilson won. In the White House, President Taft met with cabinet members and diplomats for a final reception.
Woodrow Wilson, who would lead America into a bloody and senseless war, subvert its Constitution, and begin the process of making global government and statism into the national religion of his party, was optimistic about the new year. “Thirteen is my lucky number,” he said. “It is curious how the number 13 has figured in my life and never with bad fortune.”
In Indianapolis, the train carrying union leaders guilty of the dynamite plot was making its secret way to Federal prison even while the lawyers of the dynamiters vowed to appeal.
The passing year, a century past, had its distinct echoes in our own time. There had been, what the men of the time, thought of as wars, yet they could not even conceive of the wars shortly to come. There were the usual dry news items about the collapse of the government in Spain, a war and an economic crisis in distant parts of the world that did not concern them. The Federal Reserve Act would be signed at the end of 1913, partly in response to the economic crisis.
“Unless Socialism is checked,” Professor Albert Bushnell Hart warned, “within sixteen years there will be a Socialist President of the United States.”
Hart was off by four years. Hoover won in 1928. FDR won in 1932.
At New York City’s May Day rally, the American flag was torn down and replaced with the red flag, to cries of, “Take down that dirty rag” and “We don’t recognize that flag.”
The site of the rally was Union Square, one of the locations where Black Lives Matter hangs out, taking over from Occupy Wall Street and generations of radicals.
There was tension on the Mexican border and alarm over Socialist successes in German elections. An obscure fellow with the silly name of Lenin had carved out a group with the even sillier name of the Bolsheviks. China became a Republic. New Mexico became a state, the African National Congress was founded and the Titanic sank.
There was bloody fighting in Benghazi where 20,000 Italian troops faced off against 20,000 Arabs and 8,000 Turks. The Italians had modern warships and armored vehicles, while the Muslim forces were supplied by voluntary donations and fighters crossing from Egypt and across North Africa to join in attacking the infidels.
The Italian-Turkish war has since been forgotten, except by the Italians, the Libyans and the Turks, but it featured the first strategic use of airships, ushering in a century of European aerial warfare.
There was a good deal going on while the horns were blown and men in heavy coats and wet hats made their way through the festivities.
World War I was two years away, but the Balkan War had already fired the first shots. The rest was just a matter of bringing the non-phosphorus matches closer to the kindling. The Anti-Saloon League was gathering strength for a nationwide effort that would hijack the political system and divide it into dry and wet, and, among other things, ram through the personal income tax.
Change was coming, and as in 1912, the country was no longer hopeful, it was wary.
The century, for all its expected glamor, had been a difficult one. The future, political and economic, was unknown. Few knew exactly what was to come, but equally few were especially optimistic even when the champagne was flowing.
If we were to stop a reveler staggering out of a hotel, stand in his path and tell him that war was five years away and a great depression would come in on its tail, that liquor would be banned, crime would proliferate and a Socialist president would rule the United States for three terms, while wielding near absolute power, he might have decided to make his way to the recently constructed Manhattan Bridge for a swan dive into the river.
And yet we know that though all this is true, there is a deeper truth. For all those setbacks, the United States survived, and many of us look nostalgically toward a time that was every bit as uncertain and nerve-wracking as our own.
December 31, 1912 was a door that opened onto many things.
Our December 31 is likewise a door, and if a man in shiny clothes from the year 2120 were to stop us on the street and spill out everything he knew about the next century, it is likely that there would be as much greatness as tragedy in that tale.
As the year sweeps across the earth, let us remember that history is more than the worst of its events, that all times bear the burden of their uncertainties, but also carry within them the seeds of greatness. Looking back on this time, it may be that it is not the defeats that we will recall, but how they readied us for the fight ahead.
America has not fallen, no more than it did when the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1912. Though it may not seem likely now, there are many great things ahead, and though the challenges at times seem insurmountable and the defeats many, another year and another century await us.
Happy New Year, Daniel. Thanks for reprinting your 2012 article. I could use the note of optimism. There seems to be no end to these socialist groups, most with “The Peoples” in the title, and we know they are anything but advocates for freedom for all. They have always seemed to be well funded and grow like weeds.
Thank you. A happy new year to you too.
The enemy never sleeps.
I think they reproduce like cancer cells.
You picked time 1912 in history because of your historic knowledge. By doing so you keep things in perspective. Great job as always Daniel.. look forward to this next year and your take on matters as we see them unfold. .As we’re picking times in history, I’m going way way way back and hope it’s not like 49 BC. The crossing of the river Rubicon by Julius Caesar People say too often that we’re at crossroads .24 is starting out to be that year. . God bless America and western civilization. It will surely be tested..
Thank you. There seems to be a Rubicon crossed every few years. In times when history is on the march, that often seems to be the case. But it means that rather than one single point of no return by one man, there are repeated turning points that offer many the opportunity to change the course of history.
I agree with your sentiment because it’s factual but Julius Caesar made Rome great when he crossed the Rubicon. If it weren’t for him, Rome never would’ve ditched its corrupt and failed Republic status and become a mighty Empire which made the areas around “the Pond” the vital focal point of civilization. Most importantly, without Julius, Rome would never have had Augustus Caesar, who was “immeasurably the greatest” leader the Empire ever had.
We are at a crossroads though and “God bless America and western civilization. It will surely be tested..”
Just take good look at Trumps Polls and you will know that most Americans don’t trust the M.S. Media and this Witch Hunt against rump by UN/Globalists and the phony Pope
Yes. Daniel’s words were prophetic and carry even more meaning 11 years later.
Nothing has been fixed. Ordinary Americans, if they’ve survived the last 11 years, have even less security, less peace, and less hope than before.
Our only celebration is … we’re not yet as poor, crime-ridden, war-ridden, slavery-ridden, and oppressed as the rest of the world. Hardly a good reason to celebrate.
Scientific and technical progress has continued … but not one thing of any use is present in my household (unless one counts the ad blockers, vpn, and spyware software on the machines.
… Heck, even this laptop is over 11 years old. … And I still remember being ridiculed by family, friends, and teachers for suggesting we would have such devices back in ’72 … as if it were yesterday.
If I had to guess: 2024 will be a very good year for pedophiles with private jets, Muslim billionaire terrorists living large in nations where pedophilia is legal, NGOs profiting from crime, sex-trafficking, and promoting Muslim grooming gangs, … and so on.
… And my optimist bone says, ‘well, we’ve reached Peak Leftism or Peak Stupid. We’ve got to pivot to rational behavior … ‘
.. But my cynicism bone reminds me that I’ve been waiting for that pivot since Reagan was the original Orange Man Bad …
G-d help us all.
Happy New Year!
You’re right, Dan, optimism is good but it needs to be supported with realism.
No Churches were bombed on Christmas, no Synagogues were bombed during Chanukah and no New Year’s countdown crowds were bombed, so that’s a good start for 2024.
However, the illegal invasion of America by the outside world’s human rejects perpetrated by the Dirtbagocrat and RINO coalition is enough to ruin us even without all the other sociopolitical plagues we’re suffering. And the fact that people are relieved because there were no Holiday season bombings is a sorry indication of our current and future society.
Happy New Year!
I’m haunted by the prospect that our collapse can be described with the auxiliary verb “have” in that past tense, as in
“By the beginning of 2024 all efforts to resuscitate the Republic were futile, as the ability of the USofA to install a popular government based upon a Constitutional compliant election no longer existed because the sitting powers had preferred it that way.”
Yes. The people who claim that America is finished if the next presidential election is stolen like the last one are correct, in my opinion. I also think that a Trump presidency would just be a temporary reprieve. The way things are going, the United States of America could become just a name rather than the country of our Founders., even though the clear majority of citizens support their vision written into the Constitution. What we have now is a tyranny by the minority and I can only hope it gets better after it gets worse.
I would say that the elite ruling classes of 2024 are not that different from 1912.
Their entrenched wealth and power and technological advancement and arrogance have corrupted them absolutely.
They are incapable of even imagining their folly and the danger ahead.
They are focused on their Utopian visions and ageless grievances while mindlessly expanding and maintaining their personal power and wealth and control.
I would not be surprised if the pied pipers of today are probably leading humanity into another Apocalypse.