The debate raged then, as it does now. Was 1900 the last of the old century or the first of the new? Despite the fact that President William McKinley, Queen Victoria and Pope Leo XIII were all pretty sure the 20th century was a year away, no matter. The people were going to celebrate as the '99s became '00s.
"Crossing the divide" was an almost mystical experience. "No one considered 1900 just another year," says Judy Crichton in her book "America 1900: The Turning Point" (Henry Holt, $29.95), which serves up a remarkable look at that pivotal time in our history.Like a skillful weaver, Crichton pulls together the variegated threads that ran through that year and into the century beyond: the politics, the business, the social attitudes, the disasters, the lives. Taking us month by month, she gives us the biography of a year. And she helps us to understand how we got from that point to this. So many of the patterns that came together in 1900 would shape and color the years to come.
Since 1800, America had "grown from a small and fragile republic into a nation that The (New York) Times declared the envy of the world," she notes. In just 100 years, the population had grown from 5 million in 13 states to 76 million in 45 states, sprawled across a continent 3,000 miles wide and more diverse than many wanted to recognize. In 1900, "America was such a young country its entire history could almost be measured by the life span of its oldest citizens. Those caught in the exercise of remembrance tried to describe the changes they had lived through, and often failed."
It was a time to look ahead as well as back, and magazines and newspapers of the day delighted in predicting what the future might bring, what new wonders would come, what new technologies awaited discovery, what changes would impact life.
A man named John Ingalls wondered whether by the year 2000 a writer would be able to tell his readers that "the rich are no longer afflicted with satiety nor the poor with discontent; that we have wealth without ostentation, liberty without license, taxation without oppression, the broadest education, and the least corruption of manners." He concluded with the words, "perhaps not," notes Crichton. "It was easier at the start of 1900 to predict advances in technology than expansion of the spirit."
Predictions were interesting, but it was soon back to the business of living out the year. Weeks and months went by; the year unfolded in a series of daily events, some routine, some extraordinary. At the time, it was simply . . . Life. A hundred years later, we can see how those events set the stage for the century that was to follow.
On the international scene, a major problem for America was the insurrection in the Philippines, an outgrowth of the recent Spanish-American War and a signal that the United States would take an increasing role in world affairs.
Then came the Boxer Rebellion in China, where radicals were protesting foreign involvement there. Among the Americans pinned down by the troubles: Herbert and Lou Hoover.
Politics at home were dominated by the presidential election. Would McKinley run again? Then who would be his vice president (the current one having died in office)? Nobody particularly wanted the job, least of all Theodore Roosevelt, who was railroaded into the nomination by political machinery that wanted him out of New York. After the election, Roosevelt figured he was stuck in a dead-end job, that his political career was pretty much over. Someone forgot to tell a deranged anarchist named Leon Czolgosz.
Other names making news on the political front in 1900: Utah's B.H. Roberts, ousted from the Senate because he still lived with plural wives; Richard Croker, boss of New York's Tammany Hall; William Jennings Bryant, the ultimately unsuccessful Democratic candidate for president; Boston's John Fitzgerald, stepping down after three terms in the Senate to run for mayor of Boston and perhaps spend more time with family. John's daughter, Rose, after all, was married to the son of another leading Bostonian, P.J. Kennedy.
George White was also leaving the House of Representatives, but his departure made fewer headlines. White was the last black serving in Congress; it would be 28 years before another was elected to the House; 65 years before one came to the Senate. Although blacks in 1900 were celebrating 37 years of freedom, no one, especially the blacks themselves, felt their lives had improved all that much.
Immigrants, too, pouring in from Eastern Europe especially, found that the "melting pot" was really only lukewarm.
Big business was big business in 1900, the year when J.P. Morgan bought out Andrew Carnegie for $480 million. But 1900 was a year of major clashes between business and labor; strikes were frequent and sometimes violent, particularly those involving coal miners, who were still working under deplorable conditions. Some of those conditions may, in fact, have led to the explosion in Utah's Scofield mine that killed more than 200 miners. The largest mine disaster in the country to that time, it rocked the nation. But it devastated the little town of Scofield: 107 women lost husbands, 268 children were left without fathers.
Another major disaster that year was the hurricane that nearly wiped out Galveston, Texas. Striking without much warning, it claimed more than 6,000 lives; among them, the wife of Isaac Cline, who managed the fledgling U.S. Weather Bureau office there.
Automobiles were making news, and by the fall of 1900, people were beginning to think in terms of "autocars for the average man and woman." One writer noted that operating a car was "not as difficult in practice as the operation of a sewing machine."
Trains, too, were popular. But some eyes were turning to the skies: the hydrogen-filled Zeppelin took its maiden voyage in July; two bicycle-shop owners by the names of Wilbur and Orville Wright began the first of their "flying machine" experiments at Kitty Hawk, N.C.
As the year drew to a close, people complained that Christmas was getting too commercial: Americans would spent about $50 million on the holiday that year. And they dreamed of peace: Andrew Carnegie, asked what change he would like to see in the next century, wished to see "The earth freed from its foulest stain, the killing of men by men in the name of war." If only.
Dreams and wishes aside, life went on. Years later, a woman attending a gala celebration in honor of the beginning of the new century remembered how letdown she felt. The 20th century had begun and nothing had changed.
Oh . . . but it would. "As Americans tried to perceive the shape of the future," writes Crichton, "what no one could understand -- without the gift of foresight -- was that the nation had already moved across an unseen divide, from one age to the next. The issues so critical in 1900 would be much the same in the year 2000."