We live like kings these days, even while we bemoan our state like beggars. Generally speaking, the members of the American middle class possess a material splendor that would put to shame an 8th-century chieftain. Or a 12th-century princeling. Or even an early 20th-century industrialist.
This isn't something we have to guess at. The writer Jeff Guinn has just given us The Vagabonds, a new book about the summer automobile outings of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison from 1914 to 1924. Admittedly, The Vagabonds is not a great work, its thin story padded with asides to bulk itself up to book length. Still, the text does suggest a truth that, at some level, we all know: The American summer tourist of 2019, rolling along in a giant air-conditioned motorhome, lives in many ways as well as the wealthy of a hundred years ago. What we lack in servants, we have gained in mechanics.
All those thousands of bus-sized campers parked at Niagara Falls, Mount Rushmore, and the Grand Canyon? Each of them represents ordinary folk with comforts known only to people as rich as Henry Ford, a century before. Ever since the industrial revolution began, we have seen peaks of income inequality hardly known in the earlier history of the world. And yet, because many of the eras of great new fortunes were born in technological innovation, we have also seen the middle class and even good swaths of the lower class arrive at material conditions that rank with the wealthy of a hundred years before. Relatively speaking, the average American may be far behind the current crop of industrialists, tech giants, and robber barons. But objectively speaking, middle-class people today are all little Henry Fords.
Read Full Article »
