Boomers and Millennials - Two Sides of the Same Dark Mirror?

So this is a bit more of an opinion piece than a firm historical summary, but I've recently seen an increasing number of social media posts that summarize the current situation in the United States under the heading "The Baby Boomers had the best most amazing economy and society EVER and they destroyed it an orgy of greed and stupidity."  This is usually combined with a idealized vision of the post-World War II economy of the United States, with descriptors like "Virtuous Cycle" when describing that economic period of time in the United States.

I would like to posit though that Baby Boomers and Millennials share a more in common than many of them realize and the reaction of the Baby Boomers in shifting to support Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s is not that far off from the election of Donald Trump.  Strap in and let us see where this crazy line of thought takes us.

The cornerstone of my theory rests on what I define as the "grit years" - specifically when individuals are between 16 to 28 years of age.  From my reading of history that seems to be the period when people have the most energy to protest, challenge the status quo, and extend demands upon their government in the United States.  Post those ages people seem to calm down, settle into raising families and building a wealth position, and shift more center in their politics.  (Usually center-left or center-right depending on their younger leanings.)  General trends though, there are plenty of examples of those who keep their fire up throughout their life.

So based on that Baby Boomers are, most broadly, defined as the generation born between 1943 to 1964.  The birth rate exploded between 1948 to 1958 so that ten year clump is peak "Boomer Time".

That would put our first edge of Boomers reaching the "grit age" around 1959 and the last of the reaching that "grit age" around 1980.  The biggest clump though got to the "grit age" between 1964 to 1974.  If you look at the demographic curve this huge clump of people got into their late teens and early twenties in the 1960s, which makes sense if you think about it, we've all seen the huge number of protests and outrage over the Vietnam War and Civil Rights.  Two defining moments when the young citizens of the United States, combined with older supporters from the Greatest Generation (TM), rose up and demanded significant progress from their nation.

That is an image from 1968, the My Lai Massacre, a horrific wartime atrocity committed by the United States where a village of Vietnamese civilians were slaughtered.  The story came out in 1969 and resulted in wide-spread outrage, not only that this had happened but that the United States government and military had first attempted to conceal it and then blamed it on combat officers violating their orders.  Soldiers pointing out this sort of incident happened often, and was at the implied or verbal orders of their superiors, was ignored.  Combine that with the continued horror show domestically around civil rights, and you have a combined effort of the citizens attempting to change the direction of their government and being ignored.

The Vietnam War didn't end for the United States until 1973 and the period from 1969 to 1973, under Richard Nixon, involved a crappy peace deal, a temporary expansion of the war into Laos and Cambodia, and more heavy bombing.  Nixon also refused to really engage with those who were outraged at these events and instead pushed hard to follow his own course politically.  Which meant if you were a Baby Boomer entering your "grit years" in the early 1970s you got watch all of the efforts at protest and anger seem to do little to nothing to really impact change.  Combine that with the Watergate investigation and you can imagine youth confidence in government, and its handling of any aspects of the nation's direction, was badly shattered.

So what about the magical economy that Baby Boomers inherited, the one that now Millennials envy and blame Baby Boomers for destroying?  Well the 1970s was dominated by a serious economic crisis, a combination of economic stagnation and inflation termed "stagflation" that impacted the entire globe.  There are several factors and, honestly, no one even today quite knows for sure what caused it, but several factors combined to make the 1970s an economically difficult time.  Government policy at the time didn't really seem to address the issue either and the economic crisis of the 1970s just dragged on, with inflation and rising interest rates combining to slam people in their twenties and thirties into the economic dirt.

Unemployment rates from 1974 through 1979 were not that far off from unemployment rates between 2008 - 2013.  Inflation rates in that period were insanely high compared to the modern era, ranging from 6% at the bottom to over 13% in 1979.  GDP growth in that same period was also sluggish as well.  For those checking the late teens and early twenties would cover those Baby Boomers born between 1953 to 1959 roughly.  Too young to engage in the protests of the 1960s (but old enough to remember them), to have grown up during the final booming years of the 1960s, and coming into their own when the economy tanked and their forebears seemed to have ruined everything before them.

I'd even this group of Baby Boomers and current Millenials get to share a general disbelief at the federal government's seeming inability to come up with a solid plan to address these economic issues.  People in their early twenties through their early thirties in the 1970s wanted jobs, a growing economy, security in the face of foreign competition, and an end to economic uncertainty.  What they got was the WIN campaign with signs like this (Gerald Ford) and depressing speeches about how everyone would need to cut their energy consumption (Jimmy Carter).

(Give one of Carter's energy reports a listen, it is about five minutes in length and remember, this is Carter trying to cheer the nation up about the energy crisis.)

I encourage any Millenials and Generation X readers to have a chat with your parents/grandparents about the 1970s and what the economy felt like for them.  Ask about how it felt politically, you will probably be surprised to see pursued lips and a furrowed brows.  People generally don't like to dwell on this period in the 1970s, it was too damn depressing.  I imagine many Millenials will have the same reaction when asked about the late 2000s.

So how does this end up?  Well...

I would argue with an upscale 1980s version of Donald Trump, specifically Ronald Reagan.  Now Reagan has a lot to latch onto to argue he was a better President than Donald Trump, he had actual public office experience for one thing.  But there are some eerie similarities:

• Reagan went into office with promises to reform Washington and end its current systems of welfare and social support
• Reagan planned to reduce the scope of government and end its comfortable bureaucratic structures that he claimed were throttling innovation in the United States
• He staffed his cabinet with anti-government officers bent on reducing regulation and redefining how the United States federal government operated
• Reagan had a serious love of tax cuts, although he did roll them back
• Reagan also had a serious love of military spending and expanded it greatly
• He was a foreign affairs maverick whose efforts in dealing with the Soviet Union really shifted the stance of the United States
• He was a "Big Picture, Few Details" kind of President
• Delegate, delegate, delegate
• An administration plagued with regular scandals

Hell he even had his own equivalent to the current Donald Trump Russia debacle, the Iran-Contra affair.  (There were even rumors of a foreign power meddling indirectly in the 1980 election, Iran, in holding back the release of the hostages on Carter.)

So why did Boomers vote for Reagan in such droves, shifting the political coalition of the time and sweeping former Democratic strongholds to support Reagan?  The same reasons you'd probably find for the support for Trump among that group - issues about social stability, feelings of insecurity in the future, and the promise of economic reform.

Overall I'd say this for people reading this long opinion piece - I would recommend against accepting the idea that Baby Boomers had a paradise and ruined it.  Instead I would offer that Baby Boomers ended up inheriting a United States undergoing a series of interlinked and seemingly intractable problems in the 1970s combined with a government that seemed out-of-touch and unwilling to adjust to the demands of the era.  They demanded change, swinging to a Right wing candidate who promised common sense solutions to the problems facing the United States.  Millenials and Baby Boomers - stop chopping into each other, to my eye you both have more in common than you might want to admit.

Sources:  Wikipedia articles on Ronald Reagan, US economic history in the 1970s, My Lai Massacre, Vietnam War, Baby Boomers, TheBalance on US unemployment rates/inflation/growth,

U.S. Civil War, States Rights, and Slavery

A recent article in the Washington Post titled "Texas Officials: Schools should teach that slavery was 'side issue to Civil War" has, once again, shed light on a very old fight taking place on the core issues of the United States Civil War.  Historians almost across the board agree that slavery was the core issue of the U.S. Civil War, those that disagree will normally acknowledge that the "states right" that was being fought over was slavery.  I will touch on that, later in this post, but I first wanted to express in a more general tone why, to my eye, this particular issue on the interpretation of the U.S. Civil War is so critical and is still so violently fought over.

Since the close of the U.S. Civil War in 1865, and with the termination of Reconstruction in the late 1880s, the United States has seen a general move by its southern states, and portions of the northern states, to embrace the U.S. Civil War as a fight over the "Lost Cause."  This is a romanticized view of the U.S. Civil War, a re-imagining of the conflict as a battle fought by an outmatched foe (the South) against an aggressive dominating rival (the North.)  This view of the U.S. Civil War pivots the narrative into one of the Southern states fighting to defend more morally palatable issues for the United States of the 1880s forwards, issues of limited government, Constitutional balance, and yes, states rights.

States rights reaches to the issue of federalism, the balance between the states and the central federal government, and has been an issue of contention in the United States since its founding.  The initial divide between our two political parties reflects this, it is a divide which is rooted in the current debates shaping the United States today.

At its root the "Lost Cause" view of the U.S. Civil War was an effort to remake the war into something more noble.  It was also part of an effort by the north and south to reunify the country and close still strong sectional divisions in the early 20th century.  As part of this effort both sides agreed to a tacit cultural agreement, northern historians and cultural figures would accept the "nobility" of the southern cause and support that position, and southern historians and cultural figures would embrace Abraham Lincoln and the northern actions as necessary if regrettable.  I will admit this is just my opinion but I believe it was this compromise that really put an end to the idea that states had a moral right of secession as a mainstream theory about the U.S. Civil War, most people today may debate the legality of secession and when it could happen, but they've accepted the U.S. Civil War was necessary because it kept the United States a strong nation.

This compromise reached its height, in my opinion, in 1958 with the passage of U.S. Public Law 85-425 which granted the widows of Confederate forces the right to a pension from the U.S. government.  The actual law is limited to just this but it has since been taken in common culture as a taciturn recognition of Confederate veterans as having the same status as veterans of the U.S. armed forces in general.  For the purposes of this post the actual legality of that view is irrelevant, what matters is that since 1958 the accepted image of Confederate veterans in the south is that they were patriots, equal to U.S. veterans, not traitors or criminals.

But was the U.S. Civil War about slavery at its core?  Bottom line, yes, and also state's rights, and also regional power.  To see this though you have to go back to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which dealt with how to handle new states entering the U.S.  The issue was the admission of Missouri, whose residents wanted to own slaves.  The challenge was that the balance of power in the U.S. Senate balanced evenly between slave states and free states in 1820.  This balance of power was considered vital for the southern states because the more populous north dominated the House of Representatives and with the northern states there was growing resistance to slavery.  (Not due to any particularly strong moral issues, although that was part of it, rather to a blend of moral issues with good old-fashioned economic concerns.)

To deal with this Maine was admitted at the same time, as a free state, and the U.S. Congress drew a line across the lands of the Louisiana purchase marking off where slavery would end.  Both sides also understood that newly admitted states would have to maintain the Senate balance of power between slave states and free states.  To offset that balance was unacceptable to both sides - to the north loss of the Senate would make them bound to an unfair "slave power" in the U.S., which had economic interests violently opposed to the growing interests of northern industrial powers.  For southern states loss of the Senate would make them vulnerable to pressures that would harm their economic interests as a trading power engaged in a fiercely competitive global agricultural trade.

This balance remained in place until Stephen Douglas in 1854, in part of a bid to improve his political position in a run for the Presidency, in part to open land for railroad settlement, and also due to his political convictions came up with a new plan - scrap the Missouri Compromise and let the residents of each state decide if they wanted to be free or slave.  Hence the creation, and passage, of the Kansas-Nebraska Act which said "you local residents, you decide among yourselves if you want to be slave or free."

Now if slavery was not, by itself, a burning issue with deep roots to sectional conflicts, state position, and deeply held ethnic tensions in the United States, you might imagine that this would have been settled in a calm, collected manner.  It was not.

The image above is a "free state" poster regarding Kansas - give it a look - as you can see people were quite touchy on the issue of if Kansas would be a slave or free state.  Both sides on the issue flooded the territory with individuals and the issue was resolved with armed force.  This period was, and is, referred to as "Bleeding Kansas" and it basically pitted "free territory" settlers against individuals from Missouri who came to ensure that slavery would be allowed to expand into Kansas.  The situation wasn't really resolved until 1861 when Kansas was admitted as a free state to the union.  (By which point things had already reached the "Holy Hell" stage with South Carolina already pulling out of the United States.)

Allow me to close with this point - slavery as an issue in the United States from its founding through 1865 was a contentious issue, both on its own merits and for what it symbolized to the people of the United States.  From the 1850s onward though it became probably the central issue of United States politics, for better or for worse.  From the rise of the Republican Party out of the dead remains of the Whig Party, a new political organization with an avowed goal of shattering slavery in the United States ideally and at a minimum containing it in the southern states till it died out on its own against Southern leaders who with the Dred Scott decision made it clear they intended to bring slavery into free states and use the power of the federal courts to make slavery a default acceptable option throughout the United States.

If I had to summarize it I'd say that the U.S. Civil War was about slavery because it was a war about what shape the United States would take, what sort of nation it would be - one with slavery or one without.  Because within that issue was tied a whole host of other issues of what the United States would be:

• Predominately a strong agricultural exporter power with low tariffs or a strong industrial power with high tariffs and limited foreign trade
• A nation with a strictly enforced racial hierarchy empowered by law or one in which the racial hierarchy was more fluid
• A nation in which private property was sacrosanct or one in which the federal government had the right to redefine, seize, and modify property based on Congressional laws
• A nation in which the federal government or the individual state governments would hold the strongest position of power

It is an ugly truth today but in the end it all really did come down to the issue of...slavery

Sources:  Wikipedia articles on Bleeding Kansas, Lost Cause, Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Missouri Compromise

Trump and Hitler, an apt comparison?

I'm going to open this post with a quote from Bernie Sanders:

"A nation cannot be called impotent as long as it is able to produce the minds that are necessary to solve the problems crying out for solution. We can measure the greatness of a people by the minds it produces. That, too, is a value, but only when it is recognized as a value. If a nation has the ability to produce great minds a thousand times over, but has no appreciation for the value of these minds and excludes them from its political life, these great minds are of no use."

A powerful quote from a great mind, except actually it's a HITLER QUOTE!  Only slightly modified to make you think Bernie might have said it!  *EVIL LAUGHTER*  Bernie supporters really love HITLER!  I've used the power to pluck a quote entirely out of its context, tweak it, and post it to fool you mere cretins who support Senator Sanders!

This is the sort of story I see now repeatedly which, in its many forms, attempts to link Donald Trump, Trump's current voter appeal, or Trump's statements into some sort of Hitler clone.  For example:

So although I'm not a "history teacher" I would like to point out that, first, slapping Trump's head on a classic Hitler pose does not a compelling image make.  Furthermore I checked - Hitler is not anti-immigrant.  Really, he doesn't speak on it often, because immigration was not a major issue for Germany in the 1930s.  Hitler did stand in opposition to Communism, violently opposed to it, but that is a far more complex battle than the above text implies.  One of the groups the Nazi party opposed in Germany was the German Communist Party, which also was the party that most often matched the Nazis in the late 1930s in seats in the German parliament.  So this would be a comparable moment if you actually had in the United States some sort of "Muslim Terrorism Party" that ran against the Republicans and controlled about half the United States House of Representatives regularly.

Which of course also fails as a comparison because the German parliament was nothing like the United States Congress - being based on a Parliamentary model of organization it was closer to the British Parliament.  (Variable elections based on the ability of the government to pass legislation versus fixed terms of service.)

This is Hitler - when Hitler was rising to power in the early 1930s he did it on the back of a massive economic implosion (no the recent Great Recession is not the same), and he did it leading a people still psychologically recovering from a humiliating defeat in a war and harnessing a myth that this people had been "stabbed in the back" by their government.  Also, as you can see from this genuine speech of Hitler's from 1927 Hitler is obsessed with seeing the world through a racial lens.  (Trump panders to racists but I highly doubt you will find he sees the world through a racial lens in any way like what Hitler sees it.  Imagine if in ALL of Trump's speeches he argued that the Mexican people were a separate people, a people with inferior blood, based solely on their being Mexican.  A sneaky separate people that have oppressed Anglo people around the world for generations.  A people with a secret powerful connection to shadowy cabals.)  See, it doesn't work, that isn't Trump's appeal.

Because Trump isn't trying to appeal to the prejudices of early 1930s Germans and he wasn't educated on a diet of really crappy anti-Semitic pamphlets while stewing in flophouses trying to be an artist.  Hitler wasn't well educated (Trump is comparatively), Hitler came from lower middle class roots shifted to extreme poverty (Trump didn't and isn't), and Germany in the 1930s was dealing with a completely different set of ideological problems than the United States in the mid-2010s.

But I can hear you saying "But we need something truly EVIL to be able to compare to Trump, otherwise how can we make a fast easy set of memes to draw people to what a problem he is."  You don't need to dig into the collection of 1930s European Fascists, as people of the United States we've got our own contemporary example of Trump and his dangers right here.

I give you George Wallace, 1960s politician from right here in the United States.  I propose he is a perfect stand-in for Trump:

• He's unabashedly racist and you can substitute "Mexican" into many of his speeches where he says "Black" and you'll find good parallels
• He was in favor of segregation as a permanent feature of United States policy and believed strongly in state's rights
• Passionate orator who got crowds riled up and once called upon a crowd to go deal with a group of "pinkos" protesting his rally.  (Unlike Trump when the crowd got up to actually kick some ass he calmed them down.)
• His 1968 independent run for the Presidency of the United States has some really eerie similarities to Trump's currently stated politics
• He was also big on lowering taxes to court business to moving to his home state of Georgia (just replace Georgia with "United States" and "north" with "China" and you'll be fine.)

Now I know, who has ever heard of George Wallace as compared with Hitler?  You'll have to do more work building up the meme connection between the two, maybe get some late-night television hosts to do a snappy bit on the topic, but America we can make this stick.  Let's leave the Germany's their unhappiness and tap into our own rich vein of political assholes when talking about possible evils to compare to Trump.

If nothing else do it for the children, so they can stop being taught that Hitler was some sort of mega-evil monstrosity on par with an ogre or a troll.

Sources:  Wikipedia entry on George Wallace

The tagline on the above photo is that it is an “armed protest” outside a Muslim civic center in Texas, it’s just one part of a broader series of incidents outlined in an article on Islamophobia written up in Vox.  As readers of this blog know I’m always a cautious one to draw links between Nazism and other movements, mainly because so many use Nazis and Nazism as a quick “go to” for concepts of evil, violence, or reactionary politics by extreme right-wing factions.  For me though reading about the current policies, including the sweeping series of new legislation going around various state governments outlawing “foreign law” for having any impact within their territories, and “protests” like the one above, smack of a similar mindset to early Nazi anti-Jewish activities.

This is a classic image from 1933, put up during the mostly symbolic one day national boycott of Jewish shops and businesses organized by the Nazi party shortly after Hitler became Chancellor.  Historians debate how much impact it had on Germany’s economy, many German citizens simply ignored the boycott and shopped as normal, or deliberately sought out to patronize Jewish owned businesses as a form of protest.  But it featured large numbers of armed, uniformed figures in the SA (the Nazi party’s semi-unofficial military army of the party) standing outside businesses that had been vandalized to discourage people from going in and shopping.

The Nazi boycott had a uniquely German feel to it, the storm troopers didn’t carry pistols or rifles, they wore snappy brown uniforms, and they used visual intimidation to complete their action.  But I look at the photo at the top of this blog post and I cannot help but see a parallel, although the “protest” photo at the top carries a uniquely American outlook.  But is armed men wearing jungle camouflage with an American flag that much of a difference than the Nazi storm troopers.  Both are using symbols of recognized organization and power, and both are drawing links to traditional images of power.  (The storm troopers wore the high boots used by the German military and their caps were modeled to look police or military in style.  The same with the belts.)  Some of the men in that “protest” shot could be considered to be using the imagery of the American military in making their stance.

What more deeply concerns me personally though is the legislative action being carried out by state governments.  According to the Vox article a good percentage of Americans feel that being Muslim should disqualify an individual from the office of President.  On 7 April 1933 the German government, under the control of the Nazi party, passed the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” – a law that ended employment in the civil service for “non-Aryans” – Jews – employed by the German government.


My worry is could such a law be passed in the United States?  I would like to think no, that such a thing could not happen in the United States, but I honestly wonder if some state governments might not pass a law like this on their own.  Furthermore I wonder if the federal government would crush such laws or let them go as “state privilege.”

A final note, for those out there who see Donald Trump and wonder if his rallies and his supporters touch on some of the same efforts and concepts of the Nazi party, you don’t have to seek that far.  The image above is a 1939 rally by the German American Bund, a genuine pro-Fascist Nazi party operating in the United States prior to World War II.  The image above is from their high-point rally, when 20,000 people attended Madison Square Gardens to see their rally.  I just post this because it shows how extremism, and even Fascism or its American equivalents, can wrap itself quite effectively in the flag of the United States.

Sources:  Vox article on American Islamophobia, US Holocaust Museum entry on the Jewish Business Boycott of 1933, Wikipedia article on the Jewish Business Boycott of 1933, Wikipedia entry on the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service of 1933,US Holocaust Museum entry on several early anti-Jewish Nazi laws,  Wikipedia entry on the German American Bund, and finally a blog post entry on the German American Bund

Overheard Misuse of History – Opinion

Yesterday while walking around the city I overheard two young students engaged in a debate over their ideal visions of the role of the US government in the lives of its individual citizens.  What struck me in this classic debate was the comment made by one student, a young man dressed in sweat pants, sweat shirt, and ball cap, that in his ideal vision of the United States: “the federal government would let me live my life they way I wanted to live it, let me do what I wanted, like in the 19th century, before the US government became all Socialist in the 20th century.”  It is a rare moment in my life when I want to walk up to a fellow human being and smack them on the nose with a rolled up newspaper while exclaiming “Bad human, tell me who taught you this drivel so that I may strike them as well.”

The problem with this young man’s outlook on the role of the federal government in the 19th century is that it is, quite simply, incorrect on many levels.  First off there is no ideal period in the 19th century in which the US government on a federal level did not pass legislation that directly impacted or curtailed elements of an individual citizens “freedoms” – doubly so if that citizen was from a minority segment of the population or female in gender.  A simple examination of the major ideological battles of this period refutes the young man’s argument, the controversy over slavery, in fact the very institution of slavery, negates the idea of minimal federal involvement in the lives of individual citizens.  (For example the admission of new states to the Union was fraught with controversy and federal action to maintain the Free/Slave balance of power.)  The institution of the National Bank of the United States, in its various incarnations, was seen as a direct force intervening in the daily lives of citizens across the nation and was directly linked to the US federal government.

Even the “golden” period of non-intervention in private lives by the federal government from the late 1860s through the 1890s, the Gilded Age, actually featured regular federal statues regulating immigration, interstate commerce, and direct intervention by the federal government in numerous labor disputes and moments of civil insurrection.  In fact this period featured a US effort to suppress anarchists movements and insurrections throughout the United States, as well as federal regulations prohibiting the distribution of pornographic or dangerous materials through the US mail system, a direct assault on freedom of speech and publication by the federal government.  (To remind people this was the period in which the US government directly prohibited the distribution of educational material on contraception and the distribution of contraceptive devices through the US mail.)

Never mind the fact that the period of late 1860s through the 1880s was also the height of Reconstruction, a period of incredible direct intervention by the federal government in the lives of southern US citizens.  When Reconstruction ended the Progressive movement was gaining influence among the citizens of the United States, leading to reformist (or probably for this young man “Socialist”) legislation such as the various Anti-Trust Acts, Food and Drug Purity Acts, and regulations to curb the abuses of industry throughout the United States.

But from other comments that I overheard this young man making I quickly gathered that his comment centered upon the institution of federal income tax, collected by the federal government and redistributed/spent by the federal government.  This young man wished to return to period when the US government did not directly tax the personal income of its citizens, and in that regard he is mostly correct.  Efforts by the federal government to impose an income tax in the 1860s to finance the Civil War were ended in 1872 and future efforts to impose federal income tax in the 1880s through the 1910s were blocked by the Congress or the Supreme Court, on the grounds the power to impose such taxes was not Constitutionally permitted to the federal government.  This argument ended in 1913 with the ratification of the 16th amendment.

But this young man fails, in his understanding of history, to understand the system by which the US government raised revenue from the 1860s through the 1910s, excise taxes and import tariffs.  Excise taxes are taxes imposed upon the consumption of items by private citizens and import tariffs are taxes imposed upon items imported into a nation that are manufactured abroad.  Import tariffs are particularly critical to this equation because they artificially raised the cost of imported items that were cheaper to manufacture then US domestically produced items to give US produced items an artificial market parity or even edge over cheaper foreign imports.  What this meant was that the federal governments tax structure directly impacted your fiscal freedom in the 19th century in a manner incomprehensible to most modern Americans – imagine going to a store and finding that each pair of shoes, made in the US or abroad, cost roughly the same amount.  No competitive forces to lower costs and allow your money to go to the most efficient producer, instead efficiency in manufacture is not rewarded, the ability to bribe legislatures to impose duties is rewarded.  This issue was highly controversial in the 19th century and remains highly controversial today.  Excise taxes hold the same bane today, we argue about taxes on cigarettes and alcohol, in the 19th century citizens argued about taxes on recreational facilities, chewing gum, and heavy taxes on alcohol.  As well in the 19th century it was felt that excise taxes and high import tariffs hurt the poorer members of our citizen base more then the rich and a fairer system of revenue collection was needed.


What our young man sought was a system that simply did not exist in the 19th century and, honestly, has never existed in US history.  The nature of personal intervention into average citizens lives held by the US government has changed over the last two centuries, as well as the level of direct intervention, but there has been no time in which the hand of the federal government of the United States has not directly touched some or all of its governed population.

Source: US Treasury Department Fact Sheet on Income Tax History