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We've survived much worse times than 2008

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 3, 2009

How sour is the public mood? An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found about half of people believe 2008 was one of the worst years in American history. At times, Abraham Lincoln's lament has seemed apt, "We live in the midst of alarms; anxiety beclouds the future; we expect some new disaster with each newspaper we read."

But some perspective, please. Even a steep recession doesn't compare with the events that have made for America's worst years. To wit:

•1798: France sought - and failed - to sway the election of 1796 and punished us by attacking our shipping. The conflict exacerbated a poisonous partisan environment, the Republicans vs. the Federalists, fraught with suggestions of treason.

•1837: In a real-estate bubble, people borrowed paper money to speculate in Western land. According to John Steele Gordon's book "An Empire of Wealth," the resulting depression "didn't reach bottom until February 1843, fully seventy-two months after it began."

•1862: Any year of the Civil War qualifies as one of the country's worst, but in June, Robert E. Lee took command of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. In December the Union lost more than 12,000 men at Fredericksburg. Mid-term congressional elections went poorly for Lincoln's Republicans. "If there is a worse place than hell," Lincoln said, "I am in it."

•1940: The economy was still limping, with unemployment at 14.6 percent, having hit 19 percent in 1938, during "the depression within the Depression." Adolf Hitler marched into the Netherlands, Belgium and France, overrunning them in weeks. The American public was divided about how to respond, and the country's defenses were unprepared. The army had fewer soldiers than Yugoslavia, and troops often had to train using broomsticks.

•1968: Assassinations, urban riots, a losing war in Vietnam - it was the year of the great American nervous breakdown.

Of course, the country persevered:

•Taking office after an acrimonious electoral deadlock in 1800, Thomas Jefferson said in his first inaugural, "We are all Republicans; we are all Federalists," striking a grace note that came to define the American transfer of power.

•The economy recovered from the depression of 1837, and six decades after the adoption of the Constitution, Gordon notes, had "expanded by a factor of eighteen or more."

•In U.S. Grant, Lincoln finally found his general to match Lee.

•We rearmed and defeated the Axis, as the economy shook free of the Great Depression for good.

•The aftershocks of 1968 reverberate still, but in the 1980s the country entered a long period of prosperity and defeated the Soviet Union.

"We have overcome some grim, frightful times," says best-selling presidential historian Jay Winik. "With inspired leadership, with the American spirit and ingenuity, and with an open political system that resolves conflicts through debate rather than violence, we've always been able to restore the country to dynamism and health." And surely will again, as 2008 fades into the past.

© 2008 King Features Syndicate

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