Who We Are Now

Who is the average American?

In 1900, he was a twenty-six-year-old man who lived in rented quarters in a rural community in the eastern United States. Only 1 in 20 Americans lived alone then. About the same small proportion of seventeen-year-olds had a high school diploma. More than a third of all adults worked on a farm and fewer than 1 in 5 women worked outside the home. Most Americans were married, and fewer than 1 in 100 were divorced. About 1 of every 7 Americans were foreign-born, a slightly higher proportion than the number of Americans who were nonwhite.

If 1900 seems like ancient history, consider 1950, when you or your parents or your grandparents were growing up. By then, the typical American was a thirty-year-old woman, still living east of the Mississippi, but now in a city and in her family's own home. Although the proportion of women who were divorced had doubled in a half-century (to about 1 in 50), the average woman was married and, as a result, wasn't working outside the home. The proportion of foreign-born Americans had fallen by half, and about 10 percent of the population was nonwhite.

Today, the average American is still a woman, aged thirty-five (if not a little older), living in a metropolitan area of the West or the South, more likely than not in a suburb. She owns her own home and probably lives with only one or two other people. More than a quarter of all Americans live alone. About 1 in 10 adults are divorced. More than 80 percent are high school graduates, and more than 3 in 5 women are in the workforce. About 1 in 4 Americans are black, Hispanic, or Asian.

By the time the twentieth century drew to a close, America was an altogether different place from when that century began. The changes that have reshaped society have been more than technological. The population changed, too. It had doubled in size by 1950 and then doubled again by 2000. Immigration altered the nation's complexion time and again. The mobility of native-born Americans and newcomers alike produced urban sprawl and seismic shifts in political power. Revolutions in civil rights and women's rights generated jarring upheavals in higher education, the workforce, and the family. Many of the trends that drove those twentieth-century changes accelerated in the 1990s, transforming America even more dynamically, redefining us as a nation — in some ways that were predicted and in many that were entirely unexpected — and posing profound challenges as we embark on a new century, one too young to be christened yet.

How we evolved, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century and during the transformations of the 1990s, helps explain who we are now and what makes the United States unique among nations.

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They were called "the good years," the historian Walter Lord recalled of the dawn of the twentieth century, not because everything going on in America at the time was in fact so good or that everyone benefited from its fruits, but because of the unshakable faith that what was wrong could be corrected and what was good would get even better. "These years were good," Lord wrote, "because, whatever the trouble, people were sure they could fix it."

Most of those people, Americans, could still trace their ancestry to England, Ireland, and Germany. Many were newly minted immigrants or their children, a growing number of them bringing new languages and unfamiliar customs from eastern and southern Europe. Some, largely confined to the South, were the descendants of slaves whose faith in what could be fixed and what could not had been tested mightily since the Civil War, which had ended only thirty-five years earlier. (More than a million veterans of that war were still alive.) The century had opened with Queen Victoria still on her throne, and, as the historian Henry Steele Commager wrote, "Already she had given her name to an era, and already men were beginning to pronounce that era the best, the most prosperous, and the most enlightened in history, forgetting or ignoring the poverty and misery, the cruel oppression and wars, that had stained its history."

For the most part, those optimistic people disregarded the debate (as most of the world did a hundred years later) over whether the new century began in 1900 or in 1901. At midnight on December 31, 1899, they ushered in what they and their descendants and successive waves of immigrants would transform into the American Century — a self-fulfilling prophecy first proclaimed by the journalist Henry Luce before the century was even half over. While other nations stood still or shrank or broke apart, America reinvented itself. It began the century uniquely as an experiment in racial and ethnic coexistence and would celebrate its success one hundred years later as the world's most multicultural society and a model for what other countries might eventually become.

"It is more than half a century since Carlyle said of the population of England that its workers were 'understood to be the strongest, the cunningest, and the willingest our earth ever had,'" a New York Times editorial recalled in 1900. "The praise was then unchallenged and unchallengeable. But in the interval the population of the United States has not only vastly increased beyond that of the British Islands, but its workmen have become clearly the superiors of the British workmen in all the qualities Carlyle mentions.

"Only three political systems — the British Empire, the Chinese Empire and the Russian Empire — have unquestionably greater population than the United States," the Times intoned, adding confidently, "For a young nation we are doing very well."

In the nineteenth century, the young nation's workmen had perfected and mass-produced the telegraph, telephones, and electric lights. Still, on the threshold of the twentieth, when the Times envisioned "a still brighter dawn of civilization," who would have imagined what innovations the coming decades would deliver: radio, television, the airplane. When the century began, Americans owned barely 8,000 private automobiles. When it ended, for the first time personal vehicles registered in the United States outnumbered licensed drivers.

Between 1890 and 1900, the population of the forty-five states had increased by a staggering 21 percent to 76 million. Los Angeles soared in rank from the 135th largest city to the 36th largest, and nearly 1 in 3 Americans now lived in a city. Whites accounted for nearly 88 percent of the population (the "colored" included blacks, Chinese, Japanese, and American Indians), but the proportion of foreigners — 9 in 10 of them from Europe — now matched the highs of the 1850s and was rising with no ceiling in sight. In Milwaukee, Detroit, Chicago, New York, Cleveland, and San Francisco, more than...