The Rich Don't Always Win - Excerpt

INTRODUCTION In , one of America’s most beloved social historians set out to write the story of the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century. Frederick Lewis Allen, the influential editor of Harper’s magazine, would call his book The Big Change. Allen wanted to describe the awesome transformation that he personally—and Americans collectively—had witnessed since . He certainly had plenty to write about.

Back in , Americans lived without airplanes and automobiles, without TV and radio, without high-rises and suburbs. No Americans laughed and cried with family and friends at local movie theaters when the twentieth century dawned, or stuffed clothes into washing machines. Hardly anyone—outside the nation’s most southerly climes—even ate fresh fruit in the winter.

So what did Frederick Lewis Allen, amid all these colossal changes, end up citing as the twentieth century’s single most important change of all? Simply put: equality.

“Of all the contrasts between American life in  and half a century or more later,” Allen wrote, “perhaps the most significant is in the distance between rich and poor.” Over the century’s first half, the popular historian marveled, the mansions and estates of “the rich and fashionable” had become museums and hospitals and college campuses. The super rich, an overbearing presence in America circa , had essentially disappeared.

All sorts of midcentury observers celebrated that disappearance.

Stuart Chase, a MIT-trained engineer and a nationally respected social critic since the s, began a  memoir by noting that he had lived through an “era of shattering change.” How shattering?

“I can remember as a small boy,” wrote the then eighty-year-old 1