We Will Survive

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | Nov. 2, 2024

Some of you will be reading this before Tuesday’s election and some after. You might still be hopeful or now joyful or despondent. So whether you believe the world will be, or has been, saved from the forces of evil or is likely to be controlled by those forces, take a very deep breath. It is not likely the republic will now crumble; we’ve been through much before and survived quite nicely.

And in spite of what you might have been hearing lately, we are not a failing country with a failing government, failing military, or failing schools. At worst, we are a surviving country, and we survive very well.

Let's not forget we are a country born in a violent revolution, so we survived a fairly sketchy beginning—6,800 American patriots died in battle, another 17,000 died from disease, and unknown thousands more of the 20,000 revolutionary POWs died in British captivity. But survive we did.

It was the beginning of an endless string of wars, police actions, and various skirmishes in which we’ve been involved. In fact, we’ve never gone so much as a single decade without some kind of war or battle.

After the Revolutionary War were the ignominious Indian Wars which dragged on and on and until 1925 when the Comanche Wars in Texas finally ended. (The so-called Apache Wars started in 1845 when James K. Polk was president and ended 79 years and 20 presidents later, when Woodrow Wilson was president.) These wars, which were often just massacres, also resulted in the Trail of Tears, in which at least 60,000 members of the five “Civilized Tribes” were forced to march from their ancestral lands to reservations in Oklahoma, and the Long Walk, which forced the Navajo people to relocate.

Elsewhere, there was the American-Algerian War of 1785, our first loss, and the Barbary War of 1800, which we revisited a decade later.

The British were not content with a single defeat, which led to the War of 1812. They lost again, though they did manage to burn both the White House and the Capitol and kill about 15,000 Americans through battle and disease. There was the Mexican-American War of 1848 in which the U.S. claimed sovereignty over Texas.

Then there was the Civil War, which could have destroyed the country or at least split us asunder. Attempting to secede from the union to protect slavery (if you don’t believe slavery was the cause, go online and read the Letter of Secession from any of the Confederate states and see for yourself), it was our deadliest and ugliest war. Some 700,000 Americans died, most from disease, in a war of futility that still splits us north and south and from which we are still recovering. But we did survive.

Moving ahead to just the highlights, there was World War I, hopefully but sadly known as the War to End All Wars, then the equally horrific World War II. Both purpose and outcome became less clear, but then came Korea, Vietnam, and the Afghanistan/Iraq foray, with all manner of skirmishes in between.

It’s not just wars we’ve survived. Our economy, though the strongest in the world for more than a century, has had its threatening moments. There were recessions aplenty starting with the Great Panic of 1785, the Panic of 1873, and at least 48 official recessions according to the Federal Reserve leading up to the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and the COVID recession.

We survived all of that, including so-called soft landings and hard landings, not to mention full-blown depressions which started early in our history. There was a depression in 1807, another in 1815, the dreaded Long Depression of 1873-1879, and another right away in 1882. A depression in 1920 we ignored, but that foreshadowed the nightmare that was the Great Depression starting in 1929, which saw staggering 25 percent unemployment (about a quarter of the civilian workforce), a collapse of manufacturing production, and severe deflation, with wholesale prices falling by as much as a third and retail prices falling at least 25 percent. (While we might think we’d welcome such price decreases now, if manufacturers can’t make money, their stocks tumble, which crashes the market. Not good.)

We’ve survived wars and the vagaries of an inconsistent economic system with all kinds of leaders, good and bad, capable and not. We even survive when those leaders don’t.

We’ve survived eight presidents dying in office, four from assassination (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy) and another four (William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Warren Harding, and Franklin Roosevelt) from natural causes. There have also been another half dozen assassination attempts that were, fortunately, unsuccessful.

We will not slide into the abyss of historic failure just because our preferred candidates did not win. We’ll complain, we might struggle or even suffer, but we will survive.