It has been some time since I've compared front pages of the New York Times from eighty years apart. The eighty year cycle is key to the whole Strauss-Howe framework for history, as you know--but because we haven't gone through and successfully resolved a great crisis in 2026, as we had in 1946, this comparison illuminates the enormous differences between that time and ours. Yesterday's front page, which I will get to in due course, seemed such an acute portrayal of where we now that I was moved to do the comparison again. The first thing to note, as in other comparisons, is how much more news the 1946 front page contained. It includes fifteen different news stories and a world news summary in eight columns; yesterday's six-column page has six stories, and teases for twelve more at the bottom of the page.
Two three-column headlines dominate the October 5 page. On the left, inflation, fueled above all by skyrocketing meat prices and shortages, is the story. Mayor O'Dwyer of New York has asked President Truman to ask the FBI to investigate the "meat famine" in the city and allow imports from Argentina. A second story under the headline reports that the Office of Price Administration, a holdover from wartime that was about to go out of business, was allowing restaurants to raise their prices on meat dishes by fifteen percent. A third story reports that a different agency, the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, had been unable to agree on an alternative to the current wage-price stabilization plan, which was failing. Then as now, inflation was perhaps the most serious domestic issue the country faced, and it was much more serious then. The explosion of consumer demand and shortages raised prices by 18 percent by the end of 1946, compared to an estimated 3.7 percent this year. That was the biggest reason for the Republican landslide in the congressional elections that were just a week away, and which, interestingly enough, did not make their way onto the October 6 front page. A similar story is playing out this year on a lesser scale.
The three-column headline on the right also has contemporary resonance: "Truman Again Prods Britain on 100,000 Palestine Visas; Backs Jewish State Plan." Truman said that the proposals of the Jewish Agency for Palestine for "a viable Jewish state in control if its own immigration and economic policies in an adequate area of Palestine instead of in the whole of Palestine." Eighty years later, as I have pointed out, the Israeli government seems to be executing a plan to extend the borders of that state to what was then the whole of Palestine. A second story reports that the Attlee government in Britain had immediately rejected the proposal, which had generated intense Arab opposition. Four other foreign stories, only one from wire services, occupied the rest of the three columns on the right. An international Italian Economic Commission announced that Italy would have to pay $225 million in war reparations to Yugoslavia, Greece, and Ethiopia--a figure that the great power Council of Foreign Ministers, including those of the US, the USSR, Britain and France, would have to approve. Another London story reported the creation of a new Ministry of Defense to coordinate Britain's three services. In China, an unidentified force of Chinese had attacked a US Marine supply depot, and in Yugoslavia the Tito government had arrested an American United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation official as a spy.
Between the two big headlines, a Honolulu story reported the first leg of a non-stop B-29 flight from there over the North Pole to Egypt, which had already reached Alaska. Below that, the Times reported on a speech by Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson in Buffalo, New York. Fresh from his service as a Nuremberg prosecutor, Jackson warned that "there could be no permanent peace unless minorities everywhere were to have at least a minimum of civil rights." In a related story from Tennessee, an all-white jury had acquitted twenty-three of twenty-five Negroes[sic] "accused of participating in the disorders at Columbia, Tenn., last February 25, in which two Negroes were killed and four white policemen were wounded." And in local news, a strike meeting of sailors from the merchant marine had ended in violence blamed on Communist members, and five armed men had robbed more than $1,000 from an office of Colonial Airlines.
Yesterday a foreign story of a different kind occupied the top right-hand side of the Times front page. It told how presidential envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have spent a good deal of their time in the Kremlin talking to Vladimir Putin about a big US-Russian energy deal involving a major donor to President Trump. These talks have gone parallel to their efforts to stop the Russia-Ukraine war, which have gone nowhere. Such a deal, sources say, would be a big step towards the easing of sanctions against Russia and a warming of Russian-American relations. Two domestic stories take up the rest of the top of the page. The first, on the left, deals with by far the biggest Times story of the last week, the lawsuit filed by a former Cornell student against seven young men for allegedly sexually assaulting her two years ago, and the way in which the case was originally handled by Cornell and local authorities. The second, datelined Phoenix, Arizona, tells in detail of US teenagers there who are making money reselling guns to representatives of the Mexican drug cartel. Below those two is a lighter-than-air story about the city of Philadelphia's first parallel parking championship and the contestants who have already developed an online following by posting pictures of the tight spaces they have maneuvered into. The fifth story is about an AI algorithm which claims to measure a patient's risk of getting breast cancer from a single mammogram. And the last deals with our forthcoming election from a framework that was not an issue in 1946: "Justices Brace for Disputes from Election," the headline reads, focusing on the Supreme Court.
In the wake of the Second World War, US readers remained keenly interested in global events, whether or not the US was directly involved in them. They also followed the doings the federal, state and local government closely, and civil rights had already emerged as an important new issue, even before President Truman took it up in a big way about 18 months later. They counted on the government to do something about economic distress. Yesterday the two national affairs stories focused on corruption in high places, and the near-certainty of serious disputes over the outcome of our forthcoming elections. The Cornell story reflects decades of evolving social mores, and the AI story points to another big change in how we live. The domestic and international political orders that the US had been trying to create for the first five decades of the twentieth century are gone, and we have not replaced them. In the last twenty 25 years we have had three very serious crises to cope with: 9/11, the financial crash of 2008, and the COVID epidemic. The government's failure to handle any of them in an inspiring fashion and the election and re-election of Donald Trump has destroyed faith in our institutions. I don't when or how it might be restored.