What will the legacy of 21st century America be?
PLUS: The Warning store's new Secretary of War Crimes collection + a six-month update on the Save America Movement's efforts
The 20th century officially began on the same day as that of the 19th, 18th and 17th — January 1st.
Historical epochs don’t align neatly with the calendar.
The 1970s, for example, are a time that can be measured in days, but also against broader political and cultural trends.
Those trends begin and end within periods of time that historians and social commentators like to wrap with neat bows that sort what happened into the 50s, or 60s or 70s, and so on. It’s as if the decade was a television series that yields to an entirely new zeitgeist at its end.
This isn’t true.
The 1960s of protest, Haight-Ashbury, Woodstock and Chicago took place at the end of the decade. The late 60s zeitgeist splashed into the early 1970s tragically, for instance, at Kent State, but that decade was more remembered for Watergate than Vietnam.
Looking back, it is clear that the early 1960s of John Kennedy, “The New Frontier,” the Mercury astronauts and buzz cuts had not yet escaped the cultural gravity of the 1950s, but things were changing. The rock ‘n roll of Elvis Presley was about to yield to Beatlemania and The Rolling Stones. “Change is gonna come,” sang Sam Cook, and it did in the 60s. It was the decade of assassination and civil rights, but all of those things were achieved on the building blocks of foundations laid decades before.
The seeds we plant are always harvested.
The 20th century didn’t begin in January of 1900, but rather on a horse and carriage ride that careened through the New York night over dirt roads at full gallop on September 14, 1901.
The vice president of the United States sat up top on the buck board. There is no record of him regaling anyone that night with any penis jokes told to him by the commander in chief. Though roughly the same age as JD Vance, it just wasn’t Teddy Roosevelt’s style.
TR had been pacing and impatient when he gave the dangerous order to ride shortly after midnight.
He was racing towards Buffalo, where the president of the United States lay dying, shot twice by an anarchist at the Pan-American Exposition.
The horses raced for 10 miles before needing to be changed out. They raced for 10 more before needing to be changed again, and then again. Forty miles was an exceptional distance for a hard half-day ride in the carriage.
William McKinley of Niles, Ohio, had enlisted in the United States Army as a private, and left service as a major.
He was the last combat veteran of the Civil War, and the last enlisted soldier to become commander-in-chief.
Roosevelt, 42 years old, had held his office for six months.
He had been the governor of New York for a short time and assistant secretary of the Navy.
He spent part of the 1880s in the Dakota Territory ranching, and led one of the most unique military units in American history. It became immortalized with a charge in Cuba. They were called the Rough Riders. Their charge up San Juan Hill made Teddy Roosevelt a national hero.
The vice president wasn’t addressed by his office, but rather his preferred Colonel Roosevelt.
The 40-mile midnight ride ended, and the colonel took a train to Buffalo and swore the 35-word oath that made him the 26th president of the United States.
The 20th century was underway.
Teddy Roosevelt led the American charge into the 20th century.
Two of his sons, the Medal of Honor recipient Brigadier General Teddy Roosevelt Jr, who led American troops ashore on Utah Beach on June 6th, 1944, D-Day, and Quentin Roosevelt, are at eternal rest next to one another on a small slice of American territory in Colleville-sur-Mer, France.
Those two sons of the president of the United States gave the last full measure of devotion to the Republic, and one of them is among the greatest heroes of our history. They were the polar opposite of the American Uday and Qusay, Junior and Eric, two corrupt dolts and national disgraces.
Teddy Roosevelt was the first president to fly in an airplane, which was an invention that didn’t exist as his buckboard wagon thundered through the evening of September 14, 1901, without headlights and high beams.
Horses were in the lead, but not for much longer.
The hinges of history were swinging open the portal through which nations pass into new epochs of history.
So it was true then, and so it is true now.
Is it not stupefying to think that once mankind took to the air with powered flight it took less than one lifetime — 66 years —for the nation where it was invented to land men on the moon?
The 20th was the century during which man reached for the stars, while inventing the weapons of mass extinction that gave presidents the power of the ancient gods, the power of Armageddon.
It was the century during which the world became connected by fiber optics, electricity, telephones, internet and airplanes.
This was the century of the totalitarians who killed human beings at an industrial scale.
It was the time of the Holocaust, Gestapo, Hitler, fascism, communism, Maoism and the Khmer Rouge.
This was the century of the Titanic and the Great Depression, Dust Bowl and the Great Migration of black Americans.
The 20th century saw the greatest movement of human beings from one place to another in the annals of human history as tens of millions came to America between 1900 and 1920, when the door swung shut and immigration slowed to a trickle for more than 40 years. During this era, one of the most shameful episodes in American history occurred, which was the failure to admit the German Jews into America aboard the doomed liner St. Louis.
There has not been a comparable moment of disgrace and national humiliation since Stephen MiKKKer, Kristi Noem, Corey Lewandowski, Dan Bovino and Tom Homan unleashed a masked American Gestapo.
The 21st century is being sculpted by the humans who were born during an era when America achieved its maximum power and maximum triumph.
Is it not difficult to explain the collapse of the Berlin Wall and fall of the Soviet Empire in a shocking instant that utterly changed the world to people who were born into the new one, where things such as walls in Europe to keep people penned in, seem like the relics of another dimension, not the recent past?
It is a good thing that Teddy Roosevelt was unable to realize the full ambitions of his vision of American imperialism.
The warrior became a Nobel Peace Prize winner. He projected American power across the globe when he sent the Great White Fleet on a circumnavigation of the Earth.
He was a young president with a vision for the future, who understood what was happening around him.
The Rough Riders were made up of men from every facet of American life. It was filled with cowboys and bankers and American Indians. It was an eclectic mix of every type of American who would be called to pick up a weapon for their country.
The role of the “Buffalo Soldiers” — so named by the Lakota for their “wooly hair” — is often omitted from the story of Roosevelt’s charge because he attracted more newspapermen and photographers at the top.
Access journalism was alive and well in the Hearst era. In fact, the media was more responsible for stoking the war than the politicians who launched it.
The Rough Riders and Buffalo Soldiers stormed to the top of San Juan Hill and Kettle Hill with the Rough Riders being the white knights of history, and the black troops omitted from memory.
Yet early in his presidency, Teddy Roosevelt did something that would have been unimaginable 100 years earlier — even though it caused great rage in his present.
What did he do?
He became the first president to sit down and have dinner with a black man in the White House.
The man’s name was Booker T. Washington. There are many debates that take place these days over history in schools. We should all agree on something. Ignorance around who Booker Washington was is a travesty.
When Roosevelt did this, the South went nuts, and he did not do it again.
After that moment, he met with Washington in his office, not in the dining room. Roosevelt left the presidency in 1908.
One hundred years later, President Barack Obama would be dining in the White House. His father was Kenyan. He rose to an office first filled by a slave owners who rejected the divine right of kings in favor of a republic.
He lived in a mansion built by slaves that was burned by the British 211 years before its East Wing would be demolished by a faithless American president.
The 20th century was the time of women’s rights, civil rights and gay rights.
It was a century during which genocide was repudiated by a universal declaration of human rights, largely authored by one of the century’s greatest leaders: Eleanor Roosevelt.
The first 20 years of the 21st century have been authored by a generation of political leaders who were largely born in the 1930s and 1940s. They came of age in the 1950s and 1960s.
It is likely another 40 years will pass before America is led by someone born in the 21st century.
What is it that they will inherit from this generation of political vandals that history will blame for whatever disaster comes from the MAGA era of insanity, cruelty, incompetence and evil. For the first time this century, child death rates are rising worldwide. That is a fact made possible by America’s choices.
We the people have sentenced millions to death around the world from disease and starvation with the election of Donald Trump, and the decisions of his twisted and sick cabinet.
The 20th century gave Americans the ability to claim something remarkable. Our nation, made up of all of the world’s people and faiths, fed, cured, clothed, and liberated more people in 100 years time than all of the world’s nations put together since the beginning of time.
What will the legacy of 21st century America be?
There are two facts of this moment that are indisputable.
First, the United States is burdened for the first time since secession with a political party that is utterly, fundamentally, and absolutely incapable of governing.
It is a hive of corruption, madness, malice, incompetence, grift, fraud and irredeemable dishonesty.
It is led by a rogues’ gallery of unfit, self-interested, proudly ignorant, and despicable cowards, who have abandoned every previously stated principle and piety with acts of servility, cowardice, arrogance, duplicity and submission.
Second, the 15th century was deadlier than the 14th, as the 19th century was deadlier than the 18th, 17th and 16th. The momentum of human suffering and death was driven by the Industrial Revolution through the birth of the atomic age, and the dawn of an era in which mankind possessed the power to cause its own extinction and trigger its own Armageddon.
The 20th century cannot be forgotten because it was so lethal. It demonstrated the savagery of which human beings are capable.
It was a century of unequalled blood thirstiness and madness during which the greatest horrors and crimes ever recorded were committed. When it ended, two nuclear powers stood at the brink of destruction for 45 long years.
They fought against each other in vicious proxy wars all over the world, but the deadly momentum of warfare that killed more people in the next war than the last was held back.
Ultimately, the Soviet regime, built on the principles of totalitarianism, crumbled against the superior system led by the United States. There was even a book that proclaimed we had arrived at the “end of history.” Francis Fukuyama, its author, was celebrated and acclaimed.
Today, it looks like a boast reminiscent of the arrogance of the White Star Line that played along with the hyped rhetoric that declared, “Not even God himself could sink this ship.”
History has not stopped and 25 years in, after ten years of Trump, it is clear that we have outrun the last gasps of the 20th century and lost touch with what America was, and has been.
It seems that we Americans have looked up at the “shining city on a hill” and decided to burn it down.
When did the 21st century begin?
Maybe it was on September 11, 2001, but maybe it was a bit later.
Maybe it was January 6th, 2021.
Either way, the “American Century” lays behind us, and it gets further from view every day.
I think we the people should do something about that.
Introducing the Secretary of War Crimes collection at The Warning store
Yesterday, Congress included a demand in the final draft of the annual defense bill that the Pentagon must hand over video footage of strikes against alleged drug-smuggling boats off the coast of Venezuela. Until that is done, Congress may withhold a quarter of “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth’s travel budget.
Here’s your opportunity to call Pete Hegseth out for what he is — Secretary of War Crimes — with the latest merchandise unveiled in The Warning store. Click here to check it out:
An update from the Save America Movement
It’s been a busy six months for The Save America Movement, which is now more than one million members strong.
I hope you’ll take the time to read this exciting recap of all that we’ve accomplished since we first launched:
Please consider supporting our efforts. All you need to do is click here:
History doesn’t move in neat boxes of decades…it moves in ruptures, in shocks, in the behavioral choices of people and institutions. The 20th century wasn’t just a calendar flip; it was Roosevelt’s midnight ride, the leap from horses to airplanes, the sprint from powered flight to the moon in a single lifetime. It was also the century of industrialized cruelty: Holocaust, gulags, Khmer Rouge; proof that human ingenuity can be turned toward annihilation as easily as toward progress.
What matters is the behavioral pattern: every epoch is seeded by decisions made decades before. The “New Frontier” of Kennedy was built on the gravity of the 1950s. The protests of the late 60s spilled into the 70s.
The seeds are planted.
That’s why the comparison today is so damning. Roosevelt’s sons gave their lives in service; today’s dynasties give us corruption and spectacle. The hinge of history is always behavioral: courage versus cowardice, service versus self‑dealing, clarity versus lies.
The lesson is brutal but simple: epochs don’t begin with dates, they begin with choices. And the choices we’re making now: cruelty normalized, spectacle worshipped, corruption excused; are the seeds of disgrace we’ll harvest in the 21st century.
I’m working on an examination too..starting this week a multi-part series on this year and what it means for the future.
Thank you for helping us think through this!
—Johan
Clara Barton founded one of the first free public schools in the United States in 1852. She said she was always willing to teach for free, but if she was to do a man’s work, she would do it for no less than a man is paid.
I worry about the legacy as a time of making women second class citizens.
I see the statements that things were better when women did not vote, or women called ugly or piggy, and I see particularly in the South the election of people who want women to stay in the kitchen — they say as much and they still win elections here.
Troubling, very troubling.