What has been the worst 10-year stretch in American life? Its a timely question as the nation approaches the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. This grueling decade surely stands among the nations most challenging. For this exercise, Im not confining the assessment to chronological decadesthe 1850s, say, or the 1960s. Instead, Im looking at any consecutive 120-month period and asking: Which of those 10-year interludes have been the most difficult for America?
Most historians would look first at the Civil War. And a good place to begin there is on May 30, 1854, when Franklin Pierce signed the misguided Kansas-Nebraska Act. That statute lit the fuse for the war by repealing the Missouri Compromise and instead allowing each new state to vote on whether it would permit slaveryan invitation to division. Over the next decade, America soldiered through a procession of horrors: Bleeding Kansas; the Dred Scott decision; John Browns raid; Southern secession; and, above all, the relentless carnage of the Civil War. Although the battle of Gettysburg in 1863 ensured eventual Union triumph (and inspired Abraham Lincolns great address), the outcome was still uncertain enough in spring 1864 that many Lincoln supporters doubted that he would win reelection. Indeed, the precise bookend to the decade that began with the Kansas-Nebraska Act was the first skirmishes, on May 31, 1864, of the Battle of Cold Harbor that cost the Union over 10,000 dead with little gain.
No other decade in American life was as grim. But the Depression years, shaped by the fall of the economy and the rise of Adolf Hitler, came close. The descent began with the stock market crash in October 1929, followed by an economic collapse that saw the nations total employment plummet by nearly one-fourth over just four years. The buoyant leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt lifted Americas spirits and produced a constellation of lasting reforms (such as Social Security), but fewer Americans still held jobs in 1939 than in 1929. Ten years after the crash, on Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler began World War II by invading Polanda fitting coda for poet W.H. Audens low dishonest decade.
Two more-recent, somewhat overlapping stretches also tested the nation. One was the tumultuous decade that began with the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, and ended with the first Arab oil embargo in October 1973. Those years produced almost unprecedented social turmoilfrom the civil-rights struggle to the domestic battle over the Vietnam War to urban riots and the generation gap. Pulsing behind it all was the drumbeat of casualties from Vietnamwhich eventually claimed 58,000 American lives. Trust in government plunged. But despite these serial traumas, this period, until its final years, also generated the longest, until that time, period of uninterrupted growth in American history, notes historian James Patterson of Brown University, who has written widely on the era. From 1963 to 1973, the share of Americans in poverty dropped by a third, and total employment increased by one-third. Prosperity soothed upheaval.
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