Theodore Dreiser's The Color of a Great City
is a collection of sketches--short essays and actual drawings--of New York City life between 1900 and around 1915. To Dreiser, the essays demonstrate that "the city...was more varied and arresting and, after its fashion, poetic and even idealistic than it is now," where "now" is 1923. Since the young Dreiser had little money, he spent most of his time wandering around the city's poorer quarters and observing the lives not only of struggling immigrants but of "beggars and bums and idlers and crooks in the Bowery and elsewhere." The book provides a lively reminder of a point William Easterly makes in The Elusive Quest for Growth, which I highlighted last month: "When those of us from rich countries look at poor countires today, we see our own past poverty. We are all the descendents of poverty. In the long run, we all come from the lower class." New York City at the turn of the last century was as squalid and crowded and dangerous and dynamic as any Third World City today.
At the other end of the social spectrum, Sally Bedell Smith's Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House demonstrates just how different, and by bourgeois standards decadent, the lives of the rich and powerful were in the early 1960s. Forget the heavy drinking, the secret medical treatments, and the compulsive adultery. Can you imagine a First Lady today jetting off to Europe to spend the summer with her titled sister on a Greek shipping tycoon's yacht? A First Lady who publicly modeled herself on Madame de Pompadour and aspired "to do Versailles in America."
In late January, I ran a Liberty Fund conference on "Liberty, Responsibility, and Luxury," with readings ranging from Aquinas to The New Yorker on Viking ranges--and lots of David Hume, Adam Smith, and Grant McCracken (that's pretty heady company, Grant). A number of the readings came from Commerce, Culture, and Liberty: Readings on Capitalism Before Adam Smith, edited by Hank Clark, the conference's discussion leader. Many of the book's selections seem extremely contemporary in their concerns, if not their language. Indeed, the selection we read from Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, published in 1905, felt far more dated than the 18th-century readings. Many selections from CC&L can be downloaded from this Liberty Fund page. Here's a podcast interview with Hank about the book.