History of the 20th Century: A Quote

Remem­ber­ing Where We Come From

[ad]

In all the talk about class these days related to both the Uranus-Pluto lower square and the Saturn-Pluto hap­pen­ing now, I thought a quote from Bar­bara Tuch­man’s The Proud Tower would illu­mi­nate the con­ver­sa­tion with some per­spec­tive. The quote appears as a scanned so I could include some links that appear when you click on the win­dows below the main diagram.

[ad]

We Are Lucky, Not Special

For per­spec­tive, we should remem­ber how far we have come in a short time and keep in mind how ten­u­ous our hold on the good life is. The turn of the cen­tury saw the height of the Pro­gres­sivism that won many rights for men, women and chil­dren. The present Uranus-Pluto lower square (2008–2018) traces right back to 1849Uranus-180°-Pluto1965, when the foun­da­tions of our rel­a­tively lives were laid.

The Full Quote

They came from the war­rens of the poor, where hunger and dirt were king, where con­sump­tives coughed and the air was thick with the smell of latrines, boil­ing cab­bage and stale beer, where babies wailed and cou­ples screamed in sud­den quar­rels, where roofs leaked and unmended win­dows let in the cold blasts of win­ter, where pri­vacy was unimag­in­able, where men, women, grand­par­ents and chil­dren lived together, eat­ing, sleep­ing, for­ni­cat­ing, defe­cat­ing, sick­en­ing and dying in one room, where a teaket­tle served as a wash boiler between meals, old boxes served as chairs, heaps of foul straw as beds, and boards propped across two crates as tables, where some­times not all the chil­dren in a fam­ily could go out at one time because there were not enough clothes to go round, where decent fam­i­lies lived among drunk­ards, wife-beaters, thieves and pros­ti­tutes, where life was a see­saw of unem­ploy­ment and end­less toil, where a cigar-maker and his wife earn­ing 13 cents an hour worked sev­en­teen hours a day seven days a week to sup­port them­selves and three chil­dren, where death was the only exit and the only extrav­a­gance and the scraped sav­ings of a life­time would be squan­dered on a funeral coach with flow­ers and a parade of mourn­ers to ensure against the anonymity and last ignominy of Potter’s Field.

A Com­plex Time

The four decades lead­ing up to World War I proves one of the most com­plex peri­ods in all of his­tory. When under­stood in full con­text, the ‘silly’ war that resulted makes more sense. The Proud Tower makes a great intro­duc­tion. Astrologers may want to fire up the  soft­ware and look at the outer planet sit­u­a­tion. It mir­rors the com­plex­ity of the period. The chap­ter in my upcom­ing book, Mea­sur­ing His­tory: A Visual Primer, turned into my biggest chal­lenge. Yes, I will cover it at some point here.