One Nation, Divisible

Postwar unity was the exception. Our true history is patchwork, uneven, and cruel.

Photo by Amanda Schmidt on Unsplash

It feels as though America is reverting to its natural state. That state of the state is not the heroic America of postwar consensus, nor even the New Deal order, but the period that marks the end of Reconstruction and before the reforms of the 1930s. The so-called Gilded Age. The great rollback. A time when the federal government was technically sovereign but practically skeletal. Yes, there were spurts of progressive fire, like Wisconsin tinkering with democracy in the laboratory, Jane Addams building social work out of settlement houses, muckrakers dragging corruption into daylight. But the bones of the federal state were weak, underdeveloped, and timid.

The federal government has always been a double-edged thing: funneling money into illicit enterprises, sanctioning discrimination, bending the knee to the powerful few. But it has also worked in ways we too often take for granted. Consider this: in 1935, only 10% of rural Americans had central electricity compared to 90% of urban dwellers. In that same year in France, 95% of the countryside had access. The Rural Electrification Administration wired the countryside, turning the lights on for millions who had lived in literal darkness while cities glittered. Or think about highways: before Eisenhower’s Interstate System (1956), driving across America was a patchwork nightmare of mud roads, sudden toll barriers, and endless detours. Coast-to-coast could take weeks. Now, the federal shield means you can barrel from Maryland to Montana on uniform concrete ribbons, following the same exit signs, the same speed limits, the same gas stations.

That silent standardization is the federal government at its most invisible and its most profound. You can hop a flight from New Orleans to Seattle and expect the plugs to fit, the food in the grocery aisle to be inspected, and the basic rules to align. But even that assumption has cracked. Flint, Michigan, was poisoned by lead. Jackson, Mississippi, is parched by collapsing pipes and disinvestment. The federal baseline isn’t guaranteed anymore. And where the feds retreat, states race to fill the vacuum, but not always with democracy. Look at Florida, where the latest vaccine guidance contradicts national medical standards. That’s not just “states’ rights,” that’s a return to laboratories of fragmentation.

Without federal scaffolding, the states revert to fiefdoms. Some would be “laboratories of democracy” in Brandeis’ sunny phrase; others, laboratories of repression, revanchism, or outright autocracy. That was the grim reality of the Gilded Age: Wisconsin experimenting with workers’ comp and open primaries, Mississippi perfecting poll taxes and literacy tests. Both were “experiments,” both spread. Today, the same divide yawns open: Minnesota codifying abortion rights while Texas hunts doctors; California mandating emissions standards while West Virginia sues to block them. The fragmentation isn’t coming. It’s here.

Look back at education. Around 1900, Massachusetts invested heavily in its schoolchildren while Mississippi starved them. A child’s chance at literacy or advancement was determined entirely by birthplace. Federal intervention in education only gained traction after the Soviets launched Sputnik (1957), when suddenly national security depended on math teachers in Kansas as much as generals in the Pentagon. Until then, education was luck of the draw. And if the “states’ rights” turn accelerates, it will be again.

And then there’s violence. Or the shadow America rarely admits as policy.

Between 1882 and 1968, nearly 4,800 lynchings scarred this country, the vast majority Black and concentrated in the South. These weren’t aberrations; they were governance by terror. Anti-lynching bills passed the House in the 1920s but died in the Senate under the Southern bloc. Meanwhile, outside the South, thousands of “sundown towns” from Illinois to Oregon posted signs warning Black travelers not to linger after dark. That wasn’t fringe. That was normal.

What looks like national unity is often just the afterglow of extraordinary rupture. Post-World War II wealth, the GI Bill, union contracts, and FHA loans created the illusion of permanent upward mobility. But even there, the glow was uneven. During the summer of 1947, Ebony magazine surveyed 13 Mississippi cities and found that of the 3,229 VA home loans given to veterans, just two went to African Americans. In the same postwar years, two out of three white families owned a home, while Black homeownership flatlined at around 40 percent. The “middle-class miracle” was rationed at the state and local level, carefully excluding the very people federal policy claimed to uplift.

And the Mason-Dixon trains? That wasn’t a sepia-toned relic of the 19th century; it was within living memory. Into the 1950s, Black passengers traveling north were forced to switch cars once the train crossed into Maryland or Delaware. America literally drew its racial line in steel. The supposed “consensus America” that cared about racial violence was the anomaly. The “real America,” the natural state, was one where state and local customs enforced apartheid, and the federal government mostly looked away until forced otherwise.

Even when Washington did flex, it was fragile. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 dismantled literacy tests and poll taxes, but after the Supreme Court gutted its oversight in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), states instantly re-imposed restrictions. Within hours, Texas and North Carolina rolled out laws that had been waiting in the drawer. History doesn’t repeat; it just shows you how thin the federal veneer really is.

So maybe this is the unsettling truth: the America that at least pretended to care about racially motivated violence, about universal opportunity, about common infrastructure was but a temporary America. A postwar America. A Cold War America. An America conjured by the urgency of global competition and the shock of total war.

The natural state of America, by contrast, is one where the trains split at the Mason-Dixon, the lights don’t reach the farm, the textbooks differ wildly by state, and the water isn’t always safe to drink. It’s an America where Florida can shrug at vaccines, Mississippi can leave its capital without water, and one part of the nation insists on democracy while another slides into rule by decree.

The glow of postwar wealth was always a distortion, a mirage on the long American road. If we are returning to the “natural state,” then the fragmentation isn’t looming but has already arrived. One nation, under many gods, divisible, with liberty and justice for some.