When the glorious era of the Founding Fathers tapered off with the elderly deaths of Washington (1799); Adams (1826); Jefferson (1826); Madison (1836); Monroe (1831); we entered the age of the influence of Andrew Jackson – 1815 to 1848.

If he were alive today, Jackson would have been horrified by a Federal Reserve Bank and our new overflowing plan to buy our way out of the fiscal straits we’re in because of the way we’ve run our monetary affairs. He was president from 1829-1837, but his powerful influence was pervasive before and after.

We were entering a period of enormous energy, self-improvement, some of the built-up splendor of America’s best instincts had been pent up and were bursting forth. We changed from a hard-drinking pioneer period when people might bathe once a year to a more temperate, anti-slave, broader suffrage time of focussed progress. A “republic of happy people in the 54th year of its existence ... free from debt and all her immense resources unfettered.” A time when men got rich and deserved to be. We wanted to “eradicate war years before the Civil War, eradicate slavery, false religion just before the great surge of Methodism; emphasize culture and great books, make strides in medicine. A time when dueling was to end; that, and brawling. A time of minstrel shows, free western land and manifest destiny, utopionism but Indian get out of the way; when the horror of brutalism against the mentally ill was verboten and good health was realistically sought out, even the promotion of the “graham cracker.” “Let’s go” was the motto. As Daniel Webster phrased it: “The progress of the age has almost outstripped human belief.” We had financial finagling as big industry, railroads, canals took root but the great surge of sheer momentum was uncappable.

In 1908 a financier named Henry Clews wrote a book called “Fifty Years in Wall Street” in which he discussed the American stock panics of 1812, 1823, 1825, 1837, 1857 all up and through the panic of 1893. Each “caused by too much debt , too much speculation.” Of course in between these short-lived setbacks, the United States was growing to become the largest, most successful manufacturing nation the world has ever seen. The Erie Canal opened in 1825, opening the door to the middle west so that food and manufactured goods poured into New York and the upper east coast of our Atlantic states. Railway lines intersected the middle west and went coast to coast. The panics were caused by too much debt, too much speculation. A nation sprinkled with poor rich men, with enormous property unsaleable except at a loss. “Till the tide turned,” as Mr. Clews wrote. Some insolvent firms had to be folded each time. Win some; lose some.

There’s an old joke: “I have been rich and I have been poor. Rich is better.” Ha! Ha!

If you’ve lived a long life and in many places, you must have had some brush up with poverty. If not, you should have. Poverty is educational. Character building sometimes. Character destroying others. We’re living in nerve-wracking times, either in or entering a worldwide recession, even depression.

When I moved to Orangeburg in 1973, I got in deep discussions with two eminent historically minded gentlemen, Wallace Bethea and Rutledge (“Rut”) Osborne. I learned that we have had a long history since the first white settler (1704) and contemporary times. Decades of hard work, race relations, “king cotton,” schools, wars.

Poverty, real wrenching poverty, hit Orangeburg County in 1921 when the boll weevil arrived, moving east from Texas, and almost wiped out the “money” crop, cotton, in one year. We came back from that pit slowly, but when the stock market crashed in New York in October 1929, not many people in Orangeburg owned stock and many were already in straitened circumstances. In the ensuing decades, Orangeburg has done just a splendid job of diversifying its economy, but its per-capita income is still on the low side for the state and nation. More is in the works.

My own personal, most vivid memory of poverty was the time my widowed mother sent me to our church to pick up a five-dollar bill so that she could feed me and my four younger siblings that weekend. She was a beautiful, gently reared woman, a graduate of Hollins College near Roanoke, Va. My father had died in 1926 after years of fighting a losing battle with tuberculosis in 1926. I was 11 years old.

Or in the 18 months I headed up the bookkeeping department of a tiny savings and loan company working 44 hours a week for $9 dollars a week, a tad over 20 cents an hour. I went from there to the FBI, the government police agency, at $1,100 a year as a criminal statistical clerk, which was a big raise, more money than the average American family received in 1933 when I was 19 years old.

Neither of these examples left permanent scars. Just permanent life-molding experiences.

I’ve let myself get carried away. But we’ve got to take a hard look at the shape we’re in. We’ve screwed up Social Security, long term; Medicare, and our financial system.

Just perusing the advertising pages of the magazines I subscribe to makes my remaining hair stand on end; the conspicuous consumption is insane; people exchanging 60 million condominiums! $2,000 shoes!

We are the only country that invests significantly in our military, which is stretched to the snapping point. So what incentive is there for anybody else to save the world from itself?

The United States is just below its replacement stage in its birthrate. If it weren’t for our immigrants, we’d be in a long-term standoff. That’s why the quality of our immigrants is so vital. But we need them.

When we intervene in international conflict at the risk of huge financial expense and our soldiers’ lives, it’s because we’re founded on idealism – have almost always been that way.

We’re in a recession. We’ve had 10 of them since the late 1940s. We’ve suffered under intense misgovernment. Democrats and Republicans share equal but different guilt.

I could try to dazzle you with an ancient man’s despair of the future in my grandson’s world, but what good would that do?

Attorney Austin Cunningham has been the president of five business companies and in 1988 was named Outstanding Elder Citizen of the Year for South Carolina.

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