America, Minus A Human Factor

Meditations on alcohol and drugs, for example, lead us to 19 recent years, from 1979 to 1998, during which the number of people older than 12 taking a drink in the past year rises only modestly -- from 131 million to 140 million -- meaning almost half of all Americans remained teetotalers during that period. What about other walks on the wild side? Female high school students who shoplifted something once in the previous year stayed fairly constant from 1975 to 1998, in a range between 10.4 percent and 13.3 percent. The percentage of male high school students trespassing -- going into a home or building when they were not supposed to be there -- dropped fairly steadily in those 19 recent years, however, from 16.6 percent to 10.7 percent.

So the kids are all right? They're spending all their time hanging out in the malt shop? Ah, maybe not. Every year through that whole period, about one in eight male high school seniors said they had participated in a gang fight, peaking at almost one in six in 1989. About one in 10 female seniors had such a fight in 1990, and about one in 12 in 1998. About one in four had something worth less than $50 stolen from them. The number of white seniors who experienced more serious thefts doubled, from one in 12 to one in six. For black seniors, the serious thefts they experienced rose from one in 12 to one in five.

See how this works? We started with the price of whiskey in 1859 and wound up with a succession of snapshots of America that painted a picture of who we are, how we got that way and where we're headed, through history.

At the New Orleans auction in 1859, a healthy young male field slave cost $1,564. Factor in inflation, and in today's dollars the price of this slave would be something like $37,000.

What does that compare to? Call John Deere, and it turns out today's top-of-the-line, 500-horsepower, four-wheel drive, satellite-connected, whip-through-4,000-acres-of-wheat Model 9620 tractor costs $282,638.

Can it be said, thus, that today's state-of-the-art tractor equals 7.6 slaves? What does that mean? Was the Civil War necessary? Was slavery about to implode of its own economic stupidity? Is the very idea of comparing slaves to tractors offensive?

Richard Sutch, one of the six editors of the Millennial Edition, thinks not. "Slaves were considered legally to be pieces of machinery -- chattel, in legal terms -- that were bought and sold and mortgaged and insured," he says. "This is a subject that may horrify some people. It fascinates others. The fascination is due to the shock value that, not too long ago, people treated human beings as if they were not human beings. People valued these slaves because they were able to be put to productive use -- typically in agriculture -- just like people were buying and selling mules and, later, tractors. We're quite sure that the system that the Southerners adopted made economic sense to the plantation owners, even if it doesn't make moral sense or sense to the slaves themselves."

Nonetheless, it leads to other questions. In 1860, a paid farmhand earned $11.08 a month in the south Atlantic states, not counting room and board. That's more than a decade's worth of hired-hand work that you could get before you approached the price of a slave. (Almost a century later, by the way, in 1948, farm help still earned only $57 a month.) What was a world like in which slave capital represented 44 percent of all wealth -- the largest single component -- in the cotton-growing states in 1859?

The precision of all this, of course, reflects a touching faith that reality can be measured.

Maybe "The god delights in an odd number," as Virgil said, but there are some pretty odd numbers in the Millennial Edition. Odd verging on mysterious:

· There are enough guns in this country that, if they were spread around, there would be one for every 916 men, women and children out of 1,000. What's wrong with the other 84 people?