Historically Speaking: Marriage as a Mirror of Human Nature

From sacred ritual to declining institution, wedlock has always reflected our ideas about liberty and commitment.

The Wall Street Journal

October 26, 2023

Marriage is in decline in almost every part of the world. In the U.S., the marriage rate is roughly six per 1,000 people, a fall of nearly 60% since the 1970s. But this is still high compared with most of the highly developed countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, where the average marriage rate has dropped below four per 1,000. Modern vie

History of Marriage

THOMAS FUCHS

ws on marriage are sharply divided: In a recent poll, two in five young adult Americans said that the institution has outlived its usefulness.

The earliest civilizations had no such thoughts. Marriage was an inseparable part of the religious and secular life of society. In Mesopotamian mythology, the first marriage was the heavenly union between Innana/Ishtar, the goddess of war and love, and her human lover, the shepherd Dumuzi. Each year, the high point of the religious calendar was the symbolic re-enactment of the Sacred Marriage Rite by the king and the high priestess of the city.

Throughout the ancient world, marriage placed extra constraints on women while allowing polygamy for men. The first major change to the institution took place in ancient Greece. A marriage between one man and one woman, with no others involved, became the bedrock of democratic states. According to Athenian law, only the son of two married citizens could inherit the rights of citizenship. The change altered the definition of marriage to give it a civic purpose, although women’s subordination remained unchanged.

At the end of the 1st century B.C., Augustus Caesar, the founder of the Roman Empire, tried to use the law to reinvigorate “traditional” marriage values. But it was the Stoic philosophers who had the greatest impact on ideas about marriage, teaching that its purpose included personal fulfillment. The 1st-century philosopher Musonius Rufus argued that love and companionship weren’t just incidental benefits but major purposes of marriage.

The early Church’s general hostility toward sex did away with such views. Matrimony was considered less desirable than celibacy; priests didn’t start officiating at wedding ceremonies until the 800s. On the other hand, during the 12th century the Catholic Church made marriage one of the seven unbreakable sacraments. In the 16th century, its intransigence on divorce resulted in King Henry VIII establishing the Anglican Church so he could leave Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn.

In the U.S. after the Civil War, thousands of former slaves applied for marriage certificates from the Freedmen’s Bureau. Concurrently, between 1867 and 1886, there were 328,716 divorces among all Americans. The simultaneous moves by some to escape the bonds of matrimony, and by others to have the right to claim it, highlight the institution’s peculiar place in our ideas of individual liberty.

In 1920, female suffrage transformed the nature of marriage yet again, implicitly recognizing the right of wives to a separate legal identity. Still, the institution survived and even thrived. At the height of World War II in 1942, weddings were up 83% from the previous decade.

Though marriage symbolizes stability, its meaning is unstable. It doesn’t date or fall behind; for better or worse, it simply reflects who we are.

Historically Speaking: The Long Road to Pensions for All

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

From the Song Dynasty to the American Civil War, governments have experimented with ways to support retired soldiers and workers

The Wall Street Journal

April 6, 2023

“Will you still need me, will you still feed me,/When I’m sixty-four?” sang the Beatles in their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. These were somewhat hypothetical questions at a time when the mean age of American men taking retirement was 64, and their average life expectancy was 67. More than a half-century later, the Beatles song resonates in a different way, because there are so few countries left where retirement on a state pension at 64 is even possible.

Historically, governments preferred not to be in the retirement business, but self-interest sometimes achieved what charitable impulses could not. In 6 A.D., a well-founded fear of civil unrest encouraged Augustus Caesar to institute the first state pension system, the aerarium militare, which looked after retired army veterans. He earmarked a 5% tax on inheritances to pay for the scheme, which served as a stabilizing force in the Roman Empire for the next 400 years. The Sack of Rome in 410 by Alaric, leader of the Visigoths, probably could have been avoided if Roman officials had kept their promise to pay his allied troops their military pensions.

In the 11th century, the Song emperor Shenzong invited the brilliant but mercurial governor of Nanjing, Wang Anshi, to reform China’s entire system of government. Wang’s far-reaching “New Laws” included state welfare plans to care for the aged and infirm. Some of his ideas were accepted but not the retirement plan, which achieved the remarkable feat of uniting both conservatives and radicals against him: The former regarded state pensions as an assault on family responsibility, the latter thought it gave too much power to the government. Wang was forced to retire in 1075.

Leaders in the West were content to muddle along until, like Augustus, they realized that a large nation-state requires a national army to defend it. England’s Queen Elizabeth I oversaw the first army and navy pensions in Europe. She also instituted the first Poor Laws, which codified the state’s responsibility toward its citizens. The problem with the Poor Laws, however, was that they transferred a national problem to the local level and kept it there.

Before he fell victim to the Terror during the French Revolution, the Marquis de Condorcet tried to figure out how France might pay for a national pension system. The question was largely ignored in the U.S. until the Civil War forced the federal government into a reckoning. A military pension system that helped fewer than 10,000 people in 1861 grew into a behemoth serving over 300,000 in 1885. By 1894 military pensions accounted for 37% of the federal budget. One side effect was to hamper the development of national and private pension schemes. Among the few companies to offer retirement pensions for employees were the railroads and American Express.

By the time Frances Perkins, President Franklin Roosevelt’s Labor Secretary, ushered in Social Security in 1935, Germany’s national pension scheme was almost 50 years old. But the German system started at age 70, far too late for most people, which was the idea. As Jane Austen’s Mrs. Dashwood complained in “Sense and Sensibility,” “People always live forever when there is an annuity to be paid to them.” The last Civil War pensioner was Irene Triplett, who died in 2020. She was receiving $73.13 every month for her father’s Union service.

WSJ Historically Speaking: Postal Pitfalls, From Beacons to Emails

Charles Francis Adams was an American historical editor, politician and diplomat. He was the son of President John Quincy Adams and grandson of President John Adams, of whom he wrote a major biography. PHOTO: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Charles Francis Adams was an American historical editor, politician and diplomat. He was the son of President John Quincy Adams and grandson of President John Adams, of whom he wrote a major biography. PHOTO: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

It’s now 150 years since a trans-Atlantic cable finally crackled into continuous action after nine years of false starts and disappointments. The transmission speed of up to eight words a minute seemed to the Victorians almost godlike. Small wonder that the first telegram in the U.S., sent about two decades earlier, had read, “What hath God wrought.”

Our desire for instantaneous dialogue is as old as language itself. Contemporaries praised the masterful use of rapid communication by Persian King Xerxes I, who ruled from 486 to 465 B.C. and was famous for having slaughtered the Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Xerxes’ messengers were the best in the ancient world, for “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor night holds back for the accomplishment of the course.” That sentiment, translated a bit differently, ended up chiseled in stone above the front columns of the New York City Post Office on Eighth Avenue. Continue reading…