September 11, 2001: How Has America Changed?

Five years ago today, 19 Al Qaeda terrorists armed with little more than box cutters seized control of four passenger airplanes, driving one of them into the Pentagon and two others into New York’s World Trade Center towers. The attacks killed more than 2,900 passengers, office workers, and first responders and forever altered Manhattan’s skyline, in the bloodiest foreign attack ever launched on America’s mainland. The fourth plane, United Airlines flight 93, crashed outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers wrestled back control of the plane. Everyone on board perished.

The details of September 11, 2001, are well known and require only the briefest review. How President George Bush learned of the attacks while reading “The Pet Goat” to students at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida. How the government grounded all planes over American airspace and ordered military fighters to shoot down anyone in violation of that order. How hundreds of policemen and firemen rushed into the Twin Towers shortly before they collapsed. How loved ones papered New York with “Missing” signs, hoping against all odds that their brothers, sisters, children, and spouses might still be alive, unconscious, in a city hospital. How the President stood atop a rubble heap in downtown Manhattan and promised that “the people who knocked down these buildings will hear from all of us soon.” How the country came together in a stunning show of solidarity, and how the rest of the world closed ranks with the United States.

Five years later, what has changed? How will historians remember the events of 9/11? How will they measure the war that has followed 9/11 against prior American wars?

Superficially our lives are of course different. It now takes longer to board an airplane, and it’s not unusual to see heavily armed military personnel in airports and train stations and on public thoroughfares. But in many ways, the United States hasn’t changed at all.

Though it has become axiomatic that the country has been “at war” with Al Qaeda since September 2001, unlike in other wars few Americans today have been asked to sacrifice much in the way of personal resources or time. In the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s government created a host of new taxes and instituted a draft that applied to most fighting-age men. In World War II, 16 million men served in uniform, and the government not only expanded the income tax to include most wage earners, but also imposed steep controls on wages and prices. It also rationed most essential goods, like gasoline and rubber, and many luxury goods, like coffee and sugar.

By contrast, Americans in the aftermath of 9/11 continued to rely on a volunteer army, and instead of tax hikes, the federal government has given Americans extensive tax cuts.

The Civil War and World War II also revolutionized American institutions. 9/11 did not, at least so far. The Civil War led to the emancipation of 4 million slaves, representing several trillion dollars of property in current-day dollars, and gave those ex-slaves both citizenship rights and (for men, at least) the right to vote. The war also produced the Fourteenth Amendment, which ultimately ushered in the concept of dual citizenship (citizenship of the nation as well as of one’s home state) and applied the Bill of Rights—which had heretofore governed only the relationship between citizens and the federal government—to the states. Without the Civil War, there would have been no Fourteenth Amendment. Without the Fourteenth Amendment, no Miranda, no Brown v. Board, no one-man, one-vote . . . the list goes on and on.

World War II also transformed America. Expanded income taxes forced a modest but measurable redistribution of income and helped moderate the staggering rates of economic inequality that had marked the 1920s and 1930s. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, which passed the Senate after just 45 minutes of debate and earned unanimous support in the House of Representatives, ultimately funded a vast network of veterans’ hospitals, unemployment stipends, and job assistance for returning GIs, generous loans and subsidies for home purchases and small-business start-ups, and tuition and living costs for former servicemen pursuing post-secondary education. By the time the act expired, in 1956, more than 7.8 million veterans had taken advantage of its education provisions, while millions more used the program to purchase homes and attain skilled employment. Subsequent GI Bills for veterans of the Korean and Vietnam wars extended these benefits to future generations of servicemen, including those who serve their full terms of enlistment today.

The GI Bill ultimately led to a massive expansion of the postwar middle class and helped make America the prosperous and innovative nation that it has been since the mid-twentieth century.

No such thing has happened in the wake of 9/11. Whereas veterans of World War II received the GI Bill, and veterans of the Civil War ultimately received pensions that presaged the Social Security System (and which accounted for an astounding 41.5 percent of the federal budget by the late 1890s), today the American military is so poorly paid that 21 percent of military families rely on food stamps and the Special Supplement Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, just to make ends meet.

In constitutional terms, it’s still too early to determine whether 9/11 will make a lasting impression on American jurisprudence. Much as the Lincoln administration claimed stunning new powers to suspend the writ of habeas corpus throughout non-military zones, and much as the Roosevelt administration pushed the limits of constitutional law by imprisoning tens of thousands of Japanese-American citizens—without charges or trial—the Bush administration has asserted its right to hold “enemy combatants” to a different standard from prisoners-of-war, and to detain American citizens without charges or trial. As in the 1860s, when Chief Justice Roger Taney challenged President Lincoln’s wartime powers, and the 1940s, when dissenting liberals on the Supreme Court opposed Franklin Roosevelt’s violations of the Bill of Rights, today the federal courts are grappling over just how much authority a wartime President—in a war with no foreseeable end—can assert. Those questions remain unresolved.

Interestingly, during World War II German U-boats lurked dangerously close to American shores, but though the government conducted a wide-reaching campaign alerting citizens to the dangers of German saboteurs and spies, most Americans do not seem to have lived in constant dread of a German attack. By contrast a recent poll of New Yorkers revealed that two-thirds of them were fearful of another terrorist attack on their city. Such numbers highlight what is certainly a key difference between the war on terror and most past American conflicts: At least part of this war (but by no means most of it) has thus far been fought on home soil.

It’s maddeningly difficult—even impossible—to know how 9/11 will play out in the annals of history. Whatever the case, it’s clear that the events of that Tuesday inaugurated a war unlike any America has ever fought before, and that textbook examples lend very little in the way of comparative example. We are, and we have been for five years, in uncharted territory.