ONCORD, N.H. - The most enduring figures of the late 19th century were not the powerful men who shaped its public policy, men such as Chester A. Arthur, Grover Cleveland, or Benjamin Harrison, who helped craft the government we know today. No, it is John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John Pierpont Morgan whom we remember, men who led the way in the oil, steel, railroad, and finance industries.
Decades from now, when Americans look back at the late 20th century, they, too, may be far less captivated by the accomplishments of politicians and presidents. Jimmy Carter, George Bush, and Bill Clinton may pale next to Bill Gates, Sam Walton and Jack Welch.
Like the years between Reconstruction and Populism, this is a period when civic life is in decline. Like the end of the 19th century, America's energy and spirit have been dedicated to business, not government. Like that earlier era, the most creative minds have turned to invention, not ideology. And like that other time, people now are asking if politics is dead.
It's probably only slumbering.
That is what happened in the waning years of the last century, according to Winston Churchill, known for his attention to, and affinity for, American politics. ''After slumbering since the end of Reconstruction, American politics suddenly awoke. The alarm clock was Populism,'' he wrote in his magisterial ''History of the English Speaking People.''
Before that awakening, he wrote, the politics of the mid- to late-19th century were ''insignificant,'' though the period's ''economic developments were of the first importance.''
With some exceptions -- the fall of Soviet communism, a force that held history in its iron grip from 1917 to 1989, was truly one of the important human achievements of all time -- most of the politics of the recent era have flirted with insignificance. Like the 19th century, the political world in recent years has been dominated by small partisan skirmishes, derivative of earlier politics rather than innovative in their own right, controlled by the special interests, vulnerable to the entreaties of big money.
But -- again like the 19th century -- the business and technological developments of the era have been of immense importance, largely because they reorganized how human life was structured, and altered widely accepted notions of human promise.
In our own time, the common metaphor of national life -- the journey -- has been transformed. Once it meant a physical journey, from Kansas City to the Pacific, for example, first by Conestoga, then by rail, then by automobile, finally by air. Now Americans are conducting journeys every day at their desks, and the ''places you'll go,'' as Dr. Seuss might have put it, are not locations on a fixed continent but faraway corners of the human mind and cyberspace so vast and unknown that their wrinkles cannot even be imagined.
''There were higher voter-participation rates in that 19th- century period than we have now, but American life was not very political, just as it isn't very political now,'' said William G. Mayer, a Northeastern University political scientist. ''There were no great issues that divided the populace. There were no great presidents either. Not many people can even name them.''
Historians will almost certainly remember the present period not for the activities of our presidents - they will be footnotes - but as the age of computers, genetic engineering, biotechnology, and of the emergence of a new set of dilemmas that underscored how our technological capacity grew faster than our ability to shape our ethical values to those new machines and capabilities.
Historians also will almost certainly remember our time as the preface to a new period of political activism, agitation, and passion.
One reason for the emergence of populism at the beginning of the 1890s (and progressivism a decade or so later) was the technological and economic gap that became evident in American life - the gap between the industrial and economic power of the captains of industry and the poverty and hopelessness of rural life at the time, for example. (The source of so much industrial wealth, the railroad, was simultaneously the source of so much rural anger and distress.)
At the same time, the gap between the settled urban groups and the new immigrants of the cities caused tensions in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago that called for a new brand of politics. It is no coincidence that the machines that controlled the jobs of the ''huddled masses'' whom Emma Lazarus celebrated also fostered the growth of political organizations that came to be known as ''machines.''
Many similar tensions are building today, as the battle in the streets of Seattle this month vividly suggested. They may produce the politics of tomorrow.
''There have been lots of periods in American life when people have disliked or distrusted politics and politicians,'' said John G. Geer, a Vanderbilt University political scientist. ''It is a longstanding national pattern. If you look at America right now, the economy is good and there is peace. The public is the most rational of anybody in this game. The public is disengaged, but maybe there is no reason to get engaged.''
Maybe not now. But inevitably there will be later. And the entire nature of political involvement may shift.
''If you look at students today, the people who want to be involved don't think the thing to do is to vote,'' said Constantine J. Spiliotes, a Dartmouth College political scientist. ''They are active in civic affairs. But they don't think political campaigns is the way to do it. They do grass-roots organizing, teaching, go into the Peace Corps, or work at specific issues, like housing or poverty.''
That may be why even a politician with such impeccable establishment credentials as Al Gore traffics in such words as ''psychobabble,'' drops phrases like ''peer mediation'' into his talks with students, and speaks easily of ''self-esteem'' and ''people who feel a lack of respect for themselves.'' When Vice President Gore met some first-time voters and voters of the future at Concord High School recently, he was more the teacher than the politician, speaking of what the First Amendment means, talking about how people get colds, alluding to the prominence of violence in Elizabethan drama, and talking about the difference between conscious thought and instinct. This was decidedly unpolitical, by any traditional definition, at least.
Indeed, these days voting is passe. And so, in some ways, is traditional politics. A new study by Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy shows that nearly two out of three Americans surveyed regard the 2000 presidential campaign as ''boring,'' and that more than half regard the campaign as ''uninformative.'' More distressing, more than a third consider the campaign ''discouraging.''
The Shorenstein Center, working in conjunction with the Vanishing Voter Project, found that during one week last month, only 19 percent of those polled said they had been paying ''a great deal'' or ''quite a bit'' of attention to the campaign.
''Things are going well and people are entitled to feel good about things,'' said Fred Wertheimer, a former president of Common Cause and a longtime observer of Washington and politics. ''But I've never seen such disconnection between politics and the people - and so much good reason for that disconnect. The people see poisonous partisan politics all the time. They have a president who has done well by them on the economy but who sets the lowest possible personal standards.''
People don't care as much about politics right now because they don't need as much from politics.
Unemployment is low, and so one of the perennials of the capital in bad times - bills to extend unemployment benefits for another 19 weeks - is unknown to a generation of newspaper readers. Threats from abroad are few, and so one of the chief debates in modern American politics - Are we safe from invasion? - is regarded as more of a quaint relic than might be prudent.
History may have few lessons, but surely one of them is that prosperity doesn't last and neither does tranquillity.
Hard times will be back, maybe not next month or next year, but sometime. External and internal threats will return, maybe not right away, but probably before the next decade is out. When they are back, politics will be, too. Count on it.
