Anxiety attack.

• Author: Postrel, Virginia I.

This year marks the centennial of the World's Columbia Exposition, the great fair that brought the world to Chicago. In 1893, 28 million visitors wandered through its classically inspired buildings, sampling oranges at the California exhibit and iced cocoa at the Java Village, riding the first Ferris Wheel (which took 40-person cars 264 feet in the air), marveling at the moving pictures of Thomas Edison's new kinetoscope.

The fair was a tribute to world cultures, technological progress, and material abundance. It captured the spirit of its age.

But history looks different when you're living through it. Then, as now, progress was not uniformly benevolent. 1893 was a year not unlike 1993, a time of worldwide recession and long-term economic restructuring.

Farmers, in particular, resented the Columbian Exposition's display of wealth and optimism. For them, abundance meant not oranges and kinetoscopes but falling crop prices and an uncertain future. The Farmer's Alliance in Gillespie County, Texas, resolved to ask that the fair's organizers "let the world of pleasure, leisure, and Style see the men and women in their jeans, faded callicoes, cotton-checks who by their labor and handicraft have made it possible for such an Exhibit. Let the Farmer's cabin, the miner's shanty and the tenement of factory hands be beside those magnificent buildings which represent the State and the Nation."

In 1893, the farmers' request, and the resentment and anxiety behind it, went mostly unheeded. In 1993, similar sentiments have thrown the country--or at least the opinion makers who define the spirit of our age--into an anxiety attack over jobs.

We hear the voices of those 19th-century farmers in Ross Perot's cry to "Save Your Job, Save Our Country" by rejecting free trade with Mexico. They echo in the letter to the editor of The Atlantic that declared, "WalMart is the embodiment of the excessive greed of the eighties and the horrendous devastation that has been its byproduct." They murmur throughout Robert Reich's The Work of Nations, whispering not of "the world of pleasure" versus "labor and handicraft" but of "symbolic analysts" versus "routine producers" and "in-person servers."

The mass-production revolution traded the independence of farming for the relative security of factory work. Our current "age of discontinuity," in Peter Drucker's prescient phrase, reverses that flow. Technological change, global competition, decentralized institutions, and...