On Thursday morning in Lower Manhattan, not far from where Fortune’s office is located, the bells tolled and the bugles played taps. The names of the 2,977 people who died in the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, were read, and New Yorkers paused for a solemn moment to reflect upon a tragedy that changed the city, the country, and the world 24 years ago.
The cover of the issue of Fortune magazine that came out in October 2001, the first to go to press following the 9/11 attacks, showed a man in an ash-covered business suit holding a handkerchief to his stricken face. Inside the magazine, Bill Powell wrote of what lay ahead for the country, after the clearing of “the rubble and ash that was once the citadel of American capitalism and was now the first battlefield of a new century’s first war.”
“We are now in the midst of one of the grimmest periods in American history,” Powell wrote. “Amid the wreckage and the grief, the government and key institutions in the U.S., including corporations, need to start coming to grips with the ways the country has been changed by history’s most successful and audacious terrorist attack.”
In the two-and-a-half decades since, other cataclysmic events have changed the country: wars, a worldwide pandemic, and successive waves of technology that have shifted the direction of our society in fundamental and irreversible ways. Just this week, the murder in broad daylight of the young conservative influencer Charlie Kirk offered yet another signal of the polarization, radicalization, and dark animus that have found new expression and amplification in our own grim era.
In her newsletter this week, the American historian Heather Cox Richardson quoted former President George W. Bush, musing four years ago that “[a] malign force seems at work in our common life that turns every disagreement into an argument, and every argument into a clash of cultures. So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear, and resentment.”
In the face of this malign force, the questions Americans are asking today are very similar to the ones Powell asked in the pages of Fortune in 2001: Will our systems hold? Will our democracy, our government, our courts, our media, and our economy remain strong and intact?
There’s some hope to glean from looking back at that aftermath. Powell wrote of how, after a moment of paralysis, downtown Manhattan was slowly but surely coming back to life. Terrorists had “killed thousands of the citizens who helped make [the American economic] system the greatest wealth-producing machine the world has ever known,” he wrote. “They are gone, but the system in which they thrived rolls on, battered but unbroken… The message was clear. Terrorists had brought down two of global capitalism’s towering symbols, not capitalism itself.”