One day in November, 1886, a man named Alfred Smith died in lower Manhattan, near the South Street Seaport. He had owned and driven his own horse-drawn truck—the start of a small business—until, as Robert Caro wrote in “The Power Broker,” “his health broke,” and the truck and horses and everything of value his family owned was sold, the money “eaten up by doctors’ bills and medicine.” His wife was left destitute, with a son, named after his father, and a daughter; at the time, “widows who were unable to support their children had the children taken away and placed in institutions,” Caro wrote. “She had heard about the institutions. Anything was better than that”:

Walking back from the funeral to the small flat, alone except for Al and his ten-year-old sister, Mary, she muttered, half to herself, “I don’t know where to turn.” Mary heard her brother say, “I’m here. I can take care of you.”

The younger Al Smith was then twelve years old. He quit school a few months later, in the eighth grade, after his mother, who had tried to support the children with factory work, fell ill, too. He was a newsboy and a runner for a trucking company and a roller of barrels at the Fulton Fish Market and a carrier of pipes at a pump works in Manhattan’s Fourth Ward, where tenements and brothels were filled with people only marginally less lucky than Smith and his little sister. He had, Caro writes, natural gifts: a compelling voice, pleasant looks, “a gift for getting along with people that was so highly developed as to be almost genius.” After close to a decade of manual labor, at the age of twenty-two, he caught the eye of a Tammany Hall boss. He would become a state legislator, and then governor of New York, and then, in 1928, the Democratic candidate for President.

In August, 1986, almost a hundred years to the month after the death of the older Al Smith, a man named Paul Ryan died in Janesville, Wisconsin. He passed away, apparently sometime during the night, after a heart attack. One of his sons, also named Paul, who had come home late the night before from a summer job at McDonald’s, found him—an awful experience for anyone, of any age. (Ryan Lizza describes the scene in his recent profile of Ryan.) The older Ryan had been a lawyer, and part of a family that owned a successful construction business. He left a wife and four children; Paul, who was sixteen, was the youngest.

Since the moment Mitt Romney picked Ryan as his running mate last Saturday, the death of Ryan’s father has, quite rightly, been spoken of as a defining moment—“forcing him to become self-reliant early in life,” as Joe Nocera, in the Times, summed it up. Ryan also helped care for a grandmother with Alzheimer’s. “It is remarkable that he chose a path of individual responsibility and maturity rather than letting grief take a different course,” his older brother told the Times. Mitt Romney talked about how it “forced him to grow up earlier than any young man should. But Paul did, with the help of his devoted mother, his brothers and sister, and a supportive community.” All that is true. Any child who loses a parent faces a moment of searing isolation and loss, and must, at some point, either look to himself, or lose something of what he might otherwise become. Amid the sadness, there are lures of blame and anger that Ryan, to his great credit, seems to have avoided and tempered.

No one can or ought to diminish what that costs a person. But it is also instructive to look at the difference that the hundred years between the death of the older Al Smith and of the older Paul Ryan made—to those families and to our country.

Paul Ryan’s family was not destitute. His great-grandfather got started about the time Al Smith’s father was driving his horse-drawn truck, in his case with a team of mules and a job building a railroad embankment. The firm prospered, thanks to hard work, but also to a multi-generation commitment, on the part of this country, to investment in infrastructure. One of the projects of Ryan Incorporated Central, as I noted in an earlier post, was helping to build what became O’Hare Airport, a field that started as a military project and became a civil one. The United States is a richer, and better, country than it was in 1886.

There are, of course, still plenty of desperately poor people in America today. Many of them ended up or have stayed that way, despite hard work and ambition, because, like Smith’s family, they were destroyed financially by uninsured medical costs. But even without the cushion of (presumably) health insurance and his family’s basic financial stability, Ryan and his mother would not have had to make the wrenching choices Smith and his mother did. Ryan received Social Security survivors’ benefits as a minor: “It was a tough time for our family, and Social Security was there to help us when we needed the help,” Ryan told the Associated Press in 2005. Had his mother’s income ever fallen below a certain point, she would have been able to receive Social Security support before her retirement age, too. This is not to look down on that support in any way; far from it. (My own child has received such benefits since the death of his father, also at an early age.) It is possible that Ryan’s father, who was fifty-five and a high earner, paid more in than his son got out; but the point is that the social insurance—the social compact—was there whether he did or not.

Ryan, at any rate, was able save his social-security benefits to help pay his tuition at Miami University of Ohio—a public college that itself has survived hard times due to taxpayer support. His mother went back to school to learn interior decorating, and Paul kept working summer jobs, but there was never any question about whether he would stay in school. (As much as Newt Gingrich might regret it, one of the changes in the last century has been the implementation of child-labor laws.) Ryan had the time and freedom in school to become a leader (Latin club, ski team, student government)—one who, like Smith, had a talent for getting along with people. He also learned to think philosophically. It was around then that he discovered Ayn Rand, and her notions about radical individualism and the harm governments do.

Reading and thinking about political theory—and deciding to go into politics—is, indeed, a real and valuable sort of self-reliance for a young person to develop; it is the sort of move to adulthood that should be available to all children, and not just the sons of lawyers. It is better to read long novels and be a camp counsellor and, as Ryan often did, go fishing, than to have to work the Fulton Fish Market to help your mother with the rent. (Smith made it out; but the attrition rate in such circumstances is a whole lot higher.) That is a blessing, and a freedom, of the America that emerged after gnawing its way through the Great Depression and two World Wars. The “supportive community” that Romney mentioned gathering around the Ryans can now, thankfully, mean something broader than the neighbors who chipped in to help Al Smith’s mother pay for her husband’s funeral.

It is also worth remembering that the transformation of this country from 1886 to now was neither accidental nor inevitable. The social safety net did not waft down from somewhere; roads and airports did not simply emerge from the earth; public universities did not simply coalesce. They were all built, and fought for, piece by piece, because we wanted a certain kind of country. (Franklin D. Roosevelt, the man who succeeded Smith as the governor of New York, played a role in that.) Maintaining them will be a fight, too. Which side will Paul Ryan be on?

Photograph by Win McNamee/Getty Images.