As we write this editorial America is entering what we like to call the lapse. It’s one of those moments when history has been decided but Americans don’t know what it is. We first began thinking about the lapse when, as a young reporter, we read of the great sea battles in the vast Pacific during World War II. There were hours or days in which the fate of the world had been decided in titanic naval engagements but Americans hadn’t yet heard about them.

Now, in the next few hours, as the polls start closing but the results aren’t yet reported, we’ll be entering another lapse. The fate of the country will have been decided but we won’t yet know what the decision is — and, even more remarkable, we might not know for hours, days, or even weeks to come. It’s an awkward, uncomfortable moment. In 1980, President Carter turned around and, incredibly, conceded while the polls were still open in California.

The tension can be maddening. We like to tell our children about how, in the sea battles in the Pacific, Stanley Johnston of the Chicago Tribune in 1942 fetched up at California and called his office to report that he had a “great story.” When he was told to “send it in,” Johnston refused even to talk about it. He insisted he had to go through Navy censorship. “I can’t tell you where I’ve been, nor what ship, nor how I got back.”

His editor, J. Loy Mahoney, we wrote in an editorial some years back, deduced immediately that Johnston had arisen from the Coral Sea. News of a big sea battle there had been coming in for weeks. Fearing that Johnston would stop off to see his wife at San Francisco, Maloney raced a writer to intercept him on the Coast and told him to wire a copy of the story to Washington in line with the protocol for civilian censorship.

Johnston wouldn’t do it. “This is Navy censorship,” historian Lloyd Wendt quotes him as saying. “I can’t put it on an open wire.” So Johnston was ordered back to Chicago and locked in an office. Eventually news poured in, including, under the headline: “JAP FLEET SMASHED BY U.S. TWO CARRIERS SUNK AT MIDWAY. 13 TO 15 NIPPON SHIPS HIT, PACIFIC BATTLE RAGES ON. YANK FLYERS EXACT HEAVY TOLL.”

It was worth waiting for. The five-day battle of Midway proved a turning point in America’s war with the Empire of Japan, laying the ground for our eventual victory in World War II. The current lapse might not be as dramatic. Then again, too, it might yet. Wars are festering in Europe and the Middle East, our country is over its head in debt, and the UN is against us. Control of both houses of Congress hangs in the balance. 

Yet here we are, with Americans having made their decision, and no one yet knows what it is. This is the kind of moment, though, that democracy inflicts on its subjects. However long it may take to tally up the votes, and resolve any disputes, one can at least expect the results will be known sooner than they were in the infamous election of 1876. Americans didn’t learn that Rutherford B. Hayes would be their president until March 2, 1877. Now that was a lapse.