Download WSBCTC 1 Background to World War I and the 1920s Last week

Background to World War I and the 1920s
Last week you read: "Progressives imposed their vision of America on all and lashed out
at those who disagreed. World War I exposed the paranoid nature of Progressives." In
spite of Woodrow Wilson’s contention that the United States entered the war “to make
the world safe for democracy,” those who disagreed with American involvement
because they saw the war as merely a struggle among Europe’s corrupt, imperialistic
regimes faced suppression of their civil rights. Government agents rounded up
thousands of Socialists and IWW members (Industrial Workers of the World union
members were called “Wobblies”) because their organizations spoke out against
American entry into the war. The tragic deaths at Centralia, Washington, in
November 1919 in which Wobblies were targeted revealed how these tensions
escalated after the war.
The United States entered World War I as a debtor nation with a small standing army
and emerged from it the world’s leading creditor and military power. Social
reconfiguration caused by the war included the bolstering of the American army from
two hundred thousand in early 1917 to nearly 4 million by war’s end. In the United
States, five hundred thousand African Americans left the rural South (where most
blacks still lived) for northern industrial centers between 1916 and 1920. Mobilizing the
American economy for war ended laissez-faire capitalism as the federal government
intervened in the economy by nationalizing railroads and suggesting production quotas,
but its abrupt retreat from this active role after the armistice plunged the economy into
a postwar depression. President Wilson lifted all war-time price controls and profit
restraints causing a dramatic increase in the consumer price index to a 1919 level 77
percent higher than 1916’s and a 1920 mark 105 percent higher than 1916’s. Another
immediate postwar phenomenon was the Spanish influenza outbreak, which killed at
least ten times more Americans than died in combat—over 500,000 to 50,000.
Tensions increased in the months following the November 1918 armistice. The failure of
wages to keep pace with wartime inflation and the postwar layoffs incited four million
American workers to stage some thirty-six hundred strikes in 1919. February’s Seattle
General Strike was one of the first. Events in Russia contributed to domestic unrest.
During Russia’s cataclysmic year of 1917, first the tsarist monarchy fell and then a
republican government was overturned by a Bolshevik regime that pulled Russia out of
the war against Germany and its allies. In this first "red scare," Americans increasingly
blamed foreign radicals and Bolshevism for political dissent. When mail bombs exploded
in the spring of 1919, including one at the U.S. Attorney General’s home, state and
federal officials launched a campaign to root out communists. Justice Department
agents raided offices of the IWW, the Socialist Party, and various communist
organizations. They rounded up some six thousand people across the country and
deported prominent anarchists such as Emma Goldman, but they never found evidence
of a grand conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government. [We learn about another "red
WSBCTC
1
scare" in the 1950s.]
Racial strife compounded people’s anxiety during this “red scare.” African
Americans left the South to find wartime jobs in northern industrial centers and
significantly increased the black population of these cities. For example, between 1910
and 1920 Chicago’s African-American population jumped from 44,000 to almost 110,000
and Detroit’s from less than 6,000 to almost 41,000. When industrial production slowed
after the war, blacks suffered disproportionately because they were generally the first
to be laid off. Racial tensions exploded in the summer of 1919 in twenty-five incidents
in American cities. In Chicago, five days of rioting resulted in thirty-eight people
(twenty-three blacks and fifteen whites) dying, over five hundred people being injured,
and several million dollars in property damage.
Although the cataclysms of 1919 subsided, the underlying anxieties resurfaced again
and again in the 1920s. Americans sought a return to an earlier era (what President
Warren G. Harding called "normalcy"). Uncomfortable with its new role as a world
leader and fearful of being drawn into another European war, the U.S. rejected the
Versailles Treaty negotiated by President Wilson primarily because of its provision for a
League of Nations to mediate international disputes. Through the 1920s and ’30s,
Americans proclaimed their isolationism and thus denied the brewing international
conflicts until the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor catapulted them into World War II.
At home the country continued to urbanize and industrialize. The majority of people
now lived in towns and cities, and with that shift came the transition of the United
States from a producer to a consumer culture. But many Americans remained
discomfited by the changes and expressed that uneasiness. In the 1920s
immigration restriction laws severely limited Asian and southeastern European
immigration. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK), which had disappeared in the South after
Reconstruction, revived in a new incarnation beginning in the South in 1915 and
spreading to the Midwest and far West until in 1924 it boastfully claimed as many as
four million members, including half of a million in the women’s auxiliary. The targets of
this second KKK were Jews, Catholics, African Americans, and anyone else who violated
the white Anglo Saxon Protestant code. The KKK’s resurgence was part of a movement
by some native-born Americans who felt their traditional lifestyles threatened by rapid
economic and social changes and sought to reclaim their version of being an American.
Meanwhile in this climate of backlash, the Republican presidents of the 1920s touted a
return to “normalcy” and ushered in a return of the laissez-faire capitalism of the
Gilded Age under which the government abandoned working people and embraced the
wealthy and large industries.
Corporate profits soared during the 1920s as productivity grew, but agriculture
experienced uneven economic returns despite improved production. Workers failed to
benefit from the economic boom because industrialists reinvested their profits rather
than increase wages. Bank and business consolidation during the decade resulted in a
WSBCTC
2
concentration of wealth in the hands of a few firms. The failure to increase wages
commensurate with productivity gains exaggerated the unequal distribution of wealth.
By the end of the decade, American production far exceeded the ability of Americans to
buy those goods.
The 1920s also witnessed the rampages of a bull market. Stock prices rose at almost
twice the rate of industrial production. Contributing to the problem that the paper value
of stock exceeded the real value were lax financial regulations that allowed investors to
purchase stocks by making a small down payment (as little as 10 percent) and
borrowing the rest from a broker. Corporations often reinvested their excess capital, not
in their workers’ wages, but in loans to stockbrokers. Most of us have heard about the
Wall Street Crash of 1929. Only 4 million out of 120 million Americans owned any
stocks at all, but when the market price of stocks lost $30 billion in the fall of 1929, the
Crash revealed the underlying problems in the American economy that plunged the
country into the worst depression in its history.
©2009 Susan Vetter, rev. 2011.
WSBCTC
3