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Postwar Unrest

In the spring and summer of 1919, soldiers home from Europe paraded through New York and other major U.S. cities. They had come home to prohibition, inflation, labor unrest and fear of Bolshevism. And they helped in creating a baby boom - well-timed for war two decades later.

At the close of World War I, President Wilson ended price and profit controls, and prices soared, the price index at the end of 1919 twice what it had been in 1916. With the decline in production of arms, factories dismissed workers. Strikes occurred in the coal, steel, railway and textile industries. And in the Pacific northwest, a labor movement called the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or the Wobblies, were participating in strikes and looking forward to the establishment of "one big union" and the creation of a worker-run democracy. A major grievance among workers across the nations was the length of the workweek. Many were working twelve hours a day, and some were working seven days a week.

In extent and depth, frustration in the United States was far from what it had been in Russia just prior to the overthrow of the tsar or the Bolshevik Revolution. The United States emerged from the war richer than when it went in, gaining in the sale of arms and other goods to Europe, with the nation's entrepreneurs having captured markets that had belonged to Britain and others who were diminishing  themselves economically during the war. But the war ended with many Americans fearing that just around the corner in their nation might be a Bolshevik-style revolution - while a few in the U.S. favored it.

In the U.S., anarchist activities helped fuel fears and animosity toward all radicals and labor unionists - with many Americans failing to see a distinction between Marxists, anarchists and organized labor. Anarchists sent bombs in the mail. In April, 1919, a bomb arrived at the home of the mayor of Seattle. A similar package went to the home of a former senator from Georgia, which blew off the hands of his maid. Sixteen unexploded bombs were found, then eighteen more which were timed for May Day, the day of celebration for labor - one of the bombs targeted for John D. Rockefeller. On June 2, within one hour, a series of bombs went off in eight different cities, one of the bombs shattering the home of the U.S. Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer. And in newspapers were headlines about the bombings and descriptions of Bolshevik intrigues around the world and Communist attempts at revolution in Germany.

Black Migrations, Riots and Repression

European immigration had stopped during the war, and manufacturers in the North were looking for cheap labor among blacks in the south. Whites in the South who were benefiting from the labor of blacks were concerned about losing that labor, and newspapers in the South editorialized that the South needed all of its "able-bodied Negroes," claiming that Negroes would do better by remaining in the South and calling on whites to treat blacks justly. Nevertheless, during the war, a great migration North by blacks looking for war occurred - a good portion of it to Chicago and Detroit.

Blacks were willing to work for less, and they allowed themselves to be used by employers as strike breakers. This started a riot on July 27, 1919, in Chicago, a riot that lasted eight days, with black and white gangs roaming the streets and taking vengeance on each other. Thousands were burned out of their homes. Fifteen whites and twenty-three blacks died. And that summer, race riots erupted in Knoxville, Omaha, Washington D.C. and in some other cities that had sizable increases in black populations.

Chicago was the scene of another race riot. There, blacks had been moving into white neighborhoods, and racial tensions were high. In the heat of late July, a black youth, swimming at the 31st Street lake beach, crossed into waters that whites considered off limits to blacks, and, according to reports, the whites stoned the youth, causing him to drown. Blacks at the beach were outraged, and a riot followed that spread inland. Twenty-two blacks and fourteen whites were killed before the state militia arrived two days later and restored order.

Blacks were fighting back more than before. Blacks who had served in the military in France had come home less willing to submit to injustice. In France they had found less racial discrimination, and they believed that blacks willing to die for their country deserved first class citizenship. To a few black intellectuals, the Russia Revolution appeared to make a breakthrough against colonialism, and therefore against racism. W.E.B. Du Bois, founder and leader of the NAACP, was working for integration and education and demanding immediate and equal civil and political rights for blacks. A young black writer and union organizer, A. Philip Randolph, was agitating for justice. Randolph was a moderate socialist who saw as absurd the belief in a Leninist revolution in the U.S. Nevertheless, he had recently been called the most dangerous Negro in America, and in July, 1919, his monthly journal, The Messenger, was refused passage through the U.S. mail.

Differing from Du Bois and Randolph in his approach to justice for blacks was Marcus Garvey. Garvey was a Jamaican who had excelled as a student. He had worked in dockyards in London, Cardiff and Liverpool, and he had moved to Harlem in New York, where he led his Universal Negro Improvement Association. He published a weekly newspaper "The Negro World" and in 1919 he founded a steamship company, the Black Star Line. A man who had been around, he was concerned about the welfare of blacks everywhere, and he advocated the liberation of blacks from colonialism. Concerning blacks in the United States, he opposed working with white labor unions and white revolutionaries, including Bolsheviks. This was lost on one of A. Palmer Mitchell's lieutenants, J. Edgar Hoover, who described Garvey as a part of a Bolshevik threat to the United States. Hoover started a campaign to discredit Garvey and to deny him freedom of action in the United States.

Reds, Raids and Vigilantes

In early September, 1919, 1,117 of Boston's 1,544 police patrolmen went out on strike. The salaries of Boston's police had fallen behind inflation, and they had joined the American Federation of Labor. The strike was accompanied by other people looting and creating other disorders, which added to public fears. Volunteers filled in for the police, and the governor of Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge, became a national figure by talking tough and deploying the National Guard throughout Boston.

In late September a nationwide strike in the steel industry erupted. And also in September, some socialists impressed by the Bolshevik Revolution met in Chicago and formed a Communist Party. Most of those attaching themselves to this little party were immigrants who knew little about Marx or Lenin, but they felt close to their Eastern European roots, and they were eager to present themselves as able to speak for Lenin or Trotsky. Only seven percent of them spoke or understood English, but they were hopeful that they could lead the rest of the working class in revolution.

America's Socialist Party - the party of Eugene Debs - was split on the issue of revolution, with many of its members wanting to proclaim that they were not timid, that they were for something more than reforms. Eugene Debs, still in prison for having violated the Espionage Act, announced his support for the Bolsheviks. Some moderate socialists, such as Morris Hillquit, defended the "dictatorship of the proletariat" as democratic. A faction within the party, led by the journalist John Reed, a former Harvard cheerleader from Oregon, tried to lead the party into declaring support for revolution. Failing, they broke from the Socialist Party and formed the Communist Labor Party - a rival to the Communist Party that had formed in Chicago.

Other concerned citizens were banding together to fight what they saw as the Bolshevik menace. They inspired the removal of books from libraries. They inspired universities to fire faculty members thought to be radical. Some groups were impatient with mere legal actions against those who had broken the law. Among these vigilantes was the group in Washington state that pulled an IWW organizer from his jail cell, hanged him and riddled his body with bullets. In November, American Legionnaires and members of the Citizen's Protective League besieged an IWW union hall. The union members attempted to defend their hall. Three legionnaires were killed, one IWW member was hanged, and the union members were arrested and jailed.

In November, the Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, a Wilsonian liberal, established an anti-radical section in the Department of Justice, headed by J. Edgar Hoover. Palmer was looking for radicals to deport. In dozens of cities, police raided meetings that were celebrating the second anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Several hundred workers were beaten and 250 were seized, 39 of whom were recommended for deportation. The raids extended into January, aimed at Communists in seventy cities, resulting in the arrest of about ten thousand, including the leadership of the two Communist Parties.

Moderate Socialists had also become the targets off those presenting themselves as patriots, and twice the moderate socialist, Victor Berger, was debarred from taking his seat in the House of Representatives - disenfranchising those in Wisconsin who had elected him. Five socialists who had been elected to seats in New York's state legislature were also prevented from taking their seats, on the grounds that no socialist could be considered loyal to the Constitution. And in the U.S. Senate, McKeller of Tennessee called for sending American citizens with radical beliefs to a penal colony in Guam.

Wilson Loses His Peace Treaty and His League of Nations

When Wilson returned from the Paris Conference in mid-1919, the Republicans held a slight majority in the Senate. A two-thirds vote in the Senate was needed for ratification of the treaty signed Paris, and Wilson needed to win to his side a minority of Senators who were inclined to oppose ratification. A few Republican senators wished to deny Wilson any glory he had won during his trip to Paris, and some were still disappointed that he had not included any prominent Republicans in his mission. A few Republican senators feared that ratifying the treaty would forever embroil the United States in Europeans affairs. Sounding like Mussolini, Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana saw the treaty as raising "the motley flag of internationalism," and he described the treaty as a plan to "denationalize America and denationalize the nation's manhood." A few Senators were opposed to that part of the treaty involving the League of Nations. They spoke of the U.S. losing its sovereignty by joining the League, and they were opposed to the U.S. being drawn into a war in behalf of the League.

On the opposite side of the treaty issue, only a few senators believed that the treaty was excessively harsh with Germany. One of them was the courageous Senator Robert LaFollette, who was under attack for being pro-German. He described the treaty as preparation for a future bloodbath and as a mockery of self-determination.

In an effort to gain the needed two-thirds vote in the Senate, Wilson turned to the public for support. On September 3, he began traveling across the nation by train, fighting for his League of Nations. He grew weary, and by the end of the month he was back in the White House, a victim of a stroke. And he remained bedridden for the remainder of his presidency.

Many who had favored sending the young to Europe to make the world "safe for democracy" were now unwilling to follow through with commitments to strengthen the peace in Europe. The public was in no mood to have the U.S. help guarantee France's territorial integrity or to contribute to the guarantee of political independence of other members of the League of Nations. They were fed up with Wilsonian "high-mindedness." They believed that it was time for the nation to put its feet on the ground. By this they meant that the U.S. could defend itself adequately on its own, that the rest of the world should take care of itself without help from the U.S., and that those powers that owed the U.S. money - such as Britain and France - should pay up sooner rather than later.

In the Senate, to ratify the treaty signed at Versailles a compromise bill was proposed. But Wilson opposed any compromise and, following instructions from Wilson, Democrats voted against any such compromise. It was to be a vote accepting or rejecting the whole of the peace treaty. In late November, 1919, the Senate voted 55 in favor and 39 against, short of the needed two-thirds majority. This meant that the United States was to remain outside the League of Nations and that the U.S. continued to be officially at war with Germany, Austria and Hungary.

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