Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00 So what is the great Boston molasses disaster, the Seattle general strike red summer mail bombings, poncho via the trans continental motor convoy and the black Sox scandal have in common? Well it's 1919 maybe the most important year in us history. You don't know much about join us today as we deep dive into one year 1919 hello and welcome to an incomplete history. I'm Hillary and I'm Jeff.
Speaker 3 00:46 Where are your hosts for this weekly history podcast?
Speaker 0 00:49 So Hillary, I take two on our 1919 episode.
Speaker 3 00:53 Yes, we're back after days of technical difficulties.
Speaker 0 00:57 Well I like to think it was the Illuminati. We've relocated to a secure bunker. We're now using all burner equipment, right?
Speaker 3 01:07 No. Well I mean I, I got it delivered via Amazon prime. So I think that everybody's watching. No.
Speaker 0 01:14 Oh so well cause if there is an Illuminati, Jeff Bezos is definitely tied to them. He asked me, yes, he may be the head of the Illuminati. So how's the weather out there as it's still called?
Speaker 3 01:27 Okay. So keeping in the tradition of discussing the weather, it's super important in this week because it is freezing here. Literally freezing. I mean yesterday morning.
Speaker 0 01:40 So that means it's below $32
Speaker 3 01:42 yes, yes, yes. Yesterday morning it was 60 degrees. Yesterday night it was four degrees. Four one, two, three four one, two, three, four. So four Celsius Fahrenheit. Yeah. Fahrenheit, which is below. It was so cold and okay. I will admit that that was the quote. Wind chill was, was four because the temperature was like, I think 15 degrees. Booz super cold. All of a sudden, like this cold front came through and I mean it was just like, I've never experienced such a dramatic change in temperature over the course of a couple of hours. And so it's still really cold and the dogs are snuggled up in their crate and the cats are snuggled up in bed and everyone's pretty upset about it. How'd the dogs do last night? They did so well. They were so good. They didn't cause any problems. They didn't bark. I think they knew like we must behave ourselves. Was Jenny like Dobby be Hey, I think she'd had a talk with him. Like, listen, listen, you a little jerk, be quiet. So he didn't <inaudible>
Speaker 0 03:03 the weather's perfect here. It's 74 degrees.
Speaker 3 03:06 That sounds really nice. Yeah.
Speaker 0 03:09 Are weather so uninteresting compared to yours? A fires are kind of under control now. Like we'll see. So 19, 19. Um, it's kind of odd. This is like deja VU. Uh, cause we did discuss this. Um, but 19, 19, uh, I think as I kind of researched getting ready for this, I think it may be the most important year in the 20th century as far as understanding a big shift. Right. And I know you and I kind of had a discussion about this previously. I mean, what do you think is 19, 19 a year that's worth kind of looking at
Speaker 3 03:48 by itself? Well, I think every year's worth looking at by itself. And when you break down any one year in us history and you delve into it and you're preparing to talk about it. So like we are for this podcast or sometimes when I'm preparing to talk about a specific moment in history for class, it's really easy to go, wow, this is a super important year. And I wouldn't say that this is not an important year like it is. It's very important. And you're right, when I was researching it for our discussion, I thought, wow, you know, there's a lot that happened in 1919 that I didn't learn about in school. And so I would say it's important for that reason because sometimes we can point to really pivotal role years in us history is being, you know, like Oh well 1776 is really important.
Speaker 3 04:34 Right? And everybody can point to it, but when it comes to 1919, what I find most interesting is there's a lot of really important stuff that happens, but it's not really discussed. And so I would say yes, it's very important year and we should delve into it. And I'm happy that we did that for this week because I was reminded of a lot of what happened. Um, and I didn't really think about like, wow, it happened right within this 365 days. And when you break it down in that way, you go, Oh yeah, this is super important.
Speaker 0 05:05 Yeah. I mean it's interesting. I think when in us history, when you teach it, even at the college level, there's a tendency to jump from world war one into the 20s, right? You jumped from kind of the United States involvement in the great war in the 1920s and you skip over stuff. I mean, I think you can make the argument in 1919 is the end of something we might call the progressive era, right?
Speaker 3 05:30 Right. So when you're kind of forced to define the progressive era, it can get a little muddy because it's difficult to say what, well, first of all, it's difficult to define what the progressive era was, but a lot of times people kind of market as the end of, um, the, the war. But I think 1919 is a better marker for that. And I think you had mentioned about, um, Teddy Roosevelt dying like dies
Speaker 0 05:58 in January 19, 19. Right?
Speaker 3 06:00 So it kinda kicks off the year in a bad way, but then also it kind of stops the progressive era,
Speaker 0 06:07 right? I mean, here's a guy who, after he left the Republican party kind of became more progressive in his ideology. You know, he runs as an independent, um, and don't forget Teddy Roosevelt's the president under which we get like the pure food and food and drug acts, right? So this is government oversight of corporations and saying, look, you just can't put anything you want in this stuff that people are eating or taking his medicine. The government has a responsibility to protect the public. And I think Teddy Roosevelt dying in January is maybe, you know, and it's clearly not related to the end of the progressive era, but it's so symbolic and at the same time you have this kind of odd,
Speaker 4 06:53 okay,
Speaker 0 06:53 almost humorous industrial disaster. I mean, it would be, it would be completely funny if nobody had died. Um, but people did die. So January 15th of 1919 there's the Boston molasses disaster, which I think is something that very few people know anything about outside of Boston maybe.
Speaker 3 07:17 I think it'd be a great way to start a whole class about the inner war period.
Speaker 4 07:22 Okay.
Speaker 3 07:22 Because it is this really important moment because yeah, not many people understand or know about it, but also it has a lot to do with the regulation that had been a result of the progressive era. But then there's this spillover, literally that happens that kind of, um, is, is regressive in a way because there's blame that goes around that has nothing to do with, you know, what actually occurred. So why don't you explain what happened?
Speaker 0 07:49 I've been with the molasses disaster. I know we're going to try not to laugh as much as we did in the original recording. It's, it's ridiculous. It's like absurd. I think when the friendship service talk about the acidity of human life, this is what they're talking about. But, so Boston had a long history of processing molasses goes back to the colonial era where they would get molasses out of the Caribbean and then they would distill it into alcohol. And that gets us to another topic we'll talk about today too. But so you have these huge tanks that are filled with molasses, you know, hundreds of thousands of gallons of molasses and
Speaker 4 08:25 <inaudible>.
Speaker 0 08:27 Yeah, there was kind of an unexpected warm spell in the molasses, heated up slightly and it basically ended up blowing the storage tank up. And in this Boston neighborhood, it floods the neighborhood with this kind of 30 foot tall wall of molasses traveling 35 miles an hour, which is fast.
Speaker 3 08:48 That is so scary when you think about it because living in Houston for a couple of years, like flood water is terrifying and it can sweep you under and people die in floods all the time. But if you're imagining flood, but with molasses, I mean, that is so terrifying. It sounds like something out of a horror film.
Speaker 0 09:08 Yeah. I mean, you're not going to swim out of it. I mean, they do. There are some people that survive. There's this child who survives and as kind of an interesting account, but I mean, there's this and it's an industrial disaster. Um, and investigators kind of quickly latch onto the fact that it has to do with poor maintenance on these tanks. But the owners of the distillery say otherwise, they actually blame it on kind of this group that becomes the boogeyman for the, for 1920 and 1919 for awhile. They blame it on an archivist. They say anarchistic blew the tank up.
Speaker 3 09:47 So this is kind of this moment of transition in the United States where, uh, there's an anxiety and unease in the postwar context about, uh, groups in the United States that may be trying to subvert the common good. And anarchists are definitely one of these groups that become blamed for things, but not to be confused with or tossed in the same category as communists, socialists, um, and, and you know, labor unions and all these different groups that emerge as being considered a problem in the post war era. And they become scapegoats for everything that goes wrong in society in 1919 is kind of this moment where there's so much fear and uncertainty about what's going on globally. And there's a major reordering of culture within the United States. And with the social order in the United States as a result of the war that people need to start coming up with excuses or explanations as to why things aren't going right. And so when you have molasses flowing through the streets of Boston at 35 miles per hour, and people are dying as a result of it, they don't want to point their finger at, well, maybe there was more regulations that need to happen at this plant. And they say, well, no. It was this group who's trying to create chaos in the United States.
Speaker 0 11:13 Yeah. And these, I think the thing with that too, with the anarchistic and the communist, although there's overlap between the two on <inaudible>, some people, they're both associated with immigrant groups, right? So an archivist are usually associated during this period with the Italians and kind of people from Southern Europe, whereas communists are associated with people from Eastern Europe. So you get kind of the trope of the Italian and archivists and the Russian Jewish communist. And it's a real kind of way to demonize these people and to say, not only are they different than us culturally, religiously, linguistically, but they're also different from us because they, they want to undermine our political system the way we are organized society and, right. And I, I go ahead. Well I think you combine that with this moment of labor and the labor thing I think has a lot to do with the post war period. Um, the Seattle general strike is February 6th to February 11th and it's this moment where you have unions across industries all come together in Seattle for this complete strike. And they strike for a week. And I think it scares the crap out of some industry owners,
Speaker 3 12:38 right? Cause you have something over 60,000 workers who strike, right? It's a nonviolent strike, nonviolent protest. And they're protesting, they're stagnant wages in the wake of the war. And it totally freaks people out because I think that in a postwar context, people think, well, okay, the war is over, everything's going to go back to normal. But every time people come back from war, society has reordered and they had never had this instance in the United States part because the great war is just that. It is the great war. And there hadn't really been a conflict on this scale for the United States. You know, in a forum, you know, on a foreign war, there were smaller instances of course, but it's the first great war and people come back from it and society is forever changed and reordered. And I think that it creates an unease because there's this idea that there should, there should be a moment of peace, right? Like, okay, well the war is over. We're not gonna, we're not fighting anymore. But the cultural war and the reordering of society within the United States begins to happen. And this happens globally. There are so many countries that are going through this reordering in this anxiety and these moments of tension and unease within their own countries as society is junk jumbled up after the war and the United States is no different.
Speaker 0 14:12 Yeah, I mean I think it's, it's interesting too that unlike the Italian anarchistic and the kind of Russian Jewish communist trumps most of these strikers in Seattle are white Christian men.
Speaker 4 14:28 Okay.
Speaker 0 14:30 Right. I mean, and I think that is what makes it doubly terrifying is this idea that, um, you know, where is, where are these ideas coming from? Where, why are people demanding this? And I think some people try to start making connections and saying, well, you may be the communist or infiltrating labor. Um, instead of saying, you know, look, maybe we do need to kind of fix systemic issues and, and United States, and I would say the United States has, Pat has previously experienced a moment like this where they have to reorder society. It's not global, but I would argue at the end of the civil war, right? That reconstruction is this is this great kind of reordering in American society that does not go well.
Speaker 3 15:18 W O N absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I would like to clarify that there of course there's been major reordering of society in the post civil war context, but I was thinking more in the context of global reordering of society as a result of the war. But yeah, I mean this is another moment where the United States is trying to reorganize and you're right, reconstruction doesn't go well and this doesn't go particularly well either. I mean it's,
Speaker 0 15:43 well, yeah, so I mean, so we have the Seattle general strike and already Wilson is trying to kind of hedge his bets on this stuff. And during a congressional research he, he appoints Mitchell Palmer, attorney general and Palmer's really outspoken about this. He's going to go after these groups you've used as an American and in violation of a wartime espionage act. Even though it's no longer war time, he's going to use this old law to go after people. And you know, there's a lot of kind of settling of debts. So in April of 1919, Eugene Debs famously goes to prison to serve his sentence that he had gotten during the war for speaking out against the draft. And that I think to many modern Americans hearing that somebody was being synced to prison simply because he spoke out against the draft. This wasn't that he was a draft Dodger, he was too old to be eligible for the draft. It's that he spoke out against the draft and therefore went to jail.
Speaker 3 16:45 That's terrifying. I don't think though that Americans were willing to speak out against this. I mean, there was definitely a strengthening of
Speaker 4 17:00 <inaudible>
Speaker 3 17:00 police as a result. Right? So in, in the postwar context, because there's all this scapegoating going on and saying, well, it's the communists, socialists, anarchists who are trying to infiltrate our labor unions. There's going to be a major crackdown and there is a huge
Speaker 3 17:19 surge of police presence, uh, funding for police at the local and state levels. And, uh, at the federal level as well with Palmer of course in the Palmer raids in 1919 are happening as a result of the, the anxiety in, in post war. And so with the reordering that happens as a result of war, you have a strengthening of, uh, authority, a of law enforcement and this impacts everybody. This impacts everybody. Um, you know, straight down through the levels and it, it, it particularly impacts, uh, labor people in the labor force. But then it also impacts, um, after the African American community, um, immigrant communities. And just like any other time, if there's a major surgeon, law enforcement presence, it's going to disproportionately impact these minority communities in this time period. And one of the things that happens, it's, it kind of reflects back on the reordering that we're talking about in the post civil war is this is the second emergence of the clan. So the KU Klux Klan emerges again during this time period in 1919. And we can talk about that more when we talk about the red summer, but they're there. I guess there's just a lot of unrest happening at this time. The best,
Speaker 0 18:45 before we jump into the wet red summer, let's talk about the first wave of anarchist bombings, right? Because some of those are definitely occurring around the same time as jabs goes to service sentence. Now, whether there's a causal relationship there, who knows, but I mean, just to give you some of the targets and the bombings, um, they're called anarchist bombings. Um, that doesn't mean all of these were sent by an archivist. It doesn't even mean that they are sent by the same group. But you've got the postmaster general, you've got news editors and various places. You've got the district attorney in San Francisco, you've got the commissioner general of image immigration, you've got the New York city police commissioner, you've got the mayor of Seattle, you've got, um, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who's justice in the Supreme court. You've got the mayor of New York, you've got the solicitor general of the post office.
Speaker 0 19:39 You've got various businessmen including J P Morgan and John Rockefeller. You've got Mitchell Palmer. But then, and you've got some idea, other industrial figures, but then you've got that kind of these senators and state senators and then you get a kind of an odd group. And I know you know this I think is a good segue into the red summer. You've got the governor of Mississippi, you've got the daily news editor from Jackson, Mississippi, you've got a representative from Alabama, you got a representative from Georgia. I mean you have these Southern officials that seem to stick out. You've got the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, and it's just like, huh, that's kind of odd, right? Because there doesn't, I mean, what would the overlap be between those groups?
Speaker 3 20:22 Well to me the overlap between the groups is, if you're thinking about it being a result of anarchist, it's like every person that's been sent a bomb is an authority figure, is somebody who has control and authority over society in one way or another. And if you're thinking about government officials, of course that makes sense. But you're thinking about Rockefeller. I mean that's an attack straight on capitalism. I mean it's just like somebody who's making the most money. And it, and it's an attack on the system, so to speak. And so I think they're not all coming from the same person and it's, it's probably not even a concerted effort. I think that it's probably happening as like a copycat sorta situation. And, and people are liking the ideology behind it, right? So they're sending, um, they're sending bombs through the mail and it's a huge chaotic disorder the moment. But I think what they do have in common is like, they're fighting against a system. And the system could be capitalism, the system could be a racial segregation and subjugation of the system can just be the government and the strengthening of the government itself. And so to me, there is a common thread between them though. I don't think it was concerted effort.
Speaker 0 21:40 Right. Well, I think that the race thing I think is compelling because, I mean, especially the people from Mississippi, I think it's, I think there's a connection here and I don't think it's coincidental that we have rising racial tensions after the war. Right. And I know you had wanted to talk about this. So these black soldiers return, um, you know, the vast majority of black soldiers who serve in the United States during world war one actually don't serve combat right there. They'd serve as seven doors and kind of these support personnel. But there are some that serve the most famously,
Speaker 3 22:16 go ahead. Go ahead. No, most famously who,
Speaker 0 22:19 well, most famously you get these black soldiers who actually joined the French military of these other organizations so they can actually serve in combat roles
Speaker 3 22:28 and they're treated equally in those combat roles when they're serving with the French. Right? Isn't that what kind of causes huge problem here?
Speaker 0 22:36 That's a problem. But I mean, so the war stuff ends and people come home and a lot of these returning black soldiers
Speaker 3 22:45 more, right, of course. So they're away fighting foreign war. Um, there being some black soldiers are being treated as equals amongst the French military and fighting alongside France. French soldiers, um, others may be not in combat positions, but they are, you know, in the ranks of the military. Um, and they're fighting abroad when they return home. They of course are empowered, you know, they say they've been serving their country and fighting for their country and fighting for democracy abroad when there's not democracy in the United States. And this is the rallying cry of many progressive reformers, chiefly women who are fighting for the right to vote at this time. We have the voting, uh, for women as passed in 1920. And if, you know, first goes into, uh, the legislature in 1919, but women are saying the same thing. It's like president Wilson, you're fighting for democracy abroad.
Speaker 3 23:46 Meanwhile, 20 million women are disenfranchised in your own country. And when black soldiers returned from war, they feel the same way, particularly in the South segregation and Jim Crow laws are at their height. A public lynching is happening at an alarming rate still in the South. The rise of the Klan threatens black lives, um, again, as it did in the late 19th century. So they returned to this society that's still heavily segregated, heavily stratified, um, racism and violence prevails and, uh, fear through the black community and they were soldiers fighting for the United States. And so now they're soldiers fighting for their own community. And it makes good sense to me that they come back and they want to fight for change within the South. Um, of course. So this causes, uh, another bit of social disruption and social disorder because that's not going to happen without a fight.
Speaker 0 24:47 You know, they're there, this comes in and then during from 1970 to 1919, it's interesting. So the summer of 1919 is famously called the red summer, but a lot of the racial race riots, a lot of these incidents of racial violence that occur in 1919, there already been hints. Things were really deteriorating. Um, couple of years prior to this, right, there had been these riots in 1917 and then in 1919 it all kind of explodes. And suddenly we call the red summer and it starts in Charleston, but perhaps the most famous incident was the Chicago race riot in July.
Speaker 4 25:27 Okay.
Speaker 3 25:27 Right. And this is an interesting incident too because you talk about the heat at this time, right? So we'll go a little bit into that. It's interesting.
Speaker 0 25:37 So it was an unusually hot summer. And remember this is an era before w air conditioning is available almost anywhere. And you know, some of the stories have looked at it and said, look,
Speaker 4 25:49 okay,
Speaker 0 25:50 1968, 19, 19, we've got these years where we get these uncomfortably hot temperatures. If people tent and we see more riots and you know, if the weather's hot, you're uncomfortable and you feel like you're really being abused by society, it doesn't take much to put to kind of set you off. And unlike prior racial evidence incidents, race riots, incidents, Chicago's, it's a little different rights of their Chicago sits on Lake Michigan and in the summer people go there and swim. Um, the beaches aren't officially are, weren't officially segregated, but there was kind of defacto segregation in the winter on them. And this young black man, Eugene Williams was swimming and he ended up kind of swimming over to an area that was traditionally considered. Um,
Speaker 4 26:44 okay.
Speaker 0 26:45 You know, a white beach. And he began to, you know, there was a man who was throwing rocks at him, um, and kind of other, um, black bathers in the water and eventually Williams gets killed. Um, and it's kind of explodes because unlike the past where, you know, and in some communities we have these racial tensions that would take place. The black community's response had been to kind of hunker down and just wait for the worst to be over
Speaker 4 27:19 <inaudible>
Speaker 0 27:19 right. To kind of ride it out. Yeah. But not soldiers returning from combat. Not this time. Nope. No. They're like, we're not going to take this. And I think this is the thing, is it, it shocks the city because suddenly you have people fighting back and you know, it's, it's pretty clear now that,
Speaker 4 27:44 okay.
Speaker 0 27:45 A lot of the riders and the initial group of writers who had attacked black people in Chicago were members of kind of these roving ethic Irish gangs. Right. And there's this long history of, of conflict between,
Speaker 4 28:00 um,
Speaker 0 28:02 Irish immigrants and African Americans, particularly in a couple of key cities in the United States. And they kind of played on that. But one thing that I found is they went so far, they wanted to kind of rope Southern and Eastern European immigrants into this as well. <inaudible> excuse me. And one of the ways they did that is one of the groups of, one of the Irish gangs actually dawned blackface and set fire to Eastern European immigrants homes. So this was just inciting further violence, right. To try to get those communities who really didn't have any prior beef with the African American community to join the riots. And yeah, I mean it's it, but at the same time, there is kind of cooperation that seems to go a place a white mob threatened a traditionally black hospital. Police kind of held the line there and prevented them from going into the hospital, which was definitely different than during the, um, the draft riots in New York where Irish, um, uh, writers had actually burned down a black orphanage.
Speaker 0 29:18 Right. So, I mean, it's, it's a complicated situation and it got so bad that the chief of police closed down all places. People gather, except for churches. Um, the governor kind of authorized, um, the 11th, Illinois infantry regiment and it had a machine gun company ready. Uh, but they don't, they hesitate to call in federal soldiers and everybody kind of waits to see what's gonna happen in the process. You get 38 people are dead, 23 of those are African-American, 15 are white, over 500 people are injured, the vast majority of the injured are actually African-American. Um, and you get over a thousand homes that are destroyed, just burned. And these are overwhelmingly the homes of African Americans.
Speaker 3 30:13 Well what happens during the Chicago summer, the summer in Chicago is that the police don't participate and, and that is an act of
Speaker 5 30:26 <inaudible>
Speaker 3 30:27 violence in and of itself. Right. Cause the police don't intervene. And so, you know, some people have looked at it and said like, well, it was just so bad the police didn't intervene. It's like, no, the police made a conscious decision not to intervene because it was going in the direction of, you know, more blocks, citizens dying. Right. And so like it was almost an act of complacency for the police to just stay out of it because it was going the way that they wanted it to go, if that makes sense in some messed up way. But the police weren't doing their jobs
Speaker 5 31:04 because
Speaker 3 31:06 they were in support of the terrorism action of the block people in Chicago. Right. And that was part of the issue too, because there's the systemic racism that's taking place on behalf of, from the government all the way down the ranks, but into local law enforcement agencies too. And so there's this allowance of police to just not intervene and act and do their jobs in order to protect citizens who are in danger. Because you know, this man who's swimming in the, in the Lake, like he shouldn't have had rocks thrown at him and died in the first place. Right. And this is what spurs the, the violence. Uh, but there, there's no, there's no intervention on behalf of police. I mean, you mentioned that they shut down public gathering places. Uh, but it's kind of in a reaction to trying to help white citizens who are also beginning to die. Is that a fair assessment?
Speaker 0 32:04 Oh yeah. I mean it's, you know, the police were a best case scenario. They just kind of stand by. They do protect that church. I mean the ho the hospital, that's about it. Um, you know, best case scenario, they just kind of let things happen. Worst case they're giving permission for Y writers to kind of do what they assumed, why writers would always do of
Speaker 3 32:29 lynching, which is a, as an extension of the some form of vigilante justice that is somehow sanctioned in this time period. And it has a lot to do with the reemergence of the clan and it has to do with a backlash against soldiers who have been empowered by working for the military. And you do a little bit of work about this, right? I mean in the late 19th century you work on this idea about the military kind of incorporating people as citizens and and like lending citizenship to people who may have been on the outskirts or fringes of society. And this is a great example of that, right?
Speaker 0 33:11 Well that's the thing is, um, there is a tension between racializing somebody is inferior, which is how African Americans had been depicted as particularly African American men in broader American society in the 19th and early 20th century. And then using them for military service. And, and this has a lot to do with why they were generally denied the ability to serve as combat soldiers in the army during war, during the great war. Um, there was this idea that, you know, if we let them serve and kind of military positions, what does that mean? Are we accepting that they're kind of equal with white men? Uh, so it was just easier to kind of make them do these auxiliary jobs. That being said, a lot of these African American men go over glycan serve with the French and their able to serve an active duty, uh, kind of frontline positions. And they come back and they're like, look, I served and there's this great, um, kind of poem. Um, uh, this is a
Speaker 0 34:21 web. Dubois says this. He says, um, uh, it's called returning soldiers. We returned from the slavery of uniform, which is the world's madness, demanded us to Dawn to the freedom of civil guard. We stand again to look America squarely in the face and call a spade a spade. We sing this country of ours, despite all it's better souls have done and dreamed is yet a strainful for land. We return, we returned from fighting, we returned fighting. And this is kind of in may of 1919 he publishes this and this is right kind of at the beginning of the red summer and it's idea we're not going to put up with this crap anymore. And there's this huge ratcheting up of violence. Um, the worst place is a little town in Arkansas, <inaudible> Arkansas where you have upwards of 250 black people are killed. Um, Chicago seems a lot more mild in that, you know, but um, lynching, there's a huge spike in lynching in the South, uh, church burnings in the South and you know, people have called it the Nadeer of American race relations, which means it's the low point.
Speaker 4 35:27 Okay.
Speaker 3 35:28 It certainly is a low point and it is all important to understand that it's reactionary, uh, to block citizens equal treatment and equity and citizenship and equal protection under the law. After they returned fighting for their country, they fought for their country abroad, they're going to fight for their community at home. It makes perfect sense that this is the result. And the reaction on behalf of white people is one of fear because they're uncomfortable with the fact that black people aren't just sitting in letting, letting it happen anymore, letting violence happen to them and to their families. And they are stepping up for, um, in, in really brave ways that they've never been able, they've never felt empowered to do perhaps before in this, in this orchestrated or organized of a way to say we're protecting our families, we're protecting our own, we're building and protecting our own communities.
Speaker 3 36:27 And I think that the language around this is interesting too, and we've fallen into this, this language of rioting, but this isn't, this isn't writing it's revolution for them. It's, it's acts of revolution. It's acts of defense of themselves in their communities. And we call it rioting and that's very racialized term. And it connotes that there there's chaos or disorder and yes, there's violence and chaos, but it's not disorderly conduct in a sense. I mean it's, it's disobedience in the way that the only, the only way forward, right. And we talked about this several weeks ago were Thomas Jefferson says the tree of Liberty must be watered with blood at times. And I mean this is definitely one of those instances in us history where in order to move forward, I mean there, there is violence in it's, it's all in defense of, of the black community. Right. Well, I mean,
Speaker 0 37:26 but then you look at a place like Elaine Arkansas, which I think is really interesting. So September 30th
Speaker 3 37:33 I'm white
Speaker 0 37:36 kind of landowners and farmers attack this meeting. Um, and what it was was it was black sharecroppers who were trying to unionize basically. And it was a meeting of their local chapter, the progressive farmers and household union of America and kind of these white owners, land owners and farmers kind of confront them. A white man gets shot during the confrontation, and then the planners form these kind of malicious to arrest all these African-American sharecroppers. People come in from all around the region and to help out with this. And this mob goes around and attacks people at random and upwards of 250 African Americans were killed during that period. And here's what the, the Arkansas governor actually investigates a commission to investigate what happened. And what he says was that the sharecroppers union was a socialist enterprise established for the purpose of banding Negroes together for the killing of white people.
Speaker 3 38:32 So this, I mean, that's, that's the,
Speaker 0 38:36 I mean, can you collide the 19th and 20th century some perfect.
Speaker 3 38:39 Yeah. And I mean, even, um, the late 18th century, of course, right? I mean, there are so always such fear over the organization, um, and mobilization of black Americans. And that fear is palpable at every moment in history. And this one is, is particularly salient because, uh, they're, they're using under the guise of, of calling something socialism or communism or an or here, whatever. Like it's just racism, right? I mean they are afraid that black people are going to organize and start to demand to be treated equally. And as soon as these demands come about and there's a fear of a level of organization, there is a huge violent backlash and it's the rise of th the second rise of the Klan during this period that facilitates this widespread terrorism of black Americans in the South and the the rise of the Klan too. It's important to point out this doesn't just happen in the South. Some of the resurgence of the Klan happens in places like Illinois, right? There's a huge amount. Indiana has, I think the most people, right, who join and I mean we're talking hundreds of thousands of people, prominent politicians who were joining the second iteration of the KU Klux Klan doning these white sheets and burning crosses and such. All in reaction to the mobilization of African-Americans attempting to attain equal treatment under the law. It's tense in 1919 is very tense moment.
Speaker 0 40:18 I mean, I think it's important to mention though, it's so normalized being in the clan at that point that a lot of them aren't hiding their faces either. Right? You get these parades.
Speaker 3 40:28 So that's how we know that there are prominent people who are involved because,
Speaker 0 40:32 right. Because they're, because they're aren't hooded, they are proud to be there and you get families, you get the husband and the wife and the children all kind of decked out in clan garb. And you know, I, I don't think it's an overstatement just to kind of reiterate that thing that this is the Nadeer of American race relations. Um, now it's interesting because the, the Elaine Arkansas thing, the, uh, federal Bureau, the justice department's Bureau of investigation does kind of investigate it and they don't find any evidence to corroborate the idea that these sharecroppers were out to kill white people. At the same time, nobody involved in that investigation actually interviewed a sharecropper
Speaker 4 41:14 <inaudible>,
Speaker 0 41:15 which I think is interesting. And I'm not saying that they were, that's what they were out to do. I just find it interesting that even, even the Bureau, which seems to come out with something good to say, look, all they were doing was unionizing doesn't even want to consider the voice of these African Americans. It's not entirely
Speaker 3 41:34 surprising though. I mean that's, it kind of follows the route. Yeah.
Speaker 0 41:39 But it's, it's even the people who kind of maybe seem to, I don't want to say help African-American kitty, that's an overstatement. They, there's just this kind of lack of concern for them. Right. So in a lot of ways, I think the returning black soldiers beliefs were validated during this period, right. That, you know, no matter what, at the end of the day, we're the only people who are going to work look out for our own best interest. And I think by the time we get involved in world war II, there's going to be a very different attitude in many African American communities. Right? Yeah. I mean there's, I mean there's some people who point back to 1919 and say, look, we were treated like crap when we got back last time. Should we really join this next time? And there's kind of, I think there's a fracture too in the African American community over that issue. But I mean there are other things that happen, right? So we've got the red summer is like this huge thing, but then you've got like the red scare, this fear of communism, which is also a fear of anarchism, which is also kind of xenophobic, may have elements of anti Catholicism, antisemitism. It's kind of all wrapped up.
Speaker 3 42:57 It's very rooted in global politics though at the time too. Cause there's this major fear because of the reordering of society that's happening in different countries. We have the Bolshevik revolution, right? And the fear over that or something like that happening within the United States is extreme. I mean this is a very real fear that people in the United States are feeling at most prominently figures of authority, right? People in power are afraid of this. And this is why the labor union striking and, um, February is so troubling. Um, and you know, these, the red scare, the, the um, constant fear over communism, socials and things like that. It's all as a result of watching the events happening worldwide and seeing how that's happening and playing out in a global perspective. And then there's just this anxiety that something like that will happen within the United States. And there's nothing ever close to that happening here.
Speaker 0 44:00 Well, but I th I think there's a fear amongst some people. I mean, you've got, I mean, just listing major strikes and these aren't the many others that take place. You've got that Seattle general strike. Um, then you've got, um, uh, steel strike in September of, uh, 1919. You've got, um, a coal strike, a kind of substantial month and a half long cold strike that starts in November. Um, you also have a police strike that happens in Boston. I mean, you've got all these strikes that added with kind of this idea that maybe society's coming apart at the seams.
Speaker 4 44:38 Um,
Speaker 0 44:40 people want answers, they want answers and they want solutions. And I think that's why a lot of Americans don't have a problem with Palmer and what Palmer starts to do. So on the second anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, he actually rounds up 10,000 people who are suspected of being communist and anarchist rounds them up and begins the process of trying them. And some of them just deporting without a trial. And you end up with 249 people who are deported, including Emma Goldman, who was a prominent communist labor organizer.
Speaker 3 45:18 This is something that I find interesting in the wake of war, again, with the pumping up and expansion of the government in terms of law enforcement. This happens also in the wake of the civil war. But this is a fantastic example of just how rapidly the government and law enforcement agencies have ballooned in the wake of the war to be able to even have the infrastructure to round up 10,000 people. That's, that's an incredible growth of government. And that is alarming to people. You know, I mean, some people are very supportive of it, of course, because they're not the target of these rates. But of course, this causes extreme fear on behalf of immigrant communities. Um, people who are being targeted, coming from Southern Europe. Uh, you mentioned Jewish people of Eastern Europe, they may be being targeted. This is especially troubling to African Americans again, but this, uh, expansion, this, this broad expansion of, uh, in law enforcement power in the United States at this time is troubling for many groups of people because they are going to be targeted by this expansion.
Speaker 3 46:30 And this happens at multiple junctures in us history and arguably we're, we're experiencing one right now where there are these federal agencies that are being expanded on and funded and given power and authority to go out and round people up. And this causes a lot of, uh, trouble for, for many people. And, and it, it, while some people feel safer because of it, it's causing a major divide within the United States about the role of government in everyday lives and what sort of authority that they actually have, um, to come in and, and detain and then deport cause the Emma Goldman incident, I mean, she's just deported and that's kind of freaky. Um,
Speaker 0 47:18 so I mean, to be fair, Goldman is, um, she is found guilty of dissuading people from registering for the drafts, which like Debs is, is a crime during the war. So she sends to that and actually gets out. She serves two years and it's actually gets out without, she gets kind of rounded up and deported. But Goldman is a us citizen now. She's a naturalized us citizen, which makes it easier to argue that she could be deported. But I mean this is the thing too, is that there's still this huge division between natural born and national and naturalized us citizens, which again I think brings up kind of contemporary issues because this has been kind of floated recently, right? This idea, even if a person is a citizen, if it's a naturalized citizen, it's still this kind of thing we can maybe take away.
Speaker 3 48:06 Well, think of the implications of it. Think of the mass number of immigrants that are entering the country between 1890 and 1920. They make up a huge constituency. And so if every single one of those people who's been naturalized as a citizen is potentially subject to deportation, despite the fact that they are now us citizens, this is going to cause a lot of fear on their behalf. I mean, of course they're going to be uncomfortable with this because it would almost seem that the protections that are awarded citizens don't actually extend to them. So then what is citizenship at that point? And so it brings a lot of questions to the for, uh, that, that create a lot of, um, the creative, a lot of problems for people just considering, you know, the, the power and extent of the federal government to
Speaker 0 48:58 you too,
Speaker 3 48:59 port. I mean, that's a question that comes up,
Speaker 0 49:03 right? Well, I mean, so keeping with the idea of the United States and kind of things that happened in 1919 and how that goes today, besides kind of this idea of how, how secure is your citizenship? You know, November 19, 19, 19, the U S said it fails to ratify the treaty of Versailles. So this is the treaty that kind of formally ends the great war. But it also establishes kind of the league of nations. It's something Wilson had kind of worked towards this kind of international body that would make war a thing of the past. The United States and all these other nations was set in kind of mediate disputes. No longer would war be the way you settled international disputes. You'd have kind of this formal international body and Wilson and co have, his advisors had worked carefully on this and kind of crafted this plan. The problem is Wilson endeavor really included the Senate and these discussions in the Senate has the ultimate right to accept or reject treaties like this and they reject it, which is I think so telling because last week the United States rejected its membership in a treaty that the United States had very carefully kept <inaudible> helped to construct over the last several years.
Speaker 0 50:19 Right? The Paris.
Speaker 3 50:21 Yeah. I mean there are certainly echoes of this because every time the United States, uh, withdrawals from global politics, it, things don't go great. And I wouldn't say that there's, I'm not making any argument toward American exceptionalism or that the United States must be involved in everything because obviously that's, that's troubling. And that's another conversation. But there are moments in history where the United States is heavily involved in some form of global politics and, and, and you know, has a, an opinion and wants to have involvement in, um, the, the new order that wants to have involvement in the way that, uh, global politics will operate and function and they get everybody on board and then they're like, Oh, but we're not actually, we're not actually going to be a part of it. And the treaty of Versailles is just as disastrous instance of that where, because of the, the disorder, uh, internally within all these different countries that happens as a result of the war, this treaty in the United States not actually being involved in it creates a huge power vacuum of sorts.
Speaker 3 51:29 But then also just he, um, large amount of disorder within European countries that results in the depression, which results in Germany, um, peering up for the second world war. I mean, oftentimes historians even argue that world war one and world war II aren't two separate events, that there's a break in the violence and the exchange of bombs and fire for a short period of time really. But that it's all one event and it's very true. All of these things are so connected and you can't really talk about world war II without explaining the treaty of Versailles and what happened at that moment, um, where Germany's economy just tanks as a result.
Speaker 0 52:12 Right. Well, I mean, I think that's the thing. There is kind of this, there's this desire to kind of ask, you know, could the United States have mediated and prevented Britain and France from kind of
Speaker 4 52:24 <inaudible>
Speaker 0 52:25 destroying Germany's economy, making it so Germany had no functional economy after the war. Could the United States, if it had been involved in the, the, um, league of nations actually have maybe prevented some of that and, and we'll never know. But the United States kind of rejecting an involvement in this international body. It, you know, it doesn't seem to have turned out very well. Um, Wilson himself, you know, suffers a stroke before this is even rejected. And you know,
Speaker 4 52:58 <inaudible>.
Speaker 0 52:59 So for international relations, it's pretty ignominious, right? It's an ignominious year for the United States is kind of this kind of what were we and even involved in this thing for. Um, but I want to switch here kind of in the last little bit and talk about the two constitutional amendments that kind of book in to this year. So the 18th amendment goes into effect at the beginning of 1919. Now that's not the Volstead act. The Volstead act is actually the teeth that make prohibition work. Those don't go into it. That doesn't go into effect til later in the year at the end of October. But the other one is the 19th amendment right? And it's gonna get sent out to the States for ratification
Speaker 3 53:44 of really long fight. Right? So the fight for women's right to vote begins in 1848 and the women who launched the campaign to vote Seneca falls are not even alive to see this come to fruition. So it's a very long struggle and fight for the full enfranchisement of half of the United States population. And it is, it's, um, it finally goes to a vote in 19, 19 and of course it's, um, ratified and brought in in August of 1920. But this is a period of major shift in the political sphere because, uh, suddenly half of the population is allowed a voice in the decisions made in the country. And so this is, uh, incredibly pivotal moment, uh, for history in the United States. But also it's a pivotal moment as the progressive era is book-ended. And we go into this another era because although women don't have the right to vote during the progressive era, it is female reformers who are so heavily involved in politics at this time as a result of fighting for the right to vote.
Speaker 3 54:53 But they're also just heavily involved in progressive era reform. And this is also dates back to the mid 19th century when women are involved in reform for, uh, abolition movements for temperance, for the common school. And I think we're going to have a whole episode talking about reform. But, uh, it's in 1919 that we finally see some of this come to fruition, these, this decades and decades of work that these women have been doing in order to gain the right to participate in their own government. Um, finally comes to, comes to pass in 1919. So it's a very important moment,
Speaker 0 55:30 right? And I think as a story, as we'd be remiss not to kind of point this out, the 18th amendment is before the 19th amendment. Prohibition comes before women get the right to vote. So a lot of people kind of confuse that and they assume that women get the right to vote and then prohibitions fast.
Speaker 3 55:46 I've had so many students say that like, well as soon as women had the right to vote, then they banned alcohol. And I'm like, no, literally not the case. I mean, women were heavily involved in the temperance movement, heavily involved for close to a hundred years at this point, heavily involved. But they had nothing to do with that being passed because it, the, the amendment is the 18th amendment and women don't get the right to vote until the 19th. So that is a common misconception. Um, I would say that's one of the most common misconceptions I've had students come to me with.
Speaker 0 56:25 Right. Yeah. So one last thing I want to end on. I mean there's some,
Speaker 4 56:32 yeah,
Speaker 0 56:33 other events we didn't cover and that doesn't mean we don't think they're important. You know, I didn't talk about this transcontinental motor convoy, this is kind of this caravan that goes from DC to San Francisco to see how fast you can get soldiers and kind of material across the country. Turns out it takes a long time. It takes them from Janet July 7th to September six, basically all summer. Um, and this is going to lead to the United States deciding they need some kind of national rail. Now a road network to do this, which again is another expansion. But I mean, so 1919 starts pretty ignominiously for Boston with the Boston molasses disaster, but it ends pretty badly as well. You know, as a New York Yankees fan, I just had to brag a little bit. December 26th, babe Ruth gets traded to the New York Yankees. So 19, 19, not a good year for Boston.
Speaker 3 57:29 You're a Yankees fan. I didn't even know that. Cause like, Oh
Speaker 0 57:32 yeah,
Speaker 3 57:34 sorry. I guess it makes sense. You're in new Yorker for a long time. But yeah, bad year for Boston. Bad year for Boston. Um, you gave me that fact. I didn't know that babe Ruth was traded in that year. And it's kind of interesting when you're thinking about, you know, we can talk about all these really pivotal moments in us history, but there are important cultural moments that take place too. <inaudible> babe Ruth being traded from the red Sox to the Yankees is this huge moment in the history of baseball and it does book end up bad year for Boston.
Speaker 0 58:07 Yeah, it does. So we didn't, you know, we're running out of time. We didn't, we touched on prohibition, but we're going to talk more about alcohol. And then the next episode we're actually going to talk about the alcoholic Republic, um, which is a great kind of book. Um, and just drinking generally in the Republic and kind of this alcohol consumption. I mean alcohol stands at the center of America in a lot of ways. I mean you could argue it's, it's pivotal in it's foundation. It's pivotal in its early conflicts. It changes the way people relate to the government and the way they relate to the idea of the rule of law. Um, but you know, that's the conversation for next time. Any last things you'd like to say about 1919?
Speaker 3 58:54 Well, I think that we could have another episode maybe in the next before 2019 ends because it's important to point out that we're at the hundred year anniversary of, you know, 1919. So it, we didn't just pick this year because, um, there's a lot going on. Cause of course there was, but it's also because we're kind of reflecting back on what happened 100 years ago. And so I think we may be able to touch on some more events, uh, in the coming and talk a little bit more. Cause we, we didn't get into poncho via, but um, we can certainly do that.
Speaker 0 59:27 Yeah. I got all these things on poncho via sitting here and <inaudible> didn't even get to it.
Speaker 3 59:32 So it is, I mean, you could have, I think you mentioned this, you can have an entire class on 1919 and I was asked to teach a class on the inner war period. And initially the first thing that comes to my mind is like, Oh gosh, I don't want to talk about the great Gatsby, but you could have a whole class and just not even talk about that really. You know? So, um, the way that we learn about the history of the interwar period in our K-12 system is very heavily, um, predicated on this idea of flappers and prohibition and speakeasies and dance halls and yeah, exactly. Jazz and fashion and, and these things are important. Sure. But there's just so much more that happens in the inner war period, particularly proven before 1920. Right. And so, um, I think that it's important to highlight these events and to change the conversation, particularly around writing.
Speaker 3 00:27 And we're going to be talking about Tulsa, um, in the coming months because we're coming up on the a hundred year anniversary of that. But to think of these moments as not moments of riot, but as moments of revolution, um, and acts of, uh, acts of revolution on behalf of the African American community to, uh, elevate their status in society and to seek out, uh, equity and equality for their own community. So we'll continue to kind of branch on this and continue to discuss it in the coming episodes. But this has been fun to, to delve into this year. I think you had fun with it too. Yeah.
Speaker 0 01:05 Oh, I did. I'd love, I would love to teach a class on 1990 page. All right, well, thank you so much for joining us today. Um, make sure you tune into us next time where we discuss a alcohol. Also, if you haven't listened to our old episodes, our backup suits, you can do that. Our website is an incomplete history.com. Uh, please rate us and review us on Apple podcast. You can find us anywhere you listen to a podcast. You can also go to our website if you have a question or comment for us, or a topic you'd like us to cover. Um, anyway, until next time, I'm Jeff Hillary.
Speaker 2 01:45 Thank you very much.
