Directions: Read the questions and answer them in your composition books with detailed fragments that reflect the question.
1. Why were the summer and fall of 1919 tense times for many Americans?
2. How did war change the attitudes of African Americans returning from war?
3. What happened in 1919 that demonstrates the tension between African Americans and whites in the South and the North?
4. How did baseball reflect the growing concern that values had changed?
5. What is a recession?
6. What did the labor movement do that contributed to the feelings of unrest that many Americans experienced?
7. What was the Red Scare?
8. Why is the reading titled “Prologue to the Twenties or: Why We Needed Normalcy”?
9. Based on what you know to have happened in the United States and Europe between 1910 and 1920, why do you suppose F. Scott Fitzgerald made the statement that we had “grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faith in man shaken.” (This is a challenge question! Answer with your best thinking.)
Prologue to the Twenties or, Why We Needed Normalcy
The summer and fall of 1919 were tense, anxious times for many Americans. Almost 5 million men had been called to leave their homes by the government in the draft. Large numbers of women had left their homes to work in war-related industry or work behind the lines supporting the troops in France. In the years between 1910 and 1920, more than 300,000 African Americans had left their lives in the South to seek new opportunity in northern cities. During the war, Americans, most for the first time, saw the government take control of their lives to a large degree. People were told what to eat, when they should eat it, what to produce, what to grow, what prices their goods would be sold at, what to say, what not to say, and all this from a government in a country that prided itself on its independent attitudes and non-interference.
During the winter of 1918-1919, Americans had to deal with a new threat. The deadly influenza virus that had already spread through Europe had arrived in the United States as well. Close to 20 million Americans became sick; more than 500,000 of them died. In cities, people were wearing surgical masks to protect them and phone booths, dance halls, theatres and other places closed down so they would not help spread the flu.
The experience of war had changed life for many African Americans. Soldiers returning from Europe had experienced equality in Europe that they did not find in the United States. They felt that their service for the United States proved they were worthy of equality, and many were willing to take on the racist attitudes they found back home.
Southerners worried about this new attitude. In 1919, ten black veterans were lynched. Fourteen were burned at the stake. The Ku Klux Klan’s membership increased dramatically, in both the traditional South and northern cities as well.
This tension between African Americans and whites exploded in the summer of 1919. The first race riot took place in July in Longview, Texas. A week later, in Washington, D.C., a mob made up largely of white servicemen looted black neighborhoods. The worst of these riots took place in Chicago, after an African American boy was drowned when he swam into the “whites only” section of the lakefront. For thirteen days mobs roamed the poor areas of the city, burning, looting, and killing. In the end, 15 whites, and 23 blacks were dead, 178 whites and 342 blacks wounded, and more than 1,000 families were homeless. By the end of 1919, rioting had taken place in 25 cities and hundreds were injured or dead.
People were concerned that basic values were under attack. This lack of values was made clear in the 1919 World Series when the favored Chicago White Sox lost to the Cincinnati Reds. Rumors flew that the Sox had thrown the game. While a jury refused to convict the eight men accused, the baseball commissioner banned all eight from baseball for the rest of their lives. When a young fan pleaded with Chicago star centerfielder “Shoeless Joe” Jackson to “say it ain’t so, Joe,” Jackson replied, “Yes kid, I’m afraid it is.”
The economy was also a source of concern. Production had not yet completely shifted from a war economy to a peacetime economy. Prices shot up as consumers rushed to purchase the goods that had been limited or prohibited during the war. Prices shot up as much as 77%! This post-war recession, or economic slump in which there is less economic activity, worried Americans.
Labor leaders worked hard to make sure that wages kept up with increasing prices. During the war, they had worked with the government to make sure that there were no strikes and production stayed high. Now that the war was over, they used the threat and reality of strikes to make sure that workers did not suffer. In 1919 more than 4 million workers, about 20% of the work force, walked off their jobs at one time or another. There were more strikes, about 2,600, than in any other time in history.
When strikes threatened to cripple the economy, the public began to turn against the strikers. They were accused of being Marxists, communists, and Bolsheviks. When three-quarters of Boston’s police force when on strike, they were called “agents of Lenin” and the governor of Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge, called in the National Guard.
The threat of Bolshevism seemed like the greatest threat of all. The Soviet Union had established the Comintern to work for world revolution, and communist uprisings had occurred and failed in two European nations. Many Americans worried that there was a plot to take over this country.
This worry seemed a reality when a plot involving a number of bombs, timed to go off on May Day (the international laborers day), was uncovered. In June, bombs exploded in eight American cities at the same time, one of them damaging the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Palmer, who had a genuine fear of Bolshevism as well as the desire to become president in 1920, hired J. Edgar Hoover to direct a new Bureau of Investigation. Hoover placed thousands of people under surveillance to find out what they were planning. In November, Palmer oversaw raids on radicals in twelve cities. In December, the government deported 249 foreign-born people, including the anarchist Emma Goldman, to Russia. In January, Palmer’s men arrested more than 4,000 alleged Communists. Many of the suspects were held in overcrowded, dirty conditions and denied their Fifth Amendment rights.
The Red Scare, as it was called, ended within a year. Palmer warned of communist attacks that didn’t occur and activities that never took place. By late in 1920, Americans refused to respond to Palmer’s warnings of a communist revolution. Laborers were no longer striking, Europe had settled down, and even the explosion of a wagonload of bombs on Wall Street that killed 33 and injured 200 more could not convince Americans that the revolution was going to occur.
The 1910s had seen tremendous changes. War had changed the economy and given the government more power than it had ever had. During the war, the 18th Amendment had passed, banning alcohol. Women were given the right to vote. The idea of a peace without victory and the promise of a new world in which self-determination, arms reduction, and cooperation would rule had died with the Treaty of Versailles. When the war was over, people returning from Europe and those hoping to settle back into normal times faced a deadly flu virus, race riots, corruption in sports, price increases, striking, and the Red Scare. Against all this, it is no wonder that Warren G. Harding’s promise of a “return to normalcy” (a possible misread from his cue cards, it is thought the cards said normality) swept him into the White House in the election of 1920.
Gillon, Steven M, and Matson, Cathy D.. The American Experiment, A History of the United States: Volume II. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002.