Social Science 1.1

1919: A TUMULTUOUS YEAR 1919 would prove a pivotal year in twentieth-century history, both for the United States and the world. The catastrophic damage of World War I included a staggering human toll. Estimates vary, but reliable figures place the war’s total casualties at over 37 million, split between combat deaths, soldiers missing in action, and wounded.1 The year opened to an intensifying global influenza pandemic that afflicted one in five humans alive and caused an estimated 20 million deaths worldwide. The deadly “Spanish flu” ironically originated in the United States. One of the earliest outbreaks occurred in the spring of 1918 among the 50,000 American troops gathered at an induction and training camp in Manhattan, Kansas.2 The pandemic claimed nearly 700,000 American lives, fourteen times the number of American soldiers killed in World War I.3 On the home front, 1919 saw a wave of labor unrest crash across the United States. A rash of strikes affected nearly every major industry and disrupted daily life in every large city. At the same time, a series of dynamite bombings targeting political figures further gripped the nation and spurred a government crackdown of unprecedented proportions. Racial violence exposed the shortcomings of American democracy at the very moment that President Woodrow Wilson, standing on the world’s biggest stage, proclaimed victory for world democracy in the Great War. 1919 was a defining year for Wilson’s presidency and his legacy. “Peace Without Victory”: Wilson’s Triumph and Downfall The Fourteen Points and the Paris Peace Conference Woodrow Wilson arrived in Paris on December 16, 1918, to great fanfare. The American President and First Lady rode in a horse-drawn carriage through the wide boulevards of the French capital, past buildings decorated with American flags, floral wreaths, and a huge banner that read, “Vive Wilson.”4 A crowd of cheering spectators lined his route to the Palace of Versailles, where the peace negotiations were set to begin the next month. Wilson’s rapturous reception reflected his own popularity as well as the rising power status of the United States on the world stage. “Never,” wrote the British economist John Maynard Keynes, “had a philosopher held such weapons wherewith to bind the Princes of the word.”5 A former Princeton professor, Wilson had steadfastly defended American neutrality since the war’s outbreak in 1914 and won reelection in 1916 on the campaign slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.” Despite Wilson’s exhortation for Americans to remain “impartial in thought as well as in action,” the nation’s cultural and economic ties to Great Britain ran far deeper than those to Germany. Germany’s sinking of the British merchant ship Lusitania, which led to the death of more than a hundred Americans in 1915, and the revelation of a secret telegram proposing a German alliance with Mexico two years later placed enormous pressure on Wilson to respond. Finally, in the spring of 1917, Wilson led his nation to war, declaring, “The world must be made safe for democracy.”6 Despite America’s late entry to the war, over one million U.S. troops played a decisive role in turning the tide for the Allied Powers, especially in the Meuse-Argonne offensive that led to the declaration of an armistice on November 11, 1918. Of the 50,300 American “doughboys” who lost their lives in World War I, more than half, 26,277, fell during this momentous battle.7 As President, Wilson earned a reputation for being an effective and forward-looking reformer who skillfully steered progressive legislation through Congress. As Commander-in-Chief, Wilson showed little interest in the military prosecution of the conflict. He was happy to leave such strategic matters to his generals, including General John “Black Jack” Pershing, Commander of the American Expeditionary Force in Europe. When the guns fell silent, however, Wilson stepped forward to assert himself. An ardent idealist, Wilson was intent on shaping the new world order to reflect American democratic values and his own internationalist vision. Wilson had previously laid out his postwar agenda in January of 1918, when he publicly announced his famous Fourteen Points. Wilson’s peace plan included an endorsement of self-determination (independence) for small nations, freedom of the seas, free trade, and an end to the secret alliances and shadowy diplomacy that many blamed for the outbreak and rapid escalation of World War I. The final item of the plan, which called for a “general association of nations” where both small and powerful states alike would work together to peacefully resolve international conflict, was by far the most important to Wilson.8 Entering the negotiations, Wilson made the establishment of the League of Nations his top priority. Tapping into new communication technology, Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech was simultaneously relayed via a network of radio transmitters in North and Central America to millions of listeners around the globe, making him the first leader in history to address the “world” in real-time.9 Wilson’s ideas resonated, especially among non-European peoples eager to end colonial rule and win independence.10 Wilson thus arrived in Paris as a genuine global celebrity. Wilson’s warm welcome in the streets of Paris, however, contrasted with the frosty reception extended by his French and British counterparts. French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who rounded out the Big Three of the Allied Powers, had little patience for Wilson’s high-minded idealism. France had lost a staggering 1,385,300 men in the course of the war. Britain mourned 900,000 soldiers killed in battle. The trauma of this suffering hardened the resolve in both nations to make Germany pay, literally and figuratively. Neither man felt that an American, whose nation remained largely unscathed by the fighting that had ravaged Europe and who enjoyed the added security of geographic distance, should be empowered to dictate the peace terms. French and British insistence on a punitive peace undermined Wilson’s carefully laid plans for a “Peace Without Victory” that would overturn and democratize the prewar order. As a result, the final Treaty of Versailles only dimly reflected the shining ideals of the Fourteen Points. Wilson grudgingly acceded to his allies’ demands that the treaty formally assign Germany sole blame for the outbreak of the war. As a result, Germany was ordered to forfeit its colonial holdings, drastically cut its armed forces, yield rich industrial territories to France, and pay war reparations set at the astronomical sum of $21 billion.11 The League of Nations was the one issue on which Wilson doggedly refused to compromise. If the treaty had flaws, Wilson believed the League could iron them out in due time. Wilson’s persistence resulted in the inclusion of a Covenant for the League of Nations, containing twenty-six articles and pledging to “promote international cooperation and to achieve international peace and security,” within the final treaty.12 On June 28, 1919, the Versailles Peace Treaty was signed by the Allied powers and Germany, officially ending World War I, and Wilson turned to a new challenge: selling the treaty and his precious League of Nations to the American public and a hostile, Republican-controlled Congress. The president’s own failing health posed another obstacle; during the conference, Wilson had fallen ill with what historians now suspect was Spanish flu, which led to coughing fits and pain so intense that Wilson was forced to leave meetings in order to recuperate.13 Lingering symptoms suggest he also likely suffered a minor stroke. Debilitating headaches and bouts of aphasia, which classically presents as jumbled, disjointed speech, persisted after Wilson’s return from Paris. Cross-Country Tour and Health Crisis Due to the U.S. Constitution’s unique division of powers between the executive and legislative branches, the Treaty of Versailles, and by extension the League of Nations, required the support of two-thirds of the Senate for it to be officially ratified by the United States. This meant that all Wilson’s efforts to protect the League of Nations in Paris now depended on navigating the political vicissitudes of Washington and the Republicancontrolled Senate. Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Republican chairman and de facto majority leader of the Senate, loathed Wilson. A friend and close political ally of Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson’s greatest rival, Lodge had been mobilizing opposition to the League for months before the final agreement was signed. As early as March 1919, Lodge had lined up thirty-nine senators who vowed to vote against the League without significant reservations, or amendments, earning them the designation “Reservationists.” Lodge focused his fiercest criticism on Article X of the League’s Charter. This article affirmed that “Members of the League undertake to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League.”14 To Lodge and an increasing number of ordinary Americans, this clause represented a dangerous incursion on American sovereignty and an unwelcome restraint of American power. Lodge’s sizable faction did not include the so-called “Irreconcilables,” like the isolationist Republican Senator William E. Borah of Idaho, who declared total, unqualified opposition to the Treaty and the League. “Once having surrendered and become part of European concerns,” Borah asked, “where, my friends, are you going to stop?”15 On Capitol Hill, Wilson faced the political fallout of his fateful decision to exclude Republicans from the American peace delegation. Wilson, however, made little effort to win over or find a middle ground with Republican leaders. Instead, he lectured them on the necessity of adopting the League without changes. The president resolutely believed that by binding the League and the treaty together, he had cleverly boxed in his opponents. Would they really oppose peace after one of the most devastating wars in human history? Wilson also drew on the wellspring of wartime nationalism in order to tar the treaty’s critics as unpatriotic. Leaning into the self-righteous moralism that infused his worldview, Wilson contended that to oppose the League was to oppose progress itself. “Every true heart in the world, and every enlightened judgment demanded that, at whatever cost of independent action, every government that took thought for its people or for justice or for ordered freedom should lend itself to a new purpose and utterly destroy the old order of international politics,” Wilson proclaimed as he personally submitted the final version of the Treaty of Versailles to the Senate on July 10, 1919. The League, Wilson continued, represented the best hope for all mankind for lasting peace. “Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?” he asked dramatically.16 Lodge was unmoved. The senator dug in deeper, drafting a total of forty-two amendments that he claimed were needed in order for his fellow Reservationists to vote for the treaty. Wilson refused to engage with the Lodge reservations. Convinced that he could persuade the nation to support his vision, Wilson set out to plead his case directly to the American people. On September 3, 1919, Wilson embarked on a 9,981-mile cross-country speaking tour. Beginning in Columbus, Ohio, a private railcar called The Mayflower took him to a new city each day over a three-week period.17 Crossing the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains before heading to the Pacific Northwest and California, Wilson delivered speech after speech, often in large outdoor venues with no means to amplify his voice. The grueling schedule taxed the president’s already fragile health. Nevertheless, the president pressed on and attracted huge crowds. In San Francisco, he filled a 12,000-seat auditorium, and in San Diego, he addressed more than 50,000 eager citizens packed into the local stadium.18 Wilson’s speeches did at times manage to deliver a soaring rendition of his trademark oratory. “There is one thing that the American people always rise to and extend their hand to, and that is the truth of justice and of liberty and of peace,” Wilson told the crowd gathered in Pueblo, Colorado, who responded with cheers and tears.19 It would prove to be Wilson’s final public speech. Exhausted by the strain of the trip and the thin mountain air, Wilson’s chronic cardio-vascular issues had reached an acute crisis. During his Pueblo speech, Wilson’s words became garbled and confused; he trailed off and remained silent as he struggled to regain his train of thought. The remaining stops of the tour were canceled, and Wilson rushed back to the White House. A few days later, on October 2, Wilson suffered a massive stroke that left him partially paralyzed. Edith Wilson, who had discovered her husband unconscious and bleeding on the floor, took charge. The first lady carefully controlled access to the convalescent president, kept the press at bay, and managed much of the government’s affairs by delegating responsibilities to various cabinet officials. Wilson’s health recovered only marginally, rendering the United States effectively leaderless for eighteen months. Although Article II, Section I of the Constitution addressed the potential of a president who is unable “to discharge the powers and duties of the office,” the text did not provide any clear process for assessing when such a situation existed. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which outlines a procedure for a majority of the Cabinet and VicePresident to jointly declare presidential disability, was not ratified until 1967. The Demise of the Treaty Wilson’s stroke negatively impacted the already badly frayed negotiations with congressional leaders over the fate of the treaty and the League. First, it removed Wilson from the arena at a crucial moment. The crosscountry campaign had further solidified the public’s association of the League with Wilson. His absence, therefore, deprived the League of its most influential champion. Second, accounts suggest neurological damage may have altered Wilson’s personality, making him more abrasive, petty, and short-tempered than ever.20 Isolated within the White House, Wilson hardened his resolve against any compromise and entrenched his view of the debate as an all-or-nothing struggle of good versus evil.

On November 19, Lodge introduced a revised treaty containing fourteen reservations to the Senate floor. Dutifully following Wilson’s directive to reject any changes, Democrats in the Senate joined the Irreconcilables to vote down the peace treaty—a first in American history. Four months later, after both England and France had publicly announced they would accept Lodge’s reservations, the Senate once again rejected the revised treaty by a vote of 49−35 on March 19, 1920.21 The demise of the treaty was a stunning rebuke to Wilson, who only a year earlier had basked in the admiration of the world. Without the U.S. as a member, the nascent League of Nations was badly hamstrung. It remains an open question, however, whether U.S. membership alone could have bolstered the League enough to make up for its lack of effective enforcement mechanisms and other structural deficiencies exposed during the global crises of the 1930s. While Congressional rejection of the League of Nations put a nail in the coffin of Wilson’s dream for a postwar order modeled on and led by the United States, it did not fully extinguish idealistic American internationalism, which would witness a revival during the Second World War. Indeed, a Wilsonian vision of international affairs directly inspired President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wartime rhetoric and postwar plans, and Roosevelt had served in Wilson’s administration as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. The U.S. would not only become a charter member of the United Nations in 1945, but would also host the new organization’s headquarters in New York. Nevertheless, the 1920s would be marked by a retreat to isolationism, moored in deep-rooted traditions and popular sensibilities strengthened by intense American disillusionment with World War I. The Erosion of Civil Liberties Labor Strife and Radicalism The fight over the League was only one source of political turmoil in 1919. While Wilson was in France, labor strife erupted across the United States. The troubles began in February, when a walkout by shipyard workers in Seattle quickly escalated into a city-wide general strike involving more than one hundred labor unions. The strike closed schools, shut down public transportation, and ground the city’s commerce to a halt. The general strike, which drew national attention, lasted for five days until federal troops intervened. By the end of the year, 3,600 strikes, involving more than 4 million workers had convulsed the nation.22 During the Seattle general strike, unions affiliated with the conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the radical International Workers of the World (IWW), popularly known as the “Wobblies,” had united, underscoring a worrying trend for business leaders and elected officials who combined the rhetoric of wartime patriotism and anticommunism to discredit the labor movement.

By far the largest labor union in the nation, the AFL had seen remarkable growth over the past two decades. In 1900, its membership stood at 500,000; by 1919, it boasted 4,169,000 members. In contrast, the IWW’s membership peaked at 60,000 members.23 During the First World War labor leaders, including the AFL’s Samuel Gompers, had mostly observed an uneasy patriotic truce with big business and the government in the name of bolstering wartime production and supporting the Allied cause. The end of the war, however, also meant the end of the booming war economy fueled by government defense contracts. As the U.S. military rapidly drew down its forces, millions of American servicemen returned to high inflation and rising unemployment rates. Unions felt that workers’ wartime sacrifices had earned them a share of the dividends of peace. In particular, they called for higher wages, shorter hours, and a right to bargain collectively with employers. Management refused to negotiate, and unions across the nation took action. After a summer of mounting discontent, 365,000 steelworkers affiliated with the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers (AA) went out on strike in September, paralyzing dozens of mills from Pennsylvania to Colorado.24 As the heart of America’s industrial might, the steel industry had also been at the center of the most serious labor unrest of the nineteenth century. The war had brought record profits to the owners of the steel mills, but the mostly immigrant steelworkers continued to endure grueling schedules (sometimes logging eighty-four hours in a seven-day work week) for a wage of $4 dollars a day.25 The strike dragged on for months, but eventually collapsed under the combined weight of dwindling union resources, state-sponsored and extralegal violence, and hostile public opinion. That same month, police officers in Boston went on strike to protest the refusal of the mayor to recognize their union and the city’s summary suspension of several union leaders from the police force. The absence of uniformed police quickly led to violence, and riots erupted in the streets. After delegating the initial response to the city officials, the cautious Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge stepped in and ordered state guard units to restore the peace. After firing and replacing every striking officer, Coolidge boldly declared: “There is no right to strike against the public safety, by anybody, anywhere, anytime.”26 This decisive moment made the famously taciturn Republican’s political career, helping to launch him to the White House. A subsequent strike by 400,000 coal miners in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana, and Illinois was the last major labor action of 1919. Though the miners were organized and represented by the AFL’s largest union, they fared only slightly better than the steelworkers. Facing federal court injunctions ordering them back to work, the United Mine Workers accepted an offer brokered by the Wilson administration that included pay raises but ignored their demands for safer working conditions and shorter hours. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, the man most responsible for the federal crackdown on organized labor and its most extreme tactics, now turned to a related crusade: exposing and extinguishing all forms of subversive radicalism. The Red Scare Palmer’s crackdown on real and imagined subversives, later known as the Red Scare, blasted through the remaining safeguards protecting civil liberties, which had already significantly eroded during the war. The aftershocks of the Russian Revolution added fuel to the fire. In October of 1917, the Communist leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution had seized control of the Russian government and pledged to export their workers’ revolution around the globe. While some Americans were inspired by the Russian Revolution and celebrated its success, many others feared that Bolshevism would find purchase in America and backed the government’s campaign against radicalism. Spurred by the need to protect the nation from foreign and domestic enemies, Congress had passed the Espionage Act in 1917, which was subsequently amended in 1918 as the Sedition Act. Wilson signed both pieces of legislation, which proscribed a broad range of speech and protest critical of the government, the military, or the war effort. Even after the war ended, a heightened atmosphere prevailed in which radicalism of any form was deemed dangerous. While the government’s reaction ensnared many innocent individuals guilty only of identification with political ideologies outside the mainstream of the Democratic or Republican parties, the threat was not wholly imagined. 1919 witnessed a spate of domestic terrorist attacks that rocked the nation. On April 28, Seattle’s mayor Ole Hanson, who had gained national celebrity for restoring order to his city after the general strike, was sent a homemade bomb through the mail. This bomb failed to detonate, but the following day, an identical device sent to former Senator Thomas Hardwick of Georgia exploded, severely maiming his maid and injuring his wife. Rapid action by an observant postal official in New York prevented an additional thirty-four bombs from reaching their targets, who included senators, Supreme Court justices, business and banking titans, and cabinet officials.27 Further violence and rioting accompanied left-wing parades celebrating May Day in Boston, New York, and Cleveland. More bombings followed, including a failed dynamite attack on the Attorney General’s Washington, D.C., home that left glass, brick, charred clothing fragments, and the mangled legs of the would-be assassin littering the street. Palmer’s neighbor, the young Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, discovered the carnage on his doorstep. Congress responded to Palmer’s appeals for action by appropriating $500,000 to fund the Justice Department’s efforts to stamp out domestic terrorism and its ideological backers.

Palmer, a former Pennsylvania Congressman with definite ambitions to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for President in 1920, created a special General Intelligence Division (GID) within the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation (BOI) to spearhead his anti-radical campaign. Palmer tapped a twenty-four-year-old recent law school graduate named J. Edgar Hoover to lead the agency that became the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1924. Hoover threw himself into the work of identifying, monitoring, and prosecuting radicals living in the United States. Hoover’s agents infiltrated leftist organizations and recruited a network of informants that facilitated government surveillance of citizens on an unprecedented scale.29 Adopting a state-of-the-art filing system, the GID soon amassed a vast intelligence archive of 200,000 cards cataloging detailed information about suspected individuals, organizations, and publications.30 From November 1919 into January 1920, Palmer intensified the Justice Department’s anti-radical campaign. Federal agents and local police arrested nearly two thousand suspected subversives, searched the offices of various organizations, and forced dozens of radical publications to shutter their operations. A coordinated raid on the Union of Russian Workers involved hundreds of local riot police working with federal agents who swept down on the organization’s New York City headquarters on November 7. This and other subsequent raids resulted in the confiscation of enormous quantities of alleged propaganda material and the arrest of more than five hundred individuals.31 The purpose of the Palmer Raids, according to the Attorney General himself, was to “clean up the country [by] tear[ing] out the radical seeds that have entangled American ideas in their poisonous theories.”32 While American citizens ensnared by the GID’s dragnet faced trial and imprisonment, foreign-born radicals faced immediate deportation. After a series of hastily convened, pro-forma hearings at Ellis Island, 249 suspected subversives, including the famous anarchist Emma Goldman, were loaded onto an aging steamer bound for Soviet Russia on December 21, 1919.33 In January, bureau agents in thirty-three cities made over four thousand arrests of individuals affiliated with the Communist Party or its various “front” organizations.34 Despite Palmer’s insistence that his agents were stamping out an organized conspiracy directed from Moscow, the targets represented a motley crew that lacked a single ideological orientation or a common, unified political agenda. To Palmer, however, they were simply “Reds,” a catchall term that he applied to “the I.W.W.’s, the most radical socialists, the misguided anarchists, the agitators who oppose the limitations of unionism, the moral perverts and hysterical neurasthenic [emotionally disturbed] women who abound in communism.”35 Utilizing a sophisticated propaganda strategy, Palmer promoted the Red Scare to the American public by seeding newspapers with articles and cartoons warning citizens about the radical menace. With President Wilson sidelined by his stroke, Palmer was able to exercise an extraordinary level of power. Palmer wielded his authority to chart a course that trampled on many of the civil liberties granted by the Constitution. Even before the Palmer raids, many Americans were convicted and jailed for speaking out against the war. The federal government’s zealous enforcement of the Espionage and Sedition Acts against Americans who opposed the war or who advocated for political ideologies deemed un-American raised significant constitutional questions. Three significant cases involving the free speech clause of the First Amendment reached the Supreme Court in 1919. First Amendment Supreme Court Cases The first case concerned Charles Schenck, a Socialist Party leader in Philadelphia who was convicted for violating the Sedition Act. Schenck had distributed a leaflet to recently conscripted soldiers. While the offending leaflet began by celebrating the U.S. Constitution as “one of the greatest bulwarks of political liberty,” it forcefully denounced the draft as an outmoded attack on popular democracy tantamount to slavery.36 Schenck was arrested in 1917, but it wasn’t until early January 1919 that the nine justices of the Supreme Court finally heard oral arguments in Schenck’s case. Two months later, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. delivered the majority decision for a unanimous court. In Schenck v. United States, Justice Holmes conceded that Schenck’s two-page leaflet may have indeed enjoyed free speech protection “in many places and in ordinary times.” During wartime, however, Holmes found that statements targeting conscription so acutely undermined the nation’s national defense that they posed “a clear and present danger,” which Congress could lawfully suppress without violating the First Amendment.37 Holmes immediately applied this new test to the case of Eugene Debs, the renowned labor leader and frequent Socialist presidential candidate, who had been sentenced to ten years in prison for delivering an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio. At his trial, a defiant Debs, spoke eloquently about the need for dissent in a democracy and proudly aligned himself with a long line of iconoclasts in American history, including the Founding Fathers, abolitionists, and suffragists. “I believe in the right of free speech, in war as well as in peace,” Debs told the jury.38 Nevertheless, the Supreme Court upheld Debs’ conviction and ruled 9−0 in Debs v. United States that despite the absence of an explicit denunciation of the draft, the impact of Debs’ speech was likely to hinder recruitment efforts and was therefore criminal.39 Undeterred, Debs ran for president while still behind bars and managed to garner 900,000 votes in the 1920 election.

Holmes’s “clear and present danger” doctrine placed significant restrictions on free expression during wartime and seemed to reflect the national mood at the time. For this reason, it is significant that Holmes himself had already begun to rethink his reasoning by the time the court decided Abrams v. United States in the fall of 1919. Unlike Schenck and Debs, the Russianborn Jacob Abrams and his co-defendants were prosecuted and convicted under the Sedition Act for disseminating leaflets in New York City that called for a national general strike to stop American intervention against the new Bolshevik government in Russia. In a 7−2 decision, the court ruled against Abrams, noting that his advocacy for a general strike would harm war production and, therefore, met the bar Holmes had established in Schenck. Justice Clarke, who authored the majority opinion, placed special emphasis on the revolutionary tone of the pamphlet and the fact that it was printed in the Yiddish language. Holmes, however, voted against the majority and issued a memorable dissent. Dismissing Abrams’s pamphlet as a “silly leaflet by an unknown man,” Holmes pointed out that the statements did not concern a combatant nation and rejected the notion that the pro-Bolshevik sentiments expressed therein posed “an immediate danger” warranting suppression by the U.S. government. Holmes championed the “free trade of ideas,” and cautioned that Americans “should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.”41 Despite his assertion that a robust marketplace of ideas was essential to a democratic society, Holmes was, in effect, dissenting against himself. Only Holmes’s majority opinion in Schenck carried the weight of precedent and therefore would continue to shape American law for decades to come. The Sacco and Vanzetti Trial Holmes seemed to recognize that the inherent ambiguity of what types of speech presented a “clear and present danger” empowered the government to criminalize a wide range of political ideas and chill political speech. Many liberals had already begun to criticize Palmer’s crusade against radicals as a gross abuse of governmental power. Anti-radicalism fed the clamor for immigration restriction at the same time that anti-immigrant sentiment helped fuel antiradicalism. Immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe bore the brunt of nativist wrath. In addition to religious and cultural bigotry, these immigrants faced political stigma, having been tarred by the press and xenophobic public officials as bomb-throwing radicals. The 1920 arrest and subsequent trials of two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, charged with the murder of a security guard during an armed robbery outside of Boston, became a rallying cry for a generation of leftist intellectuals. Sacco and Vanzetti were indeed anarchists, but little concrete evidence tied them to the crime, and the crime itself did not readily suggest a political motive. During their trial, the prosecution focused on the men’s status as foreign-born immigrants and avowed radical political ideology. The presiding judge even audibly referred to the defendants as “those anarchist bastards.”42 Despite international attention, popular protests against the alleged miscarriage of justice, and lengthy legal appeals that reached the U.S. Supreme Court, Sacco and Vanzetti were put to death by Massachusetts in 1927. Their fate signaled the long reach of the Red Scare and the potent strain of xenophobia that would manifest in other ways during the 1920s. A Watershed Moment for AfricanAmerican Culture and Politics The Great Migration From 1915 to 1920, over a million African Americans left their homes in the American South and journeyed north and west in search of employment and a better life. They also fled the oppression of Jim Crow segregation and rampant racial violence. These men and women comprised an early wave of what historians would later call the Great Migration. By the time it officially ended in the early 1970s, six million African Americans and Black immigrants from the Caribbean had participated in this “silent pilgrimage,” relocating to cities and towns across the nation.43 The American entry to World War I in 1917 raised the demand for labor in northern industries, intensifying an already steady flow of African-American migrants seeking jobs. Many of the newly arrived African Americans were sharecroppers from rural Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama who faced the added challenge of adjusting to urban living for the first time. Having packed all their earthly belongings into whatever luggage they could carry and stow on the train, African-American migrants streamed into fast-growing Midwestern cities and densely populated cities along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. According to census data, from 1910 to 1920, Detroit’s African-American population grew by an astounding 611.3 percent, Cleveland’s by 307.8 percent, and Chicago’s by 148.2 percent. New York and Philadelphia, which both already had large AfricanAmerican populations before World War I, nevertheless saw an increase of 66.3 percent and 58.9 percent, respectively.44 Many smaller cities like Milwaukee, Akron, Buffalo, Newark, and Gary saw similar gains. African-American migrants reshaped the culture, character, and geography of their new hometowns, giving rise to distinctive neighborhoods with nicknames like “Bronzeville” and “Black Bottom.” Harlem, situated just north of Central Park in Manhattan, shone brightest of all, earning the moniker “Black Mecca.” Harlem functioned as the unofficial capital of Black America, attracting the leading lights of African-American and Black Caribbean artistic, intellectual, and political society. The Harlem Renaissance, as the explosion of African-American art, literature, and music in the 1920s came to be known, reflected the way in which the Great Migration awakened the nation and the world to the power and diversity of African-American culture. Jazz Conquers the Globe Jazz music was born in New Orleans. In the nightclubs, bars, cafes, and dance halls of the Crescent City’s redlight district, African-American musicians gathered to play songs whose syncopated rhythms and improvised riffs borrowed elements from blues, ragtime, and classical music while producing something fresh and new. Legendary performers, including Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, and Louis Armstrong, all started in New Orleans before traveling the nation and the globe. Jazz followed African-American migrants. Along the Mississippi River, in cities like Memphis, Kansas City, and St. Louis, jazz found fertile ground while developing distinct regional styles. In Chicago, jazz reigned supreme. As the terminus of the Illinois Central Railroad, Chicago was the final destination of hundreds of thousands of African Americans leaving the Deep South during the Great Migration. The Chicago Defender, the largest AfricanAmerican daily newspaper with a subscription of 500,000 at its peak, helped drive the exodus through its critical coverage of racial violence and discrimination in the Jim Crow South and editorials promoting the bountiful employment opportunities in the Windy City’s factories and slaughterhouses.45 When Louis Armstrong arrived in Chicago 1922, the virtuoso trumpeter discovered that as a jazzman, he was treated as “some kind of God,” was cheered wherever he went, and earned five times what he had made in New Orleans to play music on the bustling South Side of Chicago.46 Armstrong joined King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, an all-star ensemble that helped define the new genre with hit records like 1923’s “Dipper Mouth Blues.” In 1925, Armstrong struck out on his own, recording solo projects that featured his distinctive scat singing and improvisation. By the end of the decade, Armstrong was celebrated around the world as an innovative genius. Jazz historians have hailed Armstrong’s creativity and experimentation for paving the way for modern jazz.47 The mid to late 1920s also saw the rise of jazz as dance music. Young people danced the “Lindy-hop” and the wildly popular “Charleston,” a frenetic dance involving four hundred steps that included, according to a contemporary account, “the most awkward postures—knock-knees, legs ‘akimbo,’ toes turned in until they met, squatting, comic little side steps, [the dancer] crossing hands on his knock-knees, weaves them back and forth, teetering at the same time on the ball of one foot.”48 At New York’s iconic Cotton Club and the Roseland Ballroom, the brilliant composer Duke Ellington and his fellow bandleader Paul Whiteman helped define jazz as the soundtrack of the era. Beyond the bright lights of Manhattan and Chicago, Kansas City, Missouri, served as an outpost of the jazz revolution. The talented pianist Count Basie, who had cut his teeth in the jazz clubs of New York, helped define Kansas City’s distinctive “swing” style. The latter half of the 1920s saw jazz spread beyond the United States to become a truly global phenomenon. African-American soldiers, including members of the famous “Harlem Hellfighters” 369th Infantry Band led by Lt. James Reese Europe, had introduced jazz to European audiences during the war. Some AfricanAmerican troops, having experienced life free from Jim Crow discrimination, decided to stay in France after the war where they were joined by a new generation of Black artists and performers. Josephine Baker, who had debuted as a chorus girl in the Broadway hit musical Shuffle Along as a teenager, rose to international stardom as a dancer in Paris in the 1920s. Baker’s movements and her suggestive attire, including an iconic banana skirt, captivated French audiences. The advent of electrical recording in 1925 dramatically improved the quality of jazz recordings, allowing for a fuller, more nuanced capture of the music. This technological advance coincided with the increasing popularity of the radio, which became a crucial medium for disseminating jazz to new audiences. By the mid1920s, London, Paris, and Berlin all had thriving jazz scenes, as did Shanghai. Even Soviet Russia initially welcomed touring jazz bands before Joseph Stalin declared the genre an expression of degenerate bourgeoisie-capitalism when he took power in 1928.49 The increasing popularity of jazz in the 1920s was not without controversy in its native land. Many social conservatives viewed jazz as immoral and dangerous, associating it with alcohol (despite Prohibition), loose sexual mores, and low culture. Many colleges and dance halls banned “vulgar, noisy jazz music,” which they blamed for corrupting the youth.50 The music’s African-American origins and its popularity in speakeasies and other illicit venues made it a target for those who saw it as a threat to traditional AngloSaxon values. Despite (or perhaps because of) this controversy, jazz continued to gain popularity among young people, becoming closely associated with the freewheeling spirit of the “Roaring Twenties.” By the end of the 1920s, jazz had firmly established itself as a major force in American popular music and one of the nation’s most significant cultural exports. The Red Summer The African-American author and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson coined the phrase “Red Summer” to describe the bloody surge in racial violence that peaked from April to November 1919. In that year alone, there were seventy-six recorded lynchings, the highest total since 1904 and nearly double the thirty-six reported in 1917.51 Between 1915 and 1919, eighteen major race riots rocked cities across the United States, including Philadelphia, Houston, Washington, D.C., Knoxville, and Omaha.52 In some cases, historians prefer the term “massacre” to describe organized attacks on African Americans during this period. During the “Elaine Massacre,” for example, African-American cotton farmers in Black-majority Phillips County, Arkansas, attempted to protest the abuses of the sharecropping system by forming a union, which met at a local church to discuss its plans on September 30. White mobs from neighboring areas converged on the small town, determined to extinguish these nascent efforts at political organization. A few of the armed men fired into the church, prompting a return of fire that killed one white man in the crowd. As rumors of an “insurrection” swirled, roving bands of vigilantes were joined by five hundred federal troops. Together, they engaged in a paroxysm of violence that left more than two hundred African-American men, women, and children dead over the next five days.53 Other race riots provided violent testimony to the dismal state of American race relations and a cruel reminder to African Americans that racism was not confined to the borders of the former Confederacy. In 1919 alone, more than 250 people died during riots in northern cities.54 While the riots followed in the wake of the demographic shifts initiated by the Great Migration, economic rivalry created by the arrival of thousands of African-American laborers only partially accounted for the dramatic outburst of race riots. More often than not, economic tensions only exacerbated preexisting white animosity toward the newly arrived Black migrants. Simmering fears regarding the social implications of the Great Migration often boiled over into vigilante violence. This dynamic was made clear in Chicago on July 27, 1919. That afternoon, Eugene Williams, an African-American teenager looking to cool off from the scorching summer heat by taking a dip in Lake Michigan, made the fatal mistake of floating past the invisible line separating the designated Black swimming area from the section reserved for white bathers. White beachgoers pelted Williams with rocks until he drowned. Williams’s murder and the refusal of police to arrest his assailants sparked seven days of rioting that left thirty-eight dead and more than five hundred injured.55 The Chicago riot destroyed numerous homes and businesses and abated only after the intervention of the National Guard. It was not an isolated incident. Only a week earlier, two thousand federal troops had been ordered to Washington, D.C., to restore order in the wake of another massive eruption of racial violence instigated by white servicemen and civilian members of the Home Defense League, who claimed to be fighting to uphold the virtue of white womanhood. Incited by racist, sensationalist newspaper coverage, armed mobs terrorized AfricanAmerican neighborhoods and randomly assaulted African Americans throughout the city. As Black veterans mobilized to defend their families and communities, James Weldon Johnson arrived in the city to discover, to his shocked horror, “that men and women of my race were being mobbed, chased, dragged from streetcars, beaten and killed within the shadow of the dome of the Capitol, at the very front door of the White House.56 Meanwhile, within the White House, President Wilson fretted that the D.C. riot might “make a detrimental impression” on nations who had previously held the United States to be “the foremost exponent of social equality and justice.”57 Marcus Garvey and the UNIA The president’s concerns were valid if slightly misplaced. Wilson had framed American entry to World War I as a noble mission to “make the world safe for democracy,” a message that resonated with millions of African Americans who enthusiastically supported the war effort. More than 400,000 AfricanAmerican men served in the U.S. military during the war, and African Americans purchased over 250 million dollars worth of liberty bonds.58 This surge of patriotism reflected a widely held belief among African Americans that wartime sacrifices would lead to social and political gains when the war ended. Returning home to a nation still plagued by racial violence, African-American veterans found the yawning gap between Wilson’s professed democratic ideals and the nation’s continued denial of basic civil rights to African-American citizens intolerable. Deep disillusionment was by no means confined to returning veterans, but pervaded postwar African-American communities, from workers who lost their jobs once the war ended to middle-class professionals who continued to face the indignities of Jim Crow on a daily basis. At this moment of profound social change and political upheaval, many African Americans gravitated to Marcus Garvey, the charismatic founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Garvey was born in the small rural town of St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica, in 1887. The youngest of eleven children, Garvey grew up poor and began working as a printer’s apprentice as a teenager. Inspired by the ideals of Booker T. Washington, in 1916 the ambitious young man immigrated to the United States, where he settled in Harlem and began to build a mass organization dedicated to rallying Black people globally to assert their own political, economic, and cultural independence. A dynamic speaker, Garvey rose to prominence for his forceful denunciations of racial violence. Speaking in the aftermath of a race riot in Omaha, Nebraska, in the fall of 1919, Garvey told his audience to prepare “to match fire with hellfire” and announced that the hour of a “new emancipation,” shorthand for the redemption of Africa from colonial rule, was at hand.59 Garvey called on African Americans to abandon the country that had once enslaved them and turn instead to the land of their ancestors: Africa. Another Garvey slogan, “Africa for the Africans,” echoed the nationalist proclamations of Irish and Indian activists and insisted that Wilson’s principle of self-determination applied equally outside of Europe. Preaching a philosophy of self-sufficiency and racial pride, Garvey appealed to a new generation of African Americans as well as to Black immigrants like himself, who were primed for a more militant political message. The UNIA’s rise was meteoric. In less than five years, Garvey’s organization established over one thousand branches in thirty-eight states and forty-one countries with as many as 2 million members.60 In 1920, the UNIA newspaper The Negro World claimed a subscription of 50,000, while some scholars estimate its total readership to have been as high as 200,000. Even the newly constructed Liberty Hall, the UNIA’s six thousand-seat headquarters in Harlem, proved too small a venue for Garvey’s mass meetings. In August of 1920, crowds of more than 25,000 supporters packed Madison Square Garden and Carnegie Hall to hear Garvey denounce the brutal treatment of African Americans in the United States.

The same month, hundreds of members of the UNIA African Legion and its female auxiliary, the Black Cross Nurses, paraded through the streets of Harlem accompanied by a marching band in an impressive show of force.62 Garvey, wearing a military uniform adorned with gold-braided epaulets and an immense plumed hat on his head, resembled Napoleon at a victory march. While some of Garvey’s contemporaries mocked his ostentatious sartorial flair, historians have noted that the imperial uniforms and the regal-sounding titles Garvey bestowed on UNIA dignitaries aimed to reverse the era’s dominant image of Black men as subordinate and submissive.63 Nevertheless, Garvey’s rise drew the scorn of established African-American leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois, America’s leading Black intellectual and head of the UNIA’s rival National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which he had co-founded in 1909. World War I had caused the NAACP’s membership to surge, but by 1919 Garvey’s UNIA was beginning to pose a serious threat to the civil rights organization.64 To Du Bois, Garvey was a demagogue driven by self-interest and financial gain. Garvey, for his part, held the Harvard-educated Du Bois in equal disdain. It did not take long for Garvey to draw the suspicion of federal agents working for J. Edgar Hoover’s new anti-radical division within the Justice Department. Initially, officials could not decide if Garvey was a German spy or a Bolshevik, but they agreed he was dangerous.65 At the height of the Red Scare, one agent warned that Garveyism represented “a greater menace than that of the Russians, for it will be a growing black peril.”

With the encouragement of several prominent African-American leaders, including Du Bois, the Justice Department began to build a felony mail fraud case against Garvey for his aggressive promotion of the Black Star Line, a shipping company that went bankrupt under his mismanagement. Following his conviction in 1923, Garvey spent four years in federal prison before being deported in 1927. While the UNIA collapsed without Garvey’s leadership, Garvey’s ideals remained influential among Black leaders in the United States and globally. For example, Malcolm X, whose parents had been active UNIA members, revived Black Nationalism in the 1960s. Garvey’s popularity also signaled a new political militancy among African Americans that would come to define the “New Negro Movement,” which will be discussed in Section III of this resource guide.