by Norman Lowe
Repression soon followed. Palmer himself whipped up the ‘Red Scare’ – the fear of Bolshevism – according to some sources, in order to gain popularity by handling the situation decisively. He was ambitious, and fancied himself as a presidential candidate in the 1920 elections. In lurid language, he described the ‘Red Threat’, which, he said, was ‘licking the altars of our churches, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace the marriage vows … it is an organization of thousands of aliens and moral perverts’. Although he was a Quaker, Palmer was extremely aggressive; he leapt into the attack during the autumn of 1919, ordering raids on publishers’ offices, union and socialist headquarters, public halls, private houses, and meetings of anyone who was thought to be guilty of Bolshevik activities. Over a thousand anarchists and socialists were arrested, and some 250 aliens of Russian origin were rounded up and deported to Russia. In January 1920 a further 4000 mostly harmless and innocent people were arrested, including 600 in Boston, and most of them were deported after long periods in jail.
One case above all caught the public’s imagination, not only in America but worldwide: the Sacco and Vanzetti affair. Arrested in Boston in 1919, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were charged with robbing and murdering a postmaster. They were found guilty, though the evidence was far from convincing, and sentenced to death. However, the trial was something of a farce; the judge, who was supposed to be neutral, showed extreme prejudice against them on the grounds that they were anarchists and Italian immigrants who had somehow avoided military service. After the trial he boasted of what he had done to ‘those anarchist bastards … sons of bitches and Dagoes’.
Sacco and Vanzetti appealed against their sentences and spent the next seven years in jail while the case dragged on. Their friends and sympathizers succeeded in arousing worldwide support, especially in Europe. Famous supporters included Stalin, Henry Ford, Mussolini, Fritz Kreisler (the world-famous violinist), Thomas Mann, Anatole France and H. G. Wells. There were massive demonstrations outside the US embassy in Rome and bombs exploded in Lisbon and Paris. In the USA itself, the campaign for their release gathered momentum; a support fund was opened for their families and demonstrations were organized outside the jail where they were being held. It was all to no avail: in April 1927 the Governor of Massachusetts decreed that the guilty verdicts should stand. In August Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in the electric chair, protesting their innocence to the end.
The whole affair provided great adverse publicity for the USA; it seemed clear that Sacco and Vanzetti had been made scapegoats because they were anarchists and immigrants. There was outrage in Europe and further protest demonstrations were held after their execution. Nor were anarchists and immigrants the only classes of people who felt persecuted; black people too continued to have a hard time in the so-called classless society of the USA.
22.5 RACIAL DISCRIMINATION AND THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
(a) Background to the civil rights problem
During the second half of the seventeenth century the colonists in Virginia began to import slaves from Africa in large numbers to work on the tobacco plantations. Slavery survived through the eighteenth century and was still firmly in place when the American colonies won their independence and the USA was born in 1776. In the North, slavery had mostly disappeared by 1800, when one in five of the total US population was African American. In the South it lingered on because the whole plantation economy – tobacco, sugar and cotton – was based on slave labour, and Southern whites could not imagine how they could survive without it. This was in spite of the fact that one of the founding principles of the USA was the idea of freedom and equality for everybody. This was clearly stated in the 1776 Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Yet when the Constitution was drawn up in 1787 it somehow succeeded in ignoring the issue of slavery. When Abraham Lincoln, who was opposed to slavery, was elected president in 1860, the eleven Southern states began to secede (withdraw) from the Union, so that they could continue slavery and maintain control over their own internal affairs. Thus the abolition of slavery and the question of states’ rights were the basic causes of the Civil War.
(b) ‘Black Reconstruction’ after the Civil War
The Civil War between North and South (1861–5) was the most terrible conflict in American history, leaving some 620 000 men dead. As well as widespread damage, especially in the South, it also left behind deep political and social divisions. The victory of the North had two clear results: the Union had been preserved, and slavery had been brought to an end. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution outlawed slavery, laid down the principle of racial equality and gave all US citizens equal protection of the law. Any state which deprived any male citizens over 21 of the right to vote would be penalized. For a short time, black people in the South were able to vote; many African Americans were elected to state legislatures; in South Carolina they even won a small majority; 20 became members of Congress and two were elected to the Senate. Another great step forward was the introduction of free and racially mixed schools.
The formerly dominant Southern whites found all this difficult to accept. They accused the black politicians of being incompetent, corrupt and lazy, though on the whole they were probably no more so than their white counterparts. Southern state legislatures soon began to pass what were known as the ‘Black Codes’; these were laws introducing all kinds of restrictions on the freedom of the former slaves, which as near as possible restored the old slavery laws. When black people protested there were brutal reprisals; clashes occurred, and there were race riots in Memphis, Tennessee, in which 46 blacks were killed (1866). In New Orleans later the same year, the police killed around 40 people and wounded 160, mostly blacks. Violence intensified in the late 1860s and early 1870s, much of it organized by the Ku Klux Klan. Union troops stayed on in the South at the end of the Civil War and were able to maintain some semblance of order. But gradually the federal government in Washington, anxious to avoid another war at all costs, began to turn a blind eye to what was happening.
The real turning point came with the presidential election of November 1876. At the end of the year, with only three states in the South – Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana – still to count their votes, the Democrats looked like winning. However, if the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, won all three, he would become president. After long and secret discussions, a shady deal was worked out: Hayes made concessions to the white South, promising extensive federal cash investment for railways, and the withdrawal of Union troops. In effect it meant abandoning the former slaves and handing back political control of the South to the whites in return for the presidency. Hayes became president in March 1877, and the period known as Black Reconstruction was over.
(c) The Ku Klux Klan and the Jim Crow laws
In their campaign to prevent blacks from gaining equal civil rights, Southern whites used violence as well as legal methods. The violence was supplied by the Ku Klux Klan (‘Ku Klux’ from the Greek kuklos – a drinking bowl), which began as a secret society on Christmas Eve 1865, in Tennessee. They claimed that they were protecting whites who were being terrorized by former slaves, and they warned that they would take revenge. They carried out a campaign of threats and terror against blacks and against whites who were sympathetic to the black cause. Lynchings, beatings, whippings and tarring and feathering became commonplace. Their aims soon became more specific; they wanted to:
terrorize blacks to such an extent that they would be afraid to exercise their votes;
drive them from any land which they had been able to obtain;
intimidate and demoralize them so that they would give up all attempts to win equality.
Ordinary law-abiding white citizens wh
o might disapprove of the Klan’s activities were afraid to speak out or give evidence against its members. And so the Klan rampaged around the South in their night raids, dressed in white hoods and masks, and holding pseudo-religious ceremonies involving burning crosses. By the end of the 1870s, with its main aims apparently achieved, Klan activity decreased somewhat until the early 1920s. Even so, between 1885 and the US entry into the First World War in 1917, over 2700 African Americans were lynched in the South.
Legal weapons used by Southern whites to maintain their supremacy included the so-called Jim Crow laws passed by state legislatures soon after Hayes became president in 1877. These severely restricted black people’s rights: various devices were used to deprive them of their vote; they were only allowed to take the worst and lowest-paid jobs; they were forbidden to live in the best areas of towns. There was worse to come: blacks were excluded from schools and universities attended by whites, and from hotels and restaurants. Even trains and buses were to have separate sections for blacks and whites. Meanwhile in the North, black people were somewhat better off in the sense that they could at least vote, though they still had to put up with discrimination in housing, jobs and education. In the South, however, at the end of the century, white supremacy seemed unassailable.
Not surprisingly, many black leaders seemed to have given up hope. One of the best known figures, Booker T. Washington, who had been born a slave in Virginia, believed that the best way for blacks to cope was to accept the situation passively and work hard to achieve economic success. His ideas were set out in his ‘Atlanta Compromise’ speech in 1895: only when African Americans demonstrated their economic abilities and became disciplined could they hope to win concessions from the ruling whites and make political progress. He stressed the importance of education and vocational training, and in 1881 became principal of the new Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which he developed into a major centre of black education.
(d) Civil rights in the early twentieth century
Early in the new century black people began to organize themselves. There were something like 10 million African Americans in the USA and 9 million of them lived in the South, where they were downtrodden and discouraged. However, several outstanding new leaders emerged who were prepared to risk speaking out. W. E. B. Du Bois was educated in the North, was the first black man to take a Ph.D. degree at Harvard, and worked as a teacher in Atlanta. He was determined to fight for full civil and political rights. He opposed the tactics of Booker T. Washington, which he thought were too cautious and moderate; he dismissed the vocational education provided at Tuskegee, claiming that it was designed to keep young black people in the old rural South, instead of providing them with the training and skills necessary for success in the new urban centres of the North. Du Bois, together with William Monroe Trotter, who edited a newspaper called the Guardian in Boston, organized a conference over the border in Canada, near Niagara Falls. This led to the formation of the Niagara group (1905); its founding statement set the tone for its campaign:
We refuse to allow the impressions to remain that the Negro-American assents to inferiority, is submissive under oppression and apologetic before insults. The voice of protest of ten million Americans must never cease to assail the ears of their fellows so long as America is unjust.
In 1910 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded, with Du Bois as one of its leaders and editor of its magazine, The Crisis. They aimed to fight segregation through legal actions and better education – by demonstrating their abilities and skills, black people would earn respect from the whites, and gradually, it was hoped, full civil rights would follow.
A rather different approach was tried by another black leader, Marcus Garvey. Born in Jamaica, Garvey only moved to the USA in 1916, arriving in New York at the time of the great influx of black people who were hoping to escape from poverty in the South. He soon came to the conclusion that there was little chance of black people being treated as equals and enjoying full civil rights in the near future. So he advocated black nationalism, black pride and racial separation. Living and working in the black areas of Harlem, Garvey edited his own weekly newspaper, Negro World, and introduced his Universal Negro Improvement Association, which he had started in Jamaica in 1914. He was a forerunner of the black nationalism of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, even suggesting that a return to Africa might be the best future for the black people of white-supremacist America. This idea failed to catch on, and he turned his attention to business ventures. He founded a Black Factories Corporation and the Black Star Line, a steamship company owned and operated by blacks. This collapsed in 1921 and Garvey got into financial difficulties. He was convicted of fraud and then deported, and his black nationalist movement declined. He spent the last years of his life in London.
At the time of the Red Scare just after the First World War, the Ku Klux Klan revived. Again it claimed self-defence as its main motive – the defence of the ‘Nordic Americans of the old stock … the embattled American farmer and artisans’ whose way of life was being threatened by hordes of fast-breeding immigrants. What worried them in the early 1920s was that the children of the immigrants who had entered the country between 1900 and 1914 were now coming up to voting age. The Klan rejected the ‘melting pot’ theory; they campaigned once more against black people, who had been moving in their thousands to live in the North, even though most of them were not exactly doing well during the ‘Roaring Twenties’. They also campaigned against Italians and Roman Catholics, and against Jews. The Klan spread to the North and by 1924 could boast not far short of 5 million members. There were more harassments, beatings and lynchings; black and white mobs fought each other and racial hatred seemed as deep-seated as ever. When the federal government limited immigration to 150 000 a year in 1924, the Klan claimed the credit. The organization declined in importance after 1925, following a series of financial and sexual scandals; by 1929 membership had fallen to around one million. However, this did not mean an improvement in the lives of black people, particularly as the country was soon plunged into the Great Depression.
22.6 THE GREAT DEPRESSION ARRIVES, OCTOBER 1929
(a) The Wall Street Crash, October 1929
As 1929 opened, most Americans seemed blissfully unaware that anything serious was wrong with the economy. In 1928 President Coolidge told Congress: ‘The country can regard the present with satisfaction, and anticipate the future with optimism.’ Prosperity seemed permanent. The Republican Herbert C. Hoover won an overwhelming victory in the 1928 presidential election. Sadly the prosperity was built on suspect foundations and it could not last. ‘America the Golden’ was about to suffer a profound shock. In September 1929 the buying of shares on the New York stock exchange in Wall Street began to slow down. Rumours spread that the boom might be over, and so people rushed to sell their shares before prices fell too far. By 24 October the rush had turned into a panic and share prices fell dramatically. By 29 October – ‘Black Tuesday’ – thousands of people who had bought their shares when prices were high were ruined; the value of listed stocks fell catastrophically by around $30 billion.
This disaster is always remembered as the Wall Street Crash. Its effects spread rapidly: so many people in financial difficulties rushed to the banks to draw out their savings that thousands of banks had to close. As the demand for goods fell, factories closed down and unemployment rose alarmingly. The great boom had suddenly turned into the Great Depression. It rapidly affected not only the USA, but other countries as well, and so it became known as the world economic crisis. The Wall Street Crash did not cause the depression; it was just a symptom of a problem whose real causes lay much deeper.
(b) What caused the Great Depression?
1 Domestic overproduction
American industrialists, encouraged by high profits and helped by increased mechanization, were producing too many goods for the home market to absorb (in the same way as the farmers). This was not apparent in
the early 1920s, but as the 1930s approached, unsold stocks of goods began to build up, and manufacturers produced less. Since fewer workers were required, men were laid off; and as there was no unemployment benefit, these men and their families bought less. And so the vicious circle continued.
2 Unequal distribution of income
The enormous profits being made by industrialists were not being distributed equally among the workers. The average wage for industrial workers rose by about 8 per cent between 1923 and 1929, but during the same period, industrial profits increased by 72 per cent. An 8 per cent increase in wages (only 1.4 per cent in real terms) meant that there was not enough buying power in the hands of the general public to sustain the boom; they could manage to absorb goods produced for a limited time, with the help of credit, but by 1929 they were fast approaching the limit. Unfortunately manufacturers, usually super-corporations, were not prepared to reduce prices or to increase wages substantially, and so a glut of consumer goods built up.
This refusal by the manufacturers to make some compromise was short-sighted to say the least; at the beginning of 1929 there were still millions of Americans who had no radio, no electric washing machine and no car because they could not afford them. If employers had allowed larger wage increases and been content with less profit, there is no reason why the boom could not have continued for several more years while its benefits were more widely shared. Even so, a slump was still not inevitable, provided the Americans could export their surplus products.