In pre-revolutionary New England “there was resentment against the authority of Parliament, resentment against the royal officials in the colony, and finally, resentment against the moneyed and merchant class in Boston” (Adams 1925, p. 160). Independence served to replace the former two with the colonial elites, such as the moneyed and merchant classes, and the large landowners; less a revolution for the majority of the population than an assumption of power by the local elites.
In the view of many little-remembered small farmers, artisans, mechanics, and laborers … those upscale, liberty loving men had long been running the colonial legislatures for the benefit of themselves and to the detriment of everyone else. Parliament and Crown weren’t the only oppressors in colonial American society. For many ordinary people, they were by no means the most direct oppressors. Rich Americans were. (Hogeland 2012. p. 23)
Just as the English Glorious Revolution a century before had freed the British elites to exploit the majority outside of the control of the sovereign, the American Revolution freed the American rich to exploit the majority of Americans outside the control of the home country. As with the British example there were two revolutions, the revolution that utilized the popular support and a second that quelled the calls for popular sovereignty and equality and delivered the nation to the colonial American elites. This model of revolt, with local elites opportunistically utilizing a colonial crisis for their own benefit, was paralleled across much of South and Central America within half a century, for example in Colombia (1810), Venezuela (1811), Argentina (1816), Chile (1818), Mexico (1821), and Brazil (1822). As Ferling (2013, p. 84) notes, some North American colonists “longed for the new United States to replicate the social and political structure of the former mother country”; still elite rule, but now local elite rule unfettered by the mother country, “their own powerful nation state, one which the entrepreneurs, speculators, exporters and importers, and men of finance would be free from London’s confining shackles and oppressive hand” (Ibid., p. 267). The later Haitian revolution (1791-1804) was a slave revolt and resulted in the expulsion and extermination of the local French elites (much like the fate of the elites in France during its own revolution); an example not propitious for the US elites nor the slave owning practices of the US South. The US refused to recognize the new nation and worked toward undermining its independence (Karp 2016). In the face of much domestic US opposition, the Jay Treaty of 1795 normalized relations with a Britain at war with revolutionary France – completing the final piece of the story of the Animal Farm novel penned by Orwell (1945) a century and a half later. The local US elites had re-established good relations with the old elites that they had taken power from and continued to rule generally in the same fashion as prior to the revolution. “Independence did not magically erase the British class system, nor did it root out long-entrenched beliefs about poverty and the willful exploitation of human labor. An unflavored population, widely thought of as waste or ‘rubbish’, remained disposable indeed well into modern times.” (Isenberg 2017, p. 14).
In the accepted mythology of the nineteenth century the Founding Fathers were considered “’to have risen to the light of prophecy’ and [to be] not at all motivated by economic interests” (McGuire 2003, p. 16). During the progressive era at the end of that century a very different view developed and was consolidated by Beard (1913). This view saw the Federalists as “mainly merchants, shippers, bankers, speculators, and private and public security holders” (McGuire 2003, p. 16) who voted with their economic interests; an interpretation that became the dominant one until the 1950s. At the start of the Cold War era this interpretation was challenged and then repudiated by the academy, but recent scholarship has tended to support Beard’s general hypothesis. The Framers can be seen as overwhelmingly representing the economic elites of society, who greatly benefitted from voting for a strong centralized nation state (as against the loose confederation and weak central government of the Articles of Confederation) that balanced some of the democratizing trends within the states; “what a Massachusetts merchant called ’plebian despotism’ and the ‘fangs’ of the citizenry” (Ferling 2013, p. 259), a parallel of the “basket of deplorables” of the 2016 Presidential campaign (BBC 2016). This strong state protected the elites’ property and was able to raise the taxes required to pay the central and state debt securities that many of them owned; “The idea of self-interest can explain the design and adoption of the constitution” (McGuire 2003, p. 4).
These men were experienced but not disinterested. More than half were slave owners, a third more actively involved in foreign and interstate commerce, the lion’s share were land speculators, and a majority owned certificates of public debt. Economic considerations were part and parcel of the deliberations. (Ferling 2013, p. 264)
The taxes claimed by the British Parliament were replaced with a national system of tariffs and taxes that were utilized to repay state war loans at face value. One result of this was the bailing out and enriching of the war debt speculators that included many of the political representatives that voted for repayment at face value and a number of New York associates of financier Alexander Hamilton, who was both a Federalist and the US Secretary of the Treasury. It offered nothing to the soldiers and the many that had lent money to the revolution who had sold their rights, many times forced to by dire financial need, to the speculators for as little as fifteen cents on the dollar. This was a conscious decision by Hamilton to create a new economic elite that could help develop the industry of the young nation, lubricated by the now large national debt and the predominantly privately owned central bank, the Bank of North America and its successor First Bank of the United States (the precursors of the Federal Reserve established in 1913). The payment of substantial bonuses to military offices also helped cement a coalition between economic and military elites, “a powerful bloc of aristocratic power within the Congress” (Stoller 2017).
Overall, Hamilton’s policies may have established the sound debts and currency required for the development of the nation, but the way in which they were implemented directly benefitted the few at the expense of the many. The farmers and soldiers, who had sold their government notes, and those unable to pay debts and increasing taxes in hard currency, were not so well looked after; an “open struggle between ordinary people and upscale investors, [which] was edited out of our common memory long ago” (Hogeland 2012, p. 3). This struggle included protests that “broke out in the western parts of the country, similar to pre-Revolution-era revolts against the British, who, in extracting revenue for the Crown and its allies, were pursuing the same policies that Hamilton did” (Stoller 2017). This became the Whiskey Rebellion (1791-1794), “’a deluded multitude’ of ‘Ignorant, wrestless [sic] desperados, without conscience and or principals’” (Ferling 2013, p. 241) according to Abigail Adams (wife of Vice President, and later President, John and a war debt speculator) that was crushed by a Federal army and extensive human rights abuses. The same bailing out of the rich at the expense of the rest can be seen in the US government responses to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (Johnson 2009), and the 2020 COVID-19 Crisis, while the hagiographic musical Hamilton was lauded by the neoliberal establishment (Stoller 2017), as well as the repeated nineteenth century battles between the “sound money” (i.e. gold and silver backed) creditors and the “paper money” debtors; especially during periods of price deflation.
Like many of his Federalist and other elite peers, Hamilton was no supporter of democracy, proposing a President and upper house serving for life atop a highly centralized federal government with extraordinary powers – against the previously envisaged decentralized state-centric approach; he gained the centralized national government with a large standing army, but had to compromise with respect to the President (indirectly elected by a Senate, itself selected by state legislators rather than directly).
He wanted to bring an elective monarchy and restore non-titled aristocracy to America. “The people are turbulent and changing”, he declared. “They seldom judge or determine right.” They must be ruled by “landholders, merchants and men of learned professions,” whose experience and wisdom, “travel beyond the circle” of their neighbors. America, Hamilton argued, … had to insulate rulers and the economy as much as possible from the jealous multitude. (Frank & Kramnick 2016) The same Platonic philosopher king logic used to justify the “independence” (from democratic control) of the later Federal Reserve.
This is the “Framers’ Coup” that Klarman (2016) refers to in his account of the making of the US Constitution, centralizing power in a way that protected elite interests and buttressed that power against the democratic whims of the common citizenry. A second counter revolution that mirrored that of the English restoration of the King and the Glorious Revolution in the seventeenth century that kept the masses at bay while freeing the elites from external control (in England the King, in the US the British state). The Quasi-War (1798-1800) with France was used by the Federalists to pass the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 in the name of “national security”, which allowed for the summary deportation of non-citizens and criminalized criticism of the government; “Not for the last time in American political history did conservative extremists … exploit a perceived foreign threat to … consolidate their strength and destroy their political opponents … to muzzle dissent and browbeat [their opposition] into submission’” (Ferling 2013, p. 413). Thomas Jefferson proclaimed, “that in less than ten years the federal government ‘has[d] swallowed more of the public liberty’ than had England before 1776” (Ibid., p. 414). With the Democratic-Republican victory in the highly contested federal elections of 1800 that took place in the shadow of possible civil war, the anti-elitist but also deeply racist (Ferling 2013, p. 90) plantation and slave owner Jefferson became the President on the thirty-sixth ballot. The Alien and Sedition acts were rescinded (excluding the Alien Enemies Act which remains in place today) and the military was reduced in size and restructured to remove the dominance of the Federalist Party and create a depoliticized and professionally trained military. Jefferson also oversaw the extension of the franchise to nearly all white men, as part of a general democratization of white male society. A first Military-Industrial Complex (MIC), combined with an autocratic Homeland Security apparatus and Imperial Presidency was averted.
Hamilton did help put in place the Infant Industry approach of high targeted tariff protections and a development state, to allow for the successful industrialization of the US (Ho 2005; Melitz 2005; Chang 2010; Hudson 2010; Ho 2013; Parenti 2020). After the Treaty of Ghent signed in 1814, following the War of 1812 with Britain, the “great influx of low-priced British manufactures threatened to extinguish American industrial capital, and thereby to restore American industrial dependence on England, leaving it prone in the event of warfare.” (Hudson 2010, p. 40). The resulting tariffs, passed with bi-partisan support, “introduced a schedule of minimum duties, a forerunner of the ‘American Selling Price’ system of import evaluation for tariff purposes.” (Ibid., p. 41); a system that the US has extensively used it economic, political and military power to stop other nations from implementing, or to force its repeal, in recent decades. Until the 1860s fracture of the Democratic Party between the Free Soil and pro-slavery factions, a coalition of the elites of the agricultural Southern and the merchant Northeastern Seaboard states worked successfully to reduce the tariffs; with the latter coming to see them as benefitting their national opponents at their own expense – the industrial North. This issue was resolved by the US Civil War, “the moral end of the Civil War was free soil, and later abolition of slavery altogether, the economic end was protectionism and industrialization, and the ancillary policies that went with it” (Ibid., p. 50). It was also a triumph for a much more purely bourgeois elite, which is very different to the European nations where the bourgeoisie is still somewhat combined with aristocratic elements:
It finally broke the southern-elite’s once iron grip on the federal government and drove its leaders into the political wilderness. Into the offices that planters and their friends had previously occupied there now stepped northerners with very different values, priorities, and outlooks. These new men used their political might to encourage the growth and development of manufacturing, transportation, and commerce … America’s “second revolution” (Levine 2013, p. 93).
The newly formed United States governed by its new constitution of 1788, had only 3.25 million white inhabitants; predominantly of English ancestry especially in New England, but also with significant Scottish, Irish, German, Swiss and French descendants. There were 750,000 Black slaves, and an uncounted number of Amerindians. From this base, the new nation set about establishing primacy in the Western Hemisphere through a series of conquests, together with the explicit claim to hemispheric hegemony contained in the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. There was very little immigration between 1770 and 1830, excluding slaves, with the population growing to 13 million and the vast majority of whites being native born. Foreign born whites only increased to 10% of a population of 23 million in 1850; skewed toward Irish and German immigrants and with naturalization only available to “free white persons”. The genocidal Indian Wars (1775-1924) included the War of 1812 that removed Britain as an ally of the native peoples, and the First Seminole War (1816-1819) that led to the ceding of Florida to the US by Spain. The British had proposed the creation of an Indian [sic] state during the Treaty of Ghent negotiations, but the US had made its position clear beneath the misleading decorum of its language:
The United States, while intending never to acquire lands from the Indians otherwise than peaceably, and with their free consent, are fully determined, in that manner, progressively, and in proportion as their growing population may require, to reclaim from the state of nature, and to bring into cultivation every portion of the territory contained within their acknowledged boundaries … for the sake of preserving a perpetual desert for savages. (Congress of the United States 1854, p. 1347)
With the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 from France, made under threat of seizure, and the approximately half of Mexico gained through the Mexican American War (1846-1848), the nation spread from “sea to sea”. The US military also backed the Open Door policy of gaining access to other nations’ markets, with the Treaty of Wanghia with China in 1844 and the opening of Japan thanks to the “persuasion” of Commodore Perry’s naval squadron that resulted in the Treaty of Amity and Commerce (1858) between the US and Japan; both treaties providing US rights of extraterritoriality (Rubenberg 1998). The peak of the native genocide occurred after the brutal American Civil War (1861-1865) that ended with the victory of the industrial North over the agricultural (and slave owning) South; with over 600,000 war casualties alone from a pre-war population of approximately 30 million.
the ‘clearing’ of the continent moved to its grand finale. By 1890, vast Indian populations had been wiped out and their remnants consigned to reservations. America had quarantined its remaining illegal enemy combatants and, along with them, centuries-long contagions of shame. (Faludi 2008, Ch. 11, para. 27)
In 1867 Alaska was purchased from Russia. Within a decade, the brief period of freedom for the former slave population under Reconstruction (1863-1877) after the Civil War was quickly replaced with the virtual slavery of the share cropping system and Jim Crow laws, reinforced by a terror campaign targeted at the African-American community (Blackmon 2009); a reality that would continue until the 1960s (Reed Jr. 2022). With the closure of the western frontier, US expansionism moved further west into the Pacific and Far East. The Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars (1898-1902), together with the defeat of the Philippine Moro Rebellion (1902-1913), established US control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and The Philippines; after numerous atrocities committed against the civilian populations. Hawaii was also annexed in 1898 after a revolution “instigated by American sugar barons” (Grandin 2006, p. 20). The US was also involved in putting down the Chinese Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901). The brutality shown in many of these interventions, especially during the Philippine campaigns, paralleled that of the Indian Wars; “The Christian Filipinos had not particularly appreciated benign assimilation until compelled by a ruthless combination of military might, concentration camps, and starvation” (Arnold 2011, p.20). Many US troops fought in both the domestic and international subjugations of Others, “Led by officers whose formative experience had come during the Indian Wars, American military leaders considered Moroland [in the Philippines] to be like a huge Indian reservation populated by savage tribes rules by warrior chieftains” (Ibid., p. 20). Grandin (2006) notes the widespread usage of the terms “Indians” and “Indian country” to describe the peoples and lands to be subjugated; terms later used in Vietnam and Iraq. Chomsky (2016, p. 16) notes the naming of the contemporary bin Laden operation “Geronimo”, and US helicopters as “Apache, Blackhawk, Cheyenne”.
There were also extensive interventions in Latin American internal politics, with US warships being sent to Latin American ports “a staggering 5,980 times between 1869 and 1897” (Grandin 2006, p. 21). US hegemony over Central America and the Caribbean was asserted through its occupation of Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) in 1904, Nicaragua in 1911 and Haiti in 1915 to recover international debts; with President Theodore Roosevelt (who had led the famous Rough Riders in the invasion of Cuba) claiming the right of “international police power” to curb “chronic wrongdoing” (Roosevelt 1904). This assertion of policing power resulted in over thirty-four US interventions in Caribbean countries in the first few decades of the new century; the discourse of “global policeman” has been heavily utilized by the US in the post-Soviet era. In addition, in 1903 a rebellion was fermented in Colombia, which resulted in the creation of a Panama that allowed US jurisdiction over the construction and operation of the Panama Canal. The continual expansion of US territory and US geographic dominance during this period is at odds with the US isolationist mythology, as Bacevich noted “I think that the abiding theme of U.S. policy virtually from the founding of the Republic has been expansionism” (Bacevich, quoted in Chotiner 2020). At the start of the new century, the United States was bordered by two weak states (Canada and Mexico), had gained significant Pacific territories, and was unsurpassed by any other state in the Western Hemisphere; the “homeland” was safe from any conceivable foreign invasion.
Skilled labor unions grew in fits and starts due to the repeated economic depressions (post-1812, 1828-31, 1839-43) and aggressive business anti-union tactics such as “Pinkertons, imported strikebreakers, militia, black lists, and yellow dog contracts” (Rayback, p. 160), together with a judiciary that viewed unions as illegal conspiracies. The movement revived in the recovery of the 1840s, successfully gaining a reduction in working hours (the 10-hour day) and survived the Civil War. The post-war depression (1868-70) and aggressive employer associations then greatly reduced its membership. After a short recovery from 1870, the US economy fell into the Long Depression of 1873-79, “For labor the depression was disastrous. By 1877 it was estimated that one-fifth of the nation’s workmen were completely unemployed, two-fifths worked no more than six or seven months a year, and only one fifth worked regularly” (Rayback 1966, p. 129). A short recovery was then followed by the depression of 1882-85, and the following recovery stopped with the depression of 1893-97.
The growth of the nation was supported by accelerating waves of mostly European immigrants, with the US population increasing from under 13 million in 1830 to 76 million in 1900; a nearly six-fold increase (with 68 million white Americans and 8.8 million Black Americans), with 15% being foreign born in the first decade of the new century. The immigration mix changed between 1880 and 1930, as a much greater number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and Russia entered the country. This brought millions of unskilled workers to be fed into the rapidly expanding US manufacturing industries, but also brought those with more left-wing political ideas. Late in this period the theory of Eugenics became popular among elite groups, directed at maintaining the quality of the homogeneous “white stock” (animal husbandry terms were widely used in the Eugenics discourse). Numerous states legislated the enforced sterilization of those deemed to be “defective” and the Federal Government legislated to maintain the ethnic shares of the US population while banning the immigration of “Asian” peoples (e.g. the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act which was only revised in 1952). Such racism was also shown in the internment of the Japanese American population during WW2, something markedly not carried out against the German American population. The continual westward movement of The Frontier, at the expense of the Amerindian and other populations, had provided the equivalent of the Lebensraum later sought for the white race by Nazi Germany (Kakel III 2011); the two being “strikingly similar projects of ‘space’ and ‘race’” (Ibid., p. 7). Such parallels, including widespread US anti-Semitism, business linkages with the Nazi regime (e.g. Henry Ford) and fascistic elements within the US itself (Roberto 2018), were to be quickly forgotten once the horrors of a Nazi regime deemed exceptional in its own way (and therefore unrepresentative of Western civilization) came to light.
The nation was also blessed with natural resources that far exceeded the needs of its growing colonist population, including extensive deposits of the coal required for industrialization. Following the Civil War, the massive expansion of the railways created a more national market, and benefitted factories, machines and semi and unskilled labor who “came from the farm and from Europe” (Rayback 1966, p. 159) and came to constitute 56-75% of the labor force. With this industrialization, the manufacturing workforce grew from 1.3M in 1860, to 2M in 1870, and to 4.25M in 1890 (Rayback 1966, p. 53). In spite of the repeated economic contractions and financial panics, between 1865 and 1880 industrial production more than doubled, and then nearly trebled in the following two decades (Davis 2004). In 1890, the US economy surpassed that of the UK, becoming the largest economy in the world.
No nation in history (now with the possible exception of China) industrialized as rapidly as the United States. In a historical eye-blink America went from being an underdeveloped nation to an industrial goliath mightier than the chief economies of Europe combined. (Fraser 2015, p. 28)
This was also a period of increasingly large corporations and the monopolistic “trusts”, together with a “a violent anti-labor campaign” (Rayback, p. 168) that followed the Haymarket Affair of 1886 and continued into WW1. The 1892 Homestead Strike that pitted Andrew Carnegie’s massive steel company against one of the best organized labor unions in the country showed the new reality: a combination of corporate financial resources, 300 Pinkerton agents, 8,000 state militiamen, and an anti-labor judiciary broke the union. The same result was achieved with the addition of federal troops and U.S. marshals in the case of the Pullman railway strike of 1894, together with a new legal weapon of blanket injunctions that effectively rendered strikes illegal; a weapon that became widely used. It became evident that “the corporations of the late nineteenth century were … capable of defeating the strongest labor organization, and that capital had secured a firm grip on state and local governments and would use the state’s power to protect its own interests” (Rayback 1966, p. 53). The period was a pivotal point with respect to corporate size and power:
Before 1880, few industrial enterprises employed more than 400 workers … By the 1890s, large-scale enterprises had grown common. Individual firms in steel, oil, and especially several of the large railroads, employed over or near 100,000 workers … The corporations soon outweighed the government in size, bankroll, and, increasingly power. (Cowie 2016, pp. 35-36)
The Crisis of the 1890s was a major turning point in American history. It marked the close of the age of Jacksonian Laissez Nous Faire, and provided the setting for the death scene of the individual entrepreneur as the dynamic figure in American life. At the same time, it marked the triumph of a new system based upon, characterized by, and controlled by the corporation and similar large and highly organized groups throughout American society. (Williams 2009, p. 29)
Churella notes (2013, Intro., para. 11) that the Pennsylvania Railroad (the largest US corporation during the last two decades of the nineteenth century) “In an era of weak national government … was a highly developed bureaucracy. In an era of relatively modest federal budgets [it] had a budget … second only to that of the national government”. The benefits of growth accumulated mainly at the top, as the increasingly semi and unskilled nature of jobs provided little bargaining leverage, especially with the inflow of workers from abroad and the agricultural hinterland, and unions that had been rendered ineffective. The possibility of a strong working-class movement was also stymied by the hope of upward mobility and divisions along racial and ethnic lines. Farmers were also defeated in their attempts to organize through Farmers’ Alliances and overcome the factors of “monopolistic railroads, greedy bankers, and a punitive credit system” (Painter 2008, Ch. 2, para. 58) that they saw as keeping them poor.
Remarkable national wealth, on the one hand, and ethnic and racial divisions within the working class, on the other, meant that broad working-class solidarity materialized briefly in moments of crisis and endured only until the inevitable red scare scattered the forces of labor. (Ibid., Intro, final para.)
The resulting concentration of wealth was extreme, with the top one percent of families owning more than the bottom 44%, and the top 12% owning 86% of the wealth. The top 2 percent of families received more than half of all income (Ibid., Intro., para. 8-9); a level of income and wealth inequality paralleling that of the present day.
In reaction to the rapid social changes driven by industrialization, the rise of big business and monopoly, the scale of violent industrial strife, and perceptions of a corrupted politics, the Progressive Movement developed from 1890 onwards. This was predominantly led by the middle class and supported a general technocratic reformative modernization and democratization of society. Corporate legitimacy was challenged by muckraking publications that exposed corporate misdeeds, together with events such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911 in which 146 died, the machine-gunning of a miners’ tent village at Holly Grove in 1913 and the Ludlow Massacre of 1914. The causes of the widespread industrial strife were laid out in a 1915 government report:
After hearing more than seven hundred witnesses, the United States Commission on Industrial Relations had identified four problems. Workers had not shared in the fruits of the enormous economic growth that the country had experienced. Between 25 and 33 percent of working families received too little to support ‘anything like a comfortable decent condition’. Workers were also haunted by the threat of a sudden layoff. A majority of them were unemployed for up to ten weeks in any twelve-month period. These men and women did not view the government as their friend. On the contrary, they believed that every agency of the government operated to uphold the power of the bosses and thus to degrade them further. The best proof of this was the refusal of the government to offer them any support in their efforts to organize. (Finan 2007, Ch. 12, para. 9).
The rapid build-up of monopolistic trusts was slowed somewhat, but many were able to remain under less formal arrangements. Any ability to change the balance of economic power in the favor of labor also came up against the “U.S. and state governments’ hostility to the collective interests of working people [that] was unremitting, and often violent. Justifications for state involvement were grounded in broad, often counterintuitive interpretations of the law” (Cowie 2016, p. 68). Such interpretations were evident in the courts’ acceptance of the misuse of the Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1906, which was used in the post-WW1 period predominantly against unions rather than the intended target of corporate trusts. In addition, “the courts’ insistence on the unconstitutionality of wages and hours legislation stymied reformers until well into the New Deal Era” (Ibid., p. 70). A new era of corporate consolidation ensued in the decade after WW1. Throughout the period from US independence to the 1930s, excluding the Civil War and WW1, government spending had averaged about 3% of GDP. This was a much smaller share than in Germany, France and the UK (Mauro et al 2015); unlike in other industrialized nations, big business preceded big government. Starting in the post-WW1 period, a multi-decadal “great migration” of African Americans from the South to the North took place that triggered both overt racist violence and structural racism such as real estate practices designed to limit African Americans to specific areas (Anderson 2016).
The intervention of the United States in WW1 in April 1917 brought a political clamp down that mirrored that during the time of Alexander Hamilton, including the passage of the Espionage Act in 1917 and the Sedition Act in 1918, together with extensive censorship and pro-war government propaganda. The largest prosecution under these acts was against the leadership of the Industrial Workers of the World, a radical union, with nearly 100 convicted and sentenced to terms of up to twenty years. Under the Espionage Act the US Postmaster was given the power to exclude any material that he considered critical of the war. In essence, he was given control of what US citizens could read, as periodicals were distributed through the US mail. This resulted in repeated refusals to carry left-wing periodicals, together with threats and even refusals to deliver mail to certain outfits; much left wing and progressive discourse was removed. Foreign periodicals “generally abandoned any commentary on the war in order to win a license to publish under the Trading with the Enemies Act” (Finan 2007, Ch. 1, para. 27). A significant victim among the thousands of arrests was that of socialist Eugene Debs, who had garnered 6% of the votes in the 1912 presidential election. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, of which he served two and a half after being convicted for publicly saying “You need to know that you are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder” (Ibid., Ch 1., para. 29).
The vast majority of the US population was against entry into what they saw as a European war and had elected President Wilson in 1916 on a non-interventionist ticket. It took three years of propaganda and then outright censorship and state political subjugation to carry the US into the war and maintain its involvement. That many agreed with Mr. Debs’ words was shown by the paltry 73,000 that volunteered against the expected 1 million for military service; forced conscription was rapidly put in place in response (Pauwels 2016). The war had been incredibly profitable for US industrialists who predominantly supplied the Entente (the empires of Britain, France and Russia) and the bankers who provided the loans to finance the purchases of those supplies. It was in their interests for the war to continue (which was not a given due to the increasing political, military and economic exhaustion of the nations involved) and for the Triple Entente not to lose, as that could be a catastrophe for the US financiers. With the US entry into the war, the profits would continue, the financiers protected, and the US elite would have a seat at the table at its conclusion.
The government and the media fostered societal feelings of being under siege by foreign agents, with the Attorney General officially supporting such vigilante organizations as the SA “brown shirt” like American Protective League with a membership of 250,000. He asserted that its role was “keeping an eye on disloyal individuals and making reports of disloyal utterances” (Ibid., Ch. 1, para. 31); such statements could be expected from the later novel 1984 (Orwell 1949), or a communist Soviet Union which had only recently been established after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, when replacing “disloyal” with “bourgeois”. The Leagues major activities included strike-breaking, union-busting (especially against the IWW), and widespread aggression and spying aimed at anyone not supportive of the war and the military draft. In the immediate post-war years, a “Red Scare” was instigated, operationalized through the Palmer Raids; suppressing left-wing activists in parallel with the anti-Bolshevik US involvement in the Russian Civil War (1918-21).
The great majority of American leaders were so concerned with the Bolshevik revolution because they were so uneasy about what President Wilson called the ‘general feeling of revolt’ against the existing order, and about the increasing intensity of the dissatisfaction. (Williams 2009, pp. 105-106)
As Hochschild (2022) puts it this was the US “democracy’s forgotten crisis”, which has very significant echoes in the 1950s and the past two decades of increasing US state domestic surveillance, intervention, propaganda, removal of civil liberties and censorship (see below). Many “radicals” imported from central and eastern Europe were also deported, the US elites wished for cheap imported labour but not populist and left-wing imported ideas. The following decade was one of concerted anti-union campaigns by businesses. Union membership had increased substantially during wartime planning, but all those gains were lost in the 1920s (Cowie, p. 11). This period can be seen as the end of the Progressive Era, as well as any possibility of the kind of labor-based political party that had developed in other countries. The control of the African American population through terror also increased with the reinvigoration of the Ku Klux Klan, aided by a deeply racist President Woodrow Wilson who re-segregated the federal government (significantly increasing the earnings gap between black and non-black civil servants [Aneja & Xu 2020]) and held a viewing of the Birth of a Nation (Griffith 1915) in the White House; a film that included the following quote from Wilson himself:
The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation ... until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country. (quoted in Matthews 2015)
The end of the 1920s completed a period in which business elites, especially big business elites, had established and maintained their political pre-eminence while greatly restricting the ability of labor to successfully organize itself in opposition. The remaining Amerindian population had been cleared from their lands and housed in government-run reservations, and a neo-slavery had been fully implemented in the South. The United States had expanded its dominance across the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific and was now the leading nation of the globe. The only failure had been the inability of the Executive to gain support from the Congress for the League of Nations. WW1 had demonstrated that the US state could enter into a major foreign war against majority domestic political opposition and then through extensive propaganda and censorship bring the nation fully behind the war effort. The usefulness of a major crisis to crackdown on dissonant voices and organizations was also demonstrated, especially the labeling of such elements as agents of a foreign country or oppositional ideology
"..the Attorney General officially supporting such vigilante organizations as the SA “brown shirt” like American Protective League ."
I'm not sure what the reference to the SA is about-it seems anachronistic. This whole paragraph might improve after review.
On the whole the essay is a good summary of the history. What purposes it serves will be shown, I expect, by the way that the book develops.
Thank you for-behind every cant phrase there is an original reality-sharing this. I can't wait to see where it goes.