Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (53 page)

In 1982, a report in the
St. Petersburg Times
related the details of the incident, and the Florida state legislature was pressed to compensate the victims. In 1994, nine living victims received $150,000 in reparations. (The story was told in the 1997 film
Rosewood
.)

Must Read:
At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America
by Phillip Dray;
The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921
by Tim Madigan.

Why were Sacco and Vanzetti executed?

People might have loved Ruth—although maybe not in Boston—and they called him the Bambino. But apart from that nickname, things Italian were not held in high regard in America of the 1920s. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti had three strikes against them. They were Italian. They were immigrants. And they were anarchists. In 1920, those traits won no popularity contests in America.

When a payroll holdup at a shoe factory in Braintree, Massachusetts, left two men dead, an eyewitness said that two of the robbers “looked Italian.” On the strength of that, Sacco and Vanzetti, known anarchists, were arrested. They were carrying guns at the time of their arrest. A few weeks earlier, another Italian anarchist had died when he “jumped” from the fourteenth floor of a building where he was in police custody. Sacco and Vanzetti were quickly tried by a judge whose mind was already made up about what he called “those anarchist bastards.” The two men became darlings of the intellectual and leftist world. They eventually became martyrs. (Years later, FBI files and ballistics reports showed that Sacco was probably guilty and Vanzetti probably innocent.)

Guilty or not, the pair died because the country was in a frenzied, lynch mob mood created by President Wilson’s attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer (1872–1936). After a bomb exploded outside his home in 1919, Palmer unleashed a hysterical Red Scare that was the equal of the more infamous McCarthy era some thirty years later. A month earlier, bombs had been mailed to some of America’s most prominent men, including John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan. Although none of the intended targets was injured, the maid of one U.S. senator had her hands blown off by a letter bomb. Palmer was riding the nation’s case of postwar jitters, a ride that he thought might take him all the way to the White House. To most Americans in 1919, the world had been turned upside down. The country went through a bout of economic dislocation of the sort that typically follows a high-powered wartime economy. Inflation was high and unemployment rose, bringing a new era of labor unrest. But it wasn’t a good time for unions. During the war, the Wobblies (see p. 301) had been broken by the government. Wobbly leader Bill Haywood skipped bail and fled to revolutionary Russia, where he later died.

Progressivism and reform were one thing. Communism was another. The Communists had taken over in Russia. Anything faintly tainted by socialism was presumed dangerous. To many Americans, anything faintly
foreign
was dangerous. Anarchism had nothing to do with Communism, but both were lumped together in the press and in the popular mind. Most immigrants were neither Communists nor anarchists, but they were so
different
. Under Palmer, mass arrests and deportations followed. Although a small federal investigation agency, the Bureau of Investigation, had existed since early in the century, Congress had been leery of creating a national police force. The first special agents of the Bureau of Investigation had no arrest power and were not authorized to carry weapons. But in August 1919, Palmer created the Radical Division—later renamed the General Intelligence Division—and appointed a supercharged anti-Communist named J. Edgar Hoover (1895–1972) to lead it.

Born in Washington, D.C., Hoover was the youngest of four children. He attended law school, earning a law degree and master’s degree in four years. During the time he worked as a clerk in the Library of Congress, he mastered the Dewey Decimal System—later applying the numbering system to the future FBI’s files. During the war, his father suffered a breakdown, and Hoover was unable to enlist. Instead he joined the Justice Department and was placed in charge of the Enemy Alien Registration Unit. After the war and the bombings, Hoover was appointed to head the new division charged with rounding up and deporting radicals. With a propensity for orderliness and an early disregard for constitutional rights, Hoover began amassing files on so-called radicals on more than 45,000 index cards. As Ronald Kessler writes in
The Bureau
, “Hoover made no distinction between criminal conduct and beliefs. . . . Hoover recommended that a German who had ‘engaged in a conversation with a Negro in which he indulged in pro-German utterances and in derogatory remarks regarding the United States government’ be jailed. The man, who had been in the United States for thirty years, was imprisoned.”

In 1920, based on Hoover’s index cards, the bureau and local police conducted a dragnet, arresting thousands of alien residents. Known as the Palmer Raids, these arrests became notorious. Most of the mass arrests led to no charges or trials. But 556 people were deported, including the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, who were sent to the Soviet Union.

Congress questioned the Palmer Raids, but J. Edgar Hoover established a pattern. Lawyers who testified against him or condemned the raids became the subjects of investigations. Files were opened on anyone Hoover viewed as a threat or enemy. It was a way of obtaining confidential information and using it to intimidate and exact revenge that Hoover followed throughout his long career as one of the most powerful men in America. As Kessler concludes, “After Hoover became director, he began to maintain a special Official and Confidential file in his office. The ‘secret files,’ as they became widely known, would guarantee that Hoover would remand director as long as he wished.”

With official America on the warpath against “foreign influences,” private America joined the hunt. The Ku Klux Klan revived once more, with a vengeance. The economic dislocation following the war gave the Klan its opening. New leadership gave it a respectability it had lacked before. But its violence was as deadly as ever. While blacks remained the chief targets of Klan venom, the new message of hate spread to include Jews, Catholics, and foreigners. By 1924, the “new” Klan claimed between 4 million and 5 million members, not limited to the South. In 1923, Oklahoma’s governor, J. C. Walton, declared martial law because he feared that the Klan was creating a state of insurrection. The largest Klan rally in American history was held in Chicago in 1919. The pace of lynchings, which had slackened during the war years, was revived with vicious frenzy.

Reflecting the great fear of people and things foreign, and the retreat from Europe’s affairs, Congress put the brakes on immigration. In 1921, a tight quota system began to limit immigration sharply. In 1924, the quotas were further reduced, and by 1929, the total number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States was lowered to 150,000. Most of these were white Anglo-Saxons from Great Britain.

The “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” would have to hold their breath and huddle a little longer.

Must Read:
J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets
by Curt Gentry.

Why was Prohibition one of the greatest social and political disasters in American history?

Nowadays, the night belongs to Michelob. Football stadiums ring with the chant “Less Filling! Tastes Great!” Budweiser comes wrapped in images of the workingman and the American flag. And attempts to limit beer sales at ball games are shot down as un-American. From the late-twentieth-century perspective, it is hard to imagine that this is the same country that once outlawed alcohol.

America has always had a love affair with simple solutions to complex problems. Indians on good land? Move ’em out. You want Texas? Start a war with Mexico. Crime problem? Bring back the death penalty. Prayer in schools will solve the moral lapse of the nation. Busing schoolchildren will end racial segregation. The solutions always seem so simple when politicians proclaim them, masses take up the cry and laws are passed with an outpouring of irresistible popular support. The problem is that these broad solutions rarely work the way they are supposed to.

America’s grandest attempt at a simple solution was also its biggest failure. The constitutional amendment halting drinking in America was supposed to be an answer to social instability and moral decline at the beginning of the twentieth century. It should stand forever as a massive memorial to the fact that complex problems demand complex responses, and that Americans balk whenever somebody tries to legislate their private morality and personal habits.

Proposed by Congress during World War I, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibited “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” within the United States. It also cut off the import and export of beer, wine, and hard liquor. In January 1919, the amendment became part of the Constitution when Nebraska voted in favor of ratification—only Rhode Island and Connecticut failed to ratify the amendment—and a year later it became the law of the land, when Congress passed the Volstead Act to enforce the law.

To President Herbert Hoover, it was “a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose.” To Mark Twain, Prohibition drove “drunkenness behind doors and into dark places, and [did] not cure it or even diminish it.”

Prohibition didn’t just spring up as some wartime cure-all for the nation’s social ills. The Prohibition spirit had been alive in America since colonial times, but was greatly revived in the nineteenth century, especially in the West, where drunkenness and immorality became inseparably linked. It was there that primarily women waged war on “demon rum” and, though they lacked the vote, first demonstrated the political clout they carried. The temperance movement was strongest in Midwestern and western states in the years after the Civil War. As the primary victims of social and economic ills spawned by alcoholism, women held prayer vigils in the streets outside the many saloons that had sprung up in the cattle era, then moved to grassroots organizing. In 1874, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) came together to fight alcohol, becoming the first broad-based national women’s organization in America.

By the turn of the century, the temperance gang lost its temper, led by the militancy of Carrie Nation (1846–1911). Striding into the saloons of Kansas with an ax and shouting, “Smash, women, smash!” Nation and her followers reduced bars, bottles, glasses, mirrors, tables, and everything else in their path to splinters and shards of glass.

The sense of dislocation left after the war, the desire for “normalcy,” the fear that emerged in Red Scares and Ku Klux Klan revivals, all helped pave the way for the Eighteenth Amendment. Prohibition was a notable example of the American predilection for living by one set of standards and publicly proclaiming another. In public, politicians wanted to be seen as upholding the Calvinist-Protestant ethic. Privately, most Americans consumed some alcohol before Prohibition and continued to do so afterward.

Once in place, Prohibition proved virtually unenforceable. “Bootlegger,” “rum runner,” and “moonshine” became part of the language. For the rich, there were “speakeasies,” the ostensibly private clubs, requiring a codeword entry, that often operated under the watchful eye of the corner cop. For the poor, there was bathtub gin. Pharmacists wrote prescriptions for “medicinal” doses of alcohol, and more Catholics must have gone to Mass, because production of legal sacramental wine increased by hundreds of thousands of gallons.

Some social historians claim that Prohibition had some beneficial effects: the rate of alcoholism decreased and, with it, alcohol-related deaths. Others argue that wages weren’t being spent on alcohol. This view overlooks the increased fatalities from the deadly use of rubbing alcohol in “bathtub gin.” It also ignores the death toll and cost of the rise of organized crime, which may have existed before Prohibition but gained its stranglehold by controlling most of the smuggling and distribution of illicit liquor—this was the heyday of Al Capone (1898–1947) in Chicago.

Few who wanted to drink were prevented. As an attempt to restore morality, Prohibition probably produced the opposite effect. The willingness to break the law contributed to a wider decline in moral standards. Official corruption, its prevalence reduced since the earlier days of reformers and muckrakers, skyrocketed as organized crime spent millions in payoffs to government officials, from cops on the beat paid to keep a benevolent eye on the local speakeasy, to senators, judges, mayors, and governors on the criminal payroll.

While the “dry” West may have stayed sober and decent, the cities entered F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age under Prohibition. It was the Roaring Twenties, the era of the hip flask filled with smuggled gin, of the rumble seat and of the flapper—the “new woman” of the twenties. With her bobbed hair, short dresses, and exotic dances, the modern woman had two other things her mother lacked. The first was birth control, in the form of diaphragms introduced through the efforts of Margaret Sanger (1883–1966), who was arrested for “distributing obscene materials” from her New York clinic. Far from being widely available, the new method of contraception nonetheless brought the subject into the open for the first time in America.

The second was the vote.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

MARGARET SANGER
in
The Woman Rebel
, a monthly newspaper she published to promote contraception (October 1914):

My work in the nursing field for the past fourteen years has convinced me that the workers desire the knowledge of prevention of conception. My work among women of the working class proved to me sufficiently that it is they who are suffering because of the law which forbids the imparting of information. To wait for this law to be repealed would be years and years hence. Thousands of unwanted children may be brought into the world in the meantime, thousands of women made miserable and unhappy.