Then the war ended, and so did the prosperity. Wartime contracts worth billions were canceled immediately, sending industry and agriculture into an uncertain and threatening future. Quickly the boom turned into its opposite. Ruinous inflation, unemployment, and labor unrest shook the economic and political order. The cost of living skyrocketed, but wages and salaries failed to keep pace. Disgusted with their inability to gain any advantages with employers, more than four million workers in various states went out on strike or merely walked off their jobs in 1919. From a general strike in Seattle to striking steel workers in Pittsburgh and coal miners in West Virginia, America’s working class challenged the power of the bosses.
Government, in tandem with Big Business, responded decisively to the worker insurgency. As Bruce Minton and John Stuart wrote in The Fat Years and the Lean (1940), “The true role of the state became clear.” It had become “the weapon … of the industrialists, the financiers, the small minority in Wall Street,” who had taken “almost complete possession of the governing agencies.” The state became “the hired policeman of the employers.” On their behalf, government launched a crusade to rid the nation of all public enemies, especially the communists and anarchists who were blamed for infecting workers with radical ideas. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer set out to eradicate these “termites of revolution,” who, he claimed, were fed by Lenin and the “Red hordes.” Justice Department agents “careened through America, violating every principle of the Bill of Rights.” The most significant of the “Palmer Raids” occurred on January 2, 1920, and resulted in the arrest of more than 2,700 men and women, many of whom were jailed for months without being charged. According to Minton and Stuart, 556 were held for deportation, with many deported without proper hearings. The combined arrests included 1,400 members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW); 300 were convicted for violating laws against criminal syndicalism and anarchy.11
Big Business stood squarely behind Palmer. “The recent action of the Government in the deportation of undesirables is to be commended,” wrote Stephen C. Mason, then president of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). “It is the only punishment that fits the crime of anarchy, sedition, or revolution by force, and the Government should comb the country with a fine-tooth comb and not let up until the last one of these pests is sent back to the country from which he came.”12 Businessmen blamed the same public enemies but singled out immigrants for infecting American workers—old-stock, Anglo-Saxon—with alien thinking and uppity Negroes who forgot their place in white society. “There is only one way to treat this disease,” wrote U.S. Steel chairman Elbert H. Gary whose own workers had struck hard, “and that is to stamp it out, to meet it boldly wherever it can be found, to expose it and to give it no chance for development.”13 The NAM waged concerted economic and political warfare on labor organizations. In the midst of the 1919 strike wave, it established an Open Shop Department designated to promote another of its creations, the American Plan, which took aim at the union movement and the closed shop. Its premise was as political and ideological as it was economic by assuming that “all law abiding citizens have the right to work when they please, for whom they please, and whatever terms are mutually agreed on between employee and employer and without interference or discrimination upon the part of others.” Throughout the 1920s, the American Plan was used to promote company unions where workers were deprived of any bargaining powers. It pushed successfully for greater use of the “yellow-dog contract” that forced workers to agree not to join a union and, in some cases, to pledge not to strike. Meanwhile, it promoted the doctrine of “True Americanism” that aimed to define the difference between the old-stock citizens considered the backbone of the nation and alien forces that threatened them. Big Business and state power came together effectively in court-ordered injunctions that made it illegal for workers to strike or even engage in collective bargaining. Despite minor concessions to some workers, the combined power of the state and Big Business proved too much for the working class.14
As business and government joined hands, organized labor sought a seat at the table. During the Great War, prosperity had seeped downward to select parts of the working class. This was especially true for workers who were directly involved in wartime production, and earned higher wages and lived more comfortably. But even before peace came in 1918, organized labor struck a deal with Big Business that held up until the 1929 crash. The unions in the American Federation of Labor (AFL), long committed to a reformist and limited agenda in their dealings with employers, had argued that labor’s fulfillment of wartime production demands had earned it a rightful place in decision making with government and business. Samuel Gompers and other AFL leaders had demonstrated loyalty to American capitalism by their hard line against the IWW and other radicals who had tried to convince American workers not to support an imperialist war against their brethren in Europe. At the same time, the AFL kept rank-and-file workers in line by winning concessions for higher wages and better working conditions. But the ideological disposition of the AFL was far deeper than its routine activities. In its deliberate aim to reject any hint of socialism and promote what it considered a viable alternative to it, the AFL under Gompers’s leadership sought harmonious relations with capital in the hope that it would lead American workers into a corporate-capitalist economic partnership with Big Business.15
Government repression and the support it got from business leaders certainly helped to promote other sources of political reaction in the immediate postwar period. The American Legion, counterpart of European para-military groups whose members helped to build the ranks of fascist organizations, declared war against all suspected insurrectionists, and directed its members to attack socialists and other radicals, especially the IWW.16 After a decades-long crusade led by Protestant fundamentalists and some Progressive Era reformers, Prohibition became the law of the land in January 1920. Anxiety and fear over changing economic conditions gripped much of rural society left behind in the great urban surge. Nativism defined the political landscape throughout small-town and rural existence. White America deemed all others as alien and thus potential targets. Violence unconnected to labor struggles increased. By 1920, the reactionary tide in America was growing in strength and fury.
The greatest force of this reaction and extremism rising up from the middle classes was the so-called second Ku Klux Klan. Established in 1915, its membership remained small until early 1920 when its ranks suddenly swelled. From its birth on Stone Mountain just outside Atlanta, the Klan had spread beyond the South to cities and towns across the United States. According to historian Nancy MacLean, “The North Central and Southwestern states enrolled the most members, followed by the Southeast, the Midwest and Far West, and, finally, the North Atlantic states. By mid-decade, the total reached perhaps as high as five million, distributed through nearly four thousand local chapters.”17 Its mass consciousness, which was deeply rooted in the ideological outlook of its white middle-class members, reflected the anxiety caused by the march of Big Business’s growth on the one hand and their fear of the masses, especially people of color, on the other. There were so many to hate—Catholics, Jews, Mexicans, Asians, Italians, and the Reds. Still, the Klan remained at heart the guardian of white supremacy and reserved its most terrorist treatment for blacks. Lynchings and massacres of African Americans rose dramatically in 1919; more than seventy black veterans of the Great War were lynched or burned alive.18 Many more went unreported. At least a dozen blacks were lynched in a fifty-mile radius of Sparta, Georgia, in a three-month period. Always, African Americans courageously fought back. Across the South, sharecroppers rebelled against debt peonage and the murderous response of white landowners, who feared the loss of black labor from the Great Migration to the cities of the North. Meanwhile, those who had migrated stood their ground against the growing abuse and violence of white