Impact of WW1 on America

Hmmm. When I think of the late 20s, successful economic boom isn't quite the phrase that comes to my mind...also, it seems kind of weird that you'd talk about all this happening after the war, I'd see what happened during the war as being more relevant, as the need to support the war effort was used as an excuse to break rising labour unrest, with the smashing of the IWW being one of the best examples of this. Have you read Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States?

also read those bits of sidney hook's autobiography about the WW1 jingo hysteria (and '1919' by dos passos, if you can stand it). this is what the govt has to do when it wants to get into a war where it has no interest at all. i had to keep reminding myself over the past 7 years, "this has happened before..."

Have you ever noticed that WWI looks just like IWW but backwards?
Almost as if someone wanted to reverse the actions of this organisation.

there were outbreaks of paranoia in the US before which fueled the "Anti-Masonic Movement" around 1830 or the nativist "Know Nothing Movement" in the 1850ies

Royal Dutch Airlines was also implicated in the assassination of Martin Luther King

The Know Nothing movement is one of my all-time favourite names for any movement ever.

Also, from the source of all knowledge:
In spite of the IWW moderating its vocal opposition, the mainstream press and the U.S. Government were able to turn public opinion against the IWW. Frank Little, the IWW's most outspoken war opponent, was lynched in Butte, Montana in August 1917, just four months after war had been declared.

The government used World War I as an opportunity to crush the IWW. In September 1917, U.S. Department of Justice agents made simultaneous raids on forty-eight IWW meeting halls across the country. In 1917, one hundred and sixty-five IWW leaders were arrested for conspiring to hinder the draft, encourage desertion, and intimidate others in connection with labor disputes, under the new Espionage Act; one hundred and one went on trial before Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis in 1918.

They were all convicted — even those who had not been members of the union for years — and given prison terms of up to twenty years. Sentenced to prison by Judge Landis and released on bail, Haywood fled to the Soviet Union where he remained until his death.

In his 1918 book "The Land That Time Forgot," Edgar Rice Burroughs presented an IWW member as a particularly despicable villain and traitor. A wave of such incitement led to vigilante mobs attacking the IWW in many places, and after the war the repression continued. In Centralia, Washington on November 11, 1919, IWW member and army veteran Wesley Everest was turned over to the lynch mob by jail guards, had his teeth smashed with a rifle butt, was castrated, lynched three times in three separate locations, and then his corpse was riddled with bullets before it was disposed of in an unmarked grave. The official coroner's report listed the victim's cause of death as "suicide."

This might help. It's from a chapter in a piece I'm hoping to work into a book on American working class history, focusing on class consciousness and how the strike weapon was traded away for collective bargaining in the post-WW2 period:

1919 & Aftermath

The Seattle General Strike established a “soviet” of the working class that ran the city for 4 days, not unlike the self-organization of the 1871 Paris Commune. Some of the organizers of the strike came from the IWW; a group that broke way from the Wobblies, One Big Union, was influential in the Winnipeg General Strike in Canada three months later. That strike lasted for over a month.

The Great Steel Strike of 1919 was the one of the first attempts to organize a nationwide industrial union. It drew on the tradition of the IWW and its leaders were former Wobblies – William Z. Foster and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, both of whom went on to become leaders of the Communist Party. The steel companies were able to weaken the strike by claiming that it was being “master-minded by “communists” and “revolutionaries” and playing off nativist fears because many of the strikers were immigrants. Despite this as many as 40,000 unskilled black and Mexican American scabs were brought in to work.

The struggle in steel was against the introduction of Taylorism and its modernizing innovation – the assembly line. Henry Ford began paying workers $5 a day and Americans were making the highest industrial wages in the world. This was based on intense technical rationalization in industries like steel, automobiles, electrical equipment, and petroleum and chemical products. It also resulted in a rising standard of living, but set against an unprecedented level of alienation.

The Seattle “Commune” and the Steel Strike marked the end of the American working class participation in the global insurrectionary wave that began in 1905. In contrast to the sometimes inspirational class struggle of this period was the ugliness of the “Red Summer,” when there were over 25 race riots, usually involving mass assaults on blacks by whites.

W.E.B. Du Bois had summed this up when he said in 1903: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line” (Du Bois, 1903). Sadly, it remains the one of the main problems for the working class in the twenty-first century as well.

1920s

Events like the workers’ uprisings in 1919 struck terror into the heart of the capitalists, whose nationwide reaction afterwards resulted in mass arrests, deportations, and brutal attacks on working class radicals. The martyrdom of Italian immigrant anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti – who were arrested in 1920 and executed in 1927 – exemplified this, as had the case of Tom Mooney, an innocent man who served 22 ½ years in prison after his frame up in 1916.

George Rawick, in his essay “Working Class Self-Activity” defines this period:

Low-capitalized industries, mostly in the South, were not affected by the technical changes to capitalism. The Communist Party was able take an important role in the struggles of textile workers, who produced low-cost consumer goods like clothing, because the American Federation of Labor was unwilling to organize unskilled workers. Because of the lack of technical development, these industries remained competitive by exploiting low-paid workers through the extraction of absolute surplus value.

Much the same was happening the in soft-coal mines of Southern Illinois and the bituminous coal mines of Kentucky. In the case of both the textile worker and miners, Leftists sabotaged the self-activity of the workers to serve their own organizational needs, which often involved aiding the modernization of decaying industries. By this period the Socialist Party no longer had an organized presence in the working class.

In 1922 chamber of commerce and manufacturers’ associations launched their “American Plan,” an open-shop drive to abolish unions and a red-scare to destroy radical organizations. This campaign to create “100% Americanism” was helped by the racist reactionaries in the American Legion, the National Security League, and the Ku Klux Klan. In response Marcus Garvey created the Universal Negro Improvement Association, claiming four million members in 1920. Black workers organized their first national mass union with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925 and its leaders went on to play important roles in later civil rights struggles. The 1920s ended with the economic crisis in 1929 that threw the U.S. and the world into the Great Depression.

The race riots coming in the period after World War I are often buried as mere footnotes in history.

The ugliest one in the "Red Summer" of 1919 was in Chicago and lasted from July 27 to August 4. 38 people were killed: 23 blacks and 15 whites. Over 500 were injured and hundreds of families were made homeless when their homes were torched.

A fictional depiction of this painful event is the film about interracial organizing in Chicago's massive meat-packing plants, set against the backdrop of the race riots, called The Killing Floor. (This film is out of print, so if anyone would like to get a DVD version, send me a PM and I'll send you one)

The worst racial violence ever in U.S. history occurred during 16 hours of rioting on May 31, 1921 [holy shit! 88 years ago today!] in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Officially 39 people were killed, including 10 whites, and 800 were injured. Over 10,000 were made homeless when a 35 square-block area was torched, destroying 1,256 residential buildings. The Red Cross disputed the official account of fatalities and said well over 300 blacks were killed by white militias.

true. i'd heard of ok city, and it has received some publicity (i mean in major-media venues like pbs), but the chicago riots are widely unknown.

Let's not forget Edward Bernays who developed public relations originally as a way of selling the war to the American public (Bernays frankly said he coined the term to replace propaganda, the real intent of public relations.) It proved to be a very useful tool of repression and control by the ruling class and the state down to the present time, another regressive effect of WWI.

I've heard of Bernays, but haven't read any of his stuff or seen the popular documentary about him. Which brings up a question:

How are the ideas of Bernays, which seem to exist parallel to the needs of capital, different from the concept of "spectacle" developed by Guy Debord? With Debord the same things are a fully integrated part of the social relations of capital.

By which I mean doesn't the logic of capital create the false consciousness that allows those most exploited to the be the strongest advocates of the system that exploits them? I think that if Bernays hadn't done it, someone else certainly would have.

World War I was the coming of age of Taylorism in production and it needed the ideology to go along with it. Didn't someone like Bernays just fill that need? If so, isn't the critique of Debord all the more profound because it points to revolution as the way to overcome this condition of mystification?

Or do you think that Bernays was such an important innovator?

A halfway decent documentary which goes into Bernays is "The Century of the Self" by Adam Curtis. You can watch the entire thing here: http://www.archive.org/details/the.century.of.the.self

My understanding of Bernays' is that he took some of the darker conclusions of Freud on human nature and used these conclusions to develop techniques and justify the manipulation the public through the utilization of mass media technologies. Bernays certainly was innovative but I don't think he was an enigma for his time. Walter Lippmann, a prominent intellectual of the period, held similarly condescending views.

I saw Adam Curtis' films Fuck You Buddy, The Lonely Robot, and We Will Force You to Be Free. All were interesting, but didn't point to anything radical. They seemed like excellent critiques of the psychological aspects of the spectacle, but lacked a critique of the commodity and the social relations of capital. But useful information nonetheless.

Techically the klan was refounded in 1915. It was slow taking off during the war years but boomed during the early 20's.

Zinn's People's History is an excellent overview, but it doesn't get into much depth simply because it's a survey.

I read this years ago, but if you want to learn about the Klan in the 1920s I think it's the most relevant:

Ku Klux Klan in the City 1915-1930, by Kenneth T. Jackson (who also wrote the excellent history of the suburbs Crabgrass Frontiers).

He details how outside the South, in the 1920s the Klan had become an urban movement with large groups in cities like Indianapolis, Denver, Los Angeles, Oakland and others across the country.

But you can say that about anything: "If Debord hadn't come up with the idea of the spectacle someone else would have." The fact is Bernays did come up with public relations and did work out its implications. He was shrewd and had the right connections at the right time.

I agree.

But in Fuck You Buddy the villain was John Nash, the game theory guy from the RAND Corporation.

My question would be about how much influence Bernays and Nash really did have and whether they were just refining and tailoring much needed capitalist ideology for changing times. Any ideas?