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Title:      Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's (1931)
Author:     Frederick Lewis Allen (1890-1954)
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Title:      Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's (1931)
Author:     Frederick Lewis Allen (1890-1954)






Only Yesterday:
An Informal History of the 1920's

by

Frederick Lewis Allen (1890-1954)



1931




CONTENTS


PREFACE

I.  PRELUDE: MAY, 1919

II.  BACK TO NORMALCY

III.  THE BIG RED SCARE

IV.  AMERICA CONVALESCENT

V.  THE REVOLUTION IN MANNERS AND MORALS

VI.  HARDING AND THE SCANDALS

VII.  COOLIDGE PROSPERITY

VIII.  THE BALLYHOO YEARS

IX.  THE REVOLT OF THE HIGHBROWS

X.  ALCOHOL AND AL CAPONE

XI.  HOME, SWEET FLORIDA

XII.  THE BIG BULL MARKET

XIII.  CRASH!

XIV.  AFTERMATH: 1930-31

Appendix: Sources and Obligations



PREFACE


This book is an attempt to tell, and in some measure to interpret,
the story of what in the future may be considered a distinct era in
American history: the eleven years between the end of the war with
Germany (November 11, 1918) and the stock-market panic which
culminated on November 13, 1929, hastening and dramatizing the
destruction of what had been known as Coolidge (and Hoover)
Prosperity.

Obviously the writing of a history so soon after the event has
involved breaking much new ground.  Professor Preston William
Slosson, in The Great Crusade and After, has carried his story
almost to the end of this period, but the scheme of his book is
quite different from that of mine; and although many other books
have dealt with one aspect of the period or another, I have been
somewhat surprised to find how many of the events of those years
have never before been chronicled in full.  For example, the story
of the Harding scandals (in so far as it is now known) has never
been written before except in fragments, and although the Big Bull
Market has been analyzed and discussed a thousand times, it has
never been fully presented in narrative form as the extraordinary
economic and social phenomenon which it was.

Further research will undoubtedly disclose errors and deficiencies
in the book, and the passage of time will reveal the shortsightedness
of many of my judgments and interpretations.  A contemporary history
is bound to be anything but definitive.  Yet half the enjoyment of
writing it has lain in the effort to reduce to some sort of logical
and coherent order a mass of material untouched by any previous
historian; and I have wondered whether some readers might not be
interested and perhaps amused to find events and circumstances
which they remember well--which seem to have happened only
yesterday--woven into a pattern which at least masquerades as
history.  One advantage the book will have over most histories:
hardly anyone old enough to read it can fail to remember the entire
period with which it deals.

As for my emphasis upon the changing state of the public mind and
upon the sometimes trivial happenings with which it was
preoccupied, this has been deliberate.  It has seemed to me that
one who writes at such close range, while recollection is still
fresh, has a special opportunity to record the fads and fashions
and follies of the time, the things which millions of people
thought about and talked about and became excited about and which
at once touched their daily lives: and that he may prudently leave
to subsequent historians certain events and policies, particularly
in the field of foreign affairs, the effect of which upon the life
of the ordinary citizen was less immediate and may not be fully
measurable for a long time.  (I am indebted to Mr. Mark Sullivan
for what he has done in the successive volumes of Our Own Times to
develop this method of writing contemporary history.)  Naturally I
have attempted to bring together the innumerable threads of the
story so as to reveal the fundamental trends in our national life
and national thought during the nineteen-twenties.

In an effort to eliminate footnotes and at the same time to express
my numerous obligations.  I have added an appendix listing my
principal sources.

F. L. A.



I

PRELUDE: MAY, 1919


If time were suddenly to turn back to the earliest days of the
Postwar Decade, and you were to look about you, what would seem
strange to you? since 1919 the circumstances of American life have
been transformed--yes, but exactly how?

Let us refresh our memories by following a moderately well-to-do
young couple of Cleveland or Boston or Seattle or Baltimore--it
hardly matters which--through the routine of an ordinary day in
May, 1919.  (I select that particular date, six months after the
Armistice of 1918, because by then the United States had largely
succeeded in turning from the ways of war to those of peace, yet
the profound alterations wrought by the Post-war Decade had hardly
begun to take place.)  There is no better way of suggesting what
the passage of a few years has done to change you and me and the
environment in which we live.



From the appearance of Mr. Smith as he comes to the breakfast table
on this May morning in 1919, you would hardly know that you are not
in the nineteen-thirties (though you might, perhaps, be struck by
the narrowness of his trousers).  The movement of men's fashions is
glacial.  It is different, however, with Mrs. Smith.

She comes to breakfast in a suit, the skirt of which--rather tight
at the ankles--hangs just six inches from the ground.  She has read
in Vogue the alarming news that skirts may become even shorter, and
that "not since the days of the Bourbons has the woman of fashion
been visible so far above the ankle"; but six inches is still the
orthodox clearance.  She wears low shoes now, for spring has come;
but all last winter she protected her ankles either with spats or
with high laced "walking-boots," or with high patent-leather shoes
with contrasting buckskin tops.  Her stockings are black (or tan,
perhaps, if she wears tan shoes); the idea of flesh-colored
stockings would appall her.  A few minutes ago Mrs. Smith was
surrounding herself with an "envelope chemise" and a petticoat; and
from the thick ruffles on her undergarments it was apparent that
she was not disposed to make herself more boyish in form than ample
nature intended.

Mrs. Smith may use powder, but she probably draws the line at
paint.  Although the use of cosmetics is no longer, in 1919,
considered prima facie evidence of a scarlet career, and
sophisticated young girls have already begun to apply them with
some bravado, most well-brought-up women still frown upon rouge.
The beauty-parlor industry is in its infancy; there are a dozen
hair dressing parlors for every beauty parlor, and Mrs. Smith has
never heard of such dark arts as that of face-lifting.  When she
puts on her hat to go shopping she will add a veil pinned neatly
together behind her head.  In the shops she will perhaps buy a
bathing-suit for use in the summer; it will consist of an outer
tunic of silk or cretonne over a tight knitted undergarment--worn,
of course, with long stockings.

Her hair is long, and the idea of a woman ever frequenting a barber
shop would never occur to her.  If you have forgotten what the
general public thought of short hair in those days, listen to the
remark of the manager of the Palm Garden in New York when reporters
asked him, one night in November, 1918, how he happened to rent his
hall for a pro-Bolshevist meeting which had led to a riot.
Explaining that a well-dressed woman had come in a fine automobile
to make arrangements for the use of the auditorium, he added, "Had
we noticed then, as we do now, that she had short hair, we would
have refused to rent the hall."  In Mrs. Smith's mind, as in that
of the manager of the Palm Garden, short-haired women, like long-
haired men, are associated with radicalism, if not with free love.

The breakfast to which Mr. and Mrs. Smith sit down may have been
arranged with a view to the provision of a sufficient number of
calories--they need only to go to Childs' to learn about calories--
but in all probability neither of them has ever heard of a vitamin.

As Mr. Smith eats, he opens the morning paper.  It is almost
certainly not a tabloid, no matter how rudimentary Mr. Smith's
journalistic tastes may be: for although Mr. Hearst has already
experimented with small-sized picture papers, the first
conspicuously successful tabloid is yet to be born.  Not until June
26, 1919, will the New York Daily News reach the newsstands,
beginning a career that will bring its daily circulation in one
year to nearly a quarter of a million, in five years to over four-
fifths of a million, and in ten years to the amazing total of over
one million three hundred thousand.

Strung across the front page of Mr. Smith's paper are headlines
telling of the progress of the American Navy seaplane, the NC-4, on
its flight across the Atlantic via the Azores.  That flight is the
most sensational news story of May, 1919.  (Alcock and Brown have
not yet crossed the ocean in a single hop; they will do it a few
weeks hence, eight long years ahead of Lindbergh.)  But there is
other news, too: of the Peace Conference at Paris, where the Treaty
is now in its later stages of preparation; of the successful
oversubscription of the Victory Loan ("Sure, we'll finish the job!"
the campaign posters have been shouting); of the arrival of another
transport with soldiers from overseas; of the threat of a new
strike; of a speech by Mayor Ole Hanson of Seattle denouncing that
scourge of the times, the I. W. W.; of the prospects for the
passage of the Suffrage Amendment, which it is predicted will
enable women to take "a finer place in the national life"; and of
Henry Ford's libel suit against the Chicago Tribune--in the course
of which he will call Benedict Arnold a writer, and in reply to the
question, "Have there been any revolutions in this country?" will
answer, "Yes, in 1812."

If Mr. Smith attends closely to the sporting news, he may find
obscure mention of a young pitcher and outfielder for the Boston
Red Sox named Ruth.  But he will hardly find the Babe's name in the
headlines.  (In April, 1919, Ruth made one home run; in May, two;
but the season was much further advanced before sporting writers
began to notice that he was running up a new record for swatting--
twenty-nine home runs for the year; the season had closed before
the New York Yankees, seeing gold in the hills, bought him for
$125,000; and the summer of 1920 had arrived before a man died of
excitement when he saw Ruth smash a ball into the bleachers, and it
became clear that the mob had found a new idol.  In 1919, the
veteran Ty Cobb, not Ruth, led the American League in batting.)

The sporting pages inform Mr. Smith that Rickard has selected
Toledo as the scene of a forthcoming encounter between the
heavyweight champion, Jess Willard, and another future idol of the
mob, Jack Dempsey.  (They met, you may recall, on the Fourth of
July, 1919, and sober citizens were horrified to read that 19,650
people were so depraved as to sit in a broiling sun to watch
Dempsey knock out the six-foot-six-inch champion in the third
round.  How would the sober citizens have felt if they had known
that eight years later a Dempsey-Tunney fight would bring in more
than five times as much money in gate receipts as this battle of
Toledo?)  In the sporting pages there may be news of Bobby Jones,
the seventeen-year-old Southern golf champion, or of William T.
Tilden, Jr., who is winning tennis tournaments here and there, but
neither of them is yet a national champion.  And even if Jones were
to win this year he would hardly become a great popular hero; for
although golf is gaining every day in popularity, it has not yet
become an inevitable part of the weekly ritual of the American
business man.  Mr. Smith very likely still scoffs at "grown men who
spend their time knocking a little white ball along the ground"; it
is quite certain that he has never heard of plus fours; and if he
should happen to play golf he had better not show his knickerbockers
in the city streets, or small boys will shout to him, "Hey, get some
men's pants!"

Did I say that by May, 1919, the war was a thing of the past?
There are still reminders of it in Mr. Smith's paper.  Not only the
news from the Peace Conference, not only the item about Sergeant
Alvin York being on his way home; there is still that ugliest
reminder of all, the daily casualty list.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith discuss a burning subject, the High Cost of
Living.  Mr. Smith is hoping for an increase in salary, but
meanwhile the family income seems to be dwindling as prices rise.
Everything is going up--food, rent, clothing, and taxes.  These are
the days when people remark that even the man without a dollar is
fifty cents better off than he once was, and that if we coined
seven-cent pieces for street-car fares, in another year we should
have to discontinue them and begin to coin fourteen-cent pieces.
Mrs. Smith, confronted with an appeal from Mr. Smith for economy,
reminds him that milk has jumped since 1914 from nine to fifteen
cents a quart, sirloin steak from twenty-seven to forty-two cents a
pound, butter from thirty-two to sixty-one cents a pound, and fresh
eggs from thirty-four to sixty-two cents a dozen.  No wonder people
on fixed salaries are suffering, and colleges are beginning to talk
of applying the money-raising methods learned during the Liberty
Loan campaigns to the increasing of college endowments.  Rents are
almost worse than food prices, for that matter; since the Armistice
there has been an increasing shortage of houses and apartments, and
the profiteering landlord has become an object of popular hate
along with the profiteering middleman.  Mr. Smith tells his wife
that "these profiteers are about as bad as the I. W. W.'s."  He
could make no stronger statement.

Breakfast over, Mr. Smith gets into his automobile to drive to the
office.  The car is as likely to be a Lexington, a Maxwell, a
Briscoe, or a Templar as to be a Dodge, Buick, Chevrolet, Cadillac,
or Hudson, and it surely will not be a Chrysler; Mr. Chrysler has
just been elected first vice-president of the General Motors
Corporation.  Whatever the make of the car, it stands higher than
the cars of the nineteen-thirties; the passengers look down upon
their surroundings from an imposing altitude.  The chances are nine
to one that Mr. Smith's automobile is open (only 10.3 per cent of
the cars manufactured in 1919 were closed).  The vogue of the sedan
is just beginning.  Closed cars are still associated in the public
mind with wealth; the hated profiteer of the newspaper cartoon
rides in a limousine.

If Mr. Smith's car is one of the high, hideous, but efficient model
T Fords of the day, let us watch him for a minute.  He climbs in by
the right-hand door (for there is no left-hand door by the front
seat), reaches over to the wheel, and sets the spark and throttle
levers in a position like that of the hands of a clock at ten
minutes to three.  Then, unless he has paid extra for a self-
starter, he gets out to crank.  Seizing the crank in his right hand
carefully (for a friend of his once broke his arm cranking), he
slips his left forefinger through a loop of wire that controls the
choke.  He pulls the loop of wire, he revolves the crank mightily,
and as the engine at last roars, he leaps to the trembling running-
board, leans in, and moves the spark and throttle to twenty-five
minutes of two.  Perhaps he reaches the throttle before the engine
falters into silence, but if it is a cold morning perhaps he does
not.  In that case, back to the crank again and the loop of wire.
Mr. Smith wishes Mrs. Smith would come out and sit in the driver's
seat and pull that spark lever down before the engine has time to
die.

Finally he is at the wheel with the engine roaring as it should.
He releases the emergency hand-brake, shoves his left foot against
the low-speed pedal, and as the car sweeps loudly out into the
street, he releases his left foot, lets the car into high gear, and
is off.  Now his only care is for that long hill down the street;
yesterday he burned his brake on it, and this morning he must
remember to brake with the reverse pedal, or the low-speed pedal,
or both, or all three in alternation.  (Jam your foot down on any
of the three pedals and you slow the car.)

Mr. Smith is on the open road--a good deal more open than it will
be a decade hence.  On his way to work he passes hardly a third as
many cars as he will pass in 1929; there are less than seven
million passenger cars registered in the United States in 1919, as
against over twenty-three million cars only ten years later.  He is
unlikely to find many concrete roads in his vicinity, and the lack
of them is reflected in the speed regulations.  A few states like
California and New York permit a rate of thirty miles an hour in
1919, but the average limit is twenty (as against thirty-five or
forty in 1931).  The Illinois rate of 1919 is characteristic of the
day; it limits the driver to fifteen miles in residential parts of
cities, ten miles in built-up sections, and six miles on curves.
The idea of making a hundred-mile trip in two and a half hours--as
will constantly be done in the nineteen-thirties by drivers who
consider themselves conservative--would seem to Mr. Smith perilous,
and with the roads of 1919 to drive on he would be right.

In the course of his day at the office, Mr. Smith discusses
business conditions.  It appears that things are looking up.  There
was a period of uncertainty and falling stock prices after the
Armistice, as huge government contracts were canceled and plants
which had been running overtime on war work began to throw off men
by the thousand, but since then conditions have been better.
Everybody is talking about the bright prospects for international
trade and American shipping.  The shipyards are running full tilt.
There are too many strikes going on, to be sure; it seems as if the
demands of labor for higher and higher wages would never be
satisfied, although Mr. Smith admits that in a way you can't blame
the men, with prices still mounting week by week.  But there is so
much business activity that the men being turned out of army camps
to look for jobs are being absorbed better than Mr. Smith ever
thought they would be.  It was back in the winter and early spring
that there was so much talk about the ex-servicemen walking the
streets without work; it was then that Life ran a cartoon which
represented Uncle Sam saying to a soldier, "Nothing is too good for
you, my boy!  What would you like?" and the soldier answering, "A
job."  Now the boys seem to be sifting slowly but surely into the
ranks of the employed, and the only clouds on the business horizon
are strikes and Bolshevism and the dangerous wave of speculation in
the stock market.

"Bull Market Taxes Nerves of Brokers," cry the headlines in the
financial pages, and they speak of "Long Hours for Clerks."  Is
there a familiar ring to those phrases?  Does it seem natural to
you, remembering as you do the Big Bull Market of 1928 and 1929,
that the decision to keep the Stock Exchange closed over the 31st
of May, 1919, should elicit such newspaper comments as this:  "The
highly specialized machine which handles the purchase and sales of
stocks and bonds in the New York market is fairly well exhausted
and needs a rest"?  Then listen; in May, 1919, it was a long series
of MILLION-AND-A-HALF-SHARE days which was causing financiers to
worry and the Federal Reserve Board to consider issuing a warning
against speculation.  During that year a new record of six two-
million-share days was set up, and on only 145 days did the trading
amount to over a million shares.  What would Mr. Smith and his
associates think if they were to be told that within eleven years
there would occur a sixteen-million-share day; and that they would
see the time when three-million-share days would be referred to as
"virtual stagnation" or as "listless trading by professionals only,
with the general public refusing to become interested"?  The price
of a seat on the New York Stock Exchange in 1919 ranged between
$60,000 and a new high record of $110,000; it would be hard for Mr.
Smith to believe that before the end of the decade seats on the
Exchange would fetch a half million.

In those days of May, 1919, the record of daily Stock Exchange
transactions occupied hardly a newspaper column.  The Curb Market
record referred to trading on a real curb--to that extraordinary
outdoor market in Broad Street, New York, where boys with telephone
receivers clamped to their heads hung out of windows high above the
street and grimaced and wigwagged through the din to traders
clustered on the pavement below.  And if there was anything Mrs.
Smith was certain not to have on her mind as she went shopping, it
was the price of stocks.  Yet the "unprecedented bull market" of
1919 brought fat profits to those who participated in it.  Between
February 15th and May 14th, Baldwin Locomotive rose from 72 to 93,
General Motors from 130 to 191, United States Steel from 90 to 104
1/2, and International Mercantile Marine common (to which traders
were attracted on account of the apparently boundless possibilities
of shipping) from 23 to 47 5/8.

When Mr. Smith goes out to luncheon, he has to proceed to his club
in a roundabout way, for a regiment of soldiers just returned from
Europe is on parade and the central thoroughfares of the city are
blocked with crowds.  It is a great season for parades, this spring
of 1919.  As the transports from Brest swing up New York Harbor,
the men packed solid on the decks are greeted by Major Hylan's
Committee of Welcome, represented sometimes by the Mayor's spruce
young secretary, Grover Whalen, who in later years is to reduce
welcoming to a science and raise it to an art.  New York City has
built in honor of the homecoming troops a huge plaster arch in
Fifth Avenue at Madison Square, toward the design of which forty
artists are said to have contributed.  ("But the result," comments
the New York Tribune, sadly, "suggests four hundred rather than
forty.  It holds everything that was ever on an arch anywhere, the
lay mind suspects, not forgetting the horses on top of a certain
justly celebrated Brandenburg Gate.")  Farther up the Avenue,
before the Public Library, there is a shrine of pylons and palms
called the Court of the Heroic Dead, of whose decorative effect the
Tribune says, curtly, "Add perils of death."  A few blocks to the
north an arch of jewels is suspended above the Avenue "like a net
of precious stones, between two white pillars surmounted by stars";
on this arch colored searchlights play at night with superb effect.
The Avenue is hung with flags from end to end; and as the Twenty-
seventh Division parades under the arches the air is white with
confetti and ticker tape, and the sidewalks are jammed with
cheering crowds.  Nor is New York alone in its enthusiasm for the
returning soldiers; every other city has its victory parade, with
the city elders on the reviewing stand and flags waving and the
bayonets of the troops glistening in the spring sunlight and the
bands playing "The Long, Long Trail."  Not yet disillusioned, the
nation welcomes its heroes--and the heroes only wish the fuss were
all over and they could get into civilian clothes and sleep late in
the mornings and do what they please, and try to forget.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith have been invited to a tea dance at one of the
local hotels, and Mr. Smith hurries from his office to the scene of
revelry.  If the hotel is up to the latest wrinkles, it has a jazz-
band instead of the traditional orchestra for dancing, but not yet
does a saxophone player stand out in the foreground and contort
from his instrument that piercing music, "endlessly sorrowful yet
endlessly unsentimental, with no past, no memory, no future, no
hope," which William Bolitho called the Zeitgeist of the Post-war
Age.  The jazz-band plays "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows," the tune
which Harry Carroll wrote in wartime after Harrison Fisher
persuaded him that Chopin's "Fantasie Impromptu" had the makings of
a good ragtime tune.  It plays, too, "Smiles" and "Dardanella" and
"Hindustan" and "Japanese Sandman" and "I Love You Sunday," and
that other song which is to give the Post-war Decade one of its
most persistent and wearisome slang phrases, "I'll Say She Does."
There are a good many military uniforms among the fox-trotting
dancers.  There is one French officer in blue; the days are not
past when a foreign uniform adds the zest of war-time romance to
any party.  In the more dimly lighted palm-room there may be a
juvenile petting party or two going on, but of this Mr. and Mrs.
Smith are doubtless oblivious.  F. Scott Fitzgerald has yet to
confront a horrified republic with the Problem of the Younger
Generation.

After a few dances, Mr. Smith wanders out to the bar (if this is
not a dry state).  He finds there a group of men downing Bronxes
and Scotch highballs, and discussing with dismay the approach of
prohibition.  On the 1st of July the so-called Wartime Prohibition
Law is to take effect (designed as a war measure, but not signed by
the President until after the Armistice), and already the
ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment has made it certain that
prohibition is to be permanent.  Even now, distilling and brewing
are forbidden.  Liquor is therefore expensive, as the frequenters
of midnight cabarets are learning to their cost.  Yet here is the
bar, still quite legally doing business.  Of course there is not a
woman within eyeshot of it; drinking by women is unusual in 1919,
and drinking at a bar is an exclusively masculine prerogative.
Although Mr. and Mrs. Smith's hosts may perhaps serve cocktails
before dinner this evening, Mr. and Mrs. Smith have never heard of
cocktail parties as a substitute for tea parties.

As Mr. Smith stands with his foot on the brass rail, he listens to
the comments on the coming of prohibition.  There is some indignant
talk about it, but even here the indignation is by no means
unanimous.  One man, as he tosses off his Bronx, says that he'll
miss his liquor for a time, he supposes, but he thinks "his boys
will be better off for living in a world where there is no
alcohol"; and two or three others agree with him.  Prohibition has
an overwhelming majority behind it throughout the United States;
the Spartan fervor of war-time has not yet cooled.  Nor is there
anything ironical in the expressed assumption of these men that
when the Eighteenth Amendment goes into effect, alcohol will be
banished from the land.  They look forward vaguely to an endless
era of actual drought.

At the dinner party to which Mr. and Mrs. Smith go that evening,
some of the younger women may be bold enough to smoke, but they
probably puff their cigarettes self-consciously, even defiantly.
(The national consumption of cigarettes in 1919, excluding the very
large sizes, is less than half of what it will be by 1930.)

After dinner the company may possibly go to the movies to see
Charlie Chaplin in "Shoulder Arms" or Douglas Fairbanks in "The
Knickerbocker Buckaroo" or Mary Pickford in "Daddy Long Legs," or
Theda Bara, or Pearl White, or Griffith's much touted and much wept-
at "Broken Blossoms."  Or they may play auction bridge (not
contract, of course).  Mah Jong, which a few years hence will be
almost obligatory, is still over the horizon.  They may discuss
such best sellers of the day as The Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse, Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons.  Conrad's Arrow
of Gold, Brand Whitlock's Belgium, and Wells's The Undying Fire.
(The Outline of History is still unwritten.)  They may go to the
theater: the New York successes of May, 1919, include "Friendly
Enemies," "Three Faces East," and "The Better Ole," which have been
running ever since war-time and are still going strong, and also
"Listen, Lester," Gillette in "Dear Brutus," Frances Starr in
"Tiger!  Tiger!" and--to satisfy a growing taste for bedroom farce--
such tidbits as "Up in Mabel's Room."  The Theater Guild is about
to launch its first drama, Ervine's "John Ferguson."  The members
of the senior class at Princeton have just voted "Lightnin'" their
favorite play (after "Macbeth" and "Hamlet," for which they cast
the votes expected of educated men), and their favorite actresses,
in order of preference, are Norma Talmadge, Elsie Ferguson,
Marguerite Clark, Constance Talmadge, and Madge Kennedy.

One thing the Smiths certainly will not do this evening.  They will
not listen to the radio.

For there is no such thing as radio broadcasting.  Here and there a
mechanically inclined boy has a wireless set, with which, if he
knows the Morse code, he may listen to messages from ships at sea
and from land stations equipped with sending apparatus.  The
radiophone has been so far developed that men flying in an airplane
over Manhattan have talked with other men in an office-building
below.  But the broadcasting of speeches and music--well, it was
tried years ago by DeForest, and "nothing came of it."  Not until
the spring of 1920 will Frank Conrad of the Westinghouse Company of
East Pittsburgh, who has been sending out phonograph music and
baseball scores from the barn which he has rigged up as a spare-
time research station, find that so many amateur wireless operators
are listening to them that a Pittsburgh newspaper has had the
bright idea of advertising radio equipment "which may be used by
those who listen to Dr. Conrad's programs."  And not until this
advertisement appears will the Westinghouse officials decide to
open the first broadcasting station in history in order to
stimulate the sale of their supplies.

One more word about Mr. and Mrs. Smith and we may dismiss them for
the night.  Not only have they never heard of radio broadcasting;
they have never heard of Coué, the Dayton Trial, cross-word
puzzles, bathing-beauty contests, John J. Raskob, racketeers,
Teapot Dome, Coral Gables, the American Mercury, Sacco and
Vanzetti, companionate marriage, brokers' loan statistics, Michael
Arlen, the Wall Street explosion, confession magazines, the Hall-
Mills case, radio stock, speakeasies, Al Capone, automatic traffic
lights, or Charles A. Lindbergh.

The Post-war Decade lies before them.



II

BACK TO NORMALCY


Early on the morning of November 11, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson
wrote in pencil, on an ordinary sheet of White House stationery, a
message to the American people:


My Fellow Countrymen:  The armistice was signed this morning.
Everything for which America fought has been accomplished.  It will
now be our fortunate duty to assist by example, by sober, friendly
counsel, and by material aid in the establishment of just democracy
throughout the world.


Never was a document more Wilsonian.  In those three sentences
spoke the Puritan schoolmaster, cool in a time of great emotions,
calmly setting the lesson for the day: the moral idealist, intent
on a peace of reconciliation rather than a peace of hate; and the
dogmatic prophet of democracy, who could not dream that the sort of
institutions in which he had believed all his life were not
inevitably the best for all nations everywhere.  Yet the spirit of
the message suggests, at the same time, that of another war
President.  It was such a document as Lincoln might have written.

But if the man in the White House was thinking of Abraham Lincoln
as he wrote those sentences--and no doubt he was--there was
something which perhaps he overlooked.  Counsels of idealism
sometimes fail in the relaxation that comes with peace.  Lincoln
had not lived to see what happens to a policy of "sober, friendly
counsel" in a post-war decade; he had been taken off in the moment
of triumph.

Woodrow Wilson was not to be so fortunate.


[2]


What a day that 11th of November was!  It was not quite three
o'clock in the morning when the State Department gave out to the
dozing newspapermen the news that the Armistice had really been
signed.  Four days before, a false report of the end of hostilities
had thrown the whole United States into a delirium of joy.  People
had poured out of offices and shops and paraded the streets singing
and shouting, ringing bells, blowing tin horns, smashing one
another's hats, cheering soldiers in uniform, draping themselves in
American flags, gathering in closely packed crowds before the
newspaper bulletin boards, making a wild and hilarious holiday; in
New York, Fifth Avenue had been closed to traffic and packed solid
with surging men and women, while down from the windows of the city
fluttered 155 tons of ticker tape and torn paper.  It did not seem
possible that such an outburst could be repeated.  But it was.

By half-past four on the morning of the 11th, sirens, whistles, and
bells were rousing the sleepers in a score of American cities, and
newsboys were shouting up and down the dark streets.  At first
people were slow to credit the report; they had been fooled once
and were not to be fooled again.  Along an avenue in Washington,
under the windows of the houses of government officials, a boy
announced with painstaking articulation, "THE WAR IS OVAH!
OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT ANNOUNCEMENT CONFIRMS THE NEWS!"  He did not
mumble as newsboys ordinarily do; he knew that this was a time to
convince the skeptical by being intelligible and specific.  The
words brought incredible relief.  A new era of peace and of hope
was beginning--had already begun.

So the tidings spread throughout the country.  In city after city
mid-morning found offices half deserted, signs tacked up on shop
doors reading "Closed for the Kaiser's Funeral," people marching up
and down the streets again as they had four days previously, pretty
girls kissing every soldier they saw, automobiles slowly creeping
through the crowds and intentionally backfiring to add to the noise
of horns and rattles and every other sort of din-making device.
Eight hundred Barnard College girls snake-danced on Morningside
Heights in New York; and in Times Square, early in the morning, a
girl mounted the platform of "Liberty Hall," a building set up for
war-campaign purposes, and sang the "Doxology" before hushed
crowds.

Yet as if to mock the Wilsonian statement about "sober, friendly
counsel," there were contrasting celebrations in which the mood was
not that of pious thanksgiving, but of triumphant hate.  Crowds
burned the Kaiser in effigy.  In New York, a dummy of the Kaiser
was washed down Wall Street with a firehose; men carried a coffin
made of soapboxes up and down Fifth Avenue, shouting that the
Kaiser was within it, "resting in pieces"; and on Broadway at
Seventieth Street a boy drew pictures of the Kaiser over and over
again on the sidewalk, to give the crowds the delight of trampling
on them.

So the new era of peace began.

But a million men--to paraphrase Bryan--cannot spring from arms
overnight.  There were still over three and a half million
Americans in the military service, over two million of them in
Europe.  Uniforms were everywhere.  Even after the tumult and
shouting of November 11th had died, the Expeditionary Forces were
still in the trenches, making ready for the long, cautious march
into Germany; civilians were still saving sugar and eating strange
dark breads and saving coal; it was not until ten days had passed
that the "lightless" edict of the Fuel Administration was
withdrawn, and Broadway and a dozen lesser white ways in other
cities blazed once more; the railroads were still operated by the
government, and one bought one's tickets at United States Railroad
Administration Consolidated Ticket Offices; the influenza epidemic,
which had taken more American lives than had the Germans, and had
caused thousands of men and women to go about fearfully with white
cloth masks over their faces, was only just abating; the newspapers
were packed with reports from the armies in Europe, news of the
revolution in Germany, of Mr. Wilson's peace preparations, of the
United War Work Campaign, to the exclusion of almost everything
else; and day after day, week after week, month after month, the
casualty lists went on, and from Maine to Oregon men and women
searched them in daily apprehension.

November would normally have brought the climax of the football
season, but now scratch college teams, made up mostly of boys who
had been wearing the uniform of the Students' Army Training Corps,
played benefit games "to put the War Work Fund over the top"; and
further to strengthen the will to give, Charlie Brickley of Harvard
drop-kicked a football across Wall Street into the arms of Jack
Gates of Yale on the balcony of the Stock Exchange.  Not only the
news columns of the papers, but the advertisements also, showed the
domination of wartime emotions.  Next to an editorial on "The Right
to Hate the Huns," or a letter suggesting that the appropriate
punishment for the Kaiser would be to deport him from country to
country, always as an "undesirable alien," the reader would find a
huge United War Work Fund advertisement, urging him to GIVE--GIVE--
GIVE!  On another page, under the title of PREPARING AMERICA TO
REBUILD THE WORLD, he would find a patriotic blast beginning, "Now
that liberty has triumphed, now that the forces of Right have begun
their reconstruction of humanity's morals, the world faces a
material task of equal magnitude," and not until he had waded
through several more sentences of sonorous rhetoric would he
discover that this "material task" was to be accomplished through
the use of Blank's Steel Windows.

And even as the process of demobilization got definitely under way,
as the soldiers began to troop home from the camps, as censorship
was done away with and lights were permitted to burn brightly again
and women began to buy sugar with an easy conscience; even as this
glorious peace began to seem a reality and not a dream, the nation
went on thinking with the mind of people at war.  They had learned
during the preceding nineteen months to strike down the thing they
hated--not to argue or hesitate, but to strike.  Germany had been
struck down, but it seemed that there was another danger on the
horizon.  Bolshevism was spreading from Russia through Europe;
Bolshevism might spread to the United States.  They struck at it--
or at what they thought was it.  A week after the Armistice, Mayor
Hylan of New York forbade the display of the red flag in the
streets and ordered the police to "disperse all unlawful
assemblages."  A few nights later, while the Socialists were
holding a mass meeting in Madison Square Garden, five hundred
soldiers and sailors gathered from the surrounding streets and
tried to storm the doors.  It took twenty-two mounted policemen to
break up the milling mob and restore order.  The next evening there
was another riot before the doors of the Palm Garden, farther up
town, where a meeting of sympathy for Revolutionary Russia was
being held under the auspices of the Women's International League.
Again soldiers and sailors were the chief offenders.  They packed
Fifty-eighth Street for a block, shouting and trying to break their
way into the Palm Garden, and in the mêlée six persons were badly
beaten up.  One of the victims was a conservative stockbroker.  He
was walking up Lexington Avenue with a lady, and seeing the yelling
crowd, he asked someone what all the excitement was about.  A
sailor called out, "Hey, fellows, here's another of the
Bolsheviks," and in a moment a score of men had leaped upon him,
ripped off his tie, and nearly knocked him unconscious.  These
demonstrations were to prove the first of a long series of post-war
anti-Red riots.

The nation at war had formed the habit of summary action, and it
was not soon unlearned.  The circumstances and available methods
had changed, that was all.  Employers who had watched with
resentment the rising scale of wages paid to labor, under the
encouragement of a government that wanted no disaffection in the
ranks of the workers, now felt that their chance had come.  The
Germans were beaten; the next thing to do was to teach labor a
lesson.  Labor agitators were a bunch of Bolsheviks, anyhow, and it
was about time that a man had a chance to make a decent profit in
his business.  Meanwhile labor, facing a steadily mounting cost of
living, and realizing that it was no longer unpatriotic to strike
for higher wages, decided to teach the silk-stockinged profiteering
employer a lesson in his turn.  The result was a bitter series of
strikes and lockouts.

There was a summary action with regard to liquor, too.  During the
war alcohol had been an obvious menace to the fighting efficiency
of the nation.  The country, already largely dry by state law and
local option, had decided to banish the saloon once and for all.
War-time psychology was dominant; no halfway measure would serve.
The War-time Prohibition Act was already on the books and due to
take effect July 1, 1919.  But this was not enough.  The Eighteenth
Amendment, which would make prohibition permanent and (so it was
thought) effective, had been passed by Congress late in 1917, and
many of the states had ratified it before the war ended.  With the
convening of the state legislatures in January, 1919, the movement
for ratification went ahead with amazing speed.  The New York
Tribune said that it was "as if a sailing-ship on a windless ocean
were sweeping ahead, propelled by some invisible force."
"Prohibition seems to be the fashion, just as drinking once was,"
exclaimed the Times editorially.  By January 16th--within nine
weeks of the Armistice--the necessary thirty-six States had
ratified the Amendment.  Even New York State fell in line a few
days later.  Whisky and the "liquor ring" were struck at as
venomously as were the Reds.  There were some misgivings, to be
sure; there were those who pointed out that three million men in
uniform might not like the new dispensation; but the country was
not in the mood to think twice.  Prohibition went through on the
tide of the war spirit of "no compromise."

Yet though the headlong temper of war-time persisted after the
Armistice, in one respect the coming of peace brought about a
profound change.  During the war the nation had gone about its
tasks in a mood of exaltation.  Top sergeants might remark that the
only good Hun was a dead one and that this stuff about making the
world safe for democracy was all bunk; four-minute speakers might
shout that the Kaiser ought to be boiled in oil; the fact remained
that millions of Americans were convinced that they were fighting
in a holy cause, for the rights of oppressed nations, for the end
of all war forever, for all that the schoolmaster in Washington so
eloquently preached.  The singing of the "Doxology" by the girl in
Times Square represented their true feeling as truly as the burning
of the Kaiser in effigy.  The moment the Armistice was signed,
however, a subtle change began.

Now those who had never liked Wilson, who thought that he had
stayed out of the war too long, that milk and water ran in his
veins instead of blood, that he should never have been forgiven for
his treatment of Roosevelt and Wood, that he was a dangerous
radical at heart and a menace to the capitalistic system, that he
should never have appealed to the country for the election of a
Democratic Congress, or that his idea of going to Paris himself to
the Peace Conference was a sign of egomania--these people began to
speak out freely.  There were others who were tired of applauding
the French, or who had ideas of their own about the English and the
English attitude toward Ireland, or who were sick of hearing about
"our noble Allies" in general, or who thought that we had really
gone into the war to save our own skins and that the Wilsonian talk
about making the world safe for democracy was dangerous and
hypocritical nonsense.  They, too, began to speak out freely.  Now
one could say with impunity, "We've licked the Germans and we're
going to lick these damned Bolsheviki, and it's about time we got
after Wilson and his crew of pacifists."  The tension of the war
was relaxing, the bubble of idealism was pricked.  As the first
weeks of peace slipped away, it began to appear doubtful whether
the United States was quite as ready as Woodrow Wilson had thought
"to assist in the establishment of just democracy throughout the
world."


[3]


But the mind of Mr. Wilson, too, had been molded by the war.  Since
April, 1917, his will had been irresistible.  In the United States
open opposition to his leadership had been virtually stifled: it
was unpatriotic to differ with the President.  His message and
speeches had set the tone of popular thought about American war
aims and the terms of eventual peace.  In Europe his eloquence had
proved so effective that statesmen had followed his lead perforce
and allowed the Armistice to be made upon his terms.  All over the
world there were millions upon millions of men and women to whom
his words were as those of a Messiah.  Now that he envisioned a new
world order based upon a League of Nations, it seemed inevitable to
him that he himself should go to Paris, exert this vast and
beneficent power, and make the vision a reality.  The splendid
dream took full possession of him.  Critics like Senator Lodge and
even associates like Secretary Lansing might object that he ought
to leave the negotiations to subordinates, or that peace should be
made with Germany first, and discussion of the League postponed, in
order to bring an unsettled world back to equilibrium without
delay; but had he not silenced critics during the war and could he
not silence them again?  On the 4th of December--less than a month
after the Armistice--the President sailed from New York on the
George Washington.  As the crowds along the waterfront shouted
their tribute and the vessels in the harbor tooted their whistles
and the guns roared in a presidential salute, Woodrow Wilson,
standing on the bridge of the George Washington, eastward bound,
must have felt that destiny was on his side.

The events of the next few weeks only confirmed him in this
feeling.  He toured France and England and Italy in incredible
triumph.  Never had such crowds greeted a foreigner on British
soil.  His progress through the streets of London could be likened
only to a Coronation procession.  In Italy the streets were black
with people come to do him honor.  "No one has ever had such
cheers," wrote William Bolitho; "I, who heard them in the streets
of Paris, can never forget them in my life.  I saw Foch pass,
Clemenceau pass, Lloyd George, generals, returning troops, banners,
but Wilson heard from his carriage something different, inhuman--or
superhuman."  Seeing those overwhelming crowds and hearing their
shouts of acclaim, how could Woodrow Wilson doubt that he was still
invincible?  If, when the Conference met, he could only speak so
that they might hear, no diplomatists of the old order could
withstand him.  Destiny was taking him, and the whole world with
him, toward a future bright with promise.

But, as it happened, destiny had other plans.  In Europe, as well
as in America, idealism was on the ebb.  Lloyd George, that
unfailing barometer of public opinion, was campaigning for
reëlection on a "Hang the Kaiser" platform; and shout as the crowds
might for Wilson and justice, they voted for Lloyd George and
vengeance.  Now that the Germans were beaten, a score of jealous
European politicians were wondering what they could get out of the
settlement at Paris for their own national ends and their own
personal glory.  They wanted to bring home the spoils of war.  They
heard the mob applaud Wilson, but they knew that mobs are fickle
and would applaud annexations and punitive reparations with equal
fervor.  They went to Paris determined to make a peace which would
give them plunder to take home.

And meanwhile in the Senate Chamber at Washington opposition to
Wilson's League and Wilson's Fourteen Points increased in volume.
As early as December 21, 1918, Henry Cabot Lodge, intellectual
leader of the Republicans in the Senate, announced that the Senate
had equal power with the President in treaty-making and should make
its wishes known in advance of the negotiations.  He said that
there would be quite enough to do at Paris without raising the
issue of the League.  And he set forth his idea of the sort of
peace which ought to be made--an idea radically different from
President Wilson's.  Lodge and a group of his associates wanted
Germany to be disarmed, saddled with a terrific bill for
reparations, and if possible dismembered.  They were ready to give
to the Allies large concessions in territory.  And above all, they
wanted nothing to be included in the peace settlement which would
commit the United States to future intervention in European
affairs.  They prepared to examine carefully any plan for a League
of Nations which might come out of the Conference and to resist it
if it involved "entangling alliances."  Thus to opposition from the
diplomats of Europe was added opposition of another sort from the
Senate and public opinion at home.  Wilson was between two fires.
He might not realize how they threatened him, but they were
spreading.

The tide of events, had Wilson but known it, was turning against
him.  Human nature, the world over, was beginning to show a new
side, as it has shown it at the end of every war in history.  The
compulsion for unity was gone, and division was taking its place.
The compulsion for idealism was gone, and realism was in the
ascendant.

Nor did destiny work only through the diplomats of the Old World
and the senatorial patriots of the New.  It worked also through the
peculiar limitations in the mind and character of Woodrow Wilson
himself.  The very singleness of purpose, the very uncompromising
quality of mind that had made him a great prophet, forced him to
take upon his own shoulders at Paris an impossible burden of
responsible negotiation.  It prevented him from properly
acquainting his colleagues with what he himself was doing at the
sessions of the Council of Ten or the Council of Four, and from
getting the full benefit of their suggestions and objections.  It
prevented him from taking the American correspondents at Paris into
his confidence and thus gaining valuable support at home.  It made
him play a lone hand.  Again, his intelligence was visual rather
than oral.  As Ray Stannard Baker has well put it, Wilson was
"accustomed to getting his information, not from people, but out of
books, documents, letters--the written word," and consequently
"underestimated the value of . . . human contacts."  At written
negotiations he was a past master, but in the oral give and take
about a small conference table he was at a disadvantage.  When
Clemenceau and Lloyd George and Orlando got him into the Council of
Four behind closed doors, where they could play the game of treaty-
making like a four-handed card game, they had already half defeated
him.  A superman might have gone to Paris and come home completely
victorious, but Woodrow Wilson could not have been what he was and
have carried the day.

This is no place to tell the long and bitter story of the
President's fight for his ideals at Paris.  Suffice it to say that
he fought stubbornly and resourcefully, and succeeded to a
creditable extent in moderating the terms of the Treaty.  The
European diplomats wanted to leave the discussion of the League
until after the territorial and military settlements had been made,
but he forced them to put the League first.  Sitting as chairman of
the commission appointed to draw up the League Covenant, he brought
out a preliminary draft which met, as he supposed, the principal
objections to it made by men at home like Taft and Root and Lodge.
In Paris he confronted a practically unanimous sentiment for
annexation of huge slices of German territory and of all the German
colonies; even the British dominions, through their premiers, came
out boldly for annexation and supported one another in their
colonial claims; yet he succeeded in getting the Conference to
accept the mandate principle.  He forced Clemenceau to modify his
demands for German territory, though he had to threaten to leave
Paris to get his way.  He forced Italy to accept less land than she
wanted, though he had to venture a public appeal to the conscience
of the world to do it.  Again and again it was he, and he only, who
prevented territories from being parceled out among the victors
without regard to the desires of their inhabitants.  To read the
day-to-day story of the Conference is to realize that the
settlement would have been far more threatening to the future peace
of the world had Woodrow Wilson not struggled as he did to bring
about an agreement fair to all.  Yet the result, after all, was a
compromise.  The Treaty followed in too many respects the
provisions of the iniquitous secret treaties of war-time; and the
League Covenant which Wilson had managed to imbed securely in it
was too rigid and too full of possible military obligations to suit
an American people tired of war and ready to get out of Europe once
and for all.

The President must have been fully aware of the ugly imperfections
in the Treaty of Versailles as he sailed back to America with it at
the end of June, 1919, more than six months after his departure for
France.  He must have realized that, despite all his efforts, the
men who had sat about the council table at Paris had been more
swayed by fear and hate and greed and narrow nationalism than by
the noble motives of which he had been the mouthpiece.  No rational
man with his eyes and ears open could have failed to sense the
disillusionment which was slowly settling down upon the world, or
the validity of many of the objections to the Treaty which were
daily being made in the Senate at Washington.  Yet what could
Wilson do?

Could he come home to the Senate and the American people and say,
in effect:  "This Treaty is a pretty bad one in some respects.  I
shouldn't have accepted the Shantung clause or the Italian border
clause or the failure to set a fixed German indemnity or the
grabbing of a lot of German territory by France and others unless I
had had to, but under the circumstances this is about the best we
could do and I think the League will make up for the rest"?  He
could not; he had committed himself to each and every clause; he
had signed the Treaty, and must defend it.  Could he admit that the
negotiators at Paris had failed to act in the unselfish spirit
which he had proclaimed in advance that they would show?  To do
this would be to admit his own failure and kill his own prestige.
Having proclaimed before the Conference that the settlement would
be righteous and having insisted during the Conference that it was
righteous, how could he admit afterward that it had not been
righteous?  The drift of events had caught him in a predicament
from which there seemed to be but one outlet of escape.  He must go
home and vow that the Conference had been a love-feast, that every
vital decision had been based on the Fourteen Points, that
Clemenceau and Orlando and Lloyd George and the rest had been
animated by an overpowering love for humanity, and that the
salvation of the world depended on the complete acceptance of the
Treaty as the charter of a new and idyllic world order.

That is what he did; and because the things he said about the
Treaty were not true, and he must have known--sometimes, at least--
that they were not, the story of Woodrow Wilson from this point on
is sheer tragedy.  He fell into the pit which is dug for every
idealist.  Having failed to embody his ideal in fact, he distorted
the fact.  He pictured the world, to himself and to others, not as
it was, but as he wished it to be.  The optimist became a
sentimentalist.  The story of the Conference which he told to the
American people when he returned home was a very beautiful romance
of good men and true laboring without thought of selfish advantage
for the welfare of humanity.  He said that if the United States did
not come to the aid of mankind by endorsing all that had been done
at Paris, the heart of the world would be broken.  But the only
heart which was broken was his own.


[4]


Henry Cabot Lodge was a gentleman, a scholar, and an elegant and
persuasive figure in the United States Senate.  As he strolled down
the aisle of the Senate Chamber--slender, graceful, gray-haired,
gray-bearded, the embodiment of all that was patrician--he caught
and held the eye as might William Gillette on a crowded stage.  He
need not raise his voice, he need only turn for a moment and listen
to a sentence or two of some colleague's florid speech and then
walk indifferently on, to convince a visitor in the gallery that
the speech was unworthy of attention.  It was about Lodge that the
opposition to Wilson gathered.

He believed in Americanism.  He believed that the essence of
American foreign policy should be to keep the country clear of
foreign entanglements unless our honor was involved, to be ready to
fight and fight hard the moment it became involved, and, when the
fight was over, to disentangle ourselves once more, stand aloof,
and mind our own business.  (Our honor, as Lodge saw it, was
involved if our prerogatives were threatened; to Woodrow Wilson, on
the other hand, national honor was a moral matter: only by shameful
conduct could a nation lose it.)  As chairman of the Foreign
Relations Committee, Lodge conceived it to be his duty to see that
the United States was not drawn into any international agreement
which would endanger this time-honored policy.  He did not believe
that the nations of the world could be trusted to spend the rest of
their years behaving like so many Boy Scouts; he knew that, to be
effective, a treaty must be serviceable in eras of bad feeling as
well as good; and he saw in the present one many an invitation to
trouble.

Senator Lodge was also a politician.  Knowing that his
Massachusetts constituents numbered among them hundreds of
thousands of Irish, he asked the overworked peace delegates at
Paris to give a hearing to Messrs. Frank P. Walsh, Edward F. Dunn,
and Michael J. Ryan, the so-called American Commission for Irish
Independence, though it was difficult for anyone but an Irishman
to say what Irish independence had to do with the Treaty.
Remembering, too, the size of the Italian vote, Lodge was willing
to embarrass President Wilson, in the midst of the Italian crisis
at the Conference, by saying in a speech to the Italians of Boston
that Italy ought to have Fiume and control the Adriatic.  Finally,
Lodge had no love for Woodrow Wilson.  So strongly did he feel that
Wilson's assumption of the right to speak for American opinion was
unwarranted and iniquitous, that when Henry White, the only
Republican on the American Peace Commission, sailed for Europe,
Lodge put into White's hands a secret memorandum containing his own
extremely un-Wilsonian idea of what peace terms the American people
would stand for, and suggested that White show it in strict
confidence to Balfour, Clemenceau, and Nitti, adding, "This
knowledge may in certain circumstances be very important to them in
strengthening their position."  No honorable man could have made
such a suggestion unless he believed the defeat of the President's
program to be essential to the country's welfare.

United with Lodge in skepticism about the Treaty, if in nothing
else, was a curious combination of men and of influences.  There
were hard-shelled tories like Brandegee; there were Western
idealists like Borah, who distrusted any association with foreign
diplomats as the blond country boy of the old-fashioned melodrama
distrusted association with the slick city man; there were chronic
dissenters like La Follette and Jim Reed; there were Republicans
who were not sorry to put the Democratic President into a hole, and
particularly a President who had appealed in war-time for the
election of a Democratic Congress; there were Senators anxious to
show that nobody could make a treaty without the advice as well as
the consent of the Senate, and get away with it; and there were not
a few who, in addition to their other reasons for opposition,
shared Lodge's personal distaste for Wilsonian rhetoric.  Outside
the Senate there was opposition of still other varieties.  The
Irish were easily inflamed against a League of Nations that gave
"six seats to England."  The Italians were ready to denounce a man
who had refused to let Italy have Fiume.  Many Germans, no matter
how loyal to the United States they may have been during the war,
had little enthusiasm for the hamstringing of the German Republic
and the denial to Germany of a seat in the League.  There were some
people who thought that America had got too little out of the
settlement.  And there were a vast number who saw in the League
Covenant, and especially in Article X, obligations with which they
were not willing to have the nation saddled.

Aside from all these groups, furthermore, there was another factor
to be reckoned with: the growing apathy of millions of Americans
toward anything which reminded them of the war.  They were fast
becoming sick and tired of the whole European mess.  They wanted to
be done with it.  They didn't want to be told of new sacrifices to
be made--they had made plenty.  Gone was the lift of the day when a
girl singing the "Doxology" in Times Square could express their
feelings about victory.  This was all over now, the Willard-Dempsey
fight and the arrival of the British dirigible R-34 at Long Island
were much more interesting.

On the 10th of July, 1919, the President, back in Washington again,
laid the Treaty of Versailles before the Senate, denying that the
compromises which had been accepted as inevitable by the American
negotiators "cut to the heart of any principle."  In his words as
he addressed the Senate was all the eloquence which only a few
months ago had swayed the world.  "The stage is set, the destiny
disclosed.  It has come about by no plan of our conceiving, but by
the hand of God who led us into the way.  We cannot turn back.  We
can only go forward, with lifted eyes and freshened spirit, to
follow the vision.  It was of this that we dreamed at our birth.
America shall in truth show the way.  The light streams upon the
path ahead and nowhere else."

Fine words--but they brought no overwhelming appeal from the
country for immediate ratification.  The country was tired of going
forward with lifted eyes, and Woodrow Wilson's prose style, now all
too familiar, could no longer freshen its spirit.  The Treaty--a
document as long as a novel--was referred to Lodge's Committee on
Foreign Relations, which settled down to study it at leisure.  A
month later Lodge rose in the Senate to express his preference for
national independence and security, to insist that Articles X and
XI of the League Covenant gave "other powers" the right "to call
out American troops and American ships to any part of the world,"
and to reply to Wilson:  "We would not have our politics distracted
and embittered by the dissensions of other lands.  We would not
have our country's vigor exhausted, or her moral force abated, by
everlasting meddling and muddling in every quarrel, great and
small, which afflicts the world."  And within a fortnight Lodge's
committee began voting--although by a narrow margin in each case--
to amend the Treaty; to give Shantung to China, to relieve the
United States of membership in international commissions, to give
the United States the same vote as Great Britain in the League, and
to shut off the representatives of the British dominions from
voting on questions affecting the British Empire.  It began to look
as if the process of making amendments and reservations might go on
indefinitely.  Woodrow Wilson decided to play his last desperate
card.  He would go to the people.  He would win them to his cause,
making a speaking trip through the West.

His doctors advised against it, for physically the President was
almost at the end of his rope.  Never robust, for months he had
been under a terrific strain.  Again and again during the Peace
Conference, Ray Stannard Baker would find him, after a long day of
nerve-wracking sessions, looking "utterly beaten, worn out, his
face quite haggard and one side of it twitching painfully."  At one
time he had broken down--had been taken with a sudden attack of
influenza, with violent paroxysms of coughing and a fever of 103°--
only to be up again and at his labors within a few days.  Now, in
September, his nerves frayed by continued overwork and by the
thought of possible failure of all he had given his heart and
strength for, he was like a man obsessed.  He could think of
nothing but the Treaty and the League.  He cared for nothing but to
bring them through to victory.  And so, despite all that those
about him could say, he left Washington on September 3rd to undergo
the even greater strain of a speaking trip--the preparation and
delivery of one or even two speeches a day in huge sweltering
auditoriums (and without amplifiers to ease the strain on his
voice); the automobile processions through city after city (during
which he had to stand up in his car and continuously wave his hat
to the crowds); the swarms of reporters, the hand-shaking, the
glare of publicity, and the restless sleep of one who travels night
in and night out on a swaying train.

Again and again on that long trip of his, Woodrow Wilson painted
the picture of the Treaty and the League that lived in his own
mind, a picture which bore fainter and fainter resemblance to the
reality.  He spoke of the "generous, high-minded, statesman-like
coöperation" which had been manifest at the Paris Conference; he
said that "the hearts of men like Clemenceau and Lloyd George and
Orlando beat with the people of the world," and that the heart of
humanity beat in the document which they had produced.  He
represented America, and indeed every other country, as thrilling
to a new ideal.  "The whole world is now in a state where you can
fancy that there are hot tears upon every cheek, and those hot
tears are tears of sorrow.  They are also tears of hope."  He
warned his audiences that if the Treaty were not ratified, disorder
would shake the foundations of the world, and he envisioned "this
great nation marching at the fore of a great procession" to "those
heights upon which there rests nothing but the pure light of the
justice of God."  Every one of those forty speeches was different
from every other, and each was perfectly ordered, beautifully
phrased, and thrilling with passion.  As an intellectual feat the
delivery of them was remarkable.  Yet each pictured a dream world
and a dream Treaty, and instinctively the country knew it.
(Perhaps, indeed, there were moments of terrible sanity when, as
the President lay sleepless in his private car, he himself knew how
far from the truth he had departed.)  The expected surge of public
opinion toward Wilson's cause failed to materialize.  The Senate
went right on discussing reservations.  On September 24th, the
first test vote went against the President 43 to 40.

On the night of the next day Wilson came to the end of his
strength.  For some time he had had indigestion and had slept
little.  After his long speech at Pueblo on the evening of
September 25th he could not sleep at all.  The train was stopped
and Mr. and Mrs. Wilson took a walk together on a country road.
When he returned to the train he was feverish and "as he slept
under a narcotic, his mouth drooled.  His body testified in many
ways to an impending crash."  The next morning when he tried to get
up he could hardly stand.  The train hurried on toward Washington
and all future speaking engagements were canceled.  Back to the
White House the sick man went.  A few days later a cerebral
thrombosis partially paralyzed his left side.  Another act of the
tragedy had come to an end.  He had given all he had to the cause,
and it had not been enough.


[5]


There followed one of the most extraordinary periods in the whole
history of the Presidency.  For weeks Woodrow Wilson lay seriously
ill, sometimes unable even to sign documents awaiting his
signature.  He could not sit up in a chair for over a month, or
venture out for a ride in the White House automobile for five
months.  During all the rest of his term--which lasted until March
4, 1921, seventeen months after his breakdown--he remained in
feeble and precarious health, a sick man lying in bed or sitting in
an invalid's chair, his left side and left leg and left arm
partially paralyzed.  Within the White House he was immured as if
in a hospital.  He saw almost nobody, transacted only the most
imperative business of his office.  The only way of communicating
with him was by letter, and as during most of this time all letters
must pass through the hands of Mrs. Wilson or Admiral Grayson or
others in the circle of attendants upon the invalid, and few were
answered, there was often no way of knowing who was responsible for
a failure to answer them or to act in accordance with the
suggestions embodied in them.  Sometimes, in fact, it was suspected
that it was Mrs. Wilson who was responsible for many a White House
decision--that the country was in effect being governed by a
regency.

With the President virtually unable to function, the whole
executive machine came almost to a stop.  It could, to be sure,
continue its routine tasks; and an aggressive member of the Cabinet
like Attorney-General Palmer could go blithely ahead rounding up
radicals and deporting them and getting out injunctions against
strikers as if he had the full wisdom and power of the Presidency
behind him; but most matters of policy waited upon the White House,
and after a while it became clear that guidance from that quarter
could hardly be expected.  There were vital problems clamoring for
the attention of the Executive: the high cost of living, the
subsequent breakdown of business prosperity and increase of
unemployment; the intense bitterness between capital and labor,
culminating in the great steel and coal strikes; the reorganization
of the government departments on a peace basis; the settlement of
innumerable questions of foreign policy unconnected with the Treaty
or the League.  Yet upon most of these problems the sick man had no
leadership to offer.  Meanwhile his influence with Congress and the
country, far from being increased by his martyrdom for the League,
dwindled to almost nothing.

The effect of this strange state of affairs upon official
Washington was well described a year or two later by Edward G.
Lowry in Washington Close-ups:

"For a long time the social-political atmosphere of Washington had
been one of bleak and chill austerity suffused and envenomed by
hatred of a sick chief magistrate that seemed to poison and blight
every human relationship.  The White House was isolated.  It had
no relation with the Capitol or the local resident and official
community.  Its great iron gates were closed and chained and
locked.  Policemen guarded its approaches.  It was in a void
apart. . . .  It all made for bleakness and bitterness and a
general sense of frustration and unhappiness."

Mr. Wilson's mind remained clear.  When the report went about that
he was unable "to discharge the powers and duties" of his office
and should, therefore, under the provisions of the Constitution, be
supplanted by the Vice-President (and reports of this sort were
frequent in those days) Senators Fall and Hitchcock visited him in
behalf of the Senate to determine his mental condition.  They found
him keenly alive to the humor of their embarrassing mission; he
laughed and joked with them and showed a complete grasp of the
subjects under discussion.  Nevertheless, something had gone out of
him.  His messages were lifeless, his mind was sterile of new
ideas.  He could not meet new situations in a new way: reading his
public documents, one felt that his brain was still turning over
old ideas, rearranging old phrases, that he was still living in
that dream world which he had built about himself during the days
of his fight for the League.

He had always been a lonely man; and now, as if pursued by some
evil demon, he broke with one after another of those who still
tried to serve him.  For long years Colonel House had been his
chief adviser as well as his affectionate friend.  During the
latter days of the Peace Conference a certain coolness had been
noticed in Wilson's attitude toward House.  This very conciliatory
man had been perhaps a little too conciliatory in his negotiations
during the President's absence from Paris: rightly or wrongly, the
President felt that House had unwittingly played into the hands of
the wily Clemenceau.  Nevertheless, House hoped, on his return from
Paris, to be able to effect a rapprochement between his broken
chief and the defiant Senators.  House wrote to suggest that Wilson
accept certain reservations to the Treaty.  There was no answer to
the letter.  House wrote again.  No answer.  There was never any
explanation.  The friendship and the political relationship, long
so valuable to the President and so influential in the direction of
policy, were both at an end--that was all one could say.

Robert Lansing had been at odds with the President over many things
before and during the Peace Conference; yet he remained as
Secretary of State and believed himself to be on good terms with
his chief.  During Wilson's illness, deciding that something must
be done to enable the government to transact business, he called
meetings of the Cabinet, which were held in the Cabinet Room at the
White House offices.  He was peremptorily dismissed.  Last of all
to go was the faithful Joe Tumulty, who had been Wilson's secretary
through fair weather and foul, in the Governor's office at Trenton
and for eight years at Washington.  Although the break with Tumulty
happened after Wilson left the White House, it deserves mention
here because it so resembles the others and reveals what poison was
working in the sick man's mind.  In April, 1922, there was to be
held in New York a Democratic dinner.  Before the dinner Tumulty
visited Wilson and got what he supposed to be an oral message to
the effect that Wilson would "support any man [for the Presidency]
who will stand for the salvation of America, and the salvation of
America is justice to all classes."  It seemed an innocuous
message, and after ten years of association with Wilson, Tumulty
had reason to suppose that he knew when Wilson might be quoted and
when he might not.  But as it happened, Governor Cox spoke at the
Democratic dinner, and the message, when Tumulty gave it, was
interpreted as an endorsement of Cox; whereupon Wilson wrote a curt
letter to the New York Times denying that he had authorized anybody
to give a message from him.  Tumulty at once wrote to Wilson to
explain that he had acted in good faith and to apologize like a
true friend for having caused the President embarrassment.  His
letter was "courteously answered by Mrs. Wilson" (to use Tumulty's
own subsequent words), but Wilson himself said not a word more.
Again Tumulty wrote loyally, saying that he would always regard Mr.
Wilson with affection and would be "always around the corner when
you need me."  There was no answer.

On the issue of the Treaty and the League Woodrow Wilson remained
adamant to the end.  Call it unswerving loyalty to principle or
call it stubbornness, as you will--he would consent to no
reservations except (when it was too late) some innocuous
"interpretive" ones, framed by Senator Hitchcock, which went down
to defeat.  While the President lay critically ill, the Senate went
right on proposing reservation after reservation, and on November
19, 1919, it defeated the Treaty.  Only a small majority of the
Senators were at that time irreconcilable opponents of the pact;
but they were enough to carry the day.  By combining forces with
Wilson's Democratic supporters who favored the passage of the
Treaty without change, they secured a majority against the long
list of reservations proposed by Lodge's committee.  Then by
combining forces with Lodge and the other reservationists, they
defeated the Treaty minus the reservations.  It was an ironical
result, but it stood.  A few months later the issue was raised
again, and once more the Treaty went down to defeat.  Finally a
resolution for a separate peace with Germany was passed by both
Houses--and vetoed by Wilson as "an action which would place an
ineffaceable stain upon the gallantry and honor of the United
States."  (A similar peace resolution was ultimately signed by
President Harding.)  President Wilson's last hope was that the
election of 1920 would serve as a "great and solemn referendum" in
which the masses of the people--those masses who, he had always
claimed, were on his side--would rise to vindicate him and the
country.  They rose--and swamped the pro-League candidate by a
plurality of seven million.

It is not pleasant to imagine the thoughts of the sick man in the
White House as defeat after defeat overwhelmed his cause and mocked
the great sacrifice he had made for it.  How soon the realization
came upon him that everything was lost we do not know.  After his
breakdown, as he lay ill in the White House, did he still hope?  It
seems likely.  All news from the outside world was filtered to him
through those about him.  With his life hanging in the balance, it
would have been quite natural--if not inevitable--for them to wish
to protect him from shock, to tell him that all was going well on
the Hill, that the tide had swung back again, that this token and
that showed that the American people would not fail him.  On such a
theory one might explain the break with Colonel House.  Possibly
any suggestion for compromise with the Lodge forces seemed to the
President simply a craven proposal for putting up the white flag in
the moment of victory.  But whether or not this theory is
justified, sooner or later the knowledge must have come, as vote
after vote turned against the Treaty, and must have turned the
taste of life to bitterness.  Wilson's icy repudiation of faithful
Joe Tumulty was the act of a man who has lost his faith in
humankind.


[6]


Back in the early spring of 1919, while Wilson was still at Paris,
Samuel G. Blythe, an experienced observer of the political scene,
had written in the Saturday Evening Post of the temper of the
leaders of the Republican Party as they faced the issues of peace:

"You cannot teach an Old Guard new tricks. . . .  The Old Guard
surrenders but it never dies.  Right at this minute, the ancient
and archaic Republicans who think they control the destinies of the
Republican Party--think they do!--are operating after the manner
and style of 1896.  The war hasn't made a dent in them. . . .  The
only way they look is backward."

The analysis was sound; but the Republican bosses, however open to
criticism they may have been as statesmen, were at least good
politicians.  They had their ears where a good politician's should
be--to the ground--and what they heard there was a rumble of
discontent with Wilson and all that he represented.  They
determined that at the election of 1920 they would choose as the
Republican standard-bearer somebody who would present, both to
themselves and to the country, a complete contrast with the
idealist whom they detested.  As the year rolled round and the date
for the Republican Convention approached, they surveyed the field.
The leading candidate was General Leonard Wood, a blunt soldier, an
inheritor of Theodore Roosevelt's creed of fearing God and keeping
your powder dry; he made a fairly good contrast with Wilson, but he
promised to be almost as unmanageable.  Then there was Governor
Lowden of Illinois--but he, too, did not quite fulfill the ideal.
Herbert Hoover, the reliever of Belgium and war-time Food
Administrator, was conducting a highly amateur campaign for the
nomination; the politicians dismissed him with a sour laugh.  Why,
this man Hoover hadn't known whether he was a Republican or
Democrat until the campaign began!  Hiram Johnson was in the field,
but he also might prove stiff-necked, although it was to his
advantage that he was a Senator.  The bosses' inspired choice was
none of these men: it was Warren Gamaliel Harding, a commonplace
and unpretentious Senator from Ohio.

Consider how perfectly Harding met the requirements.  Wilson was a
visionary who liked to identify himself with "forward-looking men";
Harding, as Mr. Lowry put it, was as old-fashioned as those wooden
Indians which used to stand in front of cigar stores, "a flower of
the period before safety razors."  Harding believed that
statesmanship had come to its apogee in the days of McKinley and
Foraker.  Wilson was cold; Harding was an affable small-town man,
at ease with "folks"; an ideal companion, as one of his friends
expressed it, "to play poker with all Saturday night."  Wilson had
always been difficult of access; Harding was accessible to the last
degree.  Wilson favored labor, distrusted businessmen as a class,
and talked of "industrial democracy"; Harding looked back with
longing eyes to the good old days when the government didn't bother
businessmen with unnecessary regulations, but provided them with
fat tariffs and instructed the Department of Justice not to have
them on its mind.  Wilson was at logger-heads with Congress, and
particularly with the Senate; Harding was not only a Senator, but a
highly amenable Senator.  Wilson had been adept at making enemies;
Harding hadn't an enemy in the world.  He was genuinely genial.
"He had no knobs, he was the same size and smoothness all the way
round," wrote Charles Willis Thompson.  Wilson thought in terms of
the whole world; Harding was for America first.  And finally,
whereas Wilson wanted America to exert itself nobly, Harding wanted
to give it a rest.  At Boston, a few weeks before the Convention,
he had correctly expressed the growing desire of the people of the
country and at the same time had unwittingly added a new word to
the language, when he said, "America's present need is not heroics
but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but
restoration; . . . not surgery but serenity."  Here was a man whom
a country wearied of moral obligations and the hope of the world
could take to its heart.

It is credibly reported that the decision in favor of Harding was
made by the Republican bosses as early as February, 1920, four
months before the Convention.  But it was not until four ballots
had been taken at the Convention itself--with Wood leading, Lowden
second, and Harding fifth--and the wilted delegates had dispersed
for the night, that the leaders finally concluded to put Harding
over.  Harding's political manager, an Ohio boss named Harry M.
Daugherty, had predicted that the Convention would be deadlocked
and that the nomination would be decided upon by twelve or thirteen
men "at two o'clock in the morning, in a smoke-filled room."  He
was precisely right.  The room was Colonel George Harvey's, in the
Hotel Blackstone.  Boies Penrose, lying mortally ill in
Philadelphia, had given his instructions by private wire to John T.
Adams.  The word was passed round, and the next afternoon Harding
was nominated.

The Democrats, relieved that Wilson's illness had disqualified him,
duly nominated another equally undistinguished Ohio politician,
Governor James M. Cox.  This nominee had to swallow the League of
Nations and did.  He swung manfully around the circle, shouting
himself hoarse, pointing with pride.  But he hadn't a chance in the
world.  Senator Harding remained in his average small town and
conducted a McKinley-esque front-porch campaign; he pitched
horseshoes behind the house with his Republican advisers like an
average small-town man and wore a McKinley carnation; he said just
enough in behalf of "an association of nations" to permit
inveterate Republicans who favored the League to vote for him
without twinges of conscience, and just enough against Wilson's
League to convince the majority that with him in the White House
they would not be called upon to march to the aid of suffering
Czechoslovakia; and the men and women of the United States woke up
on the morning of November 3rd to find that they had swept him into
the Presidency by a margin of sixteen million to nine million.
Governor Cox, the sacrificial victim, faded rapidly into the mists
of obscurity.

The United States had rendered its considered judgment on "our
fortunate duty to assist by example, by sober, friendly counsel,
and by material aid in the establishment of just democracy
throughout the world."  It had preferred normalcy.


[7]


Woodrow Wilson lived on in Washington--in a large and comfortable
house on S Street--for over three years after this final crushing
defeat.  Those who came to call upon him toward the end found a man
prematurely old, huddled in a big chair by the fireplace in a sunny
south room.  He sat with his hands in his lap, his head a little on
one side.  His face and body were heavier than they had been in his
days of power; his hair, now quite gray, was brushed back over an
almost bald head.  As he talked he did not move his head--only his
eyes followed his visitor, and his right arm swung back and forth
and occasionally struck the arm of the chair for emphasis as he
made his points.  The old-time urbanity was in his manner as he
said, "You must excuse my not rising; I'm really quite lame."  But
as he talked of the foreign policy of the United States and of his
enemies, his tone was full of hatred.  This was no time to sprinkle
rose-water round, he said; it was a time for fighting--there must
be a party fight, "not in a partisan spirit, but on party lines."
Still he clung to the last shred of hope that his party might
follow the gleam.  Of the men who had made the fulfillment of his
great project impossible he spoke in unsparing terms.  "I've got to
get well, and then I'm going out to get a few scalps."  So he
nursed his grievance; an old man, helpless and bitter.

On Armistice Day, five years after the triumphant close of the war,
he stood on the steps of his house--supported so that he should not
fall--and spoke to a crowd that had gathered to do him honor.  "I
am not," said he, "one of those that have the least anxiety about
the triumph of the principles I have stood for.  I have seen fools
resist Providence before and I have seen their destruction, as will
come upon these again--utter destruction and contempt.  That we
shall prevail is as sure as that God reigns."

Three months later he was dead.



III

THE BIG RED SCARE


If the American people turned a deaf ear to Woodrow Wilson's plea
for the League of Nations during the early years of the Post-war
Decade, it was not simply because they were too weary of foreign
entanglements and noble efforts to heed him.  They were listening
to something else.  They were listening to ugly rumors of a huge
radical conspiracy against the government and institutions of the
United States.  They had their ears cocked for the detonation of
bombs and the tramp of Bolshevist armies.  They seriously thought--
or at least millions of them did, millions of otherwise reasonable
citizens--that a Red revolution might begin in the United States
the next month or next week, and they were less concerned with
making the world safe for democracy than with making America safe
for themselves.

Those were the days when column after column of the front pages of
the newspapers shouted the news of strikes and anti-Bolshevist
riots; when radicals shot down Armistice Day paraders in the
streets of Centralia, Washington, and in revenge the patriotic
citizenry took out of the jail a member of the I. W. W.--a white
American, be it noted--and lynched him by tying a rope around his
neck and throwing him off a bridge; when properly elected members
of the Assembly of New York State were expelled (and their
constituents thereby disfranchised) simply because they had been
elected as members of the venerable Socialist Party; when a jury in
Indiana took two minutes to acquit a man for shooting and killing
an alien because he had shouted, "To hell with the United States";
and when the Vice-President of the nation cited as a dangerous
manifestation of radicalism in the women's colleges the fact that
the girl debaters of Radcliffe had upheld the affirmative in an
intercollegiate debate on the subject:  "Resolved, that the
recognition of labor unions by employers is essential to successful
collective bargaining."  It was an era of lawless and disorderly
defense of law and order, of unconstitutional defense of the
Constitution, of suspicion and civil conflict--in a very literal
sense, a reign of terror.

For this national panic there was a degree of justification.
During the war the labor movement had been steadily gaining in
momentum and prestige.  There had been hundreds of strikes, induced
chiefly by the rising prices of everything that the laboring-man
needed in order to live, but also by his new consciousness of his
power.  The government, in order to keep up production and maintain
industrial peace, had encouraged collective bargaining, elevated
Samuel Gompers to one of the seats of the mighty in the war
councils at Washington, and given the workers some reason to hope
that with the coming of peace new benefits would be showered upon
them.  Peace came, and hope was deferred.  Prices still rose,
employers resisted wage increases with a new solidarity and
continued to insist on long hours of work, Woodrow Wilson went off
to Europe in quest of universal peace and forgot all about the
laboring-men; and in anger and despair, they took up the only
weapon ready to their hand--the strike.  All over the country they
struck.  There were strikes in the building trades, among the
longshoremen, the stockyard workers, the shipyard men, the subway
men, the shoe-workers, the carpenters, the telephone operators, and
so on ad infinitum, until by November, 1919, the total number of
men and women on strike in the industrial states was estimated by
Alvin Johnson to be at least a million, with enough more in the non-
industrial states, or voluntarily abstaining from work though not
engaged in recognized strikes, to bring the grand total to
something like two million.

Nor were all of these men striking merely for recognition of their
unions or for increases in pay or shorter hours--the traditional
causes.  Some of them were demanding a new industrial order, the
displacement of capitalistic control of industry (or at least of
their own industry) by government control: in short, something
approaching a social régime.  The hitherto conservative railroad
workers came out for the Plumb Plan, by which the government would
continue to direct the railroads and labor would have a voice in
the management.  When in September, 1919, the United Mine Workers
voted to strike, they boldly advocated the nationalization of the
mines; and a delegate who began his speech before the crowded
convention with the words, "Nationalization is impossible," was
drowned out by boos and jeers and cries of "Coal operator!  Throw
him out!"  In the Northwest the I. W. W. was fighting to get the
whip hand over capital through One Big Union.  In North Dakota and
the adjoining grain states, two hundred thousand farmers joined
Townley's Non-Partisan League, described by its enemies--with some
truth--as an agrarian soviet.  (Townley's candidate for governor of
Minnesota in 1916, by the way, had been a Swedish-American named
Charles A. Lindbergh, who would have been amazed to hear that his
family was destined to be allied by marriage to that of a Morgan
partner.)  There was an unmistakable trend toward socialistic ideas
both in the ranks of labor and among liberal intellectuals.  The
Socialist party, watching the success of the Russian Revolution,
was flirting with the idea of violent mass-action.  And there was,
too, a rag-tag-and-bobtail collection of communists and anarchists,
many of them former Socialists, nearly all of them foreign-born,
most of them Russian, who talked of going still further, who took
their gospel direct from Moscow and, presumably with the aid of
Russian funds, preached it aggressively among the slum and factory-
town population.

This latter group of communists and anarchists constituted a very
narrow minority of the radical movement--absurdly narrow when we
consider all the to-do that was made about them.  Late in 1919
Professor Gordon S. Watkins of the University of Illinois, writing
in the Atlantic Monthly, set the membership of the Socialist party
at 39,000, of the Communist Labor party at from 10,000 to 30,000,
and of the Communist party at from 30,000 to 60,000.  In other
words, according to this estimate, the Communists could muster at
the most hardly more than one-tenth of one per cent of the adult
population of the country; and the three parties together--the
majority of whose members were probably content to work for their
ends by lawful means--brought the proportion to hardly more than
two-tenths of one per cent, a rather slender nucleus, it would
seem, for a revolutionary mass movement.

But the American businessman was in no mood to consider whether it
was a slender nucleus or not.  He, too, had come out of the war
with his fighting blood up, ready to lick the next thing that stood
in his way.  He wanted to get back to business and enjoy his
profits.  Labor stood in his way and threatened his profits.  He
had come out of the war with a militant patriotism; and mingling
his idealistic with his selfish motives, after the manner of all
men at all times, he developed a fervent belief that 100-per-cent
Americanism and the Welfare of God's Own Country and Loyalty to the
Teachings of the Founding Fathers implied the right of the
businessman to kick the union organizer out of his workshop.  He
had come to distrust anything and everything that was foreign, and
this radicalism he saw as the spawn of long-haired Slavs and
unwashed East-Side Jews.  And, finally, he had been nourished
during the war years upon stories of spies and plotters and
international intrigue.  He had been convinced that German
sympathizers signaled to one another with lights from mountain-tops
and put ground glass into surgical dressings, and he had formed the
habit of expecting tennis courts to conceal gun-emplacements.  His
credulity had thus been stretched until he was quite ready to
believe that a struggle of American laboring-men for better wages
was the beginning of an armed rebellion directed by Lenin and
Trotsky, and that behind every innocent professor who taught that
there were arguments for as well as against socialism there was a
bearded rascal from eastern Europe with a money bag in one hand and
a smoking bomb in the other.


[2]


The events of 1919 did much to feed this fear.  On the 28th of
April--while Wilson was negotiating the Peace Treaty at Paris, and
homecoming troops were parading under Victory Arches--an infernal
machine "big enough to blow out the entire side of the County-City
Building" was found in Mayor Ole Hanson's mail at Seattle.  Mayor
Hanson had been stumping the country to arouse it to the Red
Menace.  The following afternoon a colored servant opened a package
addressed to Senator Thomas R. Hardwick at his home in Atlanta,
Georgia, and a bomb in the package blew off her hands.  Senator
Hardwick, as chairman of the Immigration Committee of the Senate,
had proposed restricting immigration as a means of keeping out
Bolshevism.

At two o'clock the next morning Charles Caplan, a clerk in the
parcel post division of the New York Post Office, was on his way
home to Harlem when he read in a newspaper about the Hardwick bomb.
The package was described in this news story as being about six
inches long and three inches wide; as being done up in brown paper
and, like the Hanson bomb, marked with the (false, of course)
return address of Gimbel Brothers in New York.  There was something
familiar to Mr. Caplan about this description.  He thought he
remembered having seen some packages like that.  He racked his
brain, and suddenly it all came back to him.  He hurried back to
the Post Office--and found, neatly laid away on a shelf where he
had put them because of insufficient postage, sixteen little brown-
paper packages with the Gimbel return address on them.  They were
addressed to Attorney-General Palmer, Postmaster-General Burleson,
Judge Landis of Chicago, Justice Holmes of the Supreme Court,
Secretary of Labor Wilson, Commissioner of Immigration Caminetti,
J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and a number of other government
officials and capitalists.  The packages were examined by the
police in a neighboring firehouse, and found to contain bombs.
Others had started on their way through the mails; the total number
ultimately accounted for reached thirty-six.  (None of the other
packages were carelessly opened, it is hardly necessary to say; for
the next few days people in high station were very circumspect
about undoing brown-paper packages.)  The list of intended
recipients was strong evidence that the bombs had been sent by an
alien radical.

Hardly more than a month later there was a series of bomb
explosions, the most successful of which damaged the front of
Attorney-General Palmer's house in Washington.  It came in the
evening; Mr. Palmer had just left the library on the ground floor
and turned out the lights and gone up to bed when there was a bang
as of something hitting the front door, followed by the crash of
the explosion.  The limbs of a man blown to pieces were found
outside, and close by, according to the newspaper reports, lay a
copy of Plain Words, a radical publication.

The American public read the big headlines about these outrages and
savagely resolved to get back at "these radicals."

How some of them did so may be illustrated by two incidents out of
dozens which took place during those days.  Both of them occurred
on May Day of 1919--just after Mr. Caplan had found the brown-paper
packages on the Post Office shelf.  On the afternoon of May Day the
owners and staff of the New York Call, a Socialist paper, were
holding a reception to celebrate the opening of their new office.
There were hundreds of men, women, and children gathered in the
building for innocent palaver.  A mob of soldiers and sailors
stormed in and demanded that the "Bolshevist" posters be torn down.
When the demand was refused, they destroyed the literature on the
tables, smashed up the offices, drove the crowd out into the
street, and clubbed them so vigorously--standing in a semicircle
outside the front door and belaboring them as they emerged--that
seven members of the Call staff went to the hospital.

In Cleveland, on the same day, there was a Socialist parade headed
by a red flag.  An army lieutenant demanded that the flag be
lowered, and thereupon with a group of soldiers leaped into the
ranks of the procession and precipitated a free-for-all fight.  The
police came and charged into the mêlée--and from that moment a
series of riots began which spread through the city.  Scores of
people were injured, one man was killed, and the Socialist
headquarters were utterly demolished by a gang that defended
American institutions by throwing typewriters and office furniture
out into the street.

The summer of 1919 passed.  The Senate debated the Peace Treaty.
The House passed the Volstead Act.  The Suffrage Amendment passed
Congress and went to the States.  The R-34 made the first
transatlantic dirigible flight from England to Mineola, Long
Island, and returned safely.  People laughed over The Young
Visiters and wondered whether Daisy Ashford was really James M.
Barrie.  The newspapers denounced sugar-hoarders and food
profiteers as the cost of living kept on climbing.  The first
funeral by airplane was held.  Ministers lamented the increasing
laxity of morals among the young.  But still the fear and hatred of
Bolshevism gripped the American mind as new strikes broke out and
labor became more aggressive and revolution spread like a scourge
through Europe.  And then, in September, came the Boston police
strike, and the fear was redoubled.


[3]


The Boston police had a grievance: their pay was based on a minimum
of $1,100, out of which uniforms had to be bought, and $1,100 would
buy mighty little at 1919 prices.  They succumbed to the epidemic
of unionism, formed a union, and affiliated with the American
Federation of Labor.  Police Commissioner Curtis, a stiff-necked
martinet, had forbidden them to affiliate with any outside
organization, and he straightway brought charges against nineteen
officers and members of the union for having violated his orders,
found them guilty, and suspended them.  The Irish blood of the
police was heated, and they threatened to strike.  A committee
appointed by the mayor to adjust the dispute proposed a compromise,
but to Mr. Curtis this looked like surrender.  He refused to budge.
Thereupon, on September 9, 1919, a large proportion of the police
walked out at the time of the evening roll call.

With the city left defenseless, hoodlums proceeded to enjoy
themselves.  That night they smashed windows and looted stores.
Mayor Peters called for State troops.  The next day the Governor
called out the State Guard, and a volunteer police force began to
try to cope with the situation.  The Guardsmen and volunteer police--
ex-servicemen, Harvard students, cotton brokers from the Back Bay--
were inexperienced, and the hoodlums knew it.  Guardsmen were
goaded into firing on a mob in South Boston and killed two people.
For days there was intermittent violence, especially when Guardsmen
upheld the majesty of the law by breaking up crap games in that
garden of sober Puritanism, Boston Common.  The casualty list grew,
and the country looked on with dismay as the Central Labor Union,
representing the organized trade unionists of the city, debated
holding a general strike on behalf of the policemen.  Perhaps,
people thought, the dreaded revolution was beginning here and now.

But presently it began to appear that public opinion in Boston, as
everywhere else, was overwhelmingly against the police and that
theirs was a lost cause.  The Central Labor Union prudently decided
not to call a general strike.  Mr. Curtis discharged the nineteen
men whom he had previously suspended and began to recruit a new
force.

Realizing that the game was nearly up, old Samuel Gompers, down in
Washington, tried to intervene.  He wired to the Governor of
Massachusetts that the action of the Police Commissioner was
unwarranted and autocratic.

The Governor of Massachusetts was an inconspicuous, sour-faced man
with a reputation for saying as little as possible and never
jeopardizing his political position by being betrayed into a false
move.  He made the right move now.  He replied to Gompers that
there was "no right to strike against the public safety by anybody,
anywhere, any time"--and overnight he became a national hero.  If
there had been any doubt that the strike was collapsing, it
vanished when the press of the whole country applauded Calvin
Coolidge.  For many a week to come, amateur policemen, pressed into
emergency service, would come home at night to the water side of
Beacon Street to complain that directing traffic was even more
arduous than a whole day of golf at the Country Club; it took time
to recruit a new force.  But recruited it was, and Boston breathed
again.

Organized labor, however, was in striking mood.  A few days later,
several hundred thousand steel-workers walked out of the mills--
after Judge Gary had shown as stiff a neck as Commissioner Curtis
and had refused to deal with their union representatives.

Now there was little radicalism among the steel strikers.  Their
strike was a protest against low wages and long hours.  A
considerable proportion of them worked a twelve-hour day, and they
had a potentially strong case.  But the steel magnates had learned
something from the Boston Police Strike.  The public was jumpy and
would condemn any cause on which the Bolshevist label could be
pinned.  The steel magnates found little difficulty in pinning a
Bolshevist label on the strikers.  William Z. Foster, the most
energetic and intelligent of the strike organizers, had been a
syndicalist (and later, although even Judge Gary didn't know it
then, was to become a Communist).  Copies of a syndicalist pamphlet
by Foster appeared in newspaper offices and were seized upon avidly
to show what a revolutionary fellow he was.  Foster was trying to
substitute unions organized by industries for the ineffective craft
unions, which were at the mercy of a huge concern like the Steel
Corporation; therefore, according to the newspapers, Foster was a
"borer from within" and the strike was part of a radical
conspiracy.  The public was sufficiently frightened to prove more
interested in defeating borers from within than in mitigating the
lot of obscure Slavs who spent twelve hours a day in the steel
mills.

The great steel strike had been in progress only a few weeks when a
great coal strike impended.  In this case nobody needed to point
out to the public the Red specter lurking behind the striking
miners.  The miners had already succeeded in pinning the Bolshevist
label on themselves by their enthusiastic vote for nationalization;
and to the undiscriminating newspaper reader, public control of the
mining industry was all of a piece with communism, anarchism, bomb-
throwing, and general Red ruin.  Here was a new threat to the
Republic.  Something must be done.  The Government must act.

It acted.  A. Mitchell Palmer, Attorney-General of the United
States, who enjoyed being called the "Fighting Quaker," saw his
shining opportunity and came to the rescue of the Constitution.


[4]


There is a certain grim humor in the fact that what Mr. Palmer did
during the next three months was done by him as the chief legal
officer of an Administration which had come into power to bring
about the New Freedom.  Woodrow Wilson was ill in the White House,
out of touch with affairs, and dreaming only of his lamented
League: that is the only explanation.

On the day before the coal strike was due to begin, the Attorney-
General secured from a Federal Judge in Indianapolis an order
enjoining the leaders of the strike from doing anything whatever to
further it.  He did this under the provisions of a food-and-fuel-
control Act which forbade restriction of coal production during the
war.  In actual fact the war was not only over, it had been over
for nearly a year: but legally it was not over--the Peace Treaty
still languished in the Senate.  This food-and-fuel-control law, in
further actual fact, had been passed by the Senate after Senator
Husting had explicitly declared that he was "authorized by the
Secretary of Labor, Mr. Wilson, to say that the Administration does
not construe this bill as prohibiting strikes and peaceful
picketing and will not so construe it."  But Mr. Palmer either had
never heard of this assurance or cared nothing about it or decided
that unforeseen conditions had arisen.  He got his injunction, and
the coal strike was doomed, although the next day something like
four hundred thousand coal miners, now leaderless by decree of the
Federal Government, walked out of the mines.

The public knew nothing of the broken pledge, of course; it would
have been a bold newspaper proprietor who would have published
Senator Husting's statement, even had he known about it.  It took
genuine courage for a paper even to say, as did the New York World
at that time, that there was "no Bolshevist menace in the United
States and no I. W. W. menace that an ordinarily capable police
force is not competent to deal with."  The press applauded the
injunction as it had applauded Calvin Coolidge.  The Fighting
Quaker took heart.  His next move was to direct a series of raids
in which Communist leaders were rounded up for deportation to
Russia, via Finland, on the ship Buford, jocosely known as the
"Soviet Ark."  Again there was enthusiasm--and apparently there was
little concern over the right of the Administration to tear from
their families men who had as yet committed no crime.  Mr. Palmer
decided to give the American public more of the same; and thereupon
he carried through a new series of raids which set a new record in
American history for executive transgression of individual
constitutional rights.

Under the drastic war-time Sedition Act, the Secretary of Labor had
the power to deport aliens who were anarchists, or believed in or
advocated the overthrow of the government by violence, or were
affiliated with any organization that so believed or advocated.
Mr. Palmer now decided to "cooperate" with the Secretary of Labor
by rounding up the alien membership of the Communist party for
wholesale deportation.  His under-cover agents had already worked
their way into the organization; one of them, indeed, was said to
have become a leader in his district (which raised the philosophical
question whether government agents in such positions would have
imperiled their jobs by counseling moderation among the comrades).

In scores of cities all over the United States, when the Communists
were simultaneously meeting at their various headquarters on New
Year's Day of 1920, Mr. Palmer's agents and police and voluntary
aides fell upon them--fell upon everybody, in fact, who was in the
hall, regardless of whether he was a Communist or not (how could
one tell?)--and bundled them off to jail, with or without warrant.
Every conceivable bit of evidence--literature, membership lists,
books, papers, pictures on the wall, everything--was seized, with
or without a search warrant.  On this and succeeding nights other
Communists and suspected Communists were seized in their homes.
Over six thousand men were arrested in all, and thrust summarily
behind the bars for days or weeks--often without any chance to
learn what was the explicit charge against them.  At least one
American citizen, not a Communist, was jailed for days through some
mistake--probably a confusion of names--and barely escaped
deportation.  In Detroit, over a hundred men were herded into a
bullpen measuring twenty-four by thirty feet and kept there for a
week under conditions which the mayor of the city called
intolerable.  In Hartford, while the suspects were in jail the
authorities took the further precaution of arresting and
incarcerating all visitors who came to see them, a friendly call
being regarded as prima facie evidence of affiliation with the
Communist party.

Ultimately a considerable proportion of the prisoners were released
for want of sufficient evidence that they were Communists.
Ultimately, too, it was divulged that in the whole country-wide
raid upon these dangerous men--supposedly armed to the teeth--
exactly three pistols were found, and no explosives at all.  But at
the time the newspapers were full of reports from Mr. Palmer's
office that new evidence of a gigantic plot against the safety of
the country had been unearthed; and although the steel strike was
failing, the coal strike was failing, and any danger of a
socialistic régime, to say nothing of a revolution, was daily
fading, nevertheless to the great mass of the American people the
Bolshevist bogey became more terrifying than ever.

Mr. Palmer was in full cry.  In public statements he was reminding
the twenty million owners of Liberty bonds and the nine million
farm-owners and the eleven million owners of savings accounts that
the Reds proposed to take away all they had.  He was distributing
boiler-plate propaganda to the press, containing pictures of horrid-
looking Bolsheviks with bristling beards, and asking if such as
these should rule over America.  Politicians were quoting the
suggestion of Guy Empey that the proper implements for dealing with
the Reds could be "found in any hardware store," or proclaiming,
"My motto for the Reds is S. O. S.--ship or shoot.  I believe we
should place them all on a ship of stone, with sails of lead, and
that their first stopping-place should be hell."  College graduates
were calling for the dismissal of professors suspected of
radicalism; schoolteachers were being made to sign oaths of
allegiance; businessmen with unorthodox political or economic ideas
were learning to hold their tongues if they wanted to hold their
jobs.  Hysteria had reached its height.


[5]


Nor did it quickly subside.  For the professional super-patriot
(and assorted special propagandists disguised as super-patriots)
had only begun to fight.  Innumerable patriotic societies had
sprung up, each with its executive secretary, and executive
secretaries must live, and therefore must conjure up new and ever
greater menaces.  Innumerable other gentlemen now discovered that
they could defeat whatever they wanted to defeat by tarring it
conspicuously with the Bolshevist brush.  Big-navy men, believers
in compulsory military service, drys, anti-cigarette campaigners,
anti-evolution Fundamentalists, defenders of the moral order, book
censors, Jew-haters, Negro-haters, landlords, manufacturers,
utility executives, upholders of every sort of cause, good, bad,
and indifferent, all wrapped themselves in Old Glory and the mantle
of the Founding Fathers and allied their opponents with Lenin.  The
open shop, for example, became the "American plan."  For years a
pestilence of speakers and writers continued to afflict the country
with tales of "sinister and subversive agitators."  Elderly ladies
in gilt chairs in ornate drawing-rooms heard from executive
secretaries that the agents of the government had unearthed new
radical conspiracies too fiendish to be divulged before the proper
time.  Their husbands were told at luncheon clubs that the colleges
were honeycombed with Bolshevism.  A cloud of suspicion hung in the
air, and intolerance became an American virtue.

William J. Burns put the number of resident Communists at 422,000,
and S. Stanwood Menken of the National Security League made it
600,000--figures at least ten times as large as those of Professor
Watkins.  Dwight Braman, president of the Allied Patriotic
Societies, told Governor Smith of New York that the Reds were
holding 10,000 meetings in the country every week and that 350
radical newspapers had been established in the preceding six
months.

But not only the Communists were dangerous; they had, it seemed,
well-disguised or unwitting allies in more respectable circles.
The Russian Famine Fund Committee, according to Ralph Easley of the
National Civic Federation, included sixty pronounced Bolshevist
sympathizers.  Frederick J. Libby of the National Council for the
Reduction of Armaments was said by one of the loudest of the super-
patriots to be a Communist educated in Russia who visited Russia
for instructions (although as a matter of fact the pacifist
churchman had never been in Russia, had no affiliations with
Russia, and had on his board only American citizens).  The Nation,
The New Republic, and The Freeman were classed as "revolutionary"
by the executive secretary of the American Defense Society.  Even
The Survey was denounced by the writers of the Lusk Report as
having "the endorsement of revolutionary groups."  Ralph Easley
pointed with alarm to the National League of Women Voters, the
Federal Council of Churches, and the Foreign Policy Association.
There was hardly a liberal civic organization in the land at which
these protectors of the nation did not bid the citizenry to
shudder.  Even the National Information Bureau, which investigated
charities and was headed by no less a pillar of New York
respectability than Robert W. DeForest, fell under suspicion.  Mr.
DeForest, it was claimed, must be too busy to pay attention to what
was going on; for along with him were people like Rabbi Wise and
Norman Thomas and Oswald Villard and Jane Addams and Scott Nearing
and Paul U. Kellogg, many of whom were tainted by radical
associations.

There was danger lurking in the theater and the movies.  The Moscow
Art Theater, the Chauve Souris, and Fyodor Chaliapin were viewed by
Mr. Braman of the Allied Patriotic Societies as propagandizing
agencies of the Soviets; and according to Mr. Whitney of the
American Defense Society, not only Norma Talmadge but--yes--Charlie
Chaplin and Will Rogers were mentioned in "Communist files."

Books, too, must be carefully scanned for the all-pervasive evil.
Miss Hermine Schwed, speaking for the Better America Federation, a
band of California patriots, disapproved of Main Street because it
"created a distaste for the conventional good life of the
American," and called John Dewey and James Harvey Robinson "most
dangerous to young people."  And as for the schools and colleges,
here the danger was more insidious and far-reaching still.
According to Mr. Whitney, Professors Felix Frankfurter and Zacharia
Chafee (sic) of Harvard and Frederick Wells Williams and Max
Solomon Mandell of Yale were "too wise not to know that their
words, publicly uttered and even used in classrooms, are, to put it
conservatively, decidedly encouraging to the Communists."  The
schools must be firmly taken in hand: textbooks must be combed for
slights to heroes of American history, none but conservative
speakers must be allowed within the precincts of school or college,
and courses teaching reverence for the Constitution must be
universal and compulsory.

The effect of these admonitions was oppressive.  The fear of the
radicals was accompanied and followed by a fear of being thought
radical.  If you wanted to get on in business, to be received in
the best circles of Gopher Prairie or Middletown, you must appear
to conform.  Any deviation from the opinions of Judge Gary and Mr.
Palmer was viewed askance.  A liberal journalist, visiting a
formerly outspoken Hoosier in his office, was not permitted to talk
politics until his frightened host had closed and locked the door
and closed the window (which gave on an airshaft perhaps fifty feet
wide, with offices on the other side where there might be ears to
hear the words of heresy).  Said a former resident of a Middle
Western city, returning to it after a long absence:  "These people
are all afraid of something.  What is it?"  The authors of
Middletown quoted a lonely political dissenter forced into
conformity by the iron pressure of public opinion as saying,
bitterly, "I just run away from it all to my books."  He dared not
utter his economic opinions openly; to deviate ever so little from
those of the Legion and the Rotary Club would be to brand himself
as a Bolshevist.

"America," wrote Katharine Fullerton Gerould in Harper's Magazine
as late as 1922, "is no longer a free country, in the old sense;
and liberty is, increasingly, a mere rhetorical figure. . . .  No
thinking citizen, I venture to say, can express in freedom more
than a part of his honest convictions.  I do not of course refer to
convictions that are frankly criminal.  I do mean that everywhere,
on every hand, free speech is choked off in one direction or
another.  The only way in which an American citizen who is really
interested in all the social and political problems of his country
can preserve any freedom of expression, is to choose the mob that
is most sympathetic to him, and abide under the shadow of that
mob."

Sentiments such as these were expressed so frequently and so
vehemently in later years that it is astonishing to recall that in
1922 it required some temerity to put them in print.  When Mrs.
Gerould's article was published, hundreds of letters poured into
the Harper's office and into her house--letters denouncing her in
scurrilous terms as subversive and a Bolshevist, letters rejoicing
that at last someone had stood up and told the truth.  To such a
point had the country been carried by the shoutings of the super-
patriots.


[6]


The intolerance of those days took many forms.  Almost inevitably
it took the form of an ugly flare-up of feeling against the Negro,
the Jew, and the Roman Catholic.  The emotions of group loyalty and
of hatred, expanded during war-time and then suddenly denied their
intended expression, found a perverted release in the persecution
not only of supposed radicals, but also of other elements which to
the dominant American group--the white Protestants--seemed alien or
"un-American."

Negroes had migrated during the war by the hundreds of thousands
into the industrial North, drawn thither by high wages and by the
openings in mill and factory occasioned by the draft.  Wherever
their numbers increased they had no choice but to move into
districts previously reserved for the whites, there to jostle with
the whites in street cars and public places, and in a hundred other
ways to upset the delicate equilibrium of racial adjustment.  In
the South as well as in the North the Negroes had felt the
stirrings of a new sense of independence; had they not been called
to the colors just as the whites had been, and had they not been
fighting for democracy and oppressed minorities?  When peace came,
and they found they were to be put in their place once more, some
of them showed their resentment; and in the uneasy atmosphere of
the day this was enough to kindle the violent racial passions which
smoulder under the surface of human nature.  Bolshevism was bad
enough, thought the whites, but if the niggers ever got beyond
control . . .

One sultry afternoon in the summer of 1919 a seventeen-year-old
colored boy was swimming in Lake Michigan by a Chicago bathing-
beach.  Part of the shore had been set aside by mutualunderstanding
for the use of the whites, another part for the Negroes.  The boy
took hold of a railroad tie floating in the water and drifted
across the invisible line.  Stones were thrown at him; a white
boy started to swim toward him.  The colored boy let go of
the railroad tie, swam a few strokes, and sank.  He was drowned.
Whether he had been hit by any of the stones was uncertain, but the
Negroes on the shore accused the whites of stoning him to death,
and a fight began.  This small incident struck the match that set
off a bonfire of race hatred.  The Negro population of Chicago
had doubled in a decade, the blacks had crowded into white
neighborhoods, and nerves were raw.  The disorder spread to other
parts of the city--and the final result was that for nearly a week
Chicago was virtually in a state of civil war; there were mobbings
of Negroes, beatings, stabbings, gang raids through the Negro
district, shootings by Negroes in defense, and wanton destruction
of houses and property; when order was finally restored it was
found that fifteen whites and twenty-three Negroes had been killed,
five hundred and thirty-seven people had been injured, and a
thousand had been left homeless and destitute.

Less than a year later there was another riot of major proportions
in Tulsa.  Wherever the colored population had spread, there was a
new tension in the relations between the races.  It was not
alleviated by the gospel of white supremacy preached by speakers
and writers such as Lothrop Stoddard, whose Rising Tide of Color
proclaimed that the dark-skinned races constituted a worse threat
to Western civilization than the Germans or the Bolsheviks.

The Jews, too, fell under the suspicion of a majority bent upon an
undiluted Americanism.  Here was a group of inevitably divided
loyalty, many of whose members were undeniably prominent among the
Bolsheviki in Russia and among the radical immigrants in America.
Henry Ford discovered the menace of the "International Jew," and
his Dearborn Independent accused the unhappy race of plotting the
subjugation of the whole world and (for good measure) of being the
source of almost every American affliction, including high rents,
the shortage of farm labor, jazz, gambling, drunkenness, loose
morals, and even short skirts.  The Ford attack, absurd as it was,
was merely an exaggerated manifestation of a widespread anti-
Semitism.  Prejudice became as pervasive as the air.  Landlords
grew less disposed to rent to Jewish tenants, and schools to admit
Jewish boys and girls; there was a public scandal at Annapolis over
the hazing of a Jewish boy; Harvard College seriously debated
limiting the number of Jewish students; and all over the country
Jews felt that a barrier had fallen between them and the Gentiles.
Nor did the Roman Catholics escape censure in the regions in which
they were in a minority.  Did not the members of this Church take
their orders from a foreign pope, and did not the pope claim
temporal power, and did not Catholics insist upon teaching their
children in their own way rather than in the American public
schools, and was not all this un-American and treasonable?

It was in such an atmosphere that the Ku Klux Klan blossomed into
power.

The Klan had been founded as far back as 1915 by a Georgian named
Colonel William Joseph Simmons, but its first five years had been
lean.  When 1920 arrived, Colonel Simmons had only a few hundred
members in his amiable patriotic and fraternal order, which drew
its inspiration from the Ku Klux Klan of Reconstruction days and
stood for white supremacy and sentimental Southern idealism in
general.  But in 1920 Simmons put the task of organizing the Order
into the hands of one Edward Y. Clarke of the Southern Publicity
Association.  Clarke's gifts of salesmanship, hitherto expended on
such blameless causes as the Roosevelt Memorial Association and the
Near East Relief, were prodigious.  The time was ripe for the Klan,
and he knew it.  Not only could it be represented to potential
members as the defender of the white against the black, of Gentile
against Jew, and of Protestant against Catholic, and thus trade on
all the newly inflamed fears of the credulous small-towner, but its
white robe and hood, its flaming cross, its secrecy, and the
preposterous vocabulary of its ritual could be made the vehicle for
all that infantile love of hocus-pocus and mummery, that lust for
secret adventure, which survives in the adult whose lot is cast in
drab places.  Here was a chance t