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PRIMARY DOCUMENTS: SOCIAL CONFLICT DURING THE ROARING 20S
Directions: Read the primary documents and answer the questions.
How a “Red” is Made – Robert Benchley (1919)
1) What was Peters’ general feeling about joining WWI?
2) What was the subject of Peters’ speech?
3) After his name was published in the papers, why do you suppose none of Peters friends would talk to him?
4) Emma Goldman was a prominent anarchist in the early 20th century. She was eventually deported during the
Red Scare of 1919-1920. She was also one of the first advocates for the rights of homosexuals and was a
prominent suffragette. J. Edgar Hoover, future head of the FBI, called her one of the most dangerous people in
America. What, prior to the accusations against his patriotism, had Peters suggested be done with her?
5) Why did Peters eventually become an anarcho-communist?
6) What was Peters arrested for?
7) What did the Times say was the only solution to people like Peters?
8) Satire is written with a purpose beyond simply entertainment. It generally presents a social or political critique.
What point is Benchley trying to make in his satire?
Race Riots in 1919 – Unknown Author (1919)
9) What injustices directed at African-Americans does the author list in her letter?
10) Does the author seem to think that the riots were aggressive or defensive? Explain.
The Ku Klux Klan Meets Defiance in Kansas – William Allen White (1921)
11) What three types of people does White say that the Klan was opposed to?
12) What does the author think about the Klan’s plan to change American government and ideology by force?
13) Despite the fact that this author (and apparently the people of Emporia, KS) is very anti-KKK, around
5,000,000 Americans were members of the KKK between 1920 and 1925. Why do you suppose this was?
A View of Prohibition – Count Felix von Luckner (1927)
14) How did the people in the hotel get alcohol?
15) Where was the alcohol hidden in the car? How did Luckner discover the hiding place?
16) What other three places does Luckner say that he discovered alcohol?
17) What evidence for the success of prohibition does Luckner say that he saw?
18) What are Luckner’s concerns about the social climate and created during prohibition?
19) Luckner says that more people were drinking simply because it was illegal. Does this make sense to you?
20) How does Luckner say that the prohibition law came to be passed?
Big City Crime – Frederick Lewis Allen (1931)
21) Why was there money to be made by prhobition?
22) Why was Capone brought in by Torrio? What did his business card say that he did?
23) What did Capone begin to do that allowed him to become the “big shot” and replace Torrio?
24) What three ways does Allen say that enemy gangsters were eliminated?
25) Briefly describe the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929.
26) Allen says that six things led to the rise of gang violence. What were they?
27) How much money was Capone making annually?
28) Why do you suppose gang violence in the same style as it developed in Chicago spread out of Chicago?
HOW A “RED” IS MADE – ROBERT BENCHLEY (1919)
During the "Red Scare" of 1919-1920, the United States government arrested many political and labor agitators
and deported immigrants, many of whom had become American citizens. Humorist Robert Benchley’s view of the
situation produced the following satirical piece on the "Red Menace," which was first published in the “Nation”
on March 15, 1919.
You couldn’t have asked for anyone more regular than Peters. He was an eminently safe citizen. Although
not rich himself, he never chafed under the realization that there were others who possessed great wealth. In fact,
the thought gave him rather a comfortable feeling. Furthermore, he was one of the charter members of the war.
Long before President Wilson saw the light, Peters was advocating the abolition of German from the publicschool curriculum. There was, therefore, absolutely nothing in his record which would in the slightest degree alter
the true blue of a patriotic litmus. And he considered himself a liberal when he admitted that there might be
something in this man Gompers [Samuel Gompers, labor leader], after all. That is how safe he was.
But one night he made a slip. . . . Shortly before the United States entered the war, Peters made a speech
at a meeting of the Civic League in his home town. His subject was: "Interurban Highways: Their Development in
the Past and Their Possibilities for the Future." So far, 100 percent American. But, in the course of his talk, he
happened to mention the fact that war, as an institution, has almost always had an injurious effect on public
improvements of all kinds. In fact (and note this well—the government's sleuth in the audience did) he said that,
all other things being equal, if he were given his choice of war or peace in the abstract, he would choose peace as
a condition under which to live. Then he went on to discuss the comparative values of macadam and wood blocks
for paving.
In the audience was a civilian representative of the Military Intelligence Service. He had a premonition
that some sort of attempt was going to be made at this meeting of the Civic League to discredit the war and
America's imminent participation there in. And he was not disappointed (no Military Intelligence sleuth ever is),
for in the remark of Peters, derogatory to war as an institution, his sharp ear detected the accent of the
Wilhelmstrasse [the German Foreign Ministry].
Time went by. The United States entered the war, and Peters bought Liberty Bonds. He didn’t join the
Army, it is true, but, then, neither did James M. Beck [prominent politician and lawyer], and it is an open secret
that Mr. Beck was for the war. Peters did what a few slangy persons called "his bit," and not without a certain
amount of pride. But he did not . . . know that there was an investigation going on in Washington to determine the
uses to which German propaganda money had been put. That is, he didn’t know it until he opened his newspaper
one morning and, with that uncanny precipitation with which a man’s eye lights on his own name, discovered that
he had been mentioned in the dispatches. . . .
And then came the list. Peters’ eye ran instinctively down to the place where . . . the name "Horace W.
Peters, Pacifist Lecturer, Matriculated at Germantown (Pa.) Military School." Above his name was that of Emma
Goldman, "Anarchist." Below came that of Fritz von Papen, "agent of the Imperial German Government in
America," and Jeremiah O’Leary, "Irish and Pro-German Agitator."
Peters was stunned. He telegraphed to his senator at Washington and demanded that the outrageous libel
be retracted. He telegraphed to the Military Intelligence Office and demanded to know who was the slanderer who
had traduced him, and who . . . this Captain Whatsisname was who had submitted the report. He telegraphed to
Secretary Baker and he cabled to the President. And he was informed, by return stagecoach, that his telegrams had
been received and would be brought to the attention of the addressees at the earliest possible moment.
Then he went out to look up some of his friends, to explain that there had been a terrible mistake
somewhere. But he was coolly received. No one could afford to be seen talking with him after what had
happened. His partner merely said: "Bad business, Horace. Bad business!" The elevator starter pointed him out to
a subordinate, and Peters heard him explain: "That’s Peters, Horace W. Peters. Did’je see his name in the papers
this morning with them other German spies?" At the club, little groups of his friends dissolved awkwardly when
they saw him approaching, and, after distant nods, disappeared in an aimless manner. After all, you could hardly
blame them.
The next morning the Tribune had a double-leaded editorial entitled "Oatmeal," in which it was stated
that the disclosures in Washington were revealing the most insidious of all kinds of German propaganda—that
disseminated by supposedly respectable American citizens. "It is not a tangible propaganda. It is an emotional
propaganda. To the unwary it may resemble real-estate news, or perhaps a patriotic song, but it is the pap of
Prussianism. As an example, we need go no further than Horace W. Peters. Mr. Peters’ hobby was interurban
highways. A very pretty hobby, Mr. Peters, but it won’t do. It won’t do." The Times ran an editorial saying,
somewhere in the midst of a solid slab of type, that no doubt it would soon be found that Mr. Peters nourished
Bolshevist sentiments, along with his teammate Emma Goldman. Emma Goldman! How Peters hated that
woman! He had once written a letter to this very paper about her, advocating her electrocution.
He dashed out again in a search of someone to whom he could explain. But the editorials had done their
work. The doorman at the club presented him with a letter from the House Committee saying that, at a special
meeting, it had been decided that he had placed himself in a position offensive to the loyal members of the club
and that it was with deep regret that they informed him, etc. As he stumbled out into the street, he heard someone
whisper to an out-of-town friend, "There goes Emma Goldman’s husband."
As the days went by, things grew unbelievably worse. He was referred to in public meetings whenever an
example of civic treachery was in order. A signed advertisement in the newspapers protesting . . . against the
spread of Bolshevism in northern New Jersey, mentioned a few prominent snakes in the grass, such as Trotzky,
Victor Berger, Horace W. Peters, and Emma Goldman.
Then something snapped. Peters began to let his hair grow long and neglected his linen. Each time he was
snubbed on the street he uttered a queer guttural sound and made a mark in a little book he carried about with him.
He bought a copy of "Colloquial Russian at a Glance," and began picking out inflammatory sentences from the
Novy Mir. His wife packed up and went to stay with her sister when he advocated, one night at dinner, the
communization of women. The last prop of respectability having been removed, the descent was easy. Emma
Goldman, was it? Very well, then, Emma Goldman it should be! Bolshevist, was he? They had said it! "After all,
who is to blame for this?" he mumbled to himself. "Capitalism! Militarism! Those Prussians in the Intelligence
Department and the Department of Justice! The damnable bourgeoisie who sit back and read their Times and their
Tribune and believe what they read there!" He had tried explanations. He had tried argument. There was only one
thing left. He found it on page 112 of a little book of Emma Goldman’s that he always carried around with him.
You may have read about Peters the other day. He was arrested, wearing a red shirt over his business
cutaway and carrying enough TNT to shift the Palisades back into the Hackensack marshes. He was identified by
an old letter in his pocket from Henry Cabot Lodge Republican thanking him for a telegram of congratulation
Peters had once sent him on the occasion of a certain speech in the Senate.
The next morning the Times said, editorially, that it hoped the authorities now saw that the only way to
crush Bolshevism was by the unrelenting use of force.
RACE RIOTS IN 1919 – UNKNOWN AUTHOR (1919)
Many African Americans had moved North during World War I to find work. Returning soldiers faced tough
competition for jobs, and race riots broke out in many Northern cities in 1919. One African American woman
wrote a letter to “The Crisis”, a magazine published by the NAACP, explaining her reaction to the riot in
Washington, D.C.
The Washington riot gave me the thrill that comes once in a life time. I…read between the lines of our
morning paper that at last our men had stood like men, struck back, were no longer dumb driven cattle. When I
could no longer read for my streaming tears, I stood up, alone in my room, held both hands high over my head
and exclaimed aloud: "Oh I thank God, thank God." . . . Only colored women of the South know the extreme in
suffering and humiliation.
We know how many insults we have borne silently, for we have hidden many of them from our men
because we did not want them to die needlessly in our defense . . . , the deep humiliation of sitting in the Jim
Crow part of a street car and hear the white men laugh and discuss us, point out the good and bad points of our
bodies. . . .
And, too, a woman loves a strong man, she delights to feel that her man can protect her, fight for her if
necessary, save her. No woman loves a weakling, a coward be she white or black, and some of us have been near
thinking our men cowards, but thank God for Washington colored men! All honor to them, for they first blazed
the way and right swiftly did Chicago men follow [during the 1919 race riot]. They put new hope, a new vision
into their almost despairing women.
God Grant that our men everywhere refrain from strife, provoke no quarrel, but that they protect their
women and homes at any cost.
A Southern Colored Woman
THE KU KLUX KLAN MEETS DEFIANCE IN KANSAS – WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE (1921)
William Allen White, a writer and editor of the Emporia (Kansas) “Gazette”, wrote this letter in 1921 to Herbert
Bayard Swope, executive editor of the New York “World” and opponent of the Klan. "Suckers with $10 each to
squander" is a reference to the Klan’s practice of giving organizers a cut of each membership fee.
An organizer of the Ku-Klux Klan was in Emporia the other day, and the men whom he invited to join his
band at ten dollars per join turned him down. Under the leadership of Dr. J. B. Brickell and following their own
judgment after hearing his story, the Emporians told him that they had no time for him. The proposition seems to
be:
Anti foreigners
Anti Catholics
Anti Negroes
There are, of course, bad foreigners and good ones, good Catholics and bad ones, and all kinds of
Negroes. To make a case against a birthplace, a religion, or a race is wickedly un-American and cowardly. The
whole trouble with the Ku-Klux Klan is that it is based upon such deep foolishness that it is bound to be a menace
to good government in any community. Any man fool enough to be Imperial Wizard would have power without
responsibility and both without any sense. That is social dynamite.
American institutions, our courts, our legislators, our executive officers are strong enough to keep the
peace and promote justice and good will in the community. If they are not, then the thing to do is to change these
institutions and do it quickly, but always legally. For a self-constituted body of moral idiots, who would substitute
the findings of the Ku-Klux Klan for the processes of law to try to better conditions, would be a most unAmerican outrage which every good citizen should resent.
It is to the everlasting credit of Emporia that the organizer found no suckers with $10 each to squander
here. Whatever Emporia may be otherwise, it believes in law and order, and absolute freedom under the
constitution for every man, no matter what birth or creed or race, to speak and meet and talk and act as a free lawabiding citizen. The picayunish cowardice of a man who would substitute Klan rule and mob law for what our
American fathers have died to establish and maintain should prove what a cheap screw outfit the Klan is.
A VIEW OF PROHIBITION – COUNT FELIX VON LUCKNER (1927)
The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibiting the sale, transport, and manufacture (though not the
consumption) of alcoholic beverages went into effect in January, 1920. What followed was mass evasion of the
law by a large number of people. Enforcement of Prohibition was almost impossible. A German visitor to the
country in 1927 described the situation.
I suppose I should set forth my investigations into the subject of prohibition. Here is a new experience, at
a club’s celebration. Each man appears with an impressive portfolio. Each receives his glass of pure water; above
the table the law reigns supreme. The brief cases rest under the chairs. Soon they are drawn out, the merry noise
of popping corks is heard, and the guzzling begins.
Or, I come to a banquet in a hotel dining room. On the table are the finest wines. I ask, "how come?"
answer: "Well, two of our members lived in the hotel for eight days and every day brought in cargoes of this
costly stuff in their suitcases." My informant was madly overjoyed at this cunning
My first experience with the ways of prohibition came while we were being entertained by friends in New
York. It was bitterly cold. My wife and I rode in the rumble seat of the car, while the American and his wife,
bundled in furs, sat in front. Having wrapped my companion in pillows and blankets so thoroughly that only her
nose showed, I came across another cushion that seemed to hang uselessly on the side. "Well," I thought, "this is a
fine pillow; since everybody else is so warm and cozy, I might as well do something for my own comfort. This
certainly does no one any good hanging on the wall." Sitting on it, I gradually noticed a dampness in the
neighborhood, that soon mounted to a veritable flood. The odor of fine brandy told me I had burst my host’s
peculiar liquor flask.
In time, I learned that not everything in America was what it seemed to be. I discovered, for instance, that
a spare tire could be filled with substances other than air, that one must not look too deeply into certain
binoculars, and that the Teddy Bears that suddenly acquired tremendous popularity among the ladies very often
had hollow metal stomachs.
"But," it might be asked, "where do all these people get the liquor?" Very simple. Prohibition has created
a new, a universally respected, a well-beloved, and a very profitable occupation, that of the bootlegger who takes
care of the importation of the forbidden liquor. Everyone knows this, even the powers of government. But this
profession is beloved because it is essential, and it is respected because its pursuit is clothed with an element of
danger and with a sporting risk. Now and then one is caught, that must happen pro forma and then he must do
time or, if he is wealthy enough, get someone to do time for him.
Yet it is undeniable that prohibition has in some respects been signally successful. The filthy saloons, the
gin mills which formerly flourished on every corner and in which the laborer once drank off half his wages, have
disappeared. Now he can instead buy his own car, and ride off for a weekend or a few days with his wife and
children in the country or at the sea. But, on the other hand, a great deal of poison and methyl alcohol has taken
the place of the good old pure whiskey. The number of crimes and misdemeanors that originated in drunkenness
has declined. But by contrast, a large part of the population has become accustomed to disregard and to violate the
law without thinking. The worst is, that precisely as a consequence of the law, the taste for alcohol has spread
ever more widely among the youth. The sporting attraction of the forbidden and the dangerous leads to violations.
My observations have convinced me that many fewer would drink were it not illegal.
And how, it will be asked, did this law get onto the statute books? Through the war. In America there was
long a well-developed temperance movement and many individual states already had prohibition laws. During the
war it was not difficult to extend the force of those laws to the whole of the United States. Prohibition was at first
introduced only for the period of the war. For the mass of the people it was very surprising when Congress in
1920 adopted the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution which made it a crime to manufacture, transport, or
sell intoxicating liquor. The dry states had imposed their will on the whole Union.
BIG CITY CRIME – FREDERICK LEWIS ALLEN (1931)
The last days of the "roaring twenties" were awash in illegal alcohol and crime. Frederick Lewis Allen wrote
about the famous gang leader Al Capone in “Only Yesterday”, and excerpts from his 1931 book follow.
In 1929 when prohibition was very young, Johnny Torrio of Chicago had an inspiration. Torrio was a
formidable figure in the Chicago underworld. He had discovered that there was big money in the newly outlawed
liquor business. He was fired with the hope of getting control of the dispensation of booze to the whole city of
Chicago. At the moment there was a great deal too much competition; but possibly a well-disciplined gang of men
handy with their fists and their guns could take care of that, by intimidating rival bootleggers and persuading
speakeasy proprietors that life might not be wholly comfortable for them unless they bought Torrio liquor. What
Torrio needed was a lieutenant who could mobilize and lead his shock troops.
. . . He picked for the job a bullet-headed twenty-three-year-old Neapolitan roughneck of the Five Points
gang in [New York], and offered him a generous income and half the profits of the bootleg trade if he would
come to Chicago and take care of the competition. The young hoodlum came, established himself at Torrio’s
gambling place, the Four Deuces, opened by way of plausible stage setting as innocent-looking office which
contained among its properties a family Bible, and had a set of business cards printed:
ALPHONSE CAPONE
Second Hand Furniture Dealer
2220 South Wabash Avenue
Torrio had guessed right—in fact, he had guessed right three times. The profits of bootlegging in Chicago
proved to be prodigious, allowing an ample margin for the mollification of the forces of the law. The competition
proved to be exacting: every now and then Torrio would discover that his rivals had approached a speakeasy
proprietor with the suggestion that he buy their beer instead of the Torrio-Capone brand, and on receipt of an
unfavorable answer had beaten the proprietor senseless and smashed up his place of business. But Al Capone had
been an excellent choice as leader of the Torrio offensives; Capone was learning how to deal with such
emergencies.
Within three years it was said that the boy from the Five Points had 700 men at his disposal, many of
them adept in the use of the sawed-off shotgun and the Thompson submachine gun. As the profits from beer and
"alkycooking" (illicit distilling) rolled in, young Capone acquired more finesse— particularly finesse in the
management of politics and politicians. By the middle of the decade he had gained complete control of the suburb
of Cicero, had installed his own mayor in office, had posted his agents in the wide-open gambling-resorts and in
each of the 161 bars, and had established his personal headquarters in the Hawthorne Hotel. He was taking in
millions now. Torrio was fading into the background; Capone was becoming the Big Shot. But his conquest of
power did not come without bloodshed. As the rival gangs—the O'Banions, the Gennas, the Aiellos—disputed his
growing domination, Chicago was afflicted with such an epidemic of killings as no civilized modern
city had ever before seen, and a new technique of wholesale murder was developed.
One of the standard methods of disposing of a rival in this warfare of the gangs was to pursue his car with
a stolen automobile full of men armed with sawed-off shotguns and submachine guns; to draw up beside it,
forcing it to the curb, open fire upon it—and then disappear into the traffic, later abandoning the stolen car at a
safe distance. Another favorite method was to take the victim "for a ride": in other words, to lure him into a
supposedly friendly car, shoot him at leisure, drive to some distant and deserted part of the city, and quietly throw
his body overboard. Still another was to lease an apartment or a room overlooking his front door, station a couple
of hired assassins at the window, and as the victim emerged from the house some sunny afternoon, to spray him
with a few dozen machine-gun bullets from behind drawn curtains. . . .
The war continued, one gangster after another crumpling under a rain of bullets; not until St. Valentine's
Day of 1929 did it reach its climax in a massacre which outdid all that had preceded it in ingenuity and brutality.
At half-past ten on the morning of February 14, 1929, seven of the O'Banions were sitting in the garage which
went by the name of the S. M. C. Cartage Company, on North Clark Street, waiting for a promised consignment
of hijacked liquor. A Cadillac touring car slid to the curb, and three men dressed as policemen got out, followed
by two others in civilian dress. The three supposed policemen entered the garage alone, disarmed the seven
O'Banions, and told them to stand in a row against the wall. The victims readily submitted; they were used to
police raids and thought nothing of them; they would get off easily enough, they expected. But thereupon the two
men in civilian clothes emerged from the corridor and calmly mowed all seven O'Banions with submachine
gunfire as they stood with hands upraised against the wall. The little drama was completed when the three
supposed policemen solemnly marched the two plainclothes killers across the sidewalk to the waiting car, and all
five got in and drove off—having given to those in the wintry street a perfect tableau of an arrest satisfactorily
made by the forces of the law!
. . . There were over 500 gang murders in all. Few of the murderers were apprehended; careful planning,
money, influence, the intimidation of witnesses, and the refusal of any gangster to testify against any other, no
matter how treacherous the murder, met that danger. The city of Chicago was giving the whole country, and
indeed the whole world, an astonishing object lesson in violent and unpunished crime. How and why could such a
thing happen?
To say that prohibition—or, if you prefer, the refusal of the public to abide by prohibition—caused the
rise of the gangs to lawless power would be altogether too easy an explanation. There were other causes: the
automobile, which made escape easy, as the officers of robbed banks had discovered; the adaptation to peacetime
use of a new arsenal of handy and deadly weapons; the murderous traditions of the Mafia, imported by Sicilian
gangsters; the inclination of a wet community to wink at the byproducts of a trade which provided them with beer
and gin; the sheer size and unwieldiness of the modern metropolitan community, which prevented the focusing of
public opinion upon any depredation which did not immediately concern the average individual citizen; and, of
course, the easy-going political apathy of the times. But the immediate occasion of the rise of gangs was
undoubtedly prohibition—or, to be more precise, beer-running. . . .
There was vast profit in the manufacture, transportation, and sale of beer. In 1927, according to Fred D.
Pasley, Al Capone's biographer, federal agents estimated that the Capone gang controlled the sources of a revenue
from booze of something like $60 million a year, and much of this—perhaps most of it—came from beer. . . .
The young thug from the Five Points, New York, had traveled fast and far since 1920. . . . Not only did he
largely control the sale of liquor to Chicago's 10,000 speakeasies; he controlled the sources of supply, it was said,
as far as Canada and the Florida coast. He had amassed, and concealed, a fortune the extent of which nobody
knew; it was said by federal agents to amount to $20 million. He was arrested and imprisoned once in
Philadelphia for carrying a gun, but otherwise he seemed above the law. He rode about Chicago in an armored
car, a traveling fortress, with another car to patrol the way ahead and a third car full of his armed henchmen
following behind; he went to the theater attended by a bodyguard of eighteen young men in dinner coats, with
guns doubtless slung under their left armpits in approved gangster fashion; when his sister was married, thousands
milled about the church in the snow, and he presented the bride with a nine-foot wedding cake and a special
honeymoon car; he had a fine estate at Miami where he sometimes entertained seventy-five guests at a time; and
high politicians—and even, it has been said, judges—took orders from him over the telephone from his
headquarters in a downtown Chicago hotel. And still he was only thirty-two years old. . . .
Meanwhile gang rule and gang violence were quickly penetrating other American cities. Toledo had felt
them, and Detroit, and New York, and many another. Chicago was not alone. Chicago had merely led the way.