CHAPTER 22 – A
TURBULENT DECADE
Section 1 – Postwar Troubles
Demobilization
• Return of 4.5 million soldiers
• Unemployment rises, wages fall
• Wartime shortages
• High Prices
• Women forced out of jobs
• Government cancels $2 billion in military contracts
• 12% of labor force unemployed
• Farm crisis
• Cotton
• 35 cents per pound
• down to 16 cents per pound
Labor Strife
• 1919
• 3,600 work stoppages
• 4 million workers
• Seattle General Strike
• 60,000 workers left jobs to participate
• 21 community kitchens fed strikers
• Fear of Bolshevik Revolution
• “Revolution doesn’t need violence.
The General Strike is of itself
a weapon of revolution.”
• Boston Police Strike
• Officers unionized
• Not recognized by Edwin Curtis
• Police Commissioner
• 75% went on strike
• Calvin Coolidge – Governor
• State militia called in
• “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere,
anytime.
Strife Continued
• Steel Strike
• 365,000 steelworkers in western Pa
• “Loyal Americans” – Return to work
• Companies hired thugs,&police to intimidate
strikers who were jailed, beaten, or shot
• Companies brought in
• African Americans
• Mexicans
• Union leaders call off strike
• United Mine Workers Strike
• 400,000 coal miners
• Demanded 50% pay increase
• 5 day, 6 hour work week
• John L. Lewis
• President UMW
• Wilson condemns strike
• 14 % wage increase
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv1TOtm3CGE
The Red Scare
• Red Scare
• Period of anticommunist hysteria during 1919 and 1920
• Bolshevik Revolution
• 1917 Russia
• Vladimir Lenin
• Communist International
• Overthrow capitalism and free enterprise
• Marxists in America
• Eugene Debs
• Socialist Party 1901
• Ran for President 5 times from 1900 to 1920
• 1912 – 900,000 votes
• Agents = Reds
• Immigrants
• New York State Assembly
• Elected socialist members expelled
The Palmer Raids
• Bomb scares in 1919
• Antiradical fears
• April
• 36 bombs in the mail
• John D. Rockefeller
• Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (Supreme Court)
• Postmaster General Albert Burleson
• A. Mitchell Palmer (Attorney General)
• House bombed by anarchist
• Launches anticommunist crusade
• J. Edgar Hoover
• Future head of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
• Series of Raids
• Arrested thousands of suspected radicals in 33 cities nationwide
Sacco and Vanzetti
• Anarchists
• Batolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco
• Sacco – shoemaker
• Vanzetti – peddled fish from a pushcart
• Charged with murder of paymaster
• Shoe factory in Boston
• Judge Webster Thayer
• Strong dislike of radicals
• Sentences the men to death
• Executed – August 23, 1927
• “This man (Vanzetti), although he may not actually have committed
the crime attributed to him, is nevertheless morally guilty, because
he is an enemy of our existing institutions… The defendant’s ideals
are associated with crime.”
• Drew worldwide attention
• Protests
• New York, Paris
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vU0LdSYB84