1920 (15 page)

Nineteen twenty was Dr. Carter G. Woodson's year, the peak of his influence, but he would remain there for the rest of his life. The enduring strength of his achievements and the anonymity of the achiever would have been exactly what he desired.

W
OMEN, IT SEEMED CERTAIN, WOULD
soon have the right to vote; as spring began to turn up the temperature into summer, it was just a matter of days, and enthusiasm, already in the air, continued to build. But many of their men, husbands and sons and brothers who toiled day after day both above and below the ground to earn the most meager of wages, would not be able to get away from work long enough to cast their ballots. For them, the right to be counted at the polling place was as hollow as the mineshaft responsible in May, 1920, for the Matewan Massacre, one of the most ferocious labor–management conflicts in American history.

Disputes of one sort or another had been simmering for a long time, going back to the previous century, when strikes were few but the animosities that would eventually make them commonplace were becoming more and more virulent. The working man versus his employer: it was a drastic change in the American workplace—the robber barons no longer so intimidating to the people they had hired, those who labored so arduously finally rebelling
against those who paid them paltry wages and demanded so much of their lives in return. The rebellion was, many believed, too long in coming.

For the most part, the strikers were first- and second-generation Americans, men who had been falsely encouraged in their vision of the United States, not only by their own yearnings and the rare success story of a countryman, but, all the more, by the propaganda of the steamship companies who desperately needed passengers, not just cargo, to make their transatlantic routes profitable.

So they promised El Dorado. People eager for New World fantasies listened with more longing than reason. Pamphlets published by the shipping lines showed princely homes, velvet lawns, and spectacular views of other such manses from afar; the implication was that such living conditions could be had by all. Other pamphlets hinted at dignified and highly remunerative employment, also available for all. Still others mentioned the educational opportunities that awaited the children of immigrants, who would then grow up and be able to find positions of wealth and power for themselves, perhaps even international renown.

How many people truly believed the ballyhoo is impossible to say, but more often than not the ships that crossed the Atlantic were packed with dreamers fore to aft, the prices reasonable because amenities, even necessities like toilets, were nonexistent. For the passengers, the moment they were herded onto ships and assigned their own almost immovably tight spaces, it was the beginning of doubts that the dream would come true.

The role of steamship companies in breaking the hearts of Europeans bound for America is little acknowledged in volumes of history, as is the fact that many of those Europeans, having arrived in the United States and found themselves treated as menial labor at best, now began to look longingly toward the Russian Revolution as well as to listen attentively to the preaching of anarchists, many of whom were their own countrymen.

Hopes were also being shattered for native-born Americans, among whom internal immigration was increasing dramatically, and not just because of African-Americans who found the South so unwelcoming. Young white farm boys with similar dissatisfactions were also deserting their homes and heading north. The result of all this, the so-called Great Migration,
was a stirring of the melting pot such as there had never been before. The United States was changing in population, in demographic makeup, and in values and means of cultural expression.

And in even more ways: 1920 was the first census year in which the country's urban population surpassed the rural. It was a landmark in U.S. history, a sign that the only way of life generations of earlier immigrants had ever known was slipping away and would eventually be gone forever. It was as well an omen: there would be changes ahead of such magnitude that few people could even imagine them now.

Farms were no less important to America's economy and dinner tables than they had been before; but even in agriculture's lush years, the barrenness of life surrounding the fields—the tedium of the plains and endlessness of the skies—was becoming harder and harder for young people to endure. They had been fleeing, leaving their homes behind them, little by little since before the Civil War. By 1920, the pace had picked up exponentially, and the Midwest, outside of the cities, was beginning to crumble. Populations shrank in some villages as if they had been ravaged by the plague. Once-prosperous stores shut down for good, while others, already long closed, had begun to cave in on themselves, with their timbered roofs sinking and the planks that made up the outer walls collapsing; the result was that many once-bustling communities looked as flimsy as if they were fronts for movie sets that had been left behind after shooting. As the deterioration continued, a few towns became so small, so inconsequential, that they were condemned to the ultimate indignity: officially removed from the map by Rand McNally. Much of the cotton went unpicked, the wheat unharvested.

The young men and women who turned their backs on agriculture headed to places like New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and even out west to the newly exciting movie capital, Los Angeles. Some did so with their minds full of the kinds of visions written down by F. Scott Fitzgerald: tales of reckless love and even more reckless deeds; of parties at which almost fatal amounts of alcohol drowned inhibitions; of sophisticated women in daring attire and sophisticated men whose apparel was just as daring in its own way and, like that of the women, brightly bejeweled where appropriate.

Further, there were tales of nightclubs and speakeasies and midnight rides to Harlem, the white kids gathering up their gumption as they eased their way cautiously into after-hours black enclaves, perfumed and smoky dives where, after a few minutes, the dark-skinned people stopped staring at them and made room for them and their money at the bar. Soon, all eyes went to the stage. And all ears listened as men both black and white, smooth and wrinkled, played their jazz, played
with
their jazz, the notes running all over the joint, as if deciding for themselves where they would land—yet still, miraculously, under the musician's control. Did any of the white boys want some weed? There was always a seller, the air thick with his product, the dives not smoky just because of tobacco.

And the young adults from farm country had seen Fitzgeraldian visions not just in his books but in his ever more popular short stories in the
Saturday Evening Post
; they had read of wealthy couples strolling through the eternal shadows of skyscrapers to assignations on Park Avenue or the Upper East Side, afternoon sex on silk sheets covering king-size beds in penthouse apartments. Then home to their spouses. And they had read about mansions in the Hamptons, to which one drove in touring cars with their running boards and rumble seats and the tops down, vehicles that cost more than a lifetime's yield on the back forty. How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've read “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” and “The Rich Boy”?

FOR THE MOST PART, JOBS
were available for whites in the North, certainly more than for blacks; employment opportunities might have spiked during the war, but they remained high afterward, as factories that had previously converted to war materiel converted back to the consumer goods that were necessary for an eventually booming postwar economy. But, like the young African-American men from the South, the whites were crushed to realize that they had traded the variety of demanding tasks on the farm for the sameness of tasks in industry. They worked on the railroad, and toiled “with the regularity of machinery, dropping each rail in its place, spiking it down, and then seizing another.” Or they signed on for backbreaking assignments in steel mills; mind-numbing duties on automotive assembly lines, which required them to perform the same
simple task all day; stomach-churning chores in meat-packing houses, or days spent in the perpetual night of coal mines, swinging picks into solid walls of rock, hefting loaded shovels into overflowing trams. Men worked six days a week, maybe six and a half; they spent twelve hours a day on the job, maybe longer; they made less money in a month than their bosses spent for lunch on some days.

The Northern cities of 1920 were the great low-levelers of American life. In 1920, historian David Kyvig had learned, “Between a third and two-fifths of the American population could be classified as poor even by the modest standards of the time.” These people did not need Bolsheviks to tell them that their working conditions would lead to early graves. They did not need anarchists to tell them that the buildings in which they worked were unsafe, poorly ventilated, and lacking proper escape routes in case of emergency.

This last flaw proved especially tragic in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911. One hundred forty-six employees were killed, most of them women, recent immigrants, Jews and Italians, virtually none of whom had ever seen a factory in the farmland and villages of the old country. One of the youngest of the casualties, an especially hard-working, empty-eyed little girl, her name and land of origin unknown, was eleven years old. Yet one more voice in a cacophonous chorus of screams as the fire grew like mushroom clouds would grow later in the century. Not until 9/11 in the first year of the following century would New York suffer a disaster to surpass the blaze at Triangle.

It was the owners of the company, ever trying to save money so they could make more of it, who were responsible for the disaster. They had locked doors which, if unlocked, would have allowed most of the women to escape the rampaging flames. But the owners had secured them precisely for that reason, to prevent escape by women who wanted to sneak away from their tasks for a few minutes to smoke, sneak in a snack, or maybe just take a few breaths of cleaner air, which they would suck in like handfuls of water on a fast-drying oasis.

And with this we arrive yet again in this volume at the great paradox upon which the United States was built: So many of the men who made the country into the world's greatest power—from those who paid for the
railroads to be built to those whose steel mills provided the necessary metal; from those who provided the munitions for the Spanish-American War to those who financed the Panama Canal and other major construction projects, such as bridges and dams, mills and ever-taller office buildings; from those who owned the coal mines and oil wells, the appliance factories and the newly automated clothing plants—it was on too many occasions the men in such positions, the very men creating the wealth of the nation, who were destroying the lives of their workforce in the process. The dark side of Andrew Carnegie and his ilk was their willingness to inflict a perpetual midnight on the lives of their workers, the brawn that made America's place in the sun possible. It was not radicals from abroad who most seriously threatened the United States in 1920, not the Bolshies, not anarchists: it was the capitalists at home. And their behavior was not only ignored by legislative bodies and police officials; it was often
supported
.

It was further supported, much later, by a British historian whose body of work is voluminous, eminent, and enduring. Yet somehow, his view of American labor in the early twentieth century ran off the rails of logic. I include it here, in paraphrased version, almost as comic relief. The italics are mine; the punch line, so distant from the truth, demands emphasis.

As the historian Paul Johnson reminds us … so-called robber barons such as the Vanderbilts, ruthless though they undoubtedly were, not only left magnificent monuments in their wake but also created the vast national enterprises into which the teeming multitudes of immigrants were absorbed
and uplifted by the engine of prosperity
.

The engine did not uplift most immigrants: it ran over them.

Far closer to the truth is William James, the most prominent American philosopher of the twenties, perhaps of any time. A scholar who often wrote obtusely and virtually never with vulgarity, James excoriated the robber barons in an uncharacteristically succinct phrase for their willingness to kneel before “the bitch-goddess
SUCCESS.
”

Or, as the prominent socialist economist Henry George put it—briefly, but at the end of a long treatise, the “association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times.”

IN
1920,
THERE WAS THE
almost inconceivable total of more than 3,600 strikes in the United States. Less than a century earlier, there would not have been any of them; now there were ten
every day
! They had become staples of employee–employer relations, but for the former were more of a series of small wars that seldom achieved the goals of the strikers' war. They gave the men a chance to state their grievances publicly, and to adversely affect their companies' profits for a time, but the strikes simultaneously cost the workers badly needed income and sometimes even their jobs, as, when the battles ended, new workers might be hired to take the place of those who had previously turned their backs on the factories. The power of capital did not yield to the power of the man with the sweating brow.