But the final nail in the coffin for Wilson came from his own people. The fourteenth point in his 14-points called for the creation of a League of Nations, an association of nations, which would oversee territorial claims, and conflict’s between countries and mediate on them in a peaceful and pacifist way, so ending the need for violence and war. The only problem was, the American people, and Congress especially, did not want to join such a foreign League and ratification from Congress was non-forthcoming. Wilson returned home from Paris, and during 1919, while valiantly trying to convince his people and Congress to change their minds in a nationwide tour and campaign, he suffered a crippling stroke. Still, the Senate rejected both the Versailles Treaty and the League Covenant, so in a way shoving all of Wilson’s efforts back into his face. With the US not joined to the League, it was destined to failure. The American peoples ignorance is significant in that they floundered the chance for more global peace by rejecting the League. The subsequently weak League could do nothing in any grossly important situation, and so could not stop such things as Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, and Hitler and the forthcoming Second World War many years later.
Post-World War One America was a totally different place to the one that existed some 2 years earlier, before they entered. It became a melting pot of isolationism, xenophobia, civil/racial unrest and social revolutions based on ‘normal’ and ‘classic’ idiosyncrasies. The attitudes, beliefs, and morals of American society had shockingly gone against what it so vehemently stood for during the early 20th century. The USA was, and known to its people, the most powerful nation on Earth. Instead of seeing themselves as having a responsibility to aid and watch over war-torn Europe, American’s decided to shun the rest of the world and to only take care of their own problems. An example of this was the rejection of joining the League. This newfound isolationism became entrenched deep into the roots of American culture and would last for many years into the future.
In the years after the War, the American Constitution was amended twice, changing the life of every person in the country. To properly explain just how much American society changed after the war, the advents of Prohibition, woman’s suffrage, the reinstatement of Republican rule, laissez-faire economics, immigration restriction laws and the revived Ku Klux Klan must be better elucidated.
After years of complaints and calls for change from the more conservative groups in the country, the 18th Amendment was passed. This amendment instigated the Volstead Act, and both of these combined began one of the most profoundly idiotic campaigns of the 20th century, to rid alcohol from all areas of society. The era of Prohibition had begun in 1919, and instead of turning people away from the illegal liquor, it made it more lucrative and desirable. Normally law-abiding citizens saw it as an injustice and a flagrant disregard for their rights, and they fought back by purposely breaking the law. Towns formed ’speakeasies’ where alcohol was readily available, and new gangs and groups began to sprout from the criminal underworld, “bootlegging” their way to fortune, taking advantage of the peoples necessity for alcohol, and the possibilities of extremely higher levels of prices. Crime increased, instead of decreasing with Prohibitions implementation, as monitoring and policing the sale of liquor and alcohol was nigh impossible. Prohibition, or the ‘noble experiment’ as it was called, was not stopped until 1933.
The 19th Amendment was a bit more beneficial for the general populace. It finally gave to the woman of America what they had been fighting for for decades, total suffrage. As a reward for their efforts during the War, women now had the right to vote, a basic right that had been denied to them since the idea of voting was established. Women in American society were becoming more independent, more social, and most noticeably, more important. They occupied more non-menial jobs than ever, and were earning higher wages. Society had finally become more accepting to women, and this was represented in their increased stance in society and their right to pass judgment on politicians in the ballet box. As receiving the right to vote in the year 1920, they were able to vote in the 1920 presidential elections. The battle between the Democratic nominees James M. Cox, who followed from Wilson, and the Republican Warren G. Harding, was a one sided one from the start. The country had turned on the Democrats and its ideas of ‘Wilsonism’ and began to run back in flocks to the re-joined and stronger than ever Republican Party. To understand why the Republicans came back to power so effortlessly, one must think as a person of the time, and take into account all the proper factors, so noticing that only the peoples desire for any profound change to government, not the best change, was the utmost reason for their being swept into power.
Harding caught the eyes of the American people by using an unusual slogan in his election campaign, that a vote for Harding was a vote for: “A Return to Normalcy.” This slogan perfectly details the mentality of the American people at the time. The American people were sick of the radical ways in which the country had been run for the last 20 years and they wanted a change. Instead of desiring government intervention in the economy, they wanted the opposite, government non-intervention. This was after the First World War, where the government led by Wilson had, with a mandate from the people, taken control of nearly every aspect of the day to day running of American society so as to better gear it towards war. With Harding and the Republics in office, here is where the era of laissez-faire economics came into status. Laissez-faire, government abstentation from interference with individual action in commerce, meant that the American economy relied not on the decisions of parliaments and politicians as well as other factors, but solely on the vicious economic and business cycles, with there boom’s and bust’s. People, politicians and businesses wanted a system that equated to an extreme free-market enterprise approach, and that is what they got. Harding typified his and his party’s views with a now famous quote, that in the US there should be: “less government in business and more business in government.” The corporate and industrial (manufacturing especially) sector of the country loved this situation, and their profits skyrocketed during the control-free ‘roaring 20’s’. At first, for over 9 years, the economy upturned and fluctuated then boomed to unprecedented levels, but with government ignorance of intervention, the inevitable (as is in all capitalist/cycle based economies) was always going to happen. The bust, named the Great Depression for its American as well as world-wide ferocity, began in 1929 and went beyond it, shaking the nation to its core for many years, completely wiping out prices of shares on the stock market, forcing the closure of business and making bankrupt millions upon millions of lower and middle class investors/workers who’s lives depended on wages and dividends.
The American people also changed their views on foreigners during and after the war. During 1900-1915, more than 13 million people migrated to the US. But Americans, around 1919, now saw foreigners as dissidents, troublesome, job stealers and non-American. This fear was also caused by the Russian Revolution in 1917, in which a ‘Red Scare’ deluged the minds of the people. Dearth of reason, the American people believed that a Communist takeover was a real possibility, and they feared for their democratic freedoms as well as their lives. An example of the repercussions of this on society was the forced removal of many radicals from the country in 1919, exiling them forever. As another example, several severe strikes had begun in 1919, as workers found that their wages were not increasing with company profits, then, they found that their wages were decreasing as the economy slumped. In fear that a Communist upstart or surge could occur because of this, as Communism always stems from grass-roots levels where worker dissatisfaction becomes endemic, the strikes were brutally oppressed. No major strikes occurred after that precedent was set. Subsequently, with the colour red making them see red, the American people, especially after hearing propaganda tales and soldiers stories of the horrors and hatreds of war, began to cry out for restriction and a culling of the ’subtle foreign invasion’ (the mass exodus into the country). The American people did not know the realities of war in how it affected a country and its peoples, its innocent victims, since US soil was untouched, and they were apathetic to the miserable plight of the Europeans. The first step taken to limit migration was to introduce a literacy-test for prospective immigrants in 1917. But this was not close to enough to sate the hungry masses. When the Republicans returned to power in 1920, they set about tapping the flood of migrants entering the country. With a prosperous US and a war-torn Europe to choose from, many citizens of the world wanted to enter ‘the land of the free’. But in 1921, laws began to be implemented in America, which non-discriminatorily restricted immigration into the country. The National Origins Act is an example of this, which established a quota system and limited immigration to only 3 per cent. Migration levels, to the relief of the people but to the chagrin of desperate foreigners, subsequently dropped dramatically over the following years.
Later into the 1920’s, more laws were introduced and immigration levels were restricted even further.
This new fear or disdain of foreigners, or xenophobic thought, translated into racial and civil unrest inside the country. Now, people who were not born in America, weren’t white, or weren’t Protestant, became outcasts, and in some instances, the enemy. The most extroverted and passionate haters of such people joined the new Ku Klux Klan. This revived Ku Klux Klan, the second one created since the early 19th century, called for “100% Americanism.” Just the fact that the clan was revived after non-existence for so many years signifies a sharp change in social mentalities. The second Klan redefined its enemies and its targets and gained more members than ever from the North and Midwest of the USA, all eager to step up their already horrifying campaigns of fear and death that began sweeping the country, especially in the South, where hangings and murders of blacks occurred on a shocking scale. Race riots broke out all over the country as tensions fuelled both blacks and whites to choose conflict over peace, spreading the already profound xenophobic cloud over more of the country than previously ever thought possible.
From an unpopulated, insignificant backwater, the USA become the most powerful nation in the world by the close of the period of 1898-1921, militarily and economically, but in the end it enclosed itself in a protective shell, encompassing a county filled with class inequality, xenophobic thought, poverty and civil/racial unrest.
When a country as populated, self-sufficient and powerful as the USA reforms both socially and economically on the scale it did between the many tumultuous years of 1898-1921, its significance cannot be denied or played down. After the Spanish-American war of 1898, led by President McKinley, the US became an understanding, courage?s and sturdy nation that opened its doors to the world and put nations close to it under its ‘non-imperialistic’ cloak of protection. From these new ideals followed by the people sprouted Progressivism and its reform based impetus. The 8-year term of Theodore Roosevelt followed this, and with him came such things as the reform-based Square Deal, the sprouting of the muckrakers and their invaluable help to the progressive cause, and the acceptance of a new ‘Dirigisme’, or interventionist, style of government control. William Howard Taft, who succeeded Roosevelt as President, was unable to reform the areas of the economy that he planned to, due to the timely division in the Republican Party, which had been long looming for many years. With dissention and conflict rocking the Republicans and the newly formed but weak Progressive Party, led by a rejuvenated Roosevelt, the Democrats were comfortably swept into power in 1912 on the wings of Woodrow Wilson’s ambitious party program. Promising to reform the country like none before him, he did as planned, changing the way people lived their lives, the way businesses did business and the way in which government ran things, right up to the American entry into the First World War. Choosing to stay neutral for three years of the war up to 1917, it is the US’s entry into the war which changed everything. Coming into the war, and at his completion, with hopes of leading the world to peace and universal fraternity, Wilson watched as the victorious Allies, and his people, took the other road, with one wanting revenge and punishment for the beaten Germans, and the other wanting nothing to do with the upcoming new world order, respectively. After they rebutted the League of Nations and the Versailles Treaty, Wilson watched as his people sulked into an endemic isolationism. In a vain attempt to win back support, Wilson toured the country, but suffered a stroke, and in the next elections, of 1920, he observed his democrat candidate lose to the republican William G. Harding, who offered a ?return to normalcy? to the people. The beginning of the 1920?s, starting with Harding?s success and the post-war years were the time of a new America, one which fervently supported such questionable issues as Prohibition, woman?s suffrage, restricted immigration, and the new race violence erupting all over the country. This new America took it upon itself to live a responsibility free life, one where ?laissez-faire? (non-interventionist) economics monitored the country, where foreigners were the enemy, and where conflict, lawlessness and poverty seemed to be the daily facts of life.
The US went from being an aegis of fairness and duty at the start of the 20th Century to a stalwart of the business cycle and xenophobia as a way of life at the commencement of the ?roaring 20?s?. This signifies just how much it changed in only 23 calendar years.