In June 1914, the global political order suddenly shifted with the death of Franz Ferdinand, an Archduke who was heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Touring the Eastern European city of Sarajevo, Ferdinand was targeted for assassination by political activists seeking to liberate Slavic populations from Austrian control. Given his expertise in the management of modern military forces and his belief in the rights of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to expand its political influence, Ferdinand had promised to become a strong emperor—one who would work against the nationalist impulses of minority populations unhappy with the imperial power structure. Although he survived an initial assassination attempt that took place as his motorcade toured the city, Ferdinand and his wife were targeted again and killed by Gavrilo Princip, a 19-year-old Serbian activist. The Austrian leader’s unexpected and violent death threw the world into chaos. European powers, entangled in a complicated series of alliances, were drawn into the war that Austria declared upon Serbia. As the “Entente” or “Allied Powers” of England, France, and Russia mobilized their armies against the “Central Powers” of Austro-Hungary, Germany and the Ottoman Empire, the war spilled over into African and Asian colonial territories and allied nations. Although World War I (as it would later be called) was sparked by events some five thousand miles away from Washington DC, the United States would ultimately be drawn into the conflict. This era of war would prove to be a turning point in the Progressive culture that still held sway in America in the 1910s.

Progressive reformers believed that their carefully organized initiatives to improve American society would bear fruit in the 20th century. And during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson (who held office from 1913-1921), Progressive ideas continued to shape national policy as well as the nation’s economic, intellectual, and cultural standards. Yet the optimism that educated reformers could reshape America and the larger world was severely tested by the global warfare of the twentieth century. Although Wilson and other American leaders attempted to steer the nation clear from the warfare that spread from Europe to other continents in 1914, Wilson eventually shifted his stance and led America into the struggle. New weapons and military strategies threatened soldiers and civilians with unthinkable suffering; and an influenza epidemic swept the planet, taking millions of lives. While the American economy flourished in the decade after the war, Progressive activists increasingly embraced racism and xenophobia, hateful philosophies that offered blueprints for genocide in subsequent generations. And the ongoing economic difficulties of post-war Europe eventually contributed to a global financial meltdown. Once the Great Depression overtook America in 1929, assumptions that the nation’s future was bound to improve with every passing generation began to look decidedly unrealistic.

The first Southerner to be elected president since Zachary Taylor in 1848, Woodrow Wilson was the son of a Presbyterian minister who had worked for the Confederate cause and who later joined the faculty at Princeton University. Wilson received his own college education there and, after briefly working as a lawyer in Atlanta in the early 1880s, attended Johns Hopkins University to pursue his doctoral degree in history and political science, which he received in 1886. Wilson then embarked on a career as a professor and university administrator, authoring

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books about American government and eventually becoming the president of Princeton University in 1902. His policies there illustrated his Progressive management style, as he attempted to modernize the curriculum, faculty, and infrastructure of that institution. His systematic approach enabled him to succeed in growing the size and ambitions of Princeton, but it also brought him into conflict with wealthy alumni who resented the pace of change called for by Wilson.

Woodrow Wilson (left) and the departing President William Taft in 1913

(Library of Congress)

Elected governor of New Jersey in 1910, Wilson emerged as national political figure as the Democratic presidential election of 1912. Theodore Roosevelt’s entry into this election as a third-party Progressive split the Republican vote between him and Taft, opening the way for Wilson to obtain a majority in the Electoral College. Presenting his political vision through his call for a “New Freedom,” Wilson cleverly tweaked his Progressive message of reform to line up with the white Southern Democratic Party’s longstanding emphasis upon state rights by promising to push for lower tariffs. At the same time that he promised to pull back federal intrusion into the markets for imported goods, Wilson advocated for the federal government to play new roles in policing against corporate monopolies. In pursuit of this goal, Wilson and the Democrats who controlled Congress created the Federal Trade Commission, a new agency that could enforce rules against corporate collusion; Progressive Democrats also passed the Clayton Antitrust Act in 1914, which created greater legal obstacles to corporations gaining undue influence over particular markets. Wilson also backed the creation

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of the Federal Reserve System in 1913, a major innovation in the federal government’s role in managing the American economy. Following the financial panics of the late nineteenth century and the Panic of 1907 that brought the American government itself to the brink of financial collapse, policy makers such as Wilson understood that only a centralized institution with massive financial power could anchor the economy in times of duress. The creation of the Federal Reserve System empowered the federal government to choose the board members overseeing central fiscal policy while also allowing major commercial banks to play a role managing the system at a regional level. Intended to play the role that the first and second banks of the United States had played until the 1830s, the Federal Reserve represented the kind of policy that had been justified by “implied powers” readings of the Constitution by the Federalist and Whig Parties. In short, Wilson’s Progressive policy definitely continued the active federal role initiated during Roosevelt’s presidency, yet Wilson’s philosophy also promised to respect state rights on issues that mattered to Southern Democratic voters. In particular, Wilson’s policies on racial issues were firmly supportive of the Jim Crow system of segregation. While Wilson’s Progressive rhetoric initially attracted some support from African American voters in the election of 1912, Wilson proved to be a deep disappointment to black Progressives who had hoped that he might use government power to protect black civil liberties and economic rights. Instead, Wilson’s administration instituted new policies of racial segregation in federal offices and institutions such as the Post Office. In addition to creating formal rules that divided white and black federal employees, Wilson also enacted new hiring protocols that made it less likely for African Americans to find employment in the first place with the federal government. These policies led African American leaders such as the Harvard-educated newspaper editor William Monroe Trotter to complain bitterly that Wilson was implementing segregation under the false premise

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that it “was intended to prevent racial friction.” “For fifty years negro and white employees have worked together in Washington,” argued Trotter. “It was not until the present Administration came in that segregation was drastically introduced.” Wilson, for his part, maintained that “the policy of segregation had been enforced for the comfort and the best interests of both races in order to overcome friction.” In his foreign policy, Wilson adopted an activist strategy of intervening militarily in hotspots in the Western Hemisphere in his first term in office. He sent troops, for example, into Mexico, Haiti and the Dominican Republic and Panama at different points in time to stabilize regimes friendly to the United States and to protect the nation’s massive economic interests in the Panama Canal that allowed vessels to pass between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. On the question of the World War that had started in Europe, Wilson adopted a stance of neutrality, pressing the nations on both sides to respect the rights of American vessels to pass unmolested through international waters. The invention and deployment of submarines by the German navy thoroughly altered naval military strategy. For the first time, both civilian and military vessels could be destroyed without warning by unseen assailants; and the limited passenger capacity of the submarines meant that they could not rescue survivors of these attacks, even if they surrendered and asked to be taken as prisoners of war. The sinking of the large English passenger liner, the Lusitania, in 1915 outraged the American public that was shocked by the more than one thousand deaths caused by the incident. While the German government (correctly) pointed out that the Lusitania had been transporting a large supply of weapons and ammunition on behalf of the English military, it also realized the risks of the United States entering the war on the side of the western Allied Powers. To forestall that possibility, the Germans agreed to suspend their policy of targeting neutral civilian shipping. The agreement sufficiently relieved political pressure in America

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for Wilson to be able to run for re-election on a platform promising a continuation of the policy of neutrality. Voters were encouraged to support Wilson, as his campaign slogan emphasized, because he “keeps us out of war.”

The Lusitania in 1907 and one of the survivors pulled from its wreckage in 1915 (Library of Congress)

In 1917, however, German strategists realized that the war was unwinnable unless they prevented supplies from reaching their enemies. Confronted with the prospect of renewed submarine warfare on American shipping and outraged at the discovery that the German government was encouraging Mexico to attack the United States, Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war in April that year. He framed America’s motivation in fighting against Germany in terms of our need to stand up against the monstrous inhumanity of submarine warfare. In his speech to Congress, he stated that:

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The world must be made safe for democracy.  Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.  We have no selfish ends to serve.  We desire no conquest, no dominion.  We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make.  We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind.  We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.In order to prevail against the Central Powers, Wilson immediately leveraged the financial power of the Federal Reserve System that his administration had created, as well as authorizing the sale of war bonds to fund a rapid escalation in our military capability. Reinstituting a military draft and calling for the labor movement to support wartime industry, Wilson mobilized America’s vast resources on behalf of England and France. By the time that America entered the war in 1917, millions of lives had already been lost on the European continent in the most horrifying manner imaginable. In addition to submarines, modern scientists and inventors had created ever more powerful and accurate guns and artillery. Beginning with the German military, both sides also deployed chemical weapons in violation of an international agreement negotiated in 1899, the Hague Convention. And for the first time in major warfare, aircraft began to provide reconnaissance and to drop bombs on the ground positions below. The capability of entrenched defenders to hold off sustained military advances meant that the war bogged down into long battles that seldom resulted in dramatic movements of the enemy lines. In one notorious case in point, the Allied attempt to advance upon enemy trenches at the Battle of the Somme resulted in over a million casualties in a three-day period, after which, the battle lines moved a scant couple of miles from their starting point. For a brief period in the second half of 1917, Germany pressed to take advantage of Russia’s withdrawal from the war in the wake of a Communist revolution that began in March. American troops commanded by General John Pershing arrived in France but did not enter into heavy combat until early 1918 when German troops

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broke through Allied lines and threatened Paris with destruction.It was in the summer of 1918, that fresh American troops and supplies invigorated an Allied counter-attack that ended the war. As German morale broke, the nation’s leader Kaiser Wilhelm II was forced from office into exile. In November 1918, Germany’s new leaders agreed to surrender to the Western powers. For the first time in America’s history, significant numbers of troops had been deployed outside the Western Hemisphere. Some 2 million American soldiers reached Europe, with almost three quarters of them engaging in battle. Over one hundred thousand Americans lost their lives and another quarter of a million were wounded—stunningly high casualties given the brief period in which Americans took part in the fighting. The overall death toll of the war on all of the belligerent nations exceeded 16 million men; and as truly horrifying as the war had been, an outbreak of influenza in 1918-19 struck perhaps even greater terror as it infected a quarter of the world’s population, killing as many as 40 million people globally. In the United States, almost 700,000 American died in the span of a year, more than the deaths caused by the Civil War. In addition, millions of soldiers who survived the war returned home with terrible wounds, lungs seared by gas, and psychological trauma inflicted amid the carnage and explosions of warfare. The image of the modern world increasingly proved to be a deadly horror. The victory of America and the allies, however, emboldened Wilson to turn this conflict into a launching pad for a new international order to be governed by rule of law rather than battlefield violence. In a famous speech that he delivered in early 1918, the Progressive president sketched out a democratic vision for a better world in which nations would openly negotiate treaties that fostered free trade and human rights. Listing “Fourteen Points” that would systematize this new international protocol, Wilson ambitiously called for the creation of a League of Nations that would protect the interests of “great and small states alike.” Once

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Germany capitulated, Wilson took the extraordinary step of travelling to Europe to pursue the implementation of his idealistic post-war vision. Enormous, adoring crowds in France welcomed him and seemed to affirm his strategy, but leaders representing the victorious English, French, and Italian governments pressed for practical rather than idealistic provisions in the peace treaty negotiated at the former French royal palace at Versailles. To his chagrin, Wilson was forced into changing his program for peace by these Allied statesmen. Having offered Germany generous terms for peace in his “Fourteen Points” speech, Wilson nevertheless reluctantly agreed at Versailles to single out Germany for causing the war and to assign to Germany the crushing financial burden of reparation payments to the Allied governments. Perhaps worse were the treaty provisions that violated Wilson’s rhetoric of protecting the freedoms of people around the world. Instead of ending the European legacy of colonial control in Africa and Asia, the victorious powers reasserted their imperial claims. And despite Japan’s alliance with the western nations during the war, Wilson and the European leaders refused to include a treaty provision recognizing the principle of racial equality. At the very least, however, the Versailles Treaty did include Wilson’s idealistic plan for a League of Nations, a body that would work to democratically resolve conflict before it could flare again into widespread warfare. Returning to America, Wilson lobbied hard in the Senate to obtain the necessary two-thirds majority required to ratify the treaty. Realizing he faced an uphill battle to overcome the opposition of conservative Republicans to the League of Nations (which they feared would undermine Congress’s role in declaring war and sanctions), Wilson took his case directly to the American people. Yet, as he journeyed across the country giving speeches in support of the treaty, he suffered a debilitating stroke that rendered him unable to lobby further on behalf of his Progressive diplomatic vision. He returned to Washington DC partially paralyzed. And when it became clear that the Senate would only

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approve the treaty on the condition that it be amended to reflect their concerns, Wilson refused to negotiate and the U.S. remained outside the League of Nations that Wilson himself had ushered into existence.

The World War I era marked significant movement, both geographic and political, on the part of millions of African Americans. The mobilization of millions of American men into the military created unprecedented needs for new workers as the industrial economy geared up to support global war. Between 1915 and 1920, hundreds of thousands of African American men and women—some ten percent of the South’s African American population—migrated to Northern cities such as Chicago and Philadelphia to take advantage of jobs in civilian defense industries filling military contracts. Known as the “Great Migration,” this massive relocation interrupted African American community life across the South; yet ties quickly coalesced in Northern settings, with new church communities and longstanding family ties and friendships assisting the migrants in their pursuit of new opportunities. African Americans were clearly motivated by a desire to escape the racist oppression of life under the Jim Crow system in the South; yet, their initial jubilation at having escaped, once and for all, the shadow of the old slave system was soon tempered by the intense racism that they encountered in North. Echoing the terrible events that had occurred in Atlanta in 1906, race riots broke out in numerous Northern cities, including a mob outburst in East St. Louis, Illinois, that resulted, in 1917, in some forty African Americans being murdered and the African American residential district being burned to the ground. The African American experience in the war itself offered conflicting cues to the black population with respect to their standing in modern America. As Wilson brought the country into the war in 1917,

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African American leaders from across the political spectrum united in their patriotic support for the call to arms. The president of Booker Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, Robert Moton, believed that by taking part in the effort to defend American interests, African Americans “realized fully that they are heirs of America, and that as such they must be sharers of her struggles as well as partakers of her glory. More radical African American activists who were pushing hard for an end to segregation and lynching likewise counseled blacks to concentrate first and foremost on the war effort abroad. The NAACP advised African Americans to “close ranks” and “to forget our special grievances” until the war was over. Almost 400,000 African Americans served in the military during this period. They joined a military that continued the segregated practices that it had initiated during the Civil War. In some instances denied even basic shelter and sanitary conditions in their training camps, African Americans were commanded by white officers who frequently abused them. On their arrival in France, American military leaders urged their Allied counterparts to maintain racial distinctions in their treatment

Black soldiers in the 369th Regiment distinguished

themselves for bravery during the war but contintued to face racial discrimination at home.

(National Archives)

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of American troops so as to avoid “spoiling the Negroes” with equal recognition. General Pershing (whose nickname, “Blackjack,” came from an earlier phase in his career when he directly commanded black troops) planned to deploy African Americans in menial if necessary tasks instead of in high-stakes combat. When the Allied command pressed for Americans to be quickly integrated into existing army units, Pershing decided to supply them with the troops he valued least, his African American regiments. One such regiment, the 369th fought with such distinction that they received more medals from the French government than any other; none of the men from this regiment surrendered at any point in the bloody conflict. Lauded by the French who petitioned the

Civil Rights Organizations such as the NAACP protested against the racial violence in St. Louis in 1917

(Library of Congress)

Americans to send over as many African Americans as could be spared, these same heroic black soldiers were passed over by their American officers for distinctions and promotions. Even worse, upon their return to

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America black veterans were singled out for abuse by white supremacists who believed that their service had led them to forget their place in America’s racial hierarchy. Black leaders who hoped that patriotic service would result in the federal government protecting African American civil liberties were sorely disappointed. On the other hand, white American women finally achieved the longstanding goal of the suffrage that activists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton had been pressing for since the 1840s. As it had done for African American men, the war provided women with opportunities to work within the military (as nurses) and to find new jobs in the expanding wartime economy. Women’s civil rights activists such as Alice Paul led an aggressive and effective public campaign to pressure Woodrow Wilson into changing his position on the question of women’s right to vote. Born into a Quaker family in 1885, Paul earned her undergraduate degree from Swarthmore College and went on to earn her masters and doctoral degrees before also obtaining multiple law degrees that made her one of the most educated persons of either sex in the country. Active in the women’s suffrage movement in England in the early 1900s, she participated in protests that resulted in her being arrested multiple times for tactics that included smashing windows and screaming slogans at startled leaders of the English government. Taking a leadership role in the National American Woman Suffrage Association, she pressed the organization to call for a constitutional amendment ensuring women’s access to the suffrage. As her goals and tactics outpaced the more cautious membership of that organization, she formed a new group, the National Woman’s Party and engaged in direct picketing of the White House, a startling sight that caused a media frenzy. Arrested for obstructing traffic outside the White House, Paul protested her imprisonment with a hunger strike and endured forced-feedings at the hands of the prison psychiatric staff. Harshly denounced for their willingness to violate the standards of conduct for middle-class women,

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Paul’s fellow demonstrators were attacked in November 1917 by police who beat them severely. Focused on the war effort and eager to defuse the political controversy that was being stoked by the media coverage of these protests, Wilson announced his support for female suffrage in 1918, justifying the measure as “vitally essential to the successful prosecution of the great war of humanity in which we are engaged.” He even reasoned that women through their special moral agency would serve as “spiritual instruments” whose “sympathy and insight and clear moral instinct” would play an essential role in identifying “just what it is that ought to be purified and

reformed” in the world. Swayed by such reasoning, Congress approved the 19th Constitutional Amendment in 1919 and it was ratified by the states in 1920. A half century after the Fifteenth Amendment created federal protection for voters from racial discrimination, American women were finally recognized as full political participants in the American political process. Still, this advance in civil rights occurred at a strange moment in the debate over individual liberties in America. African American rights were being aggressively ignored as the women’s movement was succeeding in its initiative for the suffrage. To some extent, the contradiction could be explained by the desire of mainstream white Americans to use their wives

Women protestors were arrested at White House demonstrations in 1918(Library of Congress)

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and daughters as political allies—as voters who would support their efforts to protect white racial privilege.

American authorities feared not only threats to the racial status quo but also a growing socialist threat that posed a potentially deeper challenge to the core values of the nation. In 1917, millions of Russians had rebelled against the authority of their monarch, Nicholas II, in the midst of World War I. His removal from office (and subsequent execution) not only led Russia to exit from the Allied war effort; it also paved the way for the Communist Party led by Vladimir Lenin to create the world’s first socialist nation. Fighting for several years against forces loyal to Nicholas as well as against centrists seeking democracy and foreign armies looking to prevent the communist victory, Lenin and his countrymen established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) on the principles espoused by Karl Marx in the 19th century. Their stunning achievement posed a direct threat to the capitalist democracies since Marx had predicted that workers across the world would inevitably unite to seize power from their oppressors, the business men and leaders who supposedly dominated the means of production. In post-war America, authorities became fearful that the communist movement would spread into the ranks of American workers who might then attempt to topple the government. Eugene Debs, the former union leader who had coordinated workers’ resistance against the Pullman Company back in 1894, had already made the transition from trade unionism to an open embrace of socialism. As the presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America in 1912, Debs had even received almost a million votes—some 6 percent of the total ballots cast—suggesting to authorities that a noticeable minority of American workers were open to the socialist message that ownership of land and productive assets should be taken out of the hands of individuals

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and placed under the control of a government acting in the name of the people. When Debs spoke out forcefully against America’s entry into World War I (claiming that the war served only the interest of capitalist businessmen seeking to profit from the growth of military spending), he was imprisoned in 1918 and convicted of sedition. Branded a “traitor” by Wilson, Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison and the Supreme Court upheld his conviction in 1919 on the grounds that his speeches had been intended to obstruct military recruitment. Debs’s supporters were outraged and thousands of them marched in protests, some of which turned violent in the spring of 1919. This drama played out amid the Wilson’s fretful efforts to forestall the growth of American communist conspiracies. Wilson’s Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, was mindful that kneejerk government policies against supposed threats might wrongly violate civil liberties. Palmer had already taken a courageous stand against the American Protective League, a civilian organization that had targeted German-Americans for surveillance and harassment during the war years. Yet Palmer viewed the socialist threat as being very real, an understandable position given the fact that anarchists had attempted several times to kill him and his family and had succeeded in actually detonating a bomb in front of his home. It was Palmer who created a new government intelligence agency in 1919 to protect the nation from domestic threats. He hired J. Edgar Hoover, the leader of the wartime bureau that guarded against espionage, to take charge of the intelligence office. Amid charges that he was not doing enough to counteract the communist threat, Palmer issued a report describing numerous threats to the United States government posed by both socialist activists and the African American community that he feared would aggressively challenge American institutions. Palmer also authorized a series of raids against individuals with ties to socialist organizations, deporting hundreds of them who were of foreign origin. In spring 1920, these initiatives intensified as

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Palmer received intelligence from Hoover that radicals were planning a major attack. As Palmer directed resources to counteract that possibility, the press trumpeted his predictions of an impending battle in the streets on May 1. When the anticipated attack failed to materialize, the press turned against Palmer, mocking him as an alarmist. Still, the notion that the government needed to vigorously guard the nation from communism continued to hold sway among policy makers. To Palmer’s credit, he was able to recognize that Eugene Debs, aged and sick in his cell in a federal prison in Atlanta, posed no meaningful threat to law and order. He lobbied hard for a presidential pardon for Debs, but Wilson, adamantly refused. Debs, however, had his sentence commuted by the next president, Warren Harding, enabling him to live the final five years of his life as a free man. The association between communism and radical activists in Eastern Europe further reinforced American distaste for the “new” immigrants from supposedly undesirable parts of the world. As leaders of the American Eugenics movement such as Madison Grant continued to warn about the degradation of Americans racial attributes, Progressive racists allied with trade unionists who wished to restrict immigrants who might compete for limited jobs making it difficult for the labor movement to protect wages and benefits. This somewhat strange political coalition created a considerable majority in Congress in support of the Immigration Act of 1924 that severely curtailed immigration into the country. Creating quotas based on the ethnic and racial breakdown of the country in 1890, the act also completely restricted immigration from Asian nations. The racial politics of the era were such that Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe including Russian Jews attempting to leave the Soviet Union and Italians (whose nation had ultimately allied itself with the western powers in WWI) were turned away while German immigrants were welcomed in large numbers.

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It was also during this period that temperance reformers succeeded in enacting the 18th Constitutional Amendment, which banned the production and sale of alcohol, a policy known as Prohibition. The amendment was ratified in 1919 and Congress passed the Volstead Act that year to provide new mechanisms for enforcing the law. Long associated with the kind of urban vice that the Progressive reformers sought to counteract, alcohol use and its attending saloon culture was also strongly associated by middle-class whites with European immigrants and African Americans. For this reason, Prohibition and the Immigration Act of 1924 might be understood as one last surge of Progressive government initiatives designed to protect and to improve the nation. The 1920s also witnessed the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan into a nationwide organization that rallied white Protestants against the dangers of such contaminating influences as Catholics, Jews and African Americans. The Klan’s reappearance offered a paradox. The racist fraternal organization was decidedly traditionalist and nostalgic about a supposedly better bygone era when Americans lived according to honest values and minority populations were either forbidden from the country or controlled through the institution of slavery. Yet, the organization was recreated through the efforts of 20th century reformers who were savvy manipulators of modern mass media including the emerging technology of cinema. Thomas Watson, the former Populist politician who had inflamed racial hostilities prior to the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906, once again played a prominent role. In 1913, Leo Frank, a Jewish manager of the Atlanta Pencil Factory, was accused of murdering Mary Phagan, a teenaged worker who had moved from Marietta in search of work. Convicted in part due to the anti-semitic reasoning offered by the district attorney, Hugh Dorsey, Frank was also being tried in the court of public opinion. And

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Thomas Watson, in a stream of angry editorials powerfully connected Frank’s ethnic and religious background as a Jew to his alleged crime of defiling an innocent young white girl whom the new industrial order had inappropriately entrusted to his authority. When Georgia Governor John M. Slaton bravely commuted Frank’s death sentence, changing it to life imprisonment, his intervention in the case ended his political career, launched riots that required the mobilization of the National Guard to restore order, and necessitated Slaton’s flight from the state. As public interest in Frank remained high, members of the Marietta community organized into a fraternal order that they named the “Knights of Mary Phagan.” In 1915, these men led a mob to the Georgia prison in which Frank had been incarcerated, removed him, drove him back to Marietta, and hanged him. The story of Frank and Phagan had already struck a nerve in the white popular culture. A working-class musician named John Carson wrote “The Ballad of Mary Phagan” and performed it around the state to wide acclaim. Meanwhile, the filmmaker D.W. Griffith released The Birth of a Nation, his epic fictional tale about the Civil War and Southern Reconstruction that same year in 1915. Shot in California, the film demonstrated how old racist mythologies about the benevolence of slavery were being recast into a nationally acceptable narrative at the close of Reconstruction. As much as the film presented life in the Old South as beautiful and harmonious, characterized by kindly slaveholders and comical yet happy slaves, its nostalgia was counterbalanced by the thrilling appeal of the modern technology of film itself. And Griffith went out of his way to ground his story in the supposedly scientific and objective historical conclusions arrived at by no less an authority than Woodrow Wilson himself (who, by many accounts, applauded the film when it was screened for him in the White House). Most notably, the film presented the creation of the Ku Klux Klan as a redemptive moment. The invention of a new organization, dedicated to protecting the sexual purity of white women and upholding the values of

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the white Christian population, enabled the film’s protagonists to restore order amid the chaos of military reconstruction. Given the context of Leo Frank’s case, it was a useful coincidence that the film’s plot ultimately turns on an innocent young girl, about Phagan’s age, pursued to her death by a leering non-white attacker—in the film, a black soldier whose sexual ambitions have been encouraged by the reckless empowerment of the freed population by Republican politicians. In the film’s climactic scene, the Klan engages in a pitched battle with African American army troops to determine whether morality will be destroyed or redeemed in the South. Overcoming the black soldiers, the Klan then rides to the rescue of white characters who have been surrounded in an isolated cabin by sexually aggressive blacks. While civil rights organizations such as the NAACP protested the showing of the despicably racist film, white audiences celebrated the movie, not just in the South but across the entire nation. And then, in a bizarre sequence of modern life following modern art, the Klan itself, long dormant, surged once again into public activity. Outside Atlanta, the city that marketed itself as the symbol of a New South, William Simmons and other members of the Knights of Mary Phagan, inspired by their viewing of Griffith’s film, met at Stone Mountain, a granite outcrop ten miles east of Atlanta, and reorganized themselves as Klansmen. By the early 1920s, Klan rallies at Stone Mountain were attracting thousands of participants and the organization spread rapidly across Southern, Midwestern and Western states. At its height in the middle of the decade, as many as 5 million Americans were affiliated with it. Politicians running state governments openly presented their affiliation with the Klan as a way of courting votes. And the Klan’s openly hateful rhetoric towards non-white and non-Protestant populations and its willingness to employ violence led to countless murders. Many of the Progressive Movement’s operating assumptions were embedded in these developments. The Klan itself was a modern organization that carefully marketed and recruited its members.

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Notwithstanding its reverence for tradition, it trained its members carefully, indoctrinating them until they could reproduce the appropriate rituals and rhetoric of established by its leaders. And it sought to prevent the process of social and sexual evolution from changing the fabric of the American population with unclean or undesirable traits. And like other modern cultural trends, as quickly as it grew, the Klan just as rapidly declined, as its members lost interest and as its leaders fought over control of the organization. By the 1930s, it had shrunk to some thirty thousand members nationwide. Still capable of destroying black lives, the Klan had receded in its national political significance.

The presidential elections of the 1920s signaled that American voters were losing confidence in the Progressive strategies employed by leaders such as Roosevelt and Wilson. In the aftermath of World War I, Wilson’s promises of a world made safe for democracy failed to materialize and the war was increasingly dismissed as an unnecessary venture into European politics. By the 1930s, the accusations made by Eugene Debs (which had landed him in prison for sedition) that the war had been fought to enrich greedy capitalists, had become sufficiently mainstream to be embraced by a Congressional committee investigating the reasons for America’s involvement. In three consecutive elections in 1920, 1924, and 1928, decidedly non-Progressive Republicans gained the White House. Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover all sought to restrain the federal influence that had grown during preceding decades. And as the American economy boomed and the valuation of American companies in the stock market dramatically increased, these conservative Republicans leaders fostered an isolationist foreign policy that went hand in hand with restrictions against the “New” immigrants. The corporate tax rate and the tax rate for wealthy individuals was lowered dramatically and the pro-

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business federal and state judges began to roll back legal protections for unions. At first, such policies and politics seemed to be helpful for the American spirit and economy. Mass consumer culture delivered entertainment in the form of movies and sports to huge audiences who applauded as the nation seemed to distance itself from the horrors of the preceding decade. Still, an undercurrent of dread percolated through the pages of some of the great American novels that were written during this period. Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises depicted the emptiness of the hedonistic lifestyle of American expatriates living in Paris following World War I. His characters amused themselves by exchanging witticisms, drinking heavily and festively, and going to bull fights as they toured Spain. Yet just below the surface of such entertainments were currents of anguish over the meaningless of modern life. Wounded in their minds and bodies by the carnage of the war, these characters tried to deny their pain only to continuously injure each other’s feelings in a cycle of betrayal. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was set in Long Island, New York, where the fabulous lifestyle of the novel’s charismatic and wealthy protagonist proves to be built upon a series of lies and crimes that all come back to haunt him and the people he loves. These works of art strongly suggested that all was not well just beneath the pleasing surface of American life. Events would soon prove the accuracy of these novelists’ fundamental premise about the fragility of American culture. As wealth accumulated disproportionately into the hands of the richest one percent of the population (which controlled some 45 percent of the nation’s wealth in 1929), structural problems in the global economy were silently threatening America’s interests. As European nations struggled ineffectually to rebuild their economies, global demand for American goods could only be maintained through the extension of credit to foreign customers whose long-term financial viability remained fragile. As American wages stagnated in the middle of the decade, domestic

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demand for houses and automobiles declined. The stock market, however, surged 400 percent from 1924 to 1929 in a “bubble” of speculation as investors poured more money into stocks convinced that they could only continue to go up in value. On October 24, the bubble burst. Losing confidence almost simultaneously in the market, investors raced to sell their stocks. In a matter of days, American stocks lost 90 percent of their market value. It would not be until 1954 that the stock market would once again return values to the level that they had attained prior to the crash in 1929. A Great Depression that would last through the subsequent decade had begun.

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Franklin Roosevelt, 1913(Library of Congress)

In many ways, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an unlikely candidate to become a radical politician. The president who would do more to dramatically alter American understandings of federal government than any politician besides Abraham Lincoln was born into wealth and privilege in 1882 in New York, where his extended family included his distant cousin, Theodore Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt’s family was sufficiently wealthy that he routinely traveled to Europe and was educated in the nation’s most influential schools, receiving his high school diploma from the exclusive Groton Academy in Connecticut and his college degree from

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Harvard. Unlike Theodore, Franklin affiliated himself early in life with the Democratic Party; like Theodore (whom he very much admired), Franklin was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy, a position that he held during the Woodrow Wilson presidency. Elected governor of New York in 1928, Roosevelt responded creatively to the Great Depression that began in 1929, creating new state agencies in an effort to use the power of government to alleviate the most desperate suffering and to try to jumpstart the state economy. Reelected in 1930, Roosevelt emerged as one of the nation’s leading Democrats, one whose strong political track record and family name recognition made him a logical choice to be the party’s next presidential candidate. As he campaigned for the White House in 1932, Roosevelt promised Americans a “New Deal” if he were elected. His opponent, the Republican President Herbert Hoover, had once been credited with “engineering” the great prosperity of the 1920s; however, he now faced the difficult task of convincing voters to reelect him amid the unprecedented collapse of the American economy during his first year in office, a financial crisis that had only grown worse in the subsequent years of his presidency. As the election approached, 25% of the American workforce was unemployed (up from a 3% unemployment rate in early 1929), millions of American families faced homelessness and the real possibility of starvation, and the American banking system teetered on the edge of complete collapse. In the face of this unprecedented calamity, President Hoover attempted to use federal power in creative ways, including the allocation of hundreds of millions of dollars for public works projects expressly designed to provide jobs for the underemployed population. Still, the Republican philosophy that markets should be left largely to govern themselves without undue government interference limited Hoover’s willingness to more radically intervene in the crisis. Direct federal financial assistance to Americans remained unthinkable to Hoover and fellow Republican leaders. Impoverished migrants, reduced to living building makeshift shelters

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for their families, dubbed their shanty-towns “Hoovervilles,” and began to view the president as a symbol for the ineffectiveness and insensitivity of Republican political ideals. Further compromising Hoover’s public standing was the fiasco of the “Bonus Army” in July 1932. Thousands of World War I veterans marched to Washington DC to lobby for early dispersal of financial benefits that they were scheduled to receive years in the future. When these veterans refused to disperse from the shantytown that they constructed within view of the White House, the United States Army used heavy-handed tactics to destroy their encampment, firing tear gas at the men and their families and then charging them with fixed bayonets. It was therefore no surprise when Roosevelt was swept into office in 1932, winning almost 90 percent of the Electoral College votes.When Roosevelt took office in March 1933, he wasted no time in remaking the image of the federal government. In his First Inaugural Address, Roosevelt directly reassured the American people that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” To prevent the cascading collapse of American banks, Roosevelt temporarily declared a banking “holiday,” shutting financial institutions until Congress could pass the Emergency

The attack against the Bonus Marchers in 1932 underscored Hoover’s insensitivity to the plight of average Americans.

(National Archives)

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Banking Act creating new federal safeguards for the American financial system. In a the initial months of his administration—which became known as the “Hundred Days”—Roosevelt and the Democrats in Congress swept into laws that created the Federal Emergency Relief Administration which broke with tradition by offering millions of American families immediate financial support; the Civilian Conservation Corps, a new agency that eventually provided jobs to millions of young men working on rural conservation projects; and the Tennessee Valley Authority which likewise employed men on large public works projects constructing dams and extending the power grid to rural families. Congress also extended Roosevelt’s New Deal to include an Agricultural Adjustment Act that subsidized farmers who restricted their crop production with the end goal of reducing supply so that prices for agricultural commodities might once again rise to a level that allowed for profitability. In taking these steps, Roosevelt and his fellow Democrats were completely rejecting the longstanding Republican fiscal policy of limiting the government’s role in the economy. Although Roosevelt reassured the public that his strategies were not “radical” but were merely geared towards mitigating the worst impacts of the Great Depression, he was nevertheless creating an altogether new function for the federal government. It now promised to provide a backstop for individual families and major financial institutions, lifting both the public and important financial institutions clear from the destruction threatened by the economic collapse. A master of public relations, Roosevelt marshaled the power of radio (which had emerged as a commercially viable communication technology in the 1920s) to convey a sense of confidence and optimism to Americans who tuned in to listen to his “Fireside Chats.” Ever mindful of his image, the president quite literally took pains to convey an image of personal strength and vitality that actually ran counter to the physical disability that he had acquired after contracting polio in 1921. Paralyzed from the waist

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down and forced to rely on a wheelchair, Roosevelt insisted on publicly maintaining the fiction that he could walk, sometimes covering short distance while wearing braces to stiffen his legs and then leaning on aides who supported his weight. Photographers and film cameramen agreed not to record images of him that would have communicated to the general public the extent of his disability. Typical of his media savvy was his administration’s response to a second “Bonus Army” of veterans who arrived in Washington in 1933. Providing the marchers with land on which to build their camp, Roosevelt also dispatched his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, to meet with the veterans and listen to their concerns. He then issued orders that allowed tens of thousands of the men to find work with the Civilian Conservation Corps created by the New Deal. They dispersed

Civilian Conservation Corps workers constructing a bridge in 1937 (National Archives)

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peacefully and their encounter with the Roosevelt administration reinforced the president’s image as a caring politician. Although Roosevelt opposed the veterans’ primary demand that they receive their bonuses on an accelerated timetable, Congress acted in 1936 to fulfill that request. For Roosevelt, the initiation of new federal measures to alleviate the depression were, above all, exercises in reassuring the public that problems could in fact be fixed through a liberal use of government power. He was elected thanks to a new coalition of voters that included urban workers who supported unions, farmers and ranchers, recent immigrants, unprecedented numbers of African Americans (who were willing to bypass the old Republican “Party of Lincoln” in favor of a Northern Democrat who promised relief from suffering), and older Democratic Progressives who had supported Wilson’s agenda of the New Freedom. In addition to this “Liberal” coalition, Democrats continued to rely on the solid support of white Southerners who had long viewed the party as a vehicle for protecting white supremacy. To the extent that Roosevelt’s new exercise of federal powers might threaten longstanding white Southern reverence for state rights, the Democratic president risked alienating an essential

Roosevelt delivering one of his “Fireside Chat” radio addresses.

(National Archives)

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element of his own support. Roosevelt also walked a tightrope between aggressively deploying federal resources to fix what was broken in free market capitalism while reassuring the public that he did not advocate socialism. As such, he was frequently attacked by both the left and right wings of the American political spectrum. He was derided by communists for not doing more to redistribute directly the wealth controlled by the small hyper-wealthy segment of the population; but he was also criticized by conservative business interests that saw in the New Deal a direct threat to the centuries-old wisdom that to interfere with the “hidden hand” of the marketplace was to foster inefficiencies and to encourage individuals to avoid work and self-responsibility. Rejecting such “classical” economic logic, Roosevelt’s advisors took their cues from the English economist John Maynard Keynes, who offered innovative theories in the 1930s. Keynes insisted that only through massive government intervention could modern fiscal collapses be reversed. To the conservative mantra that in the longer term markets would correct themselves if left alone, Keynes tartly responded that “in the long run, we are all dead.” To break the vicious cycle of underemployed workers spending less, which in turn led to employers cutting production and jobs, Keynes advocated that the government stimulate the economy into motion. He believed that federal policy should increase the money supply by encouraging lower interest rates and also inject money into the economy directly through massive government spending. The idea of federal deficits, long a point of concern for conservative policy makers, was embraced by Keynes as a vote of confidence and a meaningful investment by the government on the nation’s future. While the complexity of these issues makes it difficult to issue clear-cut verdicts on the effectiveness of the New Deal’s Keynesian fiscal policies, the data does indicate that the economy slowly recovered from 1933, when Roosevelt took office, to 1937-8, when his administration prematurely cut backs on New Deal programs,

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a step that was followed by a second severe downturn in the economy. Roosevelt’s critics, however, warned that his innovative expansion of presidential and federal power carried the risk of his becoming a dictator in his own right. At times, Roosevelt reassured the public that his most aggressive New Deal measures were meant to be temporary strategies; in other instances, however, Roosevelt eagerly upped the ante on his administration’s willingness to directly intervene in the broken economy. In 1935, for example, New Deal politicians passed a new wave of legislation, later known as the “Second New Deal,” that created a modern social safety net for Americans. Most significant was the Social Security Administration Act, which was passed by Democrats over the fierce opposition of the Republican minority. Foregoing any pretense that it was a temporary measure made necessary by the extraordinary fiscal collapse, the act used federal funds to provide permanent pensions to older American workers, the vast majority of whom had established no fixed income to cover their expenses in retirement. As a result of this measure, elderly Americans went from being the most impoverished subset of the overall national population to becoming the most financially secure. The act also extended benefits to mothers and children without other means of support. In addition, Roosevelt raised corporate tax rates and lifted the personal tax rate for the wealthiest Americans from 63 percent to 79 percent, a figure that topped 90 percent during the 1940s. Roosevelt also backed the creation of the Works Progress Administration in 1935, which provided vast funding for projects that promised a public benefits. Creating jobs not only in construction (an industry in which WPA workers built hundreds of thousands of miles of new roads and tens of thousands of buildings and bridges) but also in the arts (offering work to playwrights, actors, sculptors and musicians), the act pumped billions of dollars into the ailing American economy and employed almost ten million workers before the program was discontinued in 1943. A final element of this radical phase of New Deal policy-

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making was the passage of the Wagner Act, a law that made it far easier for workers to organize into unions within industries that had previously resisted such strategies. Realizing that his political future rested upon support of working Americans more so than the corporate elite, Roosevelt represented a federal policy by the mid 1930s that was almost perfectly opposite from positions staked out by his Republican predecessors in the 1920s. Thanks in part to the Wagner Act, some one third of the American workforce had unionized by the end of the 1940s, including huge numbers of unskilled workers who would have been previously ineligible for traditional trade union membership. Through these kinds of policies, Roosevelt became one of the most popular presidents in history, a fact that was illustrated by his sweeping victory in his reelection campaign in 1936. Winning over 60 percent of the popular vote and an almost inconceivable 98 percent of the votes in the Electoral College, Roosevelt’s power had reached an unprecedented level for any president governing in peacetime. Flushed with confidence by this mandate from the American people, however, Roosevelt overextended his political reach in 1937. Angered by the one federal institution that could (and did) block certain New Deal legislation on Constitutional grounds, Roosevelt attempted to change the composition of the Supreme Court, which was dominated by conservative justices who had been appointed by Republican presidents in the 1920s. Proposing that Congress authorize him to appoint six additional justices to the Supreme Court, Roosevelt coveted the power to create a new majority in the Court that would support his New Deal policies. By even attempting to launch this plan, the president disregarded the Constitutional principles of checks and balances between the different branches of federal government. Roosevelt, in other words, was demonstrating the validity of his critics’ warnings that he had become too powerful in his control of a vast federal system of authority that seemed to be further extending its reach every passing year. Opposed by Democrats as well as Republicans in Congress, this “court packing”

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scheme ultimately failed to become law, but it did undermine Roosevelt’s standing with many of his own supporters.