To Make Men Free by Heather Cox Richardson

To Make Men Free by Heather Cox Richardson

Author:Heather Cox Richardson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465024315
Publisher: Basic Books


In the 1920s, college educations, refrigerators, and leisure time did not reach far beyond the men who congratulated themselves on their prosperous country. People in rural areas, whose front doors overlooked endless fields and ramshackle outhouses, could only dream of such riches. After World War I and the deadly influenza pandemic of 1918, which killed twenty to forty million people worldwide, farm prices crashed. Prices began to recover by 1925, but world competition and overproduction meant that by 1929 they remained less than half of what they had been in 1919.1

Worried western congressmen twice tried to prop up agricultural prices in the 1920s, but Coolidge vetoed both measures, warning that they would put farmers at the mercy of an army of bureaucrats and redistribute tax money to a special interest. If the government went down that dangerous road, he said, it was only a question of time until every special interest experiencing hard times demanded government assistance. Farmers’ best hope, Coolidge told them, was to join the modern economy by finding better ways to market their crops.2

Republicans were even less helpful to African Americans. After the Harrison administration’s drive for federal protection of black voters in 1889, lynching in the South had begun to rise as white Americans accused their black neighbors of corrupting American society. Then World War I and the Twenties exacerbated racial tensions in the North by bringing almost two million southern African Americans to northern factories. White men resented the migrants who settled in black enclaves in Chicago, Detroit, New York, and other urban areas. They saw the newcomers as awkward yokels willing to work for less money than the men they replaced.3

The Great Migration, as it became known, permanently changed race relations in America. Issues of race were no longer a “Southern Problem”; they now were national, and northerners had no more a solution to them than southerners had had. In summer 1919, race riots broke out in cities across the country, leaving dozens dead and thousands homeless. In Chicago at the end of July, white youths stoned to death a black boy who had drifted toward a whites-only beach; the resulting ten days of violence left thirty-eight dead and more than five hundred wounded. In 1921, rioters in Tulsa burned the country’s wealthiest black community and killed an untold number of African Americans (some estimates are in the hundreds). The Ku Klux Klan re-formed to defend “traditional America,” claiming forty thousand members, largely in the North. At the same time, when black soldiers returned from the trenches of Europe, where they had been fighting for American values, they were unwilling to go back to second-class citizenship.

Republican leaders had no answer for the country’s racial tensions. In their 1920, 1924, and 1928 party platforms they offered weak reassurance of safety to African Americans by stating that they wanted a federal anti-lynching law. But by the time Hoover took office, Republicans appeared to worry more about offending white sensibilities than maintaining their traditional ties to the black community.



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