Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (52 page)
Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
The lands of the Middle East that had been the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) were split among the winners, leaving Turkey a small, impoverished state. The Balkan peninsula, part of the Ottoman Empire, was divided into a handful of new states, including Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. The British took Palestine, Jordan, and oil-rich Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). France won Lebanon and Syria. A young Vietnamese who had been living and studying in Paris attempted to get independent status for his country. When the French balked, Ho Chi Minh, as he was later known, went to Moscow to study the revolutionary techniques that he would later use to wrest Vietnam away from the French and American armies. The German possessions in Africa were similarly divided among the victors under a League of Nations “mandate” that simply transferred control of these African lands to new colonial powers.
In all these postwar dealings, the seeds were being sown for the next war in Europe as well as generations of deadly division in the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Indochina.
A
MERICAN
V
OICES
H
ELEN
K
ELLER,
in a letter to Eugene V. Debs, whom she addressed as “Dear Comrade” (March 11, 1919):
I write because I want you to know that I should be proud if the Supreme Court convicted me of abhorring war, and doing all in my power to oppose it. When I think of the millions who have suffered in all the wicked wars of the past, I am shaken with the anguish of a great impatience. I want to fling myself against all brute powers that destroy the life, and break the spirit of man.
What most people know of Helen Keller (1880–1968) comes from the play and film
The Miracle Worker
, which tell the remarkable story of the relationship between Helen Keller, who became blind and deaf at the age of two, and her teacher Anne Sullivan. That story stops with Keller’s triumph in learning to sign. With Sullivan as her companion, Keller went on to Radcliffe, then Harvard’s female counterpart, from which she graduated in 1904 with honors. Born into a conservative Alabama family, Keller eventually became both an outspoken feminist and a pacifist. In 1909, she joined the Socialist Party and became friends with party leader Eugene V. Debs, who was imprisoned for expressing his antiwar views at the time Keller’s letter was written.
Chapter Six
Boom to Bust to Big Boom
From the Jazz Age and the Great Depression to Hiroshima
What happened in Tulsa and Rosewood?
Why were Sacco and Vanzetti executed?
Why was Prohibition one of the greatest social and political disasters in American history?
What was the scandal over Teapot Dome?
Did Henry Ford invent the automobile?
What was so lucky about Lucky Lindy?
Why did investors panic in 1929, leading to the Great Crash?
What was so “great” about the Great Depression?
What were the New Deal and the Hundred Days?
Why did Franklin D. Roosevelt try to “pack” the Supreme Court?
What happened to Amelia Earhart?
What did FDR know about a Japanese attack, and when did he know it?
What was the cost of World War II?
What was the Yalta Conference?
Did the United States have to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
T
he Great War was over. Disillusioned and shocked by its frightful toll, Americans wanted to retreat to the safe shell of prewar isolationism. The country wanted to get back to business. That meant putting Republicans back in the White House. Starting in 1921, a Republican held the presidency for the next twelve years. First was Warren G. Harding (1865–1923), who campaigned on the promise of a “return to normalcy.” (Although now commonly used, “normalcy” was not grammatically correct when Harding said it; the correct word is “normality.”) After he was elected in 1920, the highlights of his weak administration were the loud whispers of presidential philandering and the infamous Teapot Dome scandal of 1922.
In the midst of that scandal, Harding died and was replaced by Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933), best remembered for his pronouncement that “the business of America is business.” Known as Silent Cal, he also said, “The man who builds a factory builds a temple. And the man who works there worships there.”
Under Coolidge, America seemed to prosper during the Roaring Twenties, a period in which the booming stock market was the centerpiece of a roaring economy. This was the exuberant era in which convention and old-fashioned morality were tossed aside—in spite of Prohibition—in favor of the freewheeling spirit of the Jazz Age, the days of wild new dances like the Charleston, of hip flasks and of women shucking Victorian undergarments and donning short skirts. It was the period that provided the inspiration for the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, including the great representative character of the era, Jay Gatsby. The disillusionment with war and society also brought forth angry new literary voices like those of John Dos Passos (1896–1970), author of the World War I novel
Three Soldiers
(1921), and Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), whose first novel was
The Sun Also Rises
(1926). Also bucking the conventions of the day were the acerbic journalist H. L. Mencken (1880–1956), whose writings skewered what he called the “booboisie,” the complacent middle-class puritanical Americans who were also the target of Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) in such books as
Main Street
(1920),
Babbitt
(1922),
Arrowsmith
(1925), and his great novel of religious hypocrisy,
Elmer Gantry
(1927), a body of work that brought Lewis the 1930 Nobel Prize, a first for an American author.
But the self-satisfied America targeted by these writers was very happy with the ways things were, thank you. A new industry in a far-off patch of California called Hollywood was producing a diversion that took America’s mind off its troubles, which seemed to be few in the twenties. By 1927, a Jewish singer in blackface named Al Jolson told the country, “You ain’t seen nothing yet,” in the first “talkie,”
The Jazz Singer
, and Hollywood was soon mounting multimillion-dollar productions to meet an insatiable demand for movies.
Seemingly contented with its wealth and diversions, America stayed the course in 1928 by electing Calvin Coolidge’s commerce secretary, Herbert Hoover (1874–1964), an international hero as the World War I food administrator praised for keeping Europe from starving. But Hoover’s reputation as a brilliant manager faded fast. He was cursed with overseeing the greatest economic collapse in history.
In the midst of the worldwide economic collapse, Hoover was dropped in 1932 in favor of the governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945), already crippled by polio but elected overwhelmingly by a nation that desperately wanted a new direction. The economic crisis was met in America by Roosevelt’s progressivism and the “New Deal.” Overseas, there were different responses. As the answer to their woes, Germany turned to Hitler and Italy to Mussolini. By the middle of the depressed thirties, the war that was not supposed to be was on the horizon.
A
MERICAN
V
OICES
“Returning Soldiers” by
W. E. B. DUBOIS
(May 1919):
We return.
We return from fighting.
We return fighting.
What happened in Tulsa and Rosewood?
If hundreds of Americans were taken out and shot, burned alive, or tied to cars and dragged to death by a foreign army or bands of terrorists, it would certainly make front-page news and probably would have wound up in your history books. If six Americans were chased from their homes and murdered, and the homes of hundreds of others torched by an invading army, that also would have been worth a mention in the history books. But when Americans did these things to other Americans, it didn’t merit much attention because the victims were black Americans in what was then a very different America.
These two massacres of large groups of innocent American citizens—or “race riots,” as they were characterized—took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Rosewood, Florida. But they were lost to the history books for most of the last century.
In the early 1920s, Tulsa, Oklahoma, was a boisterous postwar boom town, getting rich quick on oil that had recently been discovered there. It was a place where the postwar Ku Klux Klan recruiters found fertile grounds. The isolationist mood, or the America First movement also called nativism, was also flourishing. In the popular mood of the country, America was white and Christian, and it was going to stay that way. In 1921, when a black shoe shiner was arrested for assaulting a white girl in an elevator, the publisher of the local paper—eager to win a local circulation war—published a front-page headline screaming, “To Lynch Negro Tonight.”
It was a familiar story in the Deep South of that era—a black man accused of sexually assaulting a white woman. Soon after the paper hit the streets on June 21, 1921, whites began to gather outside the courthouse where the accused shoe shiner, Dick Rowland, was being held. (Rowland was eventually released when the woman did not press charges.) Blacks from the Tulsa neighborhood of Greenwood, some of them recently discharged war veterans, also began to descend on the courthouse to protect Rowland from being lynched. Shots were fired and soon the wholesale destruction of an entire community began in hellish force. A mob of more than 10,000 whites, fully backed by the white police force, went wild. It was called a riot but in modern parlance there is a better term—“ethnic cleansing.” The white folks of Tulsa seemed determined to wipe the town clean of blacks.
As historian Tim Madigan put it in his book on Tulsa,
The Burning
, “It soon became evident that whites would settle for nothing less than scorched earth. They would not be satisfied to kill negroes, or to arrest them. They would also try to destroy every vestige of black prosperity.”
Soon white women were looting black homes, filling shopping bags. White men carrying gasoline set fire to the Greenwood neighborhood. When it was over, there were many dead blacks, some of them dumped into mass graves, and their neighborhood was in cinders, with more than 1,200 homes burned. Insurance companies later refused to pay fire claims, invoking a riot exemption. To add to the crime, the story disappeared from local history. Even local newspaper files were eventually cleaned out to remove evidence of the incident.
For decades, the riot and killings were hushed up, kept alive only by oral traditions of a few survivors. Only after nearly eighty years of silence did Tulsa and the Oklahoma legislature come to grips with the past. Historians looking into the city’s deadly riot believe that close to 300 people died during the violence. In 2000, the Tulsa Race Riot Commission, a panel investigating the incident, recommended reparations be paid to the survivors of what is still considered the nation’s bloodiest race riot.
Tulsa was the worst but it was far from unique. Starting in 1919, there were violent attacks on blacks in a number of cities, not limited to the Deep South, such as East St. Louis, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. These mass incidents, coupled with the wave of lynchings that spread throughout the South, continued for years. And usually, as with the Tulsa incident, they escaped the notice of most historians. That was the case with another notorious attack on blacks, in Rosewood, Florida, in 1923. A small mill town on the Gulf Coast, Rosewood had approximately 120 residents, mostly black. They attended church and worked at the local mills. For the most part, there was a sense of peaceful coexistence with whites in the neighboring town of Sumner. But another trumped-up charge of a black man assaulting a white woman again set off the tinderbox.
On January 2, 1923, after word of the supposed incident got out, white men from Sumner went on a rampage. During a week of shootings and house burnings, black families fled into the woods or to the protection of a few white families who offered shelter. During the Rosewood massacre, at least six blacks were killed; several of them had been lynched and mutilated. Two whites also died in the fighting. The entire small community of Rosewood was practically wiped out. And as in Tulsa, the history was soon erased from local memory in a conspiracy of silence, shame, and fear.
