The Year That Was
Elizabeth Lunday
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Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best The Year That Was episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to The Year That Was for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite The Year That Was episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
06/28/20 • 55 min
Women in the United States began fighting for the right to vote in 1848, and by 1910 they had achieved a few hard-won victories. But success nationwide seemed out of reach. Then Alice Paul arrived on the scene with a playbook of radical protest strategies and an indomitable will. She focused in on one target: the president, Woodrow Wilson. How far would Paul and her fellow suffragists have to go to get Wilson's support?
Dora Lewis was the member of prominent Philadelphia family. She was dedicated fighter for the right of women to vote.
In 1919, Lewis participated in the Watchfires protests, in which suffragists burned the speeches of Woodrow Wilson to reject his hypocricy of speaking about democracy and justice without protecting them for women at home.
The woman suffrage movement in the United States is usually said to have begun at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. The Convention, organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and several friends and colleagues, produced a Declaration of Sentiments that called for women to "secure for themselves their right to the elective franchise."
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (left) and Susan B. Anthony (right) met in 1851 and become close friends and dedicated fighters for votes for women.
The "New Woman" of the turn of the 19th century was educated, independent, and career-minded. These women were more demanding than previous generations and less concerned about upsetting gender norms.
I joked in this episode about New Women and their bicycles, but this was actually an enormous breakthrough for women. For the first time, women had freedom of movement that opened up a world that been narrowly restricted for previous generations.
Alice Paul was charismatic, magnetic, and impossible to refuse. She was willing to work herself into the hospital and expected the same level of effort from her friends. (She is also, in this photo, wearing an awesome hat.)
Alice Paul spent the years between 1907 and 1909 in the United Kingdom, where she joined the radical suffragette movement. She learned the power of protest in England, as well as the power of her own will.
In 1909, Paul went on a hunger strike in prison and was force fed. This was a horrifying, traumatic experience--a fact that the suffragettes didn't hesitate to leverage in their promotional material.
Paul's first major action back in the United States was the Woman Suffrage Procession of 1913. Scheduled the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, it achieved maximum publicity for the cause. This image was used as the cover of the official procession program.
This photo shows the start of the procession, with attorney Inez Mulholland on horseback.
Paul and other organizers intended to segregate African-American marchers to the end of the parade, but Ida B. Wells-Barnett had no intention of being segregated. She joined the Illinois delegation halfway along the route.
Massive crowds viewed the parade. Without adequate police monitoring, the crowd got out of control, spilled into the street, and began harassing the marchers.
In 1917, the Silent Sentinels began protesting daily at the White House. They carried banners demanding the president take action on women's right to vote.
For several months, the protests were peaceful. But Paul began cranking up the tension in the summer, and D.C. police began arresting and detaining the protesters.
Eventually, suffragists were sentenced to time at Occoquan Workhouse a grim, remote facility. Here several suffragists, including Dora Lewis, pose in their prison uniforms.
Suffragist prisoners began protests in prison, refusing to wear uniforms or do assigned work. Some, including Alice Paul, went on hunger strikes. Prison guards reacted with increasing violence. Here one of the suffragists has to be helped to a car after a harrowing stay at Occoquan.
At the same time the members of the NWP were protesting daily at the White House, members of the rival organization NAWSA were conducting a massive campaign for suffrage in New York. They won the vote for 2 million women and reinforced the nationwide conviction that the time had come for a federal amendment.
The New York campaign was one of the most inclusive in suffrage history. NAWSA partnered with both the Wage Earner's Suffrage League and the New York City Colored Woman Suffrage Club. African-American suffrage clubs were popular in northern states; this image is of such a group. (I was unable to figure out exactly where these women were from.)
After the House of Representatives passed the federal woman suffrage amendment in 1918, the NWP and NAWSA set aside their differences and worked together to lobby Senators for votes for women. They developed an early form of a database in an index card system that tracked each Senator's friends, memberships, and donors. They also logged notes of each meeting wit...
05/26/20 • 55 min
Living through the COVID-19 pandemic raises all sorts of new questions about the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919. This episode seeks to answer those questions. We look at the multiple waves of the flu, popular home remedies, who went to the hospital and who stayed home, how the federal government responded to the outbreak, the effect on the economy, resistance to face masks, and how the flu shaped the Roaring Twenties.
Correction: In this episode I state that Arthur Conan Doyle stopped writing mysteries after the flu pandemic. This is simply not true. Doyle published numerous mysteries, including several Sherlock Holmes stories, between 1919 and his death in 1930. My apologies for the error, and thanks to the listener who caught it.
Heroic efforts went into creating a vaccine for Pfieffer's Bacillus, which was believed by many doctors to cause the Spanish Flu. These efforts were all in vain, since Pfeiffer's Bacillus is a fairly common bacteria and not the cause of the flu. The actual cause would not be understood until the existence of viruses was proven in the late 1930s.
The Spanish Flu hit in three waves, in the the spring of 1918, the fall of 1918, and the spring of 1919. There is no evidence that the relaxing of social distancing and/or quarantines triggered the second wave. It is more likely that the virus mutated into a more easily transmitted and more deadly form over the summer. However, the third wave can be linked to relaxed social distancing.
Dr. Kilmer's Swamp Root was a popular patent medicine used to treat the flu. So were onions and Vick's Vapo-Rub.
Nurses played an enormous role during the Spanish Flu, perhaps a greater role than doctors, since recovery was largely the matter of careful nursing. A severe shortage of nurses put a huge burden on those trying to treat patients.
The American health system was strictly segregated in 1918-1919, and nurses of color struggled to treat the patients that overwhelmed the small and underfunded African-American hospitals.
There was no precedent in 1918 for the federal government to play anything other than a coordinating and research role during the Spanish Flu. But the situation was so dire that states and cities begged for help. Surgeon General Rupert Blue seemed unable to rise to the challenge.
The Surgeon's General's advice on how to avoid the flu was distributed widely but offered little in real help and failed to acknowledge the severity of the situation.
The 1918 mid-term election went ahead as planned, but in parts of the west, polling places were unable to open because too many workers were sick with the flu.
Public campaigns urged individuals to cover their faces when coughing or sneezing and to avoid shaking hands. If this cartoon is any indication, some people thought the efforts were extreme.
Cities railed at residents to stop spitting on the street. This was an enormous problem, although this warning seems particularly stark.
Masks were adopted across the country, and some cities mandated their use. The masks became a symbol of the disease. This cartoonist pokes fun at their ubiquity by proposing new styles soon to come out of the Paris fashion houses.
San Francisco required residents and visitors to wear face masks, and initially compliance was high. Red Cross workers sold masks at ferry terminals and on the street.
But people soon tired of wearing masks, or wore them slung around their necks. Soon police and public health officers were busy fining and arresting scofflaws.
Crowds packed the Civic Auditorium for a boxing match in November 1918, and a photographer snapped this image of hundreds of San Franciscans without a mask in sight. Dozens of city leaders were fined for violated the mask ordinance. The ordinance was lifted a few days later.
However, the ordinance was re-imposed in January when the flu returned to San Francisco. This time, opposition to masks was not just heated but organized. An anti-mask league held a meeting to which up to 5000 people attended.
Violet Harris was 15 years old and living in Seattle when the flu closed schools. She kept a diary that gives a sense of life during the shut down.
Some rumors traced the flu pandemic to German scientists and claimed the disease was spread by German submarines. This Brazilian cartoon conveys in this a rather grim way.
Hundreds of thousands of children were left orphaned by the Spanish Flu. This photo shows a group of children who lost their families when the flu raged through the Bristol Bay region of Alaska.
Links:
Say It Ain't So: The Black Sox Scandal and Baseball in 1919
The Year That Was
05/05/20 • 59 min
Baseball was the only truly national American sport in 1919, loved by fans across the United States. But the mood among players was grim--team owners kept salaries artificially low. When the Chicago White Sox won their league championship, the temptation to accept hard cash from gamblers to deliberately lose the World Series was irresistible. After all, what could possibly go wrong?
The Wingfoot Express took its maiden voyage around Chicago on July 21st, 1919. The 150-foot long airship was filled with hydrogen gas--lighter than air, but extremely flammable.
The dirigible caught fire in downtown Chicago, inside the Loop, right above the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank, at the corner of LaSalle Street and Jackson Boulevard. The entire ship was consumed in literally seconds. The five men aboard jumped and tried to inflate their parachutes, but only three were successful. One man, mechanic Carl Weaver, plunged through the skylight of the bank.
In this photo of the bank before the disaster, you can see how the interior was ringed by a circle of teller stations. They enclosed an area where typists, telegraphists, and other bank staff worked. For security purposes, this inner area could only be accessed through two gated entrances.
Flaming debris, including the engine and two full tanks, crashed through the skylight above this inner area, starting a massive fire and trapping employees inside.
This image of the interior of the bank after the disaster gives some sense of the horror of those trapped inside. 13 people died in the crash, ten of them bank employees.
Before radio, fans had few ways to follow a live baseball game. Newspapers would receive game updates by telegraph and posted results in their windows. In 1912, the Washington Post invested in an elaborate scoreboard system complete with lights indicating balls, strikes, and position on the field. You can see here fans gathered to "watch" the 1912 World Series.
The American and National Leagues kept player salaries low with the reserve clause, a provision in player contracts that kept players tied to one team and unable to negotiate higher salaries. The clause also made it difficult for new teams and new leagues to attract top-quality players. The Federal League, founded in 1913, tried to operate as a third major league and ended up suing the established leagues for operating an illegal monopoly.
This is an official scorecard of one Federal League Team, the Neward Peps.
The case came before Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. It couldn't have landed on the desk of anyone more deeply invested in the game of baseball.
At the start of World War I, team owners were desperate to keep the game going and their players out of the trenches. One attempt to demonstrate their patriotism was the practice, seen here, of holding drill sessions with players before games. The War Department was not impressed and made players eligible for the draft after the 1917 World Series.
The president of the American League, Ban Johnson, suggested reserving 18 players for each team and conscripting the rest. No one was impressed by this plan.
While more than one third of major league players enlisted, others went to work for factories in essential industries such as steel manufacturing or shipbuilding. The players spent far more time playing baseball for factory teams than painting or welding, and team owners worried that major league baseball would be run out of business by industrial ball.
Charles Comiskey, owner of the Chicago White Sox, denounced the factory team players as unpatriotic and sniffed that he wasn't sure he wanted them back on his team.
The 1918 World Series was held in early September at the request of the War Department, so the second, most deadly wave of the Spanish Flu pandemic was just getting started when baseball ended for the season. Nevertheless, at least some players took to the field in masks to prevent the spread of the disease.
I have been able to find out little about this photo. I don't know who was playing or the exact date. I wish I knew more--when and where the picture was taken would be a start. If I find out more, I will post it.
The 1919 White Sox had a fantastic team, with several top-notch players and one genuine superstar in Joe Jackson.
Shoeless Joe Jackson is one of baseball's all-time greatest players.
Eddie Cicotte was a fine pitcher and possibly the inventor of the knuckleball.
Lefty Williams was another strong pitcher for the White Sox.
Chick Gandil, on other hand, was just average. On the other hand, he had a reputation as being crooked and multiple contacts with gambling organizations.
Gandil's connections went all the way back to New York underworld figure Arnold Rothstein. Thoughtful and scheming, Rothstein inspired multiple fictional representations, including Nathan Detroit ...
02/17/20 • 59 min
William Monroe Trotter was among the richest, best-educated, and most-well-connected African-American men in the United States--and he dedicated every ounce of his privilege into helping his fellow black Americans. By 1919, he had fought with the elder statesmen of his community, been arrested in protests over "Birth of a Nation," and denounced Woodrow Wilson's racial policies to president's face. But 1919 would bring one of Trotter's greatest challenges: he would need to learn how to peel potatoes.
William Monroe Trotter was one of the most significant civil rights leaders in Amerian history, yet he is little remembered today.
Trotter crossed the Atlantic on the SS Yarmouth as assistant cook--a strange position for a Harvard graduate with two degrees and a Phi Beta Kappa key.
Trotter's father James Monroe Trotter fought in the 55th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment during the Civil War. Afterward, he served as the first Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia, a lucrative position where he earned a small fortune. James' only son William would inherit both wealth and influence, but James insisted that this privilege should be employed to fight for African-American rights.
In 1899, William Monroe Trotter married Geraldine Pindell, known by friends and family as Deenie. She was passionate about civil rights as her husband.
A year after his marriage, Trotter decided to fulfill the mission laid upon him by his father by publishing a newspaper, The Guardian. The weekly was dedicated to exposing racial issues across the United States.
In 1905, Trotter, along with W.E.B. DuBois and several other black leaders, founded The Niagara Movement to advocate for civil rights and counter the message of the Tuskegee Machine. The organization collapsed within two years, largely because Trotter was so difficult to work with.
In 1909, DuBois joined other activists to establish the NAACP with much the same aims. Trotter rejected the group, which he saw as dominated by white donors and leaders and too timid to tackle real issues. In response, he founded his own organization, which in time would take the name the National Equal Rights League, or NERL.
The 1915 film The Birth of a Nation prompted immediate reaction from both the NAACP and Trotter's NERL. But those reactions took different forms. The NAACP focused on legal challenges and attempts to disprove the historical accuracy of the movie. The NERL organized public protests intended to demonstrate the depth of African-American opposition to whites.
Among the protests Trotter organized was this one in Boston Common. The photo is extremely poor quality, but you can get a sense of the size of the crowd.
At another Trotter-organized event, 11 protestors were arrested for disturbing the peace. Trotter was among them.
At the end of the Great War, a dozen or so other delegates were elected to present an appeal for equal rights and justice to the Peace Conference. Among them were Trotter and Madam C J Walker. Walker has an incredible story--she built her business selling cosmetics and hair care products to African-American women into one of wealthiest and most successful in the country.
At the same time Trotter was trying to get to Paris to present his appeal, W.E.B. Du Bois was organization the Pan-African Congress, which included representatives from African nations and the African diaspora.
When Trotter returned home from Paris, Red Summer had begun. Trotter focused on creating a new organization that would help African-Americans defend themselves, using force against force.
The ABB ceased to be a secret in 1921 when the armed response of African-Americans during the Tulsa Race Massacre horrified white Americans. The ABB was accused of conspiracy with all of the usual suspects of the era, including the Reds and the Wobblies. In this case, the Reds, were, in fact, a factor. Within a few years, the ABB had been absorbed by the American Communist Party.
As these images show, whole blocks of Tulsa were burned to the ground, including the entire Greenwood Neighborhood, known as the "Negro Wall Street." It's unknown how many people died in Tulsa
Links:
- Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter by Kerri K. Greenidge — Greenidge's book was my essential guide during this episode. I highly recommend the book. Trotter fought far more battles than I had time to describe, and Greenidge does a fantastic job of placing his life in the context of the time and place.
There Is No Justice Here: The Red Summer of 1919
The Year That Was
01/22/20 • 57 min
A constant threat of violence hung over the lives of African Americans in the early 20th century, an unrelenting terror that served to deter economic progress and enforce a racist social order. But 1919 was different: violence spread out of the south into northern and midwestern cities and took the form of random, terrifying riots. But the response of African-American leaders in 1919 was also different. They decided enough was enough. The time had come to fight back.
Chicago's beaches in 1919 were not segregated by law, but any attempt by African-Americans to stand up to convention could prompt harsh and sudden violence. This is the white beach on the South Side, which started around 29th street.
The beach used by African-Americans was a few blocks north, around 25th street. The two beaches were divided by a rocky inlet--and as five teenaged boys discovered that July, the line between them was all to easy to cross.
In the South, the Jim Crow system enforced the segregation of all public places. African-Americans couldn't eat in the same restaurants, sleep in the same hotels, sit in the same movie theaters, use the same restrooms, or even drink the same water as whites.
Ida B. Wells had not intended to take on the cause of lynching until her friend Thomas Moss was dragged out of jail and shot in a railyard. Her investigation into lynching was a bombshell that shattered the Southern narrative about racial violence.
You can read Wells' original report, titled "Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases," online.
General Pershing likely never intended the 369th Infantry Regiment, the Harlem Hellraisers, to fight on the front lines, but under pressure from the Allies he turned them over to French command. They served with courage and distinction and won the respect and admiration of the entire French nation.
Private Henry Johnson fought off a 24-man German patrol alone while wounded. He was awarded the French Croix de Guerre--but received no medals from his own country.
James Reese Europe served as the 369th's regimental band leader. A brilliant musician, conductor, composer, and arranger, he brought jazz to France.
Author W.E.B. DuBois electrified readers of the NAACP magazine The Crisis with his essay "Returning Soldiers," which urged African-American veterans to fight racism at home. You can read the essay online.
Riots broke out in early summer in Charleston, South Carolina; Longview, Texas; and Washington, D.C. This sort of scene was happened frequently--black men were dragged out of trolley, as well as seized walking down the street or yanked out of businesses to be beaten by a white mob.
Poet Claude McKay wrote "If We Must Die" in 1919 in the same spirit as Du Bois' "Returning Soldiers." It was a call for African-Americans to stand up and defend themselves against white attacks. You can read the poem online or listen to Ice-T read it.
During the Chicago riot, bands of white men prowled the city looking for African-Americans. Here a group of men are running through a black neighborhood.
Order was finally restored when the state militia arrived. Generally, the soldiers were impartial and prevent further attacks on African-Americans, but encounters between white troops and black men were still fraught.
The riot in Omaha, Nebraska drew an enormous crowd, estimated at anything from 5000 to 15,000. Here you can see some of that mob surrounding the Omaha courthouse, which they eventually set alight.
Newspapers across Arkansas ran headlines about the supposed uprising of African-Americans in Phillips County.
Conductor and intelligence agent Water H. Loving submitted a report to the Department of War that explained that socialist, communist, and labor organizers had nothing to do with the violence in 1919; rather, African-Americans had decided enough was enough. His report was shelved and ignored.
- Please note that the links below to Amazon are affiliate links. That means that, at no extra cost to you, I can earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. (Here's what, legally, I'm supposed to tell you: I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for me to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.) However, I only recommend books that I have used and genuinely highly recommend.
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Reign of Terror: The First Red Scare
The Year That Was
12/19/19 • 61 min
Americans felt under attack in 1919 as a series of riots, strikes, disasters, and bombings hit the country. After radicals attempted to blow up the house of Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, he decided enough was enough. It was time to stop the Red Menace using any means possible. But would Americans tolerate the loss of their civil liberties in the pursuit of Bolsheviks?
A. Mitchell Palmer's home was devastated when a bomb exploded at his front door on the night of June 2, 1919. If Palmer had been at his usual spot in the library, he likely would have been killed.
This is another view of the blast damage. Notice that all of the windows and the door were blown out.
Eugene V. Debs serves as a case study of pre-war opinions about socialism. As leader of the Socialist Party in America, he was considered leftist, but not radical--until the Russian Revolution changed attitudes about anyone or anything related to communism. For saying basically the same things he had been saying for years, Debs was tried under the Sedition Act in 1919 and sentenced to ten years in prison.
Many Americans believed in the progression laid out literally step by step in this political cartoon. Disturbances such as strikes would lead inevitably to Bolshevism and chaos.
The majority of people believed that immigrants were mostly or wholly responsible for radicalism in the United States. It seemed the easiest solution was that proposed by the 1918 Immigration Act: deport them all.
To be fair, not everyone believed the Reds were an imminent threat. While many political cartoons fed the fear, others mocked it, like this example, which pointed to the hysterical tone of the Overman Report.
When A. Mitchell Palmer took the job of Attorney General in March, he was among the moderates. Everything changed when his house was blown up--and really, you can hardly blame him.
Palmer placed the young but well-liked and hard-working J. Edgar Hoover in charge of intelligence for his Red hunt. Hoover quickly gained the trust of his boss and ultimately managed all of the planning and operations details of the November and January raids.
After the November 7th raids, 249 people were deported to Russia. The sailed on the Buford, a ship that Hoover arranged to borrow from the war department. It became known as the Soviet Ark.
Up to ten thousand people were rounded up in the January 2nd, 1920 raids. Individuals were arrested, searched, and held without warrants, often in deplorable conditions.
Deportation hearings began almost immediately. This is a photo of men waiting to be called for hearings at Ellis Island. It was an incredibly fraught situation. Many of the suspected radicals had lived in the United States for decades. They had families and children--and their children had often been born in the U.S. and were therefore citizens.
Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis F. Post insisted on full constitutional protection for those rounded up in the Palmer Raids and ended up dismissing the majority of cases. He infuriated Palmer, who arranged for him to be impeached by the House of Representatives. Post's testimony was a major factor in Palmer's downfall.
After all was said and done and the panic subsided, the anarchists struck again. The 1920 Wall Street Bombing left 38 dead and hundreds wounded. It was likely the work of the anarchists, who still had not been captured.
Historic Newspapers
If you are not familiar with the fantastic resource that is the Library of Congress Chronicling America site, let me introduce it to you. It contains scanned newspapers from across the country and the decades.
Click here to find the results of a search of headlines nationwide on June 3rd, 1919, the morning after the bomb attacks. It's fascinating to compare the headlines and see what else was considered important that day.
Then have fun looking up more dates and more newspapers. You'll probably be there some time.
- Please note that the links below to Amazon are affiliate links. That means that, at no extra cost to you, I can earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. (Here's what, legally, I'm supposed to tell you: I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for me to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.) However, I only recommend books that I have used and genuinely highly recommend.
Pie in the Sky: The Wobblies and the Fight for Labor
The Year That Was
12/10/19 • 58 min
The I.W.W. was a tough, militant, radical union, and its very existence terrified business owners, factory bosses, and the entire U.S. government. Since its founding, the law had been out to get the Wobblies. In 1919, as a record number of Americans went on strike for better wages and working conditions, would the union be able to help them? Would the union even survive?
The Wobblies were so famous for singing that they repeatedly published their lyrics in "The Little Red Songbook," which contained Wobbly sayings and organizing advice as well as songs.
"Big Bill" Haywood was tough and physically imposing, but he had a big heart and a gift for communicating with workers.
Samuel Gompers was leader of the IWW-rival the American Federation of Labor. He cultivated a reputation for the organization as reasonable and cooperative--and achieved many results for his members.
Pinkerton agent James McParland took over the investigation of the murder of former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg, and his handling of the main suspect was, shall we say, questionable. McParland was one of the country's most famous Pinkerton agents, known for his infiltration of the Molly Maguires--so famous, in fact, that Arthur Conan Doyle modeled a character in his novel The Valley of Fear on McParland and imagined a conversation between Sherlock Holmes and the real detective.
The trial of multiple Wobbly leaders for the murder of Frank Steunenberg garnered nationwide--even international--press attention.
The most successful IWW-led strike was the "Bread and Roses" strike in 1912 in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Many of the strikers were women, seen here on the picket line.
IWW organizers urged the strikers to remain peaceful no matter how much the police and state militia threatened them. The strikers generally remained non-violent, although in one confrontation between the two groups a young woman was shot and killed. It remains uncertain who was responsible, but IWW organizer Joseph Ettor was placed on trial. No evidence connected him to the murder, and he was aquitted.
Joe Hill was an uneducated, unskilled Swedish immigrant with a remarkable gift for songwriting--in an adopted language, no less. He was convicted of murder and executed by firing squad in 1915. His death can be seen as matter of perverse stubbornness in the face of officialdom--he refused to explain how he had received a gunshot wound on the night a former policeman was killed. Or it was a blatant miscarriage of justice in which a man with no connection to the the murder victim became a convenient scapegoat. Or perhaps it was both. In any case, Hill became a martyr to the Wobbly cause.
This remarkable image shows striking miners and those considered their allies being loaded up into cattle cars on the morning of July 12, 1917 by the sheriff of Bisbee, Arizona and the self-appointed Citizens' Protective League. The men were told if they attempted to return to town, they would be killed. The cattle cars were abandoned across the New Mexico border, leaving the men without food or water.
Sheriff Harry Wheeler was unconcerned that his actions might have been illegal. "It became a question of 'Are you American, or are you not?'" he said.
In September 1918, 48 IWW offices across the country were raided. This image shows one office after the raid.
More than one hundred IWW members and leaders were tried under the Espionage Act. Most were convicted and received sentences of up to twenty years.
The union spent most of 1918 and 1919 raising money for defense and appeals. This was a Wobbly fundraising picnic. The banner reads, at the top, "We're in For You" and asks for money for the "Class War Prisoners."
When the unions of Seattle called a general strike in January 1919, the mayor was so terrified he requested U.S. Army troops, including machine gun companies, be sent to his town.
Actors walked out of Broadway shows in August 1919 in the first Actors Equity union strike. Here actors walk the picket line.
When the Boston Police went on strike in September 1919, the public was terrified they would be helpless at the hands of criminals. The recently elected governor Calvin Coolidge sent the state militia to town and earned nationwide praise for ensuring law and order. Coolidge is seen here inspecting militia members.
The steelworkers strike was pushed from the bottom up and never had the full support of the unions who were supposed to organize and lead it.
The factory owners convinced workers that the cause was hopeless and they should go back to work. Notice that this advertisement, which ran in a Pittsburgh newspaper, is in mutiple languages to reach immigrant workers.
When the town of Centralia, Washington planned a parade for the first anniversary of Ar...
No Cause for Panic: The Spanish Flu Pandemic
The Year That Was
10/15/19 • 43 min
The emergence of the flu virus that swept the globe between 1918 and 1920 was entirely unexpected, but the resulting pandemic can't be called an entirely natural disaster. Governments made decisions that made the flu much, much worse, and those decisions would have long-lasting consequences--and leave between 50 and 100 million dead.
Colonel Charles Hagadorn was a respected officer who had served in the Philippines, Northern Mexico, and Panama as well as at West Point as a drawing instructor. His suicide was reported across the United States.
Camp Grant in Rockford, Illinois was like many of the army camps thrown together after the United States declared war on Germany. The camp's experience with the Spanish Flu was not unusual; many camps were devasted by the pandemic. In this photo, soldiers at the camp play baseball, probably during the months either before or after the flu, since during the crisis all hands were needed to care for the sick and tend to the dead.
This photo depicts typical hospital conditions in army camps. It was taken at Camp Funston in Kansas, which some researchers believe was where the flu virus originated. Unusually virulent cases of flu had been reported in Kansas, and the camp saw some of the first cases in the United States. That did not stop the camp from sending soldiers to other camps across the country and to Europe.
Despite the fact that cases of flu had been reported among navy personnel in Philadelphia, the city went ahead with its massive Liberty Loan parade in September 1918. The streets were packed with several hundred thousand people. Within days, tens of thousands fell ill.
As the crisis continued, the Archbishop threw open churches for use as hospitals, ordered seminary students to help bury the dead, and allowed cloistered nuns to serve as nurses.
Toward the end of the pandemic, the city had to recruit workers to dig mass graves for the dead.
Cities tried to implement measures to limit the spread of the disease. Spitting on the street was a frequent target.
Islands and remote communities tried to impose quarantines to keep out the sickness. Many of these, as in Prince Edward Island, Canada and Australia, proved ineffective. However, Gunnison, Colorado's strict restrictions kept the flu out of the community.
Despite the dire situation, many governments tried to downplay the seriousness of the flu. They considered it important to maintain morale and avoid panic. The Albuquerque Morning Journal argued that fear took more lives than the disease.
The flu was a global disaster, although I have found it difficult to find photos that give a real sense of its scope. This image is from Tokyo and shows schoolgirls wearing gauze masks in an attempt to prevent spreading or catching the disease. Masks were worn around the world during the flu outbreak.
I mentioned in the episode the terrible losses in Bristol Bay, Alaska. Native villages across Alaska were hit particularly hard by the flu, and thousands of orphans were left in the aftermath of the pandemic. This photo shows a group of these orphans at the Kanakanak government orphanage.
Mohandas K. Gandhi, seen here in a photo from 1915, was one of many political and social leaders who became seriously ill with the flu.
Katherine Anne Porter, pictured here about 1912, nearly died in the influenza epidemic and was one of few writers of the era to chronicle her experience.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that no matter how terrible the crisis, someone will try to make money off of it. The Victor Victrola dealer of Billings, Montana, for example, informed the public they could still enjoy music even while concert halls and movie theaters were closed if they bought their own record player.
- Please note that the links below to Amazon are affiliate links. That means that, at no extra cost to you, I can earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. (Here's what, legally, I'm supposed to tell you: I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for me to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.) However, I only recommend books that I have used and genuinely highly recommend.
Links:
- Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World by Laura Spinney — Spinney's book focuses on the spread of the globe across the world and how it changed the society's where it struck. Vivid and detailed--a great read.
A Gladiator's Gesture: Art after the Great War
The Year That Was
09/24/19 • 42 min
In 1919, two competing art movements went head-to-head in Paris. One was the Return to Order, a movement about purity and harmony. The other was Dada, a movement about chaos and destruction. Their collision would change the trajectory of Western art.
Hugo Ball established the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, where Dada came to life in February 1916. In this photo, he's dressed in his "magic bishop" costume. The costume was so stiff and ungainly that Ball had to be carried on and off stage.
You can hear the entire text of Ball's "Karawane" on Youtube. You can also read the text.
Marcel Duchamp arrived in New York to a hero's welcome, a far cry from the disdainful treatment he was receiving in France. He was hailed for his success at the 1913 Armory Show, where his painting "Nude Descending a Staircase" was the hit of the show.
"Nude Descending a Staircase" was considered radical art, but it was still oil paint on canvas. Duchamp would soon leave even that much tradition behind.
Francis Picabia was handsome, rich, dashing, and about as faithful as an alley cat. That he wasn't court martialed for neglecting his diplomat mission to Cuba for artistic shenanigans in New York was entirely due to his family's wealth and influence. He was also well known in New York for his visit there during the Armory Show.
Picabia abandoned traditional painting for meticulous line drawings of mass-produced items, including this work, titled "Young American Girl in a State of Nudity."
Duchamp horrified New Yorkers when he presented "Fountain" to an art exhibit as a work of sculpture. A urinal may not seem particularly shocking now, but it violated any number of taboos in 1917.
While "Fountain" is generally atttributed to Duchamp, it is possible, although by no mean certain, that it was actually created by the Baroness Else von Freytag-Loringhoven. A German ex-pat, she was creating art out of ready-made objects more than a year before Duchamp and lived her life as a kind of non-stop performance art. Whatever her role in "Fountain," she deserves to be better remembered as a pioneering modernist.
After he returned to Europe, Picabia's art became less disciplined and more outlandish. He titled this ink-blot "The Virgin Saint."
Picabia also published a Dadaist journal, in which he published this work by Duchamp. It's a cheap postcard of the "Mona Lisa" to which he added a mustache. The title "L.H.O.O.Q. is a pun in French; it sounds like "she has a hot ass."
Tzara and other Dadaists in Paris devoted themselves to events and performances. This is a handbill for a "Festival Dada" that took place on May 26, 1920. Tzara and Picabia are listed as performing, along with several other prominent Dadaists including Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, and Paul Eluard. These evenings became increasingly frantic and nihilistic as Dada wore on.
By 1919, Pablo Picasso part of the artistic establishment and no longer a radical on the edges of society.
In 1911/1912, Picasso paintings looked like this--this is "Ma Jolie," a dense, complicated, frankly intimidating Cubist painting.
Ten years later, he painted this work, Woman in White. With its clarity, beauty, and nods to tradition, it is a prime example of Picasso's embrace of neo-classicism after the Great War.
The impulse to create clear, simple, ordered art existed in many European countries. In the Netherlands, Piet Mondrian worked in the Neoplasticist movement creating his iconic grid paintings. This is "Composition No. 2" from 1920.
At the same time, in Germany the Bauhaus was established. As a school of arts and crafts, it taught a stripped-down, clean aesthetic that applied to everything from architecture to furniture design, industrial design to graphic design. This poster advertising a 1923 exhibition is a good example of Bauhaus design and typography.
The Surrealist movement arose out of Dada's ashes in the mid- to late-1920s. It combined the traditional painting technique of neo-Classicism with the bizarre imagery of Dada. Salvador Dali's "Persistence of Memory," for example, is a technical masterpiece, with masterful execution. It's also impossible and, frankly, disturbing.
T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" gives the impression of randomness, of lines picked out of a coat pocket. In fact, it is painstakingly constructed and shows as much technical skill as Dali's clocks. You can read the poem...
10/08/19 • 20 min
In 1919, thousands of American soldiers fought Russian troops on Russian soil--despite the fact President Woodrow Wilson had promised to allow Russia to determine its own political future. Why did the Allies rush to land troops in eastern Siberia and along the Arctic Ocean? And why have we forgotten all about it?
General William S. Graves wanted to lead troops in France, but instead he was given confusing and contradictory orders and sent to Vladivostok in far eastern Siberia.
The Americans joined representatives of multiple other nations in Vladivostok, including French, British, Romanian, Serbian, Polish and Japanese troops. Many of the British units were from Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. Representatives of the Czechoslovak Legion and the White Army were also on hand. In this photo, American soldiers parade through Vladivostok shortly after their arrival in 1918.
I continue to struggle to find maps that show what I want. This one shows a few key points. First, the location of the territory firmly in Bolshevik hands, land generally surrounding Moscow, is in dark gray. The route of the Trans-Siberian Railway, along which the Czechoslovak Legion seized territory, crosses Siberia. Dark arrows indicate where various Allied troops landed and tried to advance into Russia.
You'll notice arrows moving up from the South, from the Crimea and around the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. These were primarily French and British troops, and Americans weren't involved. I haven't discussed these attempted invasions just to simplify matters.
Conditions in Siberia and northern Russia were predictably harsh. This photo shows American soldiers eating while sitting on a snow bank. This looks like a relatively happy gathering; it was not usually this pleasant.
This photo gives at least an inkling how cold it was, especially in northern Russia.
Most Americans had no idea their soldiers were in Russia until the issue was picked up by Senator Hiram Johnson of California. Johnson, a Republican who despised President Wilson, made the return of the troops his number one priority in late 1918/early 1919. He hoped the issue would carry him all the way to the White House.
Johnson's pressure combined with the new-found strength of the Red Army and the general American desire to bring all of the boys home ended American intervention in Russia. Most troops in northern Russia were home by the summer of 1919. The Polar Bear Division, the 339th Infantry Regiment from Michigan, were welcomed with an enormous party in Detroit, seen here.
Japan sent more than 70,000 troops to Vladivostok. The campaign became deeply unpopular at home, in part because its purpose was unclear, in part because it was a resounding failure. In order to rally public support, Japan produced numerous propaganda images. This one shows Japanese troops landing at Vladivostok to the great joy of the Russian people. The defeat of the Japanese army in Siberia contributed to the collapse of democratic rule in Japan.
Americans might have forgotten about the Allied intervention in Russia, but the Russians certainly didn't. When Nikita Krushchev visited New York in September 1959, he pointedly brought up "the time you sent the troops to quell the revolution."
Please note that the links below to Amazon are affiliate links. That means that, at no extra cost to you, I can earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. (Here's what, legally, I'm supposed to tell you: I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for me to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.) However, I only recommend books that I have used and genuinely highly recommend.
Links:
- The Polar Bear Expedition: The Heroes of America's Forgotten Invasion of Russia, 1918-1919 byJames Carl Nelson — This is a fascinating, detailed look at the Allied intervention in Russia, focusing on the Polar Bear Division from Michigan.
- Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919 by Ann Hagedorn — Hagadorn's book has been an invaluable companion as I've worked on this season. She provides an excellent overview of the American involvement in Russia and the fight by Hiram Johnson to bring them home.
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FAQ
How many episodes does The Year That Was have?
The Year That Was currently has 27 episodes available.
What topics does The Year That Was cover?
The podcast is about Art History, Literature, Society & Culture, American History, Art, History, Documentary, Podcasts and Science.
What is the most popular episode on The Year That Was?
The episode title 'Do You Expect Us to Turn Back Now: Alice Paul and the Fight for Woman Suffrage' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on The Year That Was?
The average episode length on The Year That Was is 50 minutes.
How often are episodes of The Year That Was released?
Episodes of The Year That Was are typically released every 9 days.
When was the first episode of The Year That Was?
The first episode of The Year That Was was released on Aug 12, 2019.
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