When Americans Shut Up About Politics
Americans have calmed down after periods of political violence.
(Aftermath of the Wall Street Bombing of 1920)
Political tensions are explosive right now. The 2020 Presidential Election is approaching, but it’s unlike any other. Many Americans—already stressed about the unceasing government lockdowns—worry about fraudulent mail-in ballots, Big Tech intervention, political intimidation, Deep State meddling and foreign interference will corrupt the election results.
Everyone’s nervous that neither side will accept the election outcome. About one in five Americans with a strong political affiliation say they’re willing to endorse violence if the other party wins the presidential election, according to the surveys conducted by YouGov, the Voter Study Group and Nationscape.
This is all coming after a chaotic summer of mass riots caused by the DNC. It’s not far-fetched to think there could be coup d'etat launched by the Deep State or the oligarchs in the upcoming election.
Things are very bad, but America’s seen worse. A hundred years ago the U.S. had a period of political agitation and violence called the 1919-1920 Red Scare. Over one year and four months, America endured labor strikes, anarchist bombings, angry mobs, lynchings, Bolshevik and race riots, government censorship, political repression, mass deportations and warrantless arrests. Also, keep in mind this was all happening amid the Spanish Flu (1918-1920)!
(Wall Street Bombing of 1920)
(Massachusetts Militia try to keep order in Boston amid the Police Strike)
“It was an era of lawless and disorderly defense of law and order, of unconstitutional defense of the Constitution, of suspicion and civil conflict—in a very literal sense, a reign of terror,” wrote historian Fredrick Lewis Allen in his Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (1931).
Americans were scared to express dissenting political views. In Harper’s Magazine, columnist Katherine Fullerton Gerould wrote:
America is no longer a free country, in the old sense; and liberty, increasingly, a mere rhetorical figure. … No thinking citizen, I venture to say, can express in freedom more than a part of his honest convictions. I do not of course refer to convictions that are frankly criminal. I do mean that everywhere, on every hand, free speech is choked off in one direction or another. The only way in which an American citizen who is really interested in all the social and political problems of his country can preserve any freedom of expression, is to choose the mob that is most sympathetic to him, and abide under the shadow of the mob.
One historian of that time hilariously reported: “A liberal journalist, visiting a formerly outspoken Hoosier in his office, was not permitted to talk politics until his frightened host had closed and locked the door and the window ( which gave on an airshaft perhaps fifty feet wide, with offices on the other side where there might be ears to hear the words of heresy).”
What ended the reign of terror?
A major reason for the eruption of all this violence was that Americans were living under Spartan-like conditions to support the U.S.’s involvement in WWI. Living off rations, working for lower wages, sacrificing civil liberties and being paranoid about foreign attacks, Americans were irritable and stressed out. When the war ended, the pent up energy flared up then burned itself out in 1920.
Allen said it beautifully:
The temper of the aftermath of war was at last giving way to the temper of peace. Like an over-worked business man beginning his vacation, the country had had to go through a period of restlessness and irritability, but was finally learning how to relax and amuse itself once more.
The American economy started to boom. Good paying jobs proliferated. People were too busy working to put bread on the tables they could finally afford. Whatever time they had was spent enjoying new leisure activities, not political activism. They spent their time and money on the inventions of the 1920s, like the automobile, the radio, sports and swing dancing.
Americans focused on having fun, hence, the Roaring Twenties.