- Location
- The left-wing of the impossible
Yes, though as @Sumeragi noted when she suggested the name, the combination was a very common naming convention in the period.
Reds! A Revolutionary Timeline
- Thread starter Aelita
- Start date
- Timeline Post-1900 Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
During the pan-Asianist phase during the 1920s, "Greater East Asia" was a common idea. To here we add the more socialist "co-prosperity" and "commonue/organization".
If anything, the name we know in our history was directly influenced by these pan-Asian socialist movements, from the ultranationalist factions. We just bringing things back to where they belong instead of the bastardization that happened.
1925
- Location
- The left-wing of the impossible
Some notable events, 1925
January 8: Benito Mussolini assumes dictatorial powers in Italy.
January 14: Reichspräsident Friedrich Ebert passes away from complications from influenza and appendicitis.
February 1: The first issue of The New Yorker is released.
February 18: The New York printing of The Daily Worker reaches parity with The New York Times in circulation.
March 4: President Wood is inaugurated President for his second term. After the opening of the 65th United States Congress, fist fights break out between WPA and Democratic members over comments about "monkeys in the Capitol."
March 6: Pionerskaya Pravda, a newspaper for the Young Pioneers in the Soviet Union, begins publication.
March 18: The HMS Revenge, the lead ship of the Royal Navy's Treaty exempted battlecruisers, enters commission.(1)
March 27: Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca and King of Hejaz, is coronated as Sultan of Nejd.
April 8: F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes his (eventually) famous novel, Under Red, White and Blue, to mixed critical reception and moderate commercial success, with some noting the dark undertone of disillusionment and bitterness towards the American dream.
April 12: Soviet politician Nikolai Bukharin publishes the monograph Socialism in One Country: A Road Forward in the Absence of Victory by the West-European Proletariat.
April 19: In the second round of the German presidential election, ardent monarchist General Paul von Hindenburg is narrowly elected Reichspräsident over the "Weimar coalition" candidate Wilhelm Marx of the Centre Party.
April 25: The US Navy's Fleet Problem V concludes. The aggressor Black Force, with the aviation cruiser Langley, trounces the carrier-less Blue Force in a simulated attack on Hawai'i.
April 28: British Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill announces, with the presentation of the budget, of a return to a gold bullion standard at a depreciated parity, citing advice from economist John Maynard Keynes and the British Federation of Industries.
May 1: Turnout at annual May Day parades and demonstrations is a disappointment this year. The steadily growing economy and reduced unemployment have in many ways deflated militancy on the Left. The Worker's Party and the Solidarity labor union face the first decline in total membership after almost two decades of steady growth in membership.
May 2: Communist and trade union delegates found the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the labor arm of the Communist Party of China.
May 7: The KMT's National Revolutionary Army begins the Eastern Expedition, against the warlord Chen Jiongming.
May 20: Retired Marine General Smedley Butler tours Turkey as an official guest of Mustapha Kemal. The two old soldiers reminisce about the war, and discuss the political situation in the Near East.
June 6: The Sixth June Movement: an eruption of strikes and protests in China sparked by the shooting of student protestors at the Shanghai International Settlement.
June 18: The Civil Rights Act of 1925 is enacted. The ambitious law prohibits discrimination on the basis of race or sex in all public accommodation, transport, housing and employment, overcoming a bitter battle from conservatives. In addition to empowering the National Labor Relations Board to investigate and punish employment discrimination, the Act also establishes a federal Freedom Commission to enforce its other measures.
June 25: The US Navy orders its first treaty-compliant capital ships. The five ships of the United States-class are heavily inspired by the British Revenge-class, and expected to replace the dubiously survivable Lexington-class battlecruisers.
July 1: The so-called National Government of the Republic of China is established in Guangzhou, under the KMT-CCP United Front.
July 3: The Imperial Japanese government promulgates the Peace Preservation Law of 1925 (治安維持法 Chian Iji Hō), effectively outlawing advocacy for socialism in the country, and authorizing the sentencing of members of members of socialist groups to up to ten years hard labor.
July 18: Adolf Hitler publishes the first volume of his political manifesto Mein Kampf (My Struggle), written during his imprisonment.
July 25: Anarchists Fumiko Kaneko and Pak Yeol bomb an affair led by the Japanese Crown Prince, unleashing a massive crackdown.
July 30: Days of Rage: Mob violence erupts in rural towns in South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama. Local black prominents are murdered, prompting the mobilization of the state police.
August 7: Former missionary and screenwriter William Dudley Pelley founds the Silver Legion of America in Massachusetts. Modeled off the Italian National Fascist Party and its Blackshirts, the presently tiny Silver Legion attempts to distinguish itself from the "cowardly, unfocused" KKK.
August 9: An arson attack by the Georgia Red Army kills four, including prominent country lawyer and KKK supporter Eugene Talmadge.
August 14: The Klu Klux Klan organizes a march in Washington D.C of 3,000 - 6,000 members. As soon as the march starts, WPA counter protesters and KKK members begin fighting and the police quickly intervene, arresting many KKK members and stopping the march, although many are shocked to see how large the KKK is in Washington D.C.
August 18: In the USSR, Leon Trotsky resigns his position in Sovnarkom as the People's Commissar for War, under mounting criticism within the party over, among other things, his earlier criticism of Zinoviev and Kamenev as well as his thesis on permanent revolution.
August 24: With dozens dead in sectarian conflict in the Days of Rage, and no clear winner, Congress mobilises the Army and National Guard to maintain order, and prevent the movement of Spartacus League paramilitaries to intervene in the conflict.
September 1: With the capture of Shantou, KMT control of the Guangdong Province is fait accompli.
September 4: NBI Director Hoover receives authorization to crackdown on the Klan. With the limited resources available to him, he begins establishing covert connections with left-wing groups in the South to serve as a catspaw.
September 18: The Voting Rights Act of 1925 is enacted. The Act establishes an Election Commission to oversee federal elections. It also authorizes an automatic reapportionment, subject to review by the Supreme Court, to the apportionment of Congressional seats, based on vote suppression of certain protected groups, as authorized under the Fifteenth Amendment. While chiefly targeted at the suppression of the black vote in the South, it will also block the proposals coming from the left-wing of the Workers' Party to disenfranchise class enemies.
September 29: At the British Labour Party conference in Liverpool, delegates vote to exclude communists from membership in the Labour Party.
October 3: A Congressional joint resolution authorizing a constitutional amendment to ban the production, sale and distribution of alcohol is soundly defeated. The Prohibition movement begins a long, slow death in American politics, lingering in some areas for decades but losing most if not all of the former national attention it had received.
October 10: Sun Yat-sen publishes his testament on the fourteenth anniversary of the Xinhai Revolution. In it, he calls for a continuous United Front with the Chinese Communist Party, alliance with the Soviet Union, and settles questions about succession within the KMT. Most importantly, he recommends Wang Jinwei as General Secretary of the KMT, tasking him with maintaining discipline in the party, and General Jieshi as commander-in-chief of the military, tasked with the mission of reunifying the nation.
October 14: Alabama State Police arrest Grand Dragon Clarence Churchill* for violating the state's criminal syndicalism law.
October 21: Spartacist Leaguer and NBI informant John Dillinger carries out an assassination plot against KKK Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans. Dillinger, utilizing a Thompson submachine gun and a tip provided by his NBI contact, attacks the Imperial Wizard's motorcade en route to a meeting with financial backers in Gary, Indiana. Evans succumbs to his wounds three days later, precipitating a power struggle within the embattled organization.
October 31: Soviet Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs Mikhail Frunze emerges from ulcer surgery, and is expected to make a full recovery.
November 4: Following scandal in New York high society, and a media circus over socialite Kip Rhinelander's marriage to a mixed-race woman, Alice Jones, the The Daily Worker runs the infamous headline "Critical Support for the Bourgeois Schweinhund," followed by scathing critiques of the "unscientific racialism" in New York high society.
November 14: The Australian federal elections occur after three years of a Nationalist-Country coalition. The Nationalist-Country alliance runs on a joint ticket and increases their seats despite losing votes to Labor.
November 24: Sun Yat-sen passes away. China's ongoing civil war leaves little time to mourn.
December 11: The Fourteenth Congress of the All-Union Communist Party begins in Moscow. While outwardly cordial, the congress is a clandestine battleground between the ruling troika and the Left Opposition.
December 17: Air power advocate Brigadier General Bill Mitchell is acquitted of violating Article 96 of the Articles of War, the "catch all" article, for his comments about naval airship disasters.
December 20: Reza Khan successfully overthrows Ahmad Shah Qajar of Iran, and is declared the new Shah by the Constituent Assembly, taking the name Reza Shah Pahlavi (to symbolize the new dynasty)
December 21: Sergei Eisenstein's groundbreaking film Battleship Potemkin is released.
(1) OTL's G3-class battlecruiser.
January 8: Benito Mussolini assumes dictatorial powers in Italy.
January 14: Reichspräsident Friedrich Ebert passes away from complications from influenza and appendicitis.
February 1: The first issue of The New Yorker is released.
February 18: The New York printing of The Daily Worker reaches parity with The New York Times in circulation.
March 4: President Wood is inaugurated President for his second term. After the opening of the 65th United States Congress, fist fights break out between WPA and Democratic members over comments about "monkeys in the Capitol."
March 6: Pionerskaya Pravda, a newspaper for the Young Pioneers in the Soviet Union, begins publication.
March 18: The HMS Revenge, the lead ship of the Royal Navy's Treaty exempted battlecruisers, enters commission.(1)
March 27: Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca and King of Hejaz, is coronated as Sultan of Nejd.
April 8: F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes his (eventually) famous novel, Under Red, White and Blue, to mixed critical reception and moderate commercial success, with some noting the dark undertone of disillusionment and bitterness towards the American dream.
April 12: Soviet politician Nikolai Bukharin publishes the monograph Socialism in One Country: A Road Forward in the Absence of Victory by the West-European Proletariat.
April 19: In the second round of the German presidential election, ardent monarchist General Paul von Hindenburg is narrowly elected Reichspräsident over the "Weimar coalition" candidate Wilhelm Marx of the Centre Party.
April 25: The US Navy's Fleet Problem V concludes. The aggressor Black Force, with the aviation cruiser Langley, trounces the carrier-less Blue Force in a simulated attack on Hawai'i.
April 28: British Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill announces, with the presentation of the budget, of a return to a gold bullion standard at a depreciated parity, citing advice from economist John Maynard Keynes and the British Federation of Industries.
May 1: Turnout at annual May Day parades and demonstrations is a disappointment this year. The steadily growing economy and reduced unemployment have in many ways deflated militancy on the Left. The Worker's Party and the Solidarity labor union face the first decline in total membership after almost two decades of steady growth in membership.
May 2: Communist and trade union delegates found the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the labor arm of the Communist Party of China.
May 7: The KMT's National Revolutionary Army begins the Eastern Expedition, against the warlord Chen Jiongming.
May 20: Retired Marine General Smedley Butler tours Turkey as an official guest of Mustapha Kemal. The two old soldiers reminisce about the war, and discuss the political situation in the Near East.
June 6: The Sixth June Movement: an eruption of strikes and protests in China sparked by the shooting of student protestors at the Shanghai International Settlement.
June 18: The Civil Rights Act of 1925 is enacted. The ambitious law prohibits discrimination on the basis of race or sex in all public accommodation, transport, housing and employment, overcoming a bitter battle from conservatives. In addition to empowering the National Labor Relations Board to investigate and punish employment discrimination, the Act also establishes a federal Freedom Commission to enforce its other measures.
June 25: The US Navy orders its first treaty-compliant capital ships. The five ships of the United States-class are heavily inspired by the British Revenge-class, and expected to replace the dubiously survivable Lexington-class battlecruisers.
July 1: The so-called National Government of the Republic of China is established in Guangzhou, under the KMT-CCP United Front.
July 3: The Imperial Japanese government promulgates the Peace Preservation Law of 1925 (治安維持法 Chian Iji Hō), effectively outlawing advocacy for socialism in the country, and authorizing the sentencing of members of members of socialist groups to up to ten years hard labor.
July 18: Adolf Hitler publishes the first volume of his political manifesto Mein Kampf (My Struggle), written during his imprisonment.
July 25: Anarchists Fumiko Kaneko and Pak Yeol bomb an affair led by the Japanese Crown Prince, unleashing a massive crackdown.
July 30: Days of Rage: Mob violence erupts in rural towns in South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama. Local black prominents are murdered, prompting the mobilization of the state police.
August 7: Former missionary and screenwriter William Dudley Pelley founds the Silver Legion of America in Massachusetts. Modeled off the Italian National Fascist Party and its Blackshirts, the presently tiny Silver Legion attempts to distinguish itself from the "cowardly, unfocused" KKK.
August 9: An arson attack by the Georgia Red Army kills four, including prominent country lawyer and KKK supporter Eugene Talmadge.
August 14: The Klu Klux Klan organizes a march in Washington D.C of 3,000 - 6,000 members. As soon as the march starts, WPA counter protesters and KKK members begin fighting and the police quickly intervene, arresting many KKK members and stopping the march, although many are shocked to see how large the KKK is in Washington D.C.
August 18: In the USSR, Leon Trotsky resigns his position in Sovnarkom as the People's Commissar for War, under mounting criticism within the party over, among other things, his earlier criticism of Zinoviev and Kamenev as well as his thesis on permanent revolution.
August 24: With dozens dead in sectarian conflict in the Days of Rage, and no clear winner, Congress mobilises the Army and National Guard to maintain order, and prevent the movement of Spartacus League paramilitaries to intervene in the conflict.
September 1: With the capture of Shantou, KMT control of the Guangdong Province is fait accompli.
September 4: NBI Director Hoover receives authorization to crackdown on the Klan. With the limited resources available to him, he begins establishing covert connections with left-wing groups in the South to serve as a catspaw.
September 18: The Voting Rights Act of 1925 is enacted. The Act establishes an Election Commission to oversee federal elections. It also authorizes an automatic reapportionment, subject to review by the Supreme Court, to the apportionment of Congressional seats, based on vote suppression of certain protected groups, as authorized under the Fifteenth Amendment. While chiefly targeted at the suppression of the black vote in the South, it will also block the proposals coming from the left-wing of the Workers' Party to disenfranchise class enemies.
September 29: At the British Labour Party conference in Liverpool, delegates vote to exclude communists from membership in the Labour Party.
October 3: A Congressional joint resolution authorizing a constitutional amendment to ban the production, sale and distribution of alcohol is soundly defeated. The Prohibition movement begins a long, slow death in American politics, lingering in some areas for decades but losing most if not all of the former national attention it had received.
October 10: Sun Yat-sen publishes his testament on the fourteenth anniversary of the Xinhai Revolution. In it, he calls for a continuous United Front with the Chinese Communist Party, alliance with the Soviet Union, and settles questions about succession within the KMT. Most importantly, he recommends Wang Jinwei as General Secretary of the KMT, tasking him with maintaining discipline in the party, and General Jieshi as commander-in-chief of the military, tasked with the mission of reunifying the nation.
October 14: Alabama State Police arrest Grand Dragon Clarence Churchill* for violating the state's criminal syndicalism law.
October 21: Spartacist Leaguer and NBI informant John Dillinger carries out an assassination plot against KKK Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans. Dillinger, utilizing a Thompson submachine gun and a tip provided by his NBI contact, attacks the Imperial Wizard's motorcade en route to a meeting with financial backers in Gary, Indiana. Evans succumbs to his wounds three days later, precipitating a power struggle within the embattled organization.
October 31: Soviet Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs Mikhail Frunze emerges from ulcer surgery, and is expected to make a full recovery.
November 4: Following scandal in New York high society, and a media circus over socialite Kip Rhinelander's marriage to a mixed-race woman, Alice Jones, the The Daily Worker runs the infamous headline "Critical Support for the Bourgeois Schweinhund," followed by scathing critiques of the "unscientific racialism" in New York high society.
November 14: The Australian federal elections occur after three years of a Nationalist-Country coalition. The Nationalist-Country alliance runs on a joint ticket and increases their seats despite losing votes to Labor.
November 24: Sun Yat-sen passes away. China's ongoing civil war leaves little time to mourn.
December 11: The Fourteenth Congress of the All-Union Communist Party begins in Moscow. While outwardly cordial, the congress is a clandestine battleground between the ruling troika and the Left Opposition.
December 17: Air power advocate Brigadier General Bill Mitchell is acquitted of violating Article 96 of the Articles of War, the "catch all" article, for his comments about naval airship disasters.
December 20: Reza Khan successfully overthrows Ahmad Shah Qajar of Iran, and is declared the new Shah by the Constituent Assembly, taking the name Reza Shah Pahlavi (to symbolize the new dynasty)
December 21: Sergei Eisenstein's groundbreaking film Battleship Potemkin is released.
(1) OTL's G3-class battlecruiser.
American Literature in the 1920s
Miss Teri
The Queen
- Location
- West
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Another short supplemental.
Excerpt from "The Comprehensive History of American Literature, Vol. V: 1910-1933", Simon and Schuster, 1990
[...] Inkwell was started in 1925 by a group of writers involved with the Workers' Party. It served as a monthly magazine for activists, a means by which writers who struggled to get stories published in bourgeois magazines or publishing companies, especially more politically charged stories. The cover of the first issue, an image of a man using a pen and inkwell to begin drawing the cover, was drawn by Norman Rockwell, a regular in the Pioneer calendars.
Some prominent writers would contribute to Inkwell under various aliases. Ernest Hemingway was a regular from his Paris exile, first serializing "A Farewell to Arms" in the magazine. Appreciating the defense Party affiliated legal group the International Labor Defense Committee gave for "Under Red, White, and Blue" during its legal challenges, F. Scott Fitzgerald also contributed some stories under an alias. Upton Sinclair was a constant, appearing in most issues to deal in the sort of stories that brought him into prominence in the first place.
However, by and large, it was used as a testing ground for new talent. One of the biggest rising stars of the magazine was James T. Farrell, who would use his experience growing up in an Irish American neighborhood in Chicago as the basis of many of his stories.
Inkwell was part of the official publishing press for the WPA, Vanguard Press, established using money from Charles Garland (a dissatisfied millionaire). Vanguard would publish not only novels, but magazines, roughly corresponding to the most popular magazines of the day.
Vanguard would publish translations of foreign novels, and release them, either serialized or in full form. Felix Salten's Bambi: A Life in the Woods was serialized in Inkwell by Whittaker Chambers, an editor and journalist, who in 1930 would take over as lead editor.
Vanguard's biggest edge was, through various members, getting books from the Soviet Union, allowing them to stay ahead in publishing contemporary Russian literature. Ilf and Petrov's Twelve Chairs was their biggest success, serialized in the journal Fields of Flowers (which featured translated stories from Soviet authors), and later collected in 1929. Authors like Mikhail Bulgakov, who chafed under state censorship, found currency in the United States as their works were published (though edited down to avoid any major conflicts).
Vanguard, to both compete with Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories and other science fiction magazines and to allow the publication of Soviet fantastik literature, set up Speculative Worlds. Spec Worlds would publish largely serialized, translated works from Soviet authors, including Alexander Bogdanov's Red Star and Alexei Tolstoy's Aelita. In 1928, they published We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, closely with the original Russian text, though toning down some of the more explicit criticisms of the Soviet government (Zamyatin criticized this years later).
Speculative Worlds would also attract some domestic talent. Some authors, like Edward Elmer "Doc" Smith, A. Merritt, and Clark Ashton Smith, were attracted by the relative freedom of content in comparison to other publications, as well as payment that "Hugo the Rat" (as HP Lovecraft called Gernsback) could not provide. Others were increasingly attracted by the utopian visions of society presented, which stood as distinctly political in comparison to the works of Gernsback.
Jack Williamson would write about a rebellion on a moon colony run by a repressive government in A New Republic. Gerry Tan* would satirize Phillip Nowlan's Armageddon 2419 in The Last Vagrant, with his own tale of a time displaced Asian American who has to deal with racist Americans after an apocalyptic war destroyed most of world civilization. Henrik Bach* , a German refugee, repudiated Karel Capek's Rossum's Universal Robots and its implicit anti-revolutionary themes, in Android Attack, wherein robots (with disenfranchised humans) spark a rebellion against their oppressive overlords.
Some of the newer fans brought in, including Donald Wolheim and Fredrick Pohl, would take over after the Revolution and bring it in a different direction for a new age.
[....]
Excerpt from "The Comprehensive History of American Literature, Vol. V: 1910-1933", Simon and Schuster, 1990
[...] Inkwell was started in 1925 by a group of writers involved with the Workers' Party. It served as a monthly magazine for activists, a means by which writers who struggled to get stories published in bourgeois magazines or publishing companies, especially more politically charged stories. The cover of the first issue, an image of a man using a pen and inkwell to begin drawing the cover, was drawn by Norman Rockwell, a regular in the Pioneer calendars.
Some prominent writers would contribute to Inkwell under various aliases. Ernest Hemingway was a regular from his Paris exile, first serializing "A Farewell to Arms" in the magazine. Appreciating the defense Party affiliated legal group the International Labor Defense Committee gave for "Under Red, White, and Blue" during its legal challenges, F. Scott Fitzgerald also contributed some stories under an alias. Upton Sinclair was a constant, appearing in most issues to deal in the sort of stories that brought him into prominence in the first place.
However, by and large, it was used as a testing ground for new talent. One of the biggest rising stars of the magazine was James T. Farrell, who would use his experience growing up in an Irish American neighborhood in Chicago as the basis of many of his stories.
Inkwell was part of the official publishing press for the WPA, Vanguard Press, established using money from Charles Garland (a dissatisfied millionaire). Vanguard would publish not only novels, but magazines, roughly corresponding to the most popular magazines of the day.
Vanguard would publish translations of foreign novels, and release them, either serialized or in full form. Felix Salten's Bambi: A Life in the Woods was serialized in Inkwell by Whittaker Chambers, an editor and journalist, who in 1930 would take over as lead editor.
Vanguard's biggest edge was, through various members, getting books from the Soviet Union, allowing them to stay ahead in publishing contemporary Russian literature. Ilf and Petrov's Twelve Chairs was their biggest success, serialized in the journal Fields of Flowers (which featured translated stories from Soviet authors), and later collected in 1929. Authors like Mikhail Bulgakov, who chafed under state censorship, found currency in the United States as their works were published (though edited down to avoid any major conflicts).
Vanguard, to both compete with Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories and other science fiction magazines and to allow the publication of Soviet fantastik literature, set up Speculative Worlds. Spec Worlds would publish largely serialized, translated works from Soviet authors, including Alexander Bogdanov's Red Star and Alexei Tolstoy's Aelita. In 1928, they published We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, closely with the original Russian text, though toning down some of the more explicit criticisms of the Soviet government (Zamyatin criticized this years later).
Speculative Worlds would also attract some domestic talent. Some authors, like Edward Elmer "Doc" Smith, A. Merritt, and Clark Ashton Smith, were attracted by the relative freedom of content in comparison to other publications, as well as payment that "Hugo the Rat" (as HP Lovecraft called Gernsback) could not provide. Others were increasingly attracted by the utopian visions of society presented, which stood as distinctly political in comparison to the works of Gernsback.
Jack Williamson would write about a rebellion on a moon colony run by a repressive government in A New Republic. Gerry Tan* would satirize Phillip Nowlan's Armageddon 2419 in The Last Vagrant, with his own tale of a time displaced Asian American who has to deal with racist Americans after an apocalyptic war destroyed most of world civilization. Henrik Bach* , a German refugee, repudiated Karel Capek's Rossum's Universal Robots and its implicit anti-revolutionary themes, in Android Attack, wherein robots (with disenfranchised humans) spark a rebellion against their oppressive overlords.
Some of the newer fans brought in, including Donald Wolheim and Fredrick Pohl, would take over after the Revolution and bring it in a different direction for a new age.
[....]
Last edited:
Social Upheaval in the Roaring Twenties
- Location
- The left-wing of the impossible
Excerpts from Strike Jones*, New Soviet Man: Social Upheaval and the Workers' Movement (San Francisco: Vanguard Books, 1979)
The so-called "Roaring Twenties" showcased portents of the upheaval to come. Within the civil society of the late United States, new cultural norms regarding race, ethnicity, sex and sexuality would crystallize, as a diverse grouping of the dispossessed struggled to assert itself against the dominant culture.
With the existing American civic religion interred, along with nearly one million men, in the charnel house of the Great War, a great void had formed in the superstructure of American society. The scar tissues of the war effort, the despotic measures taken to ensure victory, and the drawing of battle lines on class had made healing and a new Americanism impossible.
In the place of a civic religion and a cultural moment that could assimilate the myriad peoples inhabiting the North American continent, the civil society fractured into separate "pillars". These pillars represented wholly incompatible world views on society, culture, and the interplay between the state, the community and the individual.
[...]
Unlike the bourgeois pillar, which represented an often fractious coalition of competing economic, social and political institutions, the Workers' Party was a central hub of a unified counterculture. In opposition it could exert a level of unity that was impossible for the bourgeoisie, for it had been forged in the fires of the Biennio Rosso as the negation of bourgeois society.
While this unity of the working-class as a class for itself waned in the latter half of the 1920s, this consciousness informed daily life for workers. The Workers' Party had by 1925 erected a state-within-a-state, with wholly proletarian institutions serving the animal and human needs of the working class.
A worker in one of the strongholds of the party would live in a housing co-operative, or be protected from stingy and rapacious landlords by the Tenant's Union. He reads the party newspaper while he eats his breakfast. Breakfast itself was bought at the Bread and Roses grocery co-operative, established by the Solidarity union to provide for its members. While he goes to his union job, his wife would see the kids off to a local public school in a party controlled school district. At school, the children would learn in a progressive education environment, or they too would go on strike until reforms were implemented. While he eats his lunch at a factory canteen run by his union, his wife would return books to a civic library established by the party. For his leisure, he would take part in a sporting or civic club, or socialize with fellow workers at the Union Hall over a half-liter of beer. His children would socialize with other working class children in the Pioneer League.
These institutions were made possible because at least economically, the United States had won the war as well as the peace. But their nucleus had formed as a sort of desperate act of self-defence by a working-class that had spent years enduring a constant primary emergency, in which their lives were totally expendable, and for whom survival, let alone thriving, had become synonymous with working-class political militancy. Everything that had once been solid melted into air.
[...]
Proletarian culture in the 1920s was deliberately vanguard. The old moral lessons, the hallowed churches, the institutions of marriage, family, God and state; they were all the weapons of the enemy. Something new had to take their place.
This is not to say that this process was uniform or easy. It was often internally combative, and workers in the 20s would still be afflicted by numerous prejudices that would shock us in the present. But workers had correctly identified racism, chauvinism and sexism as barriers to emancipation and character flaws in himself to be overcome, however imperfect they might be in carrying out that task.
While the primary battle ground of the 1920s had been the destruction of the color line, this cultural war was not limited to questions of race. No aspect of life was untouched in this period, from child-rearing to etiquette at funerals.
[...]
In the 27 August 1922 issue of The Sunday Worker, Dr. Martin Klein*, a pediatrician from New York City, published an article titled "Children Are The Future." Described by DeWitt Wallace, arch-reactionary and publisher of now defunct literary Reader's Digest, as"a bomb planted under the American family," the article critiqued traditional child-rearing practices as an artifact of class society.
As Klein put it, familial discipline was "the replication of social violence from one generation to another." The use of despotic parenting styles, the withholding of affection, and violent punishment served the purpose of habituating youth into the violence of class domination.
In his view, this was imperative for workers to reject this "learned self-maiming impulse." And like all cycles of abuse, its end was a bitter pill to swallow. Anticipating the objection that his readers would make, that they had learned harsh discipline from their parents and yet had turned out just fine, Klein countered that the tradition had been preached for time immemorial for a reason: it served the interests of the ruling class, not the interests of the disciplined.
Klein was not the first of his kind; the movement for abolition always begins with the first victim. But in this moment where the mask of false-consciousness had been shattered, it could finally gain ground.
[...]
The economic needs of modernity had made the traditional spheres of the sexes no longer tenable. In the 1920s, this slowly building dialectic began to reach a rupture point in Europe and North America. The deaths of so many young, able bodied men had required women to pick up the slack in the factories, trades and shops. In the United States, women's role in the workforce during the war became increasingly permanent.
With these new burdens came new struggles. And this went far beyond the struggle for an Equal Rights amendment to the US constitution, which had gripped the fourth estate since its unveiling on 8 March 1921.
The struggle against sexual chauvinism in the workers' movement was at times bitter. Many considered it a "distraction" against more pressing concerns such as the struggle against racial chauvinism, or the immediate revolutionary task. But more forward thinking elements of the mostly male leadership had seized the issue. Just as Engels had noted the anthropological function of the so-called "traditional family" in the reproduction of class society, leaders such as C.E. Ruthenberg advanced very iconoclastic notions in the party's official organs.
The general line of the party was a well-meaning if naive brand of radical anti-essentialism. Men and women were held to be little different beyond their sex organs. Their role in society was historically contingent and not owing to any transhistoric biological reality. Male and female spheres in society were archaisms even in bourgeois society, inherited forms of oppression that had forgotten its original purpose and now utilized to divide the proletariat against itself.
The party sought to teach its sons and daughters to be "complete beings" rather than merely men or women. Fashions became more androgynous. Members corrected sexist habits of speech and conduct, while women began exerting their place within the party.
More transgressive were the serious linguistic reforms being proposed, such as the revival of the archaic 'wer-' for maleness, to deny maleness a universal quality in the word 'man'. Among the avant-garde, one would no longer speak of man and woman, but rather werman and woman. Like all linguistic reforms, its impact in the first decade was limited. Its adoption by authors of literary and speculative fiction in New York City's Greenwich Village spared it from being lost to the sands of time.
[...]
Among the earliest victories by the Socialist Labor Party was the reversal of assimilation by European ethnix. They had won back the right to speak their mother tongues and still be accepted begrudgingly as Americans. In most states, secondary language education in primary and secondary school became an institution, and even Anglo children were expected to be bilingual.
In the Great War and Roaring Twenties, this proved to a boon. Military and business interests learned the value in a large population of polyglots for America's expanding global presence. Aside from the hard-right of nativists, the multicentricity of the many nations that had immigrated to the US was no longer greatly controversial, and fears of the diminishing of the English language proved totally unfounded.
In the cities and in the midwest, the German language experienced a renaissance in the Oughts and the Teens. Germans were the largest group by self-identification, and now with it being taught in primary schools in many districts, the language climbed back into relevance. Attempts at repression were ham-handed and short-lived in the Great War. In 1922, a group of educators, academics, and publishers established the North American German Language Council, an ostensibly politically neutral group to regulate teaching and orthography in German. But given how many first and second generation German immigrants were socialists, and their strength in the movement, neutrality was impossible.
The NAGLC would be investigated for subversive activities by the Secret Service, fearing that it would be yet another conduit for espionage, and its role in publishing and translating many articles and books from Germany that were politically subversive. But it also developed new rules for German orthography better suited to cohabitation with English, as well as new dictionaries reflecting the wealth of new loanwords in the North American German dialect;
Similarly, Yiddish thrived as New York City became home to the largest population of Jews in the world. Following the wave of Jewish migration at the end of the Great War, the city's population had reached nearly seven million, of which two million were Jews. Yiddish became an official language of the City in 1919, along with English, Italian, and Chinese. Yiddish became a common second language even among Gentiles, and a flowering of Yiddish language literature, poetry and theater began soon after.
But the sunsetting of the Chinese Exclusion Act presented new challenges. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, millions emigrated from East Asia, fleeing civil war, repression and poverty, and enticed by fables of a New World where the streets were paved with gold.
Work was more than plentiful in the Great War, but the streets were far from gilded. Chinese, Korean and Japanese immigrants were initially largely excluded from the workers' movement and broader civil society. They huddled together in "Chinatowns" for protection against reactionary gangs.
But the parasitic landlords and short-sighted capitalists ensured that "Yellow Peril" fears could be overcome. Existing Chinese-American communities formed the bridge to the broader labor movement. New language federations were established in the unions and the party to ensure their constituents the means to participate in broader society. The cultural exchange with East Asia greatly enriched life in the industrial cities of the West Coast, the Midwest and the Mid-Atlantic.
Many of the institutions founded by immigrants would become pillars of the workers' movement, like the Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Commune, which would operate many canteens and grocery co-ops across the Midwest. Greater East-Asia would serve as a cultural ambassador, introducing a number of new products to the American palette such as soju, kim, doufu, and chili sauces.
[...]
The Roaring Twenties were, compared to succeeding decades, a relatively good time for sexual minorities across Europe and North America. Unquestionably, the greatest explosion of new freedom occurred in Weimar Germany, the United States, and the Soviet Union.
In the United States, this flowering is attributable to a large cosmopolitan urban population, the shattering of the moral authority of traditional institutions (especially religious), and the growth of new artistic industries.
The translation and publication of Magnus Hirschfield's pioneer research on human sexuality by the communist literary magazine The Liberator spurred on the first movements of sexual minorities from the shadows into the light of day. Hirschfield's work had struck a chord; the unspoken truth about so many male professions, from sailing and the military to logging and mining, was that situational sexuality was rule rather than the exception. Many trades isolated men from women for months at a time or more, and men would quietly make do with each other's company.
When religious authorities condemned sodomites who perverted nature and thus God with their unnatural acts, The Liberator's chief editor Max Eastman very boldly claimed that affections between men were normal and unshameful. Nor was preferring company of the same-sex an indication of mental disease or moral defect.
Slowly, public figures began leaving the closet. References to homosexuality began to be openly made in the bawdy and unregulated Hollywood of that era, in literature, in poetry. Attempts at legal suppression failed under a Supreme Court that upheld such utterances against charges of obscenity.
Two broad subcultures developed. Uranian subculture developed following the publication and popularization of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs' on male homosexuality, particularly among the Spartacus League paramilitaries. These militants were largely young unmarried men, and beyond the role of protecting against reactionary violence, the early Spartacus League gave a fraternal sense of belonging to a large corps of young men who felt out of place in the world.
Unlike most contemporary examples of military androphilia, Uranian culture in the Spartacists was largely non-violent and non-abusive. As poet Hart Crane described of his time in the League, "We fought together as comrades. And we tended to our wounds as comrades. Our affections were as equals, not master and servant. We'd had our fill of servitude in the National Army."
Sapphic subculture had been spurred to life by the new independence women had taken, made all the more urgent by the population imbalance between young men and women due to the Great War. It too had long hidden roots in American culture. "Boston Marriages", the long-term cohabitation between two independent women had been well known for decades. Such so-called "romantic friendships" were devoid of a sexual dimension--in the public eye. The Sapphics in theatre and literature began breaking from this chaste image in the 1920s.
They took their name from the ancient Greek poet Sappho, whose translated writings had long been a subject of controversy over their content. Many a devout classicist had continued to insist that the desire she expressed in her poetry was purely heterosexual, or even more confusingly, purely chaste. But new translations of Sappho's poetry exploded in popularity among the "New Women" of the Roaring Twenties.
Starting in 1925, a quotation from Sappho adorned the masthead of the communist women's magazine New Woman: "Sweet mother, I cannot weave; slender Aphrodite has overcome me with longing for a girl." The rise of casual sex among the youth in the Twenties came with a rise of same-sex experimentation.
Like Uranian, in this period Sapphic did not mean exclusive homosexuality. Sexual identity was an emerging but still not wholly formed concept. Uranian and Sapphic applied to behavior and attraction, and thus equally applied to what would now be called ambisexuals.
This is not to say that casual homophobia didn't exist, nor that it was free from backlash. But the backlash in the 1920s was largely contained to small sects of reactionaries. Attempts by religious authorities to condemn these perversions fell on deaf ears, for they'd shattered their moral authority selling pie-in-the-sky to hungry bellies on earth. And it was bad for business for the liberal Republican establishment to involve themselves in people's private lives.
[...]
The United States had somewhat undeservedly gained a reputation for piety among European observers, who extrapolated the phenomenon of the Second and supposed Third Great Awakenings to the present. Whatever historic differences there were, the major religious denominations in the United States faced serious challenges in the carnage of the Great War, and the Social War at home.
Historically, the Socialist Labor Party and the industrial unions had been strongly anti-clerical. Even the religiously inspired socialists among them heaped scorn and condemnation upon the existing Churchs, both Catholic and Protestant. The humiliating demands of many Christian "charity" groups had earned the contempt of workers. Groups like the Salvation Army, lampooned as the "Starvation Army", cared more for the salvation of souls than they did for the salvation of living humans. The demands of obeisance and the frequent intrusions of moral busybodies invited a political critique of Christianity, one which even religious socialists took up with enthusiasm.
The mass death and repression brought on by the Great War turned this cracks into a great rupture. Anti-clericalism had transformed into atheism in the Workers' Party. Communist activists took up the Marxist critique of religion like a bayonet, and found a receptive audience.
This is not to say that workers all became atheists overnight. But whatever their private religious beliefs, in the public political lives they led, they acted like atheists. The promise of posthumous salvation could no longer be stomached. The moment demanded action in the here-and-now.
This militancy did not go unchallenged. Religious socialists remained in the party and often pushed against the more direct measures by the party. But their influence was sharply constrained by democratic centralism. The workers themselves had already left or been kicked from their churches, if they had even had one. Among the youth, the difference was even more stark. The criticism that Marxian scientific socialism was a political religion had at least some truth to it, particularly among the zealots growing up within the ranks of the Pioneer League and other left youth groups. While the Boy Scouts made their first plank of their Scout Promise "to do my Duty to God and Country," the Pioneer Catechism stated "The only church that illuminates is a burning one."
Attempts by various state and local governments to inhibit this as obscenity or corrupting the youth were stymied by a robust application of the First Amendment's protections for speech and religion, and the dominant liberal Republican coalition.
It wasn't simply revolutionary atheism that grew, but also a proliferation of new religious movements flowered among the working and middle classes. These new sects proliferated vaguely aligned to the political right and left. Some, like the Ecumenists, were Christian groups that had split from mainline groups more on practical-political grounds than theologica. Theologically, the Ecumenist groups were standard Nicene Creed Christians, devoted to a social gospel on the well-trodden ground that faith without works is dead.
Others were more theological heterodox, especially the Fundamentalist splinters, who condemned theological Modernism for the crisis of faith in the people, and were aligned very closely with reactionary right-wing groups. Their increasingly suspect theology was obsessed with a refoundation of a mythical Original Church, and increasingly fanciful ideas about what the original Apostolic Church had espoused.
In tandem with the crises of Christianity, new religious groups developed among the middle classes no longer spiritually satisfied with Christianity. The most prominent of which is usually bundled together as Heathenry, the loose conglomeration of Anglo-Saxon, Nordic and Germanic neopagans began congealing in the 1920s. While their roots extended into the late 19th century in the old world, American Heathenry sprang to life in the wake of the Great War, propelled by disillusioned veterans and widows.
Heathenry in the Old World was strongly connected to Romanticist reactionary and Völkische movements, but in the United States developed in a more liberal-left leaning direction. While it shared the reconstructionist aims of its Old World counterpart, transplanted from the old lands the New World pagans were at least somewhat aware it being an invented tradition. The primordial link between blood and soil was severed, and in the ethnic melting pot of the United States it could not be reconstructed.
Rather than Romanticism, the writings of New World Heathens were informed by a deep sense of religious trauma. Heathens such as prominent Massachusetts based writer and head of the Hearg temple Owen Wilde* found the root of the conversion in the "problem of evil." Wilde's experience as an infantry officer in the National Army presented him with a paradox between the Christian notion of an all powerful, all-loving god, and the slaughter he witnessed.
Wilde and the other Heathens resolved this paradox by rejecting a belief in an all-powerful Godhead. The gods of the Heathens were more limited and flawed. Heathenry's reverence for the wilderness and animism also appealed to those who had been wounded by the cold, mechanical nature of industrial life.
While the Heathens resolved the problem of evil with more human comprehensible gods, the neo-Gnostics went the opposite direction. These mystery cults developed on the Ivy League campuses and began to spread. Like their ancient forebears, the new Gnostics took solace in the incomprehensibility of the divine, and the conflict between spirit and matter. The material world created by the Demiurge was flawed and sinful. Transcending this crude matter was their spiritual calling by learning the mysteries of the pure spiritual realm.
[...]
The Roaring Twenties upheaval was felt most keenly in the South. The war effort had brought new federal money to the impoverished South. With the railroads and dams came new factories and cities exploding in size to meet the demands of the war effort. This process did not abate with demobilization. Wood made cracking the "Solid South" a priority for the Republican Party.
For the Democratic Party, the promise of the Twenties was an existential threat. The splintering of the party, and bearing the political cost of the war and demobilization had destroyed its electoral presence outside the South. In the 1920 election season at least, the Southern states remained effectively one-party states, but they were living on borrowed time. The promise of new industries, better jobs, and modern amenities were luring some white voters to Wood's coalition, and the 1924 Alignment put the Southern states in play for the first time in decades.
The Democratic leadership was not stupid. But it was placed in the position of triangulating between the armed reactionaries on its right-wing, and the insurgent Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party on its left (supported by northern Republican money). In the Red Summer of 1920, the KKK had disastrously overreached in its attempts to terrorise the black population.
The high profile racial pogroms and lynching of decorate war heroes brought national attention to South, and galvanised black militancy among tenant farmers and industrial workers. The threat of terrorist reprisal by the various Red Army Fractions made lynching an unsafe practice.
The Democratic Party began its pivot towards the center by condemning the KKK, and in some places beginning the repeal of Jim Crow laws on its own initiative. But this change of heart should be seen for the realpolitik it was, and not as a principled move as their modern counterparts would have us believe.
Above all, the struggle undertaken by blacks in the South was a struggle first and foremost for life itself. The sharp recession brought on by demobilisation had placed the black population in a state of primary emergency, and rhetoric echoing of the Hitlerian line of "useless eaters" produced terrorist violence against their communities like it had in every past economic upheaval.
But the worst fears of racists had been, ironically, proven true. The need to mobilise blacks for war service had planted a bomb under the Southern racial hierarchy. Men who had been treated as comrades and heroes in the war, who had charged headlong into mortal combat, could not go back to the civilian life of abject servitude. Nor could white veterans stomach the abuses inflicted upon their comrades.
Black and white veterans formed the core of new civil rights groups in the South. This expression of organic solidarity was far more dangerous than any bomb. Crossing the color line was a direct refutation of the bedrock of Southern society. Police attempting to break-up a sit-in were not merely beating black men and women they considered subhuman. They also had to beat their white neighbors too. And these soldiers trained a new generation of activists to take the beatings that they had spent their entire lives trying to avoid.
The threat of force is more effective than its exercise. Force is messy. It is expensive. And most of all, it invites reprisal. The national attention brought by non-violent protests being savaged put economic pressure on the Southern states. The violence was a bad look for many national firms looking to expand to the South, especially with the unions exerting their might. Boycott, divest and sanction campaigns promoted by civic groups coupled with the threat of strikes by the unions greased the wheels for action by the establishment.
For the national political leadership, the situation in the South was an international level embarrassment that threatened the United States' moral authority. And it was bad for business. And above all, for the man at the head of the federal government, it was a moral obscenity. President Wood's political ambitions for the South had great optics. He turned the Workers' Party from a fifth column at least temporarily into begrudging supporter, and returned the country to social peace. Cracking the Solid South could mean a permanent Republican majority. But it should not be forgotten that it was an incredibly risky strategy at the time which drew bitter criticism from members of his own party up until it succeeded. He may have been handed the moment by circumstances, but Wood undeniably took up the challenge because he earnestly believed it was right.
The so-called "Roaring Twenties" showcased portents of the upheaval to come. Within the civil society of the late United States, new cultural norms regarding race, ethnicity, sex and sexuality would crystallize, as a diverse grouping of the dispossessed struggled to assert itself against the dominant culture.
With the existing American civic religion interred, along with nearly one million men, in the charnel house of the Great War, a great void had formed in the superstructure of American society. The scar tissues of the war effort, the despotic measures taken to ensure victory, and the drawing of battle lines on class had made healing and a new Americanism impossible.
In the place of a civic religion and a cultural moment that could assimilate the myriad peoples inhabiting the North American continent, the civil society fractured into separate "pillars". These pillars represented wholly incompatible world views on society, culture, and the interplay between the state, the community and the individual.
[...]
Unlike the bourgeois pillar, which represented an often fractious coalition of competing economic, social and political institutions, the Workers' Party was a central hub of a unified counterculture. In opposition it could exert a level of unity that was impossible for the bourgeoisie, for it had been forged in the fires of the Biennio Rosso as the negation of bourgeois society.
While this unity of the working-class as a class for itself waned in the latter half of the 1920s, this consciousness informed daily life for workers. The Workers' Party had by 1925 erected a state-within-a-state, with wholly proletarian institutions serving the animal and human needs of the working class.
A worker in one of the strongholds of the party would live in a housing co-operative, or be protected from stingy and rapacious landlords by the Tenant's Union. He reads the party newspaper while he eats his breakfast. Breakfast itself was bought at the Bread and Roses grocery co-operative, established by the Solidarity union to provide for its members. While he goes to his union job, his wife would see the kids off to a local public school in a party controlled school district. At school, the children would learn in a progressive education environment, or they too would go on strike until reforms were implemented. While he eats his lunch at a factory canteen run by his union, his wife would return books to a civic library established by the party. For his leisure, he would take part in a sporting or civic club, or socialize with fellow workers at the Union Hall over a half-liter of beer. His children would socialize with other working class children in the Pioneer League.
These institutions were made possible because at least economically, the United States had won the war as well as the peace. But their nucleus had formed as a sort of desperate act of self-defence by a working-class that had spent years enduring a constant primary emergency, in which their lives were totally expendable, and for whom survival, let alone thriving, had become synonymous with working-class political militancy. Everything that had once been solid melted into air.
[...]
Proletarian culture in the 1920s was deliberately vanguard. The old moral lessons, the hallowed churches, the institutions of marriage, family, God and state; they were all the weapons of the enemy. Something new had to take their place.
This is not to say that this process was uniform or easy. It was often internally combative, and workers in the 20s would still be afflicted by numerous prejudices that would shock us in the present. But workers had correctly identified racism, chauvinism and sexism as barriers to emancipation and character flaws in himself to be overcome, however imperfect they might be in carrying out that task.
While the primary battle ground of the 1920s had been the destruction of the color line, this cultural war was not limited to questions of race. No aspect of life was untouched in this period, from child-rearing to etiquette at funerals.
[...]
In the 27 August 1922 issue of The Sunday Worker, Dr. Martin Klein*, a pediatrician from New York City, published an article titled "Children Are The Future." Described by DeWitt Wallace, arch-reactionary and publisher of now defunct literary Reader's Digest, as"a bomb planted under the American family," the article critiqued traditional child-rearing practices as an artifact of class society.
As Klein put it, familial discipline was "the replication of social violence from one generation to another." The use of despotic parenting styles, the withholding of affection, and violent punishment served the purpose of habituating youth into the violence of class domination.
In his view, this was imperative for workers to reject this "learned self-maiming impulse." And like all cycles of abuse, its end was a bitter pill to swallow. Anticipating the objection that his readers would make, that they had learned harsh discipline from their parents and yet had turned out just fine, Klein countered that the tradition had been preached for time immemorial for a reason: it served the interests of the ruling class, not the interests of the disciplined.
Klein was not the first of his kind; the movement for abolition always begins with the first victim. But in this moment where the mask of false-consciousness had been shattered, it could finally gain ground.
[...]
The economic needs of modernity had made the traditional spheres of the sexes no longer tenable. In the 1920s, this slowly building dialectic began to reach a rupture point in Europe and North America. The deaths of so many young, able bodied men had required women to pick up the slack in the factories, trades and shops. In the United States, women's role in the workforce during the war became increasingly permanent.
With these new burdens came new struggles. And this went far beyond the struggle for an Equal Rights amendment to the US constitution, which had gripped the fourth estate since its unveiling on 8 March 1921.
The struggle against sexual chauvinism in the workers' movement was at times bitter. Many considered it a "distraction" against more pressing concerns such as the struggle against racial chauvinism, or the immediate revolutionary task. But more forward thinking elements of the mostly male leadership had seized the issue. Just as Engels had noted the anthropological function of the so-called "traditional family" in the reproduction of class society, leaders such as C.E. Ruthenberg advanced very iconoclastic notions in the party's official organs.
The general line of the party was a well-meaning if naive brand of radical anti-essentialism. Men and women were held to be little different beyond their sex organs. Their role in society was historically contingent and not owing to any transhistoric biological reality. Male and female spheres in society were archaisms even in bourgeois society, inherited forms of oppression that had forgotten its original purpose and now utilized to divide the proletariat against itself.
The party sought to teach its sons and daughters to be "complete beings" rather than merely men or women. Fashions became more androgynous. Members corrected sexist habits of speech and conduct, while women began exerting their place within the party.
More transgressive were the serious linguistic reforms being proposed, such as the revival of the archaic 'wer-' for maleness, to deny maleness a universal quality in the word 'man'. Among the avant-garde, one would no longer speak of man and woman, but rather werman and woman. Like all linguistic reforms, its impact in the first decade was limited. Its adoption by authors of literary and speculative fiction in New York City's Greenwich Village spared it from being lost to the sands of time.
[...]
Among the earliest victories by the Socialist Labor Party was the reversal of assimilation by European ethnix. They had won back the right to speak their mother tongues and still be accepted begrudgingly as Americans. In most states, secondary language education in primary and secondary school became an institution, and even Anglo children were expected to be bilingual.
In the Great War and Roaring Twenties, this proved to a boon. Military and business interests learned the value in a large population of polyglots for America's expanding global presence. Aside from the hard-right of nativists, the multicentricity of the many nations that had immigrated to the US was no longer greatly controversial, and fears of the diminishing of the English language proved totally unfounded.
In the cities and in the midwest, the German language experienced a renaissance in the Oughts and the Teens. Germans were the largest group by self-identification, and now with it being taught in primary schools in many districts, the language climbed back into relevance. Attempts at repression were ham-handed and short-lived in the Great War. In 1922, a group of educators, academics, and publishers established the North American German Language Council, an ostensibly politically neutral group to regulate teaching and orthography in German. But given how many first and second generation German immigrants were socialists, and their strength in the movement, neutrality was impossible.
The NAGLC would be investigated for subversive activities by the Secret Service, fearing that it would be yet another conduit for espionage, and its role in publishing and translating many articles and books from Germany that were politically subversive. But it also developed new rules for German orthography better suited to cohabitation with English, as well as new dictionaries reflecting the wealth of new loanwords in the North American German dialect;
Similarly, Yiddish thrived as New York City became home to the largest population of Jews in the world. Following the wave of Jewish migration at the end of the Great War, the city's population had reached nearly seven million, of which two million were Jews. Yiddish became an official language of the City in 1919, along with English, Italian, and Chinese. Yiddish became a common second language even among Gentiles, and a flowering of Yiddish language literature, poetry and theater began soon after.
But the sunsetting of the Chinese Exclusion Act presented new challenges. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, millions emigrated from East Asia, fleeing civil war, repression and poverty, and enticed by fables of a New World where the streets were paved with gold.
Work was more than plentiful in the Great War, but the streets were far from gilded. Chinese, Korean and Japanese immigrants were initially largely excluded from the workers' movement and broader civil society. They huddled together in "Chinatowns" for protection against reactionary gangs.
But the parasitic landlords and short-sighted capitalists ensured that "Yellow Peril" fears could be overcome. Existing Chinese-American communities formed the bridge to the broader labor movement. New language federations were established in the unions and the party to ensure their constituents the means to participate in broader society. The cultural exchange with East Asia greatly enriched life in the industrial cities of the West Coast, the Midwest and the Mid-Atlantic.
Many of the institutions founded by immigrants would become pillars of the workers' movement, like the Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Commune, which would operate many canteens and grocery co-ops across the Midwest. Greater East-Asia would serve as a cultural ambassador, introducing a number of new products to the American palette such as soju, kim, doufu, and chili sauces.
[...]
The Roaring Twenties were, compared to succeeding decades, a relatively good time for sexual minorities across Europe and North America. Unquestionably, the greatest explosion of new freedom occurred in Weimar Germany, the United States, and the Soviet Union.
In the United States, this flowering is attributable to a large cosmopolitan urban population, the shattering of the moral authority of traditional institutions (especially religious), and the growth of new artistic industries.
The translation and publication of Magnus Hirschfield's pioneer research on human sexuality by the communist literary magazine The Liberator spurred on the first movements of sexual minorities from the shadows into the light of day. Hirschfield's work had struck a chord; the unspoken truth about so many male professions, from sailing and the military to logging and mining, was that situational sexuality was rule rather than the exception. Many trades isolated men from women for months at a time or more, and men would quietly make do with each other's company.
When religious authorities condemned sodomites who perverted nature and thus God with their unnatural acts, The Liberator's chief editor Max Eastman very boldly claimed that affections between men were normal and unshameful. Nor was preferring company of the same-sex an indication of mental disease or moral defect.
Slowly, public figures began leaving the closet. References to homosexuality began to be openly made in the bawdy and unregulated Hollywood of that era, in literature, in poetry. Attempts at legal suppression failed under a Supreme Court that upheld such utterances against charges of obscenity.
Two broad subcultures developed. Uranian subculture developed following the publication and popularization of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs' on male homosexuality, particularly among the Spartacus League paramilitaries. These militants were largely young unmarried men, and beyond the role of protecting against reactionary violence, the early Spartacus League gave a fraternal sense of belonging to a large corps of young men who felt out of place in the world.
Unlike most contemporary examples of military androphilia, Uranian culture in the Spartacists was largely non-violent and non-abusive. As poet Hart Crane described of his time in the League, "We fought together as comrades. And we tended to our wounds as comrades. Our affections were as equals, not master and servant. We'd had our fill of servitude in the National Army."
Sapphic subculture had been spurred to life by the new independence women had taken, made all the more urgent by the population imbalance between young men and women due to the Great War. It too had long hidden roots in American culture. "Boston Marriages", the long-term cohabitation between two independent women had been well known for decades. Such so-called "romantic friendships" were devoid of a sexual dimension--in the public eye. The Sapphics in theatre and literature began breaking from this chaste image in the 1920s.
They took their name from the ancient Greek poet Sappho, whose translated writings had long been a subject of controversy over their content. Many a devout classicist had continued to insist that the desire she expressed in her poetry was purely heterosexual, or even more confusingly, purely chaste. But new translations of Sappho's poetry exploded in popularity among the "New Women" of the Roaring Twenties.
Starting in 1925, a quotation from Sappho adorned the masthead of the communist women's magazine New Woman: "Sweet mother, I cannot weave; slender Aphrodite has overcome me with longing for a girl." The rise of casual sex among the youth in the Twenties came with a rise of same-sex experimentation.
Like Uranian, in this period Sapphic did not mean exclusive homosexuality. Sexual identity was an emerging but still not wholly formed concept. Uranian and Sapphic applied to behavior and attraction, and thus equally applied to what would now be called ambisexuals.
This is not to say that casual homophobia didn't exist, nor that it was free from backlash. But the backlash in the 1920s was largely contained to small sects of reactionaries. Attempts by religious authorities to condemn these perversions fell on deaf ears, for they'd shattered their moral authority selling pie-in-the-sky to hungry bellies on earth. And it was bad for business for the liberal Republican establishment to involve themselves in people's private lives.
[...]
The United States had somewhat undeservedly gained a reputation for piety among European observers, who extrapolated the phenomenon of the Second and supposed Third Great Awakenings to the present. Whatever historic differences there were, the major religious denominations in the United States faced serious challenges in the carnage of the Great War, and the Social War at home.
Historically, the Socialist Labor Party and the industrial unions had been strongly anti-clerical. Even the religiously inspired socialists among them heaped scorn and condemnation upon the existing Churchs, both Catholic and Protestant. The humiliating demands of many Christian "charity" groups had earned the contempt of workers. Groups like the Salvation Army, lampooned as the "Starvation Army", cared more for the salvation of souls than they did for the salvation of living humans. The demands of obeisance and the frequent intrusions of moral busybodies invited a political critique of Christianity, one which even religious socialists took up with enthusiasm.
The mass death and repression brought on by the Great War turned this cracks into a great rupture. Anti-clericalism had transformed into atheism in the Workers' Party. Communist activists took up the Marxist critique of religion like a bayonet, and found a receptive audience.
This is not to say that workers all became atheists overnight. But whatever their private religious beliefs, in the public political lives they led, they acted like atheists. The promise of posthumous salvation could no longer be stomached. The moment demanded action in the here-and-now.
This militancy did not go unchallenged. Religious socialists remained in the party and often pushed against the more direct measures by the party. But their influence was sharply constrained by democratic centralism. The workers themselves had already left or been kicked from their churches, if they had even had one. Among the youth, the difference was even more stark. The criticism that Marxian scientific socialism was a political religion had at least some truth to it, particularly among the zealots growing up within the ranks of the Pioneer League and other left youth groups. While the Boy Scouts made their first plank of their Scout Promise "to do my Duty to God and Country," the Pioneer Catechism stated "The only church that illuminates is a burning one."
Attempts by various state and local governments to inhibit this as obscenity or corrupting the youth were stymied by a robust application of the First Amendment's protections for speech and religion, and the dominant liberal Republican coalition.
It wasn't simply revolutionary atheism that grew, but also a proliferation of new religious movements flowered among the working and middle classes. These new sects proliferated vaguely aligned to the political right and left. Some, like the Ecumenists, were Christian groups that had split from mainline groups more on practical-political grounds than theologica. Theologically, the Ecumenist groups were standard Nicene Creed Christians, devoted to a social gospel on the well-trodden ground that faith without works is dead.
Others were more theological heterodox, especially the Fundamentalist splinters, who condemned theological Modernism for the crisis of faith in the people, and were aligned very closely with reactionary right-wing groups. Their increasingly suspect theology was obsessed with a refoundation of a mythical Original Church, and increasingly fanciful ideas about what the original Apostolic Church had espoused.
In tandem with the crises of Christianity, new religious groups developed among the middle classes no longer spiritually satisfied with Christianity. The most prominent of which is usually bundled together as Heathenry, the loose conglomeration of Anglo-Saxon, Nordic and Germanic neopagans began congealing in the 1920s. While their roots extended into the late 19th century in the old world, American Heathenry sprang to life in the wake of the Great War, propelled by disillusioned veterans and widows.
Heathenry in the Old World was strongly connected to Romanticist reactionary and Völkische movements, but in the United States developed in a more liberal-left leaning direction. While it shared the reconstructionist aims of its Old World counterpart, transplanted from the old lands the New World pagans were at least somewhat aware it being an invented tradition. The primordial link between blood and soil was severed, and in the ethnic melting pot of the United States it could not be reconstructed.
Rather than Romanticism, the writings of New World Heathens were informed by a deep sense of religious trauma. Heathens such as prominent Massachusetts based writer and head of the Hearg temple Owen Wilde* found the root of the conversion in the "problem of evil." Wilde's experience as an infantry officer in the National Army presented him with a paradox between the Christian notion of an all powerful, all-loving god, and the slaughter he witnessed.
Wilde and the other Heathens resolved this paradox by rejecting a belief in an all-powerful Godhead. The gods of the Heathens were more limited and flawed. Heathenry's reverence for the wilderness and animism also appealed to those who had been wounded by the cold, mechanical nature of industrial life.
While the Heathens resolved the problem of evil with more human comprehensible gods, the neo-Gnostics went the opposite direction. These mystery cults developed on the Ivy League campuses and began to spread. Like their ancient forebears, the new Gnostics took solace in the incomprehensibility of the divine, and the conflict between spirit and matter. The material world created by the Demiurge was flawed and sinful. Transcending this crude matter was their spiritual calling by learning the mysteries of the pure spiritual realm.
[...]
The Roaring Twenties upheaval was felt most keenly in the South. The war effort had brought new federal money to the impoverished South. With the railroads and dams came new factories and cities exploding in size to meet the demands of the war effort. This process did not abate with demobilization. Wood made cracking the "Solid South" a priority for the Republican Party.
For the Democratic Party, the promise of the Twenties was an existential threat. The splintering of the party, and bearing the political cost of the war and demobilization had destroyed its electoral presence outside the South. In the 1920 election season at least, the Southern states remained effectively one-party states, but they were living on borrowed time. The promise of new industries, better jobs, and modern amenities were luring some white voters to Wood's coalition, and the 1924 Alignment put the Southern states in play for the first time in decades.
The Democratic leadership was not stupid. But it was placed in the position of triangulating between the armed reactionaries on its right-wing, and the insurgent Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party on its left (supported by northern Republican money). In the Red Summer of 1920, the KKK had disastrously overreached in its attempts to terrorise the black population.
The high profile racial pogroms and lynching of decorate war heroes brought national attention to South, and galvanised black militancy among tenant farmers and industrial workers. The threat of terrorist reprisal by the various Red Army Fractions made lynching an unsafe practice.
The Democratic Party began its pivot towards the center by condemning the KKK, and in some places beginning the repeal of Jim Crow laws on its own initiative. But this change of heart should be seen for the realpolitik it was, and not as a principled move as their modern counterparts would have us believe.
Above all, the struggle undertaken by blacks in the South was a struggle first and foremost for life itself. The sharp recession brought on by demobilisation had placed the black population in a state of primary emergency, and rhetoric echoing of the Hitlerian line of "useless eaters" produced terrorist violence against their communities like it had in every past economic upheaval.
But the worst fears of racists had been, ironically, proven true. The need to mobilise blacks for war service had planted a bomb under the Southern racial hierarchy. Men who had been treated as comrades and heroes in the war, who had charged headlong into mortal combat, could not go back to the civilian life of abject servitude. Nor could white veterans stomach the abuses inflicted upon their comrades.
Black and white veterans formed the core of new civil rights groups in the South. This expression of organic solidarity was far more dangerous than any bomb. Crossing the color line was a direct refutation of the bedrock of Southern society. Police attempting to break-up a sit-in were not merely beating black men and women they considered subhuman. They also had to beat their white neighbors too. And these soldiers trained a new generation of activists to take the beatings that they had spent their entire lives trying to avoid.
The threat of force is more effective than its exercise. Force is messy. It is expensive. And most of all, it invites reprisal. The national attention brought by non-violent protests being savaged put economic pressure on the Southern states. The violence was a bad look for many national firms looking to expand to the South, especially with the unions exerting their might. Boycott, divest and sanction campaigns promoted by civic groups coupled with the threat of strikes by the unions greased the wheels for action by the establishment.
For the national political leadership, the situation in the South was an international level embarrassment that threatened the United States' moral authority. And it was bad for business. And above all, for the man at the head of the federal government, it was a moral obscenity. President Wood's political ambitions for the South had great optics. He turned the Workers' Party from a fifth column at least temporarily into begrudging supporter, and returned the country to social peace. Cracking the Solid South could mean a permanent Republican majority. But it should not be forgotten that it was an incredibly risky strategy at the time which drew bitter criticism from members of his own party up until it succeeded. He may have been handed the moment by circumstances, but Wood undeniably took up the challenge because he earnestly believed it was right.
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EcoSyndieDragon
Free Palestine, Oppose the Fash
- Location
- United States
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Oh I really like the extra attention paid to the evolution of America's increasingly eclectic religious scene of the war. Also there's always something cathartic about seeing the Jim Crow South get taken down a peg or two in any timeline.
A basic lesson that so many states and rulers seem to have forgotten.
Also I spotted one minor error:
Otherwise another amazing installment!
A basic lesson that so many states and rulers seem to have forgotten.
Also I spotted one minor error:
Otherwise another amazing installment!
Hakazin
Serpent Admirer
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Well, that's a take I haven't seen before.
Otherwise, great as usual. I especially like the idea of a more multilingual United States.
- Location
- The left-wing of the impossible
Thanks! Beating up on the Jim Crow regime is its own reward
Thanks for pointing out the error
EcoSyndieDragon
Free Palestine, Oppose the Fash
- Location
- United States
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Thanks! Beating up on the Jim Crow regime is its own reward
Thanks for pointing out the error
You're welcome!
- Location
- United Kingdom
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Ahhhh. Really enjoyed that. Things seem to be going well, though I suspect there's going to be trouble after the wall street crash. I hope these social advances aren't washed back in the depression...
Also,
loose, not lose
Also,
loose, not lose
- Location
- The left-wing of the impossible
Thanks for helping me catch that.
Undoubtedly, there will be trouble ahead, but while we're about to go through the crucible, we'll come out the other side.
- Location
- UK
If you're going to appropriate quotes, appropriate from the best.
- Location
- 2038
Excellent update. We're really getting a sense of there being some weight behind the worker's movement here in a way which, if you don't mind me saying, wasn't quite as fleshed out in earlier versions. It's a real movement with community organising and mutual aid at its heart, real political divisions and clear short term goals. The post revolution society has a firm foundation in a way which just wasn't quite there, anywhere, in OTL.
- Location
- The left-wing of the impossible
Thanks. I was kinding of rushing things in previous versions which was definitely a suboptimal choice
- Location
- 2038
Don't get me wrong, they were still great. I didn't really realise there were things 'missing' until I read this version.
The Birth of Columbia Part 2
Spartakrod
Judeo-Spartacist Bolshevik-Kabbalist
- Location
- Sanctum Arcanorum
- Pronouns
- Fae/Faer/Faers/Faerself
The Birth of Columbia (A biography of Samantha Waver, part 2)
A fellow artist, Spartak had changed his name as part of his parents' protest at the "Americanization" process that stripped them of their original names, and the two took a shining to each other straight away. He would soon begin to date her once the two returned to school, and despite the odds managed to stay close after graduating from Bay Ridge High School[1] with distinguishment in the arts in 1921.
Her path would take her to attain a degree at Hunter College, working part time as a cartoonist for the Daily Worker, marrying Spartak in 1923 and giving birth to her own first child Brigid in 1924. Her passion for animation would not go unnoticed however, and she made a number of early shorts, most to be passed through the union.
Nor was her passion for fiction, as she would bury herself in the works of the Edda and Homer, H.G Wells, Jules Verne, Lovecraft, and more, often submitting illustrations to many of the magazines publishing modern pulp fiction works. She came to assemble the idea for Columbia throughout the twenties, working with Spartak and their new colleague Samawal Hamidi, or as he's often known Samuel Hardy.
Black and Muslim, Samawal had born his own marks of capital after living through Jim Crow,moving to the Big Apple, and would become fast friends with the two. Samawal had studied the arts extensively and came to be "possessed of the desire to show the white man that a negro is not a person without art and culture" and introduced the two to many of the African legends and myths he had found in his studies during their talks with each other.
He came to be involved in African National Congress politics at an early age, angry at the fact that even in places without Jim Crow segregation he was still being paid less than his white and Christian counterparts and so often found himself being given the lowliest positions in any artistic job he could find. Which of course, made him quite a natural fit for Samantha and Spartak.
The three of them would make a number of important contributions to animation during the 20s, usually in the form of shorts before feature length films, though they increasingly tried for more ambitious efforts within the medium as time went on. With the boom time of the twenties, work was plentiful enough and thanks to the heavily leftist dominated nature of film, many of their early shorts were able to get away with highly provocative material.
The short "Womb to Tomb", depicting a person's life from birth to death, looking forward to the promise of wealth and security only to find that poverty has interest and themselves getting poorer while their boss gets richer until their boss' undead skeleton emerges from a splendid crypt and welcomes them to a tiny, forgotten grave is still considered one of the classic works of pre-revolutionary agitprop.
Extra money was raised on the side by doing more private commissioned artwork that was used to fund the distribution of agitprop work, political cartoons. Alongside their commercial work, this commission work has attracted a sort of cult following in the present. The themes covered were eclectic and variable and while Samantha tried to refuse offers of work from people whose politics were too divergent from her own, some did slip through the cracks to her distaste.
This did however, lead them to contact with some Heathen and Gnostic sects that had begun to spread throughout America as word of their interest in mythology spread. The Sophian Church of Gnosis, a group that would later gain a place in the annals of rightist and anti-feminist conspiracy theories; contacted the trio to make a banner for their young religious group.
The piece, which would come to be known as the "judgement of Yaldabaoth" cast the scorning of Yaldabaoth by Sophia and Christ in an anti-capitalist light; showing the flawed creator as a patriarchal oppressor spurred by hatred of his mother and chaining man to bonds of ignorance, rules, and drudgery to suppress the creative soul. Throughout the process of creating the piece, the three would immerse themselves in gnostic lore to gain a better perspective of what they were working on.
What was read seemed to strike a chord in Samantha in particular, who was frequently disappointed by how masculine most mythology she read was. Casting the source of human creative spirit and liberation in the form of the epitome of feminine wisdom was "refreshing in all the best ways" to a fresh out of university Waver, and she struck up what would be a long friendship with Irene Vasseur; a mystic within the temple and recent French immigrant. A number of other illustrations would be made, largely centered around the theme of gnostic liberation from the chains of material, patriarchal slavery.
This would be followed by contact with the Heathen league, which exposed the ever mythology hungry Samantha to an influx of obscure translated Norse, Germanic, and Saxon folklore, sagas, and myths. In a world dominated by Greco-Roman and Arthurian-Carolingian studies, Pagan Germanic mythopoeia was rather obscure outside of continental Europe.
But with so many starting to question the predominant faith of Christianity in the wake of the great war's senseless slaughter, what would once be something of a taboo association with pagan barbarism was now something approaching acceptable. Being of minority, albeit monotheistic faiths themselves; they saw little harm in collaborating with the heathens on the side between their other work.
Ulfric Asthorsson notably requested a number of illustrations for his ambition to create a standardised holy text for his heathen faith; interested in the trio's dynamic and stylistic drawings over the abstractified or the realistic art forms that predominated in the day. Each of the three would spend about a year illustrating the text before presenting the final document to Ulfric's temple. Perhaps most notably for her later work, a young girl drawn as one of the Valkyries would later come to heavily influence the depiction of Commander Columbia in the future.
With the twenties being seen as a time for many oppressed peoples to come out of the shadows and step into the daylight, Samantha would make a series of important meetings and liaisons with many of these groups.
Sapphic and Uranian groups were widely represented in the WCPA even to the muted grumblings of many within the party about "bourgeois decadence." Though she mostly remained quiet about such comments, she found to her surprise that Irene was also part of a Sapphic group, and when she responded with curiosity rather than disgust; was allowed to ask frankly about what Irene's experiences were like. Despite the often vicious and salacious rumour mongering about Samantha's correspondence with Irene; the rather mundane truth is that they were simply friends who had significant influence on one another's work.
And that's hardly where the trio's burgeoning network of contacts ended. Asiatic and Hispanic American immigrants often came to New York City in search of finding a place within the "Big Apple" as the largest city in America experienced a great flourishing of culture and prosperity. Mingling with rural white and southern black internal migrants as well as Native Americans hoping to leave the poverty of the reservations after the Indian Citizenship act, New York City was becoming "the planet in one city" in the worlds of Jack Reed in his tribute to the largest of American cities. Or to those less fond of what it stood for; "the house and hearth of degeneracy" to use the invective of Adolf Hitler some years later.
Eager and willing to learn as much as they could, Samantha, Spartak and Samawal would frequently travel across the city when they weren't working or attending party services. Their journal entries would speak at great length about their experiences and how many felt some degree of cautious optimism for the future. However, this cautious optimism; as Samantha would note in some of the scripts she wrote during the period through the mouths of her characters; was well aware that it could all be taken away.
Nostalgists for the last decade of the second republic's life; it's "golden age" and black legendists often come to loggerheads about the truth of the era. Certainly there was greater acceptance of those outside of the traditional wealthy, male, white, heterosexual and cisgendered Anglo-Saxon protestant ruling class but it was never too hard to find discrimination.
Even with the legal emancipation for people of colour and women and a degree of tolerance towards non-christians and GRSM individuals there were still plenty who openly repudiated the shifts in society. Many of the period work of the trio sought to capture the still lingering issues in society and give lie to the claim that class balance and prosperity for all had come.
A noted rightist group in New York City would even post a hit piece on the trio as they started to gain some notoriety. Labelling them as communist provocateurs and social degenerates preying on "infantile newcomers", this assassination campaign would see their professions' security threatened until a strike was arranged to protest even considering letting them go to appease "reactionary bullies."
The synagogue that Samantha attended would face vandalism on the fourth of April 1927 in an attack traced to reactionary groups seeking to terrify a Jewish community believed to be agents of the Bolshevik conspiracy. And similar hate crimes would often fall upon other minority groups, such as the African Muslim Council that Samawal helped to start within New York City; as well as against Native, Asian, and Hispanic support groups that established themselves in the rapidly growing metropolis.
In Samantha's own words "The liberation of the oppressed was so often portrayed as an issue of a dispute among the rulers; those who they said sold out to whom they believed to be inferiors and those who they said couldn't see the benefits of elevating the oppressed. The idea that liberation came from the oppressed's own struggle for recognition never crossed their minds. So I imagine that caused at least half the shock of the sympathetic when the people they believed to be in need of rescue turned up to WCPA meetings of their own accord."
These lingering tensions lead many to join movements like the Workers' Communist Party on their own, seeking out the party rather than waiting to be proselytised to. Samawal himself would write an influential piece on how the resistance of the downtrodden themselves without aid from the sympathetic among the oppressing class was incalculably more valuable than any amount of "respectability". In a time when many said that bigotry would seen become a thing of the past, the three became loud voices for the need to move forward and not stop simply because those in power felt satisfied with how much farther those kept out of power had come.
But with a Republican party at least tepidly in favour of progressive, class collaborationist and reformist efforts, a Democratic Party amenable to a more populist agenda in an attempt to expand beyond a southern rural white demographic, and a Workers' Party with a significant Austro-Marxist faction; many doubted whether confrontation was needed or even wise. With the creation of more radical works from the trio slowing down over time, it seemed that they had some issues with finding an audience for continued radicalism.
Fall of a Titan
- Location
- Fort Worth, TX
Review: The Fall of a Titan by Nur Acacio
Economics Today, October 14th, 2013
By Anthony Gonzales
It was twenty years ago when the Bombay Illustrated Press received a package of documents mailed to them detailing the organization and history of one of South Asia's most notorious banks, the International Bank of Commerce and Credit (IBCC). These documents would create an earthquake that would rock the worlds of politics, business and organized crime. At the time few people outside the business community had heard of the bank, it did not advertise and relied on the business community for new businesses. While celebrated as a rising power in the Indian Ocean and Middle East the bank hid darker secrets. The Fall of a Titan explores the history of IBCC from its rise as a regional bank in the 1960's to a powerful influence in the late 80s to its collapse in the 90s from the view of three people.
The first character introduced is Sheela David, a ten year reporter for the Illustrated Press who is assigned the task of verifying the documents that the newspaper received and interviewing people mentioned in the documents. She rapidly meets a wall of resistance and threats both physical and legal, it is only by using confidential sources that she begins to piece together how a bank founded in 1966 in Karachi was able to triple its size in just ten years but remain hidden in plain sight. A second character is retired Deputy Inspector General of Police Anupama Deforrest of the Central Bureau of Investigation. A veteran officer used to investigating the world of organized crime, she is assigned to investigate the rumors of IBCC laundering funds from criminal gangs and terrorist groups in return for a percentage of the money. She races against time as IBCC begins to transfer funds, personnel away from India and destroy records in order to hide its activities. The third character is only known as Husna, who tells her story as a major officer of the bank in the early 1980's until its collapse.
The first part of the book sets the stage. How IBCC was founded in Karachi in 1966 by Shahzad Ghulam Sultana, the son of moneylenders, who used his and his family connections to the merchant community create a bank that them without many of the restrictions that public banks had. It would grow based on its culture of not asking questions about clients income and staying out of the public eye. Soon it attracted attention from organized crime and various groups who used the bank to hide the source of funds from illegal activities such as drugs or prostitution by 'laundering' them by investing them into projects like real estate, stocks, bonds and partnerships with various businesses. Instead of turning away the funds or reporting them to the authorities they instead advised the gangs and mafias how to invest the money. Using an almost unlimited amount of funds, IBCC would open branches across the GIC and Middle East with most major cities having a branch by 1980. The CBI would open its first investigation of IBCC for money laundering in 1972 but would soon find itself battling a well funded legal and political opposition to the investigations.
The second part of the book is the view of the company from the inside from Husna. A woman with a degree in business, she would join IBCC in the early 80s after graduating University. Attracted by the high salary and prestige, Husna believed that she had achieved what many young people wanted, a good job with chance of advancement in a good company. However she began to realize what the company was doing and started taking down notes. The notes, written in code and on paper, last a decade a detail how Sultana made sure that all decisions were made by him. Sections of the company were kept separate to prevent the release of sensitive information and used private investigators to silence critics and retrieve sensitive materials. Husna also described how her position was to advise wealthy clients on how to avoid income taxes and investigation through a variety of means both legal and semi-legal.
The third part is the fall beginning with the death of Shahzad in 1989. A power struggle would erupt between Shahzad's son Zawar and Shahzad's younger brother Suhail. Both men would use their contacts in the underworld to wage a bitter struggle, leading to the death of Suhail in 1991 in a car bombing. Fearing for her life, Husna would begin to collect her notes, any company materials she could locate and mail the final documents on January 1993. Even after the breakup of IBCC Husna has never come forward and many believe she may have been silenced on the orders of Zawar. With the confirmation from the Illustrated Press the CBI begins a massive crackdown on corrupt officials, businessmen and criminals named in the documents. The bank would be closed and its assets seized in 1995 for tax evasion and money laundering. Zawar himself would be tried and convicted on multiple charges in 1996 and would die in prison in 2000 of health complications.
While the book starts someone slow it helps to explain the sometimes complicated world of finance and how it can exist in two worlds at once. The three perspectives would switch throughout the book drawing closer and closer together until the final chapters with a satisfying finish. While larger and using much more detail than the average novel it draws you in and keeps you involved. I would recommend this for those long trips or for that bibliophile in your family.
Five out of Five
Economics Today, October 14th, 2013
By Anthony Gonzales
It was twenty years ago when the Bombay Illustrated Press received a package of documents mailed to them detailing the organization and history of one of South Asia's most notorious banks, the International Bank of Commerce and Credit (IBCC). These documents would create an earthquake that would rock the worlds of politics, business and organized crime. At the time few people outside the business community had heard of the bank, it did not advertise and relied on the business community for new businesses. While celebrated as a rising power in the Indian Ocean and Middle East the bank hid darker secrets. The Fall of a Titan explores the history of IBCC from its rise as a regional bank in the 1960's to a powerful influence in the late 80s to its collapse in the 90s from the view of three people.
The first character introduced is Sheela David, a ten year reporter for the Illustrated Press who is assigned the task of verifying the documents that the newspaper received and interviewing people mentioned in the documents. She rapidly meets a wall of resistance and threats both physical and legal, it is only by using confidential sources that she begins to piece together how a bank founded in 1966 in Karachi was able to triple its size in just ten years but remain hidden in plain sight. A second character is retired Deputy Inspector General of Police Anupama Deforrest of the Central Bureau of Investigation. A veteran officer used to investigating the world of organized crime, she is assigned to investigate the rumors of IBCC laundering funds from criminal gangs and terrorist groups in return for a percentage of the money. She races against time as IBCC begins to transfer funds, personnel away from India and destroy records in order to hide its activities. The third character is only known as Husna, who tells her story as a major officer of the bank in the early 1980's until its collapse.
The first part of the book sets the stage. How IBCC was founded in Karachi in 1966 by Shahzad Ghulam Sultana, the son of moneylenders, who used his and his family connections to the merchant community create a bank that them without many of the restrictions that public banks had. It would grow based on its culture of not asking questions about clients income and staying out of the public eye. Soon it attracted attention from organized crime and various groups who used the bank to hide the source of funds from illegal activities such as drugs or prostitution by 'laundering' them by investing them into projects like real estate, stocks, bonds and partnerships with various businesses. Instead of turning away the funds or reporting them to the authorities they instead advised the gangs and mafias how to invest the money. Using an almost unlimited amount of funds, IBCC would open branches across the GIC and Middle East with most major cities having a branch by 1980. The CBI would open its first investigation of IBCC for money laundering in 1972 but would soon find itself battling a well funded legal and political opposition to the investigations.
The second part of the book is the view of the company from the inside from Husna. A woman with a degree in business, she would join IBCC in the early 80s after graduating University. Attracted by the high salary and prestige, Husna believed that she had achieved what many young people wanted, a good job with chance of advancement in a good company. However she began to realize what the company was doing and started taking down notes. The notes, written in code and on paper, last a decade a detail how Sultana made sure that all decisions were made by him. Sections of the company were kept separate to prevent the release of sensitive information and used private investigators to silence critics and retrieve sensitive materials. Husna also described how her position was to advise wealthy clients on how to avoid income taxes and investigation through a variety of means both legal and semi-legal.
The third part is the fall beginning with the death of Shahzad in 1989. A power struggle would erupt between Shahzad's son Zawar and Shahzad's younger brother Suhail. Both men would use their contacts in the underworld to wage a bitter struggle, leading to the death of Suhail in 1991 in a car bombing. Fearing for her life, Husna would begin to collect her notes, any company materials she could locate and mail the final documents on January 1993. Even after the breakup of IBCC Husna has never come forward and many believe she may have been silenced on the orders of Zawar. With the confirmation from the Illustrated Press the CBI begins a massive crackdown on corrupt officials, businessmen and criminals named in the documents. The bank would be closed and its assets seized in 1995 for tax evasion and money laundering. Zawar himself would be tried and convicted on multiple charges in 1996 and would die in prison in 2000 of health complications.
While the book starts someone slow it helps to explain the sometimes complicated world of finance and how it can exist in two worlds at once. The three perspectives would switch throughout the book drawing closer and closer together until the final chapters with a satisfying finish. While larger and using much more detail than the average novel it draws you in and keeps you involved. I would recommend this for those long trips or for that bibliophile in your family.
Five out of Five
1926
- Location
- The left-wing of the impossible
January 16: A BBC radio play about a worker's revolution causes a minor panic in London, dramatically revealing the great tension between labor and capital in the UK.
January 19: Following incidents perpetrated by forces loyal to Beiyang warlord Zhang Zuolin arresting Soviet workers on the joint Soviet/Chinese controlled Chinese Eastern Railway, Soviet ambassador Lev Karakhan threatens military intervention.
January 31: The Soviet government adopts the doctrine of "socialism in one country" as official state policy.
February 4: Eugene Debs, five time presidential candidate and spiritual leader of the American socialist movement, passes away in his sleep. With the unifying force of Debs gone, many fear that the Workers' Party will soon splinter.
February 17: At the yearly plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, Italian communist Amadeo Bordiga's proposal that, as an expression of the supra-national unity of the workers' movement, all the world's communist parties should jointly administer the Soviet Union is rejected 72-21.
February 28: The Joint Opposition is formed in the Soviet Communist Party, uniting Leon Trotsky's supporters with those of Lev Kamenev against the Stalin-Zinoviev-Bukharin Center.
March 16: Engineer Robert Goddard launches the first liquid fueled rocket in Auburn, Massachusetts.
March 24: The main office of the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, a German-language confederate of The Daily Worker, is bombed, killing three and injuring seven. The bomber, Silver Legion member Max Overfield*, is successfully chased down and apprehended by recent German immigrant Paul Mattick, a streetfighting veteran currently employed at the Arbeiter-Zeitung.
April 1: Science fiction magazine Amazing Stories begins publication under publisher Hugo Gernsback.
April 17: Texas Governor George C. Butte (R) signs a landmark law abolishing most of Jim Crow. The compromise law, authored by a group of Democrats, DFLers and Republicans, aims to stem growing social conflict and prevent the reduction in federal representation.
April 24: Felix Dzerzhinsky, Director of the OGPU, suffers a near fatal heart attack while leaving his office in the evening. After some deliberation, he accepts his doctor's counsel and announces his retirement, though he remains a voting member of the Politburo.
May 4: Generalissimo Jiang Jieshi launches the Northern Expedition begins, directing the full might of the National Revolutionary Army against the Warlords and the Beiyang Government.
May 8: Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen (the first man to reach the South Pole in 1910) flies over the North Pole with his crew, becoming the first person to reach both poles.
May 12: Symphony No. 1 in F minor is performed in Leningrad. The composer is 19 year old Dmitri Shostakovich, who had composed the piece while a student at the Petrograd Conservatory.
May 28: The Portuguese First Republic is overthrown by military plotters led by General Manuel Gomes da Costa, who establish the "National Dictatorship" in its place.
June 10: The Story of Philosophy by historian Will Durant is released, exploring the history of western philosophy.
June 12: The news of the Northern Expedition causes a bank run on the Bank of Taiwan, which leads to the Japanese government attempting to redeem the discounted "earthquake bonds" from the Kanto Earthquake. This escalates into a financial crisis with the collapse of many smaller banks, resulting in economic domination by the zaibatsu conglomerates.
June 19: Rosa Luxemburg, Chairman-emeritus of the KPD, attends the dedication of a monument in Berlin dedicated to the martyrs of the Spartakusaufstand.
June 24: Amidst economic chaos and a renewed threat from Germany, Polish Marshal Józef Piłsudski begins a coup attempt against the ruling National Democratic Party, promising to end the political chaos, and secure an "Eastern Locarno" forcing Germany to recognize Polish sovereignty. The coup, though supported by many factions of the Army as well as the trade unions ultimately fails, ending with Piłsudski's surrender by week's end.
July 1: Alexei Nikolaevich, Tsarevich of Russia, succumbs to injuries sustained in a minor motor accident due to hemophilia.
July 3: Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky is established.
July 4: The "Greater German Youth Movement" is reorganized as the "Hitler Youth, League of the German Worker Youth" as an official organ of the Nazi Party.
July 17: The Automobile Workers Union is founded in Detroit, Michigan.
July 24: Congress approves funding to build the world's largest and most sophisticated wind tunnel at the NACA facility in Langley. The full-scale 10 m x 20 m wind tunnel will cement American leadership in civil and military aviation.
August 2: The National Revolutionary Army secures the Hubei Province. Whampoa alumni Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai distinguish themselves leading NRA forces into battle against warlord Wu Peifu.
August 18: Now without an heir, the grieving Nikolay II recognizes his cousin, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, as Emperor-in-exile, who establishes his court among the Russian exile community in Paris.
August 24: Riots break out in New York due to overattendence at the funeral of actor Rudolph Valentino.
September 4: SCOTUS delivers its ruling in Avner v. New York, 271 U.S. 402 (1926)*, establishing a legal principle of one-man, one-vote under the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause. The opinion of the court, written by Louis Brandeis, strikes down New York's unequal districts as unconstitutional.
September 8: The Emperor Taisho passes away from complications of pneumonia. Crown Prince Hirohito, who had been serving as prince regent for the past five years due to Taisho's failing health, succeeds him. The Shōwa era begins.
September 17: The US Army Air Service is reorganized into the Army Air Forces, elevating aviation to an autonomous component commensurate with a doubling of the number of aircraft and personnel over the next five years.
September 22: The French National Assembly narrowly ratifies the Mellon-Berenger Agreement. While the agreement reduced debt and gave easy repayment terms, the repayment of loans and in-kind transfers by the US is a bitter pill to swallow given the immense loss of life in the Great War.
October 2: The Death Ship is published in Germany, by anonymous writer B. Traven. A critique of bureaucracy and immigration policies, it becomes popular among German speaking WPA activists, and it is translated to English within a year.
October 3: Father Charles Coughlin conducts his first weekly radio address, broadcast by WJR Detroit.
October 11: A decree issued by Mussolini's government in Italy orders the arrest of all parliamentary deputies of the Italian Communist Party.
October 14: Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne is published in the United Kingdom.
October 25: The Supreme Court delivers a 6-3 verdict in Myers v. United States, 272 U.S. 52 (1926), upholding the constitutionality of laws requiring Congressional approval for the firing of executive branch officers.
November 2: In state elections across the South, the DFLP makes significant gains in state legislatures running on a general anti-corruption, pro-infrastructure platform. Nonetheless, they fail to achieve even a plurality in any state.
November 4: The USS Kitty Hawk (CV-2) is commissioned, following extensive sea trials.
November 15: At the British Imperial Conference, representatives propose the reorganization of the British Empire into an Imperial Federation. As part of this movement, the various dominions of the Empire are recognized as autonomous, though the declaration falls short of asserting their equality with the United Kingdom.
December 5: Sergei Eisenstein attends the New York premiere of his film Battleship Potemkin, amid throngs of enthused fans and numerous protesters. The film will go on to be one of the biggest draws of the coming year.
December 7: Leaders of the Italian Communist Party, including Antonio Gramsci and Amadeo Bordiga, are imprisoned on the remote island of Ustica under the new emergency laws.
December 15: Magician Harry Houdini returns to performing after a hiatus to deal with health problems.
December 18: Brawls break out in Warsaw between the left and the right following Piłsudski's acquittal for treason.
Appendix: U.S. Senate composition following 1926 election/appointment
January 19: Following incidents perpetrated by forces loyal to Beiyang warlord Zhang Zuolin arresting Soviet workers on the joint Soviet/Chinese controlled Chinese Eastern Railway, Soviet ambassador Lev Karakhan threatens military intervention.
January 31: The Soviet government adopts the doctrine of "socialism in one country" as official state policy.
February 4: Eugene Debs, five time presidential candidate and spiritual leader of the American socialist movement, passes away in his sleep. With the unifying force of Debs gone, many fear that the Workers' Party will soon splinter.
February 17: At the yearly plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, Italian communist Amadeo Bordiga's proposal that, as an expression of the supra-national unity of the workers' movement, all the world's communist parties should jointly administer the Soviet Union is rejected 72-21.
February 28: The Joint Opposition is formed in the Soviet Communist Party, uniting Leon Trotsky's supporters with those of Lev Kamenev against the Stalin-Zinoviev-Bukharin Center.
March 16: Engineer Robert Goddard launches the first liquid fueled rocket in Auburn, Massachusetts.
March 24: The main office of the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, a German-language confederate of The Daily Worker, is bombed, killing three and injuring seven. The bomber, Silver Legion member Max Overfield*, is successfully chased down and apprehended by recent German immigrant Paul Mattick, a streetfighting veteran currently employed at the Arbeiter-Zeitung.
April 1: Science fiction magazine Amazing Stories begins publication under publisher Hugo Gernsback.
April 17: Texas Governor George C. Butte (R) signs a landmark law abolishing most of Jim Crow. The compromise law, authored by a group of Democrats, DFLers and Republicans, aims to stem growing social conflict and prevent the reduction in federal representation.
April 24: Felix Dzerzhinsky, Director of the OGPU, suffers a near fatal heart attack while leaving his office in the evening. After some deliberation, he accepts his doctor's counsel and announces his retirement, though he remains a voting member of the Politburo.
May 4: Generalissimo Jiang Jieshi launches the Northern Expedition begins, directing the full might of the National Revolutionary Army against the Warlords and the Beiyang Government.
May 8: Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen (the first man to reach the South Pole in 1910) flies over the North Pole with his crew, becoming the first person to reach both poles.
May 12: Symphony No. 1 in F minor is performed in Leningrad. The composer is 19 year old Dmitri Shostakovich, who had composed the piece while a student at the Petrograd Conservatory.
May 28: The Portuguese First Republic is overthrown by military plotters led by General Manuel Gomes da Costa, who establish the "National Dictatorship" in its place.
June 10: The Story of Philosophy by historian Will Durant is released, exploring the history of western philosophy.
June 12: The news of the Northern Expedition causes a bank run on the Bank of Taiwan, which leads to the Japanese government attempting to redeem the discounted "earthquake bonds" from the Kanto Earthquake. This escalates into a financial crisis with the collapse of many smaller banks, resulting in economic domination by the zaibatsu conglomerates.
June 19: Rosa Luxemburg, Chairman-emeritus of the KPD, attends the dedication of a monument in Berlin dedicated to the martyrs of the Spartakusaufstand.
June 24: Amidst economic chaos and a renewed threat from Germany, Polish Marshal Józef Piłsudski begins a coup attempt against the ruling National Democratic Party, promising to end the political chaos, and secure an "Eastern Locarno" forcing Germany to recognize Polish sovereignty. The coup, though supported by many factions of the Army as well as the trade unions ultimately fails, ending with Piłsudski's surrender by week's end.
July 1: Alexei Nikolaevich, Tsarevich of Russia, succumbs to injuries sustained in a minor motor accident due to hemophilia.
July 3: Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky is established.
July 4: The "Greater German Youth Movement" is reorganized as the "Hitler Youth, League of the German Worker Youth" as an official organ of the Nazi Party.
July 17: The Automobile Workers Union is founded in Detroit, Michigan.
July 24: Congress approves funding to build the world's largest and most sophisticated wind tunnel at the NACA facility in Langley. The full-scale 10 m x 20 m wind tunnel will cement American leadership in civil and military aviation.
August 2: The National Revolutionary Army secures the Hubei Province. Whampoa alumni Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai distinguish themselves leading NRA forces into battle against warlord Wu Peifu.
August 18: Now without an heir, the grieving Nikolay II recognizes his cousin, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, as Emperor-in-exile, who establishes his court among the Russian exile community in Paris.
August 24: Riots break out in New York due to overattendence at the funeral of actor Rudolph Valentino.
September 4: SCOTUS delivers its ruling in Avner v. New York, 271 U.S. 402 (1926)*, establishing a legal principle of one-man, one-vote under the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause. The opinion of the court, written by Louis Brandeis, strikes down New York's unequal districts as unconstitutional.
September 8: The Emperor Taisho passes away from complications of pneumonia. Crown Prince Hirohito, who had been serving as prince regent for the past five years due to Taisho's failing health, succeeds him. The Shōwa era begins.
September 17: The US Army Air Service is reorganized into the Army Air Forces, elevating aviation to an autonomous component commensurate with a doubling of the number of aircraft and personnel over the next five years.
September 22: The French National Assembly narrowly ratifies the Mellon-Berenger Agreement. While the agreement reduced debt and gave easy repayment terms, the repayment of loans and in-kind transfers by the US is a bitter pill to swallow given the immense loss of life in the Great War.
October 2: The Death Ship is published in Germany, by anonymous writer B. Traven. A critique of bureaucracy and immigration policies, it becomes popular among German speaking WPA activists, and it is translated to English within a year.
October 3: Father Charles Coughlin conducts his first weekly radio address, broadcast by WJR Detroit.
October 11: A decree issued by Mussolini's government in Italy orders the arrest of all parliamentary deputies of the Italian Communist Party.
October 14: Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne is published in the United Kingdom.
October 25: The Supreme Court delivers a 6-3 verdict in Myers v. United States, 272 U.S. 52 (1926), upholding the constitutionality of laws requiring Congressional approval for the firing of executive branch officers.
November 2: In state elections across the South, the DFLP makes significant gains in state legislatures running on a general anti-corruption, pro-infrastructure platform. Nonetheless, they fail to achieve even a plurality in any state.
November 4: The USS Kitty Hawk (CV-2) is commissioned, following extensive sea trials.
November 15: At the British Imperial Conference, representatives propose the reorganization of the British Empire into an Imperial Federation. As part of this movement, the various dominions of the Empire are recognized as autonomous, though the declaration falls short of asserting their equality with the United Kingdom.
December 5: Sergei Eisenstein attends the New York premiere of his film Battleship Potemkin, amid throngs of enthused fans and numerous protesters. The film will go on to be one of the biggest draws of the coming year.
December 7: Leaders of the Italian Communist Party, including Antonio Gramsci and Amadeo Bordiga, are imprisoned on the remote island of Ustica under the new emergency laws.
December 15: Magician Harry Houdini returns to performing after a hiatus to deal with health problems.
December 18: Brawls break out in Warsaw between the left and the right following Piłsudski's acquittal for treason.
Appendix: U.S. Senate composition following 1926 election/appointment
| Party | Seats | Change |
| Republican | 40 | -8 |
| Democratic | 24 | 2 |
| Workers' Party | 17 | 1 |
| DFL | 15 | 5 |
| Total | 96 | 0 |
Last edited:
1927
- Location
- The left-wing of the impossible
Some notable events, 1927
January 1: Article 58 of the Penal Code of the Russian SFSR enters into force, giving an expansive definition of "counter-revolutionary activity" as well as harsh penalties for it.
January 11: At the nadir of the Japanese financial crisis, General Tanaka Giichi becomes Prime Minister of Japan.
January 14: Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca, King of Hejaz, Sultan of Nejd, passes away. His eldest son, Ali bin Hussein, inherits his titles.
January 31: Mae West's play The Drag, a bawdy drama highlighting the struggles of homosexuals, opens on Broadway amid controversy.
February 1: Norman Thomas, a former Presbyterian minister and New York City councilman, is elected to the US House in a by-election. A powerful orator and an enthusiastic activist, he quickly becomes a powerful figure in New York labor politics.
February 18: The Bingham Plan for the reconstruction and expansion of the White House is completed.
February 25: Under the leadership of CCP General Secretary Chen Duxiu, union workers begin preparations for an armed uprising against the forces of the Zhili Clique in Shanghai. Similar uprisings launch across China to "prepare the field" for the advance of the National Revolutionary Army.
February 28: Nanjing falls to the NRA's 6th Army under General Chen Qiang. Little fighting occurs in and near the city, though Chen's forces continue to nip at the heels of the retreating forces of Zhang Zhongchan.
March 1: In a paper published in the Zeitschrift für Physik, German physicist Werner Heisenberg describes his uncertainty principle (the precision of a particle's location decreases as the precision of its momentum increases).
March 4: Following the routing of Zhili forces, Chen Duxiu declares the formation of the Shanghai Soviet. At Jiang's insistence, no moves are made against the Shanghai International Settlement.
March 14: The Imperial Japanese Navy commissions the aircraft carrier Amagi, a converted battlecruiser.
March 23: Fleet Problem VII: the aggressor force, led by the USS Kitty Hawk, conducts a successful simulated raid against the locks of the Panama Canal.
April 3: The Supreme Court rules in Owens v. Randall, 272 U.S. 144 (1927)* that the current presidential election regime violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The 5-4 split ruling is made possible by the New York Republican Party's admission that the adoption of Congressional-district apportionment of electors was deliberately calculated to disenfranchise certain populations.
April 7: The European colonial powers and the United States establish an agreement to increase troop presence at their trade concessions in China, and for cooperation in the event of of conflict with the Kuomintang.
April 18: Warlord Zhang Zhongshan begins a counter offensive against NRA forces in Nanjing. Utilizing Soviet provided radios, artillery and machine guns, Jiang's favored lieutenant Zhou Enlai traps Zhang's forces in a cauldron near Hongze Lake.
April 21: After the heaviest rainfall in the recorded history of the Mississippi River, the new levees and dams constructed by the Corps of Engineers in the Mississippi watershed hold, as thousands prepare for evacuation. The levee breaks in Mississippi tributaries still force tens of thousands from their homes and farms.
April 23: Zinoviev breaks with Stalin, chiefly over the Soviet mandate for the United Front in China.
May 1: The Soviet embassy hosts negotiations between Zhang Zuolin's forces and the KMT, represented by Li Dazhao. Talks break down when it becomes apparent that the KMT is seeking terms of surrender from the de facto leader of the Beiyang government.
May 6: New York Governor Charles C. Lockwood kills the State Assembly's Public Decency bill by announcing his intention to veto it on constitutional grounds. In an opinion editorial in The New York Times, he argues that such restrictions on speech violate the state constitution, as well as the federal First Amendment.
May 8: The streets of America's major cities are filled with protestors holding vigil, as Italian-American anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are executed by electric chair at Charlestown State Prison.
May 17: Charles Lindbergh, a daring airmail pilot, is pronounced missing and presumed dead, after his plane fails to arrive in Great Britain.
May 24: Clarence Chamberlin successfully claims the Orteig Prize after piloting the WB-2 "Miss Columbia" non-stop from New York City to Paris.
June 8: Actor William Haines, the number one box office draw of the year, openly discusses his homosexuality and his relationship with his partner Jimmie Shields in an interview with the Daily Worker. The national news attention following is more one of curiosity than condemnation.
June 12: California abolishes school segregation.
June 20: Tanaka Giichi's "Far Eastern Conference" ends with the attendants resolving that the KMT and the "Red General" Jiang Jieshi are the Empire's greatest immediate security threat.
July 1: Elpin Aan (Ahn Usaeng) forms the Orienta Azia Esperanto-Instituto (East Asian Esperanto Institute) in Los Angeles. Following the tradition of learning Esperanto among East Asian socialists, Aan expands education by printing classes in newspapers and organizing committees to make the language more friendly for Sinosphere people to learn. Colloquially this reform effort is nicknamed "Shin Esperanto".
July 4: Independence Day celebrations across the country suddenly turn very somber, as news spreads of an assassination attempt on President Wood. The lone gunman is killed while attempting escape. Wood, already in poor health, is gravely wounded by two shots to the chest from the assassin's pistol.
July 5: The Secret Service begins the detention of Workers' Party members of Congress, as police forces nationwide begin crackdowns against a phantom left-wing coup.
July 6: A nation-wide general strike is averted at noon, as Vice-President Hoover orders the release of arrested leftists, apologizing for the fiasco.
July 7: Newspapers across the US report the name of the assassin, Virginia native William Burke*, a former Democratic paige and KKK member. Extracts of a manifesto he left behind are published, accusing Wood of being in an adulterous relationship with a black woman, a secret agent of the international communist movement, a Jew, and a Freemason, conspiring to Negroize the white race.
July 11: Herbert Hoover is sworn in as President. Due to a miscommunication about President Wood's death, Hoover is accidently sworn in almost a full hour before the President's passing. Due to this, and other unsightly coincidences in the affair, conspiracy theories begin to form around the assassination in later years.
July 16: American troops are deployed to China to protect vital American commercial interests.
August 6: US Naval Academy student Philo T. Farnsworth demonstrates his "image dissector", the world's first fully electronic television, to faculty.
August 11: Federal law enforcement groups, working in concert with state police, begin a major offensive against the KKK. While the group's embattled leadership disavowed any involvement in the assassination, President Hoover declares the group "public enemy number one" in his first public radio address.
August 24: The League of Nations adopts a binding resolution condemning waging wars of aggression, requiring of its members to prevent and punish such "crimes against peace."
August 30: Constitutional concerns from the July Crisis arising from confused chains of command, the Secret Service acting without the authority of either the President or Vice-President, and whether the Vice-President could assume executive authority in the case of presidential disability prompts the House of Representatives to pass a resolution to amend the constitution.
September 9: Soviet film A Kiss from Mary Pickford is released, featuring a cameo from the titular actress and Douglas Fairbanks, both of whom are associated with the WPA allied United Artists Studio.
September 14: Fearing that the US Navy is falling behind in aviation, the US Congress directs the General Board of the US Navy to study converting one of its battlecruisers. The Navy Act of 1927 also directs funding to speed the completion of the USS Ranger (CV-3), and refit her flush deck sister ship, USS Kitty Hawk, with a conning tower and funnels.
September 19: The US Senate passes its own version of the presidential succession amendment, adding clauses to resolve constitutional questions about the selection of presidential electors.
September 25: The Treaty of Jeddah: The Kingdom of Hejaz and Sultanate of Nejd are reorganised as the Hashemite Kingdom of Arabia, with Ali bin Hussein as its first king. While the treaty extends recognition and further trade and support from the British Empire, British negotiators are steadfast at rejecting any missive towards reviving his father's claim as King of the Arab Countries.
October 4: A joint-operation between the Guominjun and the NRA captures the city of Beijing. The Zhili Clique is destroyed, and with it the tenuous hold the Western recognized Beiyang government had over the Republic.
October 6: The silent film era ends with the release of The Jazz Singer.
October 17: The Soviet government grants amnesty to former White Army officers.
October 28: The Congress passes by joint-resolution a final version of the Executive Succession Amendment.
November 7: Fengtian Clique warlord Zhang Zuolin meets with representatives of the Japanese Imperial Government. Fengtian holdings in Manchuria will be reorganized as the Manchu State (Manchukuo), a protectorate of the Empire of Japan. The IJA deploys to suppress the revolts in Manchuria by communist cells, protecting international business interests.
November 8: Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev and others are formally expelled from the Communist Party. Trotsky and his associates refuse to capitulate, and soon face the prospect of internal exile.
December 6: The Soviet Communist Party, at its Fifteenth Congress, issues an official edict condemning all deviation from the party line. Josef Stalin is effectively undisputed master of the Soviet state.
December 15: For his connections to members of the Joint Opposition, Soviet Military Affairs Commissar Mikhail Frunze "resigns" his post and returns to purely military duties, his friendship with Stalin increasingly strained.
Excerpts from Michael Parenti, "The American Bonaparte" in The Masses, Vol LXX, No. 6 (June 1981)
It was a bright and sunny day that 4th of July 1927. Americans in the Second Republic turned out in droves to celebrate the anniversary of the country's independence from the British Empire under the faltering steps of the First Confederation. In his role as first citizen, Leonard Wood dutifully turned out to participate in these celebrations.
The once virile man's health had been failing from the combinations of advanced age and the strains of the executive office. Sweating under the hot July sun, he endured the heat with military stoicism as he paid homage to the country's war dead at Arlington National Cemetery. After delivering a speech about the history of the struggle for freedom, he greeted well wishers and aspiring young Republicans.
Enter William Burke, age 26. An average Anglo for the era, standing 170 centimetres. Lean of build, Burke was an avid boxer in his home city of Richmond. He was an inveterate racist, a fanatic in the dying cause of white supremacy and a now forgotten mythology of a "lost cause" of the Second Confederation from the Slavers' War. Burke had been just barely too young to serve in the Great War, and had instead joined with the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan terrorist group in 1920, which had put on the thin patina of respectability.
The KKK and the Jim Crow regime of white supremacy had been under attack by the proletarian movement and Northern liberals for years now, and Burke blamed his personal failures on the advance of Negro equality and communism. Convinced that the former Secretary of War, who had administered a bloody imperialist war effort, was somehow an active, conscious agent of international communism, Burke smuggled an M1908 Colt Pocket Hammerless into the gala.
He met the old general amid the throngs of people. As Wood extended his hand in greeting, Burke pulled the pistol from his pocket and began firing from less than two metres. His first shot struck Wood in the left lung, the second grazed his side. Subsequent shots went wide, striking a Secret Service agent and the wife of the Arlington County Commissioner.
Burke himself would perish at the scene as he fled, discarding his pistol. As Burke broke free from the crowd, Secret Service agent Vincent Fairfax* fired a snapshot with his M1911 to stop the assassin's flight. The shot would go high, striking Burke in the brainstem, killing him instantly.
Leonard Wood was the third president to be assassinated while in office. The old soldier clung stubbornly to life, fading in and out of consciousness over the next six days. The assassination revealed the barely concealed tension within the Second Republic.
For the past three years, the Workers' Party had abided by the Second Period regroupment policy. Opportunism flourished as the party moved towards the centre. But the bourgeoisie had not forgotten the revolutionary challenges made during the tail end of the Great War. With the memory of the Red Summer in mind, the military and police apparatus mobilised against the Workers' Party. Members of Congress were detained in violation of Congressional immunity, as Congress prepared to suspend the constitution. Local and state police burst into the homes of labor leaders and carted them off.
The bourgeoisie had assumed without proof that this lone gunman was the forlorn hope of a putsch and reacted accordingly. The Workers' Party, however, had not forgotten the lessons of 1920. The old soviets sprang back to life, as workers walked out en masse, ready to set up the barricades.
This would prove ultimately unnecessary. Vice-President Herbert Hoover quickly asserted his authority, assuming the powers of the presidency on the night of 5 July. The Attorney-General and the Director of the Secret Service were fired the moment he made it to old Washington. He ordered the immediate release of all political prisoners as a show of good faith, and a halt to further arrests. The workers returned to their jobs.
The National Bureau of Investigation, headed by the unrelated J. Edgar Hoover, a man who needs no introduction, took the national spotlight by beating the rest of the competing agencies to identifying the killer and his motive. Before a joint-session of Congress, the NBI's special task force delivered their preliminary findings, ending the state of emergency.
The constitutional crisis persisted, for in the constitution at the time there existed no provision for disability of the president, nor any provision for another executive officer to assume its powers temporarily. Hoover exercised the needed national leadership regardless.
As for Wood, few men across all three republics have won more acclaim before or since. Once derided as the Butcher from Massachusetts by workers, in his seven years of national leadership Leonard Wood had managed to arrest the class war in America. After his passing, Congress bestowed upon him the rank of General of the Armies of the United States, a distinction shared only with George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant and John Pershing.
Leaders of all the national parties delivered their eulogies before he was interred in Arlington. Hoover praised his even-handed leadership, his commitment to the ideals espoused by Abraham Lincoln, and his efforts to heal a divided nation. John Nance Garner caused a stir by declaring Wood a martyr for America's national sin of slavery, a father patiently correcting his prodigal sons. Burton K. Wheeler praised his diligent ethos of public service in advancing the cause of democratic republicanism.
Jay Lovestone, once Wood's bitterest political rival, took the podium last. The leader of American communism compared Wood to Napoleon Bonaparte; who contained within himself the hopes as well as the contradictions of the republic. Lovestone praised his earnest concern for the wellbeing of the citizens and the body politic and not so subtly challenged his successors to live up to his example.
No one man, no matter how Heraklean, can move the wheel of history. But some can make it budge. The bitter factional struggles before 4 July 1927 were momentarily forgotten. Wood's efforts in preserving the gerrymandering regime and extending its reach to the presidency were forgotten in the haze of momentary national unity. The nine hundred thousand plus who died to secure booty for the imperialists under his tenure were forgotten as well. His domestic surveillance and suppression of Christian pacifist groups, the attempts to break organized labor; they could not be contained within the myth of the People's General.
Unlike the conspiracy theorists in search of cabals and Illuminatis, we historical materialists know that Wood did more in death to sustain the Second Republic than he could have ever accomplished living out his natural life.
The halo of national unity would not last. The Roaring Twenties could not roar forever.
January 1: Article 58 of the Penal Code of the Russian SFSR enters into force, giving an expansive definition of "counter-revolutionary activity" as well as harsh penalties for it.
January 11: At the nadir of the Japanese financial crisis, General Tanaka Giichi becomes Prime Minister of Japan.
January 14: Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca, King of Hejaz, Sultan of Nejd, passes away. His eldest son, Ali bin Hussein, inherits his titles.
January 31: Mae West's play The Drag, a bawdy drama highlighting the struggles of homosexuals, opens on Broadway amid controversy.
February 1: Norman Thomas, a former Presbyterian minister and New York City councilman, is elected to the US House in a by-election. A powerful orator and an enthusiastic activist, he quickly becomes a powerful figure in New York labor politics.
February 18: The Bingham Plan for the reconstruction and expansion of the White House is completed.
February 25: Under the leadership of CCP General Secretary Chen Duxiu, union workers begin preparations for an armed uprising against the forces of the Zhili Clique in Shanghai. Similar uprisings launch across China to "prepare the field" for the advance of the National Revolutionary Army.
February 28: Nanjing falls to the NRA's 6th Army under General Chen Qiang. Little fighting occurs in and near the city, though Chen's forces continue to nip at the heels of the retreating forces of Zhang Zhongchan.
March 1: In a paper published in the Zeitschrift für Physik, German physicist Werner Heisenberg describes his uncertainty principle (the precision of a particle's location decreases as the precision of its momentum increases).
March 4: Following the routing of Zhili forces, Chen Duxiu declares the formation of the Shanghai Soviet. At Jiang's insistence, no moves are made against the Shanghai International Settlement.
March 14: The Imperial Japanese Navy commissions the aircraft carrier Amagi, a converted battlecruiser.
March 23: Fleet Problem VII: the aggressor force, led by the USS Kitty Hawk, conducts a successful simulated raid against the locks of the Panama Canal.
April 3: The Supreme Court rules in Owens v. Randall, 272 U.S. 144 (1927)* that the current presidential election regime violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The 5-4 split ruling is made possible by the New York Republican Party's admission that the adoption of Congressional-district apportionment of electors was deliberately calculated to disenfranchise certain populations.
April 7: The European colonial powers and the United States establish an agreement to increase troop presence at their trade concessions in China, and for cooperation in the event of of conflict with the Kuomintang.
April 18: Warlord Zhang Zhongshan begins a counter offensive against NRA forces in Nanjing. Utilizing Soviet provided radios, artillery and machine guns, Jiang's favored lieutenant Zhou Enlai traps Zhang's forces in a cauldron near Hongze Lake.
April 21: After the heaviest rainfall in the recorded history of the Mississippi River, the new levees and dams constructed by the Corps of Engineers in the Mississippi watershed hold, as thousands prepare for evacuation. The levee breaks in Mississippi tributaries still force tens of thousands from their homes and farms.
April 23: Zinoviev breaks with Stalin, chiefly over the Soviet mandate for the United Front in China.
May 1: The Soviet embassy hosts negotiations between Zhang Zuolin's forces and the KMT, represented by Li Dazhao. Talks break down when it becomes apparent that the KMT is seeking terms of surrender from the de facto leader of the Beiyang government.
May 6: New York Governor Charles C. Lockwood kills the State Assembly's Public Decency bill by announcing his intention to veto it on constitutional grounds. In an opinion editorial in The New York Times, he argues that such restrictions on speech violate the state constitution, as well as the federal First Amendment.
May 8: The streets of America's major cities are filled with protestors holding vigil, as Italian-American anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are executed by electric chair at Charlestown State Prison.
May 17: Charles Lindbergh, a daring airmail pilot, is pronounced missing and presumed dead, after his plane fails to arrive in Great Britain.
May 24: Clarence Chamberlin successfully claims the Orteig Prize after piloting the WB-2 "Miss Columbia" non-stop from New York City to Paris.
June 8: Actor William Haines, the number one box office draw of the year, openly discusses his homosexuality and his relationship with his partner Jimmie Shields in an interview with the Daily Worker. The national news attention following is more one of curiosity than condemnation.
June 12: California abolishes school segregation.
June 20: Tanaka Giichi's "Far Eastern Conference" ends with the attendants resolving that the KMT and the "Red General" Jiang Jieshi are the Empire's greatest immediate security threat.
July 1: Elpin Aan (Ahn Usaeng) forms the Orienta Azia Esperanto-Instituto (East Asian Esperanto Institute) in Los Angeles. Following the tradition of learning Esperanto among East Asian socialists, Aan expands education by printing classes in newspapers and organizing committees to make the language more friendly for Sinosphere people to learn. Colloquially this reform effort is nicknamed "Shin Esperanto".
July 4: Independence Day celebrations across the country suddenly turn very somber, as news spreads of an assassination attempt on President Wood. The lone gunman is killed while attempting escape. Wood, already in poor health, is gravely wounded by two shots to the chest from the assassin's pistol.
July 5: The Secret Service begins the detention of Workers' Party members of Congress, as police forces nationwide begin crackdowns against a phantom left-wing coup.
July 6: A nation-wide general strike is averted at noon, as Vice-President Hoover orders the release of arrested leftists, apologizing for the fiasco.
July 7: Newspapers across the US report the name of the assassin, Virginia native William Burke*, a former Democratic paige and KKK member. Extracts of a manifesto he left behind are published, accusing Wood of being in an adulterous relationship with a black woman, a secret agent of the international communist movement, a Jew, and a Freemason, conspiring to Negroize the white race.
July 11: Herbert Hoover is sworn in as President. Due to a miscommunication about President Wood's death, Hoover is accidently sworn in almost a full hour before the President's passing. Due to this, and other unsightly coincidences in the affair, conspiracy theories begin to form around the assassination in later years.
July 16: American troops are deployed to China to protect vital American commercial interests.
August 6: US Naval Academy student Philo T. Farnsworth demonstrates his "image dissector", the world's first fully electronic television, to faculty.
August 11: Federal law enforcement groups, working in concert with state police, begin a major offensive against the KKK. While the group's embattled leadership disavowed any involvement in the assassination, President Hoover declares the group "public enemy number one" in his first public radio address.
August 24: The League of Nations adopts a binding resolution condemning waging wars of aggression, requiring of its members to prevent and punish such "crimes against peace."
August 30: Constitutional concerns from the July Crisis arising from confused chains of command, the Secret Service acting without the authority of either the President or Vice-President, and whether the Vice-President could assume executive authority in the case of presidential disability prompts the House of Representatives to pass a resolution to amend the constitution.
September 9: Soviet film A Kiss from Mary Pickford is released, featuring a cameo from the titular actress and Douglas Fairbanks, both of whom are associated with the WPA allied United Artists Studio.
September 14: Fearing that the US Navy is falling behind in aviation, the US Congress directs the General Board of the US Navy to study converting one of its battlecruisers. The Navy Act of 1927 also directs funding to speed the completion of the USS Ranger (CV-3), and refit her flush deck sister ship, USS Kitty Hawk, with a conning tower and funnels.
September 19: The US Senate passes its own version of the presidential succession amendment, adding clauses to resolve constitutional questions about the selection of presidential electors.
September 25: The Treaty of Jeddah: The Kingdom of Hejaz and Sultanate of Nejd are reorganised as the Hashemite Kingdom of Arabia, with Ali bin Hussein as its first king. While the treaty extends recognition and further trade and support from the British Empire, British negotiators are steadfast at rejecting any missive towards reviving his father's claim as King of the Arab Countries.
October 4: A joint-operation between the Guominjun and the NRA captures the city of Beijing. The Zhili Clique is destroyed, and with it the tenuous hold the Western recognized Beiyang government had over the Republic.
October 6: The silent film era ends with the release of The Jazz Singer.
October 17: The Soviet government grants amnesty to former White Army officers.
October 28: The Congress passes by joint-resolution a final version of the Executive Succession Amendment.
November 7: Fengtian Clique warlord Zhang Zuolin meets with representatives of the Japanese Imperial Government. Fengtian holdings in Manchuria will be reorganized as the Manchu State (Manchukuo), a protectorate of the Empire of Japan. The IJA deploys to suppress the revolts in Manchuria by communist cells, protecting international business interests.
November 8: Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev and others are formally expelled from the Communist Party. Trotsky and his associates refuse to capitulate, and soon face the prospect of internal exile.
December 6: The Soviet Communist Party, at its Fifteenth Congress, issues an official edict condemning all deviation from the party line. Josef Stalin is effectively undisputed master of the Soviet state.
December 15: For his connections to members of the Joint Opposition, Soviet Military Affairs Commissar Mikhail Frunze "resigns" his post and returns to purely military duties, his friendship with Stalin increasingly strained.
Excerpts from Michael Parenti, "The American Bonaparte" in The Masses, Vol LXX, No. 6 (June 1981)
It was a bright and sunny day that 4th of July 1927. Americans in the Second Republic turned out in droves to celebrate the anniversary of the country's independence from the British Empire under the faltering steps of the First Confederation. In his role as first citizen, Leonard Wood dutifully turned out to participate in these celebrations.
The once virile man's health had been failing from the combinations of advanced age and the strains of the executive office. Sweating under the hot July sun, he endured the heat with military stoicism as he paid homage to the country's war dead at Arlington National Cemetery. After delivering a speech about the history of the struggle for freedom, he greeted well wishers and aspiring young Republicans.
Enter William Burke, age 26. An average Anglo for the era, standing 170 centimetres. Lean of build, Burke was an avid boxer in his home city of Richmond. He was an inveterate racist, a fanatic in the dying cause of white supremacy and a now forgotten mythology of a "lost cause" of the Second Confederation from the Slavers' War. Burke had been just barely too young to serve in the Great War, and had instead joined with the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan terrorist group in 1920, which had put on the thin patina of respectability.
The KKK and the Jim Crow regime of white supremacy had been under attack by the proletarian movement and Northern liberals for years now, and Burke blamed his personal failures on the advance of Negro equality and communism. Convinced that the former Secretary of War, who had administered a bloody imperialist war effort, was somehow an active, conscious agent of international communism, Burke smuggled an M1908 Colt Pocket Hammerless into the gala.
He met the old general amid the throngs of people. As Wood extended his hand in greeting, Burke pulled the pistol from his pocket and began firing from less than two metres. His first shot struck Wood in the left lung, the second grazed his side. Subsequent shots went wide, striking a Secret Service agent and the wife of the Arlington County Commissioner.
Burke himself would perish at the scene as he fled, discarding his pistol. As Burke broke free from the crowd, Secret Service agent Vincent Fairfax* fired a snapshot with his M1911 to stop the assassin's flight. The shot would go high, striking Burke in the brainstem, killing him instantly.
Leonard Wood was the third president to be assassinated while in office. The old soldier clung stubbornly to life, fading in and out of consciousness over the next six days. The assassination revealed the barely concealed tension within the Second Republic.
For the past three years, the Workers' Party had abided by the Second Period regroupment policy. Opportunism flourished as the party moved towards the centre. But the bourgeoisie had not forgotten the revolutionary challenges made during the tail end of the Great War. With the memory of the Red Summer in mind, the military and police apparatus mobilised against the Workers' Party. Members of Congress were detained in violation of Congressional immunity, as Congress prepared to suspend the constitution. Local and state police burst into the homes of labor leaders and carted them off.
The bourgeoisie had assumed without proof that this lone gunman was the forlorn hope of a putsch and reacted accordingly. The Workers' Party, however, had not forgotten the lessons of 1920. The old soviets sprang back to life, as workers walked out en masse, ready to set up the barricades.
This would prove ultimately unnecessary. Vice-President Herbert Hoover quickly asserted his authority, assuming the powers of the presidency on the night of 5 July. The Attorney-General and the Director of the Secret Service were fired the moment he made it to old Washington. He ordered the immediate release of all political prisoners as a show of good faith, and a halt to further arrests. The workers returned to their jobs.
The National Bureau of Investigation, headed by the unrelated J. Edgar Hoover, a man who needs no introduction, took the national spotlight by beating the rest of the competing agencies to identifying the killer and his motive. Before a joint-session of Congress, the NBI's special task force delivered their preliminary findings, ending the state of emergency.
The constitutional crisis persisted, for in the constitution at the time there existed no provision for disability of the president, nor any provision for another executive officer to assume its powers temporarily. Hoover exercised the needed national leadership regardless.
As for Wood, few men across all three republics have won more acclaim before or since. Once derided as the Butcher from Massachusetts by workers, in his seven years of national leadership Leonard Wood had managed to arrest the class war in America. After his passing, Congress bestowed upon him the rank of General of the Armies of the United States, a distinction shared only with George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant and John Pershing.
Leaders of all the national parties delivered their eulogies before he was interred in Arlington. Hoover praised his even-handed leadership, his commitment to the ideals espoused by Abraham Lincoln, and his efforts to heal a divided nation. John Nance Garner caused a stir by declaring Wood a martyr for America's national sin of slavery, a father patiently correcting his prodigal sons. Burton K. Wheeler praised his diligent ethos of public service in advancing the cause of democratic republicanism.
Jay Lovestone, once Wood's bitterest political rival, took the podium last. The leader of American communism compared Wood to Napoleon Bonaparte; who contained within himself the hopes as well as the contradictions of the republic. Lovestone praised his earnest concern for the wellbeing of the citizens and the body politic and not so subtly challenged his successors to live up to his example.
No one man, no matter how Heraklean, can move the wheel of history. But some can make it budge. The bitter factional struggles before 4 July 1927 were momentarily forgotten. Wood's efforts in preserving the gerrymandering regime and extending its reach to the presidency were forgotten in the haze of momentary national unity. The nine hundred thousand plus who died to secure booty for the imperialists under his tenure were forgotten as well. His domestic surveillance and suppression of Christian pacifist groups, the attempts to break organized labor; they could not be contained within the myth of the People's General.
Unlike the conspiracy theorists in search of cabals and Illuminatis, we historical materialists know that Wood did more in death to sustain the Second Republic than he could have ever accomplished living out his natural life.
The halo of national unity would not last. The Roaring Twenties could not roar forever.
LHB
Economics don't work like that!
- Location
- Glasgow, UK originally from California
It probably depends on how he's making the comparison and what aspects of Napoleon he plays up. You could spin the Consulate and his military victories in a positive direction.
- Location
- France
- Pronouns
- She/They
Yeah, true, after thermidor, he kinda was an improvement. The amount of blood he spilled though... And not just his enemies'.
- Location
- The left-wing of the impossible
Napoleon was the stock great man of history and people lamented the absence of such men in their present until Hitler and Stalin trashed it irrevocably
Indeed. It is meant as a sort of left handed compliment that basically anyone in the know could see as a criticism
We Just Write
Blatantly Plural
- Location
- New England
- Pronouns
- Plural
HEY! That comment is handed-ist!
Seriously, why do people who default to using the left hand always get this sort of thing happening to them?
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LHB
Economics don't work like that!
- Location
- Glasgow, UK originally from California
It doesn't hurt that, by the admittedly subterranean standards of the day, the bar he's jumping as far as contemporaries go wasn't all that difficult to surmount.