Note:  My apologies.  In the  confusion of the first week of classes, I neglected to read my own syllabus.  Mea culpa.  In atonement, see below a very easy quiz on Chapters 1 and 2 of AGW.  You can print it out and hand it in on Wed.  The DuBois reading and Wilson's war speech are on tap, as the syllabus says, for Friday, Sept. 1.

August 28, 2006.

America’s Great War, chapter 1

The US had nothing to do with the outbreak of war in 1914 yet soon became a central factor. How so?

Why did Germany resort to submarine warfare?  Why did this strategy pose particular problems for the U.S.?

Some Americans saw in the length and devastation of the war great opportunities for the US?  Which Americans?  What opportunities?

Other Americans saw in the war a terrible threat to important American values and traditions.

What about Woodrow Wilson?

****
August 30, 2006

America's Great War, chapter 2

Allied dependence on supplies, war materiels, and loans from US citizens was an increasingly important aspect of the war in Europe.  Did this high degree of US involvement make intervention on the Allied side a foregone conclusion?  Or did it provide Wilson with powerful leverage in his efforts to broker a non-punitive peace?

Who were the most ardent supporters of "Preparedness"?  The most vociferous opponents?  Where did Wilson stand?

By the time of the presidential election of November, 1916, Wilson's policy of neutrality (NOT nonintervention), combined with virtually unrestricted trade, seemed brilliantly successful.

Since it was pretty clear by the end of 1916 that the war in the West had degenerated into a hopeless stalemate, why were Wilson's efforts to bring about a "peace without victory" so unavailing?

Why did we go to war?

****
Quiz for August 30:

1.  Before the war, the US:  a) was a creditor nation; b) was a debtor nation; c) traded more heavily with Germany that it did with Britain; d) lagged behind Europe in industrial output.

2.  In chapters 1 and 2, the author emphasizes Wilson's:  a) bellicose nature; b) authoritarianism; c) religiosity; d) militarism.

3.  As a consequence of the Lusitania crisis:  a) Germany adopted a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare; b) Secretary of State William Jenning Bryan resigned in protest over Wilson's refusal to hold Germany to account; c) Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan resigned in protest over Wilson's confrontational stance vis-a-vis Germany; d) Britain imposed a blockade on Germany and her allies.

4.  Which of the following statements best captures Wilson's view of the world situation in the months between his re-election and the German announcement of unrestricted submarine warfare:  a) US belligerency on the side of the Allies was inevitable; b) his re-election rekindled his determination to play a central role in ending the war on the basis of "peace without victory"; c) his willingness to modify the "Sussex Pledge" indicated a strong tilt toward Germany; d) by creating a "Fortress America," he hoped to avoid invovlement in the war.

5.  Preparedness advocates:  a) saw in an expanded military an opportunity to bring greater order, discipline, and patriotism to America's polyglot and hedonistic population; b) succeeded in greatly expanding the army but could not gain support for naval expansion; c) pointed with pride to the brilliance and effectiveness of General Pershing's Mexican campaign; d) campaigned against Republican candidate Charles Evans Hughes in the 1916 presidential election, thus, ironically, throwing the election to Wilson, despite his anti-Preparedness stance.

*****

September 1, 2006

W.  E.  B.  Du Bois, “The African Roots of the War.”

1.  How does Du Bois explain the “new imperialism,” which gobbled up Africa in the short span of the last quarter of the 19th century?

2.  What is the connection between notions of democracy and equality in the West and the subjugation of Africa (and the “Third World” generally)?


3.  Why is the rise of Japanese power and prosperity so “disconcerting and dangerous to white hegemony”?


4.  How do blacks in the US fit into Du Bois’s view of the world through the lens of the “new imperialism”?

5.  What is “the real secret of that desperate struggle for Africa which began in 1877"? (100)

6.  How does the struggle for Africa relate to the outbreak and ferocity of the current war? 

    –Du Bois says that to “speak of the Balkans as the . . . cause of war” gets it wrong and that “the ownership of matrials and men in the darker world is the real prize. . . .” (100)

7.  What is to be done?  “We must train native races in modern civilization”? (102) If this is to be done, who is best equipped to do it?

8.  Why are current peace proposals (and remember–he’s writing in 1915) inadequate? 

9.  “Our duty is clear.”  What is “our duty” (with equal emphasis on both words)?

****

September 1, 2006

Woodrow Wilson’s speech, April 2, 1917, asking for a declaration of war against Germany.

It is, Wilson says, “a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars. . . “ So why is he doing it?  How does Wilson attempt to relate the fairly narrow and even arcane issues of neutral shipping rights to broader purposes that would justify so terrifying a step as waging war?

If in fact “we have no quarrel with the German people,” with whom do we have a quarrel?  If we have a “quarrel” with these people now (i.e., April, 1917), why haven’t we had a quarrel with them right along?  Maybe Theodore Roosevelt was right–maybe Wilson just didn’t understand the perniciousness of the German cause.

Wilson says that “We have no selfish ends to serve.  We desire no conquest, no dominion.  We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make.”  What DO we seek?  What, after all, is in it for us?

What reference does Wilson make to those alongside whom we will be fighting, i.e., Britain, Italy, France, Russia?

    The coalition now confronting Germany must be, WW says, “a league of honor.”  Awkward questions arise.  Such as. . . .

    How does Russia fit into the picture?

What would Du Bois say about Wilson’s speech?

*****

September 6, 2006

Zieger, America’s Great War, chapter 3.

Why did the Wilson administration resort almost immediately to conscription rather than attempting to build a volunteer army?

What historical precedents were available for those charged with administering the draft?

How widespread was opposition to conscription?

Some progressives welcomed the war because they believed that it would further their pre-war agenda of subjecting the economy to greater “social control”–i.e., making the economy more efficient and democratic.  To what extent did wartime mobilization fulfill these hopes?

Harry Garfield, Herbert Hoover, Bernard Baruch, and William G. McAdoo played key roles in the mobilization of the economy for war.  What did they have in common?

How was the US war effort financed?

The government invoked the notion of “voluntarism” in its efforts to mobilize public opinion in behalf of the war effort.  How did this work?

What is the author’s criticism of such devices employed to “sell” the war as the Four Minute Men?

Historians were much in demand during World War I.  Why so?

How successful was the administration in its efforts to distinguish between the German people (fellow victims of Prussian militarism) and the German government (a ruthless, power-mad, unscrupulous regime) in its wartime appeals?
*****

September 8, 2006.  America’s Great War, chapter 4.


1.  Which of the following statements best describes the initial recruitment and training of the American Expeditionary Force in 1917: a) since few men volunteered, the government had reluctantly to resort to conscription to fill the ranks; b) miliary authorities were particularly eager to recruit African Americans, who had a reputation for being particularly ferocious combatants; c) fresh from its successful pursuit of Pancho Villa in Mexico, the US Army needed little additional training before being sent to France; d) the average recruit bore little resemblance to the ideal soldier envisioned by Army strategists and planners.


2.  Which of the following statements best captures General Pershing’s view of the role the AEF should play during the war: a) he insisted on the creation of distinct, fully equipped American armies; b) he believed that American troops were best suited for service and logistical support functions, not for combat; c) he reluctantly agreed with French and British generals that piecemeal integration of US foot soldiers into Allied forces was the best policy; d) he believed that defensive warfare was the only alternative on the Western Front.

3.  According to progressive reformers, the war: a) provided an opportunity to further racial integration; b) provided an opportunity to promote distinctly “American” moral values among a polyglot population; c) made possible a welcome relaxation of moralistic standards of behavior; d) provided an opportunity to promote secular values in a society otherwise notable for religious factionalism.


4.  Which of the following statements about the role of African American troops in the AEF is the most accurate: a) fearing racial incidents, US officials restricted their service to the continental US; b) most served in combat units and suffered disproportionate numbers of casualties; c) most served in labor battalions; d) few were actually inducted into the armed forces.

5.  Which of the following statements best characterizes the US contribution to Allied victory in 1918: a) though few US troops saw combat, the ability of the American economy to produce the guns, tanks, and ships turned the tide; b) Pershing’s brilliant Meuse-Argonne campaign turned the tide, stopping the relentless German advance on the Western Front; c) although the US army performed creditably, the vaunted US Navy contributed little to Allied success; d) the main contribution of the AEF lay in the sheer numbers of troops arriving in France rather than any specific battlefield feats.

*****

September 11, 2006.  Reading: Zieger, AGW, chapter 5.

1.  Why were there so many strikes during the period of the Great War?

2.  Who was Samuel Gompers and why did President Wilson like him so much?

3.  Why did issues involving labor take on such great importance during the Great War?

4.  What motivated so many African Americans to move North in the decade of the 1910s?

5.  Why, despite the existence of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, were African Americans so vulnerable and so victimized?

6.  It has been said that African Americans have made their greatest strides toward equality during periods of war.  What advances did they make during the period of the Great War?

7.  “The more things, change,” goeth the saying, “the more they stay the same.”  How would this aphorism apply to the opportunities afforded to and the status of
 women during the Great War era?

8.  The Great War: The [culmination of; undertaker of] the Progressive Movement. Choose one.

****
September 13, 2006

AGW, pp. 153-66; DA, 13-20; WW Fourteen Points speech

1.  What was the “Wilsonian Vision”?  Is there something unique about it, or is it just a name for the personal stamp that our 26th president imposed on garden variety American themes?

2.  In particular, what relationship did WW make between the US economic system and the role he saw us playing in the world arena?  What spin might Lenin–or Howard Zinn–put on Wilson’s view of the relationship of economics to America’s (so-called?) moral leadership?

3.  I wrote this chapter in the summer of 1999, before 9/11 and the war in Iraq.  Would you say that President Bush is a Wilsonian?

4. With respect to the Fourteen Points, why did Wilson issue them unilaterally rather than as a joint communique involving our wartime partners?  What were likely to be the easiest of the 14 to be accomplished?  The hardest?

5. What does (and did) the word “Armistice” mean in 1918.  WW had championed a “peace without victory”?  Was the 1918 Armistice one?  Why didn’t we do what General Pershing wanted us to do, namely march on to Berlin?

6.  Both German strength and German weakness played a role in Allied unwillingness to attempt to invade Germany.  How so?

7.  You could say that with the abdication of the Kaiser and the adoption of democratic reforms in Germany, US war aims had been met.  You could say this, but Wilson didn’t.  Why?


*****
September 15, 2006
Reading: Zieger, AGW, 166-83

Comments on the Wilsonian world view.  Important not to see it as airy idealism.  Wilsonianism is a powerful statement of perceived US interests, which WW and his ilk see as coincident with the interests of a suffering world.  Capitalism, trade, open markets, free seas. 

    Lenin saw capitalism as the breeder of imperialist rivalry, which in turn bred war while coopting and suppressing the non-elites at home. 
   
    Wilson saw American capitalism as the dissolver of special interests, colonial domination, militaristic confrontation, and as the hand maiden of peace, democracy, and human progress.
    
What was the “Wilsonian Vision”?  Is there something unique about it, or is it just a name for the personal stamp that our 26th president imposed on garden variety American themes?  More generally, what is the proper role of religious beliefs and values in the forming and implementation of public policy?

            I wrote this chapter in the summer of 1999, before 9/11 and the war in Iraq.  Would you say that President Bush is a Wilsonian?

Events occurring in the US before the Versailles conference began weakened Wilson’s hand.  How so?

Who was not at the peace conference?   

The Big Four hardly constituted a harmonious quartet.

What were the most important provisions of the Versailles Treaty and to what extent did they reflect or reject the Wilsonian vision?

Why did Wilson see the inclusion of the League of Nations as part of the peace treaty as so central to his goals?


******
September 18, 2006

Zieger, America's Great War, 187-215; Goldberg, Discontented America, 57-61

1. Why was the  hostility toward the Bolshevik regime so intense among western officials and leaders?

2.  What did the Allies hope to accomplish by military intervention in Russia?

3.  How would you characterize Wilson's personal view of the Bolshevik revolution and of the Allied demand that the US participate in military intervention?

4.  Was the concern of government officials and political leaders about the dangers of radicalism in America after the war at all justified?

5.  Zieger suggests that the administration's vaunted "voluntarism" actually encouraged repression and extra-legal excess.

6.  How do you account for the intensity of postwar inter-racial violence?

7.  Why was the steel strike of 1919-20 such a significant turning point in modern US history?

*****

September 20, 2006



STEELWORKERS HIT THE BRICKS; STRIKE RED-INSTIGATED SAYS GARY

WILSON ABORTS SPEAKING TOUR; ILLNESS FEARED

POSTAL WORKER FOILS BOMB PLOT

NEGRO BOY STONED; VIOLENCE FLARES IN WINDY CITY

BLUE FLU HITS BEANTOWN

REDS WIN; KERENSKY OUSTED

REDS WIN; SKULDUGGERY RUMORED

WW PRESENTS TREATY TO SENATE; SEES ‘HAND OF GOD’ IN PACT

RAIDS BAG THOUSANDS

BYE, BYE EMMA

HOOVER REBUKED; FBI POWERS TO BE CURBED

SENATE REJECTS TREATY–AGAIN

ANARCHISTS TO GOVT: BRING BOYS HOME FROM RUSSIA

***

September 22, 2006
America’s Great War, 215-25; Goldberg, DA, 20-28; Wilson’s Pueblo, Colorado, speech, September 25, 1919.


1.  Why in the end was the Treaty defeated when it appears that a majority of Americans, both in and out of the Senate, favored its adoption?

2.  According to Wilson, who were the opponents of the Treaty and what were their motives?

3.  Both Zieger and Goldberg link liberal opposition to the Treaty to domestic events.  What events?  What was the connection?

4.  Wilson said that “article ten strikes at the taproot of war.”  In his view, how so?

5.  Neither the British nor the French put as much stock in the power of the League of Nations to put an end to war as did Wilson.  Yet both favored US ratification, even with strong reservations.


Questions for Americans (See Zieger, America's Great War, pp. 227-37).

****
    Politics in the 1920s

September 25, 2006

Goldberg, Discontented America, chapter 3. 

1.  From Goldberg’s discussion, what sense do you have of the constituencies of the two main political parties?  On what sources of voters did LaFollette’s supporters draw in 1924

2.  How does Goldberg account for the GOP’s overwhelming victories in 1920 and 1924?  How do you account for them?

3.  Goldberg believes that pre-war progressivism lingered on into the postwar period.  His evidence?

4. What policies and programs are associated with the Republican Party of the 1920s?

5.  How do you account for declining voter participation during the first quarter of the century?

6.  What important political figures died in the 1920s and why does Goldberg see their passing from the scene as emblematic of the country’s political drift in that decade?

7.  What effect on the US political universe did the enfranchisement of women have in the 1920s?

*****
On September 27, we reviewed Goldberg, chapter 4, and the statistics located at website fact sheet




*****
September 29.  Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "Disorderly Women: Gender and Labor Militancy in the Appalachian South," Journal of American History 73:2 (Sept. 1986): 354-382

Comments on labor conflict in the southern textile industry, 1920s, 1930s

Hall is arguing against the standard historical view of the Elizabethton strike (and similar episodes).  What is the "standard historical view"?

Who were the "girls" who worked in these mills?  Where did they come from?  What did they wear?

What's wrong with this sentence:  The women who toiled at the Bemberg and Glanzstoff mills did so reluctantly, longing to be able to go back to the farms and villages from which they had come.

Hall depicts women strikers as employing distinctive methods and forms of protest and resistance.  Such as?  To what effect?

What's Hall's point in describing at such length the trials of, and the response to, Texas Bill and Trixie Perry?

What evidences of modern consumer culture were found in Elizabethton?

What was the union's role in the strike?

*****



October 2, 2006.  Thomas F. O'Brien, "The Revolutionary Mission:  American Enterprise in Cuba," American Historical Review (June 1993)

1.  What was the “second industrial revolution”?  What were its consequences for American workers?  American consumers?

2.  Why were companies such as General Electric attracted to Latin America?

3.  The author refers repeatedly to the “corporate culture” that GE and AFP sought to promote in Cuba.  What were the components of “corporate culture,” American style, in the 1920s?

4.  The author concedes that GE’s operations in Cuba brought real advantages to Cuban workers and consumers.  Why they did the also generate so much hostility?

5.  It would seem that as a foreign corporation, GE would be vulnerable politically.  How did it seek to cover its political flank?  How successful was it?

6.  O’Brien depicts an alliance between Cuban workers and the Cuban middle class.  What were the bases for this alliance?  Why was such an alliance more effective and viable in Cuba than it was (or would have been) in the USA during this period?

7.  How does O’Brien’s essay connect with what we know about the Wilsonian world view?  How does it connect with the issues raised by Du Bois in “The African Roots of the War”?

*****

Probably I won’t get to all the points indicated below during our session of October 4.  There will be no quiz on this material but familiarity with it will facilitate discussion.

    Intellectual and Cultural Currents of the 1920s

I.  Two points that guide today’s remarks:

    A.  Enhanced economic performance, modern consumerism, and new forms of mass entertainment coexisted with profound intellectual and artistic angst.

    B.  In the 1920s, the US became for the first time a multi-cultural society–and had the scars to prove it.

II.  Why intellectual and cultural history?

III.  The 1920s–and especially the American 1920s–was a unique and distinctive decade

    A.  The problem of production had been solved; the consumer was now king (and queen)

    B.  The legacy of the Great War.  (Although here perhaps America was more sophisticated than Europe.  In view of the carnage of the American Civil War, which claimed over 600,000 lives, often in appalling circumstances, Americans perhaps were more familiar than Europeans, who had enjoyed a century of peace, with themes of mass death. Quote Hemingway here:

Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage. . . were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

                    --A Farewell to Arms

Remarks literary historian Paul Fussell, “In the summer of 1914 no one would have understood what on earth he was talking about.”

Cf.  the paridigmatic Continental texts of the 1920s, Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West; T.  S.  Eliot’s The Waste Land.  Eliot, an American who lived, worked, and wrote in England, wrote of the anxiety, despair, and emptiness of life in the age of technology, consumption, and world war.  Here are some excerpts from his poem “The Wasteland,” published in 1922:We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw.  Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

. . . .
This is the dead land

This is cactus land

Here the stone images

Are raised, here they receive

The supplication of a dead man’s hand

Under the twinkle of a fading star

. . .

The eyes are not here

There are no eyes here

In this valley of dying stars

In this hollow valley

This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places

We grope together

And avoid speech

Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless

The eyes reappear

As the perpetual star

Multifoliate rose

Of death’s twilight kimgdom

The hope only

Of empty men

. . .

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but with a whimper


    C.  The rawness and immediacy of the clash between old values and cultural patterns and newer values and patterns (e.g., race; sexual mores).  Just some quick vignettes: 100,000 Klansmen parade down Pennsylvania Avenue; the Scopes Trial; the “New Negro.”

III.  Artistic, cultural, and intellectual life in America was both vibrant and transgressive.  The energy and vigor of US literary and artistic life, from novelists such as Dos Passos, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dreiser, and Lewis, to artists such as Stuart Davis, Charles Sheeler, to the explosion of jazz and blues, to the Harlem Renaissance, to the motion pictures, whatever its overt message, asserted American strength and potency.  Moreover, public support for education and cultural production mushroomed.  For example, between 1900 and 1930, the proportion of young people enrolled in institutions of higher education tripled, from 4% to 12.42%.  Enrollment of graduate students increased eightfold in this same period.  Budgets of colleges and universities expanded rapidly, while the number of research institutes, scientific laboratories, scholarly and cultural journals, and fellowships proliferated, as did funding for them.

At the same time, scholars, painters, poets, novelists, social scientists broke free from the traditions of honor and propriety associated with Victorian culture.  Victorian values of stability, order, hierarchy, and propriety had dominated the leading magazines, publishing houses, and universities.  Views that challenged patriarchal, Anglo-Saxon, Christian capitalism were not welcome.  Here’s the president of the University of Michigan writing a fellow university president in 1885 about what he was looking for in the appointment of a new faculty member in the Department of History: “In the Chair of History. . . I should not wish a pessimist or an agnostic or a man disposed to obtrude criticism of Christian views . . . or of Christian principles.  I should not want a man who would not make his historical judgments and interpretations from a Christian standpoint. . . .”  Said Daniel Coit Gilman of Hopkins, the universities should be “steady promoters of Knowledge, Virtue, and Faith.”  (Coben, 37)

    The attack on these system-defending intellectual positions had preceded World War I.  Here we can point to the influence of Darwin (challenging Biblical accounts of human origins), Freud (foregrounding irrational and sexual impulses), Einstein (seemingly relativizing the once-stable Newtonian cosmos), Sorel (and Myth of the General Strike, repudiating bourgeois political institutions), the cult of the primitive (undermining Classical and Enlightenment notions of beauty and progress),  all stirring before the war. 

    But it is in the 1920s that the ideas flourish.  Increasingly, intellectuals, especially in the social sciences, humanities, and artistic-cultural spheres function as critics and adversaries of their society and its values rather than as upholders.  Charles A.  Beard in History; Robert and Helen Lynd in sociology; Franz Boas and Margaret Mead in anthropology.

    Sometimes, the clash between the established order and the new critical, scientific world view was direct and overt, as witnessed by the clash between Clarence Darrow and the biological establishment on the one hand, and William Jennings Bryan, on the other in the Scopes trial of 1924.      At times the emerging artistic-literary critique of American racial, ethnic, and moral hierarchies became open and public, as in the protracted Sacco-Vanzetti affair.  The sunny sense of American virtue and exceptionalism gave way to expressions of despair.  The intellectual and the artist was no longer the celebrant and validator of American superiority; he or she was now the critic, the prober of pathology and angst.  Here’s Edna St. Vincent Millay on the Sacco-Vanzetti trial and execution:


    “Justice Denied in Massachusetts,” 1927

Let us abandon then our gardens and go home

And sit in the sitting-room
Shall the larkspur blossom or the corn grow under this cloud?
Sour to the fruitful seed
Is the cold earth under this cloud,
Fostering quack and weed, we have marched upon but cannot
conquer;
We have bent the blades of our hoes against the stalks of them.

Let us go home, and sit in the sitting room.
Not in our day
Shall the cloud go over and the sun rise as before,
Beneficent upon us
Out of the glittering bay,
And the warm winds be blown inward from the sea
Moving the blades of corn
With a peaceful sound.

Forlorn, forlorn,
Stands the blue hay-rack by the empty mow.
And the petals drop to the ground,
Leaving the tree unfruited.
The sun that warmed our stooping backs and withered the weed
uprooted—
We shall not feel it again.
We shall die in darkness, and be buried in the rain.

What from the splendid dead
We have inherited —
Furrows sweet to the grain, and the weed subdued —
See now the slug and the mildew plunder.
Evil does overwhelm
The larkspur and the corn;
We have seen them go under.

Let us sit here, sit still,
Here in the sitting-room until we die;
At the step of Death on the walk, rise and go;
Leaving to our children's children the beautiful doorway,
And this elm,
And a blighted earth to till
With a broken hoe.

    More generally, though, it was an intellectual and artistic style, defamiliarizing the familiar, attacking the business culture (e.g., Sinclair Lewis), ridiculing the pieties (e.g., H.  L.  Mencken), rejecting long accepted moral values and standards (e.g., Hemingway; Fitzgerald); holding up alien models (e.g., Russian Communism; primitive life) in contrast to the conformity, rigidity, and materialism of American life.
    In general, in academic and intellectual life you have the emergence for the first time as the ordinary stance of writers and scholars a certain adversarial relationship to official culture and values.  Increasingly, it was seen as the job of the writer or scholar to seek truth regardless of its consonance with established, official, standard values and perspectives.  Whether in historical writing, biblical scholarship, sociology, anthropology, literature, or art, the new intellectual environment cultivated a dissident, critical stance.  You might almost say that the modern tradition of intellectual criticism was established in the 1920s, reversing the relationship between intellectual and cultural elites, on the one hand, and “the people” on the other than had previously prevailed.  It used to be that dissent percolated from below and was checked, suppressed, or dismissed by the intellectual and cultural elites.  Increasingly, though, popular culture and consumerism created a mass culture that blunted the dissenting edge of previous outcasts, leaving the job of dissent, criticism, and alienation to university-housed intellectual elites, thus isolating them from the general citizenry.
    The celebration of African-ness and Negro culture, as especially exhibited in the Harlem Renaissance, brings a lot of this together.  Black culture, born in resistance, steeled in tribulation, was deeply authentic.  As exhibited in distinctly American art forms such as the blues and jazz, it exhibited a rawness and power that challenged the genteel tradition.  White musicians and artists and writers began to see in Negro culture the only truly authentic American culture.  The assertion of black power by such figures as Marcus Garvey and the flowering of new black voices such as those of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, [read Hughes] along with the spectacular development of recorded black music and the emergence of such black artists as Horace Pippin  and Palmer Hayden, brought both a powerful and dynamic vigor to American life and a deeply unsettling set of challenges to traditional seats of culture and learning.
    So the 20s was a kind of cultural hinge–cultural pluralism vs.  the Immigration Act of 1924; surging KKK membership vs. the flowering of black culture and activism; unprecedented resources devoted to education and cultural access vs. the full-fledged emergence of a dissident, transgressive idiom of intellectual and cultural expression.  In a way, it seems to me that the 1920s is closer to our own time than are, for different reasons, the hard-scrabble depression years of the 1930s or the heroic and patriotic years of World War II.

*****

October 9, 2006.  Quiz on Goldberg, Discontented America, chapter 5.


1.  Which of the following statements about the black migration northward is the most accurate: a) the surge of European immigration following the outbreak of World War I aborted the migration of blacks northward; b) those migrating to the North were among the poorest and least educated of the southern rural black population; c) housing, job, and social discrimination in the North triggered a number of violent episodes; d) alone among northern institutions, the labor movement welcomed black migrants into its ranks.

2.  Marcus Garvey was: a) a West Indian immigrant who created a massive black pride movement among US blacks; b) a labor leader who turned the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters into a major civil rights organization; c) a leading black educator who was appointed by Woodrow Wilson to facilitate the entry of blacks into wartime industry; d) a leading black poet in the Harlem Renaissance.

3.  Which of the following statements about racial lynching is true: a) actually, most lynch victims were white, despite NAACP propaganda to the contrary; b) most lynchings took place in the North, despite self-serving northern propaganda to the contrary; c) to its shame, the NAACP ignored lynching, focusing its efforts during the 1920s on job opportunities for blacks; d) the House of Representatives passed anti-lynching legislation in 1922 only to have it bottled up in the Senate.

4.  The term “New Negro” refers to: a) rising black militance and racial pride; b) the NAACP’s resort to legal action against discrimination; c) the support of blacks for the Democratic party in the 1920s; d) the efforts of African Americans to “return” to Africa.

5.  In contrasting the lives of African Americans in the South and the North in the 1910s and 1930s, which of the following statements is the most accurate: a) in the South, blacks moved increasingly into urban areas whereas in the North they flocked to agricultural sections; b) in the South, blacks were deeply religious while in the North the church played only a minor role in the black communities; c) in the North, blacks could vote, while in the South the suffrage was severely restricted; d) educational opportunities for blacks were much more abundant in the South than was the case in the North.

*****

NOTE:  THERE WILL BE A QUIZ ON CHAPTER 6 POSTED BY 4 PM ON MONDAY, OCTOBER 9.  PRINT IT OUT AND HAND IT IN IN CLASS ON OCTOBER 11.  THIS QUIZ WILL NOT BE ADMINISTERED DURING CLASS TIME.  AND AS ALWAYS, TO GET CREDIT FOR THE QUIZ, STUDENTS MUST ATTEND THE FULL SESSION OF THE CLASS (IN THIS CASE, OCTOBER 11).  OF COURSE, THERE MAY ALSO BE A QUIZ AT ANY TIME BETWEEN NOW AND THE 11TH AS WELL.

Quiz for class session of October 11, 2006, on David Goldberg, Discontented America, chapter 6: “The Rapid Rise and Swift Decline of the Ku Klux Klan.”

1.  The revival of the KKK in the 1910s and early 1920s was accomplished: a) despite the vigorous opposition of the Wilson administration; b) despite the negative publicity accorded to the Klan in the classic film Birth of a Nation; c) despite the scandals associated with its promoters, notably Col. Simmons, Edward Clarke, and Elizabeth Tyler; d) despite the Klan’s socialistic tendencies.

2.  According to Goldberg, the Klan: a) recruited most heavily and successfully from among the unemployed, criminal, and rootless elements in society; b) provided an outlet for women’s activism, despite its generally male chauvinist character; c) campaigned actively and effectively against Prohibition; d) was a terrorist organization, especially in the North.

3.  With respect to religion, the KKK of the 1920s: a) was heavily Protestant in its orientation; b) avoided divisive anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish appeals; c) was a thoroughly secular organization; d) was more successful among the older, established Protestant churches (e.g., Presbyterian, Episcopalian) than among newer, more evangelical sects.

4.  Which of the following statements is the most accurate with reference to the regional character of Klan membership and influence: a) it was almost an entirely southern phenomenon; b) its membership was overwhelmingly confined to rural areas; c) it enjoyed great success throughout the Middle West; d) its greatest concentration of members was in the urban slums of the Northeast.

5.  Which of the following factors are important in explaining the rapid decline of the KKK in the 1920s: a) violent attacks, often aided and abetted by the police, on the Klan in northern cities; b) uncertainty and confusion on the part of Klan leaders as to the organization’s character and direction; c) the highly publicized involvement of key KKK leaders in scams and rackets; d) passage of the 1924 immigration act, which seemed to indicate that the organization’s anti-foreign agenda had been accomplished.

****

October 13, 2006
Goldberg, Discontented America, chapter 7


1.  Between c. 1880 and 1920, general immigration restriction was so difficult to achieve in part because of:


2.  In the 1920s, the term “Nordic Race”:


3.  Authors such as Count de Gobineau, Madison Grant, and Lothrup Stoddard:


4.  With respect to immigration, African Americans:


5.  The Immigration Act of 1924:

  AMH 4231 Mid-term exam.

Directions:  Answer all 5 of the multiple choice questions below.  Each correct answer is worth 5 points.  Then choose one of the multiple choice questions on which to write an essay.  In the essay, defend as vigorously and precisely as possible the answer you choose.  In addition, refute, again as vigorously and precisely as space permits, each of the three wrong answers.   The essay is worth 75 points–50 for the defense of the correct answer and 25 for the refutations, collectively. Be sure to observe the rules for preparing take-home exams and the general rules for writing.  Both can be found on the website syllabus.  In particular, please note the importance of making use of the required readings and of selecting an outside source relevant to your essay in preparing your paper.

1.  Which of the following statements about the lives of American women in the 1914-28 period is the most valid: a) having achieved the right to vote, they retreated to pre-Progressive Era patterns of domesticity and submissiveness; b) their entry into the electoral arena created a yawning “gender gap” in regard to voting behavior; c) they developed distinctive modes of dissent and activism that both embraced and protested against the cultural and economic changes associated with the period; d) they made permanent gains in employment opportunities and political rights during World War I.

2.  Which of the following statements about Wilsonian diplomacy is the most accurate: a) Wilson was a naive idealist who was consistently duped and browbeaten by wily Europeans; b) a staunch opponent of colonialism, Wilson battled fiercely at Versailles for the liquidation of European colonial empires; c) for Wilson, making the world “safe for democracy” entailed policies that privileged US economic interests; d) the US Senate failed to ratify the peace treaty (and thus to commit the US to participation in the League of Nations) despite Wilson’s willingness to compromise with Lodge.

3. Which of the following statements about American national politics during this period (ca. 1914-1932) is the most accurate:  a) the nomination of Herbert Hoover by the Republicans in 1928 signaled an end to the Progressive Movement; b) this was a period of unchallenged Republican dominance; c) the mass influx of women voters fundamentally reshaped partisan alignments; d) the Democratic party in particular exhibited sharp ethnic and sectional tensions.

4. Which of the following statements best characterizes American society in the World War I-1920s era:  a) the period is notable for the high degree of racial and ethnic tolerance displayed by the American public, despite the strains of war and economic change; b) this was a period of rapid and sustained advance for organized labor; c) both in the heated atmosphere of war and in the prosperous days of peace, the American people displayed an enormous capacity for division, conflict, and intolerance; d) to a remarkable extent, technological advances such as the radio, the automobile, and the motion pictures had the effect of reducing social tensions and bringing about a kinder, gentler America.

5.  Which of the following statements about race relations during the period ca. 1914-1932 is the most valid:  a) while victimization of African Americans continued to be widespread, there was much evidence of political militancy and cultural vigor among them; b) the need for black labor and military manpower during World War I fundamentally changed the policies of the federal government with respect to race; c) during the 1920s, African Americans switched political allegiance from the Republican to the Democratic party in gratitude for Wilson’s staunch support of their goals; d) the pre-World War I migration of African Americans into the North from the rural South came to an abrupt halt.

*****
October 16, 2006.  Goldberg, Discontented America, chapter 8.

Who said it?


“I am the member of no organized political party.  I am a ---------------.”

“Would to God he had been elected to SOMETHING.”

“I do not choose to run for president . . . .”

“What ARE the states west of the Mississippi?”

“We are nearer today to the ideal of the abolition of poverty and fear from the lives of men than ever before in history.”

“Mr. President, I bet my friend that I could make you say at least three words.”
        “You lose.”

It is “a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose.”

The Roman Catholic church: “the Mother of ignorance, superstition, intolerance and sin.”

“The business of America is business. . . .”   

“America's present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy. . .”

****

October 20, 23.  Lawson, Commonwealth of Hope, chapter 1.
   
    1.  Shares traded on the NY Stock Exchange
   
        1923–236 million
        1926–451 million
        1927–577 million
        1929–1.1 billion
   
    2.  Market value of shares traded on the NYSE
   
        1925–$27 billion
        1929 (October)–$87 billion
        1933–$18 billion
     
            Average closing value, September, 1929=$366.29 a share
            Average closing value, December, 1932=$96.63 a share
   
        NY Times average of representative stocks: September, 1929=452; July 1932=52
   
    3.  Bank failures
   
        1929–659; $250 million
        1930–1352; $853 million
        1931–2294; $1.7 billion
        1932–1456; $750 million
   
    4.  Industrial production, last quarter, 1930, is 26% below peak level of summer, 1929
   
    5.  Unemployment
   
        April, 1930–3 million
        October, 1930–4 million
        October, 1931–7 million
        October, 1932–11 million
        March, 1933–14 million
   
    6.  Wages and farm income
   
        Industrial wages drop 42%, 1929-33
        Gross farm income (already poor during 1920s) drops by 56%, 1929-33
   
    7.  Other income indicators, 1929-33
   
        National income drops from $87.8 billion to $40.2 billion
        Per capita income drops form %681 to $459
   

Why the Crash?  Both easy and hard to answer.  Easy: a downturn was to be expected; markets are volatile; there had been brief breaks in the market through the summer of 1929.  Hard: Why such a massive sell-off October 23-24?  Why the irreversible downward spiral?  Why didn’t this market “work” the way markets are supposed to–i.e., drive out the speculators, arrive at sensible share prices, and attract capital back in?

Why did the Crash turn into a Depression?  Galbraith specifies five factors:


Hoover’s answer:  The Depression was international in its origins.  Autarkic solutions merely delayed recovery.

Why was the Depression so severe?

    ■    It occurred at a time when the old international financial institutions, which Britain had overseen for 200 years, were weakened and in disarray owing to the effects of World War I; and before newer arrangements that depended on US world financial leadership were in place.

    ■    It occurred at a time when older industrial sectors (heavy steel, textiles, mining, railroads), which employed millions, were in relative decline, and at which newer, growth and employment producing industries (e.g., light metals; petrochemicals; modern food processing; plastics) were not yet sufficiently large to take up the slack.

    ■    Note here the uneven course of the depression.  There were significant upticks in the economy, as well as “depressions-within-the-depression,” notably the “Roosevelt Recession” of 1937-39.  See the chart.

5.  Why did it last so long?

        1.  Conservatives say–Meddling by government, which interfered with the normal workings of the market and created uncertainty and political conflict.  The pain of those disadvantaged, while regrettable, is a necessary component of capitalism’s creative destruction. 

        2.  Radicals–Capitalism prone to excess and collapse.  An irrational system always teetering on the verge of chaos.  Survives through exploitation and greed.  The chickens had finally come home to roost.  It’ll take a big war this time to save capitalism’s chestnuts.

        3.  New Deal liberals–The system combines 19th century ideas and complex modern realities.  It needs direction in the form of governmental direction and regulation.  The community needs to mobilize its resources to restore prosperity and to assist those put in need through no fault of their own.  Capitalism is too important to be left entirely to the capitalists.  Alan Lawson’s theme of “cooperative commonwealth.”

        4.  Keynes–Failure to register the central role of consumption in a modern economy.

*****
October 25, 2006.  Lawson, Commonwealth of Hope, chapters 1-3

1. Lawson sees FDR as a man with a plan.  What was it?

2.  The banking emergency and New Deal reforms.

3.  Monetary policy as a means of “reflation.”

4.  The Tennessee Valley Authority and its broader meaning

    For FDR, housing is tied in with electrification.  Prior to the 1930s, home electrification had been limited largely to providing power for illumination.  The vast majority of farm homes were not electrified.  Utilities and appliance manufacturers saw such consumer commodities as vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and other home appliances as suitable only for up-scale consumers.  Electricity was expensive, with limited markets and huge overhead (the cost of generators, transmission lines, energy).  Electric refrigerators were rare. 
    FDR sees electrification as the key to modern living and to creating a socially cohesive citizenry.  There were two New Deal programs that directly sought to increase consumer electrification: The TVA, about which Lawson writes, and the Rural Electrification Administration, established in 1935 by Executive Order and subsequently put on permanent footing by the Rural Electrification Act of 1936.  Tobey:  “TVA and REA sought by demonstration, competition, and administrative compulsion to force ### private utilities, which provided most Americans with their electricity, to extend electrical modernization to the four-fifths of the nation’’s households that were still unmodernized.”  (112-13)

    Increasingly, New Deal home loan, home improvement, and mortgage guarantee programs establish de facto building codes for new construction and for refurbishment of existing housing stock that call for expansion of electrification––more outlets, double-wiring to accommodate portable appliances.  Title I of the National Housing Act of 1934, for example, provided loan guarantees for consumer purchase of electrical appliances, vastly expanding the purchase of refrigerators, washing machines, and other household appliances.  Tobey: ““Before 1935, contractors did not design or build houses to support the [““] electrical standard of living [““].  They built many houses as starters or shells, into which the home owner would bring amenities, appliances, and utilities, as desired [or as affordable].””  (116) Eventually, federal standards for federally insurable loans and mortgages were based on the electrified home, with the cost of large appliances, notably refrigerators but increasingly including washing machines, dishwashers, and so forth, in the cost of the (typically) 30 year mortgage, bringing monthly payments down and vastly stimulating the market for appliances.

    Some of the basics of how houses are financed––mortgages, interest payments, tax deductions, and the like.  Zieger termed New Deal housing legislation and housing policy the “paradigmatic” New Deal legislation, meaning that these reforms epitomized better than any others the central aims and accomplishments of the New Deal.  Note that before ND housing policies, home mortgages were typically short term––3, 5, or at most 10 years, requiring high down payments.  If the ND had done nothing else than extend the standard home mortgage to, typically, thirty years (with, of course, the result that monthly payments were lower, down payments were considerably less, and interest payments over the life of the loan are much, much higher), this would have been a major change.  In addition, they bailed out hundreds of thousands of individual home purchasers; they did this through subsidizing private enterprise (banks and lending agencies); they largely sidetracked drastically alternative visions of how to house Americans (e.g., though the Wagner Housing Act of 1937 did provide for government construction and operation of low-cost multi-family housing, these programs were never well-funded, with the result that ““public housing”” in the U.S., unlike the case in other industrial countries, became a dumping ground for the underprivileged and/or ethnically marginal [i.e., blacks, Hispanics]).  Moreover, the implementation of federal housing subsidies to banks through the Federal Housing Authority (and later the Veterans Administration) freely resorted to red-lining, i.e., directing federal programs away from minority and/or economically marginal areas.  The disadvantaging of blacks and other minorities has been a crucial factor in black poverty since home ownership and the equity built up by government-subsidized home purchases is the single most important source of wealth for most working and middle class families. 
    Federal housing policies reflected FDR’’s strong belief in property owning as a crucial element in a stable and responsible social order.  The old Jeffersonian vision of a nation of land-holding farmers, of course, was no longer viable (though FDR did envisage resettling the unemployed on farms).  But home ownership could give people a property stake in the social order.  Hence, federal policies that in effect discouraged cooperative living arrangements, public provision of mass housing, and the like powerfully privileged the by-now standard suburban-type, auto-dependent, single-family dwelling that most of us grew up in or now live in.  There is nothing inevitable or even ““natural”” about our housing arrangements.  For good or ill, they are the product of public policy choices that date back at least to Herbert Hoover’’s vision of the good life during his tenure as Secretary of Commerce and that FDR implemented through imaginative and well-promoted government business cooperation.  Probably in no other area of daily life is the legacy of the New Deal, both in terms of specific kinds of financial arrangements and in the simple facts of where and how we live our lives, so pervasive.

    [Based on Tobey et al, "Moving Out and Settling in:  Residential Mobility, Home Owning, and the Public Enframing of Citizenship, 1921-1950," American Historical Review 95: 5 (Dec. 1990):  1395-1422; and Ronald C. Tobey, Technology as Freedom: The New Deal and the Electrical Modernization of the American Home (1996).]

5.  The National Industrial Recovery Act

6.  Labor provisions and labor activism.

*****

AMH 4231

October 27, 2006.  CH, chs. 7-8

1.  According to Lawson, most New Deal relief programs: a) relied on the outright “dole,” thus breaking loose from the antiquated notion that giving people money would corrupt and devitalize them; b) rested on some form of work relief; c) barred African Americans from participation; d) were of the “make work” variety, contributing little of permanent value.

2.  The Social Security Act of 1935: a) established federal benefit levels for pensions, unemployment compensation, aid to families with dependent children, and the sick, blind, and elderly; b) rested on “European” notions of public welfare; c) excluded large numbers of people, notably agricultural and domestic workers, from coverage; d) helped to advance FDR’s efforts to make the tax code more progressive.

3.  Francis Townsend was: a) a California physician whose bizarre plan for payments to the elderly helped pave the way for the Social Security Act; b) a Catholic priest whose radio broadcasts attacked the New Deal; c) the volatile and ineffective head of the National Recovery Administration; d) FDR’s running mate in 1936.

4.  According to Lawson, federal arts projects in the 1930s: a) amounted to a gigantic boondoggle, wasting money on tacky art and mediocre artists; b) in general aggrandized the federal government, ignoring local traditions and idioms; c) failed almost completely to address the rich artistic and musical heritage of African Americans; d) were, all in all, well-run, responsive to local conditions, and positive in their enhancement of American artistic life.

5.  Which of the following New Deal programs best exemplifies Lawson’s theme of the “Cooperative Commonwealth” as the centerpiece of Roosevelt’s New Deal vision: a) the WPA; b) the NLRB; c) the CWA; d) the TVA.

****



Nov. 1–Excerpt from Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White

1.  According to Katznelson, in the 1930s the Democratic Party: a) had healed its sectional divisions; b) was dominated by big city machine and labor representatives; c) remained a bastion of white supremacy; d) abandoned its Wilsonian commitment to social welfare legislation.

2. According to Du Bois and other leading African American spokespersons, New Deal social policies: a) did blacks a disservice because they encouraged dependency on federal largesse; b) benefitted poor blacks, though they remained racially skewed in favor of whites; c) were objectionable because they entailed creation of a huge, top-heavy federal bureaucracy; d) had little impact in the South.

3.  The old age provisions of the Social Security Act of 1935 discriminated against blacks in that:  a) they excluded occupations such as agriculture and domestic service in which a majority of African Americans toiled; b) they were administered in a discriminatory manner by southern whites; c) the benefits they provided were lower for African Americans than for whites at every level of income, occupation, and work experience; d) they excluded industrial workers from coverage.

4.  According to Katznelson, the chief reason for the de facto discriminatory working of New Deal social welfare programs was: a) the failure of African Americans to participate in the electoral process; b) southern white determination to maintain low-wage black labor and the Jim Crow system that it supported; c) FDR’s disdain for African Americans; d) the ignorance of southern politicians.

5.  According to Katznelson, the ways in which social welfare policies originating in the 1930s functioned constituted: a) affirmative action for whites; b) a regrettable, but necessary, compromise between racism and social provision; c) an embarrassment for the Republican party; d) a violation of the Constitution.

*****
Lawson, Commonwealth of Hope, chapters 11-12

    First, I want to expand on some themes found in the excerpt from Ira Katznelson’s book Affirmative Action for Whites that are contained in the quiz from last session.  This is an important book, one that links critical developments of the New Deal-World War II era to our own time.  Katznelson believes that the foundations of the modern US social order were laid during the New Deal era, that in regard to labor, housing, education, social provision, and economic security the New Deal adopted enduring policies that have underwritten the US social order since.  And, most crucially, that those policies and programs directly, significantly, overtly, and intentionally discriminated against African Americans.  They created the bases for white prosperity and opportunity.  The exclusion of large proportions of the black working class from Social Security and from coverage in the Fair Labor Standards Act; the local (i.e., white) administration of agricultural and welfare programs; the discrimination against inner cities and other minority neighborhoods by federal officials administering the various housing loan and insurance policies; and (not covered here) the ways in which WWII educational opportunities for service men and women and in which the GI Bill of Rights was targeted and administered–all of these factors amounted to “affirmative action for whites” in concrete, tangible, and specific ways.

Re chapters 11-12:

    Lawson’s organization is confusing here.  He places chapter 11, which deals with the demise of the New Deal, before chapter 12, which addresses two key areas of New Deal policy, agriculture and labor.  With respect to agriculture in particular, the chronology becomes confusing, with developments of the late 1930s sometimes folded without transition into developments of the pre-New Deal years.

    Agriculture

    Roosevelt and his advisors considered the plight of agriculture to be the key to understanding the nature of the Great Depression.  What were the central goals of the two major New Deal initiatives in agriculture, the first and second AAA?  Lawson depicts a tension among New Deal agricultural experts: some wanted, some of the time at least, to modernize agriculture, encourage, or prod, “unproductive” farmers to leave the land for more productive urban employment, and enmesh Big Agriculture more firmly into industrial society.  Others, including FDR himself at times, wanted to recreate and expand back-to-the-earth subsistence farming a la Jefferson.  Folks such as Tugwell, “Beanie” Baldwin, and Will Alexander wanted to help the agricultural proletariat, i.e., sharecroppers, tenant farmers, low-wage farm laborers, dispossessed small farmers and rural dwellers.

    Labor

    With respect to labor, Lawson appears to feel that while the explosive rise of labor activism and the growth in organized labor is an important story of the 1930s, he can’t quite fit it into his “cooperative commonwealth” theme.  So he tells the story of labor in two widely separated segments, pp. 91-101 and 211-221, and, at least in my view, does not integrate it into his overall interpretive framework.  This gap is worthy of notice because for FDR’s Progressive Era generation, no domestic issue was more important than labor; yet Lawson, while devoting substantial space to it, seems to regard “the labor problem” as peripheral to and apart from the central focus of the New Deal.

In chapter 11, he deals with the tribulations of the late New Deal.  Here are some of the themes with which a student of this period should be familiar:

Keynesian economics

The “Roosevelt Recession”

The Conservative Coalition

FDR’s efforts to modernize and streamline executive authority

FDR’s attempted “purge” of the Democratic party

*****


March 19, 1921:  Final Senate rejection of Versailles Treaty
Feb., 1922:         Washington Conference Treaties (re Pacific, naval affairs)
April 4, 1924:      Dawes Plan (restructuring German finances)
Oct.  1929:         US stock market crash
Sept.  18, 1931:   Japanese launch Manchuria adventure
Jan.  30, 1933:     Hitler becomes German Chancellor
April 12, 1934:    US Senate Nye Committee begins hearings (criticizes US entry into WWI)
Jan.  15, 1935:     Great Soviet purges begin
Sept.  15, 1935:    Nurnberg Laws promulgated against Jews in Germany
Oct.  5, 1935:       Italy invades Ethiopia
March 7, 1936:     German troops occupy Rhineland
July 18, 1936:       Spanish Civil War begins
July 7, 1936:        Marco Polo Bridge incident; full-scale Japanese war against China
July 18, 1937:       Congress passes most restrictive Neutrality Act
Dec. 1937:            “Rape of Nanking”--Japanese ravage Chinese capital
March 13, 1938:   Austria absorbed by Germany
Sept.  30, 1938:    Munich settlement; Germans begin dismembering Czechoslovakia
Nov.  9-10, 1938:  Kristallnacht--full-scale persecution of German Jews begins
Aug.  23, 1939:     German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact signed
Sept.  1, 1939:      Germany invades Poland (UK, France declare war, Sept.  3)
June 22, 1940:      French capitulate to Germany
Sept.  3, 1940:     Exchange of US destroyers for British air and naval bases
Sept.  27, 1940:  Tri-partite Pact (Germany-Italy-Japan)
Aug.-October, 1940:  Battle of Britain (RAF vs.  Luftwaffe; London bombed)
Oct.  16, 1940:    Congress passes first peacetime US conscription (by one vote)
March 11, 1941:  Congress passes Lend-Lease (aid to Britain, later USSR)
June 22, 1941:  Germany attacks USSR (“Operation Barbarossa”)
June 24, 1941:  Japanese occupy French Indo-China
June 26, 1941:  US freezes all Japanese assets
Oct.  30, 1941:  US destroyer Reuben James sunk by German u-boat; 100 lost
Dec.  7, 1941:  Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor; attack Phillippines, British possessions
Dec.  11, 1941:  Germany, Italy declare war on US

-----


I.  Consequences of the US rejection of the Versailles Peace Treaty.

    A.  Was the US “isolationist” in the 1920s?
        1.  Economic involvement with Europe
        2.  The Wilson-Hoover “new world order”
        3.  Political disengagement

    B.  In the 1930s?
        1.  Revulsion against participation in WWI
        2.  Strength of non-intervention sentiment
        3.  Neutrality legislation

II.  The rise of the expansionist powers
    A.  Italy
    B.  Germany
    C.  Japan

III.  The road to war in Europe
    A.  The Czechoslovakian Crisis of 1938
    B.  The Nazi-Soviet Pact, Aug., 1939
    C.  World War II begins, Sept. 1, 1939
    D.  Course of the war, 1939-41
        1.  Nazi victory; Battle of Britain, 1940--impact on US
        2.  German attack on USSR, June 22, 1941
    E.  “Undeclared” US war with Germany, 1940-41
        1. Destroyers for bases deal, Sept. 3, 1940
        2. Lend-Lease, March 11
        3.  US-German naval conflict, fall, 1941

IV.  The road to war in Asia
    A.  Japanese activity in Manchuria, 1931-
    B.  Japanese-Chinese war, July 1937-
    C.  US relations with Japan
    D.  Japan moves south, 1940-
    E.  The decision for war; Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941

V.  Germany declares war against the US, Dec. 11, 1941

****
November 6, 2006.  O’Neill, Democracy at War, to page 73.

1.  According to O’Neill, public opinion polls: a) were wildly inaccurate in the 1930s; b) are of little use to historians; c) assisted FDR in his efforts to deal effectively with the international crisis; d) impeded forthright and statesmanlike leadership.

2.  According to O’Neill, the neutrality laws of the 1930s were: a) judicious measures that bought time for US rearmament; b) FDR’s response to the public clamor for US military intervention in Europe; c) measures that forced the US into a needless confrontation with Japan; d) based on the country’s experience leading up to our entry into World War I.

3.  Lend-Lease refers to: a) FDR’s shrewd method of providing aid to embattled Britain; b) US corporations’ flouting of the neutrality laws; c) FDR’s method of financing US military build-up; d) the New Deal’s resort to deficit spending as an anti-recession device.

4.  In return for sending Britain a batch of World War I-era destroyers, the US received: a) control of British bases in the New World; b) Britain’s remaining gold supply; c) Churchill’s hearty thanks; d) the plans for the Norden bombsight.

5.  Which of the following statements best reflects O’Neill’s view of our response to Japanese aggression in the 1930s: We should have: a) made a deal with Hitler so we could concentrate on stopping Japan; b) ignored Japanese moves; c) confronted Japan militarily at the time of her first foray into Manchuria in 1931; d) deferred confrontation with Japan so we could more effectively deal with the greater threat, Germany.

*****




Down and dirty note on historiography:  At last count, exactly 8,450,981 books had been published relating to WWII, 30% of them by Stephen Ambrose.  The following listing consists of a few personal favorites, nothing more.

 A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (1961) (controversial argument that however deplorable Hitler and the Nazis were, the foreign policy goals that he pursued in the 1930s were those that any German regime would have pursued); Bruce Russett, No Clear and Present Danger:  A Skeptical View of the U.S. Entry in to World War II (1972; title says it all–provocative); Gerhard Weinberg, A World at Arms:  A Global History of World War II (2d ed., 2005; most comprehensive and authoritative recent one-volume survey of, predominantly, military aspects); Allan Millett and Williamson Murray, A War to Be Won:  Fighting the Second World War (2000; highly regarded entry); Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (1995; excellent overview of military matters by distinguished British scholar). 

Probably everybody should read Winston Churchill’s six volume history of the Second World War (title:  The Second World War), with their evocative titles:  The Gathering Storm; Their Finest Hour; The Hinge of Fate; The Grand Alliance; Triumph and Tragedy; Closing the Ring, although more nowadays as great public literature than as definitive historical scholarship.

Home front:  Richard Polenberg, War and Society:  The United States, 1941-1945 (1972; thoughtful overview by one of Zieger’s favorite historians); John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory:  Politics and American Culture during World War II (1976; a lot of fascinating stuff); James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt:  The Soldier of Freedom (1970; the title is somewhat, but only somewhat, ironic).  William O’Neill, A Democracy at War (1993), is an unusually thoughtful, engaging, and provocative book by another of Zieger’s favorite historians.  David Kennedy, The American People in World War II:  Freedom from Fear (2003) is excellent.

    *****
       

I.  The Opposing Sides

    A.  The Axis.  Tripartite Alliance of Sept. 1940.
    B.  Problems and exceptions:  Spain; Iraq and Arabs; Union of South Africa;  USSR; Italy.  Separate peace with USSR?  USSR neutral vis-a-vis Japan til 8\45.
    C.  The United Nations.  Big Four.  France?  China?  USSR?
    D.  US-UK “special” relationship.

III.  War aims.
    Germany
    Japan--Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere; treatment of native peoples
    USSR
    UK (India?)
    USA–To be (Wilsonian) or not to be (Wilsonian)?

IV.  Military Theaters
    A)  Eastern Front
    B)  Mediterranean-Italy
    C)  Pacific
        Central (Midway; islands)
        SW (Australia; Guadalcanal; Philippines)
        CBI
    D)  Western Europe
    E)  Strategic bombing
    F)  High seas (Battle of the Atlantic)

V.  Diplomatic developments
    A.  Wartime conferences
        1.  1\43:  Casablanca (US, UK; unconditional surrender)
        2.  12\43: Teheran.  2d front; coordination; UN
        3.  2\45:  Yalta (symbol of postwar US-USSR confrontation)
        4.  April-June, 1945:  UN, SF
        5.  7\45:  Potsdam (HST to JS:  We have a new weapon)

    B.  Perspectives on US diplomacy:  Leffler (determination to protect strategic and economic interests); Williams (Pacific War is the War for the American Frontier); Kennan (by going isolationist in the 20s and 30s we were dependent on Russia during WWII and had to square off against it afterwards)

VI.  Special features of World War II
    A.  Casualties
    B.  Treatment of civilians and prisoners (note Soviet treatment of its returning prisoners)
    C.  The ethics of “area” bombing
    D.  The Holocaust
    E.  Character of the fighting
    F.  The atomic bomb




USSR: 7 million battle deaths; 12 million civilian dead

US: 291,557 battle dead; 83,000 non-combatant military=374,557 total
    about 700,000 wounded

    Army Air Force: 52,173 battle dead; 35,946 non-combat military=88,119

UK: RAF loses 70,253, 47,268 of whom are in Bomber Command.  British civilian dead 60,000; 30,000 in London

Stalingrad:  Germans lose 300,000

D-Day: 130,000 men land.  About 4,000 killed.  As of 9-5-44, 2,086,000 Allied troops in France.
Battle of the Bulge is Dec. 16-26, 1944:  77,000 US casualties, 8,000 KIA, 48,000 wounded, 21,000 missing and captured.  What does O’Neill have to say about the limitations of US manpower policies?

Pacific War (US):

Iwo Jima, Feb. 19-March 17, 1945: 4189 killed; 15,398 wounded

Okinawa, March 19-June 21, 1945: 11,260 dead; 33,769 wounded

Total Pacific war: 41,322 dead; 170,600 all casualties

How many Germans, Japanese killed in aerial attacks?

    Japanese–Dower estimates 400,000
    Germany–About one million?  Overy says 600,000.
    Occupied France?–20,000?



A.  Economic and financial affairs:

    1.  Wartime legislation revolutionized the country’s tax structure and its methods of collecting taxes.

    2.  World War II resulted in the most significant leveling of income in recent American history.

    3.  In comparison with World War I, the US record in economic mobilization was remarkably strong. 

    4.  Large corporations, on the defensive in the 1930s, thrived during World War II and dominated war production.

    5.  Business, generally, recouped the loss of public esteem it had suffered during the 1930s.

    6.  Women’s employment gains once again did not outlive the war.

B.  Reform and social change:

    1.  The country took important steps toward racial justice.

    2.  Although in England the experience of war paved the way for major innovations in social programs, in the US World War II marked the end of the New Deal impulse.

    3.  Organized labor grew substantially but was subjected to a greater degree of control and regulation than ever before.

    4.  The US compiled a much better record in the protection of civil liberties during World War II than it had during World War I.

        –Glaring exception: Incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans.

    5.  Women’s gains in the labor force, while dramatic during the war, did not outlive the war.

C.  Politics:

    1.  No group was more dedicated to winning the war and boosting production than the Communists.

    2.  The “Conservative Coalition” made substantial gains during World War II.

    3.  World War II was marked by sharp conflict between President and Congress and by a reassertion of Congressional power.

****
Nov. 15  DAW, 225-66; FDR 1944 State of the Union ("Second Bill of Rights") speech at http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=463

 


PROSPERITY RETURNED

INFLATION SURGED

TAXES ROSE

LABOR LOST

WOMEN GAINED

THE NEW DEAL ENDURED

DEMOCRACY DECLINED

PREJUDICE DIMINISHED

*****
Here
December 4, 2006.  AH 4231.  O’Neill, A Democracy at War, chapter 19.

O’Neill is quite free with judgments about military strategy and diplomatic developments.  With which of the following statements are by him:

1.  “The assault on Iwo Jima, while resulting in a lamentably large number of casualties, was a wise one, since it paved the way for the massive bombing of the Japanese home islands.”

2.  “As in Europe . . ., the conventional bombing campaign there [i.e., in Japan] was both immoral and a military failure.”

3.  “The battle for Okinawa found US forces better led, better organized, and better deployed than in any other major engagement in the Pacific War.”

4. “Despite almost two years of bungling, and the lack of a [good] torpedo. . .the submarine was far and away the most effective weapon” in the Pacific naval war.

5.  “In a democracy the existence of the Bomb compelled its use.”

*****
Final exam

Final exam. AMH 4231.  Spring 2006.  The exam has to be turned in on or before 5:00 pm on December 14. You can put it in the cardboard box marked “Exams” in the box beside the door to my office, 236 Keene-Flint, anytime after 9:00 a.m. on December 7 or give it to me in our regular classroom during the scheduled exam period, which is 3-5 pm on December 14.  It is imperative that you retain an identical copy of the paper that you turn in, whether you put it in the box or hand it to me personally.  Please staple the multiple choice answer sheet to the written part of the exam.

Part 1.  Answer all 10 multiple choice questions on the attached answer sheet.  Be sure to put your name on the sheet and staple it to the essay part of your exam.  These answers are worth 3 points each, for a total of 30 points.

1.  Which of the following statements about US social and cultural development during the period ca. 1920-1945 is the most accurate:  a)  sustained prosperity all but eliminated ethnic and racial discrimination; b) overall, Americans in 1945 were more tolerant and accepting of religious and racial diversity than was the case a quarter century earlier; c) electronic media, notably films and the radio, promoted gender equality; d) such measures as the Immigration Act of 1924 tended to increase the cultural and ethnic diversity of the US.

2. With respect to the overall thrust and significance of the New Deal, which of the following statements is the most defendable: a) according to Lawson, FDR and his advisors had no coherent approach to political economy; b) the New Deal was notable for its legislative support for the rights and aspirations of women; c) New Deal housing policy was atypical in that it targeted the middle class as the chief beneficiary of its programs; d) the New Deal left the fundamental distribution of power and wealth in American society largely unchanged.

3. Which of the following statements about US foreign policy between the wars is the most accurate: a) the vigorous internationalist stance of the early New Deal reversed the isolationist impulse that predominated in the 1920s; b) while the term “isolationism” may fairly be applied to the attitudes that members of Congress and the public in general harbored during the 1930s, it is misleading when applied to the 1920s; c) recent revelations show that under both Hoover and FDR the US secretly encouraged the rise of Hitler as a counterweight to expanding Soviet power; d) as evidenced by the Stimson Doctrine, the US relied principally on military strength to discourage Japanese and German expansionism in the 1930s.

4.  Which of the following statements about working-class Americans in the period ca. 1917-1945 is the most accurate:  a) union membership declined steadily during this period; b) ironically, it was the Republican administrations of the 1920s that were responsible for the key labor legislation of this period; c) the federal government continued in its long-established stance of hostility toward the goals and ambitions of organized labor; d) wartime conditions proved advantageous to the economic interests of workers and the organizational ambitions of the labor movement.

5.  According to O’Neill and Zieger: a) Roosevelt lagged behind public opinion in his resistance to German aggressiveness in the 1930s; b) the US unnecessarily antagonized the Japanese during the 1930s; c) US adherence to the Tri-Partite Pact in 1940 made war with Japan inevitable; d) military leaders such as Gen. Douglas MacArthur took all reasonable steps to guard against a Japanese attack but were undermined (“betrayed” is hardly too strong a word) by Roosevelt.

6.  In comparing the roles of African Americans in the two world wars, which of the following statements is the most legitimate:  a) the desegregation of the armed forces during World War II provided opportunities for African Americans unavailable to their World War I counterparts; b) during WWII, the federal government took more vigorous and positive steps to combat racial discrimination than was the case during WWI; c) deprived of combat roles in World War I, African Americans provided the bulk of the infantry manpower in the Pacific during World War II; d) in comparison with African Americans during the Second World War, African Americans during World War I exerted much greater political clout.

7  Which of the following statements best captures ONeill’s view of developments in the US domestic economy during World War II: a) both federal officials and military leaders devised bold and innovative ways of making use of the enormous potential of American women for wartime service; b) neither Congress nor governmental officials made adequate use of the public’s willingness to sacrifice for the war effort; c) despite full employment, living standards actually declined during the war; d) despite our reputation for mass production, we were consistently outproduced by the Germans, Japanese, and Russians.

8.  During World War II: a) the expansion of the tax base and the introduction of withholding taxes marked drastic changes in the relationship of ordinary citizens to the federal tax system; b) liberal Democrats continued to make gains in Congress at the expense of the so-called “conservative coalition”; c) strikes all but disappeared from American domestic life; d) the wartime federal bureaucracy functioned with remarkable efficiency and coherence.

9. With which of the following statements about the atomic bombs would O’Neill agree: a) we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki mainly in hopes of limiting Soviet advances in Asia and discouraging their ambitions in Europe; b) the decision to use these weapons was made only after lengthy, soul-searching debates at the highest level of government; c) we dropped these bombs because doing so seemed the quickest and least costly way of forcing Japan to surrender; d) racist stereotypes were responsible for the decision to drop the bombs.

10.  Which of the following statements about diplomatic and military affairs during World War II is the most accurate: a) since official US policy gave the war in Asia the higher priority in the allocation of resources and manpower, the fact that victory came first in Europe is quite remarkable; b) diversion of critical air power to bomb the extermination camps significantly delayed the D-Day invasion; c) like his mentor Woodrow Wilson, FDR repudiated all forms of diplomatic power politics in the conduct of World War II  ; d) US strategic and diplomatic goals differed significantly from those of America’s main World War II allies.
   


Part 2.  Essay.  Write an essay on number 2 or number 10.  Using your chosen answer as the first sentence, defend in detail the answer you chose and explain briefly, but precisely, why you rejected each of the others.  Refamiliarize yourself with and follow the take home exam instructions–including the need to consult an outside source–as contained in the on-line syllabus.  This essay is worth 70 points.
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