American Nobel Prize Winners of the 1920s

Several Americans in the 1920s took home this most prestigious international award.

Charles G. Dawes: Peace, 1925 (for his work on the post-Great War reparations plan; Dawes also served as U.S. vice-president under Coolidge, as well as being a diplomat and banker)

Arthur H. Compton: Physics, 1927 (for demonstrating that light was both a wave and a particle; he would later contribute to the Manhattan Project and serve as a university chancellor)

Frank B. Kellogg: Peace, 1929 (for his leadership in producing the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a multi-national treaty endorsing “the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy”; Kellogg also served in the U.S. Senate and as secretary of state)

Below:  Kellogg with Pres. Calvin Coolidge and his wife Grace.

The 1920s: Immigration Drastically Limited

So, what evidence can you find in the chart below that immigration numbers were enormously restricted by law in the 1920s? What evidence is shown that Northern Europe was still strongly favored?

American War Deaths

This may seem like a gruesome topic, but it can be useful to consider the relative size of the many wars the U.S. has been a part of. They vary enormously in size, scope, and duration. Where does World War I fit? See below (only major wars are included).

American Revolution:  @25,000

War of 1812:  @15,000

Mexican War:  13,283

Civil War:  @650,000

Spanish-Am. War:  2,446

Philippine War:  4,196

World War I:  116,516

World War II:  405,399

Korean War:  36,516

Vietnam War:  58,209

Afghanistan War:  4,419 (as of March 2020)

Iraq War:  4,497

The death toll in World War I is especially dramatic considering that American troops were in combat zones for only about a year in significant numbers. Just over half of those who died were felled by disease rather than by weapons, but the overwhelming majority would not have died unless they had been exposed to the crowded, disease-spreading conditions of the training camps and battlefront. In class, our coverage may have left you surprised that so many survived.

Declaring War in 1917

The United States Congress responded to Pres. Woodrow Wilson's request for a war declaration by voting on April 6, 1917. The vote totals show strong support but certainly not unanimity.

The Senate voted to declare war 82-6 with 8 abstaining. Among those who did not support the war was progressive leader Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin, later a major third-party candidate for the presidency.

The House of Representatives voted in support of the war declaration 373-50 with 9 abstaining. Opposition to the war was bipartisan, though more Republicans than Democrats voted no. Two smaller-party representatives (a Prohibitionist and a Socialist) also voted no.

What pushed many of these elected officials to vote for war when many of them had previously campaigned as neutralists or peace candidates? The resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare by Germany in early 1917 changed minds; so did the Zimmerman Telegram (covered in class).

Below, this is what the Zimmerman Telegram looked like before British intelligence decoded it and passed the contents on to the United States government.

Weapons on the Lusitania?

(Night students: this is a sneak preview of what we'll cover after the quiz. Day students: now you know.)

In 1982, decades after the RMS Lusitania was sunk by German u-boats in the First World War, the British government admitted that the passenger ship was carrying not only passengers but also munitions (guns and ammunition) in significant quantities--hundreds of tons.

The gunpowder-filled shells and large-caliber bullets the ship was carrying may have set off a secondary explosion when the torpedoes hit, causing eye-witnesses to wonder if an additional torpedo strike had occurred. (The secondary explosion might also have been the boiler.)

The German Empire noted that the ship was in the blockade zone around Britain and charged that it was carrying hundreds of tons of weapons, a fact denied at the time by the British who wanted to maintain good relations with the United States. Among the 1198 deaths when the Lusitania was sunk were 128 Americans.

This event helped shift public opinion in the U.S. against Germany and toward Britain although the U.S. was officially neutral and would not declare war for almost two years.

In your view, in light of these facts, was the u-boat justified in sinking the Lusitania? The answer to that question is not history but ethics, though those two subjects interact with each other constantly.

Many of the almost 1200 dead were buried in mass graves, as shown in the photo below.

Two Things

First, we have a quiz coming up. This reminder has been brought to you by your grade point average.

Second, check this video from the Khan Academy on thinking like a (an, if being traditional) historian. It's less than 9 minutes long and provides an overview that students will benefit from.

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/precontact-and-early-colonial-era/how-to-think-like-a-historian/v/thinking-like-a-historian

U.S.S. Maine Sunk

The sinking of the U.S.S. Maine in the harbor of Havana, Cuba, on Feb. 15, 1898, helped provoke the Spanish-American War, even though no one at the time could be certain that the Spanish were responsible. Though 94 men (including 16 uninjured) survived, 261 were killed by the explosion.

Yellow journalistic newspapers loudly proclaimed Spanish responsibility, while privately the newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer said that no sane person would believe that Spain would take such provocative action.

Two months later, the United States declared war on Spain. The demise of the Maine was a contributing factor. While it is not possible to conclude with absolute certainty what caused the disaster, many modern studies have asserted that a coal bed fire adjacent to a boiler resulted in the explosion that sank the ship.

Below is a photograph of the wreckage visible above water in Havana Harbor before it was cleared.

A Few More Progressive Leaders

The following were not mentioned during class coverage or received only a passing comment, but they had an enormous impact. Alternate entries or lists are certainly possible; many reformers were at work during the Progressive Era (roughly 1890 to 1920). I'll present the ones I selected alphabetically by last name.

1. Jane Addams:  established inner city "settlement houses," which provided social services, education, and all kinds of support for the poor. She later won the Nobel Peace Prize.

2. Louis Brandeis:  this lawyer became a champion of the powerless and helped push reform in both the courts and in public opinion. Later, he would became one of the greatest Supreme Court justices ever to serve.

3. William Jennings Bryan: he ran for president as a major party candidate three times and lost all three, but is on this list for his support of election reform and revised monetary policies. (He also opposed imperialist policies.)

4. W.E.B. Du Bois:  the strongest voice of the era for civil rights for blacks. Du Bois's intellectual development of key ideas inspired many African Americans. He was the era’s leading voice against racism (which he tied to capitalism).

5. Charlotte Perkins Gilman:  also a novelist and short story writer, Gilman was known in the period for her study of gender and economics. She troubled some because she demanded reforms far beyond the right to vote for women.

6. Robert M. LaFollette, Sr.:  he served as Wisconsin representative, governor, and senator and ran for president, but is best known today for his tireless devotion to a variety of Progressive causes. He spoke and fought against "vast corporate combinations."

7. Alice Paul:  she served as the main leader and strategist for the final push for the Nineteenth Amendment, recognizing the right of women to vote. She also continued to work on women's rights for the rest of her long life.

8. Theodore Roosevelt:  before, during, and after his presidency, he pursued a number of Progressive causes, most especially in conservation. Part of his legacy is our national park system.

9. Ida Tarbell:  this muckraker journalist investigated Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller's monolithic corporation. Her findings helped break up the massive organization following a trial on violations of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

10. Booker T. Washington:  a black activist, Washington stood in strong contrast to W.E.B. Du Bois (see above) by emphasizing not civil (political) rights so much as economic development. The Progressive Era was somewhat more ready to listen to Washington, though many people today more greatly admire Du Bois.

Beware of the Internet

The photo below appears all over the internet and is often captioned, "Susan B. Anthony being arrested after voting."

But it's not.

This is Ada Wright being arrested after being knocked to the ground during a women's voting rights protest in London in 1910.

Just because an image appears online and is captioned does not mean that it's accurate.

The facts, briefly, are these. Anthony and 14 other women were arrested for voting in Rochester, New York, in the 1872 election. Only Anthony was brought to trial (though the election inspectors that did not prevent them from voting were arrested, convicted, and jailed before Pres. Grant pardoned them). At the trial, in 1873, the judge ordered the jury to deliver a guilty verdict. Later this controversial move was ruled illegal. He fined Anthony $100, but she announced that she would not pay the fine and he released her anyway. This served both Anthony’s cause—to gain publicity for the women’s rights movement—and the judge’s, because under those circumstances the court decision could not be appealed to higher courts and the case was closed.

Historians, first and foremost, need to establish and report (and then consider and analyze) facts.

Secret Presidential Surgery

Which president had surgery to remove a cancerous jaw—and successfully kept it secret?

Check this short article for the astonishing details.

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A Yacht, A Mustache: How A President Hid His Tumor (June 6, 2011, report on NPR's Morning Edition)

It's In The Mustache: According to [historian Matthew] Algeo, President Grover Cleveland believed that if anything happened to his trademark mustache during his surgery at sea, the public would know something was wrong.

In the summer of 1893, President Grover Cleveland disappeared for four days to have secret surgery on a yacht. It was the beginning of his second term as president and the country was entering a depression, a delicate time in which a president's health was inextricably linked to that of the nation. So Cleveland decided to keep the surgery a secret — and so it stayed for years.

Today, that secret is the subject of Matthew Algeo's new book, The President Is a Sick Man. Algeo tells NPR's Steve Inskeep about the presidential illness that launched a cover-up:

"Shortly after he took office for the second time in 1893, he noticed a little bump on the roof of his mouth," Algeo says. "Around June ... he had noticed it had grown quite large. And the doctor diagnosed it as cancer, [saying], 'It's a bad looking tenant, and I would have it evicted immediately.'"

Cleveland worried that news of his diagnosis would send Wall Street — and the country — into a panic. According to Algeo, that wasn't an unreasonable concern.

"It would be a big deal today," he says. "It was an even bigger deal then because at the time there was a stigma attached to cancer. Newspapers would call it 'the dread disease.'"

So Cleveland decided to have the tumor secretly removed. The plan was for the president to announce he was taking a friend's yacht, the Oneida, on a four-day fishing trip from New York to his summer home in Cape Cod.

"And it was on that yacht that this operation was performed," Algeo says. "They assembled a team of six surgeons. [It] took about 90 minutes. They used ether as the anesthesia and they removed the tumor along with about five teeth and a large part of the president's upper left jawbone."

The surgeons managed to extract the tumor through the president's mouth, which meant there was no noticeable scarring and the president's trademark mustache was left untouched — key conditions for keeping the public in the dark.

Algeo says the operation was an extraordinary achievement in American medicine.

"The doctors took incredible risks. I mean, it was really foolhardy," Algeo says. "I talked to a couple of oral surgeons [while] researching the book, and they still marvel at this operation: that they were able to do this on a moving boat; [that] they did it very quickly. A similar operation today would take several hours; they did it in 90 minutes."

The 'Press' Gets The Scoop

Even back in 1893, Algeo says, it was pretty unusual for the president to disappear for four days, so it wasn't long before people started talking.

Two months after the president's "fishing trip," Philadelphia Press reporter E.J. Edwards published a story about the surgery which he had confirmed with one of Cleveland's doctors. The president flatly denied Edwards' story and even went so far as to launch a smear campaign to discredit the reporter.

"So nobody believed E.J. Edwards," Algeo says. "He was dismissed as a disgrace to journalism."

Edwards' story may never have made its way into history books if one of Cleveland's doctors, William Williams Keen, hadn't eventually come forward.

"Twenty-four years after the operation — when all the other principals were dead — there were only three witnesses left to the operation," Algeo says. "And [Keen] decided it would be the right thing to do to publish an article to explain what really happened and to vindicate E.J. Edwards."

The closest Cleveland ever came to confessing to the surgery was in a letter he wrote to a friend after the first doctor talked to Edwards. It reads, "The report you saw regarding my health resulted from a most astounding breach of professional duty on the part of a medical man ... I tell you this in strict confidence for the policy here has been to deny and discredit this story."

(The story continues briefly but the portion above is most relevant to our Gilded Age coverage.)

Jim Crow: "A Way of Life"

As Reconstruction failed, Southern states began creating Jim Crow laws. Many students have heard this term but might not be familiar with its meaning. Here's a definition from the website of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University in Michigan. (This museum site has a number of other helpful features for students who find Reconstruction and its aftermath particularly interesting.)

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Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s. Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-black laws. It was a way of life. Under Jim Crow, African Americans were relegated to the status of second class citizens. Jim Crow represented the legitimization of anti-black racism. Many Christian ministers and theologians taught that whites were the Chosen people, blacks were cursed to be servants, and God supported racial segregation. Craniologists, eugenicists, phrenologists, and Social Darwinists, at every educational level, buttressed the belief that blacks were innately intellectually and culturally inferior to whites. Pro-segregation politicians gave eloquent speeches on the great danger of integration: the mongrelization of the white race. Newspaper and magazine writers routinely referred to blacks as niggers, coons, and darkies; and worse, their articles reinforced anti-black stereotypes. Even children's games portrayed blacks as inferior beings (see [link, active at the website] "From Hostility to Reverence: 100 Years of African-American Imagery in Games"). All major societal institutions reflected and supported the oppression of blacks.

The Jim Crow system was undergirded by the following beliefs or rationalizations: whites were superior to blacks in all important ways, including but not limited to intelligence, morality, and civilized behavior; sexual relations between blacks and whites would produce a mongrel race which would destroy America; treating blacks as equals would encourage interracial sexual unions; any activity which suggested social equality encouraged interracial sexual relations; if necessary, violence must be used to keep blacks at the bottom of the racial hierarchy.

What Else Was Happening?

This week in class we confront the challenges of Reconstruction and its ultimate failures.

Daytime students started that on Monday and will finish it early in the class period on Wednesday. Nighttime students will ride that bronco starting at 6:00 p.m. Wednesday night.

But we will also look at some more cheerful--or at least neutral--aspects of the time period. Reconstruction overlaps with another period we'll start covering next week; it's called the Gilded Age. It was a whirling mixture of progress, greed, accomplishment, violence, cultural achievement, huge inequities of wealth, and more.

We'll look at several developments, many of them accomplishments, of the early Gilded Age.

One hint about that coverage which will spark the question, "Why is this here?":  barbed wire.

Presidents Under Arms

The following presidents served in the armed forces during the Civil War. All were Union (Northern) officers.

Abraham Lincoln:  commander in chief

Andrew Johnson:  brigadier general, military governor of Tennessee

Ulysses Grant:  general of the armies (commanded Union forces for the last part of the war)

Rutherford Hayes: major general, wounded in combat

James Garfield: major general, commanded troops at the Battle of Shiloh

Chester Arthur: brigadier general, administrative posts

Benjamin Harrison: brigadier general, commanded a brigade during Sherman's March to the Sea

William McKinley: brevet major, fought at the Battle of Antietam

Other presidents alive during the war were too young to participate (such as Theodore Roosevelt, who was a toddler when the war began). One president, Grover Cleveland, paid another man $150 to take his place when he was drafted in 1863. This practice was legal at the time.

Below is Ulysses S. Grant when he was a general (not later, when he was president, having been elected principally because of his success in the Civil War).

California in the Civil War

Our state faced a serious secession crisis in 1860 and 1861. Transplanted Southerners formed a majority of the voting population in Southern California as well as in Tulare County. They also formed a sizable minority in San Joaquin, Santa Clara, Monterey, and San Francisco counties.

California voted for Lincoln--just barely--because the Southerners were split between other candidates. Attempts at pulling California out of the Union were suppressed by moving military units, some of them Northern California volunteers, to the strongholds of secession.

Violence erupted in several places throughout the state. As the war progressed, however, California's pro-Union groups prevailed and contributed substantial gold and manpower to the Northern war effort.

Below is a photo from July 4, 1862, of a clash between supporters of the Union and of the Confederacy in San Francisco at the intersection of Montgomery and California streets. That's Nob Hill (before cable cars) in the background.

A Famous Civil War Quote

Often, it's quoted simply as "War is hell," but what Gen. William T. Sherman of the Union said is more nuanced and interesting.