Social Upheaval in the Roaring Twenties

Excerpts from Strike Jones,New Soviet Man: Social Upheaval and the Workers’ Movement (San Francisco: Vanguard Books, 1979)*

The so-called “Roaring Twenties” showcased portents of the upheaval to come. Within the civil society of the late United States, new cultural norms regarding race, ethnicity, sex and sexuality would crystallize, as a diverse grouping of the dispossessed struggled to assert itself against the dominant culture.

With the existing American civic religion interred, along with nearly one million men, in the charnel house of the Great War, a great void had formed in the superstructure of American society. The scar tissues of the war effort, the despotic measures taken to ensure victory, and the drawing of battle lines on class had made healing and a new Americanism impossible.

In the place of a civic religion and a cultural moment that could assimilate the myriad peoples inhabiting the North American continent, the civil society fractured into separate “pillars”. These pillars represented wholly incompatible world views on society, culture, and the interplay between the state, the community and the individual.
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Unlike the bourgeois pillar, which represented an often fractious coalition of competing economic, social and political institutions, the Workers’ Party was a central hub of a unified counterculture. In opposition it could exert a level of unity that was impossible for the bourgeoisie, for it had been forged in the fires of the Biennio Rosso as the negation of bourgeois society.

While this unity of the working-class as a class for itself waned in the latter half of the 1920s, this consciousness informed daily life for workers. The Workers’ Party had by 1925 erected a state-within-a-state, with wholly proletarian institutions serving the animal and human needs of the working class.

A worker in one of the strongholds of the party would live in a housing co-operative, or be protected from stingy and rapacious landlords by the Tenant’s Union. He reads the party newspaper while he eats his breakfast. Breakfast itself was bought at the Bread and Roses grocery co-operative, established by the Solidarity union to provide for its members. While he goes to his union job, his wife would see the kids off to a local public school in a party controlled school district. At school, the children would learn in a progressive education environment, or they too would go on strike until reforms were implemented. While he eats his lunch at a factory canteen run by his union, his wife would return books to a civic library established by the party. For his leisure, he would take part in a sporting or civic club, or socialize with fellow workers at the Union Hall over a half-liter of beer. His children would socialize with other working class children in the Pioneer League.

These institutions were made possible because at least economically, the United States had won the war as well as the peace. But their nucleus had formed as a sort of desperate act of self-defence by a working-class that had spent years enduring a constant primary emergency, in which their lives were totally expendable, and for whom survival, let alone thriving, had become synonymous with working-class political militancy. Everything that had once been solid melted into air.
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Proletarian culture in the 1920s was deliberately vanguard. The old moral lessons, the hallowed churches, the institutions of marriage, family, God and state; they were all the weapons of the enemy. Something new had to take their place.

This is not to say that this process was uniform or easy. It was often internally combative, and workers in the 20s would still be afflicted by numerous prejudices that would shock us in the present. But workers had correctly identified racism, chauvinism and sexism as barriers to emancipation and character flaws in himself to be overcome, however imperfect they might be in carrying out that task.

While the primary battle ground of the 1920s had been the destruction of the color line, this cultural war was not limited to questions of race. No aspect of life was untouched in this period, from child-rearing to etiquette at funerals.
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In the 27 August 1922 issue of The Sunday Worker , Dr. Martin Klein*, a pediatrician from New York City, published an article titled “Children Are The Future.” Described by DeWitt Wallace, arch-reactionary and publisher of now defunct literary Reader’s Digest , as”a bomb planted under the American family,” the article critiqued traditional child-rearing practices as an artifact of class society.

As Klein put it, familial discipline was “the replication of social violence from one generation to another.” The use of despotic parenting styles, the withholding of affection, and violent punishment served the purpose of habituating youth into the violence of class domination.

In his view, this was imperative for workers to reject this “learned self-maiming impulse.” And like all cycles of abuse, its end was a bitter pill to swallow. Anticipating the objection that his readers would make, that they had learned harsh discipline from their parents and yet had turned out just fine, Klein countered that the tradition had been preached for time immemorial for a reason: it served the interests of the ruling class, not the interests of the disciplined.

Klein was not the first of his kind; the movement for abolition always begins with the first victim. But in this moment where the mask of false-consciousness had been shattered, it could finally gain ground.
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The economic needs of modernity had made the traditional spheres of the sexes no longer tenable. In the 1920s, this slowly building dialectic began to reach a rupture point in Europe and North America. The deaths of so many young, able bodied men had required women to pick up the slack in the factories, trades and shops. In the United States, women’s role in the workforce during the war became increasingly permanent.

With these new burdens came new struggles. And this went far beyond the struggle for an Equal Rights amendment to the US constitution, which had gripped the fourth estate since its unveiling on 8 March 1921.

The struggle against sexual chauvinism in the workers’ movement was at times bitter. Many considered it a “distraction” against more pressing concerns such as the struggle against racial chauvinism, or the immediate revolutionary task. But more forward thinking elements of the mostly male leadership had seized the issue. Just as Engels had noted the anthropological function of the so-called “traditional family” in the reproduction of class society, leaders such as C.E. Ruthenberg advanced very iconoclastic notions in the party’s official organs.

The general line of the party was a well-meaning if naive brand of radical anti-essentialism. Men and women were held to be little different beyond their sex organs. Their role in society was historically contingent and not owing to any transhistoric biological reality. Male and female spheres in society were archaisms even in bourgeois society, inherited forms of oppression that had forgotten its original purpose and now utilized to divide the proletariat against itself.

The party sought to teach its sons and daughters to be “complete beings” rather than merely men or women. Fashions became more androgynous. Members corrected sexist habits of speech and conduct, while women began exerting their place within the party.

More transgressive were the serious linguistic reforms being proposed, such as the revival of the archaic ‘wer-’ for maleness, to deny maleness a universal quality in the word ‘man’. Among the avant-garde, one would no longer speak of man and woman, but rather werman and woman. Like all linguistic reforms, its impact in the first decade was limited. Its adoption by authors of literary and speculative fiction in New York City’s Greenwich Village spared it from being lost to the sands of time.
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Among the earliest victories by the Socialist Labor Party was the reversal of assimilation by European ethnix. They had won back the right to speak their mother tongues and still be accepted begrudgingly as Americans. In most states, secondary language education in primary and secondary school became an institution, and even Anglo children were expected to be bilingual.

In the Great War and Roaring Twenties, this proved to a boon. Military and business interests learned the value in a large population of polyglots for America’s expanding global presence. Aside from the hard-right of nativists, the multicentricity of the many nations that had immigrated to the US was no longer greatly controversial, and fears of the diminishing of the English language proved totally unfounded.

In the cities and in the midwest, the German language experienced a renaissance in the Oughts and the Teens. Germans were the largest group by self-identification, and now with it being taught in primary schools in many districts, the language climbed back into relevance. Attempts at repression were ham-handed and short-lived in the Great War. In 1922, a group of educators, academics, and publishers established the North American German Language Council, an ostensibly politically neutral group to regulate teaching and orthography in German. But given how many first and second generation German immigrants were socialists, and their strength in the movement, neutrality was impossible.

The NAGLC would be investigated for subversive activities by the Secret Service, fearing that it would be yet another conduit for espionage, and its role in publishing and translating many articles and books from Germany that were politically subversive. But it also developed new rules for German orthography better suited to cohabitation with English, as well as new dictionaries reflecting the wealth of new loanwords in the North American German dialect;

Similarly, Yiddish thrived as New York City became home to the largest population of Jews in the world. Following the wave of Jewish migration at the end of the Great War, the city’s population had reached nearly seven million, of which two million were Jews. Yiddish became an official language of the City in 1919, along with English, Italian, and Chinese. Yiddish became a common second language even among Gentiles, and a flowering of Yiddish language literature, poetry and theater began soon after.

But the sunsetting of the Chinese Exclusion Act presented new challenges. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, millions emigrated from East Asia, fleeing civil war, repression and poverty, and enticed by fables of a New World where the streets were paved with gold.

Work was more than plentiful in the Great War, but the streets were far from gilded. Chinese, Korean and Japanese immigrants were initially largely excluded from the workers’ movement and broader civil society. They huddled together in “Chinatowns” for protection against reactionary gangs.

But the parasitic landlords and short-sighted capitalists ensured that “Yellow Peril” fears could be overcome. Existing Chinese-American communities formed the bridge to the broader labor movement. New language federations were established in the unions and the party to ensure their constituents the means to participate in broader society. The cultural exchange with East Asia greatly enriched life in the industrial cities of the West Coast, the Midwest and the Mid-Atlantic.

Many of the institutions founded by immigrants would become pillars of the workers’ movement, like the Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Commune, which would operate many canteens and grocery co-ops across the Midwest. Greater East-Asia would serve as a cultural ambassador, introducing a number of new products to the American palette such as soju, kim, doufu, and chili sauces.
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The Roaring Twenties were, compared to succeeding decades, a relatively good time for sexual minorities across Europe and North America. Unquestionably, the greatest explosion of new freedom occurred in Weimar Germany, the United States, and the Soviet Union.

In the United States, this flowering is attributable to a large cosmopolitan urban population, the shattering of the moral authority of traditional institutions (especially religious), and the growth of new artistic industries.

The translation and publication of Magnus Hirschfield’s pioneer research on human sexuality by the communist literary magazine The Liberator spurred on the first movements of sexual minorities from the shadows into the light of day. Hirschfield’s work had struck a chord; the unspoken truth about so many male professions, from sailing and the military to logging and mining, was that situational sexuality was rule rather than the exception. Many trades isolated men from women for months at a time or more, and men would quietly make do with each other’s company.

When religious authorities condemned sodomites who perverted nature and thus God with their unnatural acts, The Liberator ‘s chief editor Max Eastman very boldly claimed that affections between men were normal and unshameful. Nor was preferring company of the same-sex an indication of mental disease or moral defect.

Slowly, public figures began leaving the closet. References to homosexuality began to be openly made in the bawdy and unregulated Hollywood of that era, in literature, in poetry. Attempts at legal suppression failed under a Supreme Court that upheld such utterances against charges of obscenity.

Two broad subcultures developed. Uranian subculture developed following the publication and popularization of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ on male homosexuality, particularly among the Spartacus League paramilitaries. These militants were largely young unmarried men, and beyond the role of protecting against reactionary violence, the early Spartacus League gave a fraternal sense of belonging to a large corps of young men who felt out of place in the world.

Unlike most contemporary examples of military androphilia, Uranian culture in the Spartacists was largely non-violent and non-abusive. As poet Hart Crane described of his time in the League, “We fought together as comrades. And we tended to our wounds as comrades. Our affections were as equals, not master and servant. We’d had our fill of servitude in the National Army.”

Sapphic subculture had been spurred to life by the new independence women had taken, made all the more urgent by the population imbalance between young men and women due to the Great War. It too had long hidden roots in American culture. “Boston Marriages”, the long-term cohabitation between two independent women had been well known for decades. Such so-called “romantic friendships” were devoid of a sexual dimension—in the public eye. The Sapphics in theatre and literature began breaking from this chaste image in the 1920s.

They took their name from the ancient Greek poet Sappho, whose translated writings had long been a subject of controversy over their content. Many a devout classicist had continued to insist that the desire she expressed in her poetry was purely heterosexual, or even more confusingly, purely chaste. But new translations of Sappho’s poetry exploded in popularity among the “New Women” of the Roaring Twenties.

Starting in 1925, a quotation from Sappho adorned the masthead of the communist women’s magazine New Woman : “Sweet mother, I cannot weave; slender Aphrodite has overcome me with longing for a girl.” The rise of casual sex among the youth in the Twenties came with a rise of same-sex experimentation.

Like Uranian, in this period Sapphic did not mean exclusive homosexuality. Sexual identity was an emerging but still not wholly formed concept. Uranian and Sapphic applied to behavior and attraction, and thus equally applied to what would now be called ambisexuals.

This is not to say that casual homophobia didn’t exist, nor that it was free from backlash. But the backlash in the 1920s was largely contained to small sects of reactionaries. Attempts by religious authorities to condemn these perversions fell on deaf ears, for they’d shattered their moral authority selling pie-in-the-sky to hungry bellies on earth. And it was bad for business for the liberal Republican establishment to involve themselves in people’s private lives.
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The United States had somewhat undeservedly gained a reputation for piety among European observers, who extrapolated the phenomenon of the Second and supposed Third Great Awakenings to the present. Whatever historic differences there were, the major religious denominations in the United States faced serious challenges in the carnage of the Great War, and the Social War at home.

Historically, the Socialist Labor Party and the industrial unions had been strongly anti-clerical. Even the religiously inspired socialists among them heaped scorn and condemnation upon the existing Churchs, both Catholic and Protestant. The humiliating demands of many Christian “charity” groups had earned the contempt of workers. Groups like the Salvation Army, lampooned as the “Starvation Army”, cared more for the salvation of souls than they did for the salvation of living humans. The demands of obeisance and the frequent intrusions of moral busybodies invited a political critique of Christianity, one which even religious socialists took up with enthusiasm.

The mass death and repression brought on by the Great War turned this cracks into a great rupture. Anti-clericalism had transformed into atheism in the Workers’ Party. Communist activists took up the Marxist critique of religion like a bayonet, and found a receptive audience.

This is not to say that workers all became atheists overnight. But whatever their private religious beliefs, in the public political lives they led, they acted like atheists. The promise of posthumous salvation could no longer be stomached. The moment demanded action in the here-and-now.

This militancy did not go unchallenged. Religious socialists remained in the party and often pushed against the more direct measures by the party. But their influence was sharply constrained by democratic centralism. The workers themselves had already left or been kicked from their churches, if they had even had one. Among the youth, the difference was even more stark. The criticism that Marxian scientific socialism was a political religion had at least some truth to it, particularly among the zealots growing up within the ranks of the Pioneer League and other left youth groups. While the Boy Scouts made their first plank of their Scout Promise “to do my Duty to God and Country,” the Pioneer Catechism stated “The only church that illuminates is a burning one.”

Attempts by various state and local governments to inhibit this as obscenity or corrupting the youth were stymied by a robust application of the First Amendment’s protections for speech and religion, and the dominant liberal Republican coalition.

It wasn’t simply revolutionary atheism that grew, but also a proliferation of new religious movements flowered among the working and middle classes. These new sects proliferated vaguely aligned to the political right and left. Some, like the Ecumenists, were Christian groups that had split from mainline groups more on practical-political grounds than theologica. Theologically, the Ecumenist groups were standard Nicene Creed Christians, devoted to a social gospel on the well-trodden ground that faith without works is dead.

Others were more theological heterodox, especially the Fundamentalist splinters, who condemned theological Modernism for the crisis of faith in the people, and were aligned very closely with reactionary right-wing groups. Their increasingly suspect theology was obsessed with a refoundation of a mythical Original Church, and increasingly fanciful ideas about what the original Apostolic Church had espoused.

In tandem with the crises of Christianity, new religious groups developed among the middle classes no longer spiritually satisfied with Christianity. The most prominent of which is usually bundled together as Heathenry, the loose conglomeration of Anglo-Saxon, Nordic and Germanic neopagans began congealing in the 1920s. While their roots extended into the late 19th century in the old world, American Heathenry sprang to life in the wake of the Great War, propelled by disillusioned veterans and widows.

Heathenry in the Old World was strongly connected to Romanticist reactionary and Völkische movements, but in the United States developed in a more liberal-left leaning direction. While it shared the reconstructionist aims of its Old World counterpart, transplanted from the old lands the New World pagans were at least somewhat aware it being an invented tradition. The primordial link between blood and soil was severed, and in the ethnic melting pot of the United States it could not be reconstructed.

Rather than Romanticism, the writings of New World Heathens were informed by a deep sense of religious trauma. Heathens such as prominent Massachusetts based writer and head of the Hearg temple Owen Wilde* found the root of the conversion in the “problem of evil.” Wilde’s experience as an infantry officer in the National Army presented him with a paradox between the Christian notion of an all powerful, all-loving god, and the slaughter he witnessed.

Wilde and the other Heathens resolved this paradox by rejecting a belief in an all-powerful Godhead. The gods of the Heathens were more limited and flawed. Heathenry’s reverence for the wilderness and animism also appealed to those who had been wounded by the cold, mechanical nature of industrial life.

While the Heathens resolved the problem of evil with more human comprehensible gods, the neo-Gnostics went the opposite direction. These mystery cults developed on the Ivy League campuses and began to spread. Like their ancient forebears, the new Gnostics took solace in the incomprehensibility of the divine, and the conflict between spirit and matter. The material world created by the Demiurge was flawed and sinful. Transcending this crude matter was their spiritual calling by learning the mysteries of the pure spiritual realm.
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The Roaring Twenties upheaval was felt most keenly in the South. The war effort had brought new federal money to the impoverished South. With the railroads and dams came new factories and cities exploding in size to meet the demands of the war effort. This process did not abate with demobilization. Wood made cracking the “Solid South” a priority for the Republican Party.

For the Democratic Party, the promise of the Twenties was an existential threat. The splintering of the party, and bearing the political cost of the war and demobilization had destroyed its electoral presence outside the South. In the 1920 election season at least, the Southern states remained effectively one-party states, but they were living on borrowed time. The promise of new industries, better jobs, and modern amenities were luring some white voters to Wood’s coalition, and the 1924 Alignment put the Southern states in play for the first time in decades.

The Democratic leadership was not stupid. But it was placed in the position of triangulating between the armed reactionaries on its right-wing, and the insurgent Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party on its left (supported by northern Republican money). In the Red Summer of 1920, the KKK had disastrously overreached in its attempts to terrorise the black population.

The high profile racial pogroms and lynching of decorate war heroes brought national attention to South, and galvanised black militancy among tenant farmers and industrial workers. The threat of terrorist reprisal by the various Red Army Fractions made lynching an unsafe practice.

The Democratic Party began its pivot towards the center by condemning the KKK, and in some places beginning the repeal of Jim Crow laws on its own initiative. But this change of heart should be seen for the realpolitik it was, and not as a principled move as their modern counterparts would have us believe.

Above all, the struggle undertaken by blacks in the South was a struggle first and foremost for life itself. The sharp recession brought on by demobilisation had placed the black population in a state of primary emergency, and rhetoric echoing of the Hitlerian line of “useless eaters” produced terrorist violence against their communities like it had in every past economic upheaval.

But the worst fears of racists had been, ironically, proven true. The need to mobilise blacks for war service had planted a bomb under the Southern racial hierarchy. Men who had been treated as comrades and heroes in the war, who had charged headlong into mortal combat, could not go back to the civilian life of abject servitude. Nor could white veterans stomach the abuses inflicted upon their comrades.

Black and white veterans formed the core of new civil rights groups in the South. This expression of organic solidarity was far more dangerous than any bomb. Crossing the color line was a direct refutation of the bedrock of Southern society. Police attempting to break-up a sit-in were not merely beating black men and women they considered subhuman. They also had to beat their white neighbors too. And these soldiers trained a new generation of activists to take the beatings that they had spent their entire lives trying to avoid.

The threat of force is more effective than its exercise. Force is messy. It is expensive. And most of all, it invites reprisal. The national attention brought by non-violent protests being savaged put economic pressure on the Southern states. The violence was a bad look for many national firms looking to expand to the South, especially with the unions exerting their might. Boycott, divest and sanction campaigns promoted by civic groups coupled with the threat of strikes by the unions greased the wheels for action by the establishment.

For the national political leadership, the situation in the South was an international level embarrassment that threatened the United States’ moral authority. And it was bad for business. And above all, for the man at the head of the federal government, it was a moral obscenity. President Wood’s political ambitions for the South had great optics. He turned the Workers’ Party from a fifth column at least temporarily into begrudging supporter, and returned the country to social peace. Cracking the Solid South could mean a permanent Republican majority. But it should not be forgotten that it was an incredibly risky strategy at the time which drew bitter criticism from members of his own party up until it succeeded. He may have been handed the moment by circumstances, but Wood undeniably took up the challenge because he earnestly believed it was right.