Some notable events, 1928
January 1: Wang Jingwei removes the capital of the Republic of China and the KMT party to Nanjing. The KMT government is internationally recognized, and the country nominally unified with the remaining warlord cliques submitting to the KMT.
January 30: Leon Trotsky is arrested by the OGPU. He assumes a state of passive resistance, and is exiled to Alma Ata in the following month.
February 11: The Winter Olympics open in St. Moritz, Switzerland, the first one held as a separate event from the Summer Olympics.
February 18: Eager to prove his claims to follow the legacy of the late Leonard Wood, President Hoover signs the Muscle Shoals Bill, funding the construction of dams and fertilizer plants in the Tennessee River Valley. Hoover defends this move from the resurgent right-wing of the Republican Party by noting the importance of flood control, and the ready conversion of such chemical works to war production.
February 20 : General elections are held in Japan, the first after the introduction of universal male suffrage. In the runner up to the election date, PM Tanaka suppressed leftists, Communists and suspected Communist sympathizers through widespread arrests, ensuring that his government just barely gets the majority with 234 seats. This would contribute to the growth of nationalist radical societies, who would take on “political converts” from the crackdown.
February 23: Amid Red Army Day celebrations in Moscow, Chairman1 Mikhail Kalinin announces that the Military Academy will be renamed in honor of Mikhail Frunze
March 21: President Hoover awards Clarence Chamberlin the Medal of Honor and a promotion to Lt. Colonel in the Army Reserve for his daring Transatlantic flight.
March 23: Bambi, a Life in the Woods, a 1923 Austrian novel by Felix Salten, is translated into English by Whittaker Chambers, a journalist for the Daily Worker.
April 4: Max Eastman, editor-in-chief of the Daily Worker , publishes an article in the paper defending Leon Trotsky. While some in the Comintern call for Eastman’s dismissal, Stalin himself treats the matter with dialog and rejects more heavy handed action.
April 8: The Chicago branch of the Workers’ Party stages several protests against the administration of corrupt mayor William Thompson in the lead up to the primary elections. At one of these protests, several mysterious shooters fire into the crowd, killing several and injuring many more. The culprits (rumored to be members of the Chicago Outfit, who were allies of Thompson, sent at the behest of Underboss Al Capone) are never caught.
April 14: Lt. General Douglas MacArthur is promoted to Army Chief of Staff.
April 17: Huey Long is elected Governor of Louisiana, running on the Democratic Party ballot line with support from the DFLP and WPA, beating Congressman Riley J. Wilson, one of his Democratic Party primary opponents, who ran on the cobbled together “Louisiana Democrat” ballot line.
April 28: The Oxford English Dictionary is available in complete form after seventy years of work. The ten volumes comprise 15,490 pages, and cost, as a bound set, between 50 and 55 guineas (£52.10s. to £57.15s; the average male weekly wage was roughly £5)
May 1: The Workers’ Party Convention is held in Oklahoma City. C.E. Ruthenberg, an old party stalwart, is nominated for the President. In a historic move to capitalize on the success of the anti-Jim Crow movement, Party activist James W. Ford is nominated as his running mate, becoming the first African-American to be on a major presidential ticket.
May 4: Aviatrix Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to successfully fly across the Atlantic.
May 9: Political crisis grips the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, following an assassination attempt on Stjepan Radić, leader of the Croatian People’s Peasant League. The would-be assassin, Puniša Račić, a member of the Serbian nationalist People’s Radical Party, is detained after the attempted shooting on the floor of parliament.
May 15: Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks’ Mortimer “Morty” Mouse makes his debut in Steamboat Willie.
May 24: With Ratification by 3/4ths of the States, the Executive Succession Amendment becomes the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.
May 30: Tony Gulotta wins the 16th Indianapolis 500. His supercharged 1.5 litre roadster sets a record average speed of 100.03 miles per hour over the 500 mile endurance race.
June 4: Olmstead v. United States , 277 U.S. 438 (1928). In a 5-4 split, the Supreme Court opinion of the court, written by Louis Brandeis, holds that the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure apply to wiretaps.
June 18: American troops stationed in China begin a general withdrawal.
June 21: The Workers’ Party National Congress grumbles in discontent. Issues such as the Second Period policy, the ongoing conflict in the Soviet Union over the direction of the international, and the looming election produces clear factional lines in the party.
June 27: The keel of the first 1,000 ft ocean liner, the RMS Oceanic , laid down by Harland and Wolff in Belfast.
June 28: At the Democratic National Convention, Tennessee representative Cordell Hull nominated to run against incumbent Herbert Hoover for President. His running mate is Georgia Senator Walter F. George.
July 2: A papal edict is issued, aimed at the growing involvement of US Catholics with the socialist movement. It harshly condemns socialism and laborism, and instead encourages humility and charity as an alternative. Known members of the Workers’ Party are to be explicitly denied communion.
July 15: Anthropologist Margaret Mead publishes Coming of Age in Samoa, the culmination of her studies on the sexuality and culture of the peoples on the island of Ta’u.
July 19: The Republic of China repudiates all “unequal treaties”, demanding a renegotiation of all the “imperial concessions” that other powers have extracted from the country.
July 28: The first International Spartakiad opens in Moscow. Intended as a counter-cultural alternative to the aristocratic Olympics, the Spartakiad draws large numbers of participants and spectators in a spirit of proletarian internationalism, but are ultimately overshadowed by the spectacle of the Amsterdam Olympiad running concurrently.
July 30: In a bid to shore-up their alliance, Chairman Wang Jingwei appoints Jiang Jieshi as Premier of the Executive Yuan.
August 6: First Secretary Gillett publicly announces his retirement from leadership of the Republican Party and from politics in general. Majority Leader Nicholas Longworth is elected to head the government for the remainder of the Congress.
August 11: The Mejer Affair: Great War veteran Lt. Colonel Carol Mejer is accused of being a Soviet agent by Republican Congressman Hamilton Fish III, Chairman of the House Internal Security Committee. Fish’s rhetoric, focusing on Mejer’s Polish-Jewish ethnicity, draws alarm from Jewish civic groups
August 28: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre , sound film starring William Haines, Douglas Fairbanks, and Ramon Navarro, is released by United Artists Studio, based off the hit B. Traven novel.
September 1: Albanian President Ahmed Zogu crowns himself “King Zog”, and transitions the country into a constitutional monarchy
September 2: Bertolt Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera is first performed in Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, a staunch condemnation of capitalism and exploitation.
September 11: Mejer is arrested by Army MPs, pending court-martial. The witch hunt for GRU agents grips the front page of the worker and bourgeois newspapers.
September 28: Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming discovers that the penicillium fungus can kill off bacteria, paving the way for a new way to treat bacterial diseases.
October 6: The Wittorf Affair in the KPD reaches its conclusion. A forceful letter from the Comintern and Stalin directs the reinstatement of Ernst Thälmann to the central committee, who had been relieved for covering up the embezzlement of party funds by his friend and protégé John Wittorf.
October 14: General MacArthur reorganises the defunct Tank Corps into a secret echelon of the Military Intelligence Division, to root out subversion within the Army and keep tabs on domestic left-wing groups. He tasks his old subordinate Lt. Colonel George Patton with leading this echelon.
October 21: Howard Scott, former research director for the Solidarity trade union, establishes the Committee on Tektology, attracting membership from left-wing engineers and scientists in the United States.
November 6: US general election. President Hoover is re-elected to a full term, and the Republican Party returns a solid majority in the House of Representatives. Cooperation between the President and the First Secretary is expected to be high.
November 12: As Mejer’s court-martial begins, several officers with known or suspected left-wing affiliations are expelled from the staff of the US Military Academy.
December 2: Freed from most of his political responsibilities, General Frunze turns his attentions towards refining the Unified Military Doctrine he’d championed since the end of the Polish-Soviet War, partnering with Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Vladimir Triandafillov.
December 18: In one of its last acts, the lame duck 65th Congress approves construction of a hydroelectric dam in the Boulder Canyon on the Colorado River.
The 1928 General Election
The 1928 Republican Primaries were a forgone conclusion. Over the span of several months, Herbert Hoover had managed to the uphold the legacy of the late President Wood and achieve some of his own objectives. In particular, his handling of the July Crisis had elevated him to a highly respected statesman nationally and internationally.He had managed to shed the image of him as a party functionary latched onto the ticket to appeal to both the Business and Progressive Republicans.
The biggest challenge, however, was securing the DFL endorsement. His presence on the ticket in 1924 had been largely a means by which to keep the Republicans satisfied whilst Wood had made concessions to the DFL. Hoover was regarded with suspicion amongst the DFL, especially because of his overt loyalty to the Republicans and his decision to let newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst be his Vice President (contrary to the promise Wood had made in 1924)
However, Hoover and Hearst were able to convince the DFL to back their candidacy, though the party was increasingly wary of the corporate tied Republicans. One faction led by California delegate Culbert Olson was advocating a break of the Alignment.
While Hoover worked diligently to maintain the Alignment on the campaign trail, he was forced to triangulate himself between the emboldened Business faction of the party and the demands of the body politic. While he made some in person campaign stops in the South, it was perfunctory. To avoiding inflaming tensions after last fall’s crackdown on segregation’s hardliners, he greatly moderated the promises the party would make on the civil rights and economic relief front.
Instead, he rallied voters by taking a much harder anti-communist line. While claiming the “socialist system of labor management” represented by the unions, works councils, and labor-relations boards as a Republican achievement, he simultaneously characterized his opponents as Russian toadies and conspiratorial demagogues. On the advice of his political strategists, he made more explicit references to Christian faith and traditional American values to shore up his support.
This controversial triangulation appealed greatly to the middle strata of successful farmers, shop keepers, and intelligentsia, as well as the reactionaries and nativists. It also greatly weakened the Republican Party’s appeal people outside the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant grouping, a diminishing slice of the American electorate. In particular, the black bourgeoisie that had been wedded to the Republican Party since its founding would ultimately break permanently with it after 1928.
This was a period before scientific polling became an accepted practice. But by conventional metrics this campaign strategy was floundering until other circumstances handed Hoover a windfall. On 11 August, the national news was fixated on the alleged ensnaring of a Soviet agent within the Army.
Hamilton Fish III was a stalwart of the Republican Party’s right-wing. As chairman of the House Internal Security Committee, he’d been an opponent of Hoover’s since the July Crisis, and Hoover’s hatred of the man was a poorly kept secret (He joked to New York’s elite at one white-tie banquet that Bolshevik revolutionary justice might not be such a bad idea if they got to Fish first).
Fish’s accusations that Lieutenant Colonel Carol Mejer was a Soviet agent gave his campaign some much needed traction. The ensuing trial by media circus helped close the enthusiasm gap tremendously, swelling the ranks of the Republican Party activists and campaigners in the crucial lead up period.
It also drew unsettling parallels to the Dreyfuss Affair thirty-four years prior. The open, flagrant anti-Semitism being displayed by pillars the bourgeois media and leaders within the Republican Party unsettled liberals and America’s Jewish population. While Hoover tried to distance himself from the more extreme voices, it would prove to be poisonous to the whole of American democracy for years to come.
The Democrats, now increasingly regional with the defection of their left wing, were slowly emerging from the political woods with its nominations. Cordell Hull, one-time head of the Democratic National Committee, had managed a victory through an endorsement by Al Smith (one of the few remaining members of the Democratic left-wing after the mass defection to the DFL, as well as a rare member from New York).
Hull had been a relative moderate, and had condemned the violence that was inflicted by the KKK. He could hopefully appeal to moderates and those disenchanted with the Republican shift to the right. However, Hull made a major miscalculation with his running mate, Walter F. George
The junior Georgia senator, he had been a long time supporter of racial segregation and a southern conservative. While this secured the Southern Democrat support, this also alienated many more. George defended himself by pointing out he had no connections to the KKK, and that he had “moderated” his stance in the face of the growing violence, backing the NBI’s campaign.
However, George’s presence made him an easy target for both the Republicans and Workers Party, especially with the Wood assassination in recent memory.
The Workers’ Party had a steady increase in membership after a period of stagnation. The Convention site of Oklahoma City was chosen to purposely exploit the wide membership the Party enjoyed in that state.
However, in spite of the appearance of strength and unity, the Workers’ Party was internally divided. Previously, the presumptive nominee had either been Debs or one of his handpicked successors. But Grandfather Debs was gone now, and the events of the July Crisis had fractured the party’s programmatic unity.
However transitory it proved to be, the violation of the social truce had left many chafing against the party’s moderation. The global movement may have declared that this was a period of working class retreat, but in the United States the novelty of playing at bourgeois respectability was wearing out.
Three organic groupings emerged on the floor of the the year’s Party Congress: a Vienna International leaning Right, an orthodox Leninist Centre, and a council communist Left. They had existed in some sense since the party joined the Third International, but only now were they coming into their own as discrete groups with clear programmatic disagreements.
The natural choice for the nominee would have been the current Secretary-General Jay Lovestone. There was just a tiny problem; Lovestone was too young and foreign born. While he had enjoyed the confidence of older leaders and had come into his own, a Lovestone candidacy would have been stillborn. His organizing work had helped build the party in the Twenties, and his notion of “American exceptionalism” had proved to be a natural fit for the Second Period platform.
With the confidence of the Right and much of the Centre, Lovestone nominated his own mentor, Charles Emil Ruthenberg, better known as C.E., to lead the ticket. Ruthenberg had stepped aside from leadership in 1925 to see to his chronic health problems, and had largely been out of the loop until only a few months prior. Ideally, this ensured he had few grudges to worry about.
A rival candidacy emerged from within the Centre, placing their support for William Z. Foster, currently serving as a voting member of the Politburo and the Party’s whip in the House of Representatives. Foster had not sought the nomination, but accepted on the belief that the party needed to begin a regroupment to its militant core.
The Left was critical of the party’s participation in the pageantry of bourgeois parliamentarism, if not in theory than certainly in practice. Though the smallest number wise at the present, the Left drew its strength from among the party’s most militant workers. Influenced by the programme of the Communist Workers Party of Germany2, its members supported combative direct action and an immediate campaign to re-establish the soviets of the Red Summer as preparation for an eventual rising.
In a series of debates, Lovestone and Foster clashed over fundamentals. Lovestone touted the concrete gains that the Workers’ Party had made, and the litany of concessions it had wrung from the bourgeoisie. In his view, the growth of workers’ power and an eventual workers’ government would be built from these bricks. Foster argued that these gains had been made, not by conceding to a social democratic management of capitalist failure, but by the direct militancy of workers, something he had witnessed first hand as both the Finance Secretary of the Spartacus League, as well as one of the chief architects of the Southern Strategy.
Foster attempted to appeal to the Left to swing the nomination, but their numbers were insufficient. Once smaller nominations and spoilers were eliminated on the first ballot, Lovestone’s group clinched victory on the second ballot, with Ruthenberg winning by an almost 2:1 margin of delegates.
As a concession to Foster’s supports, Ruthenberg through his weight behind Foster’s ally James W. Ford for the Vice-Presidential nomination. Ford had been a party member, certainly in spirit, since his harrowing experiences in the Great War, and had returned home to become one of the party’s most effective organizers in the Deep South. As a prominent leader in the party’s Negro Caucus, Ford would also seize upon the successes of the struggle against Jim Crow.
The initial successes on the campaign trail were set back with the Mejer Affair. Ford’s initial successes at appealing to poor whites in the South were beset by having to refute the accusations of the party being a front for foreign agents. The party stuck to the line that the accusations were entirely fabricated and that this was an incitement to reactionary violence, a line that did not assuage fears among more nationalistic workers.
The nomination of Ford as Workers’ VP and their sudden popularity in the wake of Democratic faltering was the final straw for William Dudley Pelley, who decided to throw his hat into the ring. His organization Silver Legion, however, was meager in terms of membership and general popularity, so he campaigned among other small right wing parties to bolster his numbers.
His biggest nomination came in the faltering Prohibition Party, having now been hemorrhaging members since the failure of the Constitutional Amendment. Though, several veteran members of the Prohibition Party, including 1924 VP nominee Marie C. Brehm and Pelley’s opponent William Varney had alleged that Pelley’s followers had entered the party to inflate Pelley’s numbers. As a result, Varney would pull his own supporters and run on a separate ticket, injuring Pelley’s attempt to run.
The various parties that backed Pelley’s nomination were collectively called “America First”, which advocated an extreme right-wing, xenophobic, anti-communist platform that advocated the deportation or incarceration of all communists or even “communist sympathizers”, including President Hoover or the DFL leadership.
While Pelley’s campaign was regarded as a joke by most observers at the time, it would attract the likes of Charles Coughlin, Gerald LK Smith, and others who would serve in key positions in the White Army during the Civil War. The most notable Pelley ally in hindsight was an ex-KKK militant turned fascist backer Virgil Effinger….
Results
Presidential
Wikibox courtesy of@Asami
House of Representatives
Legislative Election, 66th Congress | | | | | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---
Party | Leader | Home State | Seats | Last | Net | Pct.
Republican | Nicholas Longworth | Ohio | 200 | 227 | -27 | 45.98%
Workers’ Party | Frank T. Johns | Oregon | 125 | 101 | 24 | 28.74%
Democratic | John Nance Garner | North Carolina | 65 | 76 | -11 | 14.94%
Democratic-Farmer-Labor | Floyd Olson | Minnesota | 41 | 29 | 12 | 9.43%
Independents | | | 4 | 2 | 2 | 0.92%
Total | | | 435 | | | 100.00%
Needed to Win | | | 218 | | |
U.S. Senate
| Party | Seats | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Republican | 42 | 2 |
| Democratic | 22 | -2 |
| Workers’ Party | 18 | 1 |
| DFL | 14 | -1 |
| Total | 96 |
- His full office is Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the All-Union Congress of Soviets, and he’s nominally the head of state of the Soviet Union, an office he held concurrently with a similar position in the Russian SFSR.
- For more information, see here.
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