There is no period of American history that so pervasively demonstrated the power of ethno-nationalism to suppress pluralist differences as that following the Russian Revolution, the end of the First World War, and then continuing through much of the 1920s. There are many broad parallels between this era and our own. In both historical moments, there is a rising racial nationalism that takes hold of a significant (and demographically similar) portion of the country. Following the 1920s, Franklin Roosevelt’s leadership during the Depression and a massive labor movement—which, at least, in its ideals (if often not its practice) extolled the social solidarity of Americans of all races, ethnicities, and religions—renewed civic nationalism. So, too, did the total mobilization on behalf of prosecuting the Second World War. But civic nationalism, too, was still flawed by institutional racism, and dependent upon extra-national enemies—first German and Japanese totalitarianism and then Soviet communism—to somewhat unify the American political culture. What might we expect to, first, culminate, and, then, follow, the moment of Trump?
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In the late stages of the Wilson presidency, several economic and political shocks jolted the nation. The country suffered a brief, but sharp, recession at the end of the First World War. Workers worried about the end of the war economy engaged in a massive wave of labor actions, including a four-day general strike in Seattle in 1919 during which workers effectively controlled the city’s operation. The strike in Seattle was joined by other major strikes of hundreds of thousands of steelworkers, and an unprecedented strike by the Boston police department. At the same time, the country was terrorized by several sensational bombings by anarchists and leftists. One hit Wall Street in 1920, killing 38 people. Despite a massive investigation, it was never fully solved, but is assumed to have been the work of Italian anarchists. These events created the Red Scare, the belief of many Americans that a radicalized, violent worker’s movement might take hold in the United States, just like Russia’s Bolshevik revolution.