The drug presents the difficult challenge for our nation of keeping the pendulum from swinging too far toward liberalism or fascism. But the truth is, we have a road map. We have already seen the social and political fallout of the attempt to define and control national habits and morality. It was the temperance movement of the previous two centuries.
The desire to curb alcohol abuse had been around since the colonial days, partly as a result of religious dogma and partly as a result of practicality: There was no time to grow anything but essential crops. Distilling and brewing were not considered appropriate uses for a garden’s harvest. In the eighteenth century, taverns were the rough and bawdy heart of port cities. They were common, unsanitary, and downright dangerous. During the Revolution, British troops regularly picked fights with colonists and one another in pubs. If a patron so much as looked at them unhappily they could be arrested as a spy. More than occasionally there were spies, since drunk soldiers were talkative soldiers.
The first antidrinking movements advocated moderation rather than outright bans.22 That attitude shifted by the mid-nineteenth century when women began to organize in support of causes such as prison reform, labor reform, women’s rights, and temperance. The rhetoric shifted from advocating self-control to the idea that since people were not able to regulate their drinking, the government had to do it for them. The birth of the Prohibition movement was the forerunner of today’s nanny state but it took hold with a hysteria that American women had not previously shown on these shores. By 1834, still early in the movement, the American Temperance Society already had 170,000 members.23 I suspect it had to do with women realizing that mobilizing gave them social and political power at a time when they otherwise had none. By organizing against alcohol consumption, they believed they could eliminate the source of many of their woes, such as wife abuse or husbands losing their jobs due to drunkenness. In 1873, women’s groups aligned themselves with evangelical churches and formed the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union,24 a group that afforded the movement new levels of credibility, gave them great organizational power, and extended reach—from the pulpit. One religious group, the Methodists, declared, without obfuscation, that drinking was a sin.
For the most part, the deeds of early temperance activists were initially benign. Women would stand outside saloons singing hymns and shaming patrons, or enter the male-only bastions, kneel in the beer-soaked sawdust, and pray. These actions were more annoying than shaming, but they had the desired result of clearing out the room. But as the hysteria grew, not all actions were peaceful. And that fanaticism grew largely because of one woman.
Carrie Nation was a six-foot-tall, broad-shouldered Social Justice Warrior whose dislikes included corsets, tobacco, insufficiently long skirts—and alcohol. In 1900, she began her crusade by marching into bars, singing, praying, and smashing glasses, casks, and fixtures with a hatchet. Nation did not do so unmolested. She was assaulted on several occasions, and during the next decade she was arrested more than thirty times. She raised bail money through lectures, autographs, and selling miniature silver replicas of her hatchet. She also sold copies of her biweekly newsletter the Smasher’s Mail. She died in 1911, at age sixty-four, nine years before Prohibition became law. Not surprisingly, she died after collapsing during one of her fiery speeches.25
During the 1916 presidential election, both Democrats and Republicans avoided addressing Prohibition. Women did not. They spoke in numbers greater than ever, in voices louder than before, and it was perceived—not incorrectly—that these women had a sacred mission, which was to preserve the American family.26
For women, the right to vote nationally was still four years away, although women had the vote in many states before the Nineteenth Amendment. But politicians believed that universal women’s suffrage was imminent, and more women than not were for Prohibition. The math put elected officials squarely behind the Eighteenth Amendment and by 1920 it was the law of the land.
The day before Prohibition went into effect, evangelical preacher Billy Sunday extolled its social benefits, saying, “We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.”27
He was wrong. Americans were about to get a harsh lesson in unintended consequences, a lesson whose price we continue to pay.
REPEALING HYSTERIA
Welcome to mass hysteria. Many of the benefits temperance advocates claimed Prohibition would yield were based on false information, wishful thinking, or outright lies. One could make a list of almost every outcome promised and show that Prohibition achieved the opposite.
For example, Prohibitionists believed temperance would be accompanied by a rise in Christian faith. Church attendance got a bump at first, but that was because the Eighteenth Amendment permitted religious organizations to serve sacramental beverages. They came to be seen as self-serving institutions as religious leaders, especially priests and rabbis, foolishly touted their ability to procure wine. Churches quickly saw their attendance decline as the devout became disillusioned.28
Predictably, mass hysteria among religious zealots came to the rescue. When temperance groups raised concerns about alcohol in houses of worship, opponents branded them as anti-Catholic or anti-Semitic. Which wasn’t far from the truth, as it turns out. Members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union often belonged to the WKKK—a woman’s auxiliary of the KKK.29 Both Klans took Carrie Nation’s fervor one step further, destroying speakeasies and tarring, feathering, and killing bootleggers. Instead of plunging, as predicted, homicides rose nationally over 1920–21, jumping from sixty-eight to eight-one per million.30
Prohibitionists had also sought to save families by shutting saloons and curtailing male drinking. But the saloons—which had been largely male bastions—were replaced by speakeasies, which welcomed women patrons.31 Rather than reduce desire, Prohibition doubled the potential drinking population.
No one should have been surprised. By its very nature, hysteria is produced by emotion, not thought. An idea may be a trigger. No one would argue that drunkenness is good. (Mothers Against Drunk Driving was formed in 1980 after a thirteen-year-old girl was killed in a DUI tragedy.32 The idea was to sponsor tougher laws and increase public awareness of the scourge, both of which were needed. The execution was methodical and rational.) But Prohibition did not proceed in a smart, patient way. As a result, by 1929, it had fallen into such disrepute that a quiet but insistent counter group, the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR), was formed.33 WONPR executives argued that repealing Prohibition would reduce alcohol-related crime and corruption. It would also afford adults free choice and the obligation of taking responsibility for their own actions. In short, it was an early opponent of the nanny state. The rise of the WONPR played into the growing national sentiment toward smaller government, reduced interventionist attitude—libertarianism was not yet a party, but it was an active idea—and personal choice. This tone, compared with the hysteria that had heralded the temperance movement, also resonated with the American public, which, more and more, were hearing the voices of public figures over the radio, not just in print. Presentation mattered. Within two years, WONPR’s membership was triple that of the WCTU.
The Great Depression all but guaranteed Prohibition’s repeal. When the economy collapsed, Franklin Roosevelt incorporated bringing back legal alcohol sales, and the all-important tax revenue they generated, in his presidential platform. By 1933, what Herbert Hoover had dubbed “a great social and economic experiment” was finished. But a new and much greater hysteria lurked just over the horizon.
At the turn of the twentieth century—the American Century, as some have called it—the United States was growing as a global power. The country’s enemies, both real and manufactured by fake news, had to reflect its new stature. Enter the anarchists and the communists, each of whom had their menace exaggerated by forces whose ri
se to power depended on presenting the populace with a virulent enemy. Ultimately, fate helped the power-mad when World War II provided new targets for hysteria—not just in a theater of battle, but at home.
10.
FROM REDS TO FASCISTS
Global Threats Produce Greater Hysteria
It’s a largely forgotten terrorist attack, but two similarities to a later, bigger, more traumatic assault bear mentioning. First, the bombing in 1920 occurred a very short walk from where the future World Trade Center would be built. Second, the act of terror occurred in early September. There is something about a pleasant fall day, when citizens are out enjoying the last of the vanishing summer, that seems ripe for disruption.
At lunchtime on September 16, 1920, financial workers in lower Manhattan were out and about in great numbers. No one thought much of another overloaded, horse-drawn carriage on the cobbled streets. That’s how deliveries were made then. It briefly stopped on the busiest corner of the financial district, across the street from the J. P. Morgan bank at 23 Wall Street. No one had any reason to suspect that the buggy was loaded with one hundred pounds of dynamite and, for shrapnel, five hundred pounds of iron sash weights that were used in windows.
The driver is believed to have left the cart and, at one minute past noon, the contents detonated. Thirty people died instantly, most of them in their teens and twenties working as messengers, secretaries, and clerks. Eight more succumbed to their injuries, 143 were gravely wounded, and hundreds more suffered minor harm. Automobiles were upended, windows were blown out for blocks around, and the interior of the bank was destroyed. Stubbornly, proudly—defiantly?—the famed statue of George Washington at Federal Hall, overseeing all, was undamaged. I have been to the site, and the scars of the blast—chipped walls and foundation—are still visible on the targeted building.1 2
By the next day, there were cries in the press and among influential Americans for local and federal authorities to root out and deport foreign radicals. Evidence and emotion converged on two possible groups: anarchists and communists. The investigation was thorough but immediately inconclusive. Six months later, the incoming administration of President Warren Harding favored and investigated the Soviets as the cause, most likely acting through their local agents in the Communist Party USA or through presumably sympathetic émigrés known as the Union of Russian Workers. But after three years, the perpetrator still was not identified. Now it is agreed that the act was likely committed by followers of the chronically hysterical sociopath Luigi Galleani, an Italian anarchist who—like the Nazi brownshirts who came after him—believed in the “propaganda of the deed,” acts of terror and destruction designed to bring down any individuals or institutions perceived, by him, to be oppressive. The assassination of President William McKinley, which elevated Teddy Roosevelt to the presidency in 1901, was one such act.
Though the so-called Galleanists were the likely bombers, and ranked near the top of Washington’s public enemies list, they were not feared as much as the communists. That’s because with anarchists, the government was able to put faces on wanted posters. Cherry-picking and eliminating anarchists inspired much the same reaction as the drone killings of ISIS commanders today, a sense that the government was doing something. Contrast that today with government activity in North Korea.
The president startled the world by sitting down with dictator Kim Jung-un and setting in motion the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Did the world press give Trump credit for defusing one of the world’s most dangerous situations? Before this summit the fake news media followed the situation in Korea like a championship tennis match.
China, which essentially controls the purse strings of Pyongyang, sits on its hands. Add to that a mainstream media determined to instill profitable fear—now, as then—and the result was several weeks of mass hysteria. The only time it goes away is when a hurricane or political scandal can briefly take its place. As those die away, Kim Jung-un once again becomes Public Enemy Number One. And even if Kim isn’t terrorizing Japan and Guam, the press will cover Robert De Niro’s hatred of Donald Trump surpassing his hatred of Kim because the president (along with many scientists) is unmoved by climate change.3 And why, exactly, is De Niro so angry? Because in September 2017, Hurricane Irma, somehow the result of the president’s neglect, severely impacted the actor’s plans to build a luxury hotel in Barbuda. But we get ahead of ourselves on the “settled science” of global warming. And because the actor is very envious of Donald Trump’s ascension to the power of the presidency. While the thespian remains a script reader. And so Bobbie De Niro, a very small restaurant and hotel owner compared with Donald Trump, appears as the mouthpiece of Hollywood and the leftist press to attack the president using the language and the guttural mannerisms of one of his characters in a gangster movie.
RED SCARE
In 1918, a year after the Russian Revolution, communists were not seen as the primary threat. Granted, we didn’t trust them, a feeling that fit neatly into our mistrust of Germans. Russian Marxism had its roots in the writings of German philosopher-economist Karl Marx. But fears of communist influence in America were fed by several incidents. The American labor movement had gained power, and two strikes—a stoppage by dockworkers in Seattle and a police strike in Boston—fueled the idea that labor organizers were following the Russian model and held communist sympathies. A sitting Senate committee investigating subversion folded communists into the mix. Though the report the committee made did not provide hard evidence regarding the extent of communist activity in the United States, it contained an alarmist picture of communist rule.
Media coverage of the report was awash in hysterical prose. Rather than focus on the thinness of the factual evidence, writers delighted in descriptions of Russian industrial corruption and salacious tales about the “nationalization” of women, in which Soviet women were allowed to choose sexual partners.4 Many “news” reports declared that communists were thriving in American cities and planning stateside revolutions.
The public’s anxiety was heightened by a series of race riots during the summer and fall of 1919. While no clear link between communists and the events was ever established, it seemed obvious to white, middle- and upper-class Americans that the lower status and poor employment prospects of blacks made them likely targets for subversive organizing.
On May 1, 1919—May Day, a Russian holiday—leftist demonstrations in several cities turned violent. The following year, as the day neared, the U.S. attorney general recklessly predicted a massive May Day uprising that would feature assassinations, bombings, riots, and an attempt to overthrow the American government. Panicked states called out their militias and cities required police officers to work straight through the day. Armored police cars with machine guns mounted on them patrolled the streets.
The day passed quietly, and the hysteria deflated as the Red Scare became an object of ridicule.5 Local and state governments bemoaned the expense of militarizing their streets, and newspaper editorials mocked what they termed “hallucinations.”6 Certainly the fear of violence on a mass scale was unfounded, but as hindsight has taught us, communism was making very real inroads into the American liberal movement.
The spread of sympathy for communism accelerated after the stock market crash of 1929. A nation in economic turmoil is vulnerable to foreign ideas, and communists gleefully exploited the crisis, presenting a utopian view of what life could be. In response to meetings, pamphlets, and public speeches, local, state, and federal governments cracked down on party members. By 1930, there was an alarming rise in prosecution of free speech to thwart the Communist Party actively organizing anti-unemployment and poverty relief rallies.7 First the blacks, then the impoverished. The consensus in Washington was that the United States was ripe for destruction at the hands of an underground, ideological army.
The U.S. House convened the Committee to Investigate Communist Activities in the United States, which attributed the majority of American communist ac
tivity to foreign-born agents directly under Moscow’s control. Once again, the press took a legitimate concern and used it to whip up mass hysteria about an imminent communist takeover.
The investigation hit upon a trope Americans could grasp, regardless of the truth: This underground army was already subverting us. According to the committee, Russia’s slave-like economy was enabling that country to further erode the crippled American economy by shipping cheap lumber to western states. While the veracity of this claim was in doubt, its impact fired up the old suspicions. People were not yet hysterical, but they were watchful.
And the reality was, Stalin’s Russia was very successful in motivating liberals, especially in Hollywood, to align themselves with communism. After all, actors, writers, and directors all felt they were the oppressed slaving for studio moguls. There was a quiet, and then vocal, war going on in the film industry, with communist-controlled talent agents openly smearing antagonistic heroes like Bette Davis and Ronald Reagan. More on this later.
The committee had one other lasting impact. Its recommendations included giving the Department of Justice greater latitude to investigate communist activity. These investigations would later form the backbone of a congressional investigation and that, too, would one day greatly impact the situation in Hollywood.
The West Coast turned out to be a hotbed of hysteria-triggering activity in the first half of the twentieth century.
Because the Naturalization Act of 1790 limited naturalized U.S. citizenship to Caucasians, it wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that substantial numbers of Japanese started migrating to the United States, driven here by the return of Japanese imperial rule and its radical societal changes in 1868. Due to the convenience of ocean passage, most immigrants settled in Hawaii and along the West Coast. As that population grew exponentially, Washington passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which banned the immigration of nearly all Japanese.8 The result was an effort to preserve their family’s history in the titles they assigned to each generation: The original immigrants were known as the Issei while their offspring were known as the Nisei, Japanese Americans; the children of the Nisei were known as the Sansei—the names coming from ichi, ni, and san, the Japanese words of “one,” “two,” and “three.”9
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