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March 30 - May 11, 2025
Between 1900 and 1912, monopolies accounted for almost a third of the nation’s industrial GDP growth. And few could mistake the upshot: giant combinations were protecting Wall Street interests, while those on Main Street were left to suffer.39 The ensuing economic turmoil eventually connected to something deeper—something cultural. The late 1800s were awash in tensions centering on questions of immigration, urbanization, and racism, among other topics. As industrialization threw wrenches into the norm of nineteenth-century life, social critics rued the newfound worship of money and castigated
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And while that explosion proved singular, it reflected the sense that America was a tinderbox—not entirely unlike today.43
It wasn’t singular by any means. Look at the attacks on Black, Latino and Asian communities leading up to the red summer in 1919.
Violent class warfare existed, it was just being fought on different battle grounds.
More than two thousand people were arrested during the war for speaking out against American involvement, some sentenced to as many as twenty years in prison.141 And when, in 1920, a bomb exploded outside Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s home in Washington, a young Wilson administration appointee named J. Edgar Hoover ordered the arrests of a range of purported anarchists and communists, some of whom were summarily deported.142
Early twentieth-century “progressive” historians in the mold of Charles A. Beard had framed America’s story as a battle of class interests, with the Constitution serving as a tool the elite utilized to undermine proletarian interests.
the Henry Street Settlement, an organization born decades earlier to help immigrants settling on New York’s Lower East Side, had more recently established Mobilization for Youth, a program designed to train local Puerto Rican and Black kids to demand city government provide more and better social services. In essence, rather than empower the Establishment to fix a problem, Mobilization for Youth was designed to empower the Establishment’s critics to demand better.
Johnson may have shared their desire to lift up the “ghetto youth”—his experience teaching poor Hispanic children on the Mexican border had imbued him with a moralizing sense of purpose—but he was fundamentally aligned with the Establishment institutions Hackett had come to disdain.16
