"Moore History" 1920s Post War America

Dr. Ed Moore stopped by his monthly history lesson as we continued the topic of America at war. This time post WWI and what was happening in the country in the wake of the "Great War." 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
We've been talking about America at war and the last
time we visited we sort of wrapped up World War One.
Did we ever really leave the war? Because it almost
feels like there's a segue from one to two, a
lot of the same players.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Yeah, there is different players though, but similar activity. We
really haven't left World War two. I mean, if you
want to value where we are. One of the things
I found when I really started looking at I was
trying to figure out what was our country, What was
the United States like in nineteen twenty, what was going
on post war? And you got to keep in mind

(00:42):
from its beginning, say seventeen eighty eight, seventeen eighty nine,
with the US Constitution. Now we got America on the
global map, we were an isolationist country, really trying to
take care of business, manifest destiny, all that stuff spreading
the country. Late eighteen hundreds, you know, the Industrial Revolution

(01:03):
began and you started seeing some growth. We sort of
got dragged into the Spanish American War. And when you
think about the US fighting Spain, think about that in
today's terms. You know, no, not really going to fight Spain. Really,
they don't even want to be part of NATO. Anymore. Yeah,
So it was a very different world. And then we

(01:23):
reluctantly got dragged into World War One. You know, Woodrow Wilson,
one of the things I kept thinking. You know, we
had almost all Republicans from the eighteen eighties until FDR
got elected. Woodrow Wilson was the only Democrat in that
whole time span of people. It was one Republican after another.

(01:46):
In the Republican theories back then, the philosophy was largely isolation, growth,
industrialization of America, those kinds of things, and then looking
for markets. We didn't want to go into World War One.
We were letting Europe fight it out with the Kaiser
in the Austro Hungary Empire and the Ottomans. I let

(02:07):
them fight it, it's not our problem. Foolishly, the Germans
decided with using U boats for the first time to
start sinking merchant ships going across, and they sank the Lusitania,
which is eleven hundred and something. People died, a number
of large number of Americans. Wilson sort of changed. He

(02:27):
had been we're not getting into war. He got actually
got re elected in nineteen sixteen. I believe under that
he kept us out of war. That was the big
deal at the time. Well, we within a year and
a half or so, we were in war. We were
part of the war, and then from that point forward
the United States was different for a couple or three years.
But when the war ended, we didn't really want to

(02:50):
be part of that anymore. We wanted to go back.
There was a longing to go back to the eighteen
hundred isolation, this kind of mentality. Wilson pushed initially the
League of Nation and then we didn't join it, you know,
Harding and got elected, and then after Harding, Coolidge and
then Hoover, and we didn't want any part of that stuff.
We wanted to be ourselves. And the next segment we'll

(03:14):
kind of go get into some of the terror fissues
and all the stuff we're talking about today. The huge
issues at the time were tariffs, immigration, oddly different, a
lot of bigotry, and the immigration issues back then it
wasn't because of terrorism or crime and the stuff you hear.
The underlying issues and the outfront issues was bigotry. I mean,

(03:38):
they didn't want people from those places. And a couple
of bills that Congress passed that we'll talk later about
actually put quotas on people coming from certain countries and
had areas that no go, You're not coming here from
those countries. If you think time wise, you look at
the entirety of it all, the Russian Revolution had occurred,

(04:00):
Communism was on the rise in a lot of places,
and there was a great fear here about having communism come.
So lots of different things at play. The map of
the world changed dramatically because of World War One. The empires,
the old empires that have been around for a long time,
the Austro Hungarian, the Ottoman Empire, the German with the

(04:23):
Kaiser and was gone. All of that was gone, and
interesting the map of Europe and a big part of
Eastern Europe changed. I was shocked when I went back
and looked at this the number of countries that came
out of World War One that didn't exist prior to that.
When they started breaking up, these empires and the Ottoman
Empire at that point in time went all the way

(04:45):
down to Israel. I mean, it was huge, the influence
of Turkey what became Turkey in that area. But new
countries then were Poland, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania,
Romani and the Soviet Union. All this was a big
boom for map makers. I mean, it's a huge change,

(05:07):
and it became culturally driven because each as each of
these countries, they were different than they were part of
the empire. These are so they all had their own
self interests and the United States used that for marketing
and exporting. However, we had huge issues here in our
country at the time because during World War One, farmers

(05:28):
Europe was a mess, so we had all these new
markets for farm goods that we could produce and send
over there. Well, after the war, the European farmers got
back to business and started working, and farmers were getting clobbered.
So we started messing around with tariffs, and they thought
this was a real good idea, we're going to put
We'll put tariffs on foreign goods. Well, of course, the

(05:49):
response was they put tariffs on American goods, and we
had as much as twenty five percent tariffs on goods
from certain countries. Didn't work real well, and we could
spend a whole show talking about how that led to
the depression and the issues surrounding that. But democracies grew
a lot of these new countries were kings and monarchs

(06:13):
and cizars were no longer around. So now we started
having actual electoral democracies.

Speaker 1 (06:22):
In many places, not all though, no, but in what.

Speaker 2 (06:25):
At that point was the focus of what was going
on in the world, because that's where most of the
trade is economically driven. Asia was getting kind of ignored,
you know, in the south part of India and that
area it was you had the British Empires still at
that point. There's so many interesting little points. I mean,

(06:46):
if you think about Australia and New Zealand Canada at
the beginning of World War One, they were automatically part
of the war because they were a strong part of
England or Great Britain at the time. At the end
of World War One when they signed the Armacists, each
of those countries signed independently and by then had developed,

(07:09):
over a period of four years, had developed a national identity.
And so now you were Australian, you weren't really part
of the British Empire. You were from New Zealand. I
mean it was Canada. Canada had troops in the war
from the beginning, providing on behalf of England. By the
end of the war, Canada was Canada. So I mean

(07:31):
this national identity really grew during that timeframe. One other
good point quick is the Balfour Decoration. In nineteen seventeen,
Arthur Balfour, the Foreign Secretary of Britain, wrote a letter
stating that he thought that Jews should have a homeland
in Palestine in nineteen seventeen. It took to nineteen forty

(07:55):
eight for this to occur, and Great Britain actually kind
of monitored and governed that region up until that point
in time. But all the issues that we're seeing now
and all the problems that we're seeing now, I'll go
back to the changes that occurred between nineteen seventeen nineteen
twenty five. The Balfour Declaration was a big deal at

(08:18):
the time, and it changed the whole orientation ast Okay,
what do we do with Jews around the world? Very
different than it is.

Speaker 1 (08:27):
I think it goes back a little further.

Speaker 2 (08:29):
Well, of course, yeah, yeah, I would recommend actually on
that there. Simon Montefiore wrote a book called Jerusalem the Biography.
It's about a nine hundred page book that I've read
that's the entire history focused on one city or town
or whatever you want to call it, way back when
for about two thousand years, and who came and went

(08:50):
from that area and who ran it. That's what I
said earlier in nineteen seventeen. So it was part of
the Ottoman Empire now that was running were Jerusalem Rusalem
is So you know, it's just studying that part of
the world is absolutely fascinating.

Speaker 1 (09:08):
I'll give you some behind the scenes inside here with
doctor ed Moore. Five pages of notes and so here
we are in the third and final segment, and we
are in paragraph two, page one, but I have them
in my head, he said, Okay, I'm gonna skip page two, three, four,

(09:28):
I'm gonna get to page five.

Speaker 2 (09:29):
Go ahead, page God's going through my head, Paul Hervey. Here,
let's talk about immigration, because immigration again in our country
is a huge issue.

Speaker 1 (09:41):
But we're talking about post World War One.

Speaker 2 (09:45):
Yeah, and then it was a big deal. Okay, Okay,
one hundred and twenty five years ago, immigration was scary
to everybody. You got to think about what was going
on in the world. You have the Russian Revolution going on,
the rise of communism going on. People didn't want anybody
from that part of the world. Don't worry. I'm here.
We don't need them. Now we're electing the mayors of
big cities. But back then it was like, oh no,
we don't want them. You had certain parts of the

(10:09):
world it was bigotry driven a large part back then.
You see a little bit of that now now a
lot of it's they used crime or fear or terrorism
is background issues for all this, but a lot of
it tends to be end up. We've got too many
of those kinds of people. I mean, that's how the
way it was back then. The Irish had swarmed over

(10:31):
here in the eighteen hundreds. Then the Italians swarmed over here,
and they were kind of running the cities. Back then
you had a lot of Irish mayors and firemen and policemen,
and then you had a lot of Italians run stuff
so well.

Speaker 1 (10:45):
I mean they are the Irish and the Italians were
the centerpiece of organized crime in the northeastern part of
the Utua.

Speaker 2 (10:52):
The Irish way before the you know, the mafia and all. Yeah, yeah,
the Irish mafia. They were pretty bad. Dudes. Encourage people
to read about it because it's a fascinating part of
big city history in America. But we had areas back
then that they just closed off. They just said we
don't we're not taking anybody from there. And it was
partially driven philosophically by like communism. We don't want to

(11:15):
take anybody from Russia, even people fleeing, we don't want them.
Eastern Mediterranean Area, North Africans, we don't want them. Not
going to happen Asia. You know. The only big acts
that we had had related immigration back in the eighteen
hundreds were like the Chinese Exclusion Act, and which was
bigotry driven. We had enough Chinese, we don't want anymore

(11:38):
of them, so that's what drove it. But then they
started nineteen oh seven, one point three million people passed
through Ellis Island in that year. One point three million
in one year through that island. Now you've got to
go back to Ellis Island didn't start functioning to what
was it eighteen ninety one January when anymore and our
two brothers got the gold coin, you know, they were

(12:00):
coming from Ireland, and it was that this is how
we're going to do it now. They started tracking from
that point forward where people were coming from prior to that.
If you got off the boat in Boston or Philadelphia
or wherever you came from. You're here and nobody really cared.
I mean that's the way it used to be.

Speaker 1 (12:18):
Get off the pier, hang a left in good life.

Speaker 2 (12:19):
You get a job, go to family, whatever you did,
You're not our problem. But then once I started creating
bureaucracies and counting people and all that, it became a problem.
So in nineteen seventeen, they had an immigration Act that
had literacy tests, they would tax immigrants, They banned undesirables,
which were sick, disabled, criminals, and then that's soon morphed

(12:41):
into races and ethnicities. They had an Asiatic bard Zone
where nobody from these areas India, Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia,
any part of Southeast Asia and the Asian Pacific islands,
we don't watch. You can't come here. I mean, that's
what it all turned into. That created a lot of

(13:01):
urban problems because we had been letting in people from
these areas, and you had these growing ethnic populations all
across the country. Obviously it started eastern seaboarding in California,
but like Chicago became a very ethnic city. I lived
there for a time you had neighborhoods that were highly ethnic.
Post War War One, the recession occurred because you had

(13:23):
all this going on during the war. It drove a
lot of industries, and now it's not happening anymore. The
immigrants all got blamed for there's no jobs for me
because they're all coming and taking jobs, so we don't
want them anymore. We ended up having a nineteen twenty
one Emergency Quota Act. We had the Johnson Redact in
nineteen twenty four. They introduced border patrol. The whole approach

(13:45):
to what we did with immigrants changed during this timeframe,
and that.

Speaker 1 (13:50):
Leads us to World War.

Speaker 2 (13:52):
Two nineteen thirties, and so we're going to set the
stage for World War two in our next next time, Yeah,
we're talking about Germany and how it evolved in the
bad things that were done to Germany post World War
One that created Germany.

Speaker 1 (14:08):
Basically more to come with Doctor ed Moore next month.
More history on The Morning Show with Preston Scott. Thanks