Martin Meenagh blog

  Prohibition in the United States was a product of two wars and protestant social reform. It had a substantial latent underside of anti-Irish, anti-German, and anti-Catholic support. Characterising it in such a way places it alongside campaigns against Mormon polygamy, prostitution, and immigration between the Civil War and the First World War. It has been viewed as seperable from the movement for female suffrage, which arose at mostly the same time and the coalition of support for which broadly overlapped with prohibition. The great historian Richard Hofstadter, in fact, called it a ‘ludicrous parody’ of social reform in 1955. Such an outlook also allows for the limited federal prohibition regulations of 1918 in the Wartime Prohibition Act to be seen as opening the door to a ‘constitutional blunder’ in 1919, when Nebraska ratified the prohibition amendment, leaving New York, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Nevada isolated. A standard narrative has develope...

There have been at least three distinct versions of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in American history. The first, as described by the republican congress of the 1870s, was established by the former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest in Tennessee in 1866. It was a collection of night-riders, lawbreakers and terrorists whose structure might well have been unsystematised but whose purpose throughout the Deep South was to undermine African-American votes, rights, and equality by legal and extralegal means. This Klan was effectively suppressed by the Grant Administration, which turned federal troops against it, though ballot intimidation, lynching, and the exclusion of black people from civil society continued via other means. The Second Klan arose in the years before World War One, and was heavily influenced by nativist suspicion of Catholics, Jews and Hispanic minorities as well as African-Americans. The Klan’s third existence was as a congeries of putative ‘white rights’ groups that ...

Historians of the 1920s and economists have been apt to disagree on the development of 1920s prosperity. This has been because economists have focussed on the monetary policies and implications of the period whereas historians have looked to the supply-side, or to Keynesian analyses based around employment and demand. The two professions have therefore, until recently, formed radically different perspectives on the period. To an historian, the 1920s were a period when Gross National Product rose by some $25 billion; the number of ‘radio-owning households’ rose over sixteen times, from 60000 to ten million; income tax millionaires rose eightfold, and the number of people who used airlines rose twentyfold. This speaks to a massive increase in demand, which can be associated with the growth of jobs in motor manufacturing, and in the associated industries such as tyre-making and steelworks. The automobile industry alone was by 1929 responsible for 7 % of all United States industrial...

Many historians, particularly those on the political left, tend to become confused over Al Smith. The ‘Lincoln of the tenements’, four times Governor of New York and a reformer who was personally transformed by the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911, the consensus more or less goes, was simply bitter when he reacted against FDR’s New Deal in 1934. His rich friends in the Liberty League somehow corrupted him. Al Sold out. These underlying explanations of motive are not in fact explanations at all, but rather attempts to ‘retro-fit’ Smith’s class, background and views to the assumption that the New Deal was universally supported within the progressive centre and on the left. Though complex, Smith was in fact more consistent in his political perspective than many writers have allowed for. Smith had been a leader of the Progressive movement, and had roots in the lower East Side. He was working class, and was not a university man. He arose in the early twentieth century. His career ha...

Herbert Hoover was not treated well by his near-contemporaries and nor has he been treated well by history. He has been described as ‘inflexible’, and pilloried for his self-confidence. His numerous attempts to draw a recovery from conferences with businessmen during the early stages of the depression have been seen as pointless, and his promotion of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which was the model for many of the later ‘New Deal’ programmes has been largely ignored or forgotten. Hoover’s beliefs in the gold standard, self-reliance, and tariffs have been taken by some to suggest economic illiteracy, despite being the bedrock of Republican beliefs since 1856. It is almost as though Calvin Coolidge’s faults of indolence and do-nothing politics, and Harding’s buffoonery, had been projected onto Hoover. Such obloquy is undeserved. Hoover was an activist president who tried his best to manage an unfolding and multi-faceted crisis, and who by the end of his time in off...