Martin Meenagh blog

  President Woodrow Wilson famously went to bed on the night of the 1916 presidential vote believing that he had lost, as did the New York Times , which had declared the race for his opponent, Charles Evans Hughes. The newspaper did this in part because, on early returns, Wilson had lost the entire North bar New Hampshire and Ohio. A (prematurely identified) tide was seen to be running against re-election. For two days, until Southern, Western, and Midwestern votes were declared, it still seemed likely that the next president would be Charles Evans Hughes, the Republican candidate. State and local elections also suggested, as Thomas Knock has noted, that the Socialist vote was reasonably strong, which, given the reunification of the Republican party after the split between Roosevelt and Taft in 1912, suggested that Wilson could lose states such as California and North Dakota. It is in fact reasonably well established that Wilson was not suffering from an excess of false humilit...

  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...

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...