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...

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...

The United States’ traditional engagement with the world, since before Washington’s farewell address, was one of trade and self-interest, rather than isolationism properly speaking. This was consonant with its existence as a country tied into foreign trade, with a government funded by a tariff (which required rather than discouraged trade and the reinvestment of profits) but no large Navy. From the late nineteenth century, this had begun to change, and the parallel development of the Great White Fleet and a style of hemispheric engagement that blended the Monroe Doctrine with the Roosevelt Corollary encouraged America to begin to integrate with the world. This integration involved a failed attempt at Imperialism; the development of dollar diplomacy; mediation in the Russo-Japanese war; and Taft’s attempt to mediate in Balkan and East European disputes before 1914. It is not therefore surprising that the US rejected Versailles. The odd thing, given its history, is the acceptance o...