The rise of reactionaries in the wake of the 1918 flu pandemic – Crosscut

The Jazz Age was flourishing, thanks in part to new Prohibition laws. In Seattle, the so-called Jackson Street nightclub and speakeasy scene took off, spreading from Pioneer Square to the Central District and eventually birthing more than a generation of great music and musicians. But while the races exuberantly mixed in the after-midnight hours at clubs like the Black and Tan, nationally and locally reactionary racial politics took hold. By day, the segregating redlines in the city were steadfast and racist covenants spread.

Politically, the white middle class yearned for normalcy, which brought a sequence of conservative Republican presidents, including Calvin Coolidge, Warren G. Harding and Herbert Hoover, all of whom carried Washington state. But normalcy for many people meant a return to aggressive white supremacy. In some cases, Washington led the way.

The Ku Klux Klan revived in the 20s. Once mostly limited to the South, it found new enthusiasts in the white middle class of the far West and Midwest. The KKK took over towns and state houses, including for a time Oregons. Anti-Black, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic and anti-modernity, theKlan became a powerful force that paraded openly in the streets and rallied tens of thousands of people to witness late-night cross-burnings in places like Issaquah, Yakima and Renton.Some events attracted 30,000 or more people.

Seattle author Timothy Egan has written a book about the 1920s Klan revival, A Fever in the Heartland, due out next spring. Some five million Americans joined the 1920s KKK. In 1924, the Democratic delegations from Washington, Oregon and Idaho together unanimously opposed a plank in the partys platform that would repudiate Klan violence.

New anti-immigration laws targeting Asians were passed to keep America white. The Northwest had been founded on race-based policies that impacted who could settle here and who could homestead. In 1921, the Washington Legislaturepassed the first law since statehood aimed at cracking down on Japanese immigrants by revoking their right to lease or rent land. A Washington Congressman, Albert Johnson, shepherded a bill through Congress, the Immigration Act of 1924, that essentially halted all Asian immigration. Johnson called it a bulwark against alien blood. These kinds of bills had strong support from both the KKK and the general public.

The year of the immigration act also saw the election of a conservative Republican governor in Washington, Roland Hartley, an Everett politician and timberman who broke with the progressive wing of the GOP. Historian Dave M. Buerge has written, The 1924 campaign was a particularly grotesque one in Washington politics, with the Ku Klux Klan fomenting hatred against blacks, foreigners, Jews, and Catholics. Government intervention in private life during the war had fostered a backlash.

Hartley capitalized. He was anti-labor, anti-tax and anti-government when he couldnt control it with his autocratic ways. He slashed funding for the state highway department and for public schools, and he almost drove the University of Washington into the ground by cutting its budgets and seizing control of its board of regents. He bullied and name-called his enemies, though Im not sure anyone today would be insulted by being called a pusillanimous blatherskite.

Not only was Washington a leader in opposing nonwhite immigration and hounding people of color with legal restrictions and burning crosses, it was also an early adopter in 1909 of eugenics laws which took choice away from some Americans by installing a system of involuntary sterilizations. In 1921, the state Legislature tookan even harsher stand against the unfit with a broadened list of who could be forcibly sterilized, including the feeble-minded, insane, epileptic, habitual criminals, moral degenerates, and sexual perverts. Such laws received U.S. Supreme Court sanction under the Buck v. Bell decision of 1927 when Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes infamously declared that three generations of imbeciles is enough to justify sterilizing women as it turned out,mostly poor Black women. Nearly 700 Washingtonians were sterilized under state law until the practice ended here in the 1940s. More than 2,600 in Oregon were sterilized until the early 1980s.

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The rise of reactionaries in the wake of the 1918 flu pandemic - Crosscut