Tant: Bigotry stained U.S. in 1919, continues today

Posted: Saturday, November 06, 1999

   World War I was touted by President Woodrow Wilson as the war to ''make the world safe for democracy,'' yet when American soldiers came home from the trenches of Europe they found that democracy was in peril right here at home in America. Eighty years ago, in the bloody year of 1919, America endured social upheaval from coast to coast. The lynch mob and the midnight police raid were commonplace in a nation that had so recently fought a ''war to end all wars.'' With post-World War I labor struggles and racial strife, America 1919 and the nation was polarized as it had been at no time since the Civil War.




In his book ''1919,'' part of his monumental U.S.A. trilogy, leftist literary lion John Dos Passos wrote of the riots, repression and radicalism that were tearing at the American social fabric 80 years ago. Repression had been on an ascendancy in America for years by the time 1919 dawned. The Ku Klux Klan had enjoyed a steady growth since the racist, terrorist group was formed just after the Civil War.

   According to ''The Illustrated History of World War I,'' there were 83 lynchings, mostly of black people, in the year 1919. The hangman's rope and the lynch mob had become as American as the flag which had so recently flown over the battlefields of the war in Europe. America was rife with race riots in 1919, and the long hot summer of that year was so bloody that it became known as ''the red summer.'' In Chicago, 13 days of race riots left 38 dead and more than 500 injured. In Omaha, a black man accused -- probably falsely -- of assaulting a white woman was sprayed with gunfire and his bullet-riddled body was strung up for display on a busy street corner in the center of that bustling Nebraska city.

   Not all of the lynch mob victims of 1919 were black. Though the venerable civil rights organization called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had been formed a decade earlier largely in response to the lynch mobs and Klan killers who terrorized blacks in the South and around the nation, politically progressive white people were not immune to the whip or the hangman's noose.

   In the small lumber company town of Centralia, Wash., a lynch mob led by members of the newly formed American Legion killed a World War I hero named Wesley Everest, hanging him from a bridge in the army uniform he had worn so proudly in World War I. A white man, Everest belonged to the Industrial Workers of the World, a militant labor union that was the first labor organization to reach out to black workers in a spirit of equality.

   On Nov. 11, 1919 -- exactly a year after the war had ended -- an Armistice Day parade headed by American Legion men dropped all pretense of festivity and attacked the IWW union hall. There was gunplay on both sides as the Legionnaires stormed the IWW hall and three of the American Legion men were killed. During the battle, Wesley Everest vowed to a comrade, ''I fought for democracy in France and I'm going to fight for it here.''

   Labor leader Everest did fight for democracy in America, but the American Legion and the lumber companies were determined to shut down the IWW in the Pacific Northwest. As he was dragged away by the lynch mob, working class hero Wesley Everest snarled, ''Tell the boys I died for my class.'' Pieces of the rope used to lynch the labor leader were sold as souvenirs to the ''good, church-going people'' of Centralia. Everest's body was displayed in the town for the gawking citizens then buried in an unmarked grave. His soul goes marching on.

   The lynch mob mentality of 1919 lives on today. Just last month I received a letter -- unsigned, of course -- calling me a ''nigger lover'' and threatening violence because I worked on the recent Edward Wright Memorial Afrocentric Festival in Athens and because I disagreed with the writings of local right-wingers in this paper. The anonymous letter only proved that whether it is 1919 or 1999, the words of philosopher John Stuart Mill still ring true: ''Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.''

    Ed Tant has been an activist since 1968 and a journalist in Athens since 1974. Write him at P.O. Box 912, Athens, Ga. 30603-0912.



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