Thread by @davidfrum

The Tulsa pogrom of 1921 was only one of a wave of race riots that bloodied the cities of the United States in the aftermath of the First World War.

In the single year 1919, some 250 black Americans were killed in some 25 riots. detroitnews.com/story/news/nat… 1/x

Most of us have a rough idea of the origin of the 1919-21 race riots. The war had drawn African American families from southern fields to northern factories.

At war's end, these new arrivals faced resentment and violence from demobilized white soldiers. 2/x

All true! But there's more to the story - and that "more" is every bit as relevant to the politics of the 2020s as the race pogroms of 1919-21. 3/x

1919 also saw terrible non-racial violence: the most tumultuous labor strife in US history, culminating a steel strike that involved 350,000 workers - and that ended in dismal defeat for organized labor. 4/x ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Great_Steel_…

Here's crucial context for both riots and strikes:

The First World War had generated significant price inflation in the United States. At war's end, US economic and monetary decided to force a return to pre-war price levels. That implied big cuts in wages. 5/x

The deflation of 1919 hit workers especially hard since wages had not kept pace with prices during the war. Wages had lagged during the wartime inflation; now they were to lead the way in postwar deflation. 6/x

The postwar deflation pushed the United States into a steep depression: the US economy actually contracted faster (if not quite as deeply) as in 1930-33.

It was this depression - not the League of Nations - that won the Republicans party their landslide in 1920. 7/x

Wages and prices deflated, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates in 1921. The economy revived - or rather, the US economy did. Without thinking very much about it, US authorities had triggered a *global* economic crisis. And that didn't end in 1921. 8/x

The war had left every other industrial society crushed by debts: Britain owed war debts to the US France and Italy owed war debts to Britain. Germany owed reparations to France and Belgium. (Soviet Russia of course had already defaulted on all its debts.) 9/x

The only way to meet those debts was by exporting to the strongest consumer market, the United States. And in 1921 and 1923, the newly elected Republicans imposed tariffs to prevent those exports. 10/x

Those US decisions thwarted recovery in Europe. They plunged the US farm economy into a decade-long depression. If Europeans could not sell manufactures to the US, they could not buy food from the US. 11/x

And in the northern cities, they exacerbated pre-existing racial and religious hostilities, symbolized by the Second Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. 12/x

The even greater disaster of the 1930s has blocked much of this history from memory. Weirdly, the people who do remember it are economic cultists who regard the deflation of 1919-20 as a brilliant idea and resounding success. (See here theatlantic.com/international/…) 13/x

Might a more accommodating economic policy in 1919-21 have mitigated race and class tensions in the United States - eased acceptance in the North of newcomers from the South? It sure would not have hurt. 14/x

And the United States had experience to learn from. The decision in 1873 to deflate prices to pre 1861 levels had cost the Republicans the House of Representatives in 1874 - and brought Reconstruction to an end soon after. 15/x

Maybe these are impossible might-have-beens. But as we in 2021 hear urgent advice to start deflating RIGHT AWAY - it's worth looking back at sad passages of history to re-learn that deflation has costs at least as serious as inflation. END

... US economic and monetary AUTHORITIES ...

... insert period after "Britain owed war debts to the US" ...