Many of us feel that that the U.S. has been going crazy politically in the last couple decades or so. But the current period is off-topic for this post.
Instead I am interested in historically when has the divisiveness been greater. Slavery is the issue which immediately come to mind. But there are issues like immigration, Native Americans, gold vs silver, religion, wars, civil rights, economic depression…
Thoughts?
America’s entry into World War I was divisive, and Congress passed some pretty awful laws to restrict dissent.
The labor movement and push back to it got ugly too, with a lot of “unrest” between 1880 and 1920
The 1930s, between the Great Depression and the run up to World War II, saw the emergence of populist demagogues who were happy to whip up dissension on all sides.
The 1960s had a whole bunch of things come together at the same time - Civil Rights, Vietnam, suburbanization, the sexual revolution - to the point where even people who agreed on one thing couldn’t agree on something else.
Less violent were the good government/anticorruption reforms of the early 20th Century, which resulted in things like the progressive income tax, direct election of Senators, initiative and recall, all of which finally led to women’s suffrage.
From the late 1940s through the 1950s, McCarthyism divided the country into two sides. Joe was able to split the country almost in half until his eventual downfall.
Not to belabor the obvious, but the Civil War and its runup would be the most divisive in the country’s history.
Before Cold War McCarthyism, there was the first red scare in the 1920’s
Was MCCarthy truly divisive, or did most people realize he was making things up?
Also 1918: the original maskers and anti-maskers.
At first people were against it (in fact, Wilson ran on the platform “He kept us out of war”), then opinion swung completely the other way and people were rabidly pro-war. If you were seen not standing during the anthem, or not having your hand over your heart, you could be reported under the Sedition Act.
The revolutionary war period has to be high on this list.
At least in the Carolinas it was basically a war of neighbor fighting neighbor; for example, the battle of Kings Mountain was fought entirely between local militias.
My own family moved to Canada as a result of the war.
Whether or not people realized he was making stuff up, numerous people in the entertainment industry had their careers interrupted, if not destroyed, when they were blacklisted for being suspected of being Communists (or sympathizers).
In chronological order: 1770s, 1780s, 1790s, 1800s … 1890s, 1900s, 1910s … 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, 2020s.
I’m not being facetious. Every time is considered by those living through it as massively contentious, riddled with hated and violence, full of despair and fear, and consumed by awareness of Others that one must oppose at all costs.
Some of these times stand out in history books. It’s impossible not to make a point of the Civil War. But thinking that other decades have not had divisiveness is a massive failure on the part of those same history books. No such thing as a quiet, placid, we-are-all-one decade ever existed in American history. That such a thing might have ever occurred is basically propaganda, no different from trying to write systemic racism out of textbooks. Race, religion, class, ethnicity, politics, finance, morality, and even where you lived all engendered endless pitched battles that started before America became a country and still rage on today.
Even WWII, when everybody was supposedly pulling together, was a very divisive period in U.S. history, with partisan attacks, arguments about military policy, outrage over corruption etc.
Some Republicans were pushing Douglas MacArthur as a 1944 presidential candidate to unseat FDR, and there’s evidence MacArthur played along for awhile.
True.
We haven’t had anyone beaten to a near-pulp in the Senate chamber recently, but in the immortal words of Judy Tenuta, “it could happen!”.
There were a series of major race riots during WWII.
Another riot took place in Mobile because black workers were promoted.
6 died and 485 injured in Harlem after a soldier tried to stop police brutality.
Other black GIs were killed by police in New Orleans, which got covered up
On the flip side, white servicemen beat up Latinos in Los Angeles’ zoot suit riots.
Maybe my next post should look at the more than 10,000 strikes and work stoppages during the war. And the more than 5 million workers who went on strike in the year after. And…
Read newspaper headlines, not high school history textbooks, for real history.
Newspapers go in the opposite direction: hyping stuff no one will care about within a very short period of time.
So contemporary information doesn’t work and historical information doesn’t work. Do you have a third alternative?
The Civil War was obviously the most divisive.
Once the Civil War ends, then we’ll be able to try to figure out what’s in second place.
As a library volunteer, I love getting old (auto)biographies and books about events that were written shortly after they happened, by the people who experienced them. There is absolutely no substitute for history that was published at the time that it happened.
The earliest divisiveness I remember well enough to at least partially understand it was the early 1980s AIDS crisis. I do vaguely recall Watergate, only because it was all that was on the news, which I did watch, and I also remember my mother crying when Nixon announced he was going to resign, as she said, “He was a good president.” (Which he was in some ways, but not others, like most of them.)
Well high school textbooks are not exactly scholarly historical research: one of their functions is to help instill patriotism–so the bad parts of history are often glossed over.
This is a big one. The number of colonists who were pro-revolution was just under half (cite 1 cite 2) and I had ancestors living out east, typically in Virginia and other non-New England places. And to be honest I don’t know which side they were on.
Then a couple generations later, many of them fought on the Confederacy side. Another huge period of division.
That’s irrelevant to what you wrote earlier.
As someone who’s spent a huge portion of the last 20 years doing serious historical research in newspaper archives, I guarantee that front page headlines are the first draft of history. Additionally, incredible amounts of gold can be found by panning the slightest entries in old newspapers, including the supposedly ephemeral ads.
Newspapers are not sufficient - letters, documents, and memoirs are invaluable - but they are necessary.