They were just asking for a raise
by digby
Here’s yet another interesting intersection between race and capitalism in America:
This is from the March 10, 1919 diary entry of Cary Grayson, Woodrow Wilson’s personal doctor:
…the President said…that if the present government of Germany is recognizing the soldiers and workers councils, it is delivering itself into the hands of the bolshevists [sic]. He said the American negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium in conveying bolshevism to America. For example, a friend recently related the experience of a lady friend wanting to employ a negro laundress offering to pay the usual wage in that community. The negress demands that she be given more money than was offered for the reason that “money is as much mine as it is yours.” Furthermore, he called attention to the fact that the French people have placed the negro soldier in France on an equality with the white men, and “it has gone to their heads.”
Jon Schwarz over at Michael Moore’s place gets to the heart of it:
The terrifying danger that the U.S. upper crust perceived in 1919 wasn’t that the lower orders were going to stage a Bolshevik revolution. It wasn’t even that they were going to try to get the right to vote and have a voice in the government. It was that they were asking for a raise.
(Also, worker councils were not a good idea that made workplaces run better, but pure revolutionary bolshevism. If you paid attention to the right-wing freakout over the UAW trying to organize the VW plant in Chattanooga, you saw nothing whatsoever has changed.)
That’s right. I think everyone knew that this laundress wasn’t spouting bolshevik propaganda. She was actually making a purely capitalist request — asking for a raise. And that was a threat.
And how did they give this threat a uniquely American spin? You guessed it:
The terrifying danger wasn’t coming from just any part of the lower orders, it was from the teeming non-white masses who want to take all our money.
Now we’re talking. This is how we did it then and how we do it now.
Read on to see how this turned into American foreign policy. We’re exceptional alright.