Populating the Great Plains and the Upper Midwest: Germans from Germany — and Germans from Russia

Germans had arrived in North America as early as 1683. They quickly became a significant part of the economy.

By the time the United States became an independent nation in 1776, Germans had earned reputations as excellent farmers, craftsmen, merchants, and technical innovators.

The German-Americans earned this admiration in the original thirteen colonies, and also helped America to defend its freedom in the war from 1775 to 1783.

As the nation expanded westward, German-Americans pioneered into the new regions, and continued to earn respect from their fellow citizens. German-Americans were seen as hard workers and wise managers of their assets, as Thomas Sowell writes:

German immigrants’ achievement as farmers in the United States remained outstanding in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In eastern Texas, German farmers were by 1880 producing a larger volume of output per farm — and on smaller farms — than other Texans.

Many of the Germans came to America, not from Germany, but from Russia. Large groups of Germans had left Germany, seeking economic opportunities, and gone to Russia. They settled in Russia, but found that low literacy rates and poor financial systems limited the income which they could generate from their farms. So they moved again, this time to America.

In Nebraska, Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming, Germans who had re-immigrated from Russia established good reputations as farmers and had excellent credit ratings at banks. Germans, both from Germany and from Russia, eventually achieved prosperity in Oklahoma, after harrowing years of pioneering in a virgin territory.

Germans in the great farming states in the middle of the country helped to create the best aspects of the nation’s agriculture system, aspects which still benefit the United States more than a century later.

On the East Coast, by contrast, Germans gained their reputations from business, industry, and technological development.

Whether on the coasts or in the interior, whether in agriculture or in urban commerce, Germans maintained a stellar reputation for diligence, cleverness, and superlative work ethic.

Black Leaders Confront Woodrow Wilson: Challenging Progressivist Racism

When President Woodrow Wilson revealed the deep-seated racism that motivated his policies, civil rights leaders took action. Two leaders in particular opposed Wilson: Ida B. Wells and Monroe Trotter.

Ida Wells started as a journalist in 1894. She wrote for a newspaper called the Daily Inter-Ocean, a Republican newspaper in Chicago. This newspaper boldly and persistently denounced lynching.

Because women in the United States were voting by this time, Ida Wells also organized the Republican Women’s Club in 1894. Her efforts resulted in Lucy Flower being elected as a trustee for the University of Illinois. This was long before the 19th amendment was passed in 1920.

Although Ida Wells enjoyed expanding rights for women and for African-Americans in the 1890s and early 1900s, President Woodrow Wilson was determined to stop the Republican Party. In 1912, Wilson began taking away the civil rights which Blacks had enjoyed since 1863, as historian Dinesh D’Souza writes:

Segregation wasn’t limited to the South. Following his election, Woodrow Wilson mandated segregation for all the agencies of the federal government. This had never happened before. In a sense, Wilson was burying the ghost of Lincoln, who would have been appalled beyond measure. The black community was apoplectic. Black leaders like Ida B. Wells and Monroe Trotter Protested Wilson’s racism, but the Democratic president was unmoved.

African-Americans and Whites had worked side-by-side in integrated and desegregated federal agencies since the time of Abraham Lincoln. But Woodrow Wilson, fueling his Democratic and Progressivist movements, undermined civil rights in ways that the nation hadn’t seen in fifty years.

Monroe Trotter, a Black civil rights leader, called Wilson’s policies “preposterous,” and confronted President Wilson in November 1914 at a meeting in the White House. When Wilson dismissed Trotter’s concerns, W.E.B. DuBois remarked that President Wilson was “insulting and condescending.”

Wilson boldly argued for segregation, as Dinesh D’Souza reports:

Wilson indignantly told these black leaders that they had no reason to complain, because segregation was in fact beneficial to blacks. Wilson also echoed the argument from Plessy that segregation was just, since whites were being separated from blacks just as much as blacks were being separated from whites.

The outbreak of WW1 gave Wilson another opportunity for racist behavior. His administration dictated that, in the U.S. Army, African-American officers were segregated from White officers. Unlike President Theodore Roosevelt before him, or President Warren Harding after him, Woodrow Wilson stubbornly clung to racism throughout his administration.

Crisis Causes Creativity: Bartering, an Inventive Solution During the Great Depression

People are often at their most creative when facing urgent problems. The Great Depression was a nationwide financial collapse, and individuals, seeing that government programs were incapable of offering much help, found their own solutions.

If the monetary system was failing, people reasoned, then they would find a way to complete transactions outside of the system. The government, in the form of the federal reserve system, lurked inside any cash transaction. But bartering would sidestep the government entirely, as historian Amity Shlaes writes:

One late summer day in 1931 in Salt Lake City, the money ran out. Not just the money in the banks, and not just the money in the town coffers - the money that citizens had to spend. Locals reached into their pockets and, finding nothing, began to trade work and objects. Barbers traded shaves and haircuts for onions and Idaho potatoes. From there, the trading spread to other products. Life in Utah had always been a desert when it came to water. Now it was a desert when it came to money, as well. People in Utah knew how to survive in a desert. Maybe they could find a way to manage in the money desert as well.

The nation’s economy, under the influence of various programs designed to improve it, would deteriorate further, conditions in 1937 being worse than in 1931. But ordinary citizens invented ways to avoid government influence and maintain some element of productive economic activity.

Government efforts, however well-intentioned, generated the opposite of the desired effects: President Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ made the misery of the Great Depression worse.

Bartering, and in some cases even ‘black market’ activity, provided the necessities of life - food, clothing, housing, medical care - despite government strategies.

The Barbary Pirates: The U.S. Navy Matures in the Face of Terrorism in the Mediterranean

The United States became an independent nation in 1776, and the war to defend that independence against British attacks ended the early 1780s. A young nation, the United States had little money and little military power. Whatever money and power it did have, it had spent defending against the British.

Other nations could easily see the American weakness. Weakness is provocative: soon pirates focused their attention on American seagoing vessels. These particular pirates were from a collection of Muslim nations known as the Barbary States. The governments of those nations didn’t do anything to stop piracy, and sometimes even encouraged it.

The pirates wanted money: the would stop an American ship, steal the cargo, and take the sailors as captives. The pirates would sell the cargo and keep the money. They also sold the sailors into slavery. They would also keep the American ship and use it to attack other cargo boats.

Any sailor who resisted would be killed.

England and France had strong navies, and could defend their commercial shipping vessels better. Occasionally, the pirates attacked English and French ships, but rarely. The Americans were a much easier target, because the United States had a new and very small navy.

The Islamic pirates had been attacking unarmed American ships as early as 1784 or 1785, but frequency of the attacks increased after 1793.

The word ‘corsair’ refers to pirates or their ships.

The French and British had been policing the pirates, but when those two nations got into a war with each other, they stopped watching the pirates, who began to attack the Americans even more frequently. As historians Allan Millett and Peter Maslowski write,

The Barbary States - Algiers, Morocco, Tunis, and Tripoli - traditionally engaged in piracy, but the European powers bottled up their activities inside the Mediterranean Sea. After 1793, with the Europeans preoccupied, corsairs from Algiers, the most powerful of the petty North African nations, entered the Atlantic and preyed upon American shipping.

The Islamic nations would sometimes demand tribute. The word ‘tribute’ refers to a payment from a weaker nation to a more powerful nation. The United States gave thousands of dollars to the Barbary States; in return, the Barbary States promised to stop attacking American ships. But the promise was broken immediately.

This cycle of paying tribute to get promises, and then seeing the promises get broken, happened several times. Sometimes the promises made by the Barbary States were documented in treaties which they signed, but they still broke their promises.

U.S. President Thomas Jefferson decided that it would be dangerous if other nations considered the United States to be weak. Congress voted to start building armed ships to strengthen the U.S. Navy. While those ships were being built, the Barbary States increased their aggressiveness, as historian Russell Weigley writes:

The Barbary States of the North African coast increased their piratical attacks upon American commerce and demands for American tribute, because the European wars made the United States the most conspicuous neutral shipping nation.

Meanwhile, the Muslim pirates also began attacking Swedish ships. Sweden and the United States worked together to begin to defend their merchant boats against attacks.

As the U.S. Navy increased the number of ships it had, the Barbary States began to realize that they could not continue attacking American ships, stealing American cargo, and enslaving American sailors. Although the conflict never turned into a full-scale war, there was fighting between the U.S. Navy and the Islamic pirates.

The Battle of Tripoli, in 1804, became famous in a song, and was a major turning point in history.

By 1805, the Barbary States, realized that they had to stop harassing Americans. They signed another treaty. But by 1807, they started again.

By 1815, the Barbary pirates were enslaving as many sailors as ever. The United States, this time teaming up with the British, had by this time an even stronger navy. The Barbary States, including Algeria, finally surrendered permanently, and after 1815 there was little piracy in the Mediterranean.

Imperialism is the Violation of Free Markets: Colonialism is the Disruption of Individual Political Liberty

Although colonialism and imperialism existed in the ancient world, the modern political paradigm of imperialist colonialism was sired primarily by the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Correspondingly, the modern paradigm of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism arose in North America in the mid-1700s.

The oppression against which the Americans rebelled manifested the essential imperialist and colonial traits of violating the free market. The colonies were abused inasmuch as they were not allowed to participate in a free market. British regulations dictated which goods they could, and could not, buy. The rebellion consisted in part of smuggling.

The English rules dictated, e.g., that the colonists could purchase only tea from Britain, not from other countries, and that the colonists must sell certain goods only to England and only at the prices dictated by the English.

This violation of free market principles constituted an abuse of human rights by the British, as Allan Millett and Peter Maslowski write:

The Revolution began in 1765, not 1775. The events of 1765–1775 marked the first phase in a colonial war of national liberation. Only a handful of colonists advocated outright independence in 1765, but they vigorously championed their cause and slowly gained adherents over the next decade. During this initial stage colonial leaders organized themselves politically while subverting the established government’s authority through terrorism and propaganda. The Stamp Act Congress, followed by the two Continental Congresses, reflected the emergence of a national political organization.

Imperialist oppression, and colonialist oppression, operate by violating the free market. Colonies are held in poverty, and denied fair prices for their products and raw materials, by keeping them from offering their products in an unregulated market.

The North American colonies were regulated by the British about what they could buy, what they could sell, to whom they could sell, and from whom they could buy.

Key actions in the early phases of the revolution were economic actions: smuggling, boycotting, and the Boston Tea Party. Millett and Maslowski continue:

At the local level the Sons of Liberty evolved into a network of committees of correspondence and of safety. These extralegal bodies coordinated the opposition against Parliament, prevented the Revolutionary movement from degenerating into anarchy, and intimidated individuals who supported England. Radical leaders also organized riots against important symbols of British rule. Mob actions were not spontaneous but instead represented purposeful violence by what were, in essence, urban volunteer militia units. Supplementing the violence was a propaganda campaign portraying every English action in the darkest hues.

The American Revolution featured ideological freedoms like those of press, speech, and religion. It also featured economic freedoms, like deregulation and significant reduction in taxation.

These two sets of freedoms are so closely intertwined that they can’t be thoroughly separated. Various individual specific liberties are organically related.

Imposed taxes are a violation of free speech. Economic regulations are a violation of the free press.

The American Revolution demonstrated the inseparable unity of various specific rights.

The Birth of Anti-Colonialism: America Launches Anti-Imperialism

Although the concepts of ‘anti-colonialism’ and ‘anti-imperialism’ can be traced back to the times when Roman soldiers occupied parts of Europe and parts of the Ancient Near East, the modern forms of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism began around 1750 in North America.

The thirteen colonies that rebelled against British imperialism had been oppressed by a colonial economic system which left them at a distinct disadvantage. The British military was well-funded: much of that funding had left the Parliament in London facing massive debts.

The cruel and inhumane treatment of the colonists was designed, in part, to extract wealth from North America to repay the British government’s debt. Parliament gave the excuse that the funding was used to protect the colonies, and that therefore the colonies should pay the debt.

The colonies, however, argued that they were capable of, and had largely provided, their own defense, e.g., in the French and Indian War (1754 to 1763). The had not requested, did not want, and did not need defense from the British military, and therefore were loath to pay for it.

The formidable British military was large, well-equipped, and skilled. Instead of defending the colonies, it was used to oppress the colonies.

The British navy had both ‘ships of the line,’ which were large and well-armed to directly encounter the enemy, and frigates, which were faster, and more maneuverable. The Americans, by contrast, only began to assemble a small navy after the Revolutionary War started in April 1775.

As one would expect in the case of oppressed colonies fighting for their liberty against imperialist exploitation, the Americans were in every material way outmatched, as historian Russell Weigley writes:

Washington’s was a generalship shaped by military poverty. When the British arrived by sea before New York in the summer preceding the Trenton raid, General William Howe brought against Washington’s defenders of the city 31,625 soldiers of all ranks, 24,464 of them effectives fit for duty when the fighting for the city commenced, well equipped, and well trained and disciplined in the arts of eighteenth-century war. Behind Howe’s soldiers stood a British fleet of ten ships of the line, twenty frigates, hundreds of transports, and 10,000 seamen, commanded by General Howe’s very capable brother, affording the British general the privilege of descending wherever he chose upon the American coast.

While materially outmatched, the Americans had more motivation than the British soldiers. The colonists were fighting for the liberty of the friends and families; the British were often merely fighting to obtain a week’s or a month’s pay.

Although the English had had authority over the colonies since the early 1600s, it was only in the mid-1700s that such authority was abusively enforced.

Whatever autonomy the colonies had enjoyed during the 1600s disappeared under the economic hegemony which the English imposed during the 1700s.

The British treated the colonists ruthlessly and brutally. This was a central cause of the bid for independence, as historians Allan Millett and Peter Maslowski write:

The series of events that led the British colonies from resistance to Parliamentary sovereignty in 1765 to outright rebellion in 1775 cannot be recapitulated here. But two points need to be made. First, the crisis represented a clash between a mature colonial society and a mother country anxious to assert parental authority. Britain had previously never exercised much direct control over the colonies. Prospering under the “salutary neglect,” the colonies enjoyed de facto independence and developed a remarkable degree of self-reliance. Colonial aspirations thus collided with England’s desire to enforce subordination and diminish colonial autonomy.

America is paradigmatic for the ideologies of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism. The “Spirit of ‘76” led to the independence of Cuba and the Philippines from Spain, and led to the Monroe Doctrine’s defense of Central and South America against European colonizers.

Several elements of the American paradigm are worth noting: anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism arose with an eye toward establishing a strong national economy and vigorous individual political liberty. The political freedom of the individual was a treasured goal of the American independence movement.

The French Revolution (1789 to 1799), which was partially inspired by the American Revolution and which followed it only a few years later, took the opposite approach to the American paradigm: the French Revolution ran roughshod over the individual and sought a uniform collectivism.

Individual political freedom spills over into economic freedom. British taxes and regulations gave way to a free market. The French Revolution failed where the American Revolution succeeded because it neglected to honor the political liberty of the individual.

Colonies which look to the French Revolution as a model for independence often find themselves under more, not less, oppression. More than 200 years later, successful independence movements still follow the American paradigm.

Organized Labor’s Communist Phase: Collective Bargaining’s Infatuation with Stalin

At different points in time during its history, the American labor union movement has embraced both pro-communist and anti-communist passions. During the 1930s, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) had self-proclaimed communists not only in its membership, but also in its leadership.

In 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was founded as an explicitly communist organization. At least one of its leaders, Bill Haywood, permanently relocated to the Soviet Union, and worked for the rest of his life to promote Stalinist oppression.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the pro-Soviet and pro-communist factions within the labor movement faced successive difficult situations. First, Stalin’s atrocities (e.g., the deaths of millions of Ukrainians when Stalin discontinued their food supply) made it awkward for them to exuberantly support Soviet Socialism. Second, Stalin’s alliance with Hitler placed them in the position of opposing America’s support of England. Third, Hitler’s eventual betrayal of Stalin made them appear to be enthusiastic followers of a dupe. Fourth, they anti-industrialist postures made them seem as if they were undermining the U.S. war effort.

By late 1940 and early 1941, a large segment of America’s industrial base was manufacturing products to fuel England’s war efforts. When the CIO struck, and the factories were idled, this was perceived as an attack on England, especially when the strikes were not for higher wages, but rather for procedural reasons related to competitions between unions.

Several manufacturers had been the targets of strikes: Vultee Aircraft, Ford, Allis-Chalmers, International Harvester, and others. Because a number of these strikes were not for higher wages, the workers weren’t benefitting, but the reduced output translated directly into deaths on the battlefield and in the air, as historian Arthur Herman writes:

For those associated with the Communist-dominated CIO, there were also political issues involved. The official party line was that the war raging in Europe was still a bourgeois struggle and the working class had nothing to gain by getting involved. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact hadn’t made the Soviet Union Hitler’s ally exactly, but Stalin and his Communist followers had no desire to help Britain or its Dominion allies win. As labor historian Max Kampelman has shown, the Communists’ goal was to halt or at least hamper the American war effort, and strikes were one way to do it.

The strikes from the communist-oriented unions didn’t obtain bigger paychecks for the workers. Instead, they were part of competition between different unions, and part of a larger scheme to aid Stalin’s war effort.

By the end of World War II, changes were in the making. As the new postwar, Cold War alignments emerged globally, labor unions in the United States moved toward a pro-liberty, anti-communist stance.

A freedom-oriented, anti-Soviet mood governed most of organized labor from the late 1940s through the end of the Cold War in 1990.

After the Cold War, the labor movement, like most things in the West, had to re-contextualize itself. Neither pro-Soviet nor anti-Soviet sentiments had relevance in a post-Soviet world. Since 1990, and especially in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, labor unions are seeking identity. Some have drifted into a Leninist-Stalinist progressivism, endorsing socialist and communist policies. Others have kept themselves away from the globalist power struggle entirely.