We have been here before

I recently picked up this book because a troll on a comment thread made the bold claim that the post-WWI recession was quickly ended by cutting taxes and government spending. "Huh?" Troll headquarters is getting more sophisticated in doling out the day's talking points. Putting that aside, it certainly is convenient that every problem can be solved by the liberal application of fundamentalist right wing policy prescriptions. It may be absolutely useless to try and argue with someone that delusional, they admit nothing and never surrender, but it dawned on me that despite taking a senior level undergraduate course on US History 1921-1945 I did not have the answer readily available in my head to even have an internal discussion on the end of WWI. That is the entire point I suppose, the troll was trying to make a "point" about something and brought up the post-WWI recession simply to obfuscate the discussion, derailing the thread while dissembling about his real reasons for inserting himself there. If you scan just about any news article on social media you see the same thing.

William E. Leuchtenburg, the author of this book, doesn't specifically have a chapter or section on the recession of 1919-21 but I was able to piece together the narrative amid the fight over the League of Nations and the Red Scare. As usual, it is the opposite of the troll's claim, Leuchtenburg writes that the government rolled back wartime controls on wages and prices too soon and all at once so prices skyrocketed while wages plunged. So people were squeezed and could not consume the products that the economy produced, when demand falls so does everything else. This led to mass layoffs, squeezing spending even more. Then government immediately ceased purchasing war material, removing still more spending from the economy. Then finally farmers, who had been encouraged to take out mortgages to more buy more land saw markets for their produce evaporate and prices for farm goods fall so banks foreclosed on them. Basically what Keynesian economics says will happen when there is a sudden and sharp drop in demand. The nail in sealing the recession was the government's brutal response to labor strikes that were in turn caused by the government's actions in withdrawing from the economy. Suppression by violence, arrests, replacement workers, and other anti-labor measures crushed working people on suspicions of "foreign extremist" ideologies at work, i.e. Bolshevism. This sent a clear signal to business that the good times of exploitation and profits while government turned a blind eye were back and corporations had nothing to fear from the liberal, "progressive" Wilson administration.

So much about this country's involvement in the Great War provides a textbook examination of how not to conduct a war. But that is a subject for another post. I started this book with a specific question in mind, I found so many more and the answers to them. Above all, this book in particular (the first edition was printed in 1958 and this edition released in 1993) says so much about where we are now, where we were then, and what not to do in dealing with all manner of political, cultural, and economic problems. Leuchtenburg wrote from the perspective of a professional historian during times of recovery from wars, upheavals, and financial peril. I think we can learn a lot from revisiting his work. I plan to spend a little time posting passages from the text and attempting to analyze and apply the examples of how screwed up the United States has always been. Hence the title of this post. History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes and we would be well-served to learn from events in the past so we don't have to deal with this particularly embarrassing era of American history again today.