When Love of Country = Hatred of Ordinary People: A Look Back At Capitalist "Patriotism"

 

1920: Nationwide

Class-Warfare Glossary

• Hyphenated Americans n.—recent immigrants from Central Europe who were “disloyalists” during WWI because of their “split” national identities

• 100% Americans n.—Americans of undivided loyalties, blindly devoted to the state and the private interests that dominate it. Soon to be known as fascists.

• American Plan n.—the inalienable right of all workers to rent their labor for whatever desperation allows them to get; syn., the Open Shop

• Bolshevism n.—an absurd and outrageously dangerous doctrine holding that the worker’s lot can be improved through collective action

• Bolshevist front n.—the ideological arm of Satan, i.e. a union

• Industrial Freedom n.—(1) the employer’s freedom to buy and sell workers; (2) the workers’ liberty to rent themselves or starve

• Radical n.—an extremist dedicated to the heresy that starvation ought to be cured before luxury is indulged

• Parlor Pink n. a middle class reformer who fails to see diabolic trickery in the radical

• Patriotic Society n.—a band of rabid vigilantes whose love of country is expressed with the hangman’s noose

• Superpatriot n.—a professional killer with a roving commission

• Subversive n.—a worker unconvinced of the need to labor to exhaustion for poverty wages

• Traitor n.—a worker who fails to see good will in his exploiters⁹

 

^Sources: 

^{Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement In The United States, Volume 8, Postwar Struggles, 1918-1920 (International Publishers, 1988) p. 172-3; Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Volume 7, Labor and World War I 1914-1918, (International Publishers, 1987) p. 254; Louis Adamic, Dynamite - The Story of Class Violence in America, (Chelsea House, , 1958) pps. 325-6}

1920: New York City

Portrait Of An Extremist Program

W. E. B. DuBois draws up an NAACP litmus test for the presidential campaign. Its alarming content proves too radical for any candidate to support: (1) a federal anti-lynching bill (2) reduction of Southern representation in the federal government proportional to the politically excluded black population under Jim Crow (3) abolition of Jim Crow cars in interstate travel (4) an end to segregation in federal civil service (5) withdrawal of U.S. forces from occupied Haiti (6) equality of federal aid in elementary education (7) the enrollment of black officers in the armed forces proportionate to their numbers in the general population.¹⁰

 

^Source:

 

^{David Levering Lewis, Vol. 2, W. E. B. DuBois - The Fight For Equality and the American Century 1919-1963 (Henry Holt, 2000) p. 28}