IWW – Industrial Workers of the World

• founded 1905 – united skilled and non-skilled labourers
• leader – ‘Big Bill’ Haywood, who called for destruction of capitalism; his extreme position split the IWW
• Haywood convicted and jailed for sedition in 1917 for opposing war; died in Moscow

President Wilson

· considered to be pro-labour; during his term Anti-Trust Acts passed to control development of industrial monopolies

• Wilson also campaigned on promise that US wouldn’t go to war and then broke the promise

Red Scare – 1919-20

• fear of radicals and foreigners
• influenced by residual war sentiment, steel worker’s strike, attempted murder of 3 prominent men (John D. Rockefeller, Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Attorney General)
• murders believed to be communist inspired

Dos Passos shows irony of US fighting to protect democracy overseas while punishing

Americans for dissent

• (355, 358) Ben Compson is imprisoned and has citizenship revoked for arguing against war and capitalism
• Logging industry showed huge profit during war

“The timber owners, the sawmill and shinglekings were patriots; they’d won the war (in the course of which the price of lumber had gone up from $16 a thousand feet to $116; there are even cases where the government paid as high as $1200 a thousand for spruce); they set out to clean the reds out of the logging camps.” (367)

• Loggers were paid in scrip; could only shop in company store, so money paid to employees went back to company coffers
• Conflict set up between Legion of Loyal Loggers and IWW so that Wobblies were seen as “unpatriotic”

“The Body of an American” (375)

• During war, numerous national differences elided for focus on national unity and hatred for enemy Other
• Post-war, Other is gone; frustration over lack of jobs, readjustment of huge male population into society, labour dissent, anger at Wilson for entering war, Red Scare contribute to issues of unrest at home
• 1921 – President Harding gives eulogy at Arlington for the Unknown Soldier
• Dos Passos argues that government uses figure of the Unknown Soldier to bring the diverse population back together and unite public and private visions in a common symbol (see William Solomon)
• Dos Passos undermines this by showing reader how the Unknown Soldier is really not representative of any diversity
• once again, only certain stories of the war are admitted into the public account
• public version is seen as ‘soothing’, but neither realistic nor representative