1919
America had won the First World War but effectively lost the peace. An isolationist Senate refused to ratify the League of Nations treaty while President Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke. Meanwhile, as the government ended wartime spending and regulations, inflation skyrocketed and unemployment shot up to 20 percent. An influenza epidemic, one of the worst in history, killed a half-million Americans. The 18th Amendment introduced Prohibition and a decade of lawlessness. More immediately, the infamous “bloody summer of 1919” saw race riots in cities across the country: Chicago erupted in five days of brutal violence that left 500 wounded and 38 dead. Meanwhile, lynchings continued to rise, with 76 black Americans killed, including 10 veterans.
The infamous “bloody summer of 1919” saw race riots in cities across the country.
The fall of 1919 featured massive labor strikes: 350,000 steelworkers in Indiana, 425,000 miners in coal country, most of the Boston police force, etc. To many, such strikes signaled that America was poised for a revolution like the Bolsheviks had just pulled off in Russia. Fear turned to panic with mail bombs sent to prominent Americans like Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and John D. Rockefeller. In November, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, himself the target of a bomb, launched the first Red Scare, a massive series of arrest raids against suspected radicals, anarchists, and communists that turned into the biggest violation of civil liberties in a half-century.
All told, 1919 was a year of political chaos, social unrest, economic disasters, health epidemics, bloody race riots, giant labor strikes, and brutal government overreach. Definitely a contender.
Kevin Kruse is the author of One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America.
1943
Amid a world at war, 1943 stood out as an awful year. The Holocaust grew more deadly by the week, and Nazis had systematically deported and killed more than 1.3 million Jews by spring 1943. News of these atrocities circulated internationally, but the Allies lacked the political will and military capacity to rescue European Jews. Szmul Zygielbojm, a Jewish-Polish politician who took his own life after his wife and son were killed in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, wrote in his suicide letter, “By my death I wish to make my final protest against the passivity with which the world is looking on and permitting the annihilation of the Jewish people.”
A depressing account of the capacity of humans to stop or prevent cruelty.
WWII also prompted an increase in food exports from British India to feed British soldiers and citizens, which produced a massive famine in the Bengal province, which killed an estimated 3 million people.