1896-5-18 Plessy v. Ferguson

.18th May 1896: Supreme Court - Plessy v. Ferguson - ‘separate but equal’ - HiPo > .

Plessy v Ferguson and Segregation: Black American History > .

Legal Segregation? | Plessy v. Ferguson - MrB > .

The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which had been ratified in 1868 during the period of Reconstruction, guaranteed ‘equal protection of the laws’ to all American citizens. This included almost 4 million former slaves who had been freed by President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment.

In 1890 the state of Louisiana introduced the Separate Car Act that required separate railway cars for black and white passengers. Two years later, in a challenge to the Act, the Comité des Citoyens (Committee of Citizens) civil rights group recruited Homer Plessy to purchase a first-class ticket from New Orleans to Covington and board a ‘Whites Only’ car. Plessy was an ‘octoroon’, which meant he had seven-eighths white and one-eighth black ancestry. Yet, despite his fair skin, under Louisiana law he was still classified as black.

The railroad company was aware of, and supported, the challenge as they opposed the need to purchase additional railway cars. Consequently Plessy was arrested after being asked to move. Having challenged the law as unconstitutional under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, the case eventually made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court after the Louisiana courts found the Act was legal for railroads operating within the state.

The Supreme Court delivered its verdict on 18 May, 1896, in which a 7–1 decision upheld that Louisiana’s train car segregation laws were constitutional. This effectively legalized racial segregation by permitting separate but supposedly equal facilities.

Low Trust Societies

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Origins of the Greek debt crisis - Kraut > .

Greek Debt Crisis ..

Undermining Democracy ..

1919-1-16 Prohibition 1933-12-15

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1919, 16th January: Prohibition - Nebraska 36th - 18th Amendment ratified HiPo > .

1933-12-15: 21st Amendment to the US Constitution repeals prohibition - HiPo > .

By the late 19th century the temperance movement in the United States had grown to include a number of organizations that sought to dramatically reduce and, in some cases, completely stop the consumption of alcohol. It was seen as the root cause of a number of the social problems that activists who flourished in the Progressive Era sought to address.

Although some individual counties and states had begun to introduce alcohol controls, the emergence of the Anti-Saloon League as a national organization saw the arrival of powerful and coordinated lobbying. In 1906 the ASL began a major campaign to encourage states to ban the sale of alcohol by making speeches, taking out advertisements, and staging public demonstrations. All these methods sought to promote the view that prohibition would improve society by eliminating poverty, violence, and antisocial behavior. The campaign also saw occasional violent action by more radical campaigners such as Carrie Amelia Moore Nation who became well-known for vandalizing saloons and smashing kegs of alcohol.

By 1916 almost half the states in America had already introduced laws against saloons. In December the following year the Eighteenth Amendment, which would prohibit the manufacture, sale, or transport of alcoholic beverages, comfortably passed both chambers in Congress. However, it would need to be ratified by at least three-quarters of the states in order to pass into law. It wasn’t until 16 January 1919 that Nebraska became the 36th to ratify the amendment. Nationwide prohibition began on 17 January the following year, and existed until its repeal by the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933.

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On 15 December 1933, the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution came into effect, repealing the Eighteenth Amendment which had made the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol illegal.

Prohibition was introduced in 1920 as a result of the Eighteenth Amendment. This ban on the sale, production, importation, and transportation of alcoholic beverages was greeted with delight by members of the temperance movement. Meanwhile many law-abiding Americans who had previously been drinkers were angry at the government for criminalising what they saw as a harmless activity.

Some members of the public were consequently willing to break the law, and this ushered in a period of criminal activity focused around the production of illegal bootlegged alcohol. Al Capone, one of prohibition’s most famous gangster bosses, made around $60 million a year from bootlegging alcohol and selling it in so-called ‘speakeasies’.

Izzy Einstein, one of the government’s best-known prohibition agents, demonstrated the scale of the problem facing the authorities who were trying to enforce the ban on alcohol. When visiting New Orleans it took him just thirty-five seconds to obtain liquor after his taxi driver offered him a bottle of whisky.

Combined with the problem of police officers being paid by the criminals to turn a blind eye to illegal activity, prohibition brought lawlessness and corruption to America. In the wake of the Wall Street Crash, repealing prohibition also made sound economic sense as alcohol taxes created a new revenue stream for the government. However, the introduction of the Twenty-first Amendment ensured that individual states were still able to enforce their alcohol laws.

Red Scare USA

1919-8 Communist Revolution in America? - The Red Scare 1919 > .    

February 1950 - McCarthyism Red Scare 

23-3-16 Powers-That-Be vs. Media | Morrow vs McCarthy (subs) - Katz > .

McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of subversion and treason, especially when related to anarchism, communism, and socialism, and especially when done in a public and attention-grabbing manner.

The term originally referred to the controversial practices and policies of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy and covers the period of the late 1940s through the 1950s. It was characterized by heightened political repression and persecution of left-wing individuals, and a campaign spreading fear of alleged communist and socialist influence on American institutions and of espionage by Soviet agents. 

What would become known as the McCarthy era began before McCarthy's rise to national fame. Following the breakdown of the wartime East-West alliance with the Soviet Union, and with many remembering the First Red Scare, President Harry S. Truman signed an executive order in 1947 to screen federal employees for possible association with organizations deemed "totalitarian, fascist, communist, or subversive", or advocating "to alter the form of Government of the United States by unconstitutional means." The following year, the Czechoslovak coup by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia heightened concern in the West about Communist parties seizing power and the possibility of subversion. In 1949, a high-level State Department official was convicted of perjury in a case of espionage, and the Soviet Union tested a nuclear bomb. The Korean War started the next year, significantly raising tensions and fears of impending communist upheavals in the United States. In a speech in February 1950, McCarthy claimed to have a list of members of the Communist Party USA working in the State Department, which attracted substantial press attention, and the term McCarthyism was published for the first time in late March of that year in The Christian Science Monitor, along with a political cartoon by Herblock in The Washington Post. 

After the mid-1950s, McCarthyism began to decline, mainly due to Joseph McCarthy's gradual loss of public popularity and credibility after several of his accusations were found to be false, and sustained opposition from the U.S. Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren on human rights grounds. The Warren Court made a series of rulings on civil and political rights that overturned several key laws and legislative directives, and helped bring an end to the Second Red Scare. Historians have suggested since the 1980s that as McCarthy's involvement was less central than that of others, a different and more accurate term should be used instead that more accurately conveys the breadth of the phenomenon, and that the term McCarthyism is now outdated. Ellen Schrecker has suggested that Hooverism after FBI Head J. Edgar Hoover is more appropriate.

The term McCarthyism has since taken on a broader meaning, describing the excesses of similar efforts to crack down on alleged "subversive" elements. In the early 21st century, the term is used more generally to describe reckless and unsubstantiated accusations of treason and far-left extremism, along with demagogic personal attacks on the character and patriotism of political adversaries.

73-1-22 Roe v Wade

.22nd January 1973: SCOTUS issues decision on Roe v. Wade abortion case - HiPo > .

In 1969 Norma McCorvey, a 25-year-old single woman from Texas, sought an abortion after becoming pregnant with her third child. However, since abortion was illegal in the state except in cases where the mother’s life was at risk, McCorvey was eventually referred to lawyers who filed a lawsuit on her behalf, using the alias Jane Roe to protect her identity.

The case was initially heard in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, where Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade defended the State. The three-judge panel found Texas law to be unconstitutional as it violated the Ninth Amendment’s right to privacy, although by this time McCorvey had given birth to a child who had been put up for adoption. Meanwhile Texas appealed the ruling, and the case was sent to the Supreme Court who heard arguments on 13 December 1971. They also heard the case Doe v. Bolton, which challenged Georgia’s abortion law.

After an initial tentative agreement to strike down the Texas law, the Supreme Court agreed for the case to reargued in October 1972. Eventually, on 22 January 1973, the Court issued a 7–2 decision in favor of McCorvey. Justice Harry Blackmun wrote the majority opinion that the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution gives women in the United States the ‘fundamental’ freedom choice in family matters, including whether or not to have an abortion. However, ‘at approximately the end of the first trimester’ this had to be balanced with the government’s interests in protecting women’s health and the potential life of a fetus. The ruling continues to be a divisive issue in American politics.