Status Updates From American Midnight: The Grea...

In the eyes of millions of American men, ambitious women were as much as threat to the traditional order as immigrants, socialist and Blacks.

Over the course of 1919, 4 million people, 1 of every 5 American workers would go on strike.

After the war Germany was so defeated that a couple of years later Adolf Hitler would have an easy time convincing millions that sinister plotting of socialists, pacifists, and Jews had robbed the German military of victory.

Another facet of growing anti immigrant fervor was a deep suspicion of foreign languages. If you couldn't understand what people were saying, it might be something un-American.

Camp Funston Military Base was one of the first places on Earth where in the spring of 1918 doctors noticed the appearance of a particularly virulent strain of influenza.

The years from 1917 to 1921 are probably unmatched in American history for popular hysteria, xenophobia, and paranoid suspicion.

Once women got the vote, many men feared what might they want next? To abolish marriage? Or to rob men of their jobs?

Black soliders were dying for the rights of Serbs and Poles in Europe while they risked being lynched at home.

The military made sure that even in uniform Blacks lived in fear.

To be a left- wing activist in this highly repressive era was not just a matter of belonging to one organization you were part of an entire subculture.

Most labor unions turned away women, Blacks, and unskilled workers.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 became the first significant law restricting immigration to the United States.

Although the United States had the planet's largest economy, its army of just over 100,000 men was smaller than Portugal's.

White, rural or small town America were profoundly unsettled by change and change that seemed embodied in people who looked or sounded different.

To help with the war efforts Daylight Savings Time was born, to decrease the need for electricity.

North Dakota, Delaware, Montana and Louisiana banned the teaching of German in school. Iowa and Nebraska banned the use in public of all foreign languages.

The military crafted a secret 57 page contingency plan to put the entire country under martial law.