Dude, who even knows.
Post reblogged from Kontextmaschine with 68 notes
America entered World War One in the face of a lot more ferociously opposed pacifist, socialist, anti-imperialist sentiment than our school books emphasized (they emphasized “isolationism”, foolish from the perspective of the Cold War empire)
And after the war there was a hard backlash against American entry, that it had been in the interest of rich Europe- and coastal city-based traders, investors, and transatlantic shippers
(Sub rosa, America had lent to everyone and intervened before anyone’s homeland got too rekt to repay; the flood of repayments inflated the Gatsby-ass Roaring Twenties but also funded the factory build-out that allowed the US to be the WWII Arsenal of Democracy and postwar consumer cornucopia/labor aristocracy)
That’s a big part of why interwar America was so entranced by buisnessman-public intellectuals associated with the new modern industries where domestic producers led the field, figures like aviation superstar Charles Lindbergh, assembly-line innovator Henry Ford, and Hollywood animation maestro Walt Disney!
I see people responding positively without any sense of irony so: anti-semitism. The joke is anti-semitism; that Walt Disney, Charles Lindbergh, and Henry Ford’s political interventions were known for it, and who do you think “Europe and coastal-city based traders, investors, and transatlantic shippers” were
Like anti-semitism was big in early 20th century American business, the only recent depiction I can remember is Herbert Moon from Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar Games is our new Scorcese, specializing in violent tales set in very specific periods of American history)
A lot of that was related to the rise of scale, related to the anti-chain store thing (A&P pre-super markets were the original WalMart). The concern was Jews had preferential access to Jewish-dominated networks of capital and trade that traces back to the great banking houses and manufacture/trade magnates of Europe
And I mean Jews did dominate the new form of department stores, super-retailers that dominated with their superior access to capital and goods markets
And the classic NYC Jewish housewife slogan, “never pay retail!” didn’t mean “wait for sales” or “clip coupons” but “pump your neighborhood (ethnic) connections for manufacturers/wholesalers who’ll sell to you at cost”, so if the whole “Jews favor other Jews in trade networks” was a made-up calumny, it somehow fooled the Jewish community of America’s major trade port/manufacturing center
How was this resolved? It wasn’t! The Depression->WWII cycle radically limited the role of European capital and manufacturing in the American economy, and later it came back much attenuated with the role and influence of Jews greatly reduced