Subtitle of this chapter: The Thread Between All Expectations is......

"I admit that I support the Democrats. Pen, fun, pavilion www. biquge。 info”

Professor Klein, who looked a little frustrated, pointed out his voice and said, "But I also have to admit that this election, Mr. James Cox, the Democratic candidate, and his running mate, Mr. Roosevelt Jr., are a sure loser." ”

"Then I'm going to ask you, why is this happening? If you want to speak, please raise your hand......"

"Well, it's you. Mr. Mike Baldwin, tell me about it. ”

The freckled McKee stood up excitedly and blurted out: "Wine, it's because of wine!" ”

"Hahaha......"

There was a burst of laughter in the classroom.

"I'm sorry." Mr. Baldwin realized that he was missing something, so he scratched his head and said with some embarrassment, "I mean Prohibition, which is the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which caused a split in the Democratic Party......"

Prohibition really, really really had a huge impact on the United States, and one of the consequences was the split in the Democratic Party in 1920.

The WASP Puritans applauded Prohibition, and they wished that the United States would really become a Protestant country with the Anglican Church as its state religion; They hope that everyone will work diligently to build our great America into a city on a hill and a country of heaven. They just want to live "no cannon except for giving birth, no money except for preaching." The kind of poor piety is naturally very uninteresting days.

So Prohibition has had little impact on the Republican Party so far. However, when the Democratic Party, which huddles with white minorities to keep warm, encounters this problem, then it becomes a big problem.

The Latins, Vikings, Germans, Celts, and Slavs are more than one can drink, and each one loves to drink. Who keeps them from drinking, it's not bad if they don't look for this guy and fight hard, and they will go to vote? Ge Sun is going to come out of the west.

So the Democratic Party was divided into "wet" and "dry" factions for drinking, and of course it was mainly based on race, so much so that it was not really a national party for the whole of the '20s. Today, the third largest party in the United States is the Prohibition Party, which is not much smaller than the Democratic Party.

Had it not been for the "timely" onset of the Great Depression in 1929, Prohibition would have nearly rewritten the two-party system in the United States.

"Because the Democrats, who don't have a dominant advantage in the first place, are divided in two, they naturally have no hope of winning. ”

Professor Klein nodded and raised his head: "Mr. Baldwin is actually right, it is absolutely impossible for a divided Democratic Party to defeat the Republican Party. ”

Professor Klein said, "You may be seated, Mike. So who else has an opinion? ”

This time, there wasn't even a single hand raised. Of course, these Stern College bachelor's and master's students are not unaware of the real reason for the defeat of the Democratic Party, but this reason is really difficult for Democrats, especially those with conscience and posture.

The reason they can't say is that in America in 1920, everyone hated Wilson!

Thomas-Woodrow-Wilson, the twenty-eighth president of the United States, is known as "America's highest academic president" because he is not only a doctor of political science from Hopkins University, but also president of Princeton University, and by the way, he was Syngman Rhee's mentor. In 1909 he was successfully elected governor of New Jersey.

In short, before he was elected president, he had an excellent reputation and prestige in the political, academic and civil circles. He can be called a representative of American progressivism. Progressivism is a center-left political economy theory that wants the government to build a mixed economy (a mixture of a market economy and a planned economy) under which to promote continued progress in labor rights and social justice. Progressives were also the earliest proponents of the welfare state and antitrust laws.

During his eight-year tenure from 1912 to 1920, President Wilson passed a series of progressive acts, including the Clayton-Antitrust-Act, which systematized antitrust laws, the Eighteenth Constitutional Amendment, which enacted Prohibition, and the Nineteenth Amendment, which established women's right to vote. There are also leftist policies and decrees such as a substantial increase in personal income tax, agricultural subsidies that benefit farmers, an eight-hour working hour for railway workers, and the illegalization of child labor. (Author's note: The Nineteenth Constitutional Amendment on women's right to vote was passed in August 1920, but that does not mean that women immediately have the same right to vote as men.) ）

Of course, the most important thing is the aforementioned one, when he created the Federal Reserve System with a Jewish consortium and established a national central bank.

It can be said that the Wilson administration put an end to the long-standing domestic controversy over tariffs, currency, and antitrust, and in fact, these policies had a profound impact on the United States. If it weren't for the neoclassical liberal masters who came out in the sixties and seventies to set things right, the United States might have continued to go all the way to the left until it became a socialist country with a centrally planned economic system.

To tell the truth, even without our Master Yuan, although it will be decades later, it is not absolutely impossible for USAS to appear. Hey, who called the socialist camp at that time a great hero of the Russian nation.

Except for a handful of big capitalists, the overwhelming majority of the American people have no reason to hate this Democratic leader who fights for the rights of the broad working class. In fact, in the polls conducted by later generations, he ranked after Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt, and was considered by the American people to be the fourth greatest president of the United States.

But this is the idea of the Americans of later generations, not the thinking of the Americans of 1920.

Please don't forget the First World War, the Germans and the Chinese, and even more wonderful is the "Treaty of Versailles" that the Americans also hated and spurned!

There is nothing to say about the performance of the American army in World War I, and more than two million young Yankeos have crossed the ocean to old Europe with the ambition of saving the world and the glorious task of collecting debts for the motherland. And then ran headlong into the terrible Hans, and there were much more terrible ...... than the Hans Spanish flu. (note 1)

This influenza killed more people than the total number of casualties in World War I!

In any case, the Entente was victorious. Grand Commander Wilson immediately became the savior of the free world, and after putting forward the "Fourteen-Point Plan" called "a program for establishing world peace," his popularity was even higher, and even at this time a large number of Chinese intellectuals placed high hopes on him.

The result......

”

Note 1: Although the neutral United States at the beginning of World War I did not refuse orders from both sides of the war, Britain and France were mainly doing business with the Allies because of their naval superiority. The main reason why the United States participated in World War I was that it did not want the Entente to lose, otherwise there would really be no one to collect the debt. Well, that's not a question of whether you can collect it or not, maybe there will be a red Europe that wants the death of the United States.

Note 2: It is fair to say that President Wilson was opposed to the Shantung Clause that handed over Qingdao to the Japanese, but he was not righteous enough to go all out to protect the interests of the Chinese.