Sherry Chandler » Plus ça change
Plus ça change
In 1907, Maryland and West Virginia, and in 1918 New York, New Jersey, Kentucky, and Massachusetts passed laws requiring all able-bodied men to be regularly emplyed for the duration of the war. Arizona passed a law forbidding the employment of or giving aid to anyone who was a deserter or a slacker. The point of these laws was less to maximize actual production (much less to contain actual threats to public safety) than to rally the populace around images of, as it was called at the time, “100% Americanism.” The close perceived connection among hobos, socialists, unionists, and foreigners, along with a belief in the necessity of a concerted national “effort,” helped suggest that ferreting out slackers and fighting labor leftists at home somehow constituted an aid to the soldiers fighting abroad.
— Tom Lutz, from Doing Nothing (page 179)
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