Wartime conformity demands persisted into peace and drove postwar xenophobia

Evidence

On Armistice Day a close observer might have guessed that the anti-radical tradition would make trouble for the immigrants in the months ahead. It is unlikely that he could have predicted the full fury of the Big Red Scare. Who could have foreseen that the emotions stirred up by the war would persist so violently into the postwar era? Yet the survival of 100 per cent Americanism under peacetime conditions is one of the great keys to the storm of xenophobia that followed in the wake of battle. An unappeased demand for the kind of conformity which only an extremely belligerent nationalism might provide flowed on for years, making World War I a major turning point in American nativism. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1323

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This is the reader’s central phenomenon in miniature: solidarity sustained by external enemy does not decay when the enemy is defeated - the demand for conformity outlives its object and flows to the next target.
• XREF: Directly evidences the reader’s hypothesis that threat-hardened solidarity persists and manufactures new enemies rather than decaying - parallels Frankfurt School analysis of fascism’s endurance. — connects to: Immigrant-directed solidarity persisted into peacetime because its psychic satisfactions outlived the war; Fear of Germany during World War One was repurposed into anti-Semitism against German Jews — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1683; Postwar patriotic societies framed assimilation as political and moral conformity. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1545 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Immigrant-directed solidarity persisted into peacetime because its psychic satisfactions outlived the war #expands (0.85)
• Postwar patriotic societies framed assimilation as political and moral conformity. #expands (0.85) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1545
• Fear of Germany during World War One was repurposed into anti-Semitism against German Jews #exemplifies (0.80) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1683
• Suspended ethnic hatreds revived rather than being consumed by war #expands (0.78) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1605