What was the Crisis, the Appalling, Sudden Wrenching of the Human Spirit during the Beginning of the Second Decade of the Twentieth Century?

That gave us, first, the Iniquitous Income Tax, then the Federal Reserve (and with it, the same year, in Paris, the first performance of Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps), and then the First World War? All of which led on, by a sort of doomed necessity, to the Espionage Act of 1917, to the bloody abomination of American Participation in the war, and to the Volstead Act of October 28, 1919, and to the flourishing of American Fascism under J. Edgar Hoover and Henry J. Anslinger.  What was the compulsion which drove us from prosperity and freedom to poverty, mass destruction and enslavement of our souls?  Just curious.

And, of course, just being curious, when I think of such lemming-like plunges of whole societies into what look, at first blush, like perfectly avoidable, utterly unnecessary cataclysm--I wonder if there were not perhaps other, less evident forces at work than the Powers Which supposedly Are. We know, for example, that much of the ill wrought by Woodrow Wilson was astoundingly subterfugitive, positively criminal in its underhanded fraudulence and extortion; this is usually evidence, in my experience, of the Mafia (Mob), and, behind them, of Flesh-eating Lizards from Outer Space.