The Age of Anxiety summary

 

 

The Age of Anxiety summary

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Chapter 19

The Age of Anxiety: 1919-1939

 

I - Postwar Pessimism

In spite of the hopes of many, the Paris Peace Conference and its inequitable (unfair) Treaty of Versailles satisfied no one. Most European economies were strained by the war and/or the peace. The “winners” had little to celebrate. Great Britain was bankrupt and had lost her control of world trade to the United States. France was also bankrupt and, although France got its revenge by regaining the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine and winning huge reparations ($$$), France was terrified of a future revived Germany. Italy had suffered much but felt ignored and cheated in that she did not get enough territory. In spite of Wilson’s idealism, the United States retreated from world affairs, refused to join the League of Nations; and even signed a separate more equitable peace treaty with Germany. China was suffering from internal chaos and was nervous about future Japanese aggression. Japan felt slighted because (like Italy) she felt ignored and did not receive more territory.

Among the losers, Germany was in shock from loss of territory and the brutal severity of the treaty. The former Ottoman Empire was in chaos and dismembered; and both the Mandate System (Arab lands placed under Anglo-French control) and the Balfour Declaration (British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine) left the Middle East resentful and bitter. Austria and Hungary were second class nations and the division of their empire created nations struggling with economic and social problems. Bulgaria was in chaos.

The League of Nations was doomed before it started since it had no power to enforce its decisions and relied on Collective Security (the concern of one member is the concern of all; great idea but no enforceable) to keep the peace. Russia (USSR) was a singleton having lost much territory, fighting bloody civil war and determined to spread its socialist message. Latin America struggled under social inequality, foreign debts and authoritarian governments. India was chaffing under British occupation and Gandhi was leading the way for independence and the struggle to solve Muslim-Hindu tensions. The world did not seem safe.

All of this led to the phenomenon of Postwar Pessimism. The American writer and feminist Gertrude Stein (1874-1976) coined the expression The Lost Generation for a group of mostly American intellectuals, poets, artists and writers who fled to France in the aftermath of WWI. Full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date. They used their talents to express the disillusionment with materialism, nationalism and brutal realities of industrialized warfare.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was the Lost Generations’ leader. He had volunteered to fight with the Italians in World War I and the Central Powers at the Battle of Caporetto shattered his Midwestern American naiveté as they crushed the Italians in 1917. In 1929 he drew on these experiences to write A Farewell to Arms in which he graphically showed the meaningless deaths and suffering caused by the war.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) portrayed the spirit of the Jazz Age and the social and moral rebellion that followed the war. Though not strictly speaking an expatriate (an exile), he roamed Europe and visited North Africa and chronicled the prohibition era. In his novel, Tender is the Night, in 1934 he succinctly expressed the pessimism of the Lost Generation. "This land here cost twenty lives a foot that summer...See that little stream--we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk it--a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation."

On the German side, Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen Nichts Neues) recorded the daily horrors of war in the trenches of the Western Front from the point of view of ordinary soldiers. Remarque (1898-1970), who had fought and been wounded while fighting in the trenches, became a spokesman for a generation that was destroyed by war, even though they had survived the killing. In 1933, his book was banned and publically burned by the Nazis, but was turned into a highly successful American film in 1930.

Another German, Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), published The Decline of the West in which he postulated that all societies pass through a cycle of birth, growth, decay and death from which he concluded that European society had entered the final stage of its life. Many felt that Spengler’s gloomy predictions were a harbinger for the entire world and all its peoples.

Almost as an answer to Spengler’s depressing ideas, the English historian, Arnold J. Toynbee (1889-1975), in his classic, A Study of History, began to write history as a study of how nations of the world developed and declined over time. Toynbee was an optimist; Spengler a pessimist. In all, Toynbee chronicled the birth, life and collapse of twenty-six nations.

Postwar Pessimism also jolted Religion. In 1919, Karl Barth (1886-1968), published Epistle to the Romans in which he suggested that modern religion had become enslaved to science, culture, mysticism and art. He wanted to bring it back the reformational ideal that God’s truth is found only in God’s revelation to people. Barth thus reflected disillusionment with modern religion and culture as he attacked the Enlightenment ideas of progress and limitless improvement and called for a return to a belief in the supremacy and transcendence of God. In other words, people had strayed from God and had made a mess of things, and only by following God’s word could people clean up the mess. He stressed the wholly otherness of God and reminded people that “God’s kingdom is not of this world.”

Barth was echoed by the Russian philosopher and theologian Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948), who criticized the institutional church and Bolsheviks both of whom collectivized and mechanized society and religion. He too felt that mankind had made a mess of things when he said, “Man’s historical experience has been one of steady failure, and there are no grounds for supposing that it will ever be anything else.” And he believed that mankind’s only hope was not in God’s justice, but in God’s love which allows man to be transfigured in the godhead (i.e., be one with God).

In 1922, the American turned English poet, T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), echoed Barth. In his complex and prophetic poem, The Wasteland, the war symbolized the breakdown of Western Civilization in a world which had become barren and spiritually empty.

The postwar era saw other forms of attack on the notion of progress. Many people had not forgotten that science and technology had given them the horrors of WWI. How could science and technology help them, if it was responsible for poison gas and machine guns? Democracy too was questioned at a time when the franchise to vote was extended to women. Many intellectuals attacked democracy as weak and ineffective. They idealized the rule of the strong and elite. This would be part of the explanation for the rise of totalitarian states in Italy and Germany.

In 1930, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) wrote a wildly popular essay, Revolt of the Masses, in which he asserted that society is composed of masses and dominant minorities. His work echoed the warnings of nineteenth century liberals that democracy carried with it the risk of tyranny by the majority. Both Bolshevism and Fascism were symptoms of usurpation of power by the "Mass Man,” which Ortega described as demanding nothing and living like everyone else, without vision or compelling moral code. Ortega warned his readers that the mass people or the “masses” could be unduly swayed by demagogues and that without moral code they might destroy the highest achievements of western culture.
In Chapter One, y Gasset writes, “To be different is to be indecent.” “The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. And it is clear, of course, that this “everybody” is not “everybody.” “Everybody” was normally the complex unity of the mass and the divergent, specialized minorities. Nowadays, “everybody” is the mass alone. Here we have the formidable fact of our times, described without any concealment of the brutality of its features."

Lastly, even Capitalism was attacked. The best known attack came from the British economist, statesman and author John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946). Simply put Keynes advocated that governments replace the Laissez-Faire system and take an aggressive interventionist stance when confronted by economic recessions and depressions. In 1919 he argued that forcing Germany to pay reparations would bankrupt Germany and lead to war. He is considered the founder of Macroeconomics and predicted the end of Laissez-Faire, but could not say what would replace it.

a. The Roaring Twenties

Postwar Pessimism also caused a kind of optimism or perhaps better said escapism. People wanted to put the horror of war behind them and sought NEW avenues of escape. Politically,  at the Washington Naval Conference of 1921 the major nations naively agreed to reduce the size of their battleship fleets and in 1928 number of nations signed the Kellogg-Briand Treaty, coauthored by the French and Americans, which (with almost comical naiveté) “outlawed war” forever. Many people naively (foolishly) hoped that the League of Nations would solve the world’s international tensions. But, as has been noted, the League was ineffectual because it had no powers of coercion (it could not make its members obey its will) and relied on Collective Security (each member in the system accepts that the security of one is the concern of all) to maintain peace.

The Roaring Twenties were a time of new technology and economic prosperity. Industrial production, especially in the U S boomed; advertising became more and more pervasive and powered consumerism. Radios, canned foods and household appliances like refrigerators and washing machines became common in industrialized nations; rayon was invented and the automobile (thanks to Henry Ford’s assembly line) became affordable for the middle class. Science added its own wonders: penicillin, aspirin and sulfa drugs extended and improved the quality of human life.

Great changes took place in popular culture. Youths and many adults rejected the hypocritical rules of the Victorian morality. Europeans embraced American culture with its greater personal freedom and willingness to socially experiment. American Jazz music, nightclubs and a spirit of hedonism became the world standard. In the United States, Prohibition (or the illegal manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages) was flaunted and Speakeasies (illegal bars) flourished in every American city.

The Harlem Renaissance was the first important movement of Black artists and writers. Jazz musicians Louis Armstrong (trumpet) and Duke Ellington (piano) took the simple melodies of the nineteenth century and improvised endless variations often with African rhythms. Movie theatres become a way of life, particularly in Euro-American culture. French competition in movie production had died in World War and Hollywood soon replaced New York as the movie capital of the world.

Women were granted suffrage in almost all-Western Industrialized nations. Women also began to become more active in politics. In 1919, Lady Nancy Astor became the first women in Great Britain to be elected and take her seat in Parliament; and in 1925, Miriam A. Ferguson became the first female governor of Texas. There was, however, one great drawback for women. During the war, women had held a wide range of jobs. When the war ended and the men returned, most women lost their wartime jobs.

On the other hand, prosperity and falling birth rates gave women, especially middle class women, more leisure time. Young women took advantage of less restrictive clothing fashions and male supervision. They began to date more freely as a preliminary marriage and to enter colleges in large numbers. Many women become Flappers who dressed unconventionally and flaunted their disdain for "decent" behavior. They represented a new breed of woman, unafraid to wear cosmetics and provocative clothing or to be seen smoking or drinking in public. In spite of protests from the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, magazine “advice” writers, like the Scottish editor and columnist Marie Stopes, influenced young women with ideas of sexual pleasure, allurement and women’s rights.

b. Revolutions in Physics, Psychology and the Arts

Although science was criticized by the Lost Generation, nevertheless great strides were made which had the impact of revolutions. The 1920s saw the first commercial radio transmissions, the first television, the first sound movies and the development of radar. In 1928, Robert Fleming accidently discovered penicillin, a type of non-toxic mold that would kill bacteria. This led to the development of modern antibiotics which we take for granted. By the early 1900s, Pierre and Marie Curie discovered that certain elements such as uranium and radium spontaneously released charged particles which led to the discovery of X-rays.

Probably the greatest scientist of the twentieth century was the physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) who developed the Theory of Relativity, which demonstrated that there is no single spatial or chronological framework in the universe, that is to say, space and time are relative. In 1934, working on the Curies’ and Einstein’s theories, Enrico Fermi discovered atomic fission, or the splitting of the nuclei of atoms in two which produced huge bursts of energy and led to the development of the first atomic bomb by Fermi and the Americans Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller.

Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) in 1927 published About the quantum-Theoretical Reinterpretation of Kinetic and Mechanical Relationships in which he established the Uncertainty Principle, which states that the determination of the position and momentum of a mobile particle necessarily contains errors the product of which cannot be less than the quantum constant h and that, although these errors are negligible on the human scale, they cannot be ignored in studies of the atom. Although this principle had to do with sub atomic particles, it quickly became obvious that it had implications beyond physics.

Heisenberg’s theory called into question established notions of truth and seemed to violate the fundamental law of cause and effect. Objectivity was impossible, because the observer was part of the process. A historian, for example, cannot be sure his analyses are correct because his mind or cultural conditioning might interfere will the correct analysis. To ordinary people, this meant that science had reached the limits of what could be known absolutely and that a common sense universe had vanished.

In psychology, an Austrian neurologist, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), became interested in hypnotism and how it could be used to help the mentally ill. He later abandoned hypnotism in favor of free association and dream analysis in developing what is now known as "the talking cure." These became the core elements of Psychoanalysis. In his practice, Freud noticed that humans had a conflict between conscious and unconscious mental processes and this clash was the basis of neurotic behavior.

Freud divided the human mind into three parts: (1) the id or the it, a selfish, primitive, childish, pleasure-oriented part of the personality with no ability to delay gratification; (2) the ego or the I, which wants to satisfy the id, but acts in reality to the world around it; and (3) the superego or the above Ego, which represents societal and parental standards of "good" and "bad", "right" and "wrong" behavior. It is important to understand that the Ego is the moderator between the id and superego which seeks compromises to pacify both.

This conflict suggested that humans often repressed the painful, keeping it away from the conscious mind. He felt that dreams held the key to understanding and resolving this conflict. His controversial conclusions led him to the idea that sexual drives and fantasies are one of the most important causes of repression. For example, the Oedipus Complex in which unconscious ideas and feelings of a child center around the desire to possess the parent of the opposite sex and eliminate the parent of the same sex.

Freud went on to analyze all human thought from religion to politics. Using the talking cure, he developed the theory of Psycho-Analysis (the discovering and revealing of a person’s unconscious thoughts) which he felt held the keys to understanding all human behavior. He offended a lot of people, and many of his fellow neurologists considered him but a slanderous story teller. But he became the father of the psychiatric profession. Moreover, his theories made an impact on anthropology, education, and literary criticism, as artists, writers and movie makers began to use his ideas in the way they presented their characters, especially in an emphasis of sexuality as a tool of understanding human behavior. 

Carl Jung (1875-1961), was one of Freud’s students who broke with Freud and rejected Freud’s overwhelming (overbearing) insistence that conscious and unconscious sexual drives were mainly responsible for the formation of human personality and mental disorders. Jung believed that the human subconscious mind contained “inherited memories” from previous generations and that these inherited memories – along with a person’s personal experiences – constituted (made up) a person’s psyche (= soul or the totality of the human mind, conscious and unconscious).

Jung regarded these “inherited memories” as valuable and postulated that early twentieth century people had lost contact with them. In 1933, Modern Man in Search of a Soul and other works, Jung moved away from Freud’s rational (scientific) approach toward a more mystical approach.  In his writings, Jung discussed his views on Dream Analysis, the value of religion and the spiritual problems confronting modern men and women after World War I.

It is important to understand that, like Darwinian thought, the work of Einstein, Heisenberg, Freud and Jung called into question the idea that humans were the special creation of God (“made in his image”) and lead to the idea of a new “survival of the fittest” which in turn would lead to the aggressive nationalism and racism of the totalitarian dictators of the 1920s and 1930s.

c. The Visual Arts
Post War Pessimism also created and/or accelerated change in the arts. During the Renaissance, artists tried to imitate the classical ideal of using canvas or marble to imitate reality. But in the late 19th century a growing cynicism along with the camera and the movie projector made reality a technological product. since they could create reality faster and more accurately; so art had to “reinvent” itself.

Artists no longer tried to reproduce the real world or even the Platonic perfect world, but now began to use art as an end in itself; to use art as a means to create reality. Now art dealt with concepts and ideas like feelings, mood, emotion and even Freudian subconscious dreams and fantasies.

Impressionism, which was centered in France in the late 19th century, was deeply influenced by primitive art and its sense of power. Even before World War I and post war pessimism, Edgar Degas and Paul Gauguin used Light and Color to reflect (or make a quick) impression of reality and illustrate the transitory quality of that impression.

Another form of artistic experimentation was Cubism. The essence of Cubism was that instead of viewing subjects from a single, fixed angle, the artist broke them up into a multiplicity of facets, so that several different aspects/faces of a subject can be seen simultaneously.

Dada was the most radical artistic experimentation and paralleled the same pessimism that the Lost Generation created in literature. Many Dada artists were veterans of World War I and had grown cynical of humanity. Their art reflected a nihilistic view of the world in which chance and randomness formed the basis of creation. The basis of Dada (the word is taken from hobbyhorse in French) is nonsense. Since World War I had destroyed the order of the world, Dada was a way to visually express the confusion felt by many people in a world turned upside down. There is not an attempt to find meaning in disorder, but rather to accept disorder as the nature of the world. Perhaps the most famous Dada painter was Marcel Duchamp.

Out of or parallel to Dada was Surrealism, which was (and is) a movement for the liberation of the mind that emphasizes the critical and imaginative powers of the unconscious. In origin, it is an intellectual movement which affected visual arts, writing and the film industry. Most people think of the works of Salvador Dali as quintessential Surrealism, but in fact he was far too right wing for most Surrealists. Thus, by the third decade of the twentieth century, the visual arts had fractured and gown in so many different directions that society no longer determined good and bad art, the artist did.

Architecture also underwent a profound transformation as old styles and types were replaced with revolutionary styles and concepts. One simple word to define twentieth emerging century architecture is modernism; and the most important movement was Bauhaus.  Walter Gropius (1883-1969) whose theory of design can be expressed by “Form follows function” founded the school. Gropius felt that a new period of history had begun with the end of World War I, and wanted to create a new architectural style to reflect this new era. He blended engineering and art using simplicity of shape and extensive use of glass. His successor, Ludwig Mies von der Rohe (1886-1969) experimented with interior steel frames to carry the load and the surrounded the frames with glass, creating the modern glass-boxed skyscraper.

II. The Western Democracies and the Great Depression

The years after World War I were not good years for democracy in Europe. The new governments of Central and Eastern Europe were fragile and had to deal with ethnic discrimination, class tension, weak economies, unemployment and inflation. The result was a rise in the number of Right Wing Dictatorships. In 1920 there were twenty-three European nations that had democratic governments; by 1939 the number had shrunk to twelve. Even the three great victors of World War I, Great Britain, France and the United States, which appeared dominant and victorious, still - under the surface - all (even the United States) faced serious problems.
Great Britain
Great Britain suffered no property damage during the war but after the war the effect of the enormous casualties suffered paralyzed much of the national identity. Moreover, Great Britain had lost world wide economic dominance to the United States. Indeed, Great Britain was to receive huge war reparations but that was counterbalanced by the fact that the war had bankrupted the country.

The Labour Party won support from the working classes and demanded a move toward socialism; the Liberal party, once supported by the Middle Class, disappeared as the middle and upper classes now supported the new Conservative Party, which held power for most of the twenties and, after a protracted worker’s strike of 1926, passed laws limiting the power of workers to strike.

Great Britain was also forced to deal with Ireland. In 1914, Britain was about to give Ireland Home Rule but the war cancelled those plans. Then in 1916, a group of Irish militants launched the Easter Uprising, which was suppressed but with great bitterness. When Ireland was not given independence after the war, members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) turned to guerrilla violence. In 1922 however, clearer heads on both sides prevailed and most of Ireland (the southern Roman Catholic counties) became independent. Nevertheless, the IRA fought on in hopes that the largely Protestant Northern counties could also be freed. 

France
With United States’ intervention, France emerged from the war victorious, but with huge loss of life and property damage. She got her revenge on Germany including the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine and huge German war reparations, but it was a hollow and haunting revenge, as France was plagued by fear of Germany, political feuding and financial scandals. Nevertheless, overall the French economy recovered fairly quickly thanks to German reparations. However, economic swing occurred and helped to lead to the growth of a communist party split the socialists and both fought with Conservatives on how to make Germany pay her war reparations. In the 1920s, France established an elaborate system of border defenses known as the Maginot Line and joining a defensive alliance with Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia called the Little Entente.

The United States
The United States emerged from the war with few casualties, a vibrant economy and zero property destruction. Moreover she was no longer a debtor nation to Europe (which she had been in 1914), but was the great creditor nation as Britain and France owed millions from World War I loans. The United States emerged from the war the strongest economic and industrial nation in the world. Nevertheless, fear of Bolshevism (Russian Communism) led to a Red Scare in1919 and many radical and suspected foreigners were deported. Fear also contributed to a new wave of American Isolationism and laws were passed limiting immigration, especially from Eastern and Southern Europe. Politically, the Senate rejected Wilson and the Versailles Peace treaty and signed a separate peace treaty with Germany. The United States with few exceptions such as the Washington Naval Treaty of 1921 and Kellogg-Briand Treaty of 1928 retreated from the world stage into isolationism.

The False Economy of the 1920s
Western industrial production soon returned to prewar levels. Great Britain suffered the most with low wages and worker unrest. As just noted, France recovered more quickly, but both economies were dependent on and supported by German reparations and the booming economy of the United States. Nevertheless, the seeds of economic disaster (The False Economy) loomed on the horizon:

• Improved technology had reduced demand for raw materials and caused excess supply. Too much supply caused prices to fall and put strain on the primary producing economies and farmers. For example, technology was now able to reclaim rubber from used tires and this decreased demand for rubber put a strain on rubber producing countries like Ceylon and Malaysia. Likewise in agriculture, improved technology caused excess production. This drove prices down and depressed farming worldwide. (In other words, farmers grew more, but made less profit.) All this led to the phenomenon of Overproduction in which the production of goods exceeded the demand. As the 1920s progressed, factories, like farms, cut back on production and workers lost their jobs.

 

• Europe’s economy depended on the United States. England and France were deeply in debt because of World War I loans taken from American banks; so they depended on war reparations from Germany and Austria to back the loans. But Germany and Austria had no money, so they borrowed money from the United States to pay their war reparations to Great Britain and France. This set up a potential domino effect if the United States economy should falter and be unable to make loans.

• Although the United States enjoyed great prosperity in the 1920s, it was, nevertheless, a false prosperity. United States investors engaged in unrestrained speculation in financial markets.  Small investors and large alike would buy stock on margins (sometimes as low a 3%; that is one pays $3.00 on 100 and borrows the rest). As long as the market increased in value, they made money. They could pay the loans they had made to buy the stock. But, if the market declined, they would be in trouble.

 

The Crash and its domino effect

On Black Thursday, October 24th, 1929, a wave of panic selling on the New York Stock Exchange caused stock prices to plummet. Investors were overextended. Their stocks shrank drastically in value, but they still owed what they had paid for the stock. Hundreds of thousands of people lost their life savings. In desperation, many people even jumped from N Y skyscrapers. Lenders then called in their loans. The borrowers could not pay. Therefore, banks began to fail and the economy ground to a halt. The contraction spiraled downward and by 1932, industrial production had fallen to half of its 1929 level.

Moreover, the United States’ economy was crucial to the global economy. When the American market contracted trying to bring money back to America, it put tremendous pressure on foreign markets. So when the United States banks markets and banks failed, they took the world with them. We have seen how Europe depended on American loans, but as bank failures in the United States dried up capital in London, Berlin and Tokyo, the depression spread worldwide. As a result, non-American banks and corporations began to fail and global unemployment rose to double-digit levels. The weak Western democracies responded conservatively and counterproductively (actually hindering their purpose) by raising tariffs, which just made everything worse. This Economic Nationalism was an “every-man-for-himself” attitude. The American Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 caused a worldwide round of tariff raising which devastated worldwide trade.

The Great Depression caused great personal suffering in both industrialized and non-industrialized nations. For millions of people, their homes, life savings, jobs and security simply vanished. Human dignity was crushed; hopes for a better future were turned into despair. By 1933, the unemployment rate in industrialized societies alone was thirty million or five times higher than in 1929. Breadlines stretched for blocks and many Americans, were forced to live in dirty cardboard, Shantytowns (sometimes called Hoovervilles) or migrate and hope for better times. Marriage, childbearing and divorce rates declined while suicide rates rose. Class envy was magnified as struggling farmers and unemployed workers came to despise the wealthy. Teenagers graduated from high school with almost no prospects for employment.

As worldwide depression expanded, unemployment spread to women as well as men. Many governments passed laws to restrict female employment especially among married women.  The idea came from the widespread notion that was in the home. In 1931, a British royal commission on unemployment insurance stated that in the case of married women as a class, industrial employment cannot be regarded as the normal condition. The French doctor Charles Richet (1850-1935) insisted that removing women from the labor force would solve the problem of male unemployment.

Writers in particular wrote sarcastically as they heaped scorn on the political and social order. The American novelist John Steinbeck (1902-1968) chronicled this poverty and despair in his book The Grapes of Wrath, which tells the story of “Okies” who had lost everything and were migrating from the dust bowl of Oklahoma to California. Steinbeck bitterly criticized what they called the hypocrisy of the government’s policy of Planned Scarcity Program, especially destroying crops or killing livestock in order to raise prices while people were starving.

Perhaps Steinbeck’ most famous passage in the Grapes of Wrath is, The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze, and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. And in the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

Outside America, the weaker industrial economies like Germany or the primary producing economies in Latin America were devastated. The primary producing economies not only lost their markets but also watched helplessly as prices collapsed and products went unsold. Brazilians, for example, used coffee beans for road construction. Ironically, Colonial Africa, South East Asia and the Philippines were exceptions because they were protected by their “mother” countries that purchased primary products from them first. China as well was spared the worst effects because she was not a large exporter and a mostly farming economy, but China had her own more serious political problems.

The bottom line was that overdependence on American loans and investments, Economic Nationalism (i.e. high tariffs), farming surpluses that led to deflation and poor banking procedures all contributed to the global depression of the 1930s.

Although the Great Depression was economic in nature, it did not take long for its effects to increase political polarization between left wing and right wing political parties. Communists (on the left) criticized the anemic response of the Western Capitalist democracies, while Fascists (on the right) sought to protect private enterprise and promote nationalism under strict state supervision. Japan’s shattered export market caused her to take a violent swing to the right as the military replaced civilians in the government. The bottom line was that the Western Democracies appeared unable to respond effectively to the crises and people looked for stronger or more radical solutions, which both the Communists (Russia and China) and Fascists (Germany, Spain and Italy) offered.

Nevertheless as time went by, the West was able to respond – albeit (although) hesitatingly and with much experimentation. John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), the British economist who had forecast the demise of Laissez-Faire economics, postulated that governments could no longer sit idly by and do nothing or foolishly raise tariffs; and hope the depression would go away. Keynes became the most influential economist in the twentieth century when he proposed (in his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money) that the fundamental cause of the Great Depression was not excessive supply but inadequate demand. Thus, he urged governments worldwide to play a more active role and stimulate their economies by increasing the money supply, lowering interest rates and encouraging investment. He advocated public works projects called “pump-priming measures” to stimulate the economy, even if it meant unbalanced budgets and deficits.

President Herbert Hoover’s administration had followed the classical economic theory that capitalism was self-correcting. It is one of the falsehoods of history that Hoover did nothing. At first, he cut taxes, balanced the budget and restraining spending. But as the human suffering became more terrible and repercussions from Europe deepened the crisis, he created the RFC or Reconstruction Finance Corporation to aid business and help farmers. Try as he might, it was too little too late, and Hoover became the scapegoat for the depression.

In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt who anticipated Keynes’s economic ideas replaced Hoover in a landslide presidential victory. Roosevelt was a charismatic leader and immediately took aggressive steps to re-inflate the economy and ease the suffering of the unemployed. His program of sweeping economic and social reforms was called the New Deal and it set out to do the following:

• restore the soundness of the banking system
• provide jobs and farm subsidies
• give workers the right to organize and bargain collectively
• guarantee minimum wages
• provide social security insurance benefits for workers’ old age

It is very important to understand that Roosevelt’s fundamental premise was that the Federal Government was justified in intervening in Capitalist economics, in order to protect the social and economic welfare of the people; nevertheless Roosevelt’s programs to do something as opposed to doing nothing, started a trend towards social reform legislation (socialism) that is still contested in our present year

III. New Aggressors: The Rise of Totalitarianism
As with Postwar Pessimism and revolution in the sciences, the paralyzing effects of the Great Depression caused many people lost faith in the ability of the Western Democracies to solve the problems and misery that confronted the peoples of the world. The Western Democracies did respond but too weakly for many. However, Italy, Germany, the Soviet Union, Spain and Japan all turned to another solution during the 1920s and1930s, in order to solve these problems. They all formed Totalitarian governments, which, like ancient Sparta, attempted to regulate every aspect of their citizen’s lives.

a. Communist Russia
Remember the two revolutions of 1917! The February revolution toppled Czar Nicholas II and installed a provisional government led by Alexander Kerensky. The Provisional Government made the mistake of continuing the disastrous war and failed bring economic stability or meaningful land reform. Thus, in October 1917, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky overthrew the Provisional Government and brought about a terrible civil war between the RED Communist forces and the WHITE royalist/moderate forces. The Communists won in 1921, but only after more than ten million people had died.

From 1921 to 1924, Lenin tightened his grip and attempted to modernize Russia. One of the problems he faced was that industrial and agricultural output were a fraction of their prewar levels. So Lenin replaced War Communism (a hasty policy during the Civil War in which the Red Government abolished private property and nationalized banks, industry and business) with his NEP or New Economic Policy. He restored a market economy and allowed limited private enterprise. Large industries, banks, transportation and communication systems remained under state control, but peasants could sell their surpluses at free market prices. The NEP also sought to modernize and industrialize Russia, building dams and hydroelectric plants and establishing technical schools. The NEP was a resounding success (and note that it really was modified capitalism) but Lenin did not live to see its fruition. He died of a stroke in 1924.

Lenin’s death touched off a four-year power struggle. Many, like Trotsky, wanted a continuing revolution, which would spread communism abroad, but others like Joseph Stalin (a Georgian born Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili) favored establishing socialism in one country alone philosophy. In 1928, Stalin (whose adopted name means Man of Steel) won the power struggle and in 1929 deported Trotsky from Russia. In 1940, Trotsky would be assassinated near Mexico City by a Stalinist agent, while Stalin proceeded to make himself one of the most brutal totalitarian dictators of all time.

Like Lenin, Stalin stressed the need for the USSR to modernize and in 1928 he initiated his First Five-year Plan. Stalin’s five-year plans were intended – finally – to transform the Soviet Union from an agricultural land into a modern, industrialized nation. Targets were set by the state for increased production, especially heavy industry. Private property was abolished. The government directed market choices and economic priorities. A key component of the Five Year Plans was Collectivization in which peasants were forced to work together on state run farms. Stalin hoped to concentrate the labor pool and increase both agricultural output and political control. The result was a national disaster as the peasants retaliated by slaughtering more than 50% of their livestock and burning much of their crops. Farm production collapsed and the resulting famine killed between four and six million people.

Stalin attempted to control the hearts and minds of the Soviet people. He used unrelenting propaganda to build a Cult of Personality. Radios blared in factories and villages; and billboards and posters praised Stalin’s leaderships urging workers to meet or exceed their quotas. Stalin required artists and writers to use a new style called Socialist Realism to show a happy people working hard for socialist goals. Stalin also attacked religion and tried to replace Russian Orthodoxy with atheism. Priests and intellectuals were killed, imprisoned or sent to labor camps and Stalin demanded that home icons be replaced by his picture.

It is interesting to note that the early 1930s, as Western Democracies struggled with the Great Depression, Stalin’s propaganda experts were proclaiming success. This convinced many Westerners that Stalin’s Soviet Socialism was the ideal solution to the financial distress of the world economy. The problem was that Stalin’s propaganda experts did not tell the world that the price of new hydroelectric dams and steel production plants was the almost complete nonexistence of consumer goods and the consequent suffering of the Russian people. Nor did they bother to mention the disaster of Collectivization or the ruthless means of enforcing it, especially the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Kulaks or wealthy peasants.

Nor did Stalin’s propaganda experts talk about how Stalin ruthlessly dealt with dissent or even imagined dissent. In 1934, at the Seventeenth Communist Party Congress, Stalin learned that many loyal communists, who called themselves the Congress of Victors, wanted to limit Stalin’s power. They quickly became the “Congress of Victims” as Stalin’s secret police eliminated two-thirds of the delegates in his Great Purge. Between 1935 and 1938, he eliminated (purged) one million people by quick trial and execution. Included were over 50% of the top ranking military leadership. Others were sent to forced labor camps or Gulags. Although some leftists and socialists in the outside world admired Stalin, most watched in contempt; and for those on the extreme right, Stalin became a feared enemy.

b. Mussolini’s Italy
After WWI, Italy was staggered by disillusionment, strikes, communist agitation and unstable government, which brought the country to the verge of anarchy. The middle and upper classes turned to the right and Benito Mussolini who created modern Fascism which was hyper-nationalistic and extremely right wing but also revolutionary and unafraid of change. Mussolini was anti-communist, anti-capitalist, anti-democratic and pro-racial bigotry and pro-ethnic superiority. He organized his supporters into combat squads called Black Shirts which attacked socialist rallies, liberal newspapers and farmers’ cooperatives. He even used his Black Shirts to remove public officials who disagreed with his Fascist ideas.

In October 1922, Mussolini convinced King Victor Emmanuel III to make him Il Duce (or leader) of Italy. He jailed or exiled political dissidents and (like Stalin) used propaganda to create a Cult of Personality. He established a totalitarian dictatorship which outlawed opposing political parties, rigged elections and used censorship to control Italy for twenty-one years. However, compared to Stalin or Hitler, he was a mild dictator. Mussolini tried to modernize Italy. He built highways, sponsored literacy campaigns, fought the Mafia, and brought medicine and technology to backward parts of Italy. He even made peace with the pope creating an independent Vatican City.

In economics, he followed the principle of Syndicalism or State-controlled Capitalism in which labor unions were suppressed and corporate leaders cooperated directly with the government. In the 1920s, Mussolini was considered by many to be an effective, even admirable leader, despite his totalitarianism and his dreams of turning Italy into a new Roman Empire. During the 1930s, however, his reputation was tarnished as the Great Depression undermined his modernizing, as he became more ruthless in foreign policy by attacking Ethiopia and drawing closer to his new friend Adolf Hitler. Until his friendship with Hitler in the late 1930s, when he issued anti-Semitic laws and accused Jews of being unpatriotic, racism and anti-Semitism were never major components of Mussolini’s Fascism.

c. Germany and National Socialism
In 1918, the Kaiser fled to Holland. In 1919, German leaders organized the Weimar Republic which was fully democratic with a constitution, a parliament (Reichstag) and a prime minister (Chancellor). The constitution provided a bill of rights and gave women the right to vote. But from its inception, the republic was dogged (harassed) by war debts, inflation, crushed national pride and popular resentment at the unfair terms of the Versailles Treaty. Political leadership was weak because the country had many competing factions, all struggling for power and sending members to the Reichstag. When the Great Depression hit, all the efforts of the Weimar leaders were wiped out. By 1932, six million Germans (40% of the work force) were out of work. Industrial production plummeted. Inflation destroyed lifetime savings of millions of Germans almost overnight. The German people were ready for radical solutions.

The Communists demanded a socialist revolution like the one Lenin had brought to Russia. Conservatives favored a return of the monarchy and stronger government. Socialist moderates who had to govern by coalition governments appeared weak and so Germany turned to the extreme right. Adolf Hitler was born in Austria; as a young man he tried to become an artist and then supported himself with odd jobs. He came to hate Jews and Communists whom he felt would destroy society. In 1913, he moved to Germany and joined the German army when the Great War broke out. He fought bravely and was highly decorated.

After the war, he joined the National Socialist German Workers Party (or Nazi Party); and in1921 became chairman of the party. On November 8, 1923, Hitler and his followers attempted the "Beer-hall Putsch," intending to overthrow the Weimar government. Hitler was imprisoned in an old fortress (rather comfortably), where he dictated his book, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), which was filled with anti-Semitic and anti Marxist outpourings, as well as his disdain (hatred) of the Versailles Treaty, his racist world views including his racial hierarchy which placed Germans on the top of humanity as a super race, and his strategy for world domination. Hitler stated clearly that the Aryan race must win a titanic struggle with the lower and inferior non-Aryan races which would determine the course of history.  

After his release, Hitler and his followers resolved to use mostly legal tactics to seize power. Hitler was a charismatic speaker and understood the principle of mass psychology. To the economically depressed and demoralized German people, he promised to despoil the “Jew financiers” whom he said had betrayed Germany. He promised the workers job security and he gained the financial support of bankers and industrialists because of his virulent anti-Communism and his promises to control trade unionism. Hitler’s arguments, especially his doctrines of racial purity, appealed to the tired and frustrated middle and lower middle classes who had been most hurt by the hyper-inflation of the 1920s and the crippling effects of the Great Depression. Thus, Hitler was able to shake the German people’s confidence in the democratic system and trust him to create a new order, his Third Reich, which he said would last a thousand years.

After 1929, the Nazi party attracted many supporters and began to gain seats in the Reichstag; and by 1930, were the largest political party in Germany. And even though Hitler’s followers often used tactics of intimidation, it is very important to understand that in January 1933, Hitler won the chancellorship by mostly legal tactics. Nevertheless once in power, he established himself as an absolute dictator within months. In February, the Reichstag building burned down and Hitler immediately declared a state of emergency and passed the Enabling Act in March, which suspended the Weimar Constitution letting Hitler rule by decree.

Under the guise of the Enabling act, Hitler immediately outlawed all political parties and took control of the press and media. All working class, communist and socialist opposition was eliminated. Between 1933 and 1935, Hitler’s government replaced Germany’s federal structure with a highly centralized stated that eliminated the autonomy previously exercised by state and municipal governments. Hitler’s Nazis also purged (cleared out) the judiciary, civil service (government bureaucrats) and police services.

Hitler imposed a Mussolini-like State-controlled Capitalism. He created the German Labor Front (DAF) which outlawed collective bargaining and strikes; and labor disputes were settled though government arbitration. The DAF was well received because employees were given relatively high wages and job security. The DAF sponsored a Strength through Joy program that provided food services, vacations, set working hours and generous work breaks during the day. Hitler’s economy policies were awesomely successful! Unemployment was eliminated, production soared; and highways and railroads were built. By 1939, the economy was so strong there was a labor shortage!

Hitler’s paramilitary SS (Schutzstaffel) troops turned Germany into a police state and would be responsible for many (if not most) of the Nazi crimes against humanity. Like Stalin and to a lesser degree Mussolini, Hitler ruthlessly exterminated any (even loyal) opposition. He built concentration camps and filled them with communists, intellectuals, other undesirables and “racial inferiors”; and he exterminated the mentally ill and criminally insane. A key component of Hitler’s ideology was an anti-Semitism based on biological racial theories stemming from the late nineteenth century. Nazi thought believed that Germans were part of a racially superior Aryan Master Race and they graded all peoples from pure-Aryan to sub-Aryan, the latter being considered sub human and included Jews, Roma (Gypsies) and Slavs. [More acceptable Aryan races were the English, the Scandinavians and the Dutch.] During the 1930s, the Nazi attack on the Jews went through three phases: exclusion, legislation and violence.

But Hitler’s most drastic measures were taken against the Jews. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped German Jews of citizenship and forbade them to marry or even have sexual relations with Germans; Jewish businessmen were even forbidden to hire German women under forty five. Hitler’s goal was to force the Jews to leave Germany and tens of thousands (including Albert Einstein) did. This pressure increased, when, on November 9th, 1938, the Nazis engineered Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) during which they destroyed thousands of Jewish stores and synagogues and killed hundreds of Jews.

Hitler believed that women played a special role in preserving racial purity and that it was the duty of every German woman to breed strong sons and daughters. Reminiscent of ancient Sparta, Nazi journalists compared the role of women in childbirth to that of men in battle. But Nazi policy favored motherhood only for those women who were racially fit for motherhood. As early 1933, the government raised the issue of what kind of men and women were fit to bear children for the nation. Thus women of sub-human races were not considered fit for parenthood. During the mass executions of Jews during the Genocide in World War II, the SS specifically targeted Jewish women for death, lest they bear a new generation.

IV. Anxiety in Asia, Africa and Latin America
Asia
The Paris peace settlement left Asia as wounded as Europe as the nations of Asia struggled to find a balance between nationalism and self-determination. India and China wanted to control their own destinies and Japan wanted to expand its nation identity. All three experienced a long period of disorder and internal struggles until a new order emerged. India would move along a path seeking home rule and ultimate independence. Indian elites (Hindu and Muslim) would struggle among themselves and against their British masters. China was torn by war lords and a great civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists. Both rejected the old Confucian order and strove to build a unified Chinese nation. Japan turned to militarism and made China’s struggles more difficult by economic imperialism and outright invasion.

 

a. The Rising Wave of Japanese Militarism
The Meiji restructuring of Japan had created a modern industrialized nation but that process, Japan became infected with imperialism. She had defeated China and absorbed Korea; she had joined the allies in the World War and seized German colonies in China and the Pacific. The war had also stimulated the Japanese economy because Japanese businesses not only made money from selling munitions to the allies but Japan also gained a bigger share of Asian commercial markets. Nevertheless, although Japan had achieved the coveted status of one of the great powers, she was still disappointed with the Paris treaties because (like Italy) she felt ignored and did not get all she wanted (China). Yet Japan still signed the Washington Naval Treaty in 1922 (limiting the size of her navy) and the Kellogg-Briand Treaty in 1928 (outlawing war “forever”).

During the early 1920s, the power of the Diet grew; political parties became more meaningful; universal male suffrage was granted (1925) and the emperor Taisho actively supported these reforms that could have steered Japan away from imperialism toward a Western style democracy. All this time, the economy continued to industrialize and modernize. However, Taisho died in 1926 and the elite, upper-classes reasserted an oligarchic control. Japan looked for new areas of conquest and the reforms of the early 1920s eroded. By the early 1930s, the four largest Zaibatsu controlled about a third of the country’s economy.

Although the war had been good for the Japanese economy, the postwar climate in 1918 saw rapid inflation and labor unrest. The 1920s, saw a series of recessions and The Great Depression, which crippled Japanese international trade, also helped destroy Japanese Democracy. As Japan’s exports plummeted in the early 1930s, the result was more than 50% unemployment and growing anti-Western sentiment. By the 1930s, the Japanese public the government for growing bribery scandals, economic malaise, massive layoffs, declining world trade and failure to deal effectively with the Great Depression.

Right wing political groups called for an end to party rule while xenophobic (fear of strangers) nationalists called for the preservation of Japanese culture and the elimination of Western influences. Political unrest led to a series of murders of political and business leaders, culminating in the assassination of the Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi (1855-1932). The right wing Kita Ikki party’s slogan was “Asia for Asians” which was code for the expulsion of Euro-American colonizing powers and Japanese expansion of political influence in East Asia.

In 1931, Japan seized Manchuria and installed Henry Pu-yi (the last Emperor) as a puppet. The League of Nations censured but Japan withdrew from the League and the next year right wing extremists assassinated the Prime Minister. In 1937, Japan formally invaded China and by the end of the decade the military, under General Hideki Tojo, had complete control of the government and dominated the young emperor, Hirohito. The Japanese however overshot themselves in December of 1941, when they attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor, an event which led to their to their undoing in four short, bloody years.

a. China’s Struggles
After the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, even Cixi, recognized the need for reform, but in 1905 she died before any serious reforms were undertaken. The boy emperor Henry Pu-yi succeeded her and little was accomplished before a rebellion in 1911 which deposed the Pu-yi and propelled Sun Yat-sen (1886-1925) to the presidency of a Chinese Republic. Sun Yat-sen is properly called the Father of Modern China. During the last years of the Qing Dynasty he united a number of opposition groups with his Three Ideas:

• Nationalism (that is, get rid of the imperialistic Manchu rulers)
• Create a democratic (modern) government
• Revive the Confucian Ideal of the People’s Livelihood (free trade and modern tax reform)

 

Sun Yat-sen was the founder of the Nationalist (Kuomintang/Guomindang) party. In 1911, he was overseas when the rebellion broke out; he returned to China was elected the provisional president of a new government but his presidency was short when he was forced the next year to turn over the government to a warlord general, Yuan Shikai (1859-1916), in order to gain support of the army. Shikai quickly dissolved the Kuomintang and dominated parliament. Sun fled to Japan and China was thrown into Civil War. The military ruled in Beijing and warlords ruled in the countryside until the 1920s.

Although China had joined the allies in World War I, the Paris Peace Conference did nothing to restore Chinese sovereignty and thus gave de-facto approval to Japanese interference in China. Angry students and intellectuals demonstrated and pledged themselves to rid China of imperialism and reestablish national unity. This May 4th Movement aimed to make China stronger through modernization and openly called into question traditional Chinese values, especially Confucianism. Many scholars see the May 4th Movement as an intellectual turning point in China and the radicalization of Chinese political thought.

But China was still badly disunited by warlords. Sun Yat Sen returned from Japan and in 1921 set up his Kuomintang government in Guangzhou, serving as president and generalissimo (top military commander).  But another group had evolved from the May 4th Movement and it turned to the ideas of Lenin and in 1921 Chinese communists organized their own party, the CCP or Communist Chinese Party.  At first the Kuomintang and CCP worked together to fight the warlords, but when Sun died in 1925, his protégée, Jiang Jieshi (1887-1975; Chiang Kai-shek), became the new head of the Kuomintang and saw the Communists as a threat.

Thus began a twenty-two year war in which Jiang Jieshi was pitted against the new Communist leader, Mao Zedong. In 1927, Jiang purged thousands (perhaps millions) of Communists and was able to drive the most influential Communists from the cities into the countryside. Jiang seemed destined to unite China but Mao managed to keep the CCP alive by his famous Long March in 1934-35 in which he moved his shattered forces from southern China to Yenan in the north from which he would attack the Nationalists and, later, the Japanese. Mao’s strategy was to make communism appealing to China’s vast masses while Jiang was content to control the semi-independent warlords and rule most of China.

b. India Struggles for Independence
In 1858, after the Sepoy Rebellion the British government realized the EEIC (English/British East India Company) could not be left in control of India and formally made India a British colony. The British built railways to exploit and export India’s natural and agricultural resources. We saw how this process ruined much native industry (especially the textile industry) and impoverished tenant farmers. To administer such an enormous and diverse country the British created an educated Indian elite and a well-educated middle class, both well versed in English language and culture. Many of these Indian elites formed an intelligentsia that became seeped in the ideals of democracy, individual freedom and equality (Liberté, égalité, fraternité of the French Revolution) and was anathema (hateful) to the British Raj in India.

So it was not a surprise that many of the Indian elite (Muslim and Hindu) wanted at least self-rule and so, to appease their demands, the British in 1885 allowed the founding of the Indian National Congress which worked to give Indians a voice in the running of their country. The Congress worked hard to gain to support of prominent Hindus and Muslims to at least work with the British to administer India. In 1906, the British government also allowed the formation of the Muslim League which gave the smaller Muslim community a more independent voice in Indian affairs. Nevertheless, in spite of religious tension between the Muslims and the Hindus, both organizations remained dedicated to achieving Indian Independence. It is important to remember that the minority Muslims (only 25% of India’s population) was deeply worried about a future “independent” India dominated by a Hindu majority.

World War I made Indian nationalism even stronger because most Indian elites supported the British war effort and Indian soldiers fought and died for Great Britain, yet in their homeland, they had few rights. The Indian elite were particularly affected by Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points which stressed self-determination and Lenin’s appeal for a united struggle by the proletariat and colonized people against the rich and powerful. Most Indians felt betrayed by the British and as a result numerous postwar protests only hardened Indian bitterness, especially after British troops killed nearly four hundred peaceful protesters in the city of Amritsar in 1919.

Then came along one of the most incredible human beings in world history, Mohandas K. Gandhi, who led the nationalist movement in India from the 1920s to 1947. Gandhi was born into the and elite Indian family (prosperous and pious Hindus), educated in Great Britain (where he became a lawyer) and migrated to South Africa in the 1890s where he took up the cause of Indians, both poor Hindu laborers and rich Muslim traders, who were racially segregated into second class citizens. It was during his twenty five year stay in South Africa where he embraced Ahimsa (nonviolence) and Satyagraha (passive resistance) as forms of civil disobedience which he believed would win Indian independence.  

In 1915, Gandhi returned to India and became active in politics. Gandhi became in the eyes of many a spiritual leader as well as a political leader. Although he was a member of the merchant caste, he was determined to eradicate the injustices of the caste system, especially the inferior status accorded women and the discrimination suffered by the Dalits (the untouchables without a caste). He was the guiding force of the Congress Party (successor to the Indian National Congress), but the political leader and his working partner was Jawaharlal Nehru. Gandhi was spiritual and traditional; Nehru, modern and secular. They changed the nature of the congress from (as our textbook says) “an elitist body of Anglicized gentlemen to an effective instrument of Indian Nationalism.” 

Gandhi masterminded the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920-22 and the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930 in which he led his famous Salt March to the sea where his followers made salt illegally. Even though he was from the educated elite, he shed his European clothing for very simple homespun cotton and encouraged Indians to make their own cotton clothing and not buy British made clothing. Gandhi came to be called Mahatma or the Great Soul and he urged cooperation between Hindus and Muslims. He was often jailed; he often went on severe, voluntary fasts but never forcibly resisted government authority. His powerful influence kept India from turning into a terrible bloodbath.

Gandhi’s relentless campaigns finally bore fruit in 1937, when the British government, after much hesitation and deliberation, enacted the Government of India Act which gave India the institutions of a self-governing state. The act allowed for the establishment of autonomous legislative bodies in the provinces of British India, the creation of a bicameral (two house) national legislature and the formation of an executive arm under the control of the British Government in London. The measure went into effect by the end of the year. The Government of India Act, however, proved unworkable for two reasons. First, India’s six hundred nominally sovereign princes refused to cooperate and (2) Muslims feared that Hindus would dominate the National Legislature.

The Muslims had much truth on their side as they were often the victims of majority Hindu entrepreneurs and land owners. In 1916, Hindus and Muslims (Lucknow Pact) had agreed to work together for greater autonomy, but they slowly went their own ways. By 1930, the Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876-1948) paralleled the Congress Party’s efforts, but called for the creation of a separate Muslim state to be called Pakistan, or “land of the pure.” The failure of Hindu’s and Muslims to work together would lead to bloodshed as independence was proclaimed and would lead to the rivalry that still exists between India and Pakistan.

c. Dictatorships in Latin America
In the nineteenth century, Latin America had achieved political independence and, as the twentieth century dawned, Latin America was still economically dominated by Euro-American investors. Most Latin American economies still depended on exporting either raw materials or agricultural products. Chile, copper and nitrates; Peru, copper; Bolivia, copper and tin; Mexico, oil; Argentina, wheat and beef; Central America, bananas, sugar cane and coffee; Brazil, coffee and steel. The Creole Elites and the foreign investors both profited, but the bulk of the population did the work and saw little profit.

The United States had considered Latin America in its sphere of influence ever since the building of the Panama Canal and the Spanish American war of 1898 when she obtained Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands and established a protectorate over Cuba. On December 6, 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt announced to Congress his Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which stated that the United States could intervene in Caribbean affairs when corruption of governments made it necessary. Roosevelt made it clear that the United States intended to police Latin American governments when American interests were at stake.

Roosevelt espoused Neocolonialism which is when a nation used capitalism and cultural imperialism to influence a developing country instead of traditional and direct military and political control which is imperialism. American Neocolonialism became more ingrained under Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft (1857-1931). In his final address to congress to congress, Taft argued that the United States should substitute dollars for bullets in foreign policy. He wanted American businesses to develop foreign markets through peaceful trading and believed that military action should be avoided wherever possible. Moreover, by replacing European investments (especially in Latin America) with American investments, the United States would face fewer European challenges to the Monroe Doctrine. Critics called this new policy Dollar Diplomacy; Latin Americans called it Yankee Imperialism.

Roosevelt and later presidents cited the corollary to justify U.S. intervention in (and occupation of) Cuba (1906-1909), Nicaragua (1909-1911, 1912-1925 and 1926-1933), Haiti (1915-1934), and the Dominican Republic (1916-1924). This domination by “big brother” to the north was bitterly resented by many Latin American states. During the 1930s, however, President Franklin Roosevelt (a cousin of Theodore Roosevelt) initiated the Good Neighbor Policy which attempted to reduce American domination of and improve relations with Latin America. Although it had shortcomings, Roosevelt’s policies led to the American Secretary of State Cordell Hull signed the 1933 Convention on the Right and Duties of States which held that: no state has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another.

World War I increased the influence of the United States in Latin America. France and England were drained financially by the war and so the United States had little foreign economic competition in Latin America. Between 1924 and 1929, American banks and businesses more than doubled their financial interests in Latin America: from 1.5 billion to 3.5 billion. Much of this money went toward the takeover of businesses extracting vital minerals, such as copper-mining in Chile and oil-drilling in Venezuela.

World War I, the Russian Revolution and the ongoing Mexican revolution helped to spread radical ideas and the promise of new political possibilities throughout Latin America. Lenin’s style of Marxism and his theories on capitalism, along with a growing concern for the impoverished Native American peasants and workers stimulated a deep-rooted anger in the minds of Latin American intelligentsia and artists. The interwar Age of Anxiety in Latin America increased the popularity of radical causes and a vision of the fruits of what revolution might bring. The Enlightenment values of the Creoles that shaped the Latin American Age of Independence (1810-1830) were now being displaced by other forms of political ideology. Neocolonialism and Imperialism were both being rejected by revolutionary ideals and fascist idealism.

The Great Depression had disastrous consequences for Latin America, halting fifty years of economic growth and revealing the disastrous consequences for nations who did not industrialize their economies. When the American and European economies were not able to purchase raw materials and agricultural products from Latin America, the result was economic disaster and human suffering on a huge scale. The price of sugar from the Caribbean, coffee from Brazil, wheat and beef from Argentine, tin from Bolivia, nitrates from Chile and many other primary products fell sharply after1929. This economic pain pushed Latin America away from democracy and toward extremism and dictatorship, which continued the long-standing tradition of authoritarian rule in Latin America.

Nicaragua: Since the nineteenth century, American financial interests had dominated Nicaragua’s economy from agricultural goods (bananas, coffee and sugar cane) to transportation industries. In response to insurrections and political instability; and to protect American civilians and business interests, American Marines occupied Nicaragua from 1912 to 1933. In 1927, General Augusto César Sandino (1895-1934) began a five year guerrilla war against the American backed conservative government and against the Marines. Sandino refused to accept any settlement that left American soldiers on Nicaraguan soil.

As part of their plan to leave, the Americans supervised elections in 1932 brought Juan Batista Sacasa (president, 1932-1936) to power and then trained the Guarda Nacional (National Guard), a military-police force, under the command of the brutal but loyal Anasticio Somoza Garcia (1896-1956). The Sacasa government and Sandino tried to make common cause but failed. Then Somoza, loyal to the United States, had Sandino murdered in 1934, deposed Sacasa in 1936 and began a hereditary dictatorship that would last until 1979. Somoza maintained his loyalty to Roosevelt as a good neighbor and made himself rich, until he was assassinated in 1956 while Sandino became a martyr who fought the good neighbor to the north. 

Mexico: The PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) had controlled Mexico since 1920 and ruled Mexico with an oligarchical government disguised as a republic. Under this arrangement the Creole elites prospered and the lower classes languished in poverty. In 1935, Lazaro Cardenas was elected president and instituted many reforms benefiting the peasants. Cardenas also defied the United States by nationalizing American oil companies and creating PEMEX, a state-run oil monopoly. President Roosevelt, living up to the Good Neighbor Policy, did not intervene and allowed Cardenas to compensate U S companies for their losses.

Brazil: On 15 November 1889, after years of economic stagnation, the Army, supported by rural and financial elites (Creoles), overthrew the emperor Dom Pedro II and established a republic. But the new republic was plagued by corruption, rigged elections and intimidation in the countryside. Many of these corrupt landowners dominated the coffee industry. The Depression gutted their industry and plunged the country into economic chaos. In 1930 a military coup made, Getulio Vargas a lawyer and politician, president and he turned Brazil into an authoritarian state in imitation of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Despite his ruthless police state, he freed Brazil from dependence of coffee by industrializing Brazil and maintained a good neighbor relationship with President Roosevelt and the United States. He was forced out of office in 1945. In spite of his authoritarian rule, Vargas was a populist (supporter - from left or right - that the poor must be relieved from oppression) who became known as the Father of the Poor.

Haiti: In 1914, Woodrow Wilson Acting under the principles of Roosevelt Corollary, sent American Marines to protect American financial interests, during which the Americans removed $500,000 from Haitian banks and sent it to New York for safe keeping. Then in 1915, after the Haitian president was assassinated, the Marines returned and occupied Haiti for twenty years during which time, the Americans installed a new government that allowed foreign ownership of Haitian property which was bitterly resented by the Haitians. President Roosevelt (Good Neighbor Policy) ordered the Marines out in 1936 but American business interests dominated Haiti until the 1980s.

Chile: In 1920, Chile’s emerging middle and working classes overcame the power of Creole oligarchs and elected a reformist president, Arturo Alessandri (1868-1950) whose efforts were blocked by conservatives. In 1924, a military coup set off a period of instability in which one government followed another until Alessandri was again elected in 1932. The government was then dominated by coalitions of which a strong middle class party, the Radicals, dominated. It is important to understand that the twenties and thirties were a time a rebellions (with consequent repression) with movement toward Nazi ideology.

Argentina: In 1916, Hipolito Irigoyen was elected president of Argentina. He and his party tried to alleviate the plight of the middle and lower classes but after the effects of the Great Depression were felt, he was driven from office in 1930 and replaced by a military dictatorship. The military government represented the old Creole elites and tried to take Argentina back to an export based economy. As a result, labor unrest increased and the radical lower classes, the Descamisados (shirtless ones) became more troublesome and restless. But more importantly, although Argentina was among richest countries in the world, this Creole led take over marked the beginning of a steady economic and social decline that pushed Argentine back into underdevelopment. In 1946, Juan Peron with his charismatic wife Eva would use their power to establish his own dictatorship.

d. Nationalism in Africa and the Middle East
By the end of World War I, the peoples of Africa were growing tired of their, inferior colonial status. They paid taxes to foreign nations, fought their wars (both in Africa and in Europe) and worked on their farms. During the 1920s and 1930s, despite their relative insulation from the worst effects of the Depression, nationalist movements began spread throughout Africa.

In Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta led protests against forced labor and heavy taxes. In South Africa, the African National Congress was founded to protest Apartheid (repressive racial segregation), which in the short term failed, but would eventually bring racial equality by the end of the century. Ethiopia would be invaded and brutally conquered by Mussolini as the League of Nations mandated sanctions it could not enforce. It would take World War II and the advent of the Cold Car to crack the colonial system and bring independence to African nations in a process called Decolonization.

The Formation of Modern Turkey: The transformation of the Ottoman Empire into the modern Turkish state had its roots in the efforts of the Young Turks. The Turks had joined the Central powers and were punished at the end of the war by having their empire broken up, mostly into mandated states given to France and Great Britain. After the last sultan fled in 1923, a war hero, Mustafa Kemal, called Ataturk (Father of the Turks) established the Turkish Republic and became its first president. Ataturk worked ceaselessly to create a modern, industrialized and westernized state. He not only introduced European technology but also encouraged Western dress and education. Two of his most profound changes were to introduce the Roman alphabet and establish a European legal system; thereby effectively replacing the Sharia and Islamic courts. Women were freed from the veil, given the right to vote and encouraged them to join the workforce.

Persia becomes Iran: Although Persia was officially ruled from 1794 to 1925 by the Qajar Dynasty, it was in reality dominated by the Russians in the north and the British in the south. After World War I, British influence increased which coincided with British investments in newly discovered oil fields. In 1921, an army officer named Reza Pahlavi, began a revolt and by 1925 had defeated the Qajar and driven the British out of Persia. He established a new dynasty, the Pahlavi, and renamed the country Iran. Like Mustafa Kemal, he worked to reform and westernize his country but, but although he made many strides towards Westernization, he did not break the power of the Islamic clergy, as did Kemal.

The Mandated States: after World War I Egypt, much of the Middle East and North Africa remained under British, French and Italian control. Most frustrated by this arrangement were the Arab states that that had once been part of the Ottoman Empire and who had support the allied powers with military assistance. The Paris Peace Conference divided these Arab lands into mandates, that is, states supervised by the League of Nations. Syria and Lebanon were assigned to France; Iraq, Jordan and Palestine were assigned to Great Britain. The Arabs felt betrayed and chafed under this Mandate System. What angered them even more was the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which publicly declared Great Britain’s support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Even though the British limited Jewish immigration, by 1939 the Jewish population was 30% of the population of Palestine.

Saudi Arabia: during the early 1920s an Arab prince, Ibn Saud drove out the remaining vestiges of Ottoman authority and in 1932 founded the kingdom of Saudi Arabia which became the only major Arab state that enjoyed full independence. Saudi Arabia became enormously important in 1938 when the Standard Oil Company discovered huge oil reserves and – almost overnight – Saudi Arabia became enormously wealthy – and strategically important.

 

 

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