World History

Textbook

Chapter 11 and 12

CHAPTER OUTLINE

1. 11.1  Alliances, Expansion, and Conflict

2. 11.2  The Collapse of the Ottomans and the Coming of War

3. 11.3  Total War

4. 11.4  War on the Homefront

5. 11.5  The War Ends

INTRODUCTION World War I served as a clear demarcation line. By separating the world of empires from an emerging and more modern world, the conflict set the stage for a redrawn map of Europe. It featured many characteristics that have since become common in warfare—total war, civilian losses, massive numbers of troops in armies, and warfare that relies on military technology as well as the courageous charge of soldiers against enemies (Figure 11.1). The war was a surprise to many and was welcomed by some when it broke out in 1914. Its level of destruction, however, came to shape public opinion about war for decades.

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FIGURE 11.2 Timeline: The War to End All Wars. (credit: “1907”: modification of work “Triple Entente” by Unknown, Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain; credit: “Jun 1914”: modification of work “Franz Ferdinand & Sophie Leave Sarajevo Guildhall” by Unknown/Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0; credit: “Jul 1914”: modification of work “Cartoon Map of Europe in 1914” by Berlin State Library/The Public Domain Review, Public Domain; credit: “Mar 1917”: modification of work “Soldiers demonstration. February 1917” by socialist.memo.ru/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

FIGURE 11.3 Locator Map: The War to End All Wars. (credit: modification of work “World map blank shorelines” by Maciej Jaros/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

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11.1 Alliances, Expansion, and Conflict

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

· Describe political conditions in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century

· Analyze the nature of the alliances made among European powers by 1914

· Explain how the desire for colonies destabilized the balance of power in the early twentieth century

· Describe the competition to build modern navies in the early twentieth century

By the early twentieth century, Europe had achieved outward stability through a series of alliances. Such accords were a hallmark of nineteenth-century diplomacy and had maintained peace for decades on the continent, compressing the wars that did occur into finite conflicts. In the 1900s, these alliances had solidified two opposed groups, each with major powers that allied with one another and then developed relationships with smaller nations. Germany’s territorial ambitions put it in direct conflict with other imperialistic powers as it sought to expand its colonial holdings. Its desire to be taken more seriously and become a force in global affairs threatened to destabilize the peace when its goals brought it into competition with other countries hungry for land and power, notably Great Britain, and led to military buildups. A specter of war soon hung over Europe.

The Long Peace

The decades before the world erupted into the Great War, as World War I was known, were generally marked by great stability. The work done in 1815 to create a balance of power among European nations in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars had been quite successful. The Concert of Europe—an informal agreement to maintain the status quo—had been able to absorb some internal conflicts and the growth of more liberal political thoughts without incurring political or territorial instability. There were occasionally military conflicts, but these were usually of short duration and limited in scale.

Prussia, however, with its militarized culture, clearly did still see warfare as a means of achieving its own ends, as did other nations such as France. Austria-Hungary and Prussia went to war in 1866. The conflict lasted only about seven weeks and was handily won by Prussia, which had invested in better military technology and weaponry and now annexed several German states. Austria was effectively barred from participating in German affairs from that point forward, and Prussia became the dominant German state. The war also forced Austria into accepting the dual monarchy system, an unwieldy alliance with Hungary. Austria agreed because it needed allies after being ousted from German affairs, but it and Hungary had separate national governments and parliaments (and different goals) despite being part of the same empire.

The Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and 1871 was another fairly brief conflict that resulted in major change. France declared war against Prussia after a dispute over who would inherit the Spanish throne. The fighting lasted only a few months, but Paris was besieged by the Prussian army, and Napoléon III was captured. The treaty that ended the conflict forced France to pay a large war indemnity to Prussia. France also had to pay for the occupation forces, while losing the territories of Alsace and Lorraine (which changed hands again several times during the first half of the twentieth century). This was a humiliating defeat for France, though it paved the way for the unification of the German Empire. The signing of the treaty in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles cemented Prussia’s leadership of the new empire and its successful achievement of what had been left undone by the revolutions of 1848: Germany automatically emerged as a major power in Europe.

The fighting in these wars was localized, and because they were short, the conflicts did not require the mobilization of a country’s economy or full resources. They did not involve numerous countries either, and the fighting rarely spilled over into other nations’ lands. With the exception of the Franco-Prussian War, their impact on civilian society was minimal, with little loss of civilian life or destruction of property. In a sense, their very nature lulled much of Europe into expecting that although there might be future wars, they would be swift and small affairs.

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Treaties and Alliances

Since he first rose to power in 1862, German chancellor Otto von Bismarck had pursued conservative policies that strengthened first Prussia and then Germany itself. In particular, Bismarck hoped to check the power of Russia and France by developing a series of alliances that would keep them from growing more dominant and presenting a threat to German leadership in the region. A military alliance with Austria-Hungary was created to stand up to Russia. This alliance later grew to include Italy and became formalized as the Triple Alliance. In 1894, Russia and France signed a treaty pledging military support for one another if attacked and requiring each to mobilize its armies if the other did so. In 1907, the Triple Entente was created between Russia, France, and Britain, growing out of a shared distrust of German aims.

By the early twentieth century, then, a series of alliances had effectively divided Europe into two blocs of power. A bloc is a group of countries united for a common purpose. One bloc included Russia, France, and Britain, and the other Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. While these two groups stood opposed to one another, there were nuances in the arrangements. Britain, for example, had not promised any mutual aid in times of war when it signed its initial agreement with France, nor had it done so in its agreement with Russia, while France was bound to provide military support for Russia if Russia were attacked and not the aggressor.

What these new alliances also did was provide fuel for the German emperor Wilhelm II’s growing concern that he was surrounded by hostile nations (Figure 11.4). Some of this preoccupation was undoubtedly justified. Germany faced a hostile France to its west and Russia to its east. But Wilhelm’s fixation on it drove him and Germany to adopt even more aggressive stances toward their “enemies” that helped create the cataclysm of World War I.

FIGURE 11.4 The Kaiser’s View of Germany. This satirical German map from 1914 reflects Kaiser Wilhelm II’s growing concern that Germany was encircled by its enemies. (credit: “Cartoon Map of Europe in 1914” by Berlin

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State Library/The Public Domain Review, Public Domain)

Colonies and Conflict

The view that imperial strength should be devoted to colony building was still very much in place in the late 1800s. Still industrializing, and having unified as a country only in 1871, Germany soon felt the pressure to build an overseas empire, just as the other industrializing nations of the world—Britain, France, Belgium, the United States, Russia, and Japan—did. But there were limited locales it could target.

Germany began to look to the Pacific as a place where it could establish itself as a colonial power. The United States, Britain, France, Japan, and the Netherlands already held extensive territory in the Pacific. Germany soon claimed part of New Guinea, part of the Solomon Islands, and the Marshall Islands. In 1899, Germany’s growing power in the Pacific led to the partitioning of the Samoan Islands with the United States. Germany also gained some of the smaller island groups—Palau, Caroline Islands, and Mariana Islands—by the beginning of the twentieth century. In addition, it planned to join the “Scramble for Africa” in which European nations were engaging to shore up their colonial holdings on the African continent.

When Germany went in search of African colonies, there was not much left. Britain, France, Belgium, and Portugal had already seized control of most of the continent and did not welcome the claims of yet another European nation. Germany took a portion of East Africa and Southwest Africa, which had a large border with the British colonies. Togoland and the Cameroons also became part of the German colonial empire (Figure 11.5).

FIGURE 11.5 German Colonies in 1914. This map shows the regions around the world that Germany had claimed as colonies by the beginning of World War I. (credit: modification of work “BlankMap-World” by CIA World Factbook/ Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

In 1905, Germany clashed with both France and Britain in North Africa. Kaiser Wilhelm II arrived in Morocco that year and made a speech in which he threw his full support behind its being an independent state led by the sultan. He also voiced his expectation that Germany would enjoy the same benefits of trade in the region that France and England did. Wilhelm hoped to divide Britain and France by thus claiming a place for

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Germany in North Africa equivalent to that held by other European nations. Instead, in response to this First Moroccan Crisis, Britain and France established stronger bonds of friendship.

A few years later, another crisis erupted over Morocco, though this one was more media driven and involved more national posturing. The Second Moroccan Crisis started in 1911. France and Germany had been negotiating over what say Germany would have in rail lines under construction in Morocco and over some territory in the French Congo that Germany wanted. Britain and France had earlier become alarmed by Germany’s plans to build another railroad in concert with the Ottoman Empire that would link Berlin to Baghdad. This railway would provide Germany with more direct access to both Persian Gulf oil and its African colonies. Moving oil and other goods by rail would also make Germany less vulnerable to potential British naval attacks.

In May 1911, France, fearing rebellion in Morocco, sent troops to the city of Fez. In July of that year, Germany sent a gunboat to Agadir, a Moroccan port on the Atlantic, to ensure that it would be compensated for any loss of control over Moroccan territory that resulted from French intervention. Germany also undoubtedly intended to frighten Britain and force it to back out of its alliance with France. Soon British politicians and the media seized on the opportunity to attack Germany for its demands. The British said they were not yet sending in the Royal Navy but would be monitoring the situation. In the end, France and Germany held successful negotiations over the issues, with Germany receiving territory in the French Congo in exchange for acknowledging French dominance in Morocco, but the international effect of the crisis was broader. Britain was reinforced in its view that Germany posed a threat to its own colonial ambitions. On the German side, the military leadership gained greater political influence in the capital in Berlin.

The Growth of Militaries

Naval power assumed a greater role in world affairs in the late nineteenth century. As more of the industrialized nations embarked on empire building, and as reaching international markets became an expected part of their strategy, the value of having strong navies to protect commercial trade only grew. Maintaining supply and fueling stations around the world to service these navies and fleets of merchant ships became a key argument in favor of developing more colonies.

At the start of the twentieth century, Great Britain was still the unmatched naval power in the world. Kaiser Wilhelm II was determined to counter Britain’s sea power by building up the German navy. In this, he was ably assisted by Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz. Tirpitz had similarly grand dreams for the navy, and through his various positions in the naval high command, he set out an ambitious building program for new battleships.

Chapter 12

CHAPTER OUTLINE

1. 12.1  Recovering from World War I

2. 12.2  The Formation of the Soviet Union

3. 12.3  The Great Depression

4. 12.4  Old Empires and New Colonies

5. 12.5  Resistance, Civil Rights, and Democracy

INTRODUCTION The interwar years of the 1920s and 1930s saw a world recovering from the upheaval of World War I. People reacted differently to the horrors of the conflict, but many chose to embrace the present, and the 1920s were filled with new forms of cultural expression and new opportunities (Figure 12.1). In Europe the economy still lagged, but in other parts of the world economic growth soared. By the 1930s, however, economic instability had become common as the Great Depression plunged nations into poverty and unemployment. Governments dealt with the downturn in a variety of ways, but solutions in several countries included more authoritarian policies.

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FIGURE 12.2 Timeline: The Interwar Period. (credit “1922”: modification of work “Stalin in July 1941” by Nationaal Archief/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain; credit “1929”: modification of work “Poor mother and children, Oklahoma, 1936 by Dorothea Lange” by Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain; credit “1930”: modification of work “Salt March” by Unknown/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain; credit “1933”: modification of work “Adolf Hitler, head-and-shoulders portrait, facing slightly left (https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/89714102/)” by George Grantham Bain Collection/Library of Congress; credit “1935”: modification of work “Mao Zedong in Yan’an” by Unknown/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

12.1 Recovering from World War I

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

· Describe World War I’s immediate aftermath

· List the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles

· Describe how economic issues in Germany helped lead to the rise of the National Socialists

· Analyze World War I’s effects on the economies of Europe, the United States, East Asia, and Latin

America

· Describe international efforts to prevent future global wars

Two major and competing forces took shape following World War I. One was disillusionment as the sheer horror of the war was finally understood. The other was the tantalizing idea that society had learned from the war and could build a better tomorrow, freed from the senselessness of war, through new institutions such as the League of Nations. Or, in the case of Russia, a new society would be based on more equitable principles. The reality turned out to be far from the ideal.

The Aftermath

As World War I ended in 1918, the world moved to cope with the destruction it had wrought. Military casualties stood between nine and ten million, civilian deaths at approximately ten million, and the number of wounded above twenty-one million. Veterans had both physical and emotional wounds; some needed physical therapy, prosthetics, or vocational training for their postwar lives. The civilian toll meant families had lost not only

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sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers but daughters, sisters, wives, and mothers. The war also brought into question the notions of superiority that had permeated Western civilization. People wondered whether the West was declining and could no longer consider itself a moral leader in the world.

In Belgium and eastern France, the physical destruction was immense. Thousands of acres, often of prime farmland, were barren after years of artillery bombardment. Towns such as Ypres in Belgium had been shelled so heavily that many buildings had collapsed (Figure 12.3). People had to filter back to the farmlands and cities they had fled and begin to rebuild their lives. Some towns, such as Thiepval, France, had been so thoroughly destroyed that they were never rebuilt.

FIGURE 12.3 Damage of War. The city of Ypres, Belgium, suffered great damage in World War I, as this 1916 photo of its ruined square shows. (credit: “Destruction on the Western Front, 1914-1918” by Ministry of Information First World War Official Collection/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

In the defeated countries of Germany and Austria-Hungary, economies were in free fall. Millions of men returned home to find stubborn economic instability and labor markets in transition, with factories ill- equipped to return to peacetime production. For men from Europe’s colonies, it took even longer to return home because European troops were demobilized first. Even the victorious nations faced economic problems. Britain and France had borrowed billions to finance the war and had sizable debts to repay, many to the United States. Industries across the world had to reconvert their machinery and processes to begin producing consumer items again, causing continued unemployment.

The world was still dealing with the flu pandemic of 1918–1920, closing schools and theaters and canceling public activities. People were encouraged to wear masks and limit their movement until the crisis had passed. The flu eventually infected about one-third of the world’s population, killing tens of millions, especially younger people. By early 1920, it had stopped spreading, however, and people were able to return to their pre- pandemic lives.

Political change was in the winds. The takeover of Russia in 1917 by a small but determined Bolshevik force

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sent shockwaves through many nations as they began to fear similar uprisings within their own borders. In the United States, a “Red Scare” was unfolding in 1919. Fear of immigrants who might be communists or socialists was expressed in the growth of nativism—the idea that the nation should be reserved for native-born people of northern European ancestry. A number of mail bombs sent to politicians, businessmen, and newspaper editors heightened public fears of anarchy, and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer began authorizing what were later called the Palmer Raids, targeting newspaper presses, immigrant groups, and Russian worker unions, often without proper search warrants. Supposed “radical aliens” were arrested; some were held for months without being charged, and some were deported to Russia. The Palmer Raids demonstrated the power of the government to ignore individual rights. The American Civil Liberties Union was formed in 1920 to provide legal assistance to those targeted by the raids. As the months passed with no clear threat of a communist takeover, the public increasingly viewed Palmer’s actions with suspicion, and his political career ended.

The Treaty of Versailles

In January 1919, the leaders of the major Allied powers (except Russia) met outside Paris at Versailles to negotiate the treaty formally ending the war (Figure 12.4). Committees were assigned to resolve the many issues concerning not only Europe but also the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. The conference lasted about a year. In its finished form, the Treaty of Versailles was actually a series of treaties, a “massive document that ran to 436 pages containing 433 articles organized into fifteen parts.”

FIGURE 12.4 Treaty of Versailles. This large 1919 painting by John Christen Johansen is called Signing of the Treaty of Versailles, 1919. U.S. president Woodrow Wilson is shown seated near the center of the group, holding some papers in his hand. (credit: “Signing of the Treaty of Versailles, 1919” by National Portrait Gallery/Smithsonian Institution; transfer from the Smithsonian American Art Museum; gift of an anonymous donor, 1926, CC0)

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President Woodrow Wilson arrived in Paris in 1919 to grand parades and a hero’s welcome. In January 1918, he had already published a plan he hoped would be the basis of the treaty—the Fourteen Points—embodying his wish to prevent future war by solving issues he believed had led to the recent conflict. Among these points were the rights of neutral nations, freedom of the seas, and the need to break up the empires that had caused the war and create new sovereign states in Europe. Wilson’s last point proposed a League of Nations where member nations could come together for mutual security and work out problems without resorting to war.

Wilson also strongly advocated self-determination, the idea that each ethnic group should have its own government. The treaty ushered in a major redrawing of Europe, and new countries flooded onto the map. Their borders were drawn by diplomats in Paris, however, and did not always reflect where people of different nationalities lived. Nor could they. In an already diverse empire such as Austria-Hungary, people of different backgrounds lived side by side, so it was no easy feat to draw a border. In some cases, the treaty grouped people in ways that may not have made sense to them. For example, the new country of Czechoslovakia was predominantly composed of Czechs and Slovaks, who did not see themselves as having similar nationalities.

Poland resurfaced after having been partitioned out of existence in the late 1700s. A new Polish nation was carved from territory on the German Empire’s eastern side and land Russia had relinquished under the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ending its involvement in the war. The German-speaking country of Austria became an independent nation, as did Hungary. The area of the Balkans, the site of so much uncertainty and nationalism prior to the war, received a particularly unfavorable decision regarding self-determination. The Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Montenegrins, and other Slavic groups there viewed themselves as separate nationalities, yet all were assembled in a single country, to be called Yugoslavia or “land of the Southern Slavs.” Yugoslavia was simply a diplomatic creation, and it did not survive the century (Figure 12.5).

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FIGURE 12.5 Redrawing Europe. These maps show Europe (a) before and (b) after World War I. Notice the postwar proliferation of new countries created by the Treaty of Versailles. (attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC BY 4.0 license)

Other provisions of the treaty were designed to weaken Germany. Great Britain and France were intent on punishing Germany for backing Austria-Hungary in 1914 and enlarging the conflict by invading Belgium and France. They did not want Germany to simply be blamed for the war; they wanted Germany to literally pay for it, so they began a painstaking financial accounting. Every destroyed house or building was assigned a monetary value. Every lost military and civilian life was assessed an amount based on what that person’s

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future earnings might have been. These reparations totaled over $30 billion in 1919 dollars. (For context, a loaf of bread cost about 9 cents at the time.) Wilson hoped to persuade the other Allied leaders to abandon this course but was unable to, and the treaty reflected their goal of revenge.

LINK TO LEARNING

The full text of the Treaty of Versailles (https://openstax.org/l/77Versailles) is available through the Library of Congress.

Take a few minutes and read through some of the first two parts. The first is about the League of Nations, and the second is about the borders of Germany.

One of the clearest punishments the treaty inflicted on Germany was restrictions on its military capacity. The German Army was limited to 100,000 troops, the draft was ended, and the number of ships, planes, tanks, and submarines was similarly curtailed. The Allied powers hoped that limiting the might of the German Army would limit its aggressiveness. The method of enforcing these limits was not resolved in Paris, however, and it arose as a real issue in the 1930s.

Germany was also shrunk, losing 13 percent of the territory it had held in Europe before the war. The Saar region was to be administered by the League of Nations. The Rhineland in the west (the Rhine River Valley) became a demilitarized zone. Germany also lost western territory to both France (Alsace-Lorraine, previously seized by Germany) and Belgium. In the east, German lands and the port of Danzig (now Gdańsk) were given to Poland. Other lands went to Lithuania and the new country of Czechoslovakia. As a result, Germany lost about one-tenth of its population, approximately 6.5 million people. It also had to give up its colonies in Asia and Africa.

One provision of the treaty related directly to Japan and China. Japan had occupied China’s Shandong Province, a former German concession, including the port of Qingdao (Tsingtao), and continued to hold it after the war. Without consulting the millions of Chinese people living there at the time, the treaty makers allowed Japan to retain this territory, which it did until 1922.

The racism of the era was apparent in what was not included in the treaty. Japan had requested a clause affirming the equality of all nations regardless of race. This proviso would have set the stage for more open migration and fairer treatment of immigrants (such as Japanese immigrants to the United States). Several powers supported its inclusion, but Australia (which allowed no non-White immigration) and then the United States stated their opposition. Wilson claimed a unanimous vote was necessary to include it, though this was not true for any other clause. In the end, the racial equality clause was absent from the final version of the treaty. As another example, when France and Britain tallied the destruction of the war, they did not include African lives lost in the fighting in Africa. The cost of the devastation there was borne solely by Africans.

It was clear that a significant period of adjustment must follow the treaty’s signing as the peoples of the new regions and their fledgling governments established themselves. There was also disappointment. For instance, in 1915, Italy had been promised territory in Dalmatia in return for joining the Allied cause but was forced to relinquish it due to Wilson’s opposition. This prompted anger in Italy and some anti-American rallies. France was annoyed that it had received only part of Germany’s African colonies of Cameroon and Togo while the rest went to Britain. Japan, besides being angered at the rejection of the racial equality clause, was disappointed that it had not been given all of Germany’s colonial holdings in Asia and the Pacific. It received only some, while others went to New Zealand and Australia. Internal ethnic issues had not been fully solved by the treaty (such as in the creation of Czechoslovakia) and could easily resurface given the chance.

The “war guilt” clause of the treaty, blaming Germany for the war, caused many problems for that country over the next decades. Its diplomats felt dishonored by being forced to agree to it, and the harsh monetary reparations left Germany unstable for several years. The government’s decision to print more money to pay

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these debts caused hyperinflation and made its politicians look incompetent. It was easy for rumors of conspiracy to take hold, particularly among war veterans. The “stab-in-the-back” theory, for example, claimed that German democratic politicians had betrayed the military with the 1918 cease-fire agreement. (In truth, the German military had reached its breaking point in 1918 and was not in a position to continue the war, especially given the continuous arrival of fresh U.S. troops.)

The U.S. Senate’s biggest worry about the Treaty of Versailles was that if the United States joined the League of Nations, its troops could be sent anywhere in the world, drawing the nation into foreign disputes that the Senate, then dominated by the Republican Party, wanted to avoid. Senators feared the treaty would thus cost them their constitutional power to declare war. They also objected to Britain and France’s desire to control the League. For these reasons, the United States did not approve the treaty and did not join the League of Nations. The organization's ability to mediate and resolve international disputes was weakened by the lack of U.S. participation.

The treaty was more popular in other Allied nations. Britain generally felt it was even-handed and that the punishment of Germany was just. The British people looked forward to joining the League. The French also agreed with the penalties heaped upon Germany, though some felt they should have gone even further because France had suffered more than Britain had. China was frustrated that Japan was allowed to retain Shandong under the treaty, but its protests fell on deaf ears. Anger at China’s treatment helped lead to the May Fourth Movement, which began in Beijing in 1919 as a protest by students. It grew to include labor strikes, calls for a boycott of Japanese-made products, and the removal of Japanese-leaning government officials.

Postwar Recession and Prosperity

World War I devastated the world’s economies. Four long years of conflict and losses had disrupted the labor force across Europe, not to mention governments’ budgetary predictions. The reparations owed by Germany were the means by which Britain and France planned to deal with their own debt, but they also created an economic house of cards that could easily tumble down. Africa, Asia, and Latin America also felt the economic effects of the war. Before the war, African nations had traded extensively with Europe, especially Germany, which had accounted for the majority of European trade with sub-Saharan Africa. When the war began, the difficulty of trading with the combatant nations meant that many European goods became more expensive, and many Africans could no longer afford them.

Following the war, Britain and France looked to their African colonies and to Germany’s former colonial possessions for their financial salvation. Both France and Britain focused on agricultural development. Often this meant increasing opportunities for White settlers to reap profit for both themselves and the home country while limiting opportunities for Black Africans. In the portion of Cameroon given to France to administer after the war, French officials encouraged growing coffee for export. But they also allotted licenses to grow the crop primarily to Europeans and restricted the number of acres that Black Africans could cultivate. Lack of opportunity for Black people meant that White coffee growers had a ready supply of agricultural laborers who were forced to accept low wages. Similarly, in British Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania), the right to cut and market timber was reserved for Europeans. Britain and France also invested heavily in railroad building in Africa following the war, and Britain poured funds into mining operations in Nigeria, the Gold Coast (Ghana), and South Africa.

East Asian countries were also affected by the war, and the economies of several, such as China and Japan, underwent a growth period following its end. Though China was not yet heavily industrialized, it benefited from the decrease in global competition caused by Europe’s economic issues.

In the Taisho period in the 1920s, the Japanese economy was buffeted by booms and recessions, the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, inflation, and a serious banking crisis in 1927. Japan had become heavily dependent on trade with the United States, and its urban economy was now undermined by the protectionism practiced by both U.S. and European markets in the form of tariffs on foreign imports. Japan’s economy

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continued growing in the 1920s, however, as the country increased military production and began making investments in China. Inflation did occur, but the government adopted austerity policies to combat it. Japan was able to increase its exports after the war even more than China did, and trade with the United States, in particular, increased substantially.

Latin American countries saw little real economic change after the war. Many had few industries and still depended on agricultural exports for economic growth. Some faced more competition for these commodities as other regions around the world began to export increasing amounts of items such as rubber. One Latin American commodity that did see growth, particularly in Venezuela, was oil, which was becoming increasingly important in global markets. The heavily industrialized countries of South America, such as Argentina, Brazil, and Peru, provided stable but minor economic growth. They geared their manufacturing to the export market, but tariffs rates and internal changes in monetary policy during the 1920s held them back.

The United States did not suffer the physical devastation of war that the other Allies did. It emerged from the conflict in a position of economic power, a creditor nation to be repaid for its wartime loans to Britain and France. Thus, the 1920s were a decade of prosperity for the country, in which technological innovations added to the sense of affluence. Major retailers were ready to sell consumers new items like vacuum cleaners, electric ovens, and refrigerators through credit lines they paid off over time. Domestic life became significantly easier, wages increased, and unemployment was low. For U.S. citizens, the future seemed bright.

Germany and Reparations

John Maynard Keynes, the creator of Keynesian economics, was a British economist at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. He was so unsettled by the potential financial repercussions of the treaty’s terms that he wrote a book contending the large reparations would mean economic ruin for Germany, endangering the entire European economy. His predictions were soon borne out.

Germany faced numerous problems as the 1920s began. It was not only blamed for the war, but its foreign financial assets had also been seized under the treaty, further compromising its economic power, and it had been physically diminished when many rich industrial areas were cut away from its territory. Thus, one of the immediate problems facing the new democratic Weimar Republic government was finding a way to pay the reparations.

The first payment came due in 1921, but Germany was unable to fund the full amount, and the unresolved issue about how to enforce the treaty terms resurfaced. The next year, 1922, Germany defaulted on its payments to France and Britain. In response, French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr Valley, the center of German iron, coal, and steel production, as a means to force repayment. The French needed the valley’s resources (especially coal). German residents of the valley resisted the occupation, and many were killed in the resulting conflict.

To reach an immediate solution, Germany began simply printing more money. But this created an inflationary cycle, and the economy soon proved incapable of keeping up with the hyperinflation that resulted. The new money was literally not worth the paper it was printed on (Figure 12.6). The government had to print ever- larger denominations of bills, and people took wheelbarrows of cash to the store to buy a loaf of bread. Holding a job seemed ludicrous when pay could not keep up with a rate of inflation that increased by the day. The entire German middle class saw their savings disappear, and with their money went their support of the government.

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FIGURE 12.6 Hyperinflation. In the 1920s, hyperinflation in Germany had made the national currency virtually worthless. In this photograph from 1923, Germany children play with stacks of banknotes. (credit: “Hyperinflation in Germany in 1923” by Mount Holyoke College/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

In 1924, the United States intervened by arranging the Dawes Plan, by which Germany’s installment payments were lowered but set to increase in the future as its economy rebounded. Foreign banks, many in the United States, also loaned Germany money to stabilize its inflationary economy. This enabled Germany to make its payments, but it also meant taking on more debt. In essence, U.S. banks were loaning money to Germany that it was using to pay Britain and France, which in turn used that money to pay back their own debts to the United States.

Reparations continued to present an extreme economic hardship for Germany. In 1929, the United States announced a new proposal. The Young Plan stretched German reparations across a fifty-nine–year payment schedule, slightly lowered the total to $29 billion, and arranged hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of additional loans. Germany continued to make payments until 1932, when the worldwide Great Depression made it untenable to continue. Later agreements canceled more of the remaining debt, and the last payment was finally made in 2010. In all, Germany paid only about one-eighth of the total.

Poor decisions by Germany’s Weimar Republic contributed to growing public frustration with the new democratic government. Many political groups attempted to use the country’s economic problems to catapult themselves to political power. Among these was the National Socialists or Nazi Party, whose members favored a more authoritarian government. One man who joined the group in the early 1920s was Adolf Hitler (Figure 12.7).

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FIGURE 12.7 Adolf Hitler. This portrait drawing of Hitler was made in 1923, when he was about thirty-four years old. (credit: “Adolf Hitler, head-and-shoulders portrait, facing slightly left (https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ 89714102/)” by George Grantham Bain Collection/Library of Congress)

Hitler was a veteran of the war who subscribed to the unfounded stab-in-the-back theory and had developed an abiding hatred of the Treaty of Versailles. He became a persuasive orator in the 1920s and rose up the ranks of the Nazis as he recruited more people to the group. In 1923, he decided to launch a takeover of the state government in Munich. The planned Beer Hall Putsch (so named because the targeted politicians were to be kidnapped at a beer hall) failed, and Hitler and many supporters were arrested. Over the next year in jail, Hitler wrote the book Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”), in which he outlined his plan for the Nazis to achieve political power and their goals for the resurgence of Germany. These goals included the uniting of German- speaking peoples under one government and an expansion eastward in search of Lebensraum or “living space.” His words found a sympathetic audience in the 1920s.

Disarmament and the Commitment to Peace

Still reeling from World War I in the 1920s, the governments of the major powers generally supported disarmament and limited military buildup. There was great hope that the next decades would be peaceful, and many agreements reached in the 1920s reflected this commitment to goodwill among nations. In 1921, the Washington Naval Conference opened to address the issue of the naval arms race that had taken place before and during World War I. U.S. secretary of state Charles Evans Hughes proposed that the three major naval powers—Britain, the United States, and Japan—each scuttle a number of ships and restrict future construction. The Five-Power Treaty that emerged limited the construction of warships and the size of aircraft carriers, then a new style of vessel in the world’s navies. It established ratios for warships whereby Britain and the United States could have the same number, and for every five ships they had, Japan could have three and France and Italy 1.75 each. Britain and the United States were allowed more ships because they maintained fleets in both the Atlantic and the Pacific to protect their colonies.

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IN THEIR OWN WORDS

The Western View of Japan Japan often argued that it was not treated fairly by Western powers at either the Treaty of Versailles negotiations or the Washington Naval Conference in the 1920s. One of Japan’s leading politicians, Okuma Shigenobu, wrote about how the West perceived the Japanese in Illusions of the White Race. As you read his words, look for the evidence he presents for his case. The white are obsessed with the mistaken theory that they are superior to all other races. This is the most serious obstacle in the way of the realization of racial equality. Now the Japanese, the Chinese, the Mongolian, the Turks, the Indians, the Afghans, the Persians, the Arabs, the Malayans, the American aborigines, and the African peoples are all non-white. They are all held in contempt by the whites. And it is the common belief among the whites that the darker the skin, the more inferior is the race. It is based neither upon science, nor upon any positive experience. It is mere superstition backed by historical prejudices. The whites are of the conviction that they are too superior a people to be governed by their non-white fellows. Therefore, they demand the privilege of extraterritoriality in the countries of the Asiatic races. They establish their own courts and trample under foot the laws and courts of Asiatic countries. . . . Of all the non-white countries, Japan had taken the lead in adopting the best parts of European civilization—including its military side. She codified her laws, and reformed her police and judicial systems, her military and naval forces, thus placing herself almost on an equal footing with that of the European countries. Therefore, the Europeans were compelled to withdraw their extraterritorial rights from Japan. . . . Some whites regard the development of Japan as an unjustifiable encroachment upon their own rights. They either instigate a non-white race against Japan or plan to organize a league of the white nations to perpetuate a white supremacy in the world. Be it remembered, however, that no unjust and unreasonable agitation against this country will ever succeed, as God never sides with an unjust cause. —Okuma Shigenobu, Illusions of the White Race · What points does Okuma Shigenobu make about Western views? · What evidence does he use to back his assertions?

By the late 1920s, optimism was high that the pain of war might be a thing of the past. It was in this spirit that the Kellogg-Briand Pact was written. The pact was a negotiation between U.S. secretary of state Frank Kellogg and Aristide Briand, the French foreign minister, renouncing war as an instrument of national policy. Fifteen nations signed it in 1928, and another forty-seven followed over the next years. However, there was no way to enforce it, and no repercussions for signatories that failed to live up to its ideals. Thus, it did little to curb the aggressive military policies of many nations during the following decade.

The same could be said of the League of Nations. Based on high ideals, the League could issue statements, restrictions, or condemnations, but it could not compel other countries to limit their activities. Assessing trade restrictions on a country might have some (minor) impact, but the League had no military arm that could physically intervene in a member country’s actions. Thus, as the 1930s began, it was regularly challenged by aggressive acts across the globe that it was powerless to influence. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931. Italy invaded Libya in 1931 and Ethiopia in 1935. The League did protest, especially over the Ethiopian invasion, but it could do little more than impose economic sanctions against Italy, and even these were not upheld by all countries. It was clear the League had no real power and no country need fear it.

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12.2 The Formation of the Soviet Union

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

· Describe the Soviet Union’s early years and the structure of its government

· Analyze the effects of Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan on the Soviet economy

· Describe life in the Soviet Union under Stalin

Russia underwent massive political upheaval during the Bolshevik takeover in 1917. A bloody civil war was fought for the next three years before the Bolsheviks and their leader Vladimir Lenin were victorious. Russia was then reorganized as the Soviet Union in the early 1920s. Lenin’s early death created an opening exploited by Joseph Stalin, an autocrat who reshaped the “worker’s paradise” of the Soviet Union to bring it fully under his authoritarian control.

The Birth of the Soviet Union and the Rise of Stalin

After the Bolshevik seizure of the government and Russia’s hasty departure from World War I, Lenin moved to consolidate power in Russia. Civil war raged from 1918 to 1921 between the Red Army of the Bolsheviks and the White Army representing all the groups that opposed them, including the Russian upper classes, forces loyal to the monarchy, and Lenin’s enemies within the Russian Social Democrats, such as the Menshevik faction. Members of the White Army disagreed on whether they sought an anti-Bolshevik communist government or the return of a tsarist government. The Red Army, though smaller, had a focused goal and was better organized.

British, French, Japanese, and U.S. troops all invaded Russia in support of the White Army and stayed until 1920, but they were unable to stop the Bolsheviks from seizing control. The civil war ended in 1921 with the Bolsheviks in control. Approximately 1.5 million soldiers had died in the fighting, but the civilian death toll was substantially higher—about eight million.

During the civil war, Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership also sought to take over lands outside Russia that had been controlled by the now-deposed tsar. Lenin approached these regions with the goal of creating a federal state of republics governed by a soviet, an elected committee of workers’ representatives. Each republic in this new “Soviet Union” would represent an ethnicity and be nominally independent but ultimately under the central government’s control. Many of these areas fiercely resisted incorporation by the Bolsheviks.

In 1919, for example, the Red Army invaded Ukraine and faced strong resistance, but by 1920, the Bolsheviks had taken control. Belarus was also established as a Soviet republic fairly easily. Both Ukraine and Belarus had some autonomy but had to rely on Lenin’s government to direct foreign policy. Other areas, like the Caucasus, proved more contentious. Azerbaijan and Armenia were incorporated by the Bolsheviks in 1920. The government in Georgia was heavily Menshevik and resisted Bolshevik rule, but in 1921 the Red Army took control of this region as well. In 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was established. It incorporated the country of Russia and the regions Russia had absorbed as soviet republics under a new centralized national government quite different from what the revolutionaries had envisioned only a few years before (Figure 12.8).

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FIGURE 12.8 The USSR. This map shows the region of the former Soviet Union with the post–Soviet Union states detailed. (attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC BY 4.0 license)

The Bolsheviks had used the civil war to strengthen their control over the economy. This included wielding oversight of industrialization and taking steps toward the elimination of private property. The national government decided what could be produced and rationed goods throughout the country. Such control was held up as necessary to meet government and military needs, but the focus on top-down administration vied with the revolution’s slogans about workers having more power under communism.

World War I and the civil war had created massive dislocations in the Russian economy. Industrial production had dropped significantly below prewar levels, as had agricultural production and particularly grain output. People were out of work, and prices had risen. The economy was essentially bankrupt. To combat these problems, Lenin abandoned the earlier economic approach, called war communism, and introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921. The NEP kept the government in overall control of the economy, but it introduced some aspects of capitalism, such as giving peasants the ability to sell their produce on the market and allowing small businesses to operate through private not state ownership. This was not the pure socialist state Lenin had envisioned. Instead, it was an emergency response to significant hardships and growing discontent among the Russian people.

By the end of the civil war, Russia’s Communist Party bureaucracy had grown quite large and intricate. There were multiple layers of leaders, from the local through the regional and national levels. One who began to exploit his understanding and control of this bureaucracy was Joseph Stalin (Figure 12.9). Stalin had grown up in poverty in the Russian Empire’s state of Georgia. He adopted the surname Stalin in adulthood because it meant “man of steel,” and he became a Bolshevik in the early 1900s. In 1922, Stalin became the Communist Party’s general secretary. This was not a high-level position, but Stalin realized he could use it to consolidate power behind the scenes. He controlled all appointments within the party and could ensure that only those who agreed with him achieved these positions.

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FIGURE 12.9 Joseph Stalin. This 1941 photo shows Stalin in a style of military tunic that other Soviet officials adopted and that later came to be named after him. (credit: “Stalin in July 1941” by Nationaal Archief/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

Lenin’s death in 1924 opened a power vacuum and a debate over the future of policy in the Soviet Union. There were two very different paths the country could follow. Favoring one path were leaders such as Leon Trotsky, the man responsible for making the Red Army a dependable fighting force during the civil war (Figure 12.10). Trotsky hoped to both increase industrialization and end the more capitalistic policies of the NEP. In particular, Trotsky hoped the Soviet Union could serve as an example to spur more revolutionary movements around the world. On the other side were those who wanted to continue the NEP and pursue a slower, less radical path to industrialization. Stalin, then in his forties, strove to keep out of these specific debates. He and Trotsky held opposing views on communist ideology and the future of the Soviet Union, but Stalin’s control over the Communist bureaucracy gave him leverage.

FIGURE 12.10 Leon Trotsky. This photo shows Trotsky in the 1930s, when he was in exile from Russia. (credit: “Leon Trotsky, 1930s” by Unknown/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

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In 1927, Stalin expelled Trotsky from the Communist Party. In 1929, Trotsky was forced into exile. He was assassinated by a Soviet agent in Mexico in 1940. By the end of the 1920s, although the new Soviet government did seek to fulfill some of the promises Bolshevism had held out, the collective approach of the early years of the decade had devolved to one-man rule.

The First Five-Year Plan

Stalin’s domestic agenda was codified in the form of Five-Year Plans outlining economic achievements the Soviet Union was to have made by each plan’s conclusion. The timeline was ambitious, if not impossible. Yet officials tried to achieve the goals; they risked losing their jobs or even their lives for not meeting production quotas.

The first Five-Year Plan was designed to rapidly industrialize the Soviet Union. Stalin abandoned his earlier support of slow growth in light of the need to produce more farm equipment for the peasants and the desire to undercut those who had been advocating for more industrialization. Cities devoted to specific industries were developed and funded. Iron and steel production was to be raised dramatically under the plan, and new electrical power stations were to be built. Many of these goals were achieved, and overall industrial capacity increased by approximately 50 percent.

Stalin’s intention to exert state control over all aspects of life in the Soviet Union foundered when it came to agriculture. The collectivization of agriculture consisted of the shift from individual farms to large state-run farms, and when Communist Party officials moved to quickly meet production quotas that were increased after the first Five-Year Plan was implemented, they did so with little regard for the realities of agricultural production. The peasants heavily resisted the intrusion of government officials into their workdays. As the plan began to be implemented, they even resorted to violent means. The revolution had promised them better lives, but these would not be possible under the terms of the plan.

Across the country’s agricultural communities were a number of peasants labeled kulaks by the government. Kulaks had prospered under the more liberal policies of the NEP. In the early 1920s, Soviet policy had specifically defined a kulak as someone who hired seasonal farm laborers for an individual farm of twenty-five to forty acres. Very few farmers fell into this category, but they became scapegoats for Stalin. He blamed them for the difficulties in implementing collectivization and cast them as enemies of the state, which made them subject to arrest and even execution. Even their family members were prevented from holding certain jobs or pursuing university educations.

IN THEIR OWN WORDS

Collectivization in the Soviet Union The following resolution was adopted during a Soviet Politburo meeting and details plans for punishing villages and kulaks who opposed collectivization. Many places opposed this policy and were seen as disloyal by government officials. As you read, note what government officials would be looking for and what types of punishments they planned to mete out. In view of the shameful collapse of grain collection in the more remote regions of Ukraine, the Council of People’s Commissars and the Central Committee call upon the oblast executive committees and the oblast [party] committees as well as the raion executive committees and the raion [party] committees: to break up the sabotage of grain collection, which has been organized by kulak and counterrevolutionary elements; to liquidate the resistance of some of the rural communists, who in fact have become the leaders of the sabotage; to eliminate the passivity and complacency toward the saboteurs, incompatible with being a party member; and to ensure, with maximum speed, full and absolute compliance with the plan for grain collection.

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12.2 • The Formation of the Soviet Union 489

The Council of People’s Commissars and the Central Committee resolve:

To place the following villages on the black list for overt disruption of the grain collection plan and for malicious sabotage, organized by kulak and counterrevolutionary elements: . . .

The following measures should be undertaken with respect to these villages:

Immediate cessation of delivery of goods, complete suspension of cooperative and state trade in the villages, and removal of all available goods from cooperative and state stores.

Full prohibition of collective farm trade for both collective farms and collective farmers, and for private farmers.

Cessation of any sort of credit and demand for early repayment of credit and other financial obligations.

Investigation and purge of all sorts of foreign and hostile elements from cooperative and state institutions, to be carried out by organs of the Workers and Peasants Inspectorate.

Investigation and purge of collective farms in these villages, with removal of counterrevolutionary elements and organizers of grain collection disruption.

The Council of People’s Commissars and the Central Committee call upon all collective and private farmers who are honest and dedicated to Soviet rule to organize all their efforts for a merciless struggle against kulaks and their accomplices in order to: defeat in their villages the kulak sabotage of grain collection; fulfill honestly and conscientiously their grain collection obligations to the Soviet authorities; and strengthen collective farms.

—Addendum to the minutes of Politburo [meeting] No. 93, December 6, 1932

· What are the kulaks accused of?

· What punishment is being assessed on them?

Stalin speeded the drive to collectivization, and local officials did what they could to comply with the new targets for grain collection. By 1939, more than 90 percent of the peasants had been forced to live and work on collective farms. If they resisted, they could be arrested, and many were sent to labor camps in Siberia. While some poor peasants complied with collectivization because they had little of their own property to lose, middle-class peasants continued to oppose it, even killing their livestock rather than turning flocks over to the Soviet government. More than half the nation’s livestock was lost under collectivization in the 1930s, and the numbers did not recover until the 1950s. In some areas, spring planting did not occur due to the upheaval.

The failures of collectivization spelled deaths for millions in the Soviet Union. Approximately two million died resisting or in prison, and between five and ten million additional lives were lost in a famine caused by the chaos of the process, the peasants’ choice to slaughter their livestock, and government policies that took food from the peasants. The grain-producing region of Ukraine was hit especially hard; government decisions there caused mass starvation. Some officials actually went into homes and took whatever food they could find. Approximately 3.9 million Ukrainians are estimated to have died in the famine they called the Holodomor (“death by famine” in Ukrainian).

The problems surrounding collectivization also led many within the Communist Party to question the wisdom of Stalin’s decisions. In 1934, the assassination of Sergei Kirov, a high-ranking Soviet politician, led to an investigation that uncovered what Stalin believed was a plot to kill him. Kirov’s death, together with the unrest caused by collectivization, the anti-Soviet rhetoric of Germany’s Nazi Party (which had taken control of Germany in 1933), and his knowledge that many Soviet politicians did not share his vision of the USSR’s future, fed Stalin’s growing feelings of paranoia. His belief that he was surrounded by enemies led to a reign of

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terror in which the Soviet secret police arrested millions of Soviet citizens on suspicion of disloyalty. Many were sent to prison camps in Siberia where they perished as a result of starvation and overwork. Some were executed immediately following brief trials. Some did not even receive trials. Among those imprisoned or killed were kulaks, former tsarist officials, intellectuals, Russian Orthodox priests, ethnic minorities, workers (labeled “saboteurs”) in factories where accidents had occurred under the frantic pace of the Five-Year Plan, Red Army officers, government officials, prominent Soviet politicians, and supporters of Lenin from the earliest days of the Bolshevik Revolution. Historians disagree about how many Soviets died as a result of the political purges of the 1930s, but one million is a likely figure.

LINK TO LEARNING

Check out this repository of Soviet posters (https://openstax.org/l/77Sovietposter) from the 1920s and 1930s. Engineers of Human Souls

Despite the clear problems with Stalinist rule, many people living in the Soviet Union, about 80 percent of whom were peasants, were still optimistic about the promised equality they believed communism could bring to their lives. The school of socialist realism that dominated art in the Soviet Union glorified peasants and industrial workers, depicting heroic, muscular steelworkers and smiling farmers wielding agricultural implements. Paintings and drawings of male and female workers in the 1930s were about patriotism as much as artistic expression.

The reality behind the government’s rhetoric about building a worker’s paradise often fell short, however. Some improvements in the quality of life were made, literacy increased, electricity was brought to rural areas, and some people found opportunities for advancement not possible under tsarist rule. But not everyone shared in these changes. People whose innovations in the workplace increased production were rewarded with higher pay, recognition, and promotions, but the production goals party leaders laid out were often impossible to meet.

Urban life grew more difficult during the 1930s. Peasants migrated to the cities to fill jobs in the new factories built to speed industrialization. Hours were long, pay was low, and housing, clothing, and food were in short supply. People crowded into small apartments, and because it was hard to find enough to eat in the state-run stores, they became more dependent on dining halls at work or school, where it was also easier for officials to monitor their conversations. At the same time, many Soviet citizens remained excited by their belief that the government would repay their efforts by providing for their needs better than the tsarist government ever would have done.

Religion served to divide the Soviet government and the masses of Soviet people. Lenin had always seen it as dangerous and a competitor to socialism, so from the early days of the Soviet Union, religion was targeted by Communist leaders. Yet the history of Orthodox Christianity among the Russian people was long, and many found it difficult to abandon their faith and traditions despite government policies to discourage them.

Soviet ideology demanded that women play new roles in society and the economy, so millions took industrial or agricultural jobs outside the home through the 1920s and 1930s. Their situation was fraught with discrimination and emotional turmoil, however. Women were rarely given positions of power in their workplaces (or within the Soviet political hierarchy), yet they were expected to produce just as much as men. Nor did the role of homemaker and mother go away. Women had to fulfill both kinds of roles, highlighting the disparity between female and male work.

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12.3 The Great Depression

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

· Explain the causes of the Great Depression

· Describe the immediate effects of the Great Depression on the economies of industrialized and

developing nations

· Describe how industrialized nations responded to citizens’ needs during the Great Depression

· Explain the attractions of communism to people in industrialized nations during the Great

Depression

· Analyze the similarities and differences among fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Stalin’s Soviet Union

The decade of the 1930s was marked by economic collapse around the world. The Great Depression gripped numerous countries, causing widespread unemployment, immense poverty, and financial collapse. There were no easy solutions for any government trying to combat the misery, and different countries adopted different methods to alleviate the suffering of their people. The inability of capitalist countries to fully solve their economic problems made ideologies such as communism more attractive. The Great Depression developed out of a perfect storm of problems, and only the economic stimulation of the onset of World War II brought the world closer to a return of prosperity.

Economic Collapse

When the economic collapse that came to be known as the Great Depression began in the United States in 1929, it ended the postwar boom and sent the entire world’s economy reeling. No economic depression is caused by one element alone. One contributing factor, however, was economic instability that the rising stock market in the United States had camouflaged.

The stock market had set new highs seemingly every year of the 1920s. Some of the increase in stock prices and the resulting valuations of companies’ worth made perfect sense at the time. Companies were in fact selling new products, and more of them. Electric ovens, washing machines, and radios were all highly desirable new consumer items. However, by the late 1920s, the stock market was beset by a wave of pure speculation, that is, the buying and selling of shares based solely on bets that stock prices would go even higher, though unsupported by increased product sales. This guesswork drove stock prices up until they became dangerously overvalued.

Stock prices began to drop sharply in the fall of 1929 and eventually crashed, bringing bank failures in their wake as banks’ investments in stocks lost value. The lack of banking regulations meant that if a bank went bankrupt, those who had placed their money on deposit there lost all their savings. Ironically, when customers began to withdraw their funds because they feared a bank would fail, they often inadvertently triggered that failure, since banks hold only a small percentage of their money as cash in their vaults and invest the rest. Not only did these failures hurt depositors in the banks; they left many communities without the means to obtain loans for businesses or farms, which further compromised the economic health of an area.

Contributing to the Depression was the buying of consumer items on credit. When the Depression came, households struggling with job losses put their remaining income into keeping a roof over their heads and food on the table. Their defaults on their credit payments starved the stores, which then had to lay off more workers to stay afloat. Meanwhile U.S. industry had grown significantly and was producing consumer goods at an unprecedented rate. With consumers both at home and abroad unable to purchase, however, the twin problems of overproduction and underconsumption ground the economy to a halt. Contributing to this financial catastrophe was the unequal distribution of wealth. When the Depression began, the majority of American families (80 percent) had no savings at all, so a job loss quickly led to homelessness and hunger (Figure 12.11).

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FIGURE 12.11 The Great Depression. This photo shows unemployed men waiting for food outside a soup kitchen in Illinois in 1931. (credit: “Unemployed men queued outside a depression soup kitchen opened in Chicago by Al Capone” by U.S. National Archives and Records Administration/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 was an example of the isolationist and protectionist policies the U.S. government followed in the 1920s. An increased tariff of nearly 40 percent had already been enacted in 1922. Smoot-Hawley raised tariff rates another 20 percent on more than twenty thousand kinds of imported goods, supposedly to protect American farmers and industries from foreign competition. These extreme rates caused other countries to institute their own retaliatory high tariff rates on U.S. goods. Therefore, the industrial might of the United States was stymied because its residents were unable to purchase goods due to job losses and lack of income, and its businesses were unable to recoup any of their monies by selling goods overseas. Smoot- Hawley was the highest tariff the U.S. government has ever enacted. It helped stifle world trade, which decreased 30 percent by the early 1930s.

One of the key aspects of the Great Depression was the way it encumbered foreign trade around the globe. Worldwide gross domestic product (GDP)—the value of all the goods and services a country produces in one year—decreased by 15 percent between 1929 and 1932. With trade plummeting, many U.S. banks began recalling loans made to foreign businesses and countries, which caused crises in other places.

Worldwide Woe

When the Great Depression occurred, ordinary people bore the brunt of it. Workers lost their jobs and were unable to find new ones as businesses laid off employees. Without the means to pay rent or a mortgage, families were evicted and became homeless. Hunger was a significant problem, particularly in urban areas where there was little chance of having a garden or finding other available foodstuffs. Families coped however they could, sometimes traveling hundreds of miles in the hope that jobs would be available somewhere. Homeless camps and shantytowns sprang up, but life in such a place was precarious because city officials might force the residents to leave (Figure 12.12).

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FIGURE 12.12 Life in a Shantytown. This 1936 image by the well-known documentary photographer Dorothea Lange shows a mother and her children living in a shantytown in Oklahoma. (credit: “Poor mother and children, Oklahoma, 1936 by Dorothea Lange” by Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

No part of the world was immune from the effects of the Great Depression. China was still relatively isolated in the 1930s, but it did experience economic problems when prices for two of its major exports, soybeans and silk, dropped. As an island nation, Japan had limited natural resources, and its militaristic new government needed to alleviate scarcities and secure needed resources such as oil and rubber. With a growing population, it also needed reliable food supplies.

All these factors coalesced into a Japanese plan to target certain areas throughout Asia for takeover, relying heavily on the Imperial Navy. Japan moved into Manchuria in 1931, setting up the state of Manchukuo there the following year. Seizing the region meant Japan would not have to pay for the items it wanted, such as rice, important during a depression that had limited its exports and thus its income from trade. The move also further established Japan as a preeminent power in the region.

Many regions of Africa produced agricultural crops—wheat, maize, and cotton, for example. As trade declined, these sectors bore significant losses, and here too the poor suffered most. The colonial areas of Africa often mirrored the economic troubles of their imperial countries. However, South Africa’s gold mines produced enough income to keep it more stable than other regions in Africa.

Many Latin American countries were unable to contend with the severe decrease in exports the Depression

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brought. Some had financial systems heavily dependent on the export market and little in the way of an industrial sector to make up for the loss. Despite this weakness, however, Latin America weathered the Great Depression quite well. Most countries went off the gold standard—a monetary system in which the value of a currency is tied directly to the value of gold—in the early 1930s, but there was no widespread banking collapse as there was in the United States.

European countries fought the Great Depression in different ways. Britain saw its exports drop considerably and in 1931 found it necessary to lower tariff rates within its empire to stimulate trade. Britain’s economy was stagnant in the 1920s, so the dip of the Great Depression was not as painful as in the United States, though economic sectors such as mining experienced a greater decline than others. Britain did not adopt widespread work-relief programs, relying instead on more targeted support of specific industries. France implemented austerity programs, hoping to keep taxation levels low. It was only in the late 1930s that the French economy turned around, due to an increase in military equipment production.

LINK TO LEARNING

Check out these unemployment statistics (https://openstax.org/l/77UnempStat) for different European countries during the Great Depression. Compare various countries and consider why some might have been more seriously affected than others.

In the United States, new president Franklin D. Roosevelt unveiled a comprehensive reform plan in 1933. This New Deal was designed to restore faith in the banking system, create work-relief programs to put the unemployed to work, increase the bargaining and consumer power of industrial workers, and provide an overall enhanced quality of life. Overhauls to the banking system included more regulations on U.S. banks and regular audit controls. The creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in 1933 meant that depositors could feel their money on deposit was safe. The United States also adopted programs that already existed elsewhere. For example, the Social Security Administration was created in 1935 to provide an old-age pension program for the country. Germany had such a program for several decades, and Britain had already enacted many programs as part of its welfare state that the United States was slow to adopt.

THE PAST MEETS THE PRESENT

The New Deal in a New Century Numerous programs enacted during the New Deal era still assist people in the United States today. Here are some examples: · The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was created in 1933 to insure depositor monies in banks. Originally it covered $5,000 per depositor, but it now covers $250,000 per depositor. · The Social Security program was begun in 1935 to oversee Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI), unemployment insurance, and aid to families. · The federal minimum wage was established in 1938 as an increase over the minimum wages in many industries, though some workers, such as domestic workers, were left out. Some of these programs are the subject of intense debate today. Projections show that Social Security may not be able to meet all its obligations in coming decades, which could lead to curtailing of benefits. The minimum wage originally reflected increased buying power for workers, rather than setting the bottom threshold of pay as it does now. Many states have mandated minimum wages above the federal government’s requirement. Some argue that a higher minimum wage today will only increase the prices of products and services. Others contend that the increased buying power of workers with a higher minimum wage will stimulate the economy for all. • Why do you think certain New Deal programs have lasted as long as they have?

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• How might arguments in favor of or against the minimum wage be different today than in the 1930s?

Communism and Authoritarianism

With economic depression dominating the world’s nations, frustration built among people who felt their governments were not actively combating the problems. In countries with capitalist systems, the gap between the “haves” and “have-nots” was particularly stark in the 1930s. Many of the rich went on with their lives with little change, while other people lost jobs and homes. The appeal of communist ideology grew among some who felt abandoned by the capitalist system, and the prospect of economic equality was its most attractive feature. In other countries, the economic crisis became an opportunity for increased authoritarianism.

The Communist Party experienced substantial growth in many Western democracies in the early 1930s as a way through the problems of the Great Depression. The Communist International, or Comintern, actively pursued the spread of communism worldwide during this decade, led by the Soviet Union. For some, communism offered not simply economic parity but the prospect of racial parity as well. In the United States, segregation laws and continued discrimination against African Americans caused some to turn to the egalitarian society promised by communism as a new avenue to pursue. The Communist Party in the United States also sought to overturn racist policies.

In Western Europe, the allure of communism grew as governments sought to handle the Depression. In France, different cabinets were formed and repeatedly reorganized, and the disordered political realm threatened to become a vacuum that far-right politicians could exploit. In 1936, a coalition of leftist groups known as the Popular Front managed to win power in the government. They introduced progressive and pro-labor policies such as forty-hour workweeks and minimum wages, both hallmarks of Western democratic responses to the Great Depression. But as other countries had done, France found it could not resolve the Great Depression through policy changes alone.

On the pretext that certain actions were necessary for the good of the populace in this time of crisis, some leaders took advantage of the opportunity to impose authoritarian rule. This was particularly true in Italy, Spain, and Germany, which all embraced fascism in the 1930s. Fascism was a political movement focused on transforming citizens into committed nationalists striving for unity and racial purity, to remedy a perceived national decline. To forge a unified nation, fascists espoused using violence, abandoning democratic norms and the rule of law to eliminate enemies real or imagined, and employing totalitarianism, the total control by the government of all aspects of a person’s life. The interwar period and the problems of the 1920s gave rise to disillusionment with democratic and parliamentary governments worldwide.

In Italy, Benito Mussolini was firmly in power by the 1930s. He had begun his rise to national prominence in 1919, partly by denouncing the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which many Italians believed had cheated their country of land it was owed as a reward for fighting on the Allied side. Like Hitler, Mussolini used fear and terror to gain political power and used a band of supporters dubbed the Blackshirts to threaten his opponents with physical violence. In 1924 his Fascist Party won a majority in parliament, and Mussolini, referring to himself as Il Duce (“the leader”), became the head of Italy. He then outlawed future elections. The fascists in Italy had wanted to focus on industrial development in the 1920s and 1930s, which had lagged, especially in the southern half of the country. In the 1930s, in a bid to prop up the industrial sector, Mussolini took over many industrial entities as banks failed across the country. The Italian government also dismantled labor unions.

In Spain, a military dictatorship was instituted in 1924. After it ended in 1930, a republic was established that quickly sought to modernize the nation. It tried to eliminate the Catholic Church’s dominant role in society and politics and attempted other changes such as land redistribution and the institution of voting rights for women and more liberal divorce laws. However, a serious military coup erupted in 1936. Fascists calling themselves

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Nationalists had co-opted much of the Spanish military and drawn the support of right-wing conservative authoritarians.

The popular general Francisco Franco, former head of Spain’s military academy, was opposed to Republican ideologies. Fighting against modernity, the radicalism of the Republicans, and the specter of communism, Franco was able to call upon fellow fascists Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini for support. Though it is debatable how militarily effective the German and Italian bombing of civilian targets like Madrid and Guernica was, it did cause people to shudder at the increased horror of warfare (Figure 12.13). British, French, and other European powers pursued a policy of nonintervention, however, believing it prudent given Japanese expansion in Asia and elsewhere and the U.S. policy of neutrality. The League of Nations also failed to take action.

FIGURE 12.13 Guernica. This outdoor mural in Guernica, Spain, is based on Pablo Picasso’s famous depiction of the horrors of aerial bombings of the town in his 1937 painting Guernica. The mural’s title calls for Picasso’s painting to be returned to the town from its current home in a Madrid museum. (credit: “Mural del “Guernica” de Picasso” by Fernando Vásquez, Panoramio/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0)

Lasting from 1936 to 1939, the Spanish Civil War resulted in as many as 500,000 casualties. When the gunfire ceased, Franco created his fascist regime. Throughout the 1930s, Spanish fascists claimed that Catholic Spain was threatened by a Jewish-Bolshevik-Masonic conspiracy against property and social order, which justified the liquidation of hundreds of thousands of Republicans and opponents of Franco. Franco melded fascism with all other political parties to create a single political movement. The Catholic Church, the army, and the bureaucracy all continued to exercise a degree of independence not permitted in other countries that developed forms of fascism. As in Italy, Spanish women were recruited to serve through propaganda work and the rearing of patriotic children. Franco’s brand of fascism and his revulsion of popular democracy, liberal ideals, secularism, feminism, and communism were similar to those of Mussolini and Hitler.

In Germany, the Depression followed a decade of economic uncertainty and massive inflation, conditions that offered the National Socialist Party (Nazi Party) under Adolf Hitler an opportunity to consolidate power. The

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rise of fascism in Germany was also the result of Germany’s devastating military loss in World War I. Having been assured of victory, the German population took the news of the armistice as a profound shock. The country’s political parties had forced the kaiser to abdicate in favor of a new constitutional government, the Weimar Republic. Given the timing of these events, many Germans therefore believed civilian politicians were responsible for their defeat in the war. In 1919, monarchists, socialists, and communists began to disrupt politics and violently contest for control of the streets in Berlin and elsewhere.

The Nazis received a substantial boost from their criticism of the Weimar Republic’s handling of the hyperinflation of the 1920s and its response to the onset of the Depression. The Nazis adopted nineteenth- century theories of the hierarchy of races that proclaimed the Germanic Nordic or Aryan races to be master humans. In garnering political support, whether through acceptance or intimidation, the German fascist militias branded journalists as liars, attacked political opponents and Jewish people, and labeled them filthy, unclean, vermin, or subhuman. The intimidating violence and anti-Semitism of fascists became central to the political life of the nation after World War I.

Hitler got a second chance to capitalize on the perceived victimization of Germany as the Great Depression put as many as four million Germans out of work. Public dissatisfaction with the economic turmoil enabled the Nazis to increase their representation in the Reichstag (the national legislature). Taking advantage of a history of anti-Semitism in Europe (most notably in Austria), Hitler and the Nazis also claimed that Jewish bankers and business owners had caused the Great Depression and promised they would no longer be allowed to create such havoc. Frustrated German voters readily accepted their arguments. The Nazis were becoming the largest party in the legislature. President Paul von Hindenburg was therefore pressured to appoint Hitler chancellor in January 1933.

Hitler accumulated power quickly. Just a month after he became chancellor, an arsonist set the German Reichstag building in Berlin ablaze. In keeping with Nazi opposition to communism, the crime was falsely blamed on a Dutch communist and communist instigators in general. The climate of crisis convinced conservative members of parliament to temporarily grant Hitler emergency powers through the Enabling Act passed in March 1933. Hitler was then able to rule essentially without the involvement of parliament or any constitutional limitations. In 1934, he declared himself führer (“leader”), fusing the offices of president and chancellor into one all-powerful role.

Aiding Hitler were some who had been with him since the Beer Hall Putsch. Hermann Göring, a former World War I fighter ace, became the second most powerful Nazi leader, in charge of organizing the national economy and commanding the German air force, the Luftwaffe. Heinrich Himmler transformed the paramilitary militia, the Schutzstaffel (SS), from a small force of 290 to over a million strong and was responsible for promoting German culture and institutions and overseeing the enforcement of Nazi racial policies.

The various German security and secret police agencies were combined to create the Gestapo, which became the main dispatcher of violence and enforcer of order. Propaganda increasingly utilized the evolving medium of mass communications. A powerful example is the work of the German film director Leni Riefenstahl. Her film of the 1934 Nazi rally in Nuremburg, entitled Triumph of the Will, is still considered an important step in the development of cinematic technique and the documentary form.

LINK TO LEARNING

You can view a short clip from Triumph of the Will (https://openstax.org/l/77Triumph) at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum website. It depicts Hitler arriving at the 1934 Nuremberg rally.

The educational system was reorganized to emphasize the physical development of youth and their thorough indoctrination into Nazi ideology regarding race and racial history. Eventually all teachers were required to join the Nazi Teacher’s Alliance and use prescribed Nazi textbooks in their teaching. Outside the classroom, German children were organized into tiered levels of youth organizations, culminating in the Hitler Youth for

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boys and the League of German Girls. For boys, the focus was on militaristic training, while girls were taught racial hygiene (the perceived need to bear children with certain traits) and the domestic skills to be good housewives and mothers.

The Nazis quickly moved to put their promises into action. Laws were passed limiting job opportunities and social activities for Jewish people, and restrictions only grew harsher as the decade wore on. Hitler banned all political parties other than the Nazis, making Germany a one-party state. All newspapers and media were Nazi controlled, and radios were widely distributed for free to get the Nazi messages to the masses.

The Nazis assured the electorate that they were the only ones who could solve Germany’s economic problems and promised to restore its international prestige. Hitler set out to provide jobs to all who needed them with a massive infrastructure program that built new highways and created the Autobahn system. Huge stadiums were constructed for sports events (such as the 1936 Berlin Olympics) and Nazi political rallies. New housing was built, as well as planes, ships, tanks, and weaponry. The work week was expanded to sixty hours; workers could not strike or even ask for raises, but unemployment declined.

Those not working in an industrial capacity could find a place in the ever-expanding Germany military. Ignoring the limits imposed by the Versailles Treaty, Hitler swelled the German Army to nearly a million soldiers, calling the need to provide employment an emergency that must be met. While the world’s powers might not have known the full extent of the re-arming underway in Germany, by 1935 they were certainly aware it was happening. If there were an opportunity to stop Hitler’s plans, it was now, before Germany amassed the weapons it would need for the next war. However, there was little international will for such intervention. It could very well mean military engagement, and in the throes of the Depression, none of the former Allied nations were interested. Nor was there any popular support in these nations for such actions.

Through employment programs and deficit spending (spending based on borrowing money rather than on raising money through taxation), the economic problems in Germany did begin to turn around under Hitler’s government. The unemployment rate dropped from a high of approximately 30 percent to about 10 percent. Many around the world applauded Hitler’s handling of the Great Depression. For those on the right side of the Nazis, life could be acceptable if not pleasant, with employment, local and national events and festivals, plenty of vigorous outdoor physical activity, and constant reminders of being part of a chosen people with a special purpose led by a messianic leader. Life for enemies of the regime could be full of deprivation and terror.

12.4 Old Empires and New Colonies

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

· Describe the breakup of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I

· Explain the division of Germany’s colonies among the Allied Powers

· Describe resistance to colonization in Africa and Asia

It was not just Europe that underwent major changes in the interwar years. The Ottoman Empire ceased to exist, and the region it had dominated now became a multitude of various powers, of which Turkey retained the largest Ottoman legacy. The colonies Germany had held in Asia and Africa were distributed among the victorious countries and came under new governments. The rhetoric of self-determination of nations was not applied equally around the world, but its focus on nationalist ideologies filtered through many societies, spurring the growth of nationalist movements around the globe.

To the Victors Go the Spoils

Already beset by internal problems and increasing difficulty controlling its holdings throughout Arabia and the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire had signed the Armistice of Mudros on October 30, 1918, bringing its participation in World War I to an end. During the war, a number of proposals for dismembering the empire had been considered. In 1919, Allied forces seized areas in the former Ottoman Empire, Greece captured

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Western Anatolia, and other Allied forces moved into Istanbul. The Turkish National Movement that resisted these occupations was led by Mustafa Kemal, later renamed Atatürk (“father of the Turks”) and already a Turkish hero for his performance at the Battle of Gallipoli.

The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres partitioned the empire, leaving the Ottomans with control over only Istanbul and Thrace. The Turks led by Mustafa Kemal won battles on several fronts, however, and forced a renegotiation of the treaty. The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 provided for an independent Turkey to succeed the Ottoman government. It also established League of Nations mandates in the Middle East. Under the mandate system, the administration of territories once controlled by the Ottomans was transferred to France or Britain, which were expected to govern these regions until some unspecified point in the future when the people there were deemed ready to govern themselves. Among the mandated areas were modern Iraq, Israel, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine (Figure 12.14).

FIGURE 12.14 The Mandate System. This map shows the British and French mandates in the Middle East and their proximity to the new nation of Saudi Arabia. (attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC BY 4.0 license)

Arabia was not easily controlled by the European powers. Warfare continued to break out over access to sites such as Mecca and Medina, both holy places in the Islamic faith. By the mid-1920s, the Saud family had taken control of areas of the Nejd (the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula) and the Hejaz (the peninsula’s western region), and soon after they consolidated that control by forming a new nation, Saudi Arabia, which came into being in 1932.

During the war, Britain and France had each begun to outline spheres of influence for themselves in the defunct Ottoman Empire. A French mandate covered Syria and Lebanon, and a British mandate the area of Iraq, Palestine, and the Transjordan (the East Bank). Despite their talk of self-determination, Europe’s surviving imperial powers clearly planned no deviation from the traditional course of empires in this region. Neither Britain nor France consulted the people who lived in the mandate areas about the decisions their governments would be making for them.

It soon became clear that the mandate system would not ensure full European control. For example, the British

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mandate over Mesopotamia, renamed Iraq, came under pressure from nationalists throughout the 1920s and 1930s. King Faisal (to whom the British had promised the rule of Syria) accepted being ruler of Iraq, but Britain controlled most of the government. The next king of Iraq had to accept similar conditions, but Iraqi nationalists became increasingly vocal about their frustration with the British presence.

The British complicated matters in another part of their mandate with the Balfour Declaration. This statement, one of many conflicting promises Britain made to various groups during the war, was issued by British foreign secretary Alfred Balfour in 1917. Balfour wrote that Britain supported a “national home” for Jewish people in Palestine. Ever since the nineteenth century, many European Jews had worked through Zionist organizations to encourage the return of Jews to their ancestral homeland in the Middle East. The Balfour Declaration marked the accomplishment of the goal that pro-Zionist groups had worked toward for years. Palestine was a British mandate after the war but mainly inhabited by Arab peoples; the move to introduce a substantial number of Jewish residents (with government support) promised to cause problems, and in fact it touched off religious and property disagreements that continue to this day.

The British began by summarily making an area of Palestine available to Jewish immigrants and, between 1922 and 1935, the Jewish population as a percentage of the total population increased threefold, from 9 percent to almost 27 percent. The Palestinians immediately complained of being treated as second-class citizens in their own land and about Britain’s failed promise to grant Arabs independence. Riots and protests became so common that Britain ultimately restricted immigration to Palestine, cutting off a route of escape for Jewish people fleeing the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis.

DUELING VOICES

A Jewish Homeland in Palestine The subject of a Jewish homeland in Palestine was quite controversial. Here are two voices on opposite sides of the issue. First is an excerpt from Theodor Herzl’s pamphlet advocating a Jewish homeland. (A diaspora is the scattering of a population; a gestor is someone who intervenes.) The second excerpt is from a letter written by a Jewish politician who opposed Britain’s support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. “Negotiorum Gestio” The Jewish people are at present prevented by the Diaspora from conducting their political affairs themselves. Besides, they are in a condition of more or less severe distress in many parts of the world. They need, above all things a gestor. This gestor cannot, of course, be a single individual. Such a one would either make himself ridiculous, or—seeing that he would appear to be working for his own interests—contemptible. The gestor of the Jews must therefore be a body corporate. And that is the Society of Jews. “Benefits of the Emigration of the Jews” The States would have a further advantage in the enormous increase of their export trade; for, since the emigrant Jews “over there” would depend for a long time to come on European productions, they would necessarily have to import them. The local groups would keep up a just balance, and the customary needs would have to be supplied for a long time at the accustomed places. Another, and perhaps one of the greatest advantages, would be the ensuing social relief. Social dissatisfaction would be appeased during the twenty or more years which the emigration of the Jews would occupy, and would in any case be set at rest during the whole transition period. —Theodor Herzl, “The Jewish State”

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The Asian and African holdings of the German Empire were also divided among the victors. Some of Germany’s Asian lands had been relinquished early in the war, such as Samoa, which New Zealand formally took over after the war. Australia took German New Guinea and Nauru. The Japanese Empire gained German- held islands north of the equator, such as the Marshall Islands and the Caroline Islands (Figure 12.15).

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I lay down with emphasis four principles:

1. I assert that there is not a Jewish nation. [. . .] It is no more true to say that a Jewish Englishman and a Jewish Moor are of the same nation than it is to say that a Christian Englishman and a Christian Frenchman are of the same nation. [. . .

2. When the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home, every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens, and you will find a population in Palestine driving out its present inhabitants, taking all the best in the country, drawn from all quarters of the globe, speaking every language on the face of the earth, and incapable of communicating with one another except by means of an interpreter. [. . .

3. I claim that the lives that British Jews have led, that the aims that they have had before them, that the part that they have played in our public life and our public institutions, have entitled them to be regarded, not as British Jews, but as Jewish Britons. [. . .

4. I deny that Palestine is to-day associated with the Jews or properly to be regarded as a fit place for them to live in. [. . .] I would not deny to Jews in Palestine equal rights to colonisation with those who profess other religions, but a religious test of citizenship seems to me to be the only admitted by those who take a bigoted and narrow view of one particular epoch of the history of Palestine, and claim for the Jews a position to which they are not entitled.

—Edwin Montagu, Memorandum on the Anti-Semitism of the British Government

· Compare the two positions and explain why some Jewish people would have favored the Balfour Declaration while others did not.

· Which of these arguments do you find more convincing? Why?

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FIGURE 12.15 German Colonies in Asia. Most of Germany’s Asian colonies were occupied by the Allied nations early in the war. This 1915 map reflects those changes and foreshadows the way the Allied powers continued to control these regions after the war. (credit: “German Pacific Colonies 1915 Map” by Project Gutenberg/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

In Africa, Germany had held Kamerun (including modern Cameroon as well as areas of Chad, Gabon, Nigeria, and the Congo), German East Africa (Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania), Togoland (Togo and part of Ghana), and German Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia). These became mandates after the war. Both Britain and France gained land in Togo and Cameroon, South Africa took Southwest Africa, and the Belgians received land in Burundi and Rwanda. No one consulted the African peoples in making these divisions, and in fact the borders cut through ethnic groups, leaving some groups divided between two governments. Self- determination of nations was clearly not at work in Africa, and increasingly louder voices questioned whether Europe had any real moral authority over African colonies.

The Fight for Self-Determination in Africa

Most Africans were not considered citizens of the empires of which they were part. Imperial powers exploited the colonies for their mineral wealth and other resources. They did little to better the lives of Africans, and the rhetoric of “civilizing” the continent was based on ingrained assumptions of White superiority. However, participation in World War I changed things for many Africans. More than one million Africans had fought in the war. The sense that their contribution should be rewarded with new political power was one result. Another was their exposure to international issues and the recognition that the principle of self-determination applied directly to themselves.

A number of groups had begun to argue for more African involvement in colonial governments beginning in the late 1800s. In 1918, the National Congress of British West Africa (NCBWA) was formed to pressure the British government to turn legislative work over to elected assemblies in its West African colonies. This initiative marked a political awakening in the four British colonies of West Africa. The NCBWA sought to have them work as a cohesive political unit. The war itself had caused many European officials to depart Africa, turning a number of services over to Africans to administer and thus providing new roles for them to play in

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the running of their countries. Many imperial powers also squeezed their African colonies to produce more for the war effort but failed to pay fair prices for these items. This clear exploitation, along with a growing sense of their power, led many Africans to embrace nationalist movements after the war.

With the Great Depression came increasing pressure to “do more” with African colonies, as a way for imperial countries to deal with their economic problems. Those that could cultivate greater economic development in the colonies would benefit from increased resources and develop a colonial population with greater buying power for its own goods. Such development was a slow process in the 1930s, however (Figure 12.16). The British government enacted a Colonial Development Act at the end of the 1920s that funneled small amounts of money into its African colonies. But larger investments did not flow into Africa until after World War II.

FIGURE 12.16 Colonial Africa. This map shows European nations’ colonial holdings in Africa during the 1920s and 1930s. (attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC BY 4.0 license)

A growing Pan-African movement also developed in the early twentieth century, with the goal of uniting African peoples to achieve greater independence. The first Pan-African Congress met in 1918 in Paris, organized by African American activist W. E. B. Du Bois. Its goal was to influence the Paris Peace Conference to support self-determination for the African colonies. Its impact was minimal, but it did contribute to the ideas of African nationalism that were growing at the time.

Another influence on the growth of African nationalism was the work of Marcus Garvey. Garvey was born in Jamaica and lived in the United States for many years. He founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which hoped to unite all people of African descent into one body with one government. Garvey’s

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work was focused on specific plans for a migration of African Americans from North America to the West African country of Liberia. These “Back to Africa” plans fell apart, however. Sufficient funds did not exist to make the migration possible. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the largest African American civil rights organization in the United States, also refused to endorse Garvey’s ideas, and the migration never materialized.

One way people in Africa expressed their independence of thought was by developing an African-based church system. Christianity in Africa had been inextricably tied to the missionary model, in which Europeans came to Africa and established church missions to spread the Christian faith. The independent African churches that began emerging in the late 1800s were formed in places like Ethiopia and Nigeria with the idea that Africans should be in charge of them rather than Europeans, whose churches were often seen as simply an extension of colonialism. The independence that African-led churches advocated in religious matters soon evolved into support for independence in political matters as well.

An Independent India

The significant role their troops in the British Army had played in World War I offered Indians some hope that Britain might now extend them more rights than before. Indians were also anxious to have the British government’s restrictive wartime measures lifted. However, it soon became clear that Britain had no plans for change. So, as in many other countries, in India a growing nationalist movement now advocated independence from colonial rule. The clash between Indian Nationalists and British rulers began almost immediately after the end of World War I.

In early April 1919, Indians began to gather in a walled square in Amritsar, a city in Punjab that was sacred to the Sikh population. They were protesting the passage of the Rowlatt Act, which allowed Indians suspected of engaging in revolutionary activities to be detained for two years without trial. At times the protests turned violent. Then, on April 13, the British Indian Army opened fire on the protestors, who had little chance of escape from the closed-in space. Hundreds were killed and more than a thousand wounded. The British commander of the unit ultimately resigned after an investigation. The massacre prompted the British government to make some legislative changes in India regarding who was eligible to vote and how many Indian representatives could sit in the national assembly. However, this small concession did not quell the continued criticism from Indian nationalists, who urged independence and self-rule. The Indian National Congress argued that India should be ruled by Indians. Its members proposed continued nonviolent disobedience and boycotts against British goods, along with a refusal to pay certain taxes.

In this chaotic and emotional situation, a lawyer named Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi began to take center stage. Gandhi adopted and advocated the practice of civil disobedience and nonviolence, wore traditional modes of dress, and renounced material possessions. In the 1920s, the movement for self-rule became a grassroots operation preaching civil disobedience to people throughout India. Gandhi became head of the Indian National Congress in 1921, and it soon became the party of the masses.

LINK TO LEARNING

This link presents a video clip of a British newsreel showing Mahatma Gandhi’s 1931 arrival in England (https://openstax.org/l/77GhandiEngland) for discussions regarding India’s constitution. Note the condescending tone of the narration.

Many British rules flew in the face of Indian traditions, such as those regarding the collection of salt, a common element of the Indian diet. Under the colonial system, Indians could not gather or sell salt; instead, they had to purchase it from the British and pay a heavy tax. On March 12, 1930, Gandhi began a protest known as the Salt March, in which he led his supporters on a two-hundred-mile, twenty-four-day march to the Arabian Sea to collect salt from the seawater. Despite British efforts to obscure the salt deposits at the beaches, Gandhi and his followers did collect salt, in violation of British law (Figure 12.17Figure B12_04_GandhiSalt). He and

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approximately sixty thousand others were arrested for these acts of civil disobedience. In numerous locations over the next several weeks, other nationalists similarly began collecting salt at coastlines in defiance of the law. Gandhi was not released from jail until the following year and agreed to suspend the mass act of civil disobedience.

FIGURE 12.17 The Salt March. Mahatma Gandhi collects salt at the shore of the Arabian Sea in 1930, in defiance of British law. (credit: “Salt March” by Unknown/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

While the British were not inclined to embrace India’s independence movement, within a few years they did begin to relent on the question of self-rule. While retaining control of the military and foreign policy functions, they turned other government operations over to Indians via the Government of India Act in 1935. This was an important step toward more autonomy for India. Muslim representation in India remained an issue, however. For example, the Indian National Congress was dominated by the Hindu majority, but rather than recognizing that body as representing all those living in India, the British recognized the separate Muslim League as the representatives of the Muslim population. The Indian National Congress had achieved a measure of its agenda in favor of self-rule, but India was still clearly under British control.

12.5 Resistance, Civil Rights, and Democracy

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

· Describe the expansion of liberty and civil rights in Western Europe and the United States during the

interwar period

· Analyze the development of democracies in Asia during the interwar period and the challenges they

faced

· Explain the rise of militarism in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s

· Describe the growth of popular culture in the 1920s and 1930s

War is often a catalyst for societal change, and this was certainly true of World War I. Women had long fought for increased political rights, and the next decade saw the franchise for women expand in several countries. Women also adopted freer styles of dress and defied traditional gender roles by working outside the home and dancing and drinking in public. Likewise, the status of African Americans in the United States drew more

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attention as civil rights leaders emphasized the contributions of African American veterans to showcase the need for fair treatment, and writers and musicians used their work to give voice to the Black experience and to honor their heritage. Many countries embarked on efforts to incorporate more democratic principles. It was not an easy process, and many nations continued to face significant challenges in achieving their goals. The 1920s and 1930s also witnessed the growth of new forms of popular culture—the radio and movies—that appealed to the masses.

The Expansion of Democracy

When the war ended, the suffrage movement had been going on for several decades in the United States and Britain. Those who protested in support of women’s right to vote, called a suffragist, had sometimes taken radical action to highlight their cause, such as Emily Davison who threw herself in front of the King of England’s horse at a derby in 1913 and was killed. Suffragist leaders in both countries were often arrested, and many went on hunger strikes while in jail, enduring forced feedings to draw more attention to the cause.

Women’s support of the war and their physical work in war industries and the medical corps led politicians to look more favorably on the idea of women voting. Women won the right to vote in the United States in 1920, though it was couched as a reward for their war service. Britain adopted a phase-in approach. First, women over thirty who met a property qualification were given the right to vote in 1918. Then in 1928, the vote was extended to women twenty-one and older. The property qualifications for men were abolished in 1918, and all men twenty-one and older were allowed to vote. For those in the military, the age limit was lowered to nineteen.

Other countries joined the trend. German women won the right to vote in 1918. The new country of Poland extended the vote to women immediately. Other countries still imposed limitations, such as property qualifications or the need to be a war widow in order to vote. France and Italy lagged behind; women could not vote in either country until 1945. In Japan, female activist groups argued for a role in politics throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Japanese law changed to allow women to attend political rallies, but women did not receive the right to vote until after World War II. Rising feminism in China linked to the May Fourth Movement helped women obtain individual property rights under the law.

Individual female voices were also heard. Huda Sha’arawi founded the Egyptian Feminist Union in 1923 and stopped wearing her veil and headscarf. She had already been engaged in providing education for girls and was active in the Egyptian independence movement. She became vice president of the International Women’s Union in the 1930s. Zaynab al-Ghazali founded the Muslim Women’s Society in Europe in 1936. Al-Ghazali contended that women could play a role in politics outside the home while still being adherents to Islam.

LINK TO LEARNING

As an activist in her native Egypt, Huda Sha’arawi advocated women’s rights for decades. This link takes you to the text of her brief opening and closing speeches at Egypt’s First Arab Feminist Conference (https://openstax.org/l/77EgyptFem) that met in 1944. As you read, look for the many rationales she offers for the legitimacy of women’s rights.

Several minority groups in the United States hoped military service would gain them wider acceptance and rights. More than eleven thousand Native Americans served in the military during the war, and many hoped this volunteer service would provide them U.S. citizenship. Native Americans were in fact granted citizenship in 1924. Another group hoping for change were African Americans. Long subject to discriminatory laws and racial segregation, African Americans felt World War I offered them an opportunity to prove themselves loyal citizens. The United States operated a segregated military, and all-Black service member units serving overseas had a unique chance to see how other places treated them. Those in France, in particular, were struck by the freedom of movement and acceptance they found there. They were allowed in combat, while U.S. units kept them largely in support roles. There was genuine optimism that life in the United States would be

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different after the war.

However, after 1918, many found that little had changed. Discriminatory laws remained in place, and poor treatment even of veterans was commonplace. What was new was the prospect of mobility. In 1917, the lure of good-paying industrial jobs producing items for the war began drawing African American workers and families north. This movement continued after the war as factories began to pump out consumer products. By 1920, more than a million African Americans had left the south in a Great Migration, which continued through the next decades as well.

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IN THEIR OWN WORDS

Marcus Garvey on Race in the United States Marcus Garvey was a Jamaican-born activist who spoke and wrote about Pan-Africanism and the need to address racial issues worldwide. This is an excerpt from his 1923 speech, “A Last Word Before Incarceration.” As you read, notice his characterization of African Americans. Those of you who have been observing events for the last four or five weeks with keen eyes and keen perceptions will come to no other conclusion than this—that through the effort to strangle the Universal Negro Improvement Association—through the effort to silence Marcus Garvey—there is a mad desire, there is a great plan to permanently lay the Negro low in this civilization and in future civilizations. But the world is sadly mistaken. No longer can the Negro be laid low; in laying the Negro low you but bring down the pillars of creation, because 400,000,000 Negroes are determined to [be] a man, to take a place in the world and to hold that place. The world is sadly mistaken and rudely shocked at the same time. They thought that the new Negro would bend; they thought that the new Negro was only bluffing and would exhibit the characteristic of the old Negro when pushed to the corner or pushed to the wall. If you want to see the new Negro fight, force him to the wall, and the nearer he approaches the wall the more he fights, and when he gets to the wall he is even more desperate. —Marcus Garvey, “A Last Word Before Incarceration” · According to Garvey, how have African Americans changed? · In what ways are African Americans not what Whites in the United States expect them to be?

Racism was not absent in the North. The summer of 1919 was marked by race riots in many cities, and in the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan, a White supremacist group formed after the Civil War, spread throughout the nation. Nevertheless, northern racism seemed mild compared to what African Americans’ southern experience had been, and greater opportunities for jobs and education continued to draw people to the cities of the North and Midwest. New livelihoods and membership in civil rights groups such as the NAACP drew many into the New Negro movement in the 1920s. This drive “promoted a renewed sense of racial pride, cultural self-expression, economic independence, and progressive politics.” One of the movement’s first tasks was to agitate for a federal anti-lynching law. Lynching had become a vigilante crime whose targets were overwhelmingly African American. Anti-lynching activists knew that White men who murdered African Americans would not be punished by southern state courts. By making lynching a crime that would be tried in a federal court, however, they hoped to achieve greater justice. An anti-lynching bill came up for a vote in Congress in 1922 but was rejected, and again in 1935. White southern politicians resisted any federal intrusion, even in humanitarian causes.

Racial pride also influenced the artists of the Harlem Renaissance, an outpouring of African American literature, art, and music named for a neighborhood in New York City in which many African American participants in the Great Migration settled. The Harlem Renaissance, which was in full bloom in the 1920s, brought into the mainstream the work of many African American writers, such as poet Langston Hughes and

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Zora Neale Hurston, who wrote about the racial struggles of twentieth-century African Americans in her novels, short stories, and plays. The music of African American communities in Harlem and elsewhere featured the distinctive blues and jazz styles, which both became international genres and provided the soundtrack for the dynamic changes of the decade following World War I.

LINK TO LEARNING

This short video about the origins of jazz music (https://openstax.org/l/77JazzOrigins) was made by the Museum of American History and features both words and music.

The Harlem Renaissance, especially the works of Jamaican-born Claude McKay, in turn inspired the Négritude movement, a literary movement that emerged in French-speaking parts of Africa and the Americas. The movement was founded by Léopold Sédar Senghor, a Senegalese poet and university professor. Négritude, a term coined by Aimé Césaire, a poet and playwright from the Caribbean island of Martinique (at that time a French colony), called upon Blacks to reject European culture and values in favor of African ones.

Democratic Yearnings

The dismantling of empires at the end of the war was clearly a boon for democracy, but it was not always easy for fledgling countries to adopt new political systems. The tense situation in Ireland of the 1920s was just one example.

In 1922, the Irish Free State was created through the Anglo-Irish Treaty. This 1921 pact ended the Irish War of Independence that had begun in 1918 when the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Irish Nationalist Party fought British rule. Groups such as Sinn Féin (“We Ourselves”), organized in 1905 to fight for an independent Ireland, were often associated with the IRA and sometimes adopted more violent measures than the more moderate Irish Nationalist Party. They had the same goal but very different methods.

The Anglo-Irish Treaty initiated a vote on the future of Ireland. The six northern counties, largely Protestant, voted to remain part of the United Kingdom, but the other twenty-six formed the Irish Free State and received dominion status in the British Empire. As a dominion, the Irish Free State could make and enforce its own laws, make treaties, appoint ambassadors, and send its own representatives to international organizations. A sizable number of Catholics remained in the northern counties, however, which ultimately led to long-term violence. And while the new arrangement was a significant improvement over the past, it did not fully satisfy many Irish republicans, who wanted complete independence for Ireland. Sinn Féin itself was split; some members wanted greater sovereignty for Ireland and for the entire island to be rid of the British presence. A brief civil war broke out between the IRA and the Free State, but the Free State emerged victorious. In 1937, it was reorganized under a new government headed by Éamon de Valera, an anti-treaty leader, and took the name “Ireland.”

Japan also took steps toward becoming more democratic for a brief period after World War I. In 1912, a new emperor, Taisho, had ushered in a period of liberalism with democratic and progressive politics. For example, labor strikes, such as the rice riots in 1918 in which tens of thousands of people protested the government’s failure to pay market prices for rice, became increasingly common as workers fought for better wages and working conditions. Women became active in labor unions and politics for the first time, and the number of unions more than tripled in the 1910s. During this period, Japan was viewed as a triumph of constitutional government.

However, the progressive period did not last long. In 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake, measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale, destroyed two major cities, Yokohama and Tokyo. Nearly 150,000 people died in the earthquake and the resulting fires and tsunamis (Figure 12.18). Rumors quickly spread that Koreans in the area were taking advantage of the chaos, were plotting political insurrection, and had already poisoned wells to contaminate the drinking water. Several thousand Koreans were targeted and killed in response. The

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devastation also provided an opportunity for the conservative and pro-military forces in the Japanese government to exercise increased control over society. Martial law was declared, and the repression of radicals was stepped up. Political activists who questioned government policies disappeared.

FIGURE 12.18 A City Destroyed. This 1923 photograph shows the extent of destruction in Tokyo caused by the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923. (credit: modification of work “The Great Kanto Earthquake” by “urbz”/Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

When the emperor died in 1926, his son Hirohito ascended to power, and the Shöwa period began. Japan’s political system now became increasingly dominated by the military, and the emperor’s role was shrouded in secrecy and worship. The country’s military leaders believed more aggressive actions were needed for Japan to control the Pacific as they wanted to.

Operating with a heightened sense of duty and honor, Japan’s military establishment and certain factions of its army became increasingly contemptuous of civilian leaders. By the late 1920s, they saw these politicians as incapable of solving domestic issues or addressing challenges from China and the Soviet Union. Some disaffected Japanese field commanders in China and the Japanese colony of Korea began to engage in direct actions, forming criminal conspiracies and cover-ups to secure the future of Japan as they saw it, even as they served the emperor.

Nationalistic secret societies such as the Cherry Blossom Association and the Blood-Pledge Corps blossomed within the Japanese armed forces, particularly in the prestigious Kwantung Army stationed in Korea. The Japanese chafed at perceived unequal treatment in world affairs, such as at the Washington Naval Conference. Anxiety rose about the growth of Chinese nationalism under Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalist Guomindang government, and what it might mean for Japanese interests in China.

Manchuria, which bordered Korea, was a semiautonomous province of China. In 1931, to precipitate a political crisis that would enable Japan to intervene, hyper-patriots in the Japanese army conspired to blow up a portion of the South Manchurian Railway near the Manchurian city of Mukden (Shenyang) and blamed the incident on Chinese nationalists. The local Japanese commander took the opportunity to occupy Mukden, and

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field commanders in Korea dispatched reinforcements without any orders from Tokyo to do so. Japanese public opinion supported the army’s action.

As the Japanese army fanned out in Manchuria, the Kwantung Army approached the former Chinese Emperor, Pu Yi, who had been living in the Japanese concession (an area of the city granted to Japan) in Tianjin since 1925 (Figure 12.19). The Japanese convinced Pu Yi they had acted in the interests of the Manchurian people to preserve law and order in his homeland. They then smuggled him back to Manchuria, and by March 1932, he had been persuaded to accept the position of “chief executive” of the newly born state of Manchukuo, otherwise known as Manchuria. As the Chinese government called for the League of Nations to intervene and pledged to accept its rulings, a British diplomat in Japan warned of “an atmosphere of gun-grease” in Japan.

FIGURE 12.19 The Last Emperor. This photograph shows Pu Yi, China’s last emperor and Manchukuo’s first and only “chief executive,” in the 1930s or 1940s. (credit: “Pu Yi, Qing dynasty, China, Last emperor” by Unknown/ Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

In the fall of 1931, the League established the Lytton Commission to look into the situation. In January 1932, U.S. secretary of state Henry Stimson announced the Stimson Doctrine, which refused to recognize Manchukuo as an independent state.

Chinese public opinion was aroused, and in January 1932, clashes erupted between Japanese marines and Chinese troops in the outskirts of Shanghai. In Manchuria, the Lytton Commission found that the Guomindang government of China “was no longer exercising any political or administrative ‘authority in any part of Manchuria.’” Japan formally recognized the establishment of Manchukuo, its client state (a subordinate and dependent area), as a theoretically free, completely sovereign, and independent nation (Figure 12.20). The Lytton Report, published in October 1932, found fault on both sides but did not recommend full autonomy for Manchukuo. Japan responded by withdrawing from the League in March 1933. Japan ran the government in Manchukuo as a puppet state, controlling the native Chinese officials. Pu Yi continued as “head” of the government there until the end of the war, after which China took back control.

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FIGURE 12.20 A Disputed Client State. Manchukuo (Manchuria) was a client state in Japan’s imperialistic sphere of influence from the 1930s to the end of World War II. (attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC BY 4.0 license)

The Japanese secret societies within the military were animated by an exaggerated sense of Japan’s destiny. They began a campaign of violence against the Japanese civilian government. Elements of the Imperial Navy launched a coup in March 1932 by executing Japan’s former finance minister, Junnosuke Inoue, and Baron Dan, the head of Mitsui Corporation, as traitors to the Japanese people. On May 15, Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi was shot to death by eleven young naval officers. Between 1930 and 1935, the Japanese witnessed twenty terrorist incidents, the assassination of four political leaders, the attempted murders of five others, and four coup attempts.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the dominant political party in Japan was a fusion of Meiji oligarchs, government bureaucrats, and recruits from other political parties. The Seiyukai, as it was named, consistently supported a march toward authoritarian government. Beginning in 1932, “national unity” governments dominated by high-ranking military officers increasingly assumed power and repressed threats and enemies. Authoritarian government took hold from the top down in the mid-1930s, as the military intimidated and overpowered civilian governance and created a military dictatorship.

The situation in China was quite fluid through the 1920s and 1930s. Revolutionary activity grew but splintered, and the opposing views of Communists and Nationalists led to civil war. The Guomindang was led by Sun Yat-sen from 1912 until his death in 1925. Sun Yat-sen developed a more inclusive party and made an alliance with those who followed the communist path. After his death, Chiang Kai-shek arose as the leader of the Nationalists. Chiang focused on more traditional positions, and in the late 1920s, he chose to formally oust the communist members of the Guomindang.

One of the people who had joined the communist ranks was a young member from Hunan Province, Mao Zedong (Figure 12.21). Mao had had intermittent schooling but was drawn to the revolutionary fervor of the Russian Revolution of 1917. He had supported both the communist cause and the Guomindang, but after

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Chiang ousted the communists, Mao took up arms against him.

FIGURE 12.21 Mao Zedong. This photo of Mao, who was born in 1893, was taken before World War II. (credit: “Mao Zedong in Yan’an” by Unknown/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

Mao viewed communism and Marxism in a rather unorthodox way. Generally, Marxism relied on the proletariat, the industrial workers in the factories, gaining class consciousness. However, this model did not exist in China, a land of mostly agricultural peasants and little industrialization. So Mao came to believe that a Marxist state could be built on the peasantry rather than on industrial workers. Chinese communists would seek to overthrow not the capitalists but the landlords who controlled the land. This was a powerful tonic for the mass of Chinese peasants, who hungered for land reform. Such reform would oust the landlords and return all the land to the hands of the peasants who worked on it.

The Nationalists themselves had encouraged assistance from the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, and the Soviet Union had responded with aid and training. Once Chiang became head of the Nationalists, however, he decided to break with the Communists and planned an extermination of the Communist forces. This forced many into hiding, but in 1935, Mao was able to lead them on the Long March to a safe retreat in northern China. Many flocked to Mao and his oratory about a new government in China that reflected the will of the people. In 1937, however, the Japanese Empire invaded mainland China. Chiang offered Mao a truce, setting aside the civil war in favor of fighting against the invading forces. Still, the internal battles between these two sides weakened the war effort against the Japanese.

In Southeast Asia, themes of nationalism were also growing in popularity. Following his inability to be heard at negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles, Ho Chi Minh had returned home to the northern part of French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) and organized guerrilla fighters to begin ousting the French. Championing Vietnamese nationalism, Ho had received training from the Soviet Union and hoped communism would provide a path for his country to achieve independence.

Turkey welcomed the spread of democratic institutions in the 1920s. After the triumph of his nationalist party in the early 1920s, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk established a republic with a constitution and regular elections. The Republic of Turkey disassociated itself from the old Ottoman rule by adopting many Westernized elements. Women had the right to vote, the Arabic alphabet was no longer used, and traditional dress (veils for women and the fez for men) was outlawed. European fashion became the norm. Another major shift in Turkey was its adoption of a fully secular society. The legal system was overhauled to focus on a civil code like those of other European countries rather than on Islamic law.

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Latin American countries, too, had some success expanding democracy in the 1920s. In 1910, revolution broke out in Mexico. A struggle over leadership followed in which Mexico was governed by a succession of revolutionary generals without any established way for the next president to come to power. The creation of a political party was meant to fix this, and by the 1920s, the PRI (the Institutional Revolutionary Party) had been formed. Though subject to name changes through the decades, this party dominated Mexican politics until the twenty-first century. There were regular elections and an expansion of voting, reflecting at least the outward acceptance of democratic institutions. However, the PRI effectively ran a one-party state, and all presidents and nearly all the members of the legislature were members of the party. In 1938, a new president, Lázaro Cárdenas, focused on the plight of ordinary workers in Mexico. He supported labor unions, nationalized the oil industry, promoted land reform, and attempted to bring more socialist policies to Mexico.

Other countries throughout Latin America extended voting rights in the early 1900s. Chile suffered its share of chaos as reformers tried to seize political power there. Ultimately, Chile was able to build a series of coalition governments in the 1930s that brought stability for many years. By the 1920s, political instability was increasingly common in other places like Argentina. In September 1930, General José Félix Uriburu seized power in the capital, Buenos Aires. Uriburu had been heavily influenced by the Italian version of fascism. He banned political parties and suspended the constitution. His was the first of several military coups that occurred in Argentina in the ensuing decades.

A New Culture for the Masses

Alongside the expansion of democracy, the 1920s also shepherded in a new world of mass culture and mass media. Technological innovations let people connect nearly instantaneously and have shared experiences without being in the same place. Where the infrastructure existed, it was radio and the movies that made this possible.

Radio wave technology had been pioneered in the late 1800s, but its widespread use and cultural influence were still decades off. By the 1920s, radio’s value as a news medium was becoming clear, but its true influence came from commercial radio shows, supported through another new medium called advertising that filled the airwaves in the mid-1920s. From that point through the interwar years, people could gather to hear the latest episodes of entertaining soap operas, mystery shows, and westerns, along with news items and live reporting of sports events.

Silent films had ruled movie theaters in the 1900s and 1910s, but beginning in the late 1920s, “talking pictures” emerged and quickly became the dominant form of motion pictures. Mass media technologies meant people could watch the same movies, follow the same soap operas, and cheer for the same teams despite being hundreds or thousands of miles apart. These experiences created a mass culture for the first time, uniting people whose lives had once been dominated by regional and local concerns.

The film industries in many countries developed somewhat differently in the 1930s. In the United States, the industry was centered in Hollywood, a district in Los Angeles, California. The bosses of movie studios wanted to make films that were popular with audiences and relatively cheap to produce. In other countries, the film industries were similarly popular, but many were also supportive of artistic experimentation in film. The German film industry took a modernist approach, seen in the silent 1920 horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, for example, and many of its films critiqued politics and society in the postwar era. In Japan, the film industry went through a period of reform in the 1920s as producers and directors began adopting different filmmaking techniques instead of simply recording a theatrical production. Some films took leftist positions that reflected the growth of unions in Japanese society, but other genres such as those featuring samurai characters also became popular and well known.

People were also embracing new ways of living in the 1920s. Women, in particular, were ready to fulfill their updated expectations for themselves. The “New Woman” of this era abandoned the traditions of the past to enter an exciting future. Women in many countries were also adopting new plans for their lives, such as

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pursuing higher education, although a college degree was still quite rare among women. There were also many new jobs in the workplace that women were eager to hold. In Europe and the United States, secretarial work was becoming dominated by women rather than the men who had held such jobs in the 1800s. Nursing also became an important career option for women.

The New Woman was a significant departure from the nineteenth-century Western woman, who wore her long hair piled high on her head and dressed in high-necked blouses and ankle-length skirts. Young women in the 1920s wore knee-length skirts, discarded corsets, and cut their hair short. They went out in the evenings to drink and dance and socialize. A woman who adopted these behaviors became known as a flapper in the United States, due to the way these women danced with arms flapping from their sides (Figure 12.22).

FIGURE 12.22 A Flapper. This early photo of American film star Clara Bow personifies the flapper image. After starring in It, a romantic comedy in which she played a salesperson working in a department store, Bow became known as the “It Girl” and symbolized the New Woman of the 1920s. (credit: “Photo of Clara Bow in 1921” by Brewster Magazine/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

The spread of this modern image of a woman demonstrated the influence the West and especially the United States already had on popular culture. The New Woman appeared around the world on signs, in books, in song lyrics, and throughout the burgeoning movie industry. Advertisers, in particular, were quick to adopt her image, making it one to which female consumers could aspire. Each country had its own version—the moga (modern girl) in Japan, the garçonne (tomboy or flapper) in France.

BEYOND THE BOOK

The New Woman in China Flip through the pages of the Chinese women’s magazine Ling long, (https://openstax.org/l/77LingIong) a weekly publication that was highly popular in the 1930s. Look for examples of Western influence on Chinese culture. (Be

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sure to click the arrows on the left to move forward through the pages, in keeping with the way Chinese books were formatted in this period.) The site includes a feature that will read the content aloud in Mandarin.

View multimedia content (https://openstax.org/books/world-history-volume-2/pages/12-5-resistance-civil-rights- and-democracy)

· What are some examples from the magazine of Western influence on Chinese culture?

· Does anything strike you as unusual in the collection of images in this magazine? How would you

characterize the images as a whole?

516 12 • Key Terms Key Terms Balfour Declaration a 1917 statement by British foreign secretary Alfred Balfour publicly supporting the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine Beer Hall Putsch a 1923 attempt by Adolf Hitler and his followers to take over the city of Munich collectivization the taking over of agriculture by a national government fascism a political movement focused on transforming citizens into committed nationalists striving for unity and racial purity to remedy a perceived national decline Five-Year Plans domestic plans adopted by the Soviet Union in the 1930s to target industrial and agricultural output goals that were usually unrealistic flapper woman of the 1920s who embraced an independent lifestyle while wearing shorter skirts and hairstyles gold standard a monetary system in which the value of a country’s currency is tied directly to the value of gold gross domestic product (GDP) the value of all the goods and services a country produces in one year Guomindang the Chinese Nationalist Party founded by Sun Yat-sen and later led by Chiang Kai-shek Irish Free State a state formed by the twenty-six southern counties in Ireland and later called Ireland Kellogg-Briand Pact a 1928 treaty signed by more than sixty countries to renounce war as a foreign policy tool League of Nations a multinational organization created by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles to promote the goal of collective security Long March a northward march of communist supporters led by Mao Zedong that saved them from extermination by the Guomindang mandate system a system in which control of an area was transferred from one government to another under the oversight of the League of Nations New Deal a U.S. program of economic reform under Franklin Roosevelt that created work-relief programs New Economic Policy (NEP) Lenin’s policy that introduced some aspects of capitalism in response to hardships and growing discontent among the Russian people New Negro movement a movement that developed in the 1920s as African Americans agitated for increased civil rights Pan-African movement a movement based on the idea that all people in Africa could work together to achieve greater independence reparations monetary payments to be made to the Allied nations by Germany to compensate for destruction they suffered in the war Salt March a two-hundred-mile march led by Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi in India in 1930 to protest the British prohibition on collecting salt and the heavy taxes on its purchase Schutzstaffel (SS) German Nazi paramilitary organization designed for security and intimidation Sinn Féin a political party organized in 1905 that argued for greater sovereignty for Ireland socialist realism an artistic movement in the Soviet Union that took the worker as a subject and was about patriotism as much as art suffragist a person who protested in favor of women’s right to vote totalitarianism a form of government in which the state controls all aspects of a person’s life Treaty of Versailles a 1919 treaty that formally ended World War I, redrew the map of Europe, and created the League of Nations Section Summary 12.1 Recovering from World War I A period of significant change followed World War I. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles fully blamed Germany for the war and sought to punish it by assessing reparations of more than $33 billion and physically shrinking the country. New countries emerged through the redrawing of Europe’s maps. Massive physical rebuilding was necessary in former combat areas in Europe, while the United States emerged as a major player in world Access for free at openstax.org

politics and a creditor nation on the brink of prosperity. The economic repercussions of the treaty proved devastating in Germany, where economic instability and mistrust of the new government opened the door for the rise of the Nazi Party. In Asia, Japan was growing in both political and military power, positioning itself as a force throughout the Pacific. Yet in the 1920s and 1930s, hope still prevailed that no such conflict would ever occur again, underscored by international efforts to both prevent war and intervene in aggression before it rose to the status of war.

12.2 The Formation of the Soviet Union

The Bolsheviks’ effort to wrest control of Russia did not go unchallenged, as evidenced by the civil war that unfolded after World War I. Though ultimately successful in consolidating power, throughout the 1920s the Bolsheviks continued to disagree among themselves about the proper application of communist principles. The power vacuum left after Vladimir Lenin’s death allowed Joseph Stalin to emerge as the leader of the new Soviet Union. Stalin’s Five-Year Plans brought not only more centralized economic control but a more authoritarian government that compelled obedience, no matter the resistance or the impact, including death and famine. Life in the Soviet Union became more structured and rigid as the government asserted control over all aspects of civilian life. Anyone even remotely suspected of disloyalty faced imprisonment or death.

12.3 The Great Depression

The Great Depression of the 1930s was an economic downturn unparalleled in modern history. The interconnectedness of the world’s economies became clear as countries around the globe suffered the effects. While no single event caused the Great Depression, few people were left unscathed. Nations tried innovative ways to provide for their people, enacting work-relief programs, food programs, and new economic policies to bring their economies back under control. While many programs helped mitigate the pain of the Depression, none fully solved it, and some people embraced new political parties that offered different solutions. In the case of Italy and Germany, these new parties and politicians exploited the decade’s economic instability for their own ends in a grab for greater power.

12.4 Old Empires and New Colonies

The Treaty of Versailles created new countries and new governments and encouraged many groups’ desire for independence. However, independence did not come without struggle. European powers hoped to retain their hold over resource-rich regions around the world through the colonial or mandate system. Still, many Jewish people celebrated the promise of a Jewish homeland, while rising nationalism in Africa began to reshape the politics and geography of that continent. The struggle for independence in India took both violent and nonviolent forms as leaders chafed against British rule.

12.5 Resistance, Civil Rights, and Democracy

The years following World War I left many democratic yearnings unfulfilled around the globe. African Americans in the United States were able to seize new job opportunities and greater mobility, but they still faced marked racism and limitations. Efforts toward self-rule in Ireland made substantial progress but were also tainted by violence. The promise of greater democracy in China was subsumed by civil war. In Latin America, the hope of greater equality among social classes was frustrated by political instability and the first appearance of more authoritarian leaders. Many aspects of Western society wound their way around the globe via the new technologies of mass media. Peoples around the world clearly wanted change, but implementing it sometimes proved exceedingly difficult.

References

Link:  https://assets.openstax.org/oscms-prodcms/media/documents/World_History_Volume_2-WEB_LdwoslB.pdf