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Hum 104, Lecture notes 2014, class VI

Chapter 21, Age of the Masses and Zenith of Modernism, 1914-1945

This was also an age of crisis. The era began with the Great War, followed by the Bolshevik Revolution, the Great Depression, and another great war, World War II. It was also the era where the common man moved onto center stage and challenged the Bourgeoisie as they had once challenged the aristocracy.

The Great War, World War I, happened because of the central European powers’ desire to reestablish their place of preeminence that had not been theirs for 200 years. Western Europe was organized as the Triple Entente and was made up of Great Britain, France, and Russia. The central powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy were joined by treaty as the Triple Alliance. The Entente had as a goal the stopping of Germany’s expansion. Don’t forget that Germany had only been truly unified since 1871 through the efforts of William I (Wilhelm I), King of Prussia and his Prime Minister, Otto von Bismarck. After Wilhelm I’s death in 1888, Wilhelm II (Kaiser Wilhelm of War I) fired Bismarck and made the decisions that lead Germany to the war. The Great War became the great, expensive, deadly stalemate from 1914-1917. It was trench warfare as the machine gun proved to be a great people killer, and no offensive technology had yet been proven as its equal. Mustard gas incapacitated many and left lungs scarred for life. Fresh troops made available by the USA’s entry into the war in 1917 more than made up for Russia’s withdrawal because of the Bolsheviks. Unrestricted submarine warfare brought the US into the conflict. The war ended with Germany’s surrender in 1918 and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The site was the same as that of the 1871 treaty imposed upon France after Prussia’s victory. France had felt humiliated then, and Germany felt that they were being purposefully humiliated in 1919. Their opinion was shared by John Maynard Keynes, the English treasury’s principal representative at the treaty conference. He withdrew from the discussions, as he thought the resulting treaty would be too burdensome on Germany. In addition the treaty called for a League of Nations to help resolve issues so that no future war would take place. The concept was strongly supported by President Woodrow Wilson, but the League remained too weak to be effective, largely because the US congress did not ratify the treaty and the US never became part of the League. Hence, the seeds were sown for another Great War.

In the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire ended as Turkey had chosen the wrong side. In the early 1920s, the area was partitioned by the victors. France established a sphere of influence that included Syria and Lebanon. England got Transjordan (Jordan), Palestine, and the Mesopotamian provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra which it turned into the Kingdom of Iraq. This fusion ignored deep differences between Sunni and Shia Muslims and tribal and ethnic differences among Arabs, Kurds, Persians and Assyrians. 1917’s Balfour Declaration by Britain supported Palestine as a national home for the Jewish people. Egypt became a British protectorate, Greece got Thrace and the Aegean Islands; Armenia became a free country; and Turkey emerged from the rubble of the Ottoman Empire. Saudi Arabia was founded by Ibn Saud as a fundamentalist Islamic State. It is a major player on the world stage as the home of Islam’s holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, and later (1938) because of discovering huge oil reserves. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 and had 2 million members across the Arab world by 1945.

In Great Britain and France, boom times returned, but none of the wealth went to helping Central Europe. The United States brought its Expeditionary Force home and returned to the position of isolationism. Great economic boom times filled the 1920s only to be undone by “uncontrolled greed and no government monitoring” that lead to the stock market crash of 1929. (Scenes from The Great Gatsby). This ultimately triggered the Great Depression in the United States (Scenes from The Grapes of Wrath) that lead to severe economic problems in Europe. Great Britain and France scrapped free trade but did not intervene to lower unemployment. Germany failed to act, and the economic disaster lead to the end of the Weimar Republic. Franklin Roosevelt fought the Depression and its huge unemployment with a number of government programs including the New Deal’s CCC, PWA projects, Social Security, etc. Still, nothing brought the economy fully back until World War II got manufacturing going full speed. As the west suffered, Japan flourished. While nominally headed by God on Earth, Emperor Hirohito, the military/industrial complex drove a militaristic, expansionist course. While the west was distracted, Japan invaded Manchuria and China and later moved into the East Indies and Southeast Asia.

Socially in the United States, prohibition was ushered in by the 18th Amendment in 1920 and lasted until repealed by the 21st Amendment in 1933. Women got the vote in 1920 as a result of the 19th Amendment. In civil rights, separate but equal was still in force including in the military. Women had gotten the vote in Britain in 1918. Britain now faced issues with its Indian colony. Mistrust between Hindus and Muslims kept dissonance fractured until Mohandas Gandhi became leader of the National Indian Congress in 1921. His legal training, knowledge of east and west, and his commitment to amity between Hindus and Muslims allowed him to lead the movement that was non-violent and lead to Indian independence.

Politically, as of 1919 democracy was in place in most of Europe. But by 1939 Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, and Rumania were totalitarian. That is, the government made all decisions including proper art, literature, thought, etc. It decided what was truth. Russia was communist under Josef Stalin; Italy and Germany were Fascist under Mussolini and Hitler respectively. Spain’s monarchy was overthrown in the early 1930s. Conservatives, including the Catholic Church sought to restore the monarchy, and a civil war ensued. The conservatives won, and General Francisco Franco assumed power in 1939. The civil war gave Germany and Italy an opportunity to practice for the coming total war. They supported General Franco while Russia backed the losers. Ernest Hemmingway was moved by this conflict to write For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Hemmingway was a fairly traditional writer who mostly enjoyed the man sports of drinking with friends, and chasing beautiful women. F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of that circle of authors, including Hemmingway, with one foot in the Paris scene. Other writers of the era were more prone to experiment in an effort to control instability and impose order. Stream of consciousness writing featured narrative of the characters’ unedited thoughts through whom readers experienced the story. James Joyce’s masterpiece was Ulysses, and its last 45 pages had no punctuation. Virginia Woolf in Great Britain and William Faulkner in the United States wrote in similar fashion. Other writers had other approaches. D. H. Lawrence in England expressed modernism through sexual themes such as found in Lady Chatterley’s Lover which was about personal freedom. The Englishman, George Orwell wrote Animal Farm to satirize Russian communism, but he also wrote 1984 to warn about the wider threat of repression and totalitarianism. NSA anyone?

In poetry, William Butler Yeats was a romantic writer who began to change in 1910 and became fully anti-British after their heavy handed response to 1916’s Easter Rebellion (The Easter rising was an attempt by Irish republicans to free Ireland from being part of Great Britain. The English were in the midst of the Great War, and put the rising down with heavy weapons that included artillery). Ex-pat American writer, T. S. Eliot wrote The Wasteland which described the hollowness of modern life. On the other hand, he also wrote Cats. In the US Langston Hughes, the black modernist poet wrote of the movement of rural blacks to the cities and to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Zora Neale Hurston wrote of a black woman’s experience in a white male world in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Painting in the Modernist style moved close to the abstract. Picasso was an abstract painter while Salvador Dali was more surreal as he added bizarre twists, often including sexual innuendo to ordinary things. Photography continued to evolve as an art form, and pictures began to tell stories about ordinary people.

Mass entertainment gained a wider audience than did Modernism. Movies went from short, silent, and humorous to more serious topics, to full length with sound. Music moved to swing with jazz and blues still there. All the forms reached wider audiences through radio and records. Duke Ellington, Billie Holliday, Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald were leaders on the scene.

We’ll talk about World War II next week.