Chapter 23 Revolution, Depression, and the Rise of Totalitarianism |
Section 2 |
The turmoil and bloodshed of the
Russian Revolution contributed to the disillusionment with Western
Civilization that many people around the world felt after World War I.
For others, however, both the Allied victory and the initial overthrow
of autocracy in Russia still seemed to promise a new era full of hope
for the ideals of liberal democracy. Among the new countries of Eastern
Europe, including the Central Powers themselves, new democratic
constitutions replaced the defeated autocracies. In Japan, too, the
triumph of the Allies led many to believe that democracy was the wave of
the future and the most efficient form of government for the modern
world. As new democratic forms began to spread in the early 20s,
however, challenging older aristocratic traditions and cultural values,
a period of reaction set in. Moreover, it soon became clear that even
the old democracies in Europe and America had not been completely
unscathed by the war. The Western Democracies: Britain,
France, and the United States Although the triumphant western democracies hailed the end of the war with
relief, their joy soon turned sour. The full price of the war became
clear as their economies began to suffer under the pressures of
returning to peacetime production. During the early 1920s all the major
powers except Russia, which was still engaged in civil war, experienced
economic hardship and rising unemployment. The United States was the
least affected, but even there postwar industrial production began to
slow down as wartime contracts were cancelled. By 1920, American exports
had begun to decline. With declining exports came lower wages and even
lay-offs of workers. American labor unions, once again free to strike
after the war, called major strikes in heavy industries. Railway strikes
also plagued the country between 1919 and 1921. Similar problems faced
France and Britain.
Of all the victorious allies, France had suffered the most damage
from the war. The battlefields of World War I lay like open sores upon
the French landscape, still littered with all the debris of war—burned
out villages and towns, scattered twisted metal. Landmines and
unexploded shells continued to take occasional lives and limbs for many
years. In some regions, prime farmland had to be devoted to an even
sadder purpose. Instead of seed, as far as the eye could see, neat lined
furrows were sown with small white crosses that marked the graves of the
fallen. Vineyards and wheat fields, once the agricultural base of French
prosperity, had become virtual deserts. Although less physically damaged
than France, Britain too had a hard time recovering after the war. Once
the world's leading industrial manufacturer, after the war Britain could
no longer compete effectively with her wartime allies. As exports
declined, unemployment rose. By 1920 some two million people were out of
work.
As they confronted the problems of recovery, all three allies
experienced considerable internal political and social upheaval. In 1920
American voters rejected the Democratic Party and elected the Republican
candidate, Warren G. Harding, who promised a "return to
normalcy," by which he meant the prosperity of the pre-war era. In
France, the ugly divisions that had so threatened the republic during
the Dreyfuss affair at the turn of the century re-emerged, as numerous
political parties struggled for power. In Britain, too, post-war
hardship blew apart the wartime coalition forged by Lloyd George. In
1922 the Conservatives came to power on the same platform of
"normalcy" popularized by President Harding in the United
States. Britain should "get on with its work," they declared,
"with the minimum of interference at home and of disturbance
abroad."[1][1] The Liberal
Party, which had split during the war, was in disarray. For the first
time, in 1922 the socialist Labour Party became the official Opposition
Party.
In the United States many Americans blamed their hard times on
"foreign" influences. The Russian revolution raised fears of a
worldwide communist movement. In the early 1920s a "Red Scare"
led to the arrest of thousands of suspected subversives. Organizations
such as the Ku Klux Klan attracted new members by calling for "100
per cent Americanism," and persecuting non-white and non-Protestant
minorities such as African Americans, Native Americans, Asians,
Catholics, and Jews. Congress passed new restrictions on immigration.
Asians were excluded altogether, and the new rules favored
"Anglo-Saxons" and other northern, western Europeans over
southern and eastern Europeans.
In Britain, hard times led to growing class tensions. In 1924,
continuing unemployment led briefly to the first Labour Government under
Ramsay MacDonald. Although the Conservatives returned to power in less
than a year under their new leader, Stanley Baldwin, the economic
situation did not improve. Both Conservative and Labour governments
refused to devalue Britain's currency, which would have stimulated
industry by making British exports less expensive. In 1925 Baldwin
baldly stated his own solution to the problem: "All the workers in
this country have got to take reductions in wages to help put industry
on its feet."[2][2] Instead, led by
Britain's coalminers, in May 1926 as many as 4 million union members
called the first national strike. Refusing to give in, the Government
called for help from middle class citizens. As they pitched in, driving
milk wagons, running trains, and doing other essential work, eventually
the strike collapsed. The Conservatives once again expressed relief at
the return to normalcy, but the action left a sense of bitterness in
British society.
Despite these years of hardship, however, by the end of the 1920s
all three western democracies had experienced some degree of recovery.
Under President Harding's pro-business policy, the American industrial
economy rebounded and began a decade-long boom. Harding died in 1923 but
his successor, vice-president Calvin Coolidge, continued the
pro-business policy. "The business of America is business,"
Coolidge declared, and was resoundingly re-elected in 1924. In 1928, a
new Republican president, Herbert Hoover, expressed the views of many in
his inaugural address: "Ours is a country with rich
resources, stimulating in its glorious beauty, filled with millions of
happy homes, blessed with comfort and opportunity.... I have no fears
for the future of our country. It is bright with hope."
Prosperity in the United States flowed over to former wartime
allies. In 1926, a "national union" government came to power
in France under the Social Democrat, Raymond Poincaré. With the help of
the Dawes Plan, after 1926 the French prospered once more. France's
farming economy recovered and remained strong by producing primarily for
the domestic market. French industry also revived, although more slowly.
Even Britain recovered quickly from the National Strike and by the
decade's end was once again feeling moderately prosperous – though
unemployment remained extremely high and many working people resigned
themselves to living on "the dole," or unemployment insurance. The Weimar Republic Of all the new democracies to emerge after the war in the major European
nations, that in Germany seemed the weakest. Born out of the collapse of
Germany's home front in October 1918, the new German Republic had been
proclaimed November 9, 1918, just after the Kaiser's abdication. Even
its birth pangs were violent. Almost immediately Marxist revolutionaries
led by Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht besieged the Provisional
Government in an effort to establish a Leninist style regime. One
participant later recalled the scene: "The People's Representatives
practically did their work as prisoners. Machine-guns rattled day and
night in the Wilhelmstrasse, and noisy processions of many thousands,
mostly armed to the teeth, were continuously organized by Liebknecht in
front of the Chancellery."
Most of the supporters of the new republic, including its first
President, Friedrich Ebert, were Social Democrats who had forsaken
revolution in favor of working for socialism within the existing system
of government. Confronted by such revolutionary violence, Ebert
desperately appealed to former generals of the German army, most of whom
were still loyal to the deposed German emperor, to save the republic.
Secretly, Ebert authorized them to raise volunteer armed bands to crush
the Communist uprising. The generals accepted the challenge and quickly
suppressed the revolt. Instead of disbanding, however, they marched on
Berlin and proclaimed their own government. A sympathetic German Army
stood by, but eventually the new rebellion collapsed in the face of a
general strike called by labor leaders.
Against this background of chaos, German voters elected a
Constituent Assembly to draw up a new constitution in the German city of
Weimar. On August 11, 1919, the new Weimar Constitution went into
effect. Plagued by devastating inflation, at first the future of the new
republic looked bleak. After the Dawes Plan went into effect in 1924,
however, the German economy gradually recovered. The Social Democrats
pushed through social reforms such as unemployment insurance and women's
suffrage. With growing foreign investment, especially from the United
States, by 1929 Germany was producing more steel, iron, chemicals, and
other industrial goods than before the war.
Yet despite this return to prosperity, at best the Weimar
republic was an artificial creation with little deep-seated support
among the German people. In 1923, for example, another rebellion broke
out in Munich, known as the Beer Hall Uprising, led by the former German
general Erich von Ludendorf and the leader of a small right wing party,
Adolph Hitler. Although the revolt was easily put down, and its leaders
jailed, the publicity attending their trials only underscored the
weakness of the government. One Weimar statesman complained in 1926 that
"The weakest spot--and it still exists--is that the people have not
yet made it [the Weimar Constitution] a thing of life." They never
did. Challenges to Democracy While the course of democracy was shaky at best even in the major
countries of Western Europe after the war, elsewhere it broke down
altogether. In the new countries that emerged out of the ashes of the
old empires in Eastern Europe, the end of the war had not displaced
local aristocrats or lessened their traditional authority in society.
Although efforts were made to pursue liberal democracy while at the same
time modernizing and industrializing the eastern economies, these
efforts only increased the level of social tensions and general
insecurity among the people. Similar problems confronted Japan, the only
non-western nation to industrialize and develop democratic institutions
before World War I. Eastern Europe. In
Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria, and the Baltic states of Latvia,
Lithuania, and Estonia, the new democratic governments alienated
landowners by breaking up old aristocratic estates, giving the land to
peasants. In the Baltic States and Czechoslovakia, where landowners were
mostly German, such policies also led to ethnic tensions between German
minorities and Czech and Slavic majorities. The new governments also
tried to encourage industrialization by raising tariff barriers to
protect their industries from foreign competition. Tariffs, however,
disrupted the trade patterns that had prevailed under the old empires.
As trade between the new countries began to dry up, so did their
prosperity. Growing social tensions led to bloodshed in many countries.
Landowners and others increasingly feared that communism would spread
from Russia to their own countries. Liberal democratic governments began
to crumble.
In Austria, for example, socialists and conservatives began to
create private armies that fought for control of the government in the
streets of Vienna. Anxious to restore order, the government became less
and less democratic. Similar problems undermined democracy in Hungary. A
brief soviet-style revolution led to a reaction from the traditional
aristocracy, the middle class, and the Church. Banding together, they
established a conservative authoritarian regime under Admiral Nicholas
Horthy, formerly of the Imperial Austrian Navy. Landlocked Hungary
became known as the "kingdom without a king, ruled by an admiral
without a fleet." By 1926, Poland, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and
Rumania had followed the Hungarian example, with either conservative
authoritarian regimes, military dictatorships or monarchies. By 1930,
only Czechoslovakia and the Baltic republics remained truly democratic. |