03.1. Hist 20 podcast: 1920-1929

events in the 3rd decade of the 20th C

Transcript

University of California UCOP | podcast 3.1

Testing, testing. Hello, again. Let's talk about the '20s. Did you know the first appearance of the word robot happens in January 1921? In some ways, the appearance of the word robot that had never been uttered before that may be the beginning of the modern age. Obviously, not technically, because mechanization predates the 20th century.

But the word robot, it materializes something. It gives a name to something that up until then was perhaps just a feeling, right? It materializes both humanity's fears and humanity's aspirations around technology and mechanization.

And so once there's a word for that feeling, then that feeling is no longer just something that an individual has, but it's something that is shared. And it can be talked about. And perhaps, it can even be addressed. The word appeared in a Czech play by a man called Karel Capek. And the play was called Rossum's Universal Robots.

It was so successful. As a play, it was avant-garde. So it was really sort of pushing the envelope on many levels. It was staged in Broadway in 1922. It was staged in London in 1924, and then in Tokyo in 1925.

So this widespread staging of a Czech play, that was not just a reflection of a generalized concern with technology in the modern world. So there's sort of that shared feeling that I was talking about. But it's also a shared aspiration. There's an entire generation of engineers that will strive to make a robot.

And in fact, a British captain, a veteran of World War I, Captain Richards, made the first robot. And he called it Eric. And Eric has a chest plate. And on the chest plate are the initials RUR. And do you know what RUR stands for in this real robot that moved its head and could greet visitors?

There's an article in this week's materials that you might want to read about Eric. It's a 1929 article, so it was written at the time. RUR stands for Rossum's Universal Robot. So there's a direct connection between the play and the first robot.

Apart from robots, science, advancements, the 1920s are also an amazing period for women's rights, especially in

Europe and the US. So in places where women have already acquired the right to vote or will soon acquire the right to vote, there's sort of space for them to really change how they are viewed and what they do. But even in countries where they haven't, women's roles are being redefined and expanded.

I mean, in countries where they haven't gotten the right to vote, their roles are being questioned and changed. Wars really have that effect. Women's participation as nurses in the First World War, as soldiers in the Mexican Revolution, as comrades in the Soviet revolutions, all these events challenge the traditional conceptions of what a Revolution, as comrades in the Soviet revolutions, all these events challenge the traditional conceptions of what a women's role and place in society is.

Now, this doesn't mean that challenging the conceptions of women's place immediately resolves the issue of giving them a place wherever men are. And in many ways, the struggle for equality continues. But in the 1920s with sort of the changes brought on by the war and the increasing number of women who had the right to vote, you could really see sort of a watershed moment for women.

Now, in other parts of the world, old systems of rule remain in place. And this affects all genders. European colonies have played a vital role in World War I. So there were troops from Africa and India that were fighting on many fronts of the war.

And they rightfully, these troops and the countries or the territories from which they came, expected to receive some form of self-government in return for that physical human contribution to the war. But they were quite wrong.

Now, it's simplistic, perhaps, but I don't think it's wrong to suggest that the reason for this denial of self- determination in the aftermath of World War I has a lot to do with racism.

It's not an accident that the 1920s are also a period when the idea of eugenics really comes into favor. Eugenics is the notion by which to suggest that there is a scientific way in which ideal human characteristics can be bred into humans. So just as the world emerges from one of the most violent global conflicts, just as technology is entering everyday life in the form of electricity in the home in electric lighting, as radio and film, as the world is being connected through technology and electricity, this is the same time that a theory arises and acquires traction that humanity can be improved scientifically by, in a sense, selecting specific qualities and essentially breeding an ideal human.

Now, these ideas are not contradictory. Humanity can be both enlightened and misguided at the same time. It can be enlightened about one thing and misguided about the application of that one thing. And I think if we see the advances in technology and sort of the advancing of this eugenic ideal as happening at the same time, that concept of moving forward, but not necessarily in the right direction really is embodied there.

Now, we'll see how this affects Africa and India in a second. Now, let me backtrack a little bit first. Post World War I negotiations and peace treaties were so punishing to the defeated countries, it was largely expected that the resentment that these peace treaties created and these reparations created would essentially lead to the next war in the not too far future.

And to make matters worse, the League of Nations, which was founded in 1920 precisely to maintain world peace- and we really can't argue against an institution that is created to maintain world peace-- was a weak and lopsided institution. The League of Nations was originally a British idea. And the term was coined in 1914 by internationalists and pacifism, essentially people who saw the world as a system, that saw it in its entirety, and aimed to create incentives that would encourage the whole world to remain at peace.

The idea took root in the US as well by 1915. And there it was called The League to Enforce Peace. Ultimately, the League of Nations was a proposal that was a product of both French, American, and British discussions. There were also South African diplomats involved.

But it had a couple of flaws. And they were pretty major. First, the colonies were not included in the league. Second, Germany wasn't allowed in, because it had started the war, back to the punishment. And Russia wasn't allowed in, because the Allies did not approve of the communist government. So there are three sets of pretty important parts of the world that were not allowed into this League of Nation that was essentially created to avoid war. And last, but not least, despite the fact that President Wilson had really sort ofbeen influential in the creation of the League of Nations, had enormous support for it-- or at least, he had supported it enormously. He got the Nobel Prize, in fact, for his role in the creation of the League of Nations.

The United States did not join the League of Nations. So you have the colonies, Germany, and Russia who are not allowed in, and the United States that refuses to join. So this is a league of a few nations, not all nations, in the end. So why did the US not join?

In one word, politics. President Wilson did not have internal support for the League. He refused to listen to anyone on the Democratic or the Republican side who suggested that there were perhaps some reservations to joining a league that would probably mean the US would be dragged into more wars, and that perhaps it would be worthwhile to have a broader discussion about what US involvement in an international organization of this kind would mean. So in the end, we have a League of Nations that is just the league of some nations.

It's a League of Nations that has two of the largest surviving imperial powers, Britain and France, in it. And these two take over the colonies of the old German and Ottoman Empires. And then they are mandated by the League to rule over these colonial territories.

So this is how the British came to have a mandate over Palestine in the 1920s. France had the mandate over Syria and Lebanon. The British also had a mandate in Iraq and Kuwait. And in fact, Saudi Arabia launched a huge attack against the British mandate in 1928. But they were unsuccessful.

So all this to say that it's not like the British and French rule in the Middle East was accepted by all. But there it was. And in Palestine, things got even more complicated. Again, a little backtrack here. Palestine is quote unquote, "the promised land" of the Bible where the Israelites settled after Moses brought them out of Egypt. And if you need a little refresher on this, check out the book of Exodus in the Bible for more details.

The Israelites, which is an ancient way of referring to the Jews, were thrown out by Roman Emperor Titus in the first century. So this is how the phrase "next year in Jerusalem" came into the Passover dinner wish every year.

So Jews once had a territory that they could refer to as home. They haven't had that since the first century.

And that lack of a home is built into a significant number of Jewish rituals. Their idea of the return to Palestine for the Jewish people was a wish. But it was not a reality for almost 2,000 years. And it becomes a reality in the context of a revival-- or actually not a revival, but a creation of nationalist ideas.

The end of colonies in the Americas, the discussion around nation-building in Europe all leads to sort of a discussion also amongst these diasporic, these traveling Jews throughout Europe, who by the way had always been targets of enormous anti-Semitism in Europe. And so in the middle of the 19th century, there's a revival of a movement of returning to Palestine.

However, in the intervening 2,000 years or so, Arab peoples had also lived in Palestine and also considered it home. None of the territorial discussion around a Jewish home in Palestine had mattered much. Because before 1914, Palestine was under Ottoman rule.

But after the end of World War I, at the end of the Ottoman Empire, once the British had a mandate over Palestine, the British really had to think about how they would allocate land. And this is where the Balfour Declaration, which I think I spoke about last week, would come to haunt everyone. If you remember, Balfour had offered British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine if he could get US support for Britain and the Allies in World War I.

The details of the Balfour Declaration at that time were quite vague. And so the British had to figure out-- in the Balfour declaration, it said the Jewish homeland in Palestine would exist as long as the rights of Arab Palestinians were respected. But how do you do that?

There's nothing in the Balfour Declaration that established what Arab Palestinian rights were and what respect meant. So how do you respect the rights of peoples you're going to ask to move off land they considered to be theirs to make room for new people who also consider that land to be theirs? The British tried to control the number of Jewish people who moved into Palestine.

They tried to control the number of Palestinians they asked to move. They tried to control the number of Palestinians attacking Jewish settlers. And they tried to control the number of Jewish settlers who would attack Palestinians in return. And what's the outcome of this kind of trying to control? Well, both Jews and Palestinians agreed on one thing.

They both hated the British. They both saw the British as an unnecessary colonial ruler. And they both were extremely violent in trying to get the British out of there.

And what would that lead to? By the end of the 1920s and the early 1930s, the British established martial law in Palestine. And they significantly curtailed the number of Jewish immigrants to the area right at a time when the Jews would be even more pressed to find alternatives. But that's for another lecture.

Let's think about the rest of the area. Egypt, in the 1920s, was also a British protectorate. But you know, there was some opposition, or significant opposition to the British there. They were never particularly welcome to rule over others.

But the opposition amongst Egyptians was much stronger than the opposition to the British. And so in the context of Egypt, the British became a pawn that different sides of Egyptian politics would use to get their wishes across.

The rest of Africa was also in play.

Britain had acquired Tanganyika, which is Tanzania today. France then also got Senegal in Togo. South Africa, which was the only African country with a substantial white settler population, and therefore also a member of the League of Nations-- that's back to that racist context-- got what we now call Namibia.

Let's talk a little bit about South Africa. It was different from the rest of Africa, as I mentioned, because it had a substantial white settler population that dated back to the 17th century. There were two main groups at play in South Africa. And I'll talk about them, because they're going to be really important over the rest of the 20th century.

There were the Afrikaners. They were white. They were descendants of Dutch settlers. And they loathed black Africans. And they loathed the British.

They loathed black Africans, because they were largely racists. And they considered themselves to be superior to them, back to eugenics. And they didn't like the British, who they saw as just too liberal.

The British, racist as they might have been in the colonial empires, however, did understand that in order to establish productive colonial relationships, you couldn't be cruel to the people you ruled over. And so the British in South Africa were more recent settlers to South Africa. And they were really uncomfortable with the racial laws that the Afrikaners were so keen on.

And this would become a pretty significant tension in South Africa in the 20th century history of South Africa.

Because this sort of concern, these rough racial laws that the Afrikaners were so keen on, would become the apartheid policies. And the apartheid policies are going to have a significant effect over the sort of world politics in the 20th century. And they are the policies that Nelson Mandela would successfully fight to abolish, but not until 1993. India, which had been a British colony since 1958 is going to be involved in these South African racial tensions in the 1920s. Let me tell you how. South Africa did not just have white settlers and African inhabitants there. There was a significant amount of movement from the sort of Indian territories, Indian colonies into South Africa, kind of immigration you would call it.

And a London-trained Indian lawyer who worked in South Africa lead a protest movement in South Africa against restrictions that limited the movement of Indians. Because Indians were neither white nor are they black. But in this South African practice, they needed to have a pass that would allow them to move.

Because they were technically considered not white. As non-whites, they did not have freedom of movement. And this lawyer used British law to argue that, as a British subject, they were not required to subject themselves to these rules, these restrictions.

And he was successful. And he realized that British law could be used, could be mobilized, to start protests that would lift the restrictions on Indians in their own country. This man was called Mahatma Gandhi.

So the South African restrictions and his success that he had in South Africa were a significant part of the movement that he started in the 1920s in India. So India becomes independent, in large consequence because of Gandhi's peaceful demonstrations, but not until the 1940s. In the 1920s, Gandhi would inspire peaceful resistance.

And largely, it really starts in India, because of a riot in 1919 that was viciously and violently sort of pushed down. It was a massacre. It's known as the Amritsar Massacre in which a British general orders the troops to fire on unarmed crowds to sort of stop a riot.

And this massacre made it really difficult for anyone to argue that British rule was for India's good. Now, you might agree that British rule was not for India's good. But if you were British, that didn't mean that you didn't think that it was for your own good.

And so in the 1920s, what Gandhi would start doing would be to peacefully resist the occupation, the colonial rule of the British. And what the Indian government, or at least the British government in India would do, would be try to tax India into submission. So when Gandhi called for a boycott of foreign cloth in 1921, the British would throw them into jail and would increase taxes on Indians.Gandhi used his policy of nonviolence for the next 20 years. And the turbulence in the 1920s in India are really not just around the British. India's an extremely large country. And it had two main religion, the Hindi religion and the Muslim religion.

And in the 1920s, there's conflict of sovereignty of India, the sovereignty in conflict with the British colony. And there's conflict among Indians along religious lines. And this conflict both around ethnicity and around sovereignty is going to mirror much of what is going on in other colonies.

You will see, in the 1920s, nationalist movements in defiance of colonial powers, and then often also internally in defiance of internal ethnic agreements in Burma, in Kenya, in the Philippines, in Java, in Hong Kong, in French Indochina-- so this is not limited to the British colonies-- in Cyprus, in Nigeria, and in Jamaica. So World War I might be over in the 1920s. By now, it doesn't mean that the world is at peace. By no means is the end of one enormous global conflict the end of all conflicts.

And while in Europe and in the US, the economies were building, and the arts and the sciences flourish with sort of the advent of technology that allows for many different ways of expressing arts and science, the rest of the world is dealing with unfinished business. Colonialism simply doesn't mix well with nationalism and self- determination. So if you add to this the powder keg that were the punishing World War I peace treaties and the suspicion among some people that they're better and the conviction among many people that they deserve better than what they got out of the World War I treaties, and then you add to that the fact that there's this idea that not only is there such a thing as racial superiority, but that this racial superiority can scientifically be translated into power, and then that power can be translated into territorial power, well, you get a sense of what lies ahead in the 1930s.