04.1 Hist 20 podcast: 1930-1939

events in the 4th decade of the 20th C

Transcript

University of California UCOP | podcast 4.1

Hi, everyone. It's the 1930s now. And I've got news for you. The 1930s actually started in 1929. I know. There I go

again, messing up your dates and when decades actually begin. But when the US stock market crashed on

October 29, 1929 on a day that would eventually be remembered as Black Tuesday, that sent the US into an

economic tailspin that pretty much dragged the rest of the world with it.

And that tailspin had such wide-ranging consequences and can be considered at the origin of much of the

extremism we'll see in the 1930s that will lead all the way to World War II, that we can essentially say that the

decade of the 1930s and its most defining event, world event, the war, really did start in 1929. But more

importantly, or just as importantly, this economic recession that started in 1929 also fundamentally altered the

United States' attitudes towards the rest of the world. The United States was already becoming a more isolationist

country. As you remember, it hadn't joined the League of Nations in the 1920s.

And this recession, the lack of resources that the recession essentially meant, really did warrant an inward focus.

The United States couldn't go to war under the current circumstances. And so the recession really made this

isolationism policy. Also, this policy acquired a name with regards to its Latin American neighbors.

You might have heard of the Good Neighbor policy, which was proclaimed by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. That

policy's main principle was that there would be a policy or an attitude of nonintervention and noninterference in the

domestic affairs of Latin American countries. The United States would not intervene and not interfere.

He reinforced that the United States would be a good neighbor, that there would be reciprocal exchange between

the United States and Latin American countries, that they would be respectful of each other, but largely

independent of each other. And it's because of the Good Neighbor policy that the United States terminated the

occupation of Nicaragua in 1933 and its occupation of Haiti in 1934. It annulled the Platt Amendment in Cuba in

1934.

And when Mexico nationalized the foreign-owned oil assets in Mexico, of which the United States was a significant

owner, in 1938, essentially when it divested those American interests and made the Mexican, the United States

did not intervene. It just accepted the outcome in 1938. Now, there are many reasons why the United States

would not go to war with Mexico over this nationalization in 1938.

And one of them is not just the Good Neighbor policy, but the fact that in 1938, it looked increasingly like the world

was on the brink of war. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let me focus on the world economic crisis in 1929.

By 1930, in order to get out of the recession that was brought on by this crash, President Roosevelt had focusedon a series of economic plans that would focus on public works projects, that regulated banks, that tried to

establish price control to control inflation, and overproduction. That created incentive programs for farmers to buy

their farms and to improve land cultivation. And he also created the first social security system, the social security

system we still have today, so that the poor, the sick, and the unemployed could be provided for. And this sounds

pretty good, right? I mean, who would object to that?

Well, not everybody thought that was such a great idea. Some people were really concerned that what seemed an

increasingly centralized control over the economy that was coming from the executive. Actually, on both sides of

the political aisle, there was concern that Roosevelt's policies were reflective of policies other less-democratic

rulers were implementing.

They were worried that Roosevelt was establishing a centrally-planned economy that looked a lot like what Stalin

was doing in Russia and what Mussolini was doing in Italy. And, you know, there are many ways in which we can

assess what Roosevelt was doing and come to the conclusion that he was not at all a dictator and that he was

very much unlike Stalin in Russia or Mussolini in Italy or Franco in Spain. And And he wasn't a military leader. But

that really is the least of it.

Let's focus a little bit on these concerns. What concerns were there about these authoritarian leaders in Europe in

the '30s? Mussolini was the first. He took power in 1922.

And I know, I know, it's the wrong decade. But bear with me. During the time of social upheaval, again, all tied to

the end of World War I, which by the way the social upheaval, Mussolini had helped stir that up to a large extent.

He then marched onto Rome and asked the Italian King to appoint him prime minister, so that he could end the

political violence.

So like an arsonist who becomes a firefighter, Mussolini presented himself as the solution to the problem he had

started. And the country was sufficiently destabilized that a strong man like Mussolini, established some order.

Mussolini, in fact, is the one that coined the term fascism. And he defined it roughly like this.

First, all power should go to the state. Second, individuals should submit to the will of the state. Third the state

should control private enterprise, especially heavy interests. So not all private interest, but should have a

significant influence on it.

And fourth, the state should control education. And as a bonus, and this is sort of the real fascist twist, one man

should control the state. These five points, there's just no way that you could think that Franklin Delano Roosevelt

was even remotely connected to this type of definition of power.

But that's not the case. People were concerned about that level of concentration of power. But rather than try toanalyze whether Franklin Roosevelt was a fascist dictator, which we know he wasn't, let's think about the copycats

that Mussolini had.

By the time Adolf Hitler won the elections in Germany in 1933-- I'm so sorry about that. Portugal and Spain where

well on their way to fascist regime. Hungry, Poland, Albania, Yugoslavia, they all suffered military coups and were

becoming increasingly authoritarian. Romania and Austria were ruled by mostly military strongmen. So there are

quite a few countries in Europe that have authoritarian military leaders at the helm.

It's really no accident that the destabilization caused by the end of the many long-standing empires at the end of

World War I would cause this sort of political imbalance. And where there's political volatility, there's room for a

dictator to take power and to promise a return to some previous ideal or a future glory.

And in the aftermath of World War I, as the League of Nations tried to figure out how to build peace and largely

failed and while the cosmopolitan cities of Europe and America celebrated the end of the war by making music

and theater and art and new technologies, other people looked askance at what they considered a world gone

awry. Fascism's infamous contribution to the political history is its ability to turn people against each other,

because of a threat that is personified. You see this especially in Germany.

But the loss of the war, the wealth discrepancy between the seemingly successful city dwellers and the

impoverished factory workers and rural workers, collide into a narrative that the war was lost, because of

weakness in Germany. The war was lost, because its leaders were weak. And they were weak, because they

were not focused on Germany first.

And that is if only Germany could focus on its own people and its own economy, then it would prosper. And it

could avenge the loss of the previous war. So this is narrative that all is not well and what's not well is largely

because of weakness, and that weakness has something to do with others and that if only the particular country,

Germany, could just be more German, it could fix this.

This nationalistic narrative repeats itself across populist regimes in the 1930s. It's very rare. In fact, I don't think

I've ever seen a dictator appeal to diversity, to value diversity in their nation's people. Generally, a dictator appeals

to certain key values that are held above all others that are fetishized as unique to their people that nobody else

has and that embody the essence of what it means to be, in this case, German, or Italian, or Japanese.

Often once the narrative starts being told it starts calling out behaviors that are aberrant, behaviors that don't

comply with the definition of what that country's values are supposed to be. And the narrative will draw attention to

specific groups of people who represent this aberration. So the story then will be that these people, specifically

this group of people, is what's wrong. This is the reason why we are not great. If we can get rid of these people,we will acquire greatness again.

And so these people, this particular group of people, become the obstacle to the country's greatness. They

become the reason that nation is weak. They become the target of policies to remove them from the country,

because the strategy for strength requires getting rid of them.

And, again, Germany is a excellent example of this tactic. But it wasn't the only one. But this does bring us to Adolf

Hitler. It's often tempting to think of him as an aberration, as a unique form of evil, that before him, nobody could

be this terrible. And after him, we never saw this kind of evil again.

To be sure, Hitler was worse than most. He certainly perfected the art of being a really nasty guy. But he before

he became the worst person ever, he had a lot in common with other leaders.

And he was elected, which means he must have had some appeal. So let's think about what people might have

liked about him. As we've seen, in the 1920s were a roaring good time. But the Weimar Republic, the name by

which the German post-war republic was called, could not withstand, eventually, the economic shock of the Wall

Street crash. The

After the World War, the Weimar Republic had rewritten the constitution to guarantee civil rights to everyone,

political freedom for all. But it was constantly besieged by political threats. It was threatened by communists who

tried to stage a violent coup which was inspired by the Russian Revolution.

But the republic resisted long enough to then have to withstand a power grab by ex-army veterans of World War I

who felt that it was the Republic's fault. And in a sense, Weimar had yielded too quickly. That these reparations

that Germany was now paying were the fault of the Republic. Now, the coup by the ex-army veterans only failed,

because all the labor unions called a general strike.

And, ultimately, the Weimar Republic survived. But it survived a very short time before the economy melted out

from them. And there's a reason for that.

For the years after World War I, the United States had really helped this fragile German Republic out with loans in

US dollars. And after the stock market crash, those loans were called in. Not only were those loans called in, but

worldwide economic production crashed.

So Germany owed money, and it couldn't generate the income to pay any of it back. So unemployment soared in

Germany. And the government seemed incapable of doing anything to stop the bleed. And in the face of that sort

of what seemed to be a government that couldn't control the outcome of what was happening, the extremists were

back on the street.Know people were scared of communism, because of that earlier coup attempt, that they figured they'd side with

what they considered to be the lesser of two evils. And in this case, that was the Nazi party. So if you put fascism

and eugenics, which is this fake pseudo-science of human excellence and racial purity, if you put those two things

in a blender, you get the Nazi Party.

It's interesting, Mussolini, the original fascist, wasn't particularly concerned with racial purity. In fact, if you were

looking for anti-Semitic countries in Europe before 1930-- and anti-Semitic means countries that were overtly

intolerant of Jews-- before 1930s, you'd probably end up in France, Poland, and Russia. Those were three

countries that were explicitly anti-Jewish.

Russia had been staging raids against Jews for decades by then. Germany, by contrast, was tolerant. Germany

didn't particularly care about religious affiliation. It was loosely Protestant. But really, it was not part of its identity.

And Berlin and many other German cities were really quite progressive. In fact, the early sex reassignment

surgeries were performed by German doctors in Berlin and Dresden. All this tolerance and free spirit would

change under the Nazi regime.

And it's strange, because by the 1920s, we were headed in a very different direction. And why do you think this

happens? Why do you think people will, in a sense, endure these shifts to totalitarian regimes? What is it that

makes these reversals possible?

And the thing is as long as you're not in the category of people identified as enemies of the state, or in the case of

Germany people identified as Jewish or communists or any other of the categories that the Nazis would eventually

identify as non-German or anti-German, as long as you didn't misbehave, your life could be pretty great in fascist

Italy or in Germany. I mean, the government provided work. Sometimes it even provided free holidays. And

always, always it provided a sense of pride in your nation or in their nation.

The government promised a better future. And to many people, it did. And a slight curtailment of civil liberties or a

curtailment of other people's civil liberties or greater liberties, liberties to live, to vote, to be a citizen, those all

seem like a small price to pay. And so like the frog in slowly warming pot of water, people really couldn't sense

how these increasing threats would ultimately affect them, too.

It's easy to look at Germany's invasion of the Sudetenland in what is now Czechoslovakia as the sort of most

important thing on the road to World War II. But I'm going to argue that it was, in fact, the Italian invasion of

Abyssinia that set the tone for what would follow. So let's look at this minor part of Italian history, or a major part. It

depends which way you look at it.Abyssinia was a part of the Kingdom of Ethiopia over which Italy, which hadn't really been a very large colonial

power, had designs in the early 20th century. So when Italy invaded it in 1935, it in fact claimed that Abyssinia had

invaded them. And I urge you to take a look at a map.

And in retaliation for the Abyssinians invading them, which in fact had been the Italians invading Abyssinia,

Mussolini ordered a full scale invasion in retaliation. So Mussolini ordered an invasion in retaliation for an act

nobody had committed except for Mussolini himself. And not only did the Italian Army then spent six months laying

waste to Ethiopia, they then sprayed the capital, Addis Ababa, with poison gas.

So, a pretty horrific exercise in which a territory, a country, is goaded into defending itself, then accused of being

the perpetrator of the crime, and then gassed. You'd think that there'd be some form of public outcry. Maybe, I

don't know, the League of Nations is going to do something, because this is unacceptable inhumane behavior.

Well, actually, on the contrary. France and Britain looked the other way. They were perfectly happy to let Mussolini

carve out Ethiopia. And the League of Nations was powerless. They were worried of alienating Mussolini. So they

didn't really do anything.

That was a pretty poor calculation. Because what did Hitler learn from this? Well, he learned that he could

probably do the same and get away with it. So when he sent troops into the Rhineland, which is right next to

France and was a clear violation of the Treaty of Versailles, no one did anything.

When Germany and Italy and Japan signed mutual support pacts, no one did anything. Then Germany annexed

Austria in 1938. If any of you have seen the movie Sound of Music, that's the context. Well, guess what? No one

did anything.

Finally, when Hitler demanded that area of territory that it lost in World War I, the Sudetenland that is now in

Czechoslovakia, all of a sudden the British and the French think, well, OK, wait. Hold on, wait a second. Maybe we

should do something.

But really what could they do? You know, France was in political turmoil. And if they went to war with Germany, it's

most likely that they would have lost or fallen into complete civil disarray, like Spain.

The British, they didn't have enough of an army to fight Germany. And they were much more concerned about

Japan and sort of the threat that Japan posed to their Far East colonies. Most Europeans were kind of agreed on

the fact that the Versailles Treaty had been too harsh.

And so when Germany demanded access or sort of demanded the Sudetenland back, which had originally been

German, they said, well, you know, maybe since most of the people who live there are ethnically German anyway,maybe Hitler has a point. Maybe he should have that territory back. And even if anybody had thought that maybe

they should sort of take action against that, rearming would take time. And most people really didn't want another

war.

So in light of this, France and Britain chose appeasement. They decided that they were going to keep Hitler

talking, that they'd keep the negotiations open, and that that would probably be the best option, right? As long as

they were talking, they weren't at war. They could probably, maybe, avoid the wars by letting Hitler have some of

what he wanted.

Well, the outcome of appeasement was World War II. Hitler didn't just want the Sudeten. He wanted it all.

And he wasn't just interested in German territorial power. He wanted German purity. It would take a while, a

couple of years, for the French and the British and eventually everyone else to catch onto this. And we'll take a

look at what that outcome is in the next decade.