The democracies of the West were tested in the
period after the war. If they failed to retain the
active support of the people, then others were
ready to take over power. To the right, fascist
movements and later the Nazi movement developed,
promising new solutions. To the left, the
communists pointed to the Soviet Union and the
new society being created there as the right goal
for all progressive peoples.
Before the Great War the triumph of liberal
democracy had seemed certain in the West. Even
Russia had begun to establish embryonic parliamentary
institutions, and Italy had extended the
vote to all adult males. The war, which ended
with the victory of the democracies, might have
been expected to confirm the superiority of the
parliamentary form of government. The tide first
turned against democracy in Russia after the revolution
of 1917, in Italy in the 1920s with
Mussolini and the emergence of the fascists.
Forms of fascism spread to a number of the new
Balkan successor states of the Habsburg Empire.
Czechoslovakia was the shining exception, a
bastion of Western liberal ideas and institutions in
Eastern and central Europe. The most critical
question was whether Germany would become a
liberal democracy.
The immediate danger from the Bolsheviks
faded. The Polish defeat of the Red Army in 1920
halted any dream of spreading revolution with the
Red Army in the vanguard. Lenin and Stalin did
not lose their sense of isolation and insecurity. On
the contrary, they expected the capitalist West to
turn on communist Russia and crush it. In foreign
relations the initiative nevertheless passed out of
the hands of the Kremlin. Soviet policy in the
1920s was directed to increasing the difficulties of
‘imperialist’ Britain by encouraging the colonial
peoples, especially in Asia, to struggle for independence.
Another objective was to divide the
Western democratic nations from each other;
separate agreements of technical and military
cooperation were concluded with the government
of Weimar Germany (Treaty of Rapallo, 1922;
Berlin, 1926). Even while cooperating, however,
the third prong of Soviet policy, surreptitiously
masterminded by the Comintern, was to promote
internal disruption within the Western democracies
with the objective of weakening them and
so making it a safer world for the first and only
communist state – Russia. In Weimar politics the
German Communist Party exerted a harmful
influence on the attempts to construct a parliamentary
democracy. Thus, although the Soviet
Union lacked the strength to endanger peace in
Europe directly, communist tactics in the democratic
states and fear of communism were among
the formative influences of the 1920s.
The communists were weakest in the country
which they had mistakenly believed would lead
the ‘capitalist assault’ on the Soviet Union one
day. There was never any danger between the two
world wars that Britain would deviate from its
evolutionary democratic path. The tradition of
parliament, the impartial administration of the
law and civic freedoms of the individual were too
deeply embedded in the British way of life to be
overthrown by any authoritarian movement. But,
within the constitutional framework the struggle
for ‘social justice’ increased. Working people
demanded the satisfaction of basic economic
rights; they called for state intervention to assure
them of these rights should this prove necessary;
they wanted work, a decent wage and adequate
support for themselves and their families when
out of work or unable to work due to sickness;
they expected the ending of bad housing and, as
they became increasingly aware of their disadvantaged
position in society, a better future for their
children. Industry, the manufacturers and the
mine owners all looked back to before the war
and wanted to be rid of all wartime government
control and direction, though not subsidies when
forthcoming.
The majority of the Conservatives believed in
market forces to remedy the economic difficulties,
in sound money and in a balanced budget.
Government’s business in the direct control of
industry, they believed, was to divest itself as
rapidly as possible of such controls as had been
brought in during the war. The Labour Party had
scarcely begun in the 1920s to translate socialist
aspirations into practical policies. That work was
not done until the 1940s. Meanwhile the Labour
Party knew clearly what it did not want: communism
on the Russian model. The small British
Communist Party was refused affiliation to the
Labour Party and in the mid-1920s communists
could no longer be individual members of the
Labour Party. The Labour Party, supported by the
Trades Union Congress, sought power within the
constitution knowing that to be tainted with communism
would drive away moderate political support.
It became the main opposition party, and
held office on its own twice during this period,
briefly in 1924 as a minority government and from
1929 until the financial debacle of 1931.
Labour prospered on the decay of the once
great Liberal Party. The Liberal Party had lost its
identity, its reforming policies absorbed by the
Conservatives to the right, with Labour to the left
offering a dynamic alternative to Conservative
rule. The working man’s vote in the industrial
towns swung to Labour; many Liberal supporters
deserted liberalism for the Conservatives, giving
the latter an almost unbroken hold of power in the
inter-war years. The Liberals in the post-war years
had neither great national causes nor political
leaders who could command a mass personal following
as Gladstone had once done. Lloyd
George appeared the obvious candidate, the man
through whose energy and leadership Britain’s
war effort had been galvanised to victory; Lloyd
George had then become a leader on the world
stage at the Paris Peace Conference. His standing
in 1919 was, indeed, high. As prime minister of a
coalition government of those Liberals who followed
him and the Conservatives, the elections of
December 1918 gave the Conservative–Lloyd
Georgian Liberal coalition parties a landslide victory.
The Liberals under Asquith, who opposed
them, won no more than twenty-eight seats.
Labour, with 2.3 million votes and sixty-three
seats, for the first time became the main opposition
party. This election marked a profound
change in British politics. The results, moreover,
reflected a greatly enlarged electorate. For the first
time the vote was exercised by women over thirty;
having proven during the war that they could do
a man’s job on the land and in factories, women
could no longer be denied the vote.
For a time Lloyd George’s personal ascendancy
obscured the collapse of Liberal support in
the country. He had agreed with his coalition
partner, Andrew Bonar Law, the leader of the
Conservatives, that the Conservatives would
support 159 Liberal candidates, and the majority,
133, were elected as a result. Nevertheless, the
Conservatives predominated over Lloyd Georgian
Liberals in the coalition by almost three to one.
This meant Lloyd George was at the mercy of
Conservative support. They would drop him for
a Conservative leader when he ceased to be an
electoral asset. And that is what they did in 1922.
An immediate problem facing post-war Britain
was Ireland. ‘Home rule’ was no longer enough
for the Irish nationalists, whose cause had been
spectacularly enhanced by the Easter rising in
Dublin in 1916. Sinn Féin fought the general
election of December 1918, won all but four seats
outside Ulster, and met in Dublin – those
members not in prison – in a self-constituted Irish
parliament which promptly declared the whole of
Ireland an independent republic. Bloodshed,
guerrilla war and the breakdown of law and order
followed. The ‘Troubles’ began in 1919. Allied
with Sinn Féin was the Irish Republican Army
(IRA) which attacked the armed police (Royal
Irish Constabulary) and the British volunteer
troops known as the Black and Tans. The IRA
attempted to force the British government in
London to recognise Irish independence. It was
the worst sort of violent conflict – civil war,
without battle lines, carried on by ambush, assassination
and murder on both sides.
Two problems stood in the way of a solution:
Lloyd George’s refusal to grant total independence
without any link with Britain, and the attitude
of the six counties of Ulster, where a
majority of Protestants fiercely defended union,
refusing to be merged with the predominantly
Catholic south. An attempted British solution
of December 1920 did not satisfy the south.
Atrocities on both sides multiplied. But an appeal
by the king in June 1921 led to a truce and a
negotiated settlement that December. The Irish
Free State became a Dominion and so remained
within the British Empire, and the six counties of
Ulster were granted the right to vote themselves
out of independent Ireland and so remain a part
of the United Kingdom. But the Irish leaders in
London, in accepting partition, brought about a
new civil war in Ireland in 1922 with those who
rejected the treaty. Not until the spring of 1923
was Ireland at peace, with partition a fact. Yet the
seeds of conflict tragically remained.
Dominion status in practice meant independence.
The other British Dominions were independent,
though the personal links between
Dominion leaders and the British political leaders
remained close and every Dominion except the
Irish Free State independently joined Britain in
declaring war on Germany in September 1939. As
significant as this insistence of the right of the
‘white Dominions’ to exercise independence was
Britain’s declared intention to extend Dominion
status to the ‘brown empire’. During the war, in
1917, the British government had declared that
its aim was ‘responsible government’ for India.
Fourteen years later, in 1931, a viceroy of India
had advanced this to ‘Dominion status’ for India
eventually. No one in Britain believed this would
come about for a generation or two. But the
major Indian independence party, the Congress
Party, agitated for independence to be conceded
quickly.
During the 1930s Mahatma (‘great-souled’)
Gandhi had launched his remarkable movement
of non-violent passive resistance to the British–
Indian authorities. He served notice to the Raj
that India could not be ruled in the long run
without the consent of the Indian masses. And
these masses of the poor of India were responding
to a Western-educated lawyer, now turned
into a holy man and skilled politician all in one,
walking the length and breadth of India wearing
a loincloth and carrying a stick. The emaciated
figure of Gandhi was as powerful a symbol for
change as the strutting militaristic dictators of
Europe. His teaching of how the poor and powerless
could force the hand of the powerful
and armed proved to be one of the most potent
influences in the world of the twentieth century.
Violence in Ireland and mass protest movements
in India did not complete Britain’s difficulties.
Nearer home British governments from
1920 down to the present day became preoccupied
with Britain’s relative industrial decline, the
threat of falling living standards and, most of all,
the miseries of unemployment. Britain was not a
happy land between the wars. The problem was
deep-seated and arose from a combination of
changes. Britain had increasingly derived earnings
from trading as well as manufacture to offset the
cost of importing food and raw materials. After a
short post-war boom world trade contracted, particularly
in the 1930s, and the earnings from
carrying the world’s trade fell correspondingly.
There was no demand for more ships, and the
shipyards of Scotland and north-east England
became symbols of the deepest depression and
unemployment.
World patterns of trade were also changing.
Britain’s traditional trade in textiles and other
goods to the empire suffered as the poor of the
world became even poorer. As raw material prices
fell with slackening industrial activity so the
poorest parts of the world earned less and less;
this in turn gave them less to spend on British
goods. Then textile factories, the first stage of
industrialisation, were springing up in India and
Japan and with their low labour costs drove
Britain out of many traditional markets. Actually
Britain was remarkably successful in developing
the industries of the second industrial revolution,
the chemical, electrical and motor industries. But
these successes could not take up the slack of
Britain’s pre-war traditional exports.
The coal industry was one of the worst affected.
The mines were not efficient, and demand for
coal slackened with declining industrial activity in
Europe and the competition of oil. The powerful
miners’ union saw nationalisation as the solution
that would enable the numerous privately owned
mines to be developed on a national basis. The
mine owners, faced with declining profits, argued
for increasing hours and cutting wages. But the
owners’ case was weakened by the fact that they
had not used their large profits of the war years
to modernise the mines. The mines had then been
under state control and the miners were embittered
when Lloyd George returned them to their
owners’ control in 1921. A miners’ strike failed
to win better terms. In 1925 a strike was narrowly
averted when the government paid a temporary
subsidy to the mines to prevent wage cuts, and
set up an inquiry. The report of this inquiry (the
Samuel Commission) the following year found
much in favour of the miners’ view but rejected
nationalisation and suggested that less drastic cuts
in wages were probably inevitable. The miners
were anxious to avoid a strike which would bring
hardship to themselves, but in negotiating with
the owners refused to countenance any further
cut in wages or increase in hours. At the end of
April 1926 the government subsidy came to an
end and the mine owners now locked out the
miners.
The importance of the dispute with the miners
lay in the fact that it led to the General Strike of
1926, the most widespread and dramatic breakdown
of Britain’s industrial relations for a
century. It lasted only nine days from 3 to 12 May
1926. But these days manifested Britain’s division
into the labouring class and the middle and upper
classes, who for the main part wished to break the
strike. There was more involved than a strike
of miners. The Trades Union Congress (TUC)
involved itself and in doing so involved organised
labour on the one hand, and the prime minister
Stanley Baldwin and the British government on
the other. Its sincere intention was to facilitate a
compromise settlement between the mine owners
and the miners. When these efforts foundered the
TUC used its industrial muscle to call out on
strike key industries, including transport. The
government countered by putting into practice
carefully worked-out emergency measures to keep
the essential services going. The TUC’s attempt
to force the government to coerce the mine
owners failed, though the rank and file overwhelmingly
supported the call to strike. What was
the strike really about then? It certainly was not
an attempt to bring about a revolution. It was not
purely industrial either. At the end of the General
Strike, which the TUC called off, the miners were
left to fight their own battle, which lasted several
bitter months.
In the 1920s and 1930s Conservativedominated
governments of the Lloyd George,
Baldwin and Chamberlain era were socially conscious
and anxious to pass measures that would
protect the sick and unemployed and help the
poor. Their finance was orthodox, believing the
country was best served by sound money and balanced
budgets but not by direct control of industry.
The minority Labour government of 1924
was just as orthodox in financial questions as the
Conservatives. Neither Conservatives nor Labour
followed policies of confrontation and even the
General Strike was not a confrontation that either
side had been keen to invite. What would be held
against the governments of the inter-war years
was the persistence of 1 million unemployed, and
much higher numbers during the most severe
years of depression, concentrated above all in the
north of the country. No government knew how
to ‘cure’ this unemployment in the prevailing
international conditions. It was the biggest argument
against ‘democracy’, yet the great majority
of the British electorate turned neither to fascism
nor to communism.
France emerged the victor from the Great War,
but no country, excepting Russia, had suffered
more physical damage, human and material. In
the struggle for power on the European continent,
France was the loser. Population losses had
been such that there were now three German for
every two French. French industry had been devastated
in northern France. The war had deeply
scarred the towns and countryside of this region,
whereas no battles, apart from the early encounters
in East Prussia, had been fought on German
soil. One in every five Frenchmen had been
mobilised during the war (one in eight in Britain),
1.4 million killed and another three-quarters of a
million permanently invalided. Put another way,
it has been calculated that for every ten men
between the ages of twenty and forty-five, two
were killed, one was totally invalided and three
were incapacitated for long periods of time,
leaving only four available for work. The French
governments faced the common problems of
demobilisation and changeover from wartime and
industrial controls to a peacetime economy. In
addition the French had to cope with the task of
reconstruction in the war-torn regions of France.
The acquisition of Alsace-Lorraine and the
utilisation of the Saar mines were important compensations
for the losses suffered, but did not
cancel them out. Financially France was in a difficult
plight. The government had financed the
war not by taxes but largely by making loans at
home and receiving loans from Britain and the
US. After the war, yet more money had to be
found for reconstruction and invalid or widows’
pensions. France was dependent on the goodwill
of the US and Britain. It was also dependent on
receiving reparations from Germany to cover the
gap between what it could earn and what it spent.
French needs and policies in the 1920s have
not received the understanding and sympathy
they deserve. In British judgement, the French
were acting vindictively and arrogantly towards
defeated Germany, and thus were responsible in
part for Germany’s fervent nationalism and for
delaying a ‘normalisation’ and pacification of
Western Europe. Britain came to see its role not
as an ally of France so much as a mediator
between France and ‘helpless’ Germany in the
interests of creating a new balance of power. This
British attitude of ‘conditional’ support could
only strengthen France’s anxieties about its longterm
security once Germany had revived its
strength.
For France the ‘German problem’ was insoluble,
because France alone could not enforce any
solution in the long run. Britain and the US could
express their disapproval effectively by applying
financial pressure on a weakened French economy.
But the exaction of reparations from Germany
was, for France, not only a necessary financial
operation; far more was involved. Nothing less
than the question of whether Germany would be
required, and if necessary forced, by the Allies to
abide by all the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.
On that issue depended the security of France.
If Germany could set aside reparations with
impunity, then why not also the military restrictions
and finally the territorial clauses of Versailles?
Marshal Foch had expressed these deep fears when
he called the Treaty of Versailles no more than a
twenty-year truce. France had already lost one pillar
of its security when the Senate of the US failed
to ratify the Treaty of Guarantee, and Britain, too,
according to its original terms, had backed out.
The second pillar of its security was the Allied
(including its own) right to occupy the Rhineland
zones and to continue to do so beyond the five-,
ten- and fifteen-year periods specified if Germany
did not fulfil its obligations under the Treaty
of Versailles. After the failure of the Treaty of
Guarantee, the French were naturally all the
more determined to maintain their rights. In the
third pillar, the League of Nations, the French
realistically did not place much faith.
In March 1921, with the Germans appearing
to be evading the military and financial obligations
placed on them, the French, with Britain’s
blessing and cooperation, occupied three industrial
German towns. Almost immediately afterwards
the Germans were presented with the total
reparations bill of 132 billion gold marks (£6,600
million) and a method of payment. The Germans
gave way. Reparations were regularly resumed
until the end of 1922. Then the Germans
defaulted once again and disputed with Poincaré,
by then prime minister, the amounts due and
already delivered. Despite British disapproval,
French and Belgian troops occupied the industrial
Ruhr in January 1923, ostensibly with the object
of collecting what was due. The more important
objective was to weaken Germany’s reviving
power by occupying its most important industrial
region. French uncertainties about Germany’s
ultimate intentions had been increased by the
murder of Rathenau, by the political instability of
the country and by what appeared to be deliberate
attempts to evade its obligations.
The French move was no sudden reaction but
the result of a carefully thought-out policy. It
separated France from Britain, as the Germans
could not fail to note, and they exploited the split
successfully in the 1920s. The German government
called an industrial boycott in the Ruhr,
thereby providing the French with a reason for
staying there; only the German coal owners
refused to behave so patriotically and continued
delivering coal to the French. The ruin of German
finances, which was the consequence of Germany’s
decision to order industrial passive resistance
in the Ruhr, was a victory of sorts for
Poincaré. In outward appearance his resistance to
British mediating pressure seemed justified too.
He demanded that the Germans call off their
industrial boycott before fresh negotiations over
reparations could be started to resolve the underlying
problem that had led to the occupation. In
September 1923 the new Stresemann government
abandoned resistance and agreed to resume
reparations payments.
All along, however, reparations had been only
part of the reason for the conflict. The French felt
too weak to control the Germans single-handed.
The years 1923–4 marked France’s last effort to
attain what it had failed to secure at Versailles, a
means of checking the future threat of German
preponderance in Europe. France failed in 1924
and had to bow to the pressure of the US and
Britain. This was marked by its agreement that
experts should work out a new reparations settlement
which, when accepted by Germany, would
leave France no excuse to stay in the Ruhr. The
American expert Charles G. Dawes gave his name
to the reparations plan of 1924; it did not fix a
final total but, as expected, scaled down the
immediate annual payments and coupled payment
to a loan to the Germans. The Germans accepted
the plan and with the restoration of the value of
their currency became internationally creditworthy.
Poincaré fell from power. Briand, who
returned to power, had no option but to end
the occupation. Meanwhile, all the efforts that the
French had made to encourage separation in the
Rhineland failed.
The French had to make the best of the situation.
The outcome was the European reconciliation
of Locarno. Briand and Stresemann to all
outward appearances had buried wartime enmities.
In the Locarno Treaties, signed on 16
October 1925, the Germans renounced any
desire to change their western frontier with
France and so accepted the loss of Alsace-
Lorraine. Britain and Italy guaranteed the
western frontiers and the continued demilitarisation
of Rhineland against a ‘flagrant breach’, and
engaged themselves to aid the victim of aggression
whether France or Germany. The British
congratulated themselves that their original
Versailles obligations were now lessened, since
‘flagrant’ was an adjective open to different interpretation.
The French sadly noted that they had
secured British support not in an equal Anglo-
French alliance but with Britain in its new role
as mediator and arbitrator. Much would therefore
depend on the view Britain took of any
particular situation.
France was left with no secure allies. Its position
was worse than in 1914 when Russia, militarily,
had been a powerful and reliable ally. It had
a new alliance with Poland and Czechoslovakia,
but these two countries could not be relied on to
fight for French security, nor France for theirs,
for there was a ‘catch’ in the European security
arrangements. The Germans had refused to
include their eastern frontier with Czechoslovakia
and Poland in the Locarno Treaties package.
Britain and Italy did not act as guarantors of
these frontiers, either. The Germans had signed
arbitration treaties with Czechoslovakia and
Poland separately, but they were worth little. The
Germans could still resort to force if arbitration
did not give them what they wanted. Only the
separate alliances of Poland and Czechoslovakia
with France might deter Germany. But now, by
the terms of the Locarno Treaties, France would
be arraigned as the aggressor if the French army
sought to come to the aid of their eastern allies
by the only means available to them – an attack
on Germany. Britain was to exercise this ‘leverage’
to the full when, thirteen years later, France
declared itself ready to aid its Czech ally against
Germany in 1938. Britain then insisted that,
should such an eventuality lead to war with
Germany, it was not bound to help France.
In the new spirit of conciliation, France also
relinquished prematurely its territorial guarantees
permitted by Versailles, the occupation of the
Rhineland zones. In order to prove their goodwill,
Britain and France had pulled out their last
troops by 1930. The ‘goodwill’ and ‘faith’ were
not justified, as the later experience of the 1930s
was to show. Briand played this last card of defusing
the German problem by seeking to make
Germany and France the nucleus of a ‘new
Europe’, but in vain.
Where, then, was the most serious single
flaw in the way in which Britain and France,
with American financial connivance, dealt with
Germany? Was the right policy coercion or conciliation?
Both were tried, with some good results
and some bad. But the basic fault of Allied policy
lay in not maintaining Anglo-French unity after
the war. Allied policy of either coercion or conciliation
should have been based on strength, on
the capacity and determination to preserve peace
if ever again threatened by Germany. The French
realised this and tried to act as if they were strong.
It was Britain that basically undermined this
stance. Horrified by the Great War and the millions
of dead and maimed, it attempted to withdraw
and limit its European commitments. At
Locarno it had refused to guarantee the frontiers
of Poland and Czechoslovakia, an open invitation
to German revisionism. Britain acknowledged
that its strategic ‘frontier’ now ran along the
Rhine, but the British Cabinet was not willing to
match this concept militarily by maintaining a
British army capable of defending this supposedly
‘joint’ frontier. France alone stood as guardian of
the European frontiers of Versailles, and France
by itself was too weak for that role. Briand’s
policy of reconciliation was sincere enough; it
seemed also the only way left to achieve French
security.
Despite the grave uncertainties of France’s
European position, and weakness of its international
financial position, it achieved a spectacular
domestic recovery in the 1920s. The majority
of Frenchmen resisted the siren call of those on
the right, the fascist Action Française, or the
Communist Party on the extreme left, who
sought to overthrow the institutions of the Third
Republic.
The elections of November 1919 were won
by groups of the conservative right allied in a
Bloc National. Led by an ex-socialist, Alexandre
Millerand, its commanding figure was Clemenceau,
the ‘father of victory’. Behind the Bloc stood
big business interests and the mass of voters, especially
the peasantry frightened by the Bolshevik
bogey. They approved of a policy of dealing sternly
with Germany; exacting reparations rather than
paying taxes. Once elected, the Bloc National
reverted to the tradition of the Third Republic in
denying the presidency to Clemenceau in 1920.
They preferred a weak president, only this time
overdid it in electing a man who a few months later
had to retire into a mental home. Clemenceau’s
career, too, was ended.
The work of reconstruction was begun in
north-eastern France and with government credits
there was enough to do to ensure full employment
in the 1920s. Some concessions were also
made to the workers in legislating for an eighthour
day and conceding collective bargaining.
But control of industry was handed back to the
owners. The government was firmly opposed to
nationalisation and socialism. Among industrial
workers after the war there was much discontent.
Their wages had not kept pace with rising
prices. The main French trade union – the Confédération
Générale du Travail – was determined
to challenge the government in a series of large,
well-organised strikes. The socialist-inspired
strikes were as much political as economic.
Confident of the army and of majority electoral
support, the government would not yield; the
unions had no chance and lost. In the 1920s
French socialism split, as it did elsewhere in
Europe. The communists formed their own party
and separate trade union. The ‘democratic’ socialists,
led by Léon Blum, and democratic trade
unions organised themselves also. The split of the
‘left’ was mirrored by a split on the right,
Poincaré’s policies having failed to produce the
expected results in 1923.
The elections of 1924 gave power to a grouping
of centre radicals and socialists, the so-called
Cartel des Gauches. The Bloc National formed
the main opposition to the right, and the small
Communist Party to the left, but the presence of
the communists to their left, bitterly critical, had
the effect of inhibiting the socialists from collaborating
with the radicals of the centre. The split
of French socialism thus deprived the large socialist
electorate from exercising an influence in the
government of the Republic commensurate with
their strength. It was a formula for sterility.
Meanwhile the undoing of the Cartel government
was its inability to master the financial situation.
The franc fell precipitously in value. While
American loans were reaching Germany, the
French inability and refusal to negotiate a debt
settlement with the US closed the American
money market to the French. In 1926, the
Chamber turned once more to the strongman of
French politics, Poincaré. Poincaré was granted
special powers to restore France to financial
health, which he promptly succeeded in doing by
raising taxes and cutting expenditure. France now
experienced a few golden years of progress and
prosperity until the effects of the worldwide
slump made themselves seriously felt in France in
1933.
In industrial strength and influence the US had
emerged as a world power by the close of the First
World War. But victory left the American people
disillusioned with the role of world leadership
that Wilson had sought to thrust upon them. Yet
during the 1920s and 1930s there was no way in
which the Americans could opt out of world
affairs and return to what appeared only in retrospect
as a golden past of American self-sufficiency.
The immediate post-war mood favoured a
rapid return to freeing the individual American
from all constraints of wartime control and freeing
business too to get on with the job of expanding
American prosperity. An amiable conservative
Republican politician, Warren G. Harding, had
been elected to the White House in November
1920 on a campaign slogan that reflected the
public mood precisely: ‘less government in business
and more business in government’. Businessmen
were no longer depicted as the ‘robber
barons’ ruthlessly amassing wealth but as the
new patriotic leaders who would benefit the
average American. On 4 March 1921 Harding
was inaugurated. Big business was brought into
government with the appointment of Andrew
Mellon, one of the richest men of the US,
whose wealth was exceeded only by Rockefeller
and Ford, as secretary of the treasury. Mellon’s
fortune was founded on banking, channelling
money into steel, railroads and a wide range
of industry. There were other appointments of
men of proven ability: Herbert Hoover, Henry
Wallace and, as secretary of state to take charge
of foreign affairs, a brilliant lawyer, Charles Evans
Hughes. Unfortunately, Harding made grave
errors too in rewarding political cronies of his
own state, Ohio. The ‘Ohio gang’ were to surround
Harding in 1923 during the last months
of his administration with spectacular scandals of
corruption.
The early boom which had absorbed the exservicemen
in 1919 collapsed in 1920 and the
depression lasted until 1922. But then followed
seven years of remarkable economic expansion
and rising industrial prosperity led by the growth
of the automobile industry, electrical machinery
and appliances and building. Yet, the decade was
to close with the most severe and long-lasting
economic collapse in American history. The
1920s did not turn out to be the new era of
never-ending prosperity.
With hindsight the weaknesses of the 1920s
can be discerned. Industry, enjoying the protection
of a high tariff, had over-expanded as its productivity
had increased. Wages had failed to keep
pace with the increases in production. Big business
had successfully defeated the great waves of
strikes that spread across the country in 1919 by
characterising the strikers and their leaders as
Bolsheviks. Acts of terrorism in the cities were
blamed on the ‘radicals’ and communists. Antilabour
hysteria swept the country. Aliens were
arrested as suspected communists though few
were actually deported. The most celebrated case
of prosecution of suspected radicals arousing
worldwide interest was the arrest and conviction
in 1920 of two anarchists, Nicola Sacco and
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, for robbery and murder.
Liberals insisted that their trial was a travesty of
justice and called for their release. They were executed
all the same in 1927.
Intolerance and hysteria extended to other
minorities: black people were vulnerable as well as
Jews and Catholics. The racial prejudice by whites
and competition for work in the cities exploded
in racial riots in some twenty cities in 1919.
Before the Great War the great majority of the
black population had lived in the south. During
the war half a million African Americans sought
an escape from poverty by migrating to the industrial
cities of the north. Wilson’s efforts to establish
democracy and self-determination in Europe
stood in glaring contrast to intolerance and discrimination
at home. In the south the Ku Klux
Klan greatly expanded its violent activities.
One of the most extraordinary aspects of
American government in the era of financial and
industrial ‘freedoms’ of the 1920s was the invasion
of people’s privacy and right to lead the life
they chose through the enactment of Prohibition.
Congress had passed the law in 1919 over
Wilson’s veto. The law could never be properly
enforced as ordinary citizens constantly broke it
by surreptitiously consuming liquor. On the now
illegal manufacture and transportation of alcoholic
drinks gangster empires flourished. The
most notorious, Al Capone’s, in Chicago, with its
aura of violence and series of street murders
undertaken by rival gangs, became as much a
symbol of America in the 1920s as jazz and the
stolid respectability of President John Calvin
Coolidge, who had succeeded to the presidency
in August 1923 following the death of Harding.
Related to the attitude of intolerance was the
change in immigration laws. They, too, exhibited
a racial aspect of discrimination. Immigration
from eastern Asia was cut off. Quotas for immigrants
were now established, which favoured the
British, Germans, Irish and Scandinavians as
against the ‘new immigrants’ from central and
southern Europe. The era of virtually free entry
to the US from Europe was over. Something
special which the US stood for – a haven from
persecution – was ended.
American soldiers returned from Europe
believing they had won the war for the Allies, and
their president sailed home believing he had put
the world on the road to peace and prosperity.
Dreams turned sour. The American people now
wanted to get on with their own lives, to own a
home, a Model-T Ford and a refrigerator. The
Hollywood dream industry started on its phenomenal
growth. In the inter-war years more and more
Americans questioned why the US had involved
itself at all in the war. The overwhelming feeling
was that the American continent was far enough
away from the storm centres of Europe and Asia to
enjoy geographical security. There was thus no
reason why Americans should again sacrifice their
lives for other nations. They needed no large
army. Their security could be guaranteed by a
navy powerful enough to meet any challenge.
International naval disarmament was welcomed
as it would allow less to be spent on the
US navy. President Harding bowed to the public
revolt on armaments expenditure. Secretary of
State Hughes was successful in hosting a naval
disarmament conference in Washington. The
British, too, were anxious to turn their backs
on the war and reduce armaments expenditure.
The outcome of the conference was a treaty in
which Britain and the US agreed to limit their
battleship strength to 500,000 tons each and
Japan to 300,000 tons. It was said that the
Washington Conference between November
1921 and February 1922 sank more ships than all
the naval battles of the war put together. As there
were no American or British naval bases anywhere
close to Japan, and American and British naval
defences spanned the Atlantic and Mediterranean
too, the apparent Japanese inferiority was not so
real. At that same conference, in further treaties,
the Americans hoped to ensure that China would
remain free and independent. More important,
the Japanese government itself decided to withdraw
from Siberia and China. The treaties provided
the illusion of peace in eastern Asia without
solving the underlying conflicts, just as the later
Locarno Treaties created the illusion of peace in
Europe. The climax came in 1928 with the
Briand–Kellogg treaty ‘outlawing’ war. They
lulled the West into a false sense of security. No
doubt many people wished to be lulled.
Americans did not speak of ‘isolationism’ in
the 1920s, but of ‘America first’. Even the Midwesterner
knew that the US could not be separated
from the rest of the world. What Americans
demanded was that in dealings with the rest of the
world it was the duty of Congress and the administration
to take care of American interests and not
to meddle in the world concerns of the League
of Nations. Above all, America should not be
dragged into conflicts by concluding a military
alliance with any other country but should preserve
a ‘free hand’, confident in its ability to defend its
interests. It was an attitude based on confidence.
In fact, the American administrations involved
the US more in problems of international diplomacy
than the American people would have
approved of.
One aspect of ‘America first’ was the insistence
on collecting all the moneys lent mainly to France
and Britain but also to the other Allies, during
the Great War. Since Europe remained in desperate
need of American loans, the administration
could pressurise the wartime Allies by closing the
American money market to those nations which
defaulted. One of the curious results of this
outlook was the treatment of Germany. When the
US, at length, concluded a separate peace with its
former enemy, only token reparations were
demanded. Consequently, Germany had free
access to the American money market. American
financial orthodoxy in the 1920s had the effect of
dragging out the reparations problem which did
so much to unsettle Europe.
Americans did play a major role in 1924 and
1930 and gave a lead in sorting out the reparation
question, but rejected the British suggestion
that German reparations should be linked to
Allied indebtedness. It would have created a very
much healthier international financial climate if
both large reparations and large debts had been
cancelled altogether. Lessons were learnt only
after the Second World War. A narrow, nationalistic
approach to international finance and trade,
in the end, harmed the US as much as it did other
countries, for it contributed to the great collapse
of 1929 and to the depression of the 1930s
and so, indirectly, to the rise of Hitler and the
outbreak of the Second World War.
World History
