The Great Depression

• initiated by the American stock market crashed (October 24, 1929)

• over the next couple of years, Banks closed, many people lost their life savings, Investment dried up, businesses contracted when they were unable to sell their products, and unemployment in both Germany and the United States reached 30 percent or more by 1932

• world trade dropped by 62 percent within a few years

  • • Countries or colonies tied to exporting one or two products were especially hard-hit

    • Chile -- which was dependent on copper mining, found the value of its exports cut by 80 percent

    • Brazil -- in an effort to maintain the price of coffee, Brazil destroyed enough of its coffee crop to have supplied the world for a year

    • Colonial Southeast Asia -- the world’s major rubber-producing region, saw the demand for its primary export drop dramatically as automobile sales in Europe and the United States were cut in half

    • Britain’s West African colony of the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) -- farmers who had staked their economic lives on producing cocoa for the world market were badly hurt by the collapse of commodity prices

Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal (1933–1942)

• John Maynard Keynes -- British economist who argued that government actions and spending programs could moderate the recessions and depressions to which capitalist economies were prone

• Roosevelt’s efforts permanently altered the relationship among government, the private economy, and individual citizens

• New Deal

  • • immediate programs of public spending

      • • built dams, highways, bridges, and parks

        • sought to prime the pump of the economy and thus reduce unemployment

    • longer-term reforms

      • • the Social Security system, the minimum wage, and various relief and welfare programs

        • attempted to create a modest economic safety net to sustain the poor, the unemployed, and the elderly

    • federal regulation and supervision of the economy

      • • new government agencies created

• Results

  • • none of the New Deal’s programs worked very well to end the Great Depression

    • only WWII with its massive government spending and new global realities turned the American economy around

• The most successful efforts to cope with the Depression came from Nazi Germany and an increasingly militaristic Japan

Italy

Underlying Issues

• The First World War gave rise to resentful veterans, many of them unemployed, and to patriots who believed that Italy had not gained the territory it deserved from the Treaty of Versailles.

• During the serious economic downturn after World War I, trade unions, peasant movements, and various communist and socialist parties threatened the established social order with a wave of strikes and land seizures

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945)

• charismatic orator and a former journalist with a socialist background

• Black Shirts -- a private army of disillusioned veterans and jobless men

• 1922 -- Mussolini rose to power promising an alternative to both communism and ineffective democratic rule

• Considerable violence accompanied Mussolini’s rise to power as bands of Black Shirts destroyed the offices of socialist newspapers and attacked striking workers

• Fearful of communism, big business threw its support to Mussolini, who promised order in the streets, an end to bickering party-based politics, and the maintenance of the traditional social order

Italian fascism in Practice

• fasces -- the symbol of the movement (a bundle of birch rods bound together around an axe)

  • • represented power and strength in unity and derived from ancient Rome

• promised his mass following major social reforms

  • • in practice he concentrated instead on consolidating the power of the central state

• Democracy in Italy was suspended

  • • opponents were imprisoned, deported, or sometimes executed

• Independent labor unions and peasant groups were disbanded

• banned all political parties except the Fascist Party

• a “corporate state” took shape

  • • workers, employers, and various professional groups were organized into “corporations”

    • supposed to settle their disagreements and determine economic policy under the supervision of the state.

• Mussolini, though personally an atheist, embraced the Catholic culture of Italy in a series of agreements with the Church (the Lateran Accords of 1929)

  • • made the Vatican a sovereign state

    • Catholicism Italy’s national religion

• Women

  • • no hint of equality or liberation

    • fascist propaganda, women were portrayed in highly traditional terms as domestic creatures

      • • as mothers creating new citizens for the fascist state

• “new Roman Empire”

  • • Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935,avenging the embarrassing defeat that Italians suffered at the hands of Ethiopians in 1896

    • goal to revitalize Italian society and give it a global mission

Japan

Context (developments different from war-torn Europe)

• During the 1920s, Japan seemed to be moving toward a more democratic politics and Western cultural values

  • • Universal male suffrage was achieved in 1925

    • cabinets led by leaders of the major parties, rather than bureaucrats or imperial favorites, governed the country

    • a two-party system began to emerge

    • free expression of ideas, and greater gender equality was growing

      • • middle-class women entered new professions

        • young women known as moga (modern girls) sported short hair and short skirts, while dancing with mobo (modern boys) at jazz clubs and cabarets

        • women’s movement advocated a variety of feminist issues, including suffrage and the end of legalized prostitution

    • Education expanded

    • an urban consumer society developed

• Societal Tension was Present

  • • “Rice riots” in 1918 brought more than a million people into the streets of urban Japan to protest the rising price of that essential staple

    • Union membership tripled in the 1920s as some factory workers began to think in terms of entitlements and workers’ rights rather than the benevolence of their employers

    • rural areas, tenant unions multiplied, and disputes with landowners increased amid demands for a reduction in rents

    • rise of “proletarian parties”—the Labor-Farmer Party, the Socialist People’s Party, and a small Japan Communist Part

    • elite circles—bureaucrats, landowners, industrialists, military officials

      • • viewed all of this as alarming, even appalling, and suggested echoes of the Russian Revolution of 1917

Move towards Fascism

• 1925 -- Peace Preservation Law

  • • promised long prison sentences, or even the death penalty, to anyone who organized against the existing imperial system of government or private property

• Great Depression

  • • Japan’s exports fell by half between 1929 and 1931

      • • a million or more urban workers unemployed

        • drop in world demand for silk impoverished millions of rural dwellers who raised silkworms

        • young workers returned to their rural villages only to find food scarce

        • families forced to sell their daughters to urban brothels

        • neighbors unable to offer the customary money for the funerals of their friends

        • disillusionment with parliamentary democracy and capitalism

• Radical Nationalism or the Revolutionary Right

  • • especially appealing to younger army officers

    • The movement’s many separate organizations shared

      • • extreme nationalism

        • hostility to parliamentary democracy

        • a commitment to elite leadership focused around an exalted emperor

        • and dedication to foreign expansion

    • Members of such organizations managed to assassinate a number of public officials and prominent individuals, in the hope of provoking a return to direct rule by the emperor

    • 1936 a group of junior officers attempted a military takeover of the government, which was quickly suppressed

Autocratic Regime Emerges

• Differences from Italy and Germany:

  • • no right-wing party gained wide popular support (no major fascist party emerged)

    • Japan did not produce any charismatic leader

    • People arrested for political offenses were neither criminalized nor exterminated

      • • those arrested were subjected to a process of “resocialization” that brought the vast majority of them to renounce their “errors” and return to the “Japanese way.”

• Japan’s established institutions of government were sufficiently strong, and traditional notions of the nation as a family headed by the emperor were sufficiently intact, to prevent the development of a widespread fascist movement able to take control of the country

  • • Continuity

      • • Parties and the parliament continued to operate

        • elections were held

    • Change

      • • major cabinet positions now went to prominent bureaucratic or military figures rather than to party leaders

        • military in particular came to exercise a more dominant role in Japanese political life

          • • military men had to negotiate with business and bureaucratic elites as well as party leaders

        • Censorship limited the possibilities of free expression

        • a single news agency was granted the right to distribute all national and most international news to the country’s newspapers and radio stations

        • Industrial Patriotic Federation replaced independent trade unions with factory-based “discussion councils” to resolve local disputes between workers and managers

        • Education changed

          • • new textbooks for use in all Japanese schools focused on the unique aspects of Japanese culture

            • more physical training -- Japanese martial arts replaced baseball in the physical education curriculum

• Economy

  • • large-scale spending on armaments, and public works projects enabled Japan to emerge from the Depression rapidly

    • mid-1930s -- the government increasingly assumed a supervisory or managerial role in economic affairs that included subsidies to strategic industries

      • • profit ceilings on major corporations

        • caps on wages, prices, and rents

        • a measure of central planning

    • Private property, however, was retained, and the huge industrial enterprises called zaibatsu continued to dominate the economic landscape

Germany

similar to its Italian counterpart--Both:

• • • espoused an extreme nationalism

    • openly advocated the use of violence as a political tool

    • generated a single-party dictatorship

    • led by charismatic figures

    • despised parliamentary democracy and free speech

    • hated communism

    • viewed war as a positive and ennobling experience

Underlying Issues

• Weimar Republic

  • • new democratic Parliamentary government that replaced the German Imperial government

    • negotiated the peace settlement with the victorious allies to produce the Treaty of Versailles

• some began to argue that German military forces had not really lost the war but that civilian socialists, communists, and Jews had betrayed the nation,“stabbing it in the back.”

• inflation of 1923

  • • Weimar Republic policies resulted in French occupation of the Rhur valley

    • payment of reparations through printing currency resulted in devaluation of currency

• Great Depression

  • • German economy largely ground to a halt

    • massive unemployment among workers and the middle class alike

    • Many industrial workers looked to socialists and communists for solutions; others turned to fascism

    • Large numbers of middle class people deserted moderate political parties in favor of conservative and radical right-wing movements

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945)

• National Socialist, or Nazi, Party

• proclaimed a message of intense German nationalism cast in terms of racial superiority, bitter hatred for Jews as an alien presence, passionate opposition to communism, a determination to rescue Germany from the humiliating requirements of the Treaty of Versailles, and a willingness to decisively tackle the country’s economic problems

• Mein Kampf (My Struggle)

  • • Hitler outlined his case against the Jews and his call for the racial purification of Germany in vitriolic terms

• Following the Great Depression, Nazis attracted 37 percent of the vote

  • • 1933 -- Hitler was legally installed as the chancellor of the German government

    • within 2-years, the Weimar Republic, a democratic regime that never gained broad support, give way to the Third Reich

German fascism in Practice

• All other political parties were outlawed

• independent labor unions were ended

• thousands of opponents were arrested

• the press and radio came under state control

• The government invested heavily in projects such as superhighways, bridges, canals, and public buildings

• after 1935, in rebuilding and rearming the country’s diminished military forces

• These policies drove down the number of unemployed Germans from 6.2 million in 1932 to fewer than 500,000 in 1937

• appealed to rural and traditional values

• Jews became the symbol of the urban, capitalist, and foreign influences that were undermining traditional German culture

  • • Hitler implemented policies that increasingly restricted Jewish life

    • 1933-- Jews were excluded from universities, professional organizations, and civil employment

    • 1935 -- the Nuremberg Laws ended German citizenship for Jews and forbade marriage or sexual relations between Jews and Germans

    • November 9, 1938 -- Kristallnacht (known in Germany today as the November Pogrom as not to glorify the Nazi term for the event)

      • • Nazis smashed and looted Jewish shops

        • thousands of Jews were arrested and sent to labor camps

The Depression hit Latin America as hard as it hit Europe and the United States

• the value of agricultural and mineral exports fell by two-thirds between 1929 and 1932

• Brazil veered toward authoritarian regimes that promised to solve their economic problems.

• In 1930 Getulio Vargas a state governor, staged a coup and proclaimed himself president of Brazil.

Getulio Vargas

• Policies

  • • He wrote a new constitution that broadened the franchise and limited the president to one term

    • raised import duties and promoted national firms and state-owned enterprises, culminating in the construction of the Volta Redonda steel mill in the 1930s

    • By 1936 -- industrial production had doubled, especially in textiles and small manufactures

    • labor unions were allowed to form

    • pension plans, and disability insurance established

    • countryside also was transformed

      • • Scrubland was turned into pasture, and new acreage was planted in wheat, corn, and sugar cane

        • 1930- American industrialist Henry Ford invested $8 million to clear land along the Tapajós River and prepare it to become the site of the world’s largest rubber plantation

          • • Ford had to abandon the project—but not before leaving 3 million acres (1.2 million hectares) denuded of trees

Under his guidance, Brazil was on its way to becoming an industrial country

• • • import-substitution industrialization, Vargas’s policy, became a model for other Latin American countries as they attempted to break away from neo-colonial dependency.

1938 Estado Novo, or “New State”

• Getulio Vargas was prohibited by his own constitution from being reelected

• Vargas staged another coup, abolished his own constitution, and made himself the supreme leader

• Policies

  • • He abolished political parties

    • jailed opposition leaders

    • turned

    • Brazil into a fascist state

• When the Second World War broke out, however, Vargas aligned Brazil with the United States and contributed troops and ships to the Allied war effort

• Vargas was overthrown in 1945 by a military coup.

Stalin's Rise to power

• 1922-Secretary General of the party

  • • appointed leaders of the Soviets

    • oversaw the secret police

    • this position enabled him to outmaneuver others when Lenin died in 1924.

      • • both Trotsky and Bukharin (developed the NEP) were close to Lenin

• Stalin was not close to Lenin, but came to establish the interpretation of Leninist Orthodoxy-“Cult of Lenin”

  • • Stalin advocated Socialism in one country

Five Year Plans

• goal: transform the Soviet Union from a predominantly agricultural country to a leading industrial power.

• First Five year Plan (1929)

  • • set targets for increased productivity in all spheres of the economy but emphasized heavy industry—especially steel and machinery—at the expense of consumer goods.

    • Gosplan -- the central state planning agency

      • • attempted to coordinate resources and the labor force on an unprecedented scale

• application:

  • • set unrealistically high production targets

    • failed to meet targets, but the Soviet leadership proclaimed success after only four years

    • scarcity or nonexistence of consumer goods was to some degree balanced by full employment, low-cost utilities, and—when available—cheap housing and food

      • • In the context of the depression-ridden capitalist world, the ability of a centrally planned economy to create more jobs than workers could fill made it appear an attractive alternative

“dizzy with success” -- collectivization

• kulaks —relatively wealthy peasants who had risen to prosperity during the NEP but accounted for only 3 to 5 percent of the peasantry

  • • became the targey of Stalin

• goal:

  • • expropriate privately owned land to create collective or cooperative farm units whose profits were shared by all farmers

    • viewed collectivization as a means of increasing the efficiency of agricultural production and ensuring that industrial workers would be fed.

• application:

  • • outraged peasants reacted to the government’s program by slaughtering their livestock and burning their crops

    • Millions of farmers left the land and migrated to cities in search of work, thereby further taxing the limited supplies of housing, food, and utilities

    • Unable to meet production quotas, peasants often starved to death on the land they once owned

    • it was estimated that agricultural production would rise 50 percent, however, agricultural production actually dropped.

      • • Stalin blamed this unanticipated failure on kulaks (rich peasants) who resisted collectivization

• Stalin called a halt to collectivization in 1931, proclaiming the policymakers “dizzy with success,” half the farms in the Soviet Union had been collectivized. Estimates of the number of peasant lives lost have fluctuated wildly, but even the most cautious place it at three million

Gulags

• collective labor camps where “enemies of the state” could be reformed

  • • 1929-300,000

    • 1933-7-Million

    • Industrialization occurred through forced labor

• Class warfare against the Kulaks

  • • Ideological attack and liquidation. Anyone who resisted Collectivization was identified as a Kulak.

    • Over 1-Million killed or “sent away” to the Gulags during Collectivization

Holodomor: Forced Famine in Ukraine, 1932-1933

• Holodomor​ (meaning, “hunger-extermination” in Ukrainian)

• Yale University historian Timothy Snyder estimates that 3.3 million people died as a result of the Holodomor

• Stalin refused international aid offers

Terror, or the Great Purges (1935-1938)

• Stalin turns his attention to the Party

  • • Purged the Party of internal conspiracy (enemies of the people)

• In the Great Terror of 1937-8, executing some 700,000 people and sending two million to die in the gulag, among them the Soviet Union’s most accomplished citizens – technologists, scientists, artists – then decapitating the army by shooting most of the senior officers

• Percentage of Party members who had joined the party before 1921:

  • • • 1934-81%

      • 1939-19%

      • Leningrad was hardest hit--too “western”

• “Show trials”

• • • Revolution devours itself

• Synthesis-Jacobin France

On Stalin’s Team by Sheila Fitzpatrick

• Kliment Voroshilov was the worst marshal in the Soviet army and he knew it: when the others were arrested, he told the equally dimwitted Marshal Budionny, “Don’t worry: they’re only arresting the clever ones”.

Soviet Realism

• 1934-under Stalin, the regime established requirements for art

  • • Portray a positive view of society and party

    • Be representative, not abstract

    • Be understandable to the proletariat