An Age of Anxiety

7.4 Economy in the Interwar Period


PROBING CULTURAL FRONTIERS

Post War Pessimism

  • Gertude Stein and Ernest Hemingway says American intellectual and literati who gathered in paris in postwar are a “lost generation”

  • Oswald Spengler said Europe entered final stage of its existence

    • They only have irreversible decline by imperialism and warfare


Religious Uncertainty

  • Karl Barth is one of the most notable Christian theologians 

    • Attacked Christian theology of the idea of progress 


Attacks on Progress

  • Scientist's dream to benefit human gone bc they spent time making gas and explosives

  • Democracy decaying bc ppl want own voice 

  • Removal of property and educational restrictions make male suffrage→gave women rights

  • German still had democracy



New Visions in Physics, Psychology, and Art

  • Albert Einstein spread his theory of special relativity


The Uncertainty Principle

  • Werner Heisenberg wrote paper about this

    • Impossible to assume position of subatomic particles

  • Questioned notions of truth and violated law of cause and effect


Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory

  • By Sigmund Freud

    • Though it provided key to understand human behavior

  • Focus on psychological rather than physiological for mental disorders

  • Found conflict between conscious and subconscious 

    • Painful memories or threatening event kept away from conscious mind

  • Discovered Oedipus where male children are attached to mother and hostility to father




Experimentation in Art

  • Dadaism is an anti-establishment art movement 

    • In Zurich Paris, and New York

      • Meeting to insult nationalism, materialism, and rationalism

  • Neue Sachlichkeit: German art movement

    • Realistic paintings that depict critical attitude towards war

      • Wilhelm Heinrish Otto Dix: German painter and printmaker

    • George Grosz: one of most important artists

  • Art then became a way to express feelings and emotions through violin distortion farms and colors

  • Inspired by Freudian psychology, tries to talk to inner vision or dream

  • All artists have own reality and “good” and “bad” art disappeared


GLOBAL DEPRESSION

The Great Depression

  • Prosperity was fragile and problems remained  in international economy 


Economic Problems

  • Economic recovery with by war debt from Allies, compensation paid by Germany and Austria, and flow of US funds to Europe

  • Improvements in industrial reduced raw materials →increased supplies and dropped prices 

  • One of worst weakness: bad agriculture 

    • →overproduction and dropped prices

  • As production increases, demand declines, and prices dropped

    • Caused businesses to cut production and fire workers


The Crash of 1929

  • US enjoyed boom after Great War: wages high, production and eating increased

    • Many invested earning and saving to buy stock

  • Economic slowed down and stock prices were overpriced

    • On Black Thursday, panic selling caused stock prices to drop

      • Lost saving and 11 investors committed suidice


Economic Contraction Spreads

  • Decreased business activies, wages, and employment

  • 45% of US banks were out of business

  • Nations that relied on exports of manufactured goods suffered most

  • Hardest hit on countries that depend on expert of agricultural goods and raw minerals




Industrial Economies

  • Austria and Germany vulnerable to collapse bc they depended on US loans

  • German faced similar problems to US after its loss

    • Although they lost war, it remained leading economic power in postwar

      • Bc there was no fighting on their soil

  • Japan economy fell too bc they depended on US markets


Economic Nationalism

  • It didn't work bc it provoked retaliation

  • Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act: raised duties on manufactured goods in US

    • Other nations retaliate by raising tariff on import of US goods

      • Cause drop  international trade


Despair and Government Action

  • More than 30 million people unemployed


Personal Suffering

  • Shantytowns appeared in urban areas

  • Marriage, having children, and divorce rate declined while suicide rose

  • Ppl bottom of economic ladder increased social division and hated these higher

  • Hope in literature


Economic Experimentation

  • Gov responded to economic crises in 2 ways:

    • Doing nothing or doing to balance budgets and cut public spending


Keynes

  • John Maynard Keynes: most influential economist offered solution

  • To him, cause of depression was not supply but demand

  • Wanted gov to increase money supply to lower interest rates and encouraging investments

    • Wanted to make public projects for jobs and redistribute incomes through tax policy


The New Deal

  • Franklin Delano Roosevelt took aggressive steps to help economy and decrease suffering

    • Legislation to prevent bank collapse, give jobs, workers right to organize, minimum wages, and social reforms






CHALLENGES TO THE LIBERAL ORDER

Communism in Russia

  • Lenin and Bolsheviks took power of Russian working class but socialist victory did ot bring peace and stability

    • Had to defend world’s first dictatorship of proletariat


Civil War

  • Russian Communist Party didn’t like Bolsheviks and become a civil war

    • Communist began Red Terror against and killed Whites

  • Bolsheviks killed Tsar Niichloas II, Empress Alexandra, and 5 children bc they fear Romanov family would fall into hands of the Whites

    • Whites as brutal as Red

  • Foreign military support White resisting communist takeover

    • Russia withdrawal form Great War

      • Whites disorganized and defeated by Reds with no support


War Communism

  • Bolshvik assumed control of banks, industries, etc.

  • Abolition of private trade was unpopular and took crops from peasants to feed cities

  • Red won but Lenin faced problems in rebuilding society

    • Tried to take strict control 

    • With economic paralysis, he reverse war communism


The New Economic Policy

  • Temporarily restored mark economy 

  • Industrie, banks and transportation/communication places under state control

    • But gov returned small-scale industries to private ownership

  • NEP successful

    • Feature: school to train technicians and paralytic strokes

  • Lenin died before seeing and Bolshevik leader fight for power after


Joseph Stalin

  • Promate socialism

  • An intellectual among Bolsheviks elite and clear way for unchallenged dictatorship of Soviet Union


First Five-Year Plan

  • For rapid economic development

    • To transform Soviet Union from agricultural country to leading industrial power

  • Tried to direct resources and labor force


Collectivization of Agriculture

  • Necessary drive for industrialization

  • Communist ideology demanded abolition of private property and market choices

  • Stalin saw collectivization to increase agricultural production and industrials workers fed

  • Enforced against kulaks

  • Mad peasants react to program by killing farm animals and burning crop

    • Made farmers leave to work in cities

      • No production = peasants starved to death


The Great Purge

  • Result of Stalin’s First 5-year plan made controversy as Communist Part prepared for 17 congress

    • Congress of Victors became Congress of Victims as Stalin stirred up civil war

  • Salin removed authority from all suspect of opposition

    • Executed or suffered in labor camps

  • Outside world saw political and social chaos that transformed Russia was important


The Fascist Alternative

  • Fascism: political movement to create new society against democracy and spread socialism and communism



Defining Fascism

  • Popular in middle class, rural populations, and nationalist

    • Wanted to create new national community 

      • Devotion to strong leader, ethnocentrism, and militarism

  • Were hostile to liberal democracy

    • Its individualism and institutions were viewed weak

  • Emphasized chauvinism and xenophobia


Italian Fascism

Benito Mussolini

  • Forces behind Italian fascism 

  • Founded newspaper ,II Popolo d’Italia to encourage Italy to enter Great War

  • Demanded for suppression of socialists  and a strong political leader

  • Elected 35 fascists to Italian parliament

    • Blackshirts: effective violence by fascist armed squads

      • Become at state for civil war

        • Time for fascist to take power and march on Rome




The Fascist State

  • Italy’s fascists got power throughout laws that made their nation a dictatorship

  • Mussolini became dictator and ruled Italy as II Duce

  • Special Tribunal for Defense of State by military silenced political dissent

    • Italians improsion, exiled, or punished

  • National Council of Corporation settle labor disputes and watched wage settlements

  • Antisemitic law labeled Jews as unpatriotic

    • Excluded for gov, jobs, and can’t marry Aryans

      • Most likely from being friends with Hilter


German National Socialism

Hilter and the Nazi Party

  • Chairman of National Socialist German Workers’ Party

  • National Socialist became known by attempt to overthrow democratic Weimar Republic

    • Hilter jailed

  • “Path of legality”: legally got power through ballot box 


The Struggle for Power

  • Ppl blamed young German democracy for Germany’s misfortunes 

    • Hilter promised to end them by making new order

  • Nazis avoided class divisions by allowing all but mainly appealed lower-middle classes

  • Great depression lead to bloody street battles

  • Nazi party became largest party in parliament and president, Paul von Hindenburg give Hilter chancellorship

    • Hilter promised a German Reich


Consolidation of Power

  • Emiliating working-class and liberal opposition

  • Suppressed German communist and socialist parties

    • Ended all constitutional and civil rights

  • Crime to create new party

  • Destroy trade unions and eliminated bargaining

    • Prohite strikes and lockouts

  • Control police and remove enemies


The Racial State

  • Nazi made racial into a practice

  • Leader of Third Reich created race-based community to improve # and German race

  • Social Darwinism: evolutionary theory 

    • It strengthened radical theory

    • Natural selection and survival of the fittest

  • Eugenics: to improve gene pool by encouraging those fit to have more children

    • Tied to racism and adopt by German Nazi to justify the undesirable population


Women and Race

  • Nazis launches campaign to increase births

    • Encourage marriage and ban abortions and birth control 

  • Pronalatist to increase births

  • Rabbit decoration: award on August 12th to women who had many children

    • Bronze =more than 4

    • Silver = more than 6

    • gold = more than 8


Nazi Eugenics

  • Program for men and women who have hereditarily determined sickness

    • Killed 200k women, men, and children


Antisemitism

  • Nazis suppressed Germany’s Jewish population

    • Used religious decent to find Jews

  • Nuremberg Laws: deprived German Jews citizenship, marriage, and intercourse with other Germans

    • Economic life and wealth →lost jobs

  • Goal of Nazi was Jewish emigration

  • Kristallnacht: nights where Nazis destructed Jewish places and murder them

  • Pogrom: massacre to a ethnic group, especially Jews in Eastern Europe