The Global 1930s

The international decade

Marc Matera, Susan Kingsley Kent

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351780605
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Decentering the traditional narrative of American breadlines, Soviet show trials and German fascists, The Global 1930s takes a truly international approach to exploring this turbulent decade. Though nationalism was prevalent throughout this period, Matera and Kent contend that the 1930s are better characterized by the development of internationalist impulses and transnational connections, and this volume illlustrates how the familiar events of this decade shaped and were shaped by a much wider global context.

Thematically organized, this book is divided into four main parts, covering the evolving concept and trappings of modernism, growing political and cultural internationalism, the global economic crisis and challenges to liberalism. Chapters discuss topics such as the rivalry between imperial powers, colonial migration and race relations, rising anti-colonial sentiments, feminism and gender dynamics around the world, the Great Depression and its far-reaching repercussions, the spread of both communist and fascist political ideologies and the descent once more into global warfare.

This book deftly interrogates the western-focused historical tropes of the interwar years, emphasizing the importance and interconnectedness of events in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Wide-ranging and comprehensive, it is essential and fascinating reading for all students of the international history of the 1930s.

Part I

Primitive modern

On October 2, 1925, La Revue Nègre premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris. The packed house awaited excitedly as first the musicians took their seats and then the curtain rose on twenty-five black performers singing, dancing, talking with one another, and sauntering along a dock on the Mississippi River. A strange figure appeared among the crowd in the scene – seemingly half animal, half human as it writhed and shimmied, crossed its eyes, blew out its cheeks, and sent eerie, shrill sounds into the air. Shocked and dumbfounded, audience members watched transfixed as the form suddenly dropped onto all fours, rear-end pitched high in the air, and hightailed it offstage, legs stiff and hands slapping the floor as she scurried away.

For it was a she. After another eight acts finished up, the astonishing creature of the first act returned, this time clad in nothing but “a pink flamingo feather between her limbs,” as one theater-goer described the appearance of Josephine Baker in the performance that made her notorious, la danse sauvage. Carried upside down on the shoulders of “a black giant,” Joe Alex, legs akimbo, Baker was then deposited on the floor, where she stood as “an unforgettable female ebony statue.” The crowd “screamed” its shock as she began to move “her violently shuddering body” before them. Against the backdrop of a Harlem nightclub scene, Baker and Alex electrified the crowd. “In the short pas de deux of the savages,” wrote one dance critic, “there was a wild splendor and magnificent animality.” Baker arched her back, thrust out her buttocks, entwined and raised up her arms in a phallic gesture. The explicit sexuality of the tableaux, the combination of animality and eroticism, mesmerized the audience. When the dance ended and the curtain fell, ecstatic cheers and outraged boos filled the air. Whether thrilled or disgusted – or thrilled and disgusted – no one had ever seen anything like it. La dance sauvage, modern critics have observed, seems to have torn away “the fragile veneer called civilization, … revealing a primitive, protohuman core.”¹

Baker skyrocketed to fame. In subsequent performances on stage and screen over the next decade she established herself as an icon of the primitive and the modern, all at the same time. She exhibited the bestial side of her creation both on stage and on the streets, where she wore nothing but a banana skirt in the former and paraded her cheetah in the latter in a kind of live performance of animality. At the same time, she embodied all that was modern: elegant, sophisticated, “tanned,” with sleek bobbed hair and a long angular body shown off by sheath dresses, she epitomized the chic “modern girl” of the jazz age. Her routines in the 1930 Paris Qui Remue – Paris When It Sizzles – retained elements of the exotic and primitive, but they tended to emphasize the modern more than had been the case in 1925. One review described the grand finale as “super-modern, electric: one hundred electric dresses … Debauchery of electricity.”² In 1937, she opened her own nightclub in the rue François-Ier, in a fashionable and wealthy neighborhood close to the Champs Elysée.

La Baker, as she was dubbed by a largely enraptured French press, self-consciously enacted a number of roles that exemplify some of the most salient dynamics of the 1930s. In one guise, she played into the colonial imagination of a nation convinced of the benefits of civilization it brought to its subject peoples; in another, she aroused the fantasies of white heterosexual men desirous of sampling the exotic wares of the sexualized black woman. In yet another, she personified the “It Girl” of the interwar years and even lent her name to a product – Bakerfix – that slicked down the hair of women seeking to emulate her. In her performances of both the primitive and the modern, she conveyed the preoccupations of surrealists and other modernists who focused much of their art on Europe’s “others” and especially on the purported authenticity of the savage and the primordial. At once the “other” and “one of us” (she became a French citizen in 1937), Josephine Baker articulated the many contradictions of the decade.

Notes

1Quoted in Karen C.C. Dalton and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Josephine Baker and Paul Colin: African American Dance Seen through Parisian Eyes,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 4 (Summer, 1998): 903–934, 914, 915, 916.

2Quoted in Jennifer Anne Boittin, Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 11.

1

’30s modern

In 2008, the world’s population was split evenly between rural and urban areas for the first time. It marked a historical tipping point that was the culmination of a centuries-long transition initiated by the growth of global trade and industrial capitalism. Even for the majority of people who lived outside urban areas in the 1930s, the city was synonymous with modernity. Avant-garde artists, modernist architects, urban developers, and social planners equated the city with the future. Centers of wealth and seats of governmental power, they were also spaces of circulation and “nodal points of change,” objects of artistic representation and intellectual scrutiny, targets of social engineering, and vehicles of collective memory and competing ideologies.¹ In the 1930s, people experienced the quintessential features and instruments of modernity in and through cities: the compression of space and time; the mixing of “high” and “low”; the social dislocation, anonymity, and alienation of modern life; the mass nature of modern amusements; the factory floor, department store, dance hall, and cinema. While not all of these were completely new in the ’30s, technological developments such as the advent of electrical sound recording in the mid-1920s were assimilated into the fabric of urban life, generating a host of new spaces, means, and mediums of social intercourse and self-fashioning. Together they constituted the cultural epoch of modernism.

Most historians and cultural critics use the terms modernity and modernization to connote an interrelated set of cognitive and socio-economic transformations: on the one hand, the rise of a scientific consciousness, a secular worldview, a progressive philosophy of history, an individualistic conception of the self and rights, and realist aesthetics; on the other, the emergence of a global capitalist economy, industrialization, forms of popular government, urbanization, and increased literacy and mobility. However, the “modern” also entailed an oppositional, “cultural modernity,” as one scholar terms it, led by avant-garde artist movements; collectors and producers of “primitive” art; circles of spiritualists, traveling mystics, and religious teachers; and many others who rejected the “stifling conformities and banalities” of bourgeois modernity, its materialistic nature, and the violence that produced and sustained it.² New technologies and the latest innovations spread rapidly, if unevenly, but this did not lead to cultural homogeneity. Entrepreneurs and administrators, cultural producers and average people domesticated new media and foreign cultural forms and used them in distinctive ways, adding new layers of meaning and significance to them. In short, even as certain communication technologies, means of conveyance, and the patterns and noises of daily life linked more people and societies around the world, the modern included – indeed, proliferated – a range of alternatives that took shape in opposition to aspects of modernity.

Urban space and modern culture

Writing in the late 1920s, the German Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin suggested that only the “prompt language” of “leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards,” could match the pace and urgency of the times, could be “actively equal to the moment.”³ The 1930s marked the apogee of small journals and other literary ephemera, and urban readers constituted their primary audience. The visual signs of city life and advertisements for cosmetics, gramophones and records, and an endless parade of other products, promising a taste of modernity and marketed using a modernist aesthetic, filled the pages of mass daily newspapers and foreign and domestic magazines. American magazines, especially Vanity Fair, influenced publishers, designers, and modernist writers in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The literature of the period confronted readers with the recognizable features, scenarios, and characters of urban existence. Publishers churned out urban guidebooks that promised to unlock the city’s secrets for visitors and outsiders with a variety of tastes and inclinations. Crime columns, detective fiction, and memoirs of former vice police – predecessors to the post–World War II explosion of noir film and literature – fed popular fascination with the city’s exotic and dangerous underbelly. Erotic publications and commercial entertainments proliferated alongside more conventional forms of sex work. At the same time, interwar political and cultural movements reshaped understandings of the city, its pleasures, and its perils. While wealthy urbanites engaged in conspicuous consumption and nights out at exclusive restaurants and clubs, cities also offered a growing array of more proletarian enticements. The city itself became a symbol of the social and economic volatility of modernity and global capitalism, the mixing of cultures and people, associated particularly with the more explosive consequences of rapid change, including crowd violence and rioting.

Urban growth was a global phenomenon. The populations of New York City and Chicago ballooned due in part to the mass movement of African Americans from the south in the Great Migration, which produced large enclaves of people of color – “black metropolises” – in Harlem and Bronzeville, but stabilized following the imposition of immigrant restrictions during the 1920s and the onset of the Great Depression. Across the Atlantic, London remained the largest city in Europe. Its geographical size expanded at an unprecedented rate during the 1920s and 1930s as the city consumed portions of Essex, Herefordshire, Kent, Surrey, and Middlesex in a suburban housing boom. The extension and consolidation of public transport services enabled this growth. The municipal railways and London Underground were electrified, the Northern Line of the latter was extended in north London, and new tram and bus lines connected the city center to outlying areas. Many of the numerous railway companies operating segments of the underground system merged. In 1933, the London Passenger Transport Board absorbed London County Council Tramways and assumed the role of managing the transportation network of southeast England. The population of London reached 8.6 million by 1939. The city also became more diverse, attracting colonial subjects from across the empire, large numbers of Irish immigrants, and Jewish, Germany, and Spanish exiles and refugees from Europe.

Urbanization also took place outside the North Atlantic context between the world wars. It stimulated the introduction of distinctive socioeconomic relationships and institutions, novel living arrangements, and new forms of cultural expression enabled by new spaces and objects of consumption. Tokyo and Shanghai moved into the top five largest cities in the world, and Buenos Aires and Moscow into the top ten. Industrialization and migration fueled rapid urban growth in South America’s second largest city, Rio de Janeiro. Its population doubled during the 1920s, reaching 2,380,000 in 1930. Municipal officials introduced the first major urban plan at about the same time, segregating the city along class and functionalist lines. The plan reserved the boroughs of Ipanema, Lebron, and Gavea in the south for the lighter-skinned upper classes and consigned industry and the dark-skinned working class to the suburbs. More than fifty favelas or slums of squatter settlements emerged during the 1930s, the majority sprouting along riverbanks and in the hills around the city center.⁴ Africa had comparatively few large cities, but as many historians have shown, the scale of urban growth does not necessarily capture the importance of urbanization as an engine of change. In 1930, the populations of Ibadan, Addis Ababa, Lagos, and Khartoum stood at 385,000, 160,000, 125,000, and 100,000, respectively. Cities in the settler colonies of Algeria and South Africa, where the European-descended population was concentrated, enjoyed the most modern amenities, including public transit, communications, and municipal infrastructure. Spatial segregation and deepening inequality divided the urban landscape. As land dispossession and poverty in rural areas drove growing numbers into urban labor markets, the indigenous populations faced increasingly cramped slum-like conditions in strictly delimited districts or on the city’s outer fringes. In Algiers, the celebrations in 1930 marking the centennial of French colonization ranged from military parades and cultural and art exhibitions to ambitious projects to renovate and improve housing in the city. Neoclassicism still dominated after the First World War, but the modernist emphasis on functional design principles became increasingly common in new social housing projects built during the late 1920s and 1930s. The modernist architect Le Corbusier lamented the state of the European quarters of Algiers and devised plans for a completely redesigned colonial city, but French officials rejected his proposals. Between 1925 and 1933, seven new housing complexes were built for Europeans on the outskirts of the city. The construction of a new waterfront neighborhood pushed the casbah – the Arab and Berber district – further into the hills and reduced its size. Twice the population crowded into one quarter as many buildings as in 1830, when the French first occupied the city.

Only three housing projects were completed for Algerians in the city during the 1930s. “To Algerians living under French occupation, home carried a special meaning as the private realm where they found refuge from colonial interventions they confronted continually in public life,” one historian explains. “To the colonizers, the Algerian house represented the impenetrable aspect of Algerian life, centered around the family and women’s activities.” The new complexes both reproduced French understandings of Algerian difference, which often focused on gender relations and the private realm, by adapting rural living patterns to an urban setting, and “rationalized” the “traditional” home by incorporating clean lines and supposedly universal design principles. Far more people ended up living in these structures than originally intended, and a tendency to cut corners to reduce construction costs led to chronic plumbing issues. Nevertheless, French administrators trumpeted the projects as material symbols of their noble efforts to bind Algeria ever more closely to France north of the Mediterranean.⁵

In East and Southeast Asia, the most dramatic urban growth occurred in cities along the Pacific coast. Provincial or regional “second cities” became peripheries of the metropolis and increasingly dominant centers in relation to their rural surroundings. During and after World War I, cities became associated with the possibility of acquiring great wealth quickly and with new social types such as the narikin (or nouveau riche) in Japan. The great Tokyo earthquake of 1923 and the fires that it sparked destroyed large sections of the city. A new, self-consciously modern Japanese capital arose from the rubble and ashes of the old ci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: the Wilsonian moment betrayed, 1919–1929
• Part I Primitive modern
• Part II Internationalism
• Part III International crisis
• Part IV International challenges to liberalism
• Conclusion: the road to war
• Index