The Global 1920s

Politics, economics and society

Richard Carr, Bradley W. Hart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317277866
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

The 1920s is often recognised as a decade of fascism, flappers and film. Covering the political, economic and social developments of the 1920s throughout the world, The Global 1920s takes an international and cross-cultural perspective on the critical changes and conditions that prevailed from roughly 1919 to 1930.

With twelve chapters on themes including international diplomacy and the imperial powers, film and music, art and literature, women and society, democracy, fascism, and science and technology, this book explores both the 'big' questions of capitalism, class and communism on the one hand and the everyday experience of citizens around the globe on the other. Utilising archival sources throughout, it concludes with an extensive discussion of the circumstances surrounding the 1929 stock market crash and the onset of the Great Depression, the effects of which were felt worldwide.

Covering topics from the oil boom in South America to the start of civil war in China, employment advances and setbacks for women across the globe, and the advent of radio and air travel, the authors provide a concise yet comprehensive overview of this turbulent decade. Containing illustrations and a selection of discussion questions at the end of each chapter, this book is valuable reading for students of the 1920s in global history.

Part I

1 Empires and the aftermath of Versailles

DOI: 10.4324/9781315640723-1

In January 1919, delegates from 24 nations began meeting in Paris to negotiate a treaty that would profoundly alter not only the lines of the world map but also the lives of millions of people. The Treaty of Versailles, as the document that the talks eventually produced would be known, was the source of immediate controversy and remains disputed by historians to the present day. For its detractors, the treaty was a misguided attempt to punish Germany that eventually sowed the seeds for the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Second World War, while more sympathetic commentators have viewed it as a flawed but workable document that was ultimately destroyed by the onset of a Great Depression that many could not foresee, coupled with the political extremism that came to pass in its wake. Historians today remain divided, with an increasing number recognising that the treaty was probably the most pragmatic compromise that could be reached under both difficult circumstances and pressing time constraints, despite some acknowledged flaws (Boemeke et al. 1998: 3). As Adam Tooze has recently argued, the fact that ‘it took a second dramatic crisis, the Great Depression’ to unleash the forces of anti-Versailles and anti-liberal political insurgency in many nations means mistakes must have lain beyond the cartography of 1919 at the very least (Tooze 2014: 18).

That said, it is undeniable that in many ways the Treaty of Versailles shaped the political direction of the 1920s, and had consequences far beyond the drawing of borders on maps and reparations payments between governments. As this volume’s final chapters note, the debate over the economic impact of the Treaty began immediately – particularly over the question of German reparations and more generally what future the country that many, and indeed the treaty, stated had caused a war that had ended in the deaths of over 17 million people. To address such issues, this chapter considers first the terms of the Treaty of Versailles itself, along with the objectives that the allied governments whose representatives authored its terms were hoping to accomplish, before turning to the effects of the treaty around the globe. These were most directly felt in Europe, which saw the creation of a number of new states out of the ruins of defeated empires, and in the colonial regions of Africa and the Middle East. Such changes would have long-term ramifications, as we will note.

Beyond altering the world map, the Treaty also created a new body – the League of Nations – tasked with providing collective security and preventing future wars. The League had first been called for by President Woodrow Wilson in his wartime Fourteen Points which had been drawn up during the conflict to provide an exit strategy through which combatants could emerge with honour intact. Yet, ironically, the United States would never join the organisation it had provided the inspiration for and indeed refused to sign the Treaty itself. The League would thus be created without the emerging world power of the 1920s being part of its deliberations, circumscribing its influence significantly. At the same time, however, the League retained importance throughout the decade, particularly in areas that had been cleaved off from former imperial states. Finally, this chapter concludes with an examination of the diplomacy that followed the Treaty of Versailles and continued throughout the decade. On the one hand, many of these efforts were designed to address the problems that had already emerged with various clauses of the treaty only a few years after its signing, particularly involving German war reparations and territorial claims. The fear in many allied governments was that if harsh terms remained in place, German resentment against its terms would grow, in addition to the economic destruction that might be suffered by all if the country were to collapse. The crippling of the German economy – as a major importer and exporter of Western goods – also could potentially undermine the GDPs and balance of payments positions of victorious powers. It was a tricky balancing act to get right. By the late 1920s optimists in Britain and France believed that the major complaints had been suitably addressed, while the sceptics still feared what might come next.

In contrast to these pragmatic negotiations to preserve the post-war order, the 1920s saw a number of efforts to secure the conditions for a lasting world peace. The Washington Naval Conference of 1921–2, for instance, resulted in a series of agreements to limit naval armaments and prevent future arms races. The world’s traditional naval power of Great Britain and the new global force of the United States naturally secured the highest tonnage limits for new ship construction, while lower limits were imposed on Japan, Italy and France. In 1928, signatories to the Kellogg–Briand Pact agreed to ‘condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another’. The United States, France, Britain and Germany were among the first to sign, theoretically outlawing the possibility of future war between them or any of the other dozens of countries that soon signed on as well. More pragmatically, the 1925 Geneva Protocol outlawed ‘the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices’, and while the United States would not ratify it until 1975, it was widely seen as an important step forward in the effort to prevent a recurrence of the widespread use of poison gas that had taken place in the First World War (UN 1925: passim). On paper and to some degree in deed, the 1920s was a period of general disarmament and deliberate attempts to reduce international tensions. By the mid-1930s, many would look back and view disarmament as naïve or foolish, but in the immediate aftermath of Versailles there was optimism that the ‘war to end all wars’ might have actually produced major steps to do so. With a multilateral Treaty of Versailles in place and further bi-lateral agreements through the decade to bolster it, this was not the naïve suggestion it may appear.

The Treaty and the European powers

The Versailles peacemakers in 1919 were faced with an overwhelming number of immediate concerns. Millions of soldiers were still at arms in the field, European economies lay in shambles, and there was widespread starvation in Germany. Weighed against this was the fact that the German army appeared to have not been crushingly defeated (and certainly Germany itself was unoccupied) and thus, while the Germans were severely weakened, a resumption of hostilities was possible. Equally, the Russian Civil War was waging in the East at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, and the question of how much of the former Russian Empire the Bolsheviks would manage to conquer was a pressing one, as they might end up with a border on Germany itself and thus have a direct route into Central Europe. The negotiations at Versailles were thus not conducted in a vacuum but were a response to pressing, life-and-death considerations. Importantly, the Treaty of Versailles was between the allied nations and Germany alone: peace with Austria–Hungary and Germany’s other allies would have to be agreed separately, placing the negotiations within an even wider context. Zara Steiner has noted that in 1919 ‘there was no possible return to the old order. The disruptions were too many and the effects too widespread. It was a changed world in which the rulers of Europe now operated’ (Steiner 2005: 11). This is no doubt true, but it is important to acknowledge that Europe had both changed and was still changing as the delegates gathered.

The dominant players at Versailles were the ‘Big Four’: US President Woodrow Wilson, whose Fourteen Points had become the framework around which negotiations would at least initially proceed; British Prime Minister David Lloyd George; Georges Clemenceau, Prime Minister of France; and Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando. All of these came into the conference with differing objectives: Wilson sought the ideals of the Fourteen Points, including a prohibition on secret treaties (as had taken place before the outbreak of the First World War), free trade, freedom of the seas (rejected immediately by the British on the grounds that it would preclude blockades against hostile countries), ‘a free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims’, and the creation of an international organisation (the League of Nations) to mediate future disputes before they became war. For Tooze, this was an ‘anti-militarist, post-imperialist agenda for a country convinced of the global influence that it would exercise at arm’s length through the means of soft power – economics and ideology’ (Tooze 2014: 16). Evidence of this growing influence can be gleaned from the fact that the liberal-minded and internationalist Fourteen Points had been disseminated by the US government without consulting the British or the French and, as Winston Churchill later recounted, both Lloyd George and Clemenceau were immediately sceptical of their implications (Churchill 1929: 103–4). At the same time, when the German army began to collapse in late 1918, the initial diplomatic outreach from its government was directed at Wilson in the hopes that the Fourteen Points might provide the basis for a more favourable peace than might be expected under other circumstances (Churchill 1929: 99). Wilson’s January 1917 call – prior to America entering the war – for a ‘peace without victory’ suddenly sounded very appealing to the Germans (Boemeke 1998: 609).

The French and the British were far less willing to grant the Germans the favourable terms they sought, however, and they were not about to give up the notion that they had won what had proved to be a nightmarish conflict and thus deserved significant compensation. The French, having suffered horrific casualties and material damage from years of warfare that had often taken place in French territory, were committed to not only smashing German military might and claiming German territory, but also extracting as much money in reparations as possible. These efforts would soon bring them into conflict with the other allies. As American commentator Herbert Adams Gibbons put it in 1923, ‘from the moment the war ended down to the present time the French attitude has been that the victors were amply justified in whatever steps they took because, had Germany been victorious, she would have done the same’ (Gibbons 1923: 29–30). The French defended themselves in simple terms: as future Prime Minister (and Versailles delegate) André Tardieu wrote, ‘To make certain her safety was the first duty of France. To secure reparation was her second … Germany was doubly responsible for the destruction caused by the war; due first to her premeditated aggression and then made worse by her systematic savagery’ (Tardieu 1921: 280). At this time there were not many doves in the Elysée.

Lloyd George’s view was in broad terms similar but rather more moderate, and he vowed in December 1918 that his objectives were to secure a criminal trial for the now-deposed German Kaiser, the punishment of German war criminals, and financial reparations for the costs of the war (‘Make them pay’ was a much repeated slogan) (Gibbons 1923: 32–3; Churchill 1929: 154). The Italians, having entered the war on the side of the allies late, hoped to obtain modest territorial gains, described later in this book. Despite Russia having fought on the side of the allies for most of the war only to sign a separate peace (the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk) with the Germans after the overthrow of the Tsar, the Russian Bolshevik government was not invited to take part in the negotiations. The Germans were also not invited, raising the immediate concern that any treaty the country was forced to sign would be seen as a ‘dictated’ peace rather than a negotiated one.

The Treaty of Versailles was signed in late June 1919 following months of negotiations that Wilson himself had travelled from the United States to attend – becoming the first President to leave the country during his tenure. The final agreement was lengthy and complicated, with a US State Department printing of the text with commentary stretching more than 700 pages (US Department of State 1947: passim). The map of Europe would henceforth look rather different: the country of Poland, to Germany’s East, would be recreated after centuries of being ruled by other powers; the Rhineland region of Germany, on the border with France, would be demilitarised; the territory of Alsace–Lorraine was returned to France; the German city of Danzig, now lying in Polish territory, would become a ‘free city’; and a new, multi-national state, Czechoslovakia, would be carved out of former parts of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Later treaties would separate Austria and Hungary themselves, and carve the southern portions of their former empire into a series of states that would become Yugoslavia. While Germany would not be dismantled completely, as Austria–Hungary would be, the country would lose approximately 13 per cent of her territory, much of which was heavily industrial and economically significant. She was also forbidden any Anschluss, or union, with the new rump Austrian state (Lamb 1989: 6). And, further, Germany was stripped of her overseas colonies, including a series of islands in the Pacific Ocean that eventually were delivered to Japan and, in addition, the German military’s strength would be reduced to a set number of 100,000 soldiers (US Department of State 1947: 278). The spectre of pre-war Prussian militarism was to be extinguished, or so the peacemakers hoped.

But as A.J.P. Taylor noted in his famously strident anti-German tract The Course of German History – written during the Second World War – these territorial shifts created a shift in mentality amongst the German elites. ‘Before 1914’, Taylor argued,

Prussian landowners regarded the separation of Austria from Germany as [nineteenth-century leader Otto von] Bismarck’s greatest achievement, the guarantee of their own position. Now, resisting the loss of their Polish lands [at Versailles], they were prepared to resist the loss of Austria also. The Treaty of Versailles was a defeat both for conservative German nationalism and for demagogic German nationalism; therefore it united them as never before and ensured that all parties in Germany would combine to overthrow it the moment that the army leaders gave them permission to do so.

(Taylor 1945: 218)

The debate over whether Versailles was doomed from the outset has, as mentioned, exercised historians ever since. Certainly, as our ninth chapter notes, the degree to which elites elevated fascist parties into power is an issue which unites Italy in the early 1920s and Germany a decade later.

Equally if not more important than these territorial concerns surrounding Germany’s frontiers, however, was the question of reparations. Both Clemenceau and Lloyd George had agreed that Germany should be made to pay financial compensation for the destruction caused by the First World War. Article 231 of the Treaty, commonly known as the ‘War Guilt Clause’, specified explicitly that Germany

accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Decades in Global History
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I
• 1 Empires and the aftermath of Versailles
• 2 Equality, Class, Race and General Living
• 3 Science and Technology in the Jazz Age
• Part II
• 4 Film, Music and Other Pastimes
• 5 Art, Literature and the Convergence of Culture and Politics
• 6 Women and Society
• 7 Democracy and its Malcontents
• 8 Communism
• 9 Fascism
• Part IV
• 10 Global Economic Conditions in the 1920s
• 11 The calamity on Wall Street
• 12 Responses to the Crash
• Conclusion: A Global 1920s?
• Index