World History

Unit 6: World War in the Twentieth Century

Chapter 25: The Great Depression and the Rise of Totalitarianism

Mon, Mar 17, 2014

52. Tue, Mar 18, 2014

The textbook missed a trick (surprise, surprise) in not connecting the uncertainty, uneasiness, and relativism of Einstein, Heisenberg, Kafka, and Freud with jazz. For those unfamiliar with the genre, jazz is highly free-form, and moreover is marked by frequent improvisation. Music that you made up as you went along fits in rather nicely. Moreover jazz was fundamentally a music of rebellion, growing as it did out of African-American music at a time when black people were very much the bottom of the heap. For white people to celebrate black music and musicians was to go against class, prejudice, and prudery, a way of being wild and non-conformist... even as everyone else flocked to jazz too. The musical descendants of jazz, rock 'n roll as well as rap, are much the same. Plus, jazz was fun. (The blues were less fun, but spoke to people eloquently.)

There's a reason the 1920s have been called the Jazz Age — it was a time when people increasingly set aside old rules, in pursuit of profit or pleasure. Prohibition was voted in and, almost immediately, disregarded by vast numbers of Americans. Criminalization of narcotics came at the same time and followed the same trajectory. Organized crime flourished as almost a direct result. Driven more by suffrage and a taste of economic independence, "liberated" women became more common. Just before the arrival of the Nazis, Berlin was a city either scandalously immoral or intoxicatingly free, depending on whom you asked. And of course the stock market soared with virtually no rules at all.

Then came the crash. The book does a half-decent job of quickly explaining something that we still don't fundamentally understand — the causes of the Great Depression are still hotly debated today, especially considering our own economic times. At any rate, it all came down.

One thing is clear: the global economy was already intricately tied together, but the world took an "every nation for itself" approach in reaction. The book is a bit unclear as to the currency manipulations and regulations of the time, which also played their role: German war reparations, for instance, had to be paid in dollars, pounds, or gold, meaning that Germany constantly had to scrape together foreign currency and precious metals, which were then shipped out of the country. It was hard to get that foreign currency back into the country afterward, meaning that from time to time Germany had enough wealth to pay the reparations (if only just) but didn't have the means.

Another aspect was the banking situation. Banks had invested in the stock market like anyone else, and were thus laid low and wiped out of business too. This led to ordinary people getting wiped out, too. A cartoon which has always resonated with me summed the situation up: a squirrel asks a down-and-out man, "But why didn't you save up when times were good?" The man replies, "I did."

The American response to the Great Depression was initially a "stay-the-course" mentality, but after prosperity failed to turn up no matter how many corners were rounded, some efforts at government relief were launched. This actually predated the New Deal, as Herbert Hoover made some efforts, but not enough. Franklin Roosevelt was elected in a truly massive landslide, and kept winning reelection as long as he lived. The New Deal did not erase the Depression, but it did help when nothing else had.

Socialists, watching a rich president rolling out reforms that they had long been fighting for, noted skeptically that Roosevelt was doling out limited reforms to keep the system working. Basically "FDR" was saving capitalism, they argued. What he was doing without question was restoring confidence, from his perpetual cheerful smile to his firm pronouncement, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." It worked; while people still faced hard times until around 1940, for as long as FDR was in office, most Americans believed the country was getting better, and would keep going that way. This was in sharp contrast to several other nations, as we'll see on Thursday.

• The shifting morality of the Jazz Age leads to some interesting ethical questions. So much as they did, were people right to move away from the old pre-World War rules? Most Christian leaders, after all, had actively supported the war (the Pope was a notable exception). A whole generation had volunteered for selfless service and had essentially been thrown away. In light of that, were people justified in moving more toward the pursuit of personal pleasure?
• The Great Depression was considerably lengthened by the attempts by nations to protect themselves, with no thought to the rest of the world. Is this a lesson on the limits of the nation-state?
• Considering the fierce debate and lingering uncertainty about the Great Depression, can we derive any lessons from 1929 and apply them to today? Or are the situations just too different, historically? Which leads us back to a larger recurring question: how much can we really learn from history?

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