Chapter 29 Introduction

• The 1920s were profoundly shaped by World War I and by movements well underway before the war.

• Three major patterns emerged: first, western Europe recovered from the war only incompletely; second, the United States and Japan rose as giants in industrial production; third, revolutions of lasting consequence shook Mexico, Russia, and China.

• Each of these developments brought into doubt western Europe’s assumptions about its place as the dominant global power.

I) The Disarray of Western Europe, 1918-1929

• In western Europe in the 1920s, new and often troubling political, social, psychological, and economic patterns arose.

• Fascism gained power in Italy and Germany. • Over ten million died in the Great War and millions

more were wounded. • The governments of Germany and Austria-Hungary

collapsed. • Western Europe’s dominance of world markets lost

ground and fell behind the United States and Japan.

a) The Roaring Twenties

• A brief period of stability, even optimism, emerged in the middle of the 1920s.

• Germany’s new democratic government promised friendship with its former enemies. The Kellogg-Briand Pact, outlawing war, was signed by a number of nations. However, internal politics was polarized by leftists who wanted to emulate the Communist regime of the Soviet Union and by rightists who sought authoritarian government based on the recovery of national honor.

• By the latter half of the decade, general economic prosperity and the introduction of consumer items like the radio and affordable automobiles buoyed hopes. A burst of cultural creativity appeared in art, films, and literature. The cubist movement, headed by Pablo Picasso, rendered familiar objects a geometric shapes.

• Women, who lost their economic gains in the war’s factories, attained voting rights and social freedoms in several countries.

• In science, important advances continued in physics, biology, and astronomy.

b) Fascism in Italy

• In 1919, Benito Mussolini formed the Fascist Party, which advocated a corporate state to replace both capitalism and socialism and an aggressive foreign policy under a strong leader.

• Fascism had its roots in the 19th century with groups disenchanted with liberal, parliamentary systems and social conflict. Various intellectuals in many countries began to urge the need for new authoritarian leadership with a devotion to nationalist values.

• Once in power (1922), Mussolini eliminated his opponents, issued a stream of nationalist propaganda, and began a strict program of government-directed economic programs.

c) The New Nations of East-Central Europe

• Many of the problems that beleaguered western Europe also plagued the new nations created at Versailles (1919), from eastern and central Europe.

• There were also rivalries among the small eastern European states, where authoritarian governments often took hold.

• Peasant land hunger, poverty, and illiteracy continued despite regime changes.

II) Industrial Societies Outside Europe

• Settler societies, such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, became more autonomous during this era.

• Canada saw an increasingly strong economy and rapid immigration during the 1920s.

• Australia emphasized socialist programs like nationalization of railways, banks, and power plants and experienced rapid immigration as well.

a) The Rise of the American Colossus

• Of greater significance was the rise of the United States to international economic prominence, even while it attempted to shrink from the world political stage in the 1920s, after its Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles. (Intervention in Latin American politics continued, however.)

• The U.S. economy boomed between World War I and the Great Depression and established itself as an innovator in products, technology, and corporate practices.

• The nation also exported its culture around the world through music and movies.

b) Japan and Its Empire• After World War I, Japan became Asia’s leading

industrial power. The industrial combines, called the zaibatsu, rapidly expanded in areas like shipbuilding.

• Like Western countries, Japan saw its political institutions challenged by war and depression.

• In response, the nation developed an aggressive foreign policy pushed by a government controlled by the military.

• Advances in education and rapid growth in population were two other features of this era.

c) A Balance Sheet

• Changes in Europe, the settler societies, the United States, and Japan in the 1920s were complex.

• Political, economic, and social forces fostered varying degrees of change.

• Continuity was sought after in many quarters, but seldom found.

III) Revolutions: The First Waves

• An unprecedented tide of revolution swept key regions outside Europe.

• Each, with varying degrees of success, challenged the Western model of the role of government in the economic, political, and social realms.

a) Mexico’s Upheaval• In Latin America, the first of these challenges occurred in

Mexico. • Calls for political and land reform, education, and nationalism

led to the Mexican Revolution. • The regime of dictator Porfirio Diaz had been in power since

1876 and seemed unshakable. • By 1910 Diaz was 80 years old and Francisco Madero, a

wealthy son of an elite family, decided to run against him. • Diaz had Madero arrested, rigged the election, and when

Madero was released from prison he triggered a rebellion.• Several key players, like Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa, and

Victoriano Huerta battled for control of the country, eventually yielding to Alvaro Obregon (1915).

• The Mexican Constitution of 1917 made promises of land reforms (slow to materialize) and public education (more successfully met).

b) Culture and Politics in Post- revolutionary Mexico

• Attempts to “Indianize” the nation were begun by the government.

• Pro-Marxist artists like Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco became well known around the world, by capturing the past and outlining a social program for the future in stunning murals on public buildings designed to inform, convince and entertain at the same time.

• The gains of the revolution were not made without opposition. The secularization of society and especially education met strong opposition from the Catholic church, and in the 1920s they backed a conservative peasants movements in central Mexico called Cristeros, which lasted for several years until a compromise was reached.

• The government took control of the petroleum industry. • The PRI developed into the controlling force in politics and

remained so through the end of the twentieth century.

c) Revolution in Russia: Liberalism to Communism

• In 1917, the tsar abdicated and a provisional government, headed by Alexander Kerensky, struggled to maintain control of the country.

• When reforms seemed slow in coming, popular unrest ensued and by the end of the year a second revolution (1917) occurred, bringing into power a radical new form of government—Communism.

• Under the Bolshevik banner, Vladimir Lenin signed a treaty ending hostilities with Germany and ended any semblance of a multiparty system.

• An ensuing civil war killed millions, but the Communist Red Army prevailed, under the leadership of Leon Trotsky.

d) Stabilization of the New Regime

• Order was restored after the revolution with the construction of the powerful new Red Army under Trotsky.

• Lenin issued the New Economic Policy, a stopgap economic mix of true Communism and capitalism.

• Food production increased, giving the Bolsheviks time to strengthen their grip on national politics.

• By 1923, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a fact but was a “peoples’ government” in name only, with all the features of an authoritarian system.

• The Supreme Soviet had many of the trappings of a parliament and was elected by universal suffrage, yet competition was prohibited which meant the Communist party easily controlled the body.

e) Soviet Experimentation• In the middle of the 1920s, the Communist Party encouraged the

organization of workers’, students’, and women’s groups, and provided public education.

• This era of experimentation was short-lived however, as a power struggle broke out among Lenin’s deputies after his unexpected death.

• Many revolutionary leaders encouraged communist parties in the West and set up a Comintern or Communist International Office to guide the spread of the revolution throughout the world.

• The eventual winner to Lenin's throne was Joseph Stalin who believed in a strong nationalistic version of Communism which he called “socialism in one country.”

• Rivals to his political philosophy were exiled and/or killed.• Stalin would accelerate industrial development with the first of his 5

year plans (1927-1928) while attacking peasant land ownership with a new collectivism program that forced peasants to collective farms where millions fell victim to slaughter or starvation.

f) Toward Revolution in China• The fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912 occurred when

the last emperor abdicated, and began a long struggle over the political future in China.

• The best positioned of the contenders for power were regional military commanders or warlords, who would dominate Chinese politics for the next 3 decades.

• The most powerful was Yuan Shikai, who was based in north china and hoped to seize the vacated Manchu throne and found a new dynasty.

• Merchants and bankers in the coastal cities of Shanghai and Canton made up a second power center in post Qing China.

• Intellectuals such as students and teachers provided another factor, as well as peasants and foreign powers, most notably Japan.

g) In Depth: A Century of Revolutions

• Not since the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were there revolutions like those in the early twentieth century. Differently, the revolutions of the early twentieth century were precursors to later revolutions that struck after 1945.

• Like those from a century earlier, twentieth-century revolutions had several commonalities: rural discontent, population pressures, high taxes. Unlike the previous era, however, twentieth-century revolutions were also caused by the disruptions of the Industrial Revolution and by a Western-centered global market system.

• In addition, discontented World War I soldiers were a ready source of militant action for revolutions. Opposition to perceived Western influence was another ingredient.

• Finally, the Communist theories of Marx, Lenin, and Mao were a factor not in existence a hundred years before.

h) China’s May Fourth Movement and the Rise of the Marxist

Alternative• Sun Yat-sen’s Revolutionary Alliance had spearheaded the overthrow

of the Qing, but Sun’s political power was weak from the start. • Increasing Japanese encroachment into China’s internal affairs led to

the May Fourth Movement in 1919. • The movement sought Western-style reforms but proved ineffective

against powerful warlords not interested in yielding power.• It soon became clear that many Chinese intellectuals and students

felt that a more radical solution was needed for China’s problems.• The most influential of the thinkers was Li Dazhao, who felt that the

Bolshevik victory in Russia could rework the Marxist ideology to fit China’s situation.

• One of his students, Mao Zedong , used the example of the Russian Revolution and the ideology behind Marxist theory led Mao Zedong to form the Communist Party of China.

i) The Seizure of Power by China’s Guomindang

• Sun Yat-sen formed the Nationalist Party of China, or Guomindang, and forged key alliances with several groups in an attempt to rid the nation of the warlords.

• In 1924 the Whampoa Military Academy was founded with Soviet help to give the Nationalists a critical military dimension to their political maneuvering.

• Promising social and land reforms, the Guomindang instead focused on international issues.

• In an attempt to gain support from the peasants and urban workers, Sun even allied with the Communists, Chinese and Russian, and received aid from the latter.

• Meanwhile, the government largely ignored crises like famine and disease among the rural poor.

j) Mao and the Peasant Option

• Mao was a committed revolutionary who understood the importance of peasant support.

• Sun died in 1925 and was replaced by Chiang Kai-shek who, with Western approval, quickly turned against the Communists, most brutally in Shanghai.

• Mao led 90,000 of his supporters across thousands of miles to the more remote northwest in the Long March and regrouped.

• By this time, Japan was the more imminent threat to China as a whole, and the Nationalists under Chiang had to ally with the Communists to fight the invaders.

k) Global Connections: The Interwar Decades and the World

• Globalization retreated on the political and diplomatic fronts in the 1920s, despite the creation of the League of Nations.

• That organization turned out to be little more than a debating society incapable of real international influence.

• On the economic and social level, however, the Westernization of the world, with the United States as its epicenter, continued at a rapid pace.