The Postwar Era (1919 - 1929)

CCLXXII

The Great War (later to be called “The First World War”) had ended suddenly in 1918, almost as unexpectedly as it had begun in 1914. In terms of mass destruction no one had ever seen such an orgy of carnage telescoped into such a brief period of time and carried out with such terrifying efficiency.

1916

Only plagues were more murderous: The Black Death, which was first reported in Central Asia circa 1330 killed an estimated 150,000,000 human beings in Eurasia in the next sixty years, reducing the world’s human population from 450 million to 300 million. The Spanish Influenza pandemic was worse; breaking out in late 1917 it faded away by early 1920, but not before carrying off 100,000,000 souls --- most in just 24 weeks in the autumn of 1918 --- out of a total world population of 1.5 billion. 500 million people were infected worldwide, making the planetary death rate from influenza a full 20% of those stricken ill. And it struck young adults the hardest at a time when the young were already dying in droves as war casualties.

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1918

There had been “great” wars before, and no one had ever measured them in quite the same way. There had been the Hundred Years War, a conflict that began in 1337 (the year the Black Plague reached Europe) and ended in 1453, a dynastic conflict that had swept across Western Europe for over 116 years, determining in its end whether England and France were to be separate nations or a united kingdom. Over that bloodstained century some 2.5 million people died as a direct result of the war --- and more than a third of French and English civilians died of plague.

Joan of Arc (c. 1410 – 1431) was a French heroine of the Hundred Years War. Burned as a heretic by the English, she was later canonized by the Roman Catholic Church

There had been the Napoleonic Wars of 1803 to 1815 that cost four million lives in combat and civilian losses both. It had been the “Great War” of its time. And it had bought Europe a century of relative peace.

Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow (1812)

World War I cost at least 20 million lives. The Russian Revolution arose out of it in 1917 and turned into a bloody civil war and epidemic that caused an estimated ten million deaths. And the Spanish Flu cost almost seven million more lives in Europe and America. That Europe’s leaders wanted to avoid another catastrophic war at all costs is not hard to understand.

Civil war in Russia (1917-1922)

So, with the narrow minds of grey-suited bureaucrats they set about laying the foundation for the next war. Europe’s statesmen politically quarantined newly-red Russia and they imposed crippling war reparations upon Germany even while stripping Germany of any ability to pay the billions demanded. Playing God, they created countries by drawing lines on maps in Eastern and Central Europe and in the Middle East that had no connection to realities on the ground. Members of ancient ethnic groups found themselves thrown pell-mell into political unions with their traditional enemies. The men with the pens called this “self-determination” and “democracy” but there was little of either. Given the chance to lead, the United States withdrew behind its oceanic moat and told them all to go to the devil. And, bizarrely, everyone celebrated.

Europe in 1914

Europe in 1920

The Middle East in 1914

The Middle East in 1920

The 1920s were a modern Decameron. Relieved to have survived war and pestilence, western culture rejoiced. It was the Age of Jazz, the Age of the Flapper, and a time when everything new predominated. The mass media, once limited only to print, suddenly exploded --- radio, recordings, films. Flying became the thing.  America, which had legally banned alcohol, became headily drunk in ten thousand blind pigs.  The stock market, entirely unregulated, headed for the stratosphere. America brought the rest of the world, or at least Europe and its colonial empires, along for the ride.

Perhaps nothing personified the Roaring Twenties as much as the flapper --- just a few years before, her older sister had looked much like the photo below. Spurred by the war and its associated technological advances, society underwent a sea change between 1914 and 1924 that was not just fast-paced or even revolutionary. It was radical

There was a frenzy to it all, a darkness underlying all the glitz and glitter, and it didn’t take long to manifest itself. In 1922, Benito Mussolini, a one-time schoolmaster became head of the government of Italy and introduced the world to a new concept --- Fascism. And so it went in country after country as the new democracies of Europe were taken over by strongman leaders. In Britain and France and the United States these events were largely ignored.

Mussolini though, had tapped directly into the heart of that darkness. In 1923, a little-known landscape painter and political debater named Adolf Hitler tried to overthrow the Weimar democracy by starting a revolution in a beer hall in Munich. His “Beer Hall Putsch” was an absurd failure, but Hitler was undaunted. He knew, even if no one else did, that his day would come.

Fascism was not limited to Italy and Germany. Here, Sir Oswald Moseley acknowledges the raised-arm salutes of a group of young women belonging to the British Union of Fascists, established in 1932. Three years earlier they had all been dancing to Jazz

The Great Depression, which began in 1929, slammed the door shut on the Jazz Age with an ominous bang. The near-complete collapse of the world financial market was matched by the near-complete collapse of the agricultural market, particularly in America, the world’s breadbasket. A dire drought that lasted from 1931 to 1938 turned 100 million acres of arable land into a Dust Bowl. The German Mark became literally worthless. Twenty-Five percent of Americans could not find a job. The people of the era might be forgiven for thinking that democracy was a failed experiment.

The climate on the Great Plains was naturally too arid for agriculture but a relatively rainy few decades persuaded mankind to ignore nature's other warning signs in pursuit of profits. Farmers prospered especially during World War I, breaking up the natural landforms to grow cash crops. The loose topsoil of the prairies was a yard deep in places and rich, but the drought of the early Thirties crippled the land. Without a wheat crop and without its natural buffalo grass cover the soil just blew away by the millions of cubic yards in “black blizzards”. There are areas of the United States that have never recovered from this man-made ecological disaster

The factory is operating but thousands of families were reduced to living in shantytowns called “Hoovervilles” in the shadow of wealth and plenty. By 1932, there were rumblings of revolution in the air

The Hooverville in New York’s Central Park stood on landfill that was once the Croton Reservoir and would soon be the Great Lawn

The Great Depression was as far away from Juan Trippe and Pan Am’s world-beating Clippers as can be imagined but yet Trippe no doubt had seen the Hooverville in Central Park, just blocks from his office on the 58^th floor. What he thought of it he never said. If he thanked his lucky stars he did so where no one could hear him.