The Hot War

I. Stalinism v. Nazism

A. Atrocities--murder is murder, and to the dead it makes little difference to discern the reasons behind their death. It is also true that Stalinism and Nazism were not the same thing, and one of the distinguishing characteristics has to do with the reasons they killed people.

B. Genocide--has a very specific meaning, although that meaning is often in contention. As coined by the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, genocide was “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”



C. Internment Camps--both the Soviet Union under Stalin and Germany under Hitler forcibly transported large numbers of people to internment camps because, they argued, these groups posed a threat to the well-being of the nation.

1. Concentration camps--location where a significant population of undesirable or “enemy” populations are forced to live, under guard and confinement, because of the perceived danger these people were believed to pose to the well-being of the state.

a) United States--while both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany ran concentration camps, it is often overlooked that the United States ran concentration camps, as well, where Japanese on the West Coast were sent after the bombing of Peal Harbor. This included both Issei (immigrant Japanese) and Nissei (second generation Japanese-Americans who were citizens of the United States--something the Chinese could not aspire to until 1943, when the United States rescinded the article in the Chinese Exclusion Act that prohibited Chinese from becoming citizens.

2. Labor camps--most concentration camps were run as labor camps. Workers were forced to labor for no compensation--they served, in fact, as slave labor

a) Soviet Union--”enemies of the state” were sent out to these labor camps--later known by their Russian acronym Gulag--for a variety of crimes against the state: being late for work too many times, too many unexcused absences, complaining about the government (and real crimes, as well). Many of these camps were located in inhospitable climates (Siberia), and many inmates died (perhaps millions, certainly hundreds of thousands) because of harsh working conditions and/or inadequate diets.



b) Nazi--Nazi labor camps were first inhabited by communists and socialists, along with Jehovah Witnesses, Roma people, the mentally ill, and other “social deviants.” Some of these people may have been Jew (except the Jehovah Witnesses and Roma, of course), but they were not rounded up because they were Jewish.






This changed after Anschluss in Austria, and Kristalnacht in December 1938, when Jewish adult males were arrested and sent to these “concentration camps.” After 1938, Jews were identified (fairly easy to do, since in many places in Europe Jews had to live within restricted neighborhoods known as ghettos), and many of them began to be transported to labor camps--where many died because of the working conditions they had to endure and inadequate diets. Oskar Schindler, of Shindler’s List fame, was a member of the Nazi Party, and the Jews who worked for him were assigned to a work camp and treated as slaves--although Schindler treated his group better than most employers.

3. Death Camps--also known as extermination camps. Several labor camps were converted to death camps, and other death camps were established, where inmates were systematically murdered.

a) Soviet Union--Stalin, despite his numerous faults did not establish any death camps--although many thousands died in their labor camps.

b) Nazi Germany--in 1943, several work camps were converted to death camps, and several other death camps were established in Nazi-held Poland and Czechoslovakia. Jew and Roma (Gypsies) were transported to these new death camps, where showers had been converted into gas chambers, and ovens built to cremate the remains--after dental gold and other valuables were recovered. Industrial efficiency was applied to the systematic murder of human beings.

4. Genocidal intent

a) Soviet Union--evidence is lacking for reaching a conclusion about whether Stalin intended to commit acts of genocide; Stalin simply had a callous disregard for human life in general. There was no systematic attempt to exterminate a particular ethnic group.

b) Nazi Germany--the intent of the Final Solution was to exterminate Jews and Roma and other “enemy” populations. In fact, assets were devoted to this task even while causing defeats on the fronts the war was fought on.

II. War and Xenophobia

A. Definition of Xenophobia--An unreasonable fear, distrust, or contempt of strangers, foreigners, or anything perceived as foreign or strange.

1. Racism--a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races [itself a fallacy, since there is only one race of humans in existence today--gm]. Racism often grows from xenophobia.

B. Racializing “the Other”--as Harman argues in his book, Hitler capitalized on xenophobia and racism to get Germans to go along with (or actively support) his Final Solution.

1. Aryans as the “superior” race--Hitler’s government actively sought to promote his ideas about the racial superiority of “aryans”--by which he meant blue eyed blond white people, and the government provided monetary awards for these kinds of people to have greater numbers of children.

2. Untermenschen--German for “sub-humans,” used to characterize Poles, Russians, and other Slavic peoples--the reason given for German domination (and extermination) of these peoples; Jews were considered even lower than the untermenschen.



3. Japanese--considered other Asian peoples being inferior to themselves, and therefore people who should be dominated by them. Japanese also considered Americans racially inferior to themselves, part of the decadent and soft peoples of the world.

4. United States--The United States had a whole host of racist ideologies, present from its inception--even though the reasons given for going to war against Germany was that country’s racist ideology, the United States quickly racialized its conflict with Japan--as a viewing of cartoons from the time quickly inform us. Japanese were depicted as devious--if not terribly intelligent--with wide toothy grins and round glasses. Germans, on the other had, were largely depicted as sadistic Nazis.

5. War as a Racist Enterprise--any (every?) war that lasts any appreciable length of time incorporates racist/xenophobic rhetoric, which in lend itself to justifying wartime atrocities. This is particularly true for guerilla wars, where the “enemy” is difficult to distinguish from non-combatants.

a) Gook--perhaps the longest-lasting wartime epiteth, first coined by US Marines during the Moro Rebellion in the Philippines following the War with Spain; remained in use for the next 70+ years to describe any combatant in eastern Asia (as well as in Haiti)



b) Dehumanization--by using ugly epitaths to describe people soldiers are sent to kill--Krauts, Wops, Japs, gooks, even hajis--these soldiers grant themselves the license to treat them as sub-humans, to destroy their lives and/or property even if they have not offered any resistance.

III. From Depression to War

A. State Planning of Economics--Again, American conservatives like to argue that the Great Depression would have ended much earlier if only government had stayed out of the economy--but around the world, no government, no matter what political ideology, did so. Even the Conservative (Tory) Party in Great Britain nationalized public utilities, the airlines, and coal mining rights.

1. Economics as warfare--during the Great Depression, nations used trade as a sort of proxy for warfare. Tariffs were used to make imports from other countries more expensive to purchase, while the devaluation of currency make exports from a country cheaper than many of its competitors

a) Look, for example, at the foreign trade practices in China; tariffs on imported goods make them more expensive, while economic incentives are provided to manufacturers to locate factories in the country--and keeping the Chinese yen artificially low makes Chinese exports readily available.

2. Colonies as captive markets--maintaining colonies provided developed countries with captive markets for their goods, easing the economic pain for home manufacturers. European countries without colonies (Germany and Italy) used military force to gain colonies or their equivalent

a) Germany’s push toward the Middle East (through the Balkans) threatened British control of the Suez Canal, as well as the oil fields of its creation called Iraq, This threat propelled Great Britain to back its ally France, which began preparations for war with Germany as the latter swallowed up a number of France’s erstwhile allies in Eastern Europe.

3. Government spending--to gear up for war, governments around the world borrowed money from their banking systems, and then spent it on the manufacture of war goods--trucks, planes, ships.

a) By the end of the war, at the huge airplane factory built by the US government and the Ford Motor Company at Willow Run near Ypsilanti, assembly line production eventually produced an airplane an hour.

b) In the United States, wartime spending was spread around the country to ensure continued Congressional support for the spending--resulting in the manufacturing base of the country also being spread around the country. This meant that this base was no longer centered around the Great Lakes; this has had a significant effect on the region in the postwar era.

B. Hegemonic Strategy--while the war was ostensibly fought to keep the “free world” from the iron fist of Nazi domination, it was also fought--perhaps largely fought--to ensure that the “great powers” maintained control of strategic locations.

1. “The Soft Underbelly of Europe”--Churchill insisted that before a second front was opened in western Europe that what he called the “soft underbelly”of the continent--though mountinous Italy, then attempt to attack Germany through the Alps--be exploited. This strategy had the effect of prolonging the conflict in Europe, I would argue.

C. Hegemonic Peace--first at Yalta, and confirmed at Potsdam, much of the world was divided into “spheres of influence,” where either the Soviet Union, Great Britain, or the United States would dominate. The “hot war” devolved in the postwar era into a “cold war” that each side tried to undermine through economic power and proxy wars.

1. Great Britain--never recovered from the destruction of the war--despite the Marshall Plan--and has largely served since the end of the war as a junior partner to the ambitions of the United States

The Left and the War

I. The Revolution Betrayed

A. Struggle for Power After Lenin

1. The NEP (New Economic Policy)--re-introduced the market (in a limited way) to the Russian economy. Begun by Lenin and Trotsky in 1921, it allowed farmers to sell their produce (particularly grain) as long as they paid a tax in kind (that is, in the produce they grew) to the state. Banking and heavy industry remained under the control of the state. The agricultural sector grew much faster than the industrial sector as a result of this. Industry then began to charge higher prices for the goods it produced, forcing farmers to grow more to buy these consumer goods--or to withhold goods from the market to await higher prices. There also emerged speculators, known as “NEP-men” who bought the grain from farmers and held it to await the rise in price.



2. Lenin dies 1924--setting off a power struggle between Stalin and Trotsky

3. Stalin the Bureaucratic Infighter--Stalin proves more adept at the bureaucratic infighting, increasingly marginalizing Trotsky, eventually forcing him into exile.



4. “Socialism in One Country”--Stalin argues, contrary to his previous position (and in contrast to Trotsky’s argument of the Permanent Revolution) that in order to keep socialism alive, the revolution must be protected in the Soviet Union at all costs. This entails enforced orthodoxy from Moscow, and the ending of the NEP.

a) This communist orthodoxy is enforced through the Third International (also known as the Communist International, or Comintern). Those who strayed from this orthodoxy were branded “fascists,” and thrown out of the Communist Party.

b) This action had varying effects. Where the socialist movement was weakest it had the greatest effect, since socialists seeking to change the political structure in their country had little choice but to go along or become estranged from the movement; this was particularly potent in countries like the United States

5. State Socialism--in ending the NEP, Stalin ended the market experiment in the Soviet Union. All peasant farms were collectivized--i.e., the state took control of them. Farmers were forced to live on communes, and the state seized all that was produced. Those who resisted were either executed or exiled to the gulag work camps. In order to compete with the west, the state also exercised more stringent control of the factories in the countries, banning independent labor unions (which had operated in the country previously), while also implementing the most oppressive aspects of capitalist control of workers, and Soviet industry strove to catch up to western capitalist industry.

II. The Threat from the Right

A. Hitler and Germany

1. Reichstag Fire--blamed on Communist infiltrators. Although only five Communists were arrested for the crime--and only one was convicted--all known communists were hunted down, arrested, and sent to concentration camps.

2. Fascist intimidation--the German Social Democrats attempted to placate the Nazi Party by declaring May 1--International Workers’ Day--a day of national unity; on May 2 the Social Democrats were rounded up and sent to concentration camps as well.

B. Austria and the Christian Right

1. Dolfuss--Englehart Dolfuss was the leader of a fascist Christian Social Party, who seized power in 1933 due to a power struggle in the lower house of parliament in Austria. He ruled as a dictator until he was assassinated by Nazi agents in 1934.



2. Austrian Social Democrats--were defeated in a three-day civil war attempting to resist the (temporarily) united forces on the right; as a result of the defeat, the party was outlawed and its leaders were either arrested or fled the country.



3. Anschluss--the threat of war made by Mussolini kept Nazi forces from uniting Austria with Germany until 1938--the event known as Anschluss, popularly remembered at the end of the movie The Sound of Music.

C. France and the Popular Front--the attempted coup d’etat on the part of political parties on the right led to the unification of socialists and communists and the Radical Party (the liberal political party, despite its name).

1. Rise of Hitler--in Germany caused a change of policy on the part of Stalin (who had ordered Communist parties around the world not to cooperate with other political groups on the left--particularly Socialists). This led the French Communist Party to unite with the Socialists and Radicals--although the did not receive any cabinet positions as a result of this unification. Leon Blum, a moderate leftist, was elected prime minister.



2. Political Unity--because the focus was on political unity, rather than on the possibility of socialist revolution, the leadership of both the Socialists and Communists reigned in the spontaneous rank-and-file rebellion that this new unity inspired. French workers had a long history of syndicalist action (worker control at the point of production), but the Popular Front leadership worked hard at tamping this rebellion down.

3. Spanish Civil War--to appease the right-wing of the Radical Party, when fascist Francisco Franco led the army against the duly elected Socialist government in Spain, Blum declared that France would remain neutral, and see that no arms were shipped to the Spanish government to assist them in putting down this rebellion. The Communists objected to this, and abstained in a no-confidence vote taken in its aftermath (rather than vote in support of the government), but this development revitalized the right in France.

4. End of the Popular Front--the business interests were emboldened by the failure to support Republican Spain, and began to move politically against the Popular Front, culminating in the defeat of strikes protesting the government rolling back the 40 hour work week. The working-class became more disillusioned with the leadership of left-wing political parties, and drifted away in large numbers.



5. Vichy France--when war seemed imminent between France and Germany in August 1939, the French ruling class outlawed the French Communist Party. When France was defeated in the war that followed with the occupation of Paris on July 22, 1940, those same ruling elites collaborated with the Nazis to divide the country, surrendering the northern half to Germany while retaining Vichy France in the south.

D. Spanish Civil War--like Russia, Spain had retained feudalism far longer than many of its European neighbors, and retained that feudal influence through a number of royalists and conservative Roman Catholics. These forces resisted both political liberals and later republicans. This resistance also fed the development of more radical political elements; anarchism became on important political movement in Spain in the years before the civil war.

1. Second Spanish Republic--a center-left coalition, enacted such radical measures as the Agrarian Law of 1931, which distributed land among poor peasants (who were treated much like serfs by wealthy landowners before the passage of the law), cutback in military spending and reforms, and anti-clerical laws--all of which spurred opposition from the right



2. Generalissimo Francisco Franco--was head of the army in Spanish Morocco, and the leader of the attempted coup on the part of Spanish Army Generals. Franco received support from both Hitler and Mussolini; Germany in particular supplied arms, training, and troops to try out new military tactics that we have come to identify as blitzkrieg.

3. Republican forces--relied on support from the Soviet Union, and from Mexico--along with thousands of volunteers from around the globe, including Eric Blair, the British writer better known by his pen name, George Orwell.



4. Fascism triumphant--the Soviet Union was unwilling to provide the level of support that the fascist forces provided Franco, and after three years of war the royalist forces prevailed. Spain remained a fascist dictatorship until Franco’s death in 1975.

E. War and Civil War in China--the Kuomintang, led by General Chiang Kai-shek, had cooperated with the then newly established Chinese Communist party in the 1920s to fight against Japan and several European countries, but turned on them to consolidate power into his own hands; the communists, in the famous Long March, moved to a part of the country out of Chiang’s control, and began working for their own rise to power. The Kuomintang army, in part because of the large scale of corruption introduced by Chiang, proved little resistant to Japanese forces in the late 1930s, when Japan once again invaded China.



F. The Left in the United States--the failure of recovery in the United States led to a resurgence of the left in the country. The left had been decimated after the repression in 1919, although a dedicated cadre remained. These people remained dedicated to organizing the working-class, however, and when the began collaborating with elements of the resurgent Democratic Party in an American Popular Front, the labor movement in particular gained a new influence in the political process

The Great Slump

I. World-Wide Depression



A. Black Thursday--October 24, 1929 the New York Stock Exchange crashed, losing fully one-third of its value. Many rich investors who had put most of their wealth in the stock market lost it; newspapers in New York reported 11 suicides related to the Wall Street crash the next day.

B. Causes of the Great Depression--despite the popular perception that the Great Depression started on Black Thursday, there was not one single cause for the Great Depression--but it was not caused by a “perfect storm” of unconnected factors, either. The reactions by governments around the world, coupled with malfeasance and criminal behavior on the part of the business class, helped increase the severity of the slump, and prevented a quick recovery.



1. Conservative explanation--it has become popular for ideologues on the right to claim that the Great Depression was, in fact, merely another manifestation of the business cycle, and if governments would not have interfered with the market, everything would have righted itself more quickly. This argument hinges upon the 1937 “Roosevelt Recession,” when FDR slashed slashed the federal budget in an attempt to balance the budget.

2. Winston Churchill and the Gold Standard--Churchill served as Chancellor of the Exchequer (equivalent to the Secretary of the Treasury in the US), and was determined to return Great Britain to its pre-war greatness--by returning the country to the gold standard and pegging the value of the British pound to the US dollar.



a) Effects--to raise the cost of British exports, making them more costly for other countries to purchase--which depressed employment. Britain suffered a bit less during the Great Depression because it had colonies to sell to as protected markets, but the missteps of Churchill made the situation much worse than it would have been otherwise.



3. Germany--after the social turmoil of the war and its aftermath, Germany after 1923 was fairly stable--thanks to an infusion of cash from the United States via the Dawes Plan. This spurred investors from the US to also invest in the country, which was responsible for its prosperity. That investment stopped in November 1929 with the stock market crash, and the US insisted that the loans provided under the Dawes Plan be paid back on schedule.

a) National Socialist Party--after the abortive Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923, Adolph Hitler (after serving his eight-month sentence for treason), acted more cautiously, maintaining a more disciplined party of thugs (the Stormtroopers, or SA), but not attempting another coup d’etat until the proper time. The Nazis remained a minor party throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s. At the height of their electoral powers, they only received 37% of the vote--and that percentage declined after they came to power.

b) German politics unravels--the renewed economic crisis brought on a new political crisis in Germany, as well. The president of the Weimar Republic, military hero Paul von Hindenburg, was approaching senility. After several unsuccessful appointments of prime ministers, Hindenburg reluctantly turned to “the corporal” to head up the new government in January 1933.



c) Reichstag Fire (February 1933)--just a month after Hitler came to power, the Reichstag was set on fire. The Nazis blamed the fire on a Communist plot, and rounded up several suspects. Ultimately, a single Communist was convicted for the crime--but four alleged co-conspirators were found not guilty.



4. France--France had a relatively high degree of self-sufficiency, and suffered less than most of the industrialized European countries--although the hardship was severe enough, and unemployment high enough, that workers rioted in June 1934--leading to the rise in power of the socialist Popular Front that year.




a) Much of French industry did not have the level of capitalist investment that was present in other industrialized countries; ownership was mostly individuals or small partnerships, and little investment was placed in stock ownership.

b) Farms in France were also smaller than in many industrialized countries, although a push to “modernize” agriculture in the country during the 1920s had begun to change that.

c) Unemployment stayed fairly low because the population remained depressed as a result of the carnage France had suffered during the First World War.



5. United States--ground zero for the Great Depression. The economic malaise lasted the longest and cut the deepest.



a) Malfescence--while prices remained low (this was, in fact, an extended period of deflation), the crisis in the banking industry made economic conditions much worse--and much of this problem was a result of criminal, or near criminal, behavior on the part of “banksters.” Interlocking directorships (men sitting on the board of directors of banks also served on the boards of other institutions--and many of these institutions obtained loans from these banks with little collateral). Banksters also used their connections to obtain loans for a variety of purposes--and bank mergers also helped to hide the losses banks suffered as loans went bad, hiding the losses until the whole house of cards collapsed.

b) Solutions--Herbert Hoover attempted to stabilize the banking industry by creating the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) to take over troubled banks, but the US government under Hoover never was vigorous enough to regulate the banking industry and staunch the bleeding. It was not until FDR took office and declared a “bank holiday,” closing all banks in the country until they could prove they were solvent, that the banking industry could begin to recover. Congress then passed legislation to prevent most banks from engaging in speculative ventures like the stock market and created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (the Glass-Steagall of 1933; the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 repealed the provisions preventing banks from engaging in speculative ventures, and is in part responsible for the difficulties the banking industry is in today).



6. Japan--was still in the early stages of industrial capitalization, but was the first industrial nation to embrace what became known as the Keynseian remedy--deficit spending by the national government to encourage production and job growth, and the devaluation of the national currency to make exports cheaper. Japan focused its spending program on the production of armanents; since this coincided with increased militarization of Japanese society, it also encouraged colonial expansion. The military was so enthusiastic about the program in fact that when the finance minister attempted to decrease the deficit spending, the army had him assassinated.



7. Italy--the European country that suffered least from the effects of the Great Depression. Mussolini had already implemented “state capitalism,” control of the economic system by the state, but with profits still going to the private sector.

II. The Revolution Betrayed

A. Struggle for Power After Lenin



1. The NEP (New Economic Policy)--re-introduced the market (in a limited way) to the Russian economy. Begun by Lenin and Trotsky in 1921, it allowed farmers to sell their produce (particularly grain) as long as they paid a tax in kind (that is, in the produce they grew) to the state. Banking and heavy industry remained under the control of the state. The agricultural sector grew much faster than the industrial sector as a result of this. Industry then began to charge higher prices for the goods it produced, forcing farmers to grow more to buy these consumer goods--or to withhold goods from the market to await higher prices. There also emerged speculators, known as “NEP-men” who bought the grain from farmers and held it to await the rise in price.



2. Lenin dies 1924--setting off a power struggle between Stalin and Trotsky

3. Stalin the Bureaucratic Infighter--Stalin proves more adept at the bureaucratic infighting, increasingly marginalizing Trotsky, eventually forcing him into exile.

4. “Socialism in One Country”--Stalin argues, contrary to his previous position (and in contrast to Trotsky’s argument of the Permanent Revolution) that in order to keep socialism alive, the revolution must be protected in the Soviet Union at all costs. This entails enforced orthodoxy from Moscow, and the ending of the NEP.



5. State Socialism--in ending the NEP, Stalin ended the market experiment in the Soviet Union. All peasant farms were collectivized--i.e., the state took control of them. Farmers were forced to live on communes, and the state seized all that was produced. Those who resisted were either executed or exiled to the gulag work camps. In order to compete with the west, the state also exercised more stringent control of the factories in the countries, banning independent labor unions (which had operated in the country previously), while also implementing the most oppressive aspects of capitalist control of workers, and Soviet industry strove to catch up to western capitalist industry.



III. Conclusion--The reaction of counties to the stress induced by the Great Depression led to greater political conflicts by government in Europe, and also to greater conflict between the United States and Japan around the Pacific Rim. By the end of the 1930s, this led to a Second World War, with even greater devastation and carnage than witnessed during the First World War.

The Ascendency of Capitialism

I. The Jazz Age--The Commodification of Culture



A. Jazz--the 1st World Music

1. Development--jazz developed from the synergistic relationship between African and European folk music traditions that also spawned other American music idioms like the blued (the first manifestation of this relationship), country music, much 20th century popular music, rock and roll--and all that followed.



a) War with Spain (1898)--the United States’ short-lived war with Spain netted the country its first overseas colonies (the Philippines, Puerto Rico, kind sorta Cuba), and to accompany the soldiers off to war there were numerous members of brass bands.



b) New Orleans--the largest US port on the Caribbean became the place where returning soldiers were mustered out of the Army--and where these military brass bands dumped their instruments, as well--creating an abundance of musical instruments in the city, and dropping the price for used instruments there considerably.



c) “Entertainment” Center--New Orleans was filled at the turn of the 20th Century with brothels and saloons, with a clientele ranging from sailors and dockhands to company executives--all interested in entertainment of one sort or another. New Orleans also had an abundance of Creole (mixed ancestry French/Spanish/African persons) who provided a cadre of musicians trained in European classical music, but familiar with the early blues music as well.

2. Dissemination--jazz might have remained a localized phenomenon, except for the criminalization of brothels in New Orleans, and Thomas Edison’s invention of the grammaphone.



a) Player piano--the earliest disseminator of jazz-style music was the ragtime rolls produced for player pianos the were in many middle-class homes just before the turn of the 20th century--this is the reason we know anything about how Scott Joplin and other “ragtime” composers sounded like. This also introduced some middle class kids to the sound of this newly emerging music.

b) Reform in New Orleans--closed many of the venues that New Orleans musicians had plied their trade in, and forced them to look elsewhere for paying musical jobs--mainly in cities that were seeing a large influx of African American migration in the United States, like St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, and New York; these cities became hot new centers for jazz music by the early 1920s.



c) Gramaphone--replaced the player piano in many homes, and because it was so much less money than a player piano, it came into much wider use. Its sale created a market for recorded music; although jazz was first a staple of the “race records” market, when it left the pressing plant the companies exercised no control over who bought it--including white kids in places like Davenport, Iowa like Leon “Bix” Beiderbecke



(1) Music was introduced to Europe by African American soldiers during World War I, some of whom chose to live there after the war ended--Paris was a particularly choice spot--because they did not face the level of every day discrimination there that they did in the United States.

(2) Jazz also provided the basis for the development of popular music in the United States and Europe, as “hot” jazz was “sweetened” for white audiences; the Paul Whiteman Orchestra was the best known example of this.



B. The Automobile Age



1. Development--no one person--or even one country--can be credited with the development of the automobile. Its development came about because of the developments in earlier related industries--particularly bicycle making, wagon making--and by engineering advances that made smaller engines more efficient and powerful.



a) Bicycles--manufacturing bicycles helped develop new metal working techniques, particularly the technique for hardening metals for use in manufacturing gears, and the use of hollow metal tubes for frames, proving to be both strong and lightweight. The bicycle industry also trained workers in these techniques.

(1) Bicycling was an international craze in the years before the invention of the automobile. Coventry, England was a major center of manufacturing (American centers of bicycling manufacturing--like Toledo--labeled themselves the “Coventry of America”); the current Tour de France is a reflection of the popularity of bicycle racing dating from this period.



2. Wagon-making--expertise in the manufacturing of wagons also informed the manufacturing process for building automobile bodies for years--into the early 1950s, in fact, when “uni-body” construction was invented (note the “woody” station wagon)



3. Smaller, more efficient engines--were the result of hundreds (thousands?) of “shade tree” mechanics tinkering and experimenting in their workshops, and through mounting the results on wagons and other vehicles and seeing what resulted--men like Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler in Germany, Charles and Frank Duryea and Ransom E. Olds in the United States, and Rene Panhard and Emile Levassor in France.



4. Henry Ford and the Popularly-Priced Automobile--Ford is largely responsible for popularizing the automobile. He accomplished this by utilizing two factors--by seeking manufacturing innovations to cut his cost of production (by 1924, when Ford had manufactured 50% of all vehicles then on the road, the Model T sold for $295--the equivalent of $3,660 in 2009), and by paying his workers an astounding $5/day--thereby helping create a market for his inexpensive car.

II. “The New Prosperity”

A. The New Economics--beginning in 1919, a rollback of gains labor unions had made during the labor shortage of the war years, coupled with the quashing of all dissent from those opposed to capitalist enterprise, created the atmosphere for the “Golden 20s.”

1. Political Backlash in the United States



a) Labor--in 1919, a variety of strikes were defeated around the country by governmental sanction of the use of strikebreakers; companies brought in strikebreakers, and local and state governments used their police powers to break up the massive pickets that unions used in response in the name of “law and order.”



b) Political dissent--1919 also saw the wholesale arrest of political dissenters, epitomized by the “Palmer Raids.” Repression of dissent began two years earlier, during the war, when federal, state, and local governments began vigorous enforcement of the Alien and Sedition Act. A.Mitchell Palmer, US Attorney General in 1919, attempted to distinguish himself as a leading presidential contender for the 1920 Democratic Party nomination by rounding and deporting the remaining “reds”; this proved to be a little too heavy-handed, however, even for patriotic Americans. The criticism Palmer received for these ill-considered, and illegal, raids ended his political career



(1) Mike Davis contends that the bombing of Wall Street in 1920 was in direct response to this affair.

2. The United States and World Finance--the cost--both in money and population--and the destruction of industrial infrastructure (particularly in German) shifted the balance of financial might from Great Britain and Germany to the United States.

a) Wall Street investment--investing had previously been the exclusive field for people rich enough to own banks; in the 1920s it became possible for smaller investors to move into The Market, investing their savings or, better yet, borrowing money “on the margin” (a promise to pay a certain price for a stock, then selling it when the price went up, pocketing the difference--without actually putting any money up).



b) Economists believed that, in fact, capitalism had “matured,” and that the “boom and bust” of the business cycle had been overcome.

c) A new financial tool was invented as well--”consumer credit”--that allowed the middle class (and those aspiring to move into the middle class) to buy goods like washing machines and especially automobiles. The automobile industry--outside of Ford--began to market cars as status symbols, since financing the purchase of an automobile allowed the consumer to buy “more car” than they could afford to pay cash for.
3. Some of the financial innovations in the US spread to Europe throughout the 1920s, allowing the middle class there to also indulge in an array of consumer spending.



Conclusion--This eased access to credit proved to be the engine to greater prosperity for many people of all economic classes--especially in the United States. But the prosperity this generated also encouraged people to take on a large amount of debt, and when the good times ended, it left many people over-extended financially, and the mountain of bad debt proved to have a long-term stranglehold on the economies of the world.