RECOVERY II (THE “ROARING TWENTIES”)

Deep postwar anguish

What would American society, but especially European society, do to come back from this insane disaster that the Christian West had just put itself through? Of course reactions would vary from society to society. But they all tended to be rather intense in nature. Coming out of this wartime disaster emotionally, spiritually, was not going to be easy. Europe had lost a good part of a rising generation of young men. And the ones who did survive would be scarred deeply by their wartime experience.

The Spanish Flu (1918). Then there was the matter of the Spanish Flu, which hit the world hard just as the war was coming to a halt. 16 million people had died during the war; but the Spanish Flu killed three times that number within mere months (late 1918). And many that survived the attack would nonetheless find themselves permanently crippled.

This then left the question: where was God in all of this? Clearly he had not started this war, nor seemed to be the cause of its end. And certainly he had not chosen to inflict the Spanish Flu on those millions of good people. But still, why had he not intervened?

Economic depression in rural America. Then too, economically speaking, the European national economies now found themselves at a horrible low. The end of the war most naturally shut down a good part of the industrial world so recently built around the material requirements of the war. And shifting to a peacetime economic order was going to take some time. Thus work for those returning from the battlefields was hard to find.

In this, America seemed to be, at first, the exception, in part because its military loss had been much less by comparison to the loss on the part of the European societies. Indeed, for the farming world, the huge profits they made on their food products sold to a rather farmerless Western Europe (young European farmers had become soldiers during the war) would continue to flow to America, at least for a couple of years after the war’s end.

However, when the European farm boys got themselves back working on their farms, the profitability of American farm production, built heavily on that export market, quickly faded away.*

American farmers had put themselves in deep debt during the war, because of the bank loans they had taken out to purchase all that new farm machinery and additional farmland. But these were loans that within a few years of the end of the war they were totally unable to repay. They would be most willing at this point to sell off some of that land, now that production had cut back so greatly. But who would want to buy that farmland from them? The value of the land now proved to be much less than the bank loans they still had to pay the interest on. Thus it was that bankruptcy hit rural America savagely. But it hit not only the farmers, it also hit the local banks, who found their involvement in supplying these farmers with those now unpayable loans rendering the banks themselves worthless.

Minnesota potato farmers finding life to be quite tough – 1920s

The onset of the Great Depression at the beginning of the 1930s is quite well-known to us (and we will have much to say about this further on). But most of us do not know that for rural America, that same Great Depression actually started ten years earlier, when it hit at the beginning of the 1920s. And recovery would be slow, and not great for rural America.

Again, where was God in all this?

Jazz Age urban America

Then there was urban America, which seemed to suffer none of the shortcomings experienced by rural America. Indeed, urban America seemed to enter some kind of party mode, where life was seemingly rich and exciting. 

A Charleston competition in St. Louis – 1925

A big part of this was due to the way American industry quickly switched from military production to the production of radios, washing machines, and other household goods, but most importantly automobiles. The latter was partly a result of the policies of Henry Ford, who made his Model-T Ford priced at a level that even his own workers could afford one for themselves. When the Model-T was replaced by the Model-A in 1927, the number of Model-Ts that had been sold amounted to over 15 million!

But also under production during these “Roaring Twenties” was flashy clothing, cigarettes, and yes alcohol. In fact there was a great expansion of the (not so undercover) alcohol trade that went on despite – or even in deliberate defiance of – the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, which went into effect in 1919, outlawing alcohol sales. This was a law that a very traditional (mostly rural and small town) America had seen to impose on the country. And urban America found the new law to be something they were proud to ignore.

The wonderfully illegal partying at a 1920s “speakeasy”

Indeed, the “law” in general seemed to come into purposed disrespect by a newly “freed” postwar culture or spirit, a spirit found widely among America’s younger adults.

Another sign of the times was the entry into effect in 1920 of the 19th Amendment, opening the national vote to women in those states that had not already done so. The idea was that women no longer needed to rely on their husbands to do the speaking for the family. They could do that for themselves. In fact the idea was that they were free to do most anything for themselves, family roles no longer holding the paramount position that they had held formerly. A spirit of “individualism” was growing strongly in American culture, particularly among younger Americans.

Enjoying life in a train’s smoking car

The Scopes Monkey Trial (July 1925)

A sign of the times was the famous trial held in Dayton Tennessee over a state law that prevented Darwinism from being part of the teaching conducted in Tennessee’s schools. The trial all started as something of a stunt by some of the town’s leaders, who thought that contesting the law would bring some needed attention to the town. But the stunt became a national debate when the New York celebrity lawyer Clarence Darrow was brought in to defend the town against the law, and found strong support from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), in the ACLU’s effort to replace America’s traditional Christian worldview with Secular-Humanism as America’s new worldview.

Defending the “Christian” viewpoint, that God, not mechanics, stood behind man’s origins, was the old political warhorse William Jennings Bryan (formerly three times the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate). Bryan’s defense was that man was not the descendant of some earlier form of “monkey” (thus “monkey trial”), but was founded fully in his present form from the very beginning of his creation.

Darrow and Bryan

But actually his defense reached much more broadly than simply this matter of Darwinism. To Bryan, the case was really about how “science” had replaced Christian ethics (built on Christ’s love) with the laws of mechanics, loveless mechanics that had just proven themselves able to slaughter millions on the world’s battlefields. His closing argument (not presented at the trial itself but published soon after) is worth quoting because it is also highly prophetic. Most tragically, World War Two would soon validate completely Bryan’s warning:

Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. . . . Science has made war so hellish that civilization was about to commit suicide; and now we are told that newly discovered instruments of destruction will make the cruelties of the late war seem trivial in comparison with the cruelties of wars that may come in the future. If civilization is to be saved from the wreckage threatened by intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the moral code of the meek and lowly Nazarene. His teachings, and His teachings alone, can solve the problems that vex the heart and perplex the world.

Ultimately this trial truly revealed the deep moral-spiritual division America had fallen into. Bryan’s view was strongly supported from American pulpits across the country, while the major Liberal (Secular-Humanist) “up East” newspapers treated the matter as a sad joke, sad because any reasonable person could see how the Tennessee law was the dangerous tool of fools.

In the end, no one truly won or lost the case. The battle of worldviews would simply continue … to be present constantly in serious moral-spiritual questions that the country would continue to face (even down to today).

Moral-spiritual America in the 1920s

The “Prohibition” culture generated by the 18th Amendment served only to deepen this “traditional” versus “progressive” social divide afflicting America. Notorious were the gangs that made huge profits off the sale of the illegal alcohol, not only defying the law, but defying all moral sense needed by American society. Particularly famous, treated almost as heroes by “progressive” America, were the likes of Chicago gangster Al Capone, Capone known for his murderous hand in the wars going on between corrupt gangs.

St. Valentine’s Day gang killing in Chicago – 1929

But that same moral decline was to be found in the presidential offices of William Harding, not so much in the president himself, but certainly in the offices below him that he seemed unable to discipline.* Sadly he suffered a heart attack and died after only two years in office (1921-1923) while taking a trip across the country to present his side of the moral questions that were rising around him.

It would finally take the strong Puritan moral character of his Vice President (thus now President) Calvin Coolidge to inspire America to head back towards its former, quite strong, moral foundations. And indeed, America would settle down (somewhat) under his quiet but firm leadership.

   Harding            Coolidge

As for Christian America, America’s churches at least, the 1920s would generally prove to be a huge disappointment. There was much hope placed in an Interchurch World Movement, numerous Christian denominations coming together immediately after the war to try to support the Wilsonian dream of a new world of peace and wisdom, the churches seeing Christian mission as a vital part of that dream. But just like the post-war fast-fading of Wilsonian Idealism, so the missionary spirit faded, and the organization failed to find the funding it was expecting in order to carry out its proposed mission. It would still continue forward, but at a much lower operational level than originally planned.

Then too, the bitter Liberal versus Fundamentalist battle in the American theological centers would not lessen. The initial Fundamentalist supremacy was finding itself, step by step, being replaced by a rising Liberal supremacy, as pastors switched loyalties, or were simply driven from their particular denominations. Often it was not a pretty scene.

Equally sadly for traditionalist America, across the nation (and the Western or “Christian” world as well) the 1920s would see an alarming drop in church attendance.

But Liberal America was running into its own moral-spiritual problems, in that all this moral-spiritual freedom was leading individuals to find themselves without purpose as they took on life’s challenges. The “Jazz Age” often found itself not truly free, just simply empty.

The “Lost Generation.” A classic expression of this spirit was found in a work of one of America’s great authors, F. Scott Fitzgerald: his The Great Gatsby (1925), where a group of quite fancy Jazz Age individuals coexist in a world of conflicting sexual relations, but also a world which ends in Gatsby’s murder, depicting just such a world without any particular meaning or grand purpose. In a way, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) was an attempt to impart some element of meaning and purpose to the Jazz Age world of the “Lost Generation,” a term American Gertrude Stein used in reference to the large group of American expatriate artists and intellectuals that she hosted in Paris, who gathered there in the hope of finding such meaning and purpose. Whether Hemmingway succeeded or not in his effort is debatable.

Fitzgerald                    Hemmingway                Stein

Freud. Not helping the matter much was the Austrian psychologist, Sigmund Freud. Freud’s “science” was actually merely Freudian opinion on matters of how and why the human mind works as it does, Freud hoping to bring some degree of rationality to such matters. He loved to see human instinct as shaped by very early sexual urges that get repressed during childhood … which good counseling can release the person from. That was a theory that appealed greatly to people looking for the “cause” of their behavior, even though there was no truly “scientific” basis on which Freud’s theories were derived.

But he also loved to attack the West’s traditional religions, but especially Christianity, as being nothing more than tragic neurosis, useful illusions that we feed ourselves in order to find some degree of comfort in the face of a very difficult existence.

But then, how was Freudian psychology any less the sort of thing that he accused traditional religion of being, namely, just a set of useful ideas offering some degree of comfort in the face of a very difficult existence?

But thus it was that he was able to gather into his realm a large number of Jazz Agers, practicing Freud’s very “rational” religion.

THE BROADER WORLD DURING THE TWENTIES

Russia

Russia would, as a follow-up to the collapsed Tsarist regime in early 1917, most definitely not go down the road that the Idealist Wilson had dreamed it would. The new Provisional Government of Kerensky foolishly assumed that what formed the foundation of this political changeover was the people’s enthusiastic support for a new democratic government. Actually, they just wanted out of the war, and failed to come to such support of the new government when it became clear that this government was going to continue to pursue the war, in joining with Wilson in his “crusade for democracy.” Some did join, many of “middle-class” Russia. But Russia’s industrial workers refused to go down that road, and formed a party under V.I. Lenin’s Marxist leadership (Russia’s “October Revolution” in late 1917), Lenin committed not only to getting Russia out of the war but also to setting up their own “Communist” society governed by workers’ councils (soviets).

Kerensky                              Lenin     

When Lenin was fully able to take command of the strategic soviets of Petrograd and Moscow, and then in December of 1917, through his envoy Leon Trotsky, get an agreement with Germany ending the war between the two powers, Lenin’s Communist party, soon identified as the “Reds” (their flag), found themselves more securely in power. But still resisting them were the “Whites,” a loose coalition of middle-class “democrats” and former Tsarist supporters … as Russia now became caught up in a vicious civil war.

At this point, Wilson, along with the British (and others), sent troops to Russia in July of 1918 to aid the White coalition in its fight with Lenin’s Reds. But it soon became apparent that politically, as well as militarily, this was far more complicated a matter than Wilson had expected. He thus gave up the effort (as eventually did the other allies) and withdrew his American troops from this Russian civil war in July of 1919 – a war which Lenin and his Communist Red Army would eventually win (1921-1922).

Actually, Lenin soon backed down a bit in his Marxist purity, acknowledging with his “New Economic Policy” Russia’s need to continue to work a bit with Russia’s entrepreneurial talents (the “capitalists”) to get the Russian economy back up and running. But he was, at that point, a sick man, and died in 1924.

Soviet Russia then fell into a bitter contest for leadership, Lenin’s associate Trotsky being the presumed leader. But Joseph Stalin busied himself working secretly to put his followers in positions of power wherever he could, and, in openly opposing “Trotskyism,” one by one have his opponents eliminated.* Then when in 1928 he was so bold as to take command of the Soviet economy with his Five-Year Plan for government-directed industrial development in Russia, he found himself unopposed. He was clearly Soviet Russia’s new leader (dictator actually).

Tragically, this cost the lives of millions of Russians when Stalin shifted the foundations of the Russian economy from agriculture to heavy industry, producing starvation when the peasants resisted the turnover of their lands and herds to the Soviet authorities now ruling the land (“collectivization”). But there was nothing they could do to protect themselves, Stalin having put deep fear in the hearts of anyone not carrying out his orders.

Italy

Then there was Italy, a country stung by its poor performance in the war. The Italians had finally entered the war in 1915 on the British, French and Russian side, and subsequently had done very poorly against an Austro-Hungarian advance along the northern Italian front. This undercut deeply the country’s support for its national leadership, giving the ambitious journalist Benito Mussolini the opportunity to make a postwar move against Italy’s leadership, encouraging a band of his “Fascists” to march on Rome in October of 1922, and convince the King that what Italy needed was true leadership, the kind that Mussolini presumably offered. The king yielded, and Italy consequently found itself under Mussolini as their Duce (Leader) and his Fascist Party, a party increasingly backed up by a growing number of Fascist “Black Shirts,” paramilitary types ready to strike fear in the hearts of anyone so bold as to oppose, or even question, the leadership of their Duce. So Italy too had come under some kind of political dictatorship.

What Mussolini planned to do to build a stronger Italy was never clear. Aside from the fanfare that accompanied Mussolini’s frequent public appearances, little seemed to change in Italy. Ultimately, the Italians seemed content to simply live life locally (as they had for centuries), and politically quietly.

Germany

Under the terms of the peace treaty signed in 1919 in Versailles, Germany’s new government based at Weimar (thus “Weimar Germany”) was virtually disarmed, forced to pay huge reparations payments to the allies for its role in the war, payments that Germany in no way could afford.

Somehow life was expected to continue on a somewhat normal basis for “democratic” Germany. But it seemed that everything that the victors did (principally Britain and France, because America basically backed out of further involvement in European affairs) was designed to ensure that postwar Germany failed. And indeed, the violent civil chaos of this group fighting that group, which descended upon Germany after the war, made it look as if this was indeed going to be the case.

But the spirit of the Germans was quite strong, despite the political things going on around them even after the civil fighting settled down. The worst they had to go through was the devaluation of Germany’s currency, the mark − the printing of mass amounts of marks done in part to meet the impossible reparations requirements. But the devaluation of the mark brought it to such low value, that in January of 1923, the Weimar government announced that it could not continue making the reparation payments. In consequence, French and Belgian troops moved into Germany to take over Germany’s industrial region, to “guarantee” that those reparation payments continued. But the humiliation did not end there, because the mark continued to drop in value, so that by the autumn of 1923 the mark was not even worth the paper it was printed on.

A German using worthless marks to heat her stove

The German government finally took the action to revalue, and promise to hold, the German mark to approximately 4.2 marks to the dollar, by cutting 12 zeros off the currency! This finally stabilized matters. But the whole thing had ruined the life savings of all German investors, and left a deep bitterness in the German heart towards their government, and the foreigners who had been behind this catastrophe.

Taking advantage of this mood was Adolf Hitler, who had played his cards right in publishing his personal story, Mein Kampf (My Struggle) while briefly in prison for an attempted takeover of the Bavarian state by his small group of National Socialists or Nazis. Little by little he would expand his circle of supporters, the paramilitary Brownshirts or SA (Sturmabteilung) “storm troopers,” mimicking Mussolini’s Blackshirts and their bullying tactics. But Hitler would not achieve the political status he was seeking until the early 1930s.