No figure after the war captured the popular imagination and
represented the condition of the masses of society better than did
Charlie Chaplin. He was called by an English publication "Everyman
on the Screen," the allusion being, of course, to the character in the
medieval morality play who stood for the human condition. Chaplin's
film roles were constant: the gentle, little tramp, simple of mind and
purpose, who was in search of happiness but was continually
frustrated by authority (in the form of the policeman) and modernity
(in the form of the gadgets and activities of the industrial age). That
Chaplin's success--unlike the tramp's--was international can in part
be explained by the fact that films were then silent, the style of
acting therefore bordering on exaggerated pantomine within easy
reach of all viewers. More important, however, was the identification
of the Chaplin tramp with the pathetic humor of the time, the hollow
laughing of people uncertain of the future and not reassured by the
past.
For millions of war veterans readjustment to civilian life was an immense problem. The search for jobs, the attempt to repair marriages disrupted by years away from home, the bitterness over reports of war profiteering, and the disappointment over the shortages of housing were personal difficulties quickly dampening the enthusiasm for the long sought-after peace.
Psychologically, the leaders of Europe looked backward. The
very word used to describe the early postwar mood was
"reconstruction," an attempt to reorder what had been. Western
European politics tended to be conservative, and so did the business
outlook. But drastic changes had taken place that made such an
attitude unrealistic.
The readjustment to a peacetime economy was never made
successfully in the interwar period. True, prewar production figures
would be reached and surpassed in most industries by the middle
1920s. And the newer industries, like the automotive, radio, and the
film, were providing highly exportable products. However, in face of
these rising production figures stood the much more impressive
world output of the United States and, somewhat later, of an
industrialized Japan. The sum of the matter is this: While European
production recovered and exceeded postwar records, the percentage
of the growing world market held by Europe declined. Relatively
speaking, therefore, European economic vitality had slipped.
More significant, however, was a general condition of
instability that was widely felt and recognized. And it was a
condition with its own hard facts.
First, Europe was no longer the world's banker. The capital
reserves of the major nations were badly depleted: England had lost
one-fourth of its foreign investment; France, one-half; Germany was
deprived of most of its foreign investments. Added to this fiscal
difficulty was the indebtedness of the Allied Powers of France and
England to the United States for war loans. The result was a severe
weakening of European currency. Some idea of the problem can be
grasped from the fact that the French premier, Raymond Poincare,
who stabilized the franc in the mid-twenties, was given the title
"saviour of the franc." Only once before in French history had
"saviour" been popularly employed--and that was for Joan of Arc.
Second, industrial needs drastically shifted. Certain heavy
industries like steel and shipbuilding were no longer required to
meet the grotesque demands of the military. They therefore cut back
in production, hence in manpower as well. And other industries, like
aircraft and munitions manufacturing, collapsed with the advent of
peace. Finally, the increased production of certain resources like
copper, phosphates and wheat, all essential to wartime needs, now
meant overproduction--a glut which sent prices reeling.
Third, the rearrangement of the European political map
disturbed the economy. The increase of protective tariffs among the
newly created nations slowed down the flow of goods on the
continental level. Nowhere was this more evident than in the lands of
the former Austrian Empire now divided, as a result of the peace
settlement, into separate nation-states that had once existed as a
large customs union but now were burdened with national trade
barriers. Moreover, as the new nations took form, populations
suddenly found themselves with a new political allegiance. Thus,
problems in manpower availability and distribution within national
economic units occurred as large numbers of people were added or subtracted politically. The German demographic situation was one of the most telling. By 1925 some
705,000 Germans had left territories incorporated into the new state
of Poland, while 132,000 Germans left Alsace-Lorraine, once again
part of France.
Fourth, the war reparations program, whereby Germany had to
assume financial responsibility for civilian war damages, had
unanticipated effects. The German treasury was soon emptied of
precious metals, a condition that caused German money to become all
but worthless, hence a grave matter for all those Germans who had
bank accounts and stocks and bonds. Because of Germany's
precarious position, international trade with neighboring states was
adversely affected. And those countries to which the reparations
payments were made felt the impact of imported German industrial
goods, now that the new German republic tried to pay in kind
because it could no longer pay in cash.
Under these conditions, the fact that labor unrest was a major
problem in the postwar era is easily understood. Workers feared for
their positions in an economy that was undergoing conversion from
wartime to peacetime needs and in an economy that was out of
equilibrium. Returning servicemen sought employment, and in so
doing displaced many of the women who had been given job
opportunities for the first time during the war. Finally, the depletion
of capital inhibited the modernization of older industries and the
creation of new ones so that job opportunities were not expanding
significantly in new directions.
A sign of the times was the increase in the number and
frequency of strikes, particularly in the years immediately after the
war. In Italy and France a series of strikes in major industries caused
national alarm in 1919 and 1920. Then in England in 1926 a most
impressive general strike occurred with 2 l/2 million workers
participating. Begun in the coal industry, it ran through other heavy
industries, but was conducted with little violence and some goodwill.
All such strikes were manifestations of a grave economic situation
and of the government's seeming inability to arrive at a plan for
meaningful economic recovery.
The plight of the industrial laborer was converted into a fear
among many middle-class entrepreneurs. The British Socialist Harold
Laski, one of the most influential thinkers of the interwar era, looked
back at the postwar condition and wrote: "Capitalism's conception of
what was reasonable was limited by two factors--the economic crisis
on the one hand, and the profound fears engendered by the Russian
Revolution on the other." His assertion was not much exaggerated.
If the economic situation was chaotic to the laboring masses, it
was precarious to the entrepreneurial classes. The popular myth of
the "Bolshevik" quickly grew: a fear of conspiratorial activity
between citizens who were Communists and the newly established
Soviet Union, committed to International revolution and the
overthrow of capitalism. The establishment of the Third
International, the Communist International--or Comintern, for short
--in 1919 lent credence to this fear, because the newly emerging
Communist parties in Western Europe joined the Comintern. In 1920,
for instance, the French Socialist party split in two over the question
of adherence to the Comintern. The emergent French Communist
party had, by 1921, some 140,000 members, while the residual
Socialist party only had 30,000.
Communism added a new but ill-defined dimension to many aspects of European life in the interwar period. Governments were concerned about subversive activities
because of the control Moscow maintained over the Western
European parties; much of the upper middle class saw communism as
a threat to private property; yet some intellectuals assumed that the
Soviet Union heralded the advent of a new social order soon to
redress the worst evils of modern industrial society.
As the French Revolution before it, the Russian Revolution of
1917 introduced a political and social system that stood in opposition
to the established European order. But the first two decades of Soviet
rule were chaotic, repressive, and brutal. With the ascendency of
Joseph Stalin to power in 1927, the regime took on the characteristics
of a police state, one far removed from the earlier Marxist
proclamation that under communism the "state would wither away."
Prison camps in Siberia for enemies of the regime, severe
regimentation of labor in order to develop the economy according to
state planning, the creation of a secret police organization used
primarily as a weapon of terror--all were characteristics of interwar
Russia and the features which led later critics to compare Stalinist
rule with that of Hitlerian Germany.
If the enthusiasm some European intellectuals had initially felt
for the Communist experiment now declined, fear of the new
Soviet regime as a potentially disturbing force both in domestic and
international politics continued. "The Red Menace" and "the Bolshevik
Threat" were popular terms suggesting that Marx's introductory
statement to the Manifesto had belatedly come true: "A specter is
haunting Europe--the specter of communism." And it was a specter
all the more ominous because of the instability of the postwar
economic order.
Not everyone despaired of the economic situation, however. A
newly emerging managerial elite, professionals concerned with the
social implications of modern technology, addressed the perplexing
question of how to assure industrial development. They had behind
them a wartime experience in industrial management, brought about
by the accelerated growth in productive capacity, the amassing of
labor for new tasks in the factory, and the distribution of scarce raw
materials. "War socialism" created conditions of state intervention
and rudimentary governmental planning that ran counter to older
free-trade and competitive-market concepts. Moreover, enthusiasm
for the American industrial system, so recently distinguished by the
mass-assembly techniques developed by Henry Ford, was generated
as a result of the steady flow of wartime supplies from the other side
of the Atlantic.
In the peacetime environment, this new group of technocrats,
the professional managers and planners, turned their attention to the
reordering of society so as to make it more productive, but by means
of techniques that stressed "social engineering." Here the ideas of
Frederick W. Taylor, an American engineer who had tried to
regularize labor with machinelike precision, were persuasive because
they suggested the route to greater efficiency. But the resulting
efficiency in production was seen by many of the European
technocrats as a means to social as well as to economic betterment.
Through "social engineering," worker, manager, and machine would
be harmoniously integrated into something approaching an economic
community. Output would increase; social tension would decrease.
And thus the older utopian dream of a society based on cooperative
and well-integrated economic activity, not on political factionalism
and dispute, would be realized.
The translation of these managerial ideas into the working of
the post-war factory system was not made to any great degree,
however. The widespread interest in "rationalization" suggested that
the European economic order was in need of renovation. While the
era did witness new corporate growth and integration, this was
primarily made in the form of mergers and international
consolidation: Unilever, the great English soap combine, and Royal
Dutch Shell, the oil refining company, are two notable examples.
Planning, even though tried in the Soviet Union with considerable
success but at an enormous cost in human life, remained excluded
from European economic considerations until World War II.
NEXT: Modifications in Social Structure
