Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938

by Philipp Blom

the studio bosses decided to pay the Reich’s vice consul in Los Angeles, Georg Gyssling, a particular courtesy. He was invited to preview their releases in private and to suggest cuts and alterations as he saw fit, effectively giving the Nazi government a veto over what emerged from Hollywood’s burgeoning film industry.

In a blatant pandering to Nazi propaganda, in 1934 20th Century Fox made The House of Rothschild, depicting the head of the famous family as a money-grubbing, power-hungry caricature who might have stepped straight out of the classic anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

the original Hollywood film so alarmed officials of the American Jewish Anti-Defamation League that they persuaded studio executives to refrain in the future from including obviously Jewish characters in their films. The unintended result was that for the remainder of the 1930s, the persecution of Jews and their desperate plight in Europe were to remain almost completely absent from Hollywood films—not only those screened in Germany but also those seen all over the world, from Idaho to Shanghai.

CULTURAL PROPAGANDA and cultural oppression were equally a feature of the other great totalitarian power of the time: the USSR.

Stalin’s administration had put an end to almost all artistic experimentation and freedom, ruthlessly streamlining cultural production in a manner very similar to that of the Nazi Gleichschaltung.

Mikhail Bulgakov chose to work in secret on his great novel, The Master and Margarita, at the same time producing politically acceptable pieces for the stage. Boris Pasternak was forced to make radical changes to his poetry and to his prose style, in order to escape the perilous label of “bourgeois reactionary.”

Gorky died in unclear circumstances in 1936; it is thought he may have been murdered on Stalin’s orders.

Perhaps it was this prolonged absence from Britain that made Wodehouse’s books such perfect time capsules, for despite the fact that he continued writing into the 1970s, the social and emotional world of his fictional characters was anchored firmly in the 1920s.

In mid-1930s Britain, there was little else to laugh about.

BRITAIN HAD FINANCED THE WAR by liquidating foreign investments, increasing taxes, and borrowing, with the result that the national debt increased twelvefold, to £8 billion ($634 billion in today’s money). This in turn had forced the Conservative government under prime minister Stanley Baldwin to raise taxes yet again in order to service the debt. In 1929, the electorate had reacted by voting in a Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald. Traditionally strongly export-oriented, the British economy had suffered enormously from the interruption to world trade brought on by the Great War, as well as from the destruction of some 40 percent of its merchant navy by German submarines and from the generally weak world market after 1918.

Its heavy industries, such as coal and steel, and also much of its manufacturing sector, especially for cotton products, which before the war had clothed half the world, were largely operating with outdated methods and machinery. Indeed, those industries were themselves old-fashioned. Even before the war, Germany and the United States had overtaken Britain in newer industries such as chemicals, electrical machinery, and precision tools.

In many ways, the war had accelerated a crisis that had already been looming before 1914, with Britain relying on the captive markets of its empire to support industries that were increasingly less competitive on the world stage. But its reach was wide, and its position had still been strong. With the slu...

Coal-mining towns were hit particularly badly.

J. B. Priestley

English Journey.

His explorations extended from the prosperous south to the stricken north, painting a vivid picture of the huge disparities between those areas that were comfortably well off and those others ...

by the end of 1931, both MacDonald and Snowden had admitted defeat: even with Liberal support, the massive difficulty of both repaying debt and supporting the millions unemployed had proved as great as that of fighting and financing the war. MacDonald chose what he considered the lesser of two evils and invited the Conservatives into a government of national unity. Though this act led to his expulsion (and Snowden’s) from the Labour Party, it was popular with the public:

in a general election in November of that year, Labour crashed from 287 parliamentary seats to a mere 54, but MacDonald himself was returned to power with a resounding majority for his coalition. His new chancellor, the Conservative Neville Chamberlain, did manage to balance the budget by early 1934, though at huge cost to the poorest Britons. MacDonald had disagreed with his methods, but he remained dependent on Conservative support for his coalition.

Chamberlain had cut unemployment benefits by 20 percent, and others also had had to make major sacrifices. The result was serious social unrest.

Sir Oswald Mosley,

then a member of the Independent Labour Party. In early 1930, Mosley had put forward a proposal to rescue the flailing economy and beat back unemployment with a Keynesian plan of public works funded by deficit spending, supplemented by a program of high tariffs and the nationalization of heavy industries. In May 1930, his proposal rejected, he had resigned in protest

admiring study of Mussolini’s Fascist government,

The British Union of Fascists was established in 1932

the group did for a time enjoy the support of the Daily Mirror, a London tabloid with a circulation of some three million, owned by Lord Rothermere, an admirer and personal acquaintance of both Mussolini and Hitler.

In January 1934 the paper ran an infamous editorial entitled “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” and lauding Mosley’s “sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine.”

the British Fascists failed to make much of an impact on interwar politics. Mosley himself was regarded as too narcissistic and too self-indulgent to be taken seriously as a political leader.

Mosley’s views received at least qualified sympathy among the British upper class, many of whom, concerned at the increasing social unrest, feared a Bolshevik-style revolution.

As a popular movement, fascism failed to gain traction in Britain. After a violent incident between protesters and blackshirts at a party rally in 1934, it was entirely marginalized; in 1936, a Public Order Act outlawed military-style organizations and the wearing of political uniforms.

From the perspective of the left, things looked even more threatening.

despite

regional prosperity, the Wodehouse universe was vanishing,

Despite the unemployment, even in the south, despite real deprivation and hardship, working people resis...

Something in British society had changed—subtly, but irrevocably. At least in some parts of the country, an increasingly modernized, industrialized economy was offering other, better employment opportunities for working-class people.

people were free to do as they pleased during their leisure hours.

There was another change in attitude, too, one that the war itself had provoked.

While the idea of a “lost generation” still haunted the imagination of the privileged, working-class attitudes had been profoundly changed by the perceived incompetence and remoteness of the upper-class officers.

This is very much the attitude Jeeves harbors toward his master, Bertram Wooster, the quintessential upper-class twit.

Though these factory workers and shop girls could hardly be said to be forming a new elite, they were carving out spaces where social hierarchy was determined by the number of sixpences in your pocket—in other words, by how much money you had. Birth and breeding, the great protectors and promoters of “sound” but dim chaps like Bertie Wooster, had begun their final decline into irrelevance. As Priestley had seen, the Americanization of the ancient English hierarchies was under way.

Elsewhere, too, new elites were taking over from the old, more swiftly and in some cases more violently. In the Soviet Union and Italy, and to a lesser extent in other dictatorial states such as Hungary, societies were being forcibly remade in a new mode, not necessarily more egalitarian, but certainly not based on ancestry or upbringing.

The Russian aristocracy had long...

In Germany, the Nazis were the new arbiters of social standing;

The new situation brought opportunities to many who would once have been excluded from any possibility of advancement, and they naturally took advantage of it,

Ironically, in America, “Americanization” was hardly progressing at all. So severe was the Depression in the United States that the old elites, albeit of money rather than birth, not only maintained but even solidified their positions of power.

The wind drew unusual amounts of dust into the air this time, though, and farmers soon understood that this was a result of their land cultivation. Not only were millions of acres under cultivation, but the pull of demand and the development of new agricultural machines also meant they had been cultivated in a different way. Traditional horse-drawn plows had dug deep into the earth, turning large, heavy sods in their entirety, like a blanket on a bed. The modern “sodbusters” were faster and considerably more efficient. Each tractor could pull several rows of disks that cut into the soil superficially, breaking the top layer into finer crumbs. There was less resistance that way and a huge gain in speed, and the depth of the broken earth was still sufficient for sowing. Now, as the crops were failing, the chopped-up topsoil offered no resistance to the uplift of the winds.

By 1936 there would be five dust storms per month, carrying with them the precious fertile soil.

By 1935, few were so hopeful. For the farmers, the storms were now dictating every aspect of their lives.

One hundred million acres had become a wasteland. Sometimes the skies were so dark that it seemed to be night for twenty-four hours, while high winds could blow five days in a row.

The poet Archibald MacLeish

He understood that the catastrophe had been caused not just by a freak of nature but also by a destructive interpretation of the American dream, an exploitative, aggressive hunt for profits that had exposed the earth to the elements and the farmers to misery. The great ideas of the founding fathers, he implied, had been perverted.

families began to give up, packing up what little they had left and leaving.