Tragedy and Hope
A History of
the World in Our Time
By
Carroll
Quigley
Volumes 1-8
New York: The
Macmillan Company
1966
Table of
Contents
Introduction
Preface
Part
One—Introduction: Western Civilization In Its World Setting
Chapter
1—Cultural Evolution in Civilizations
Chapter
2—Cultural Diffusion in Western Civilization 2
Chapter
3—Europe's Shift to the Twentieth Century
Part
Two—Western Civilization to 1914
Chapter
4—The Pattern of Change
Chapter
5—European Economic Developments
Chapter
6—The United States to 1917
Part
Three—The Russian Empire to 1917
Chapter
7—Creation of the Russian Civilization
Part Four—The
Buffer Fringe
Chapter
8—The Near East to 1914
Chapter
9—The British Imperial Crisis: Africa, Ireland, and India to 1926
Chapter
10—The Far East to World War I
Part
Five—The First World War: 1914: 1918
Chapter
11—The Growth of International Tensions, 1871-1914
Chapter
12—Military History, 1914-1918
Chapter
13—Diplomatic History, 1914-1 918
Chapter
14—The Home Front, 1914-1918
Part
Six—The Versailles System and the Return to Normalcy: 1919-1929
Chapter
15—The Peace Settlements, 1919-1923
Chapter
16—Security, 1919-1935
Chapter
17—Disarmament, 1919-1935
Chapter
18—Reparations, 1919-1932
Part
Seven—Finance, Commercial and Business Activity: 1897-1947
Chapter
19—Reflation and Inflation, 1897-1925
Chapter
20—The Period of Stabilization, 1922-1930
Chapter
21—The Period of Deflation, 1927- 1936
Chapter
22—Reflation and Inflation, 1933-1947
Part
Eight—International Socialism and the Soviet Challenge
Chapter
23—The International Socialist Movement
Chapter
24—The Bolshevik Revolution to 1924
Chapter
25—Stalinism, 1924-1939
Part
Nine—Germany from Kaiser to Hitler: 1913-1945
Chapter
26—Introduction
Chapter
27—The Weimar Republic, 1918-1933
Chapter 28—The
Nazi Regime
Part
Ten—Britain: the Background to Appeasement: 1900-1939
Chapter
29—The Social and Constitutional Background
Chapter
30—Political History to 1939
Part
Eleven—Changing Economic Patterns
Chapter
31—Introduction
Chapter 32—Great
Britain
Chapter
33—Germany
Chapter
34—France
Chapter
35—The United States of America
Chapter
36—The Economic Factors
Chapter
37—The Results of Economic Depression
Chapter
38—The Pluralist Economy and World Blocs
Part
Twelve—The Policy of Appeasement, 1931-1936
Chapter
39—Introduction
Chapter
40—The Japanese Assault, 1931-1941
Chapter
41—The Italian Assault, 1934-1936
Chapter
42—Circles and Counter-circles, 1935-1939
Chapter
43—The Spanish Tragedy, 1931–1939
Part
Thirteen—The Disruption of Europe: 1937-1939
Chapter
44—Austria Infelix, 1933-1938
Chapter
45—The Czechoslovak Crisis, 1937-1938
Chapter
46—The Year of Dupes, 1939
Part
Fourteen—World War II: the Tide of Aggression: 1939-1941
Chapter
47—Introduction
Chapter
48—The Battle of Poland, September 1939
Chapter
49—The Sitzkrieg, September 1, 1939-May 1940
Chapter
50—The Fall of France, (May-June 1940) and the Vichy Regime
Chapter
51—The Battle of Britain, July-October 1940
Chapter
52—The Mediterranean and Eastern Europe, 1940) June 1940-June 1941
Chapter
53—American Neutrality and Aid to Britain
Chapter
54—The Nazi Attack on Soviet Russia, 1941-1942
Part
Fifteen—World War II: the Ebb of Aggression: 1941-1945
Chapter
55—The Rising in the Pacific, to 1942
Chapter
56—The Turning Tide, 1942-1943: Midway, E1 Alamein, French Africa, and
Stalingrad
Chapter
57—Closing in on Germany, 1943-1945
Chapter
58—Closing in on Japan, 1943-1945
Part Sixteen—The
New Age
Chapter
59—Introduction
Chapter
60—Rationalization and Science
Chapter
61—The Twentieth-Century Pattern
Part
Seventeen—Nuclear Rivalry and the Cold War: American Atomic Supremacy:
1945-1950
Chapter
62—The Factors
Chapter
63—The Origins of the Cold War, 1945-1949
Chapter
64—The Crisis in China, 1945-1950
Chapter
65—American Confusions, 1945-1950
Part
Eighteen—Nuclear Rivalry and the Cold War: the Race for H-Bomb:
1950-1957
Chapter
66—"Joe I" and the American Nuclear Debate, 1949-1954
Chapter
67—The Korean War and Its Aftermath, 1950-1954
Chapter
68—The Eisenhower Team, 1952-1956
Chapter
69—The Rise of Khrushchev, 1953-1958
Chapter
70—The Cold War in Eastern and Southern Asia, 1950-1957
Part
Nineteen—The New Era: 1957-1964
Chapter
71—The Growth of Nuclear Stalemate
Chapter
72—The Disintegrating Super-blocs
Chapter
73—The Eclipse of Colonialism
Part
Twenty—Tragedy and Hope: the Future in Perspective
Chapter
74—The Unfolding of Time
Chapter
75—The United States and the Middle-Class Crisis
Chapter
76—European Ambiguities
Chapter
77—Conclusion
Introduction
By
Michael L.
Chadwick
In
1965 one of the nation's
leading professors quietly finished the last draft of a 1311 page book
on world history. He walked over to his typewriter and secured the last
pages of the book and placed them into a small box and wrapped it for
mailing. He then walked to the Post Office and mailed the final draft
to his publisher in New York City. The editor was somewhat overwhelmed
and perhaps even inhibited by the scholarly treatise. The last thing he
wanted to do was to read the huge draft. He knew and trusted the
professor. After all, he was one of the leading scholars in the western
world. They had been acquaintances for several years. He had already
signed an agreement to publish the book before it was finished. He had
read several chapters of the early draft. They were boring, at least to
him. He decided to give the book to a young editor who had just been
promoted to his assistant. The young editor was also overwhelmed but
happy to oblige the Senior Editor. The young editor was unaware of the
importance of the manuscript and of the revelations which it contained.
To the young editor this was just another textbook or so he thought.
Somehow
one of the most
revealing books ever published slipped through the editorial of offices
of one of the major publishing houses in New York and found it way into
the bookstores of America in 1966.
Five
years later I was
meandering through a used bookstore and stumbled upon this giant book.
I picked up the book, blew the dust off and opened it to a page where
the author stated that:
"...[T]he
powers of financial
capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a
world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the
political system of each country and the economy of the world as a
whole. this system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the
central banks of the world acting in concert by secret agreements
arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of
the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle,
Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central
banks which were themselves private corporations....
"It
must not be felt that
these heads of the world's chief central banks were themselves
substantive powers in world finance. They were not. Rather, they were
the technicians and agents of the dominant investment bankers of their
own countries, who had raised them up and were perfectly capable of
throwing them down. The substantive financial powers of the world were
in the hands of these investment bankers (also called 'international'
or 'merchant' bankers) who remained largely behind the scenes in their
own unincorporated private banks. These formed a system of
international cooperation and national dominance which was more
private, more powerful, and more secret than that of their agents in
the central banks. this dominance of investment bankers was based on
their control over the flows of credit and investment funds in their
own countries and throughout the world. They could dominate the
financial and industrial systems of their own countries by their
influence over the flow of current funds though bank loans, the
discount rate, and the re-discounting of commercial debts; they could
dominate governments by their own control over current government loans
and the play of the international exchanges. Almost all of this power
was exercised by the personal influence and prestige of men who had
demonstrated their ability in the past to bring off successful
financial coupes, to keep their word, to remain cool in a crisis, and
to share their winning opportunities with their associates."
I
could hardly believe what I
was reading. I sat in the bookstore and read until closing time. I then
bought the book and went home where I read almost all night. For the
next twenty-five years I traveled throughout the United States, Europe
and the Middle East following one lead after another to determine if
the incredible words of the professor were really true. While serving
as the Editor of a scholarly journal on international affairs, Director
of the Center for Global Studies and foreign policy advisor for a key
U. S. Senator in Washington, D. C., I conducted over 1000 interviews
with influential world leaders, government officials, military
generals, intelligence officers, scholars and businessmen, including
corporate CEOs and prominent international bankers and investment
bankers. I went through over 25,000 books and over 50,000 documents. I
learned for myself that the professor was telling the truth.
There
really is a "world
system of financial control in private hands" that is "able to dominate
the political system of each country and the economy of the world." I
call this system the World Trade Federation. It is an ultra-secret
group of the most powerful men on the earth. They now control every
major international institution, every major multinational and
transnational corporation both public and private, every major domestic
and international banking institution, every central bank, every
nation-state on earth, the natural resources on every continent and the
people around the world through complicated inter-locking networks that
resemble giant spider webs. This group is comprised of the leading
family dynasties of the Canada, United States, Britain, Germany,
France, Italy, Japan, Russia and China. This self-perpetuating group
has developed an elaborate system of control that enables them to
manipulate government leaders, consumers and people throughout the
world. They are in the last stages of developing a World Empire that
will rival the ancient Roman Empire. However, this new Empire will rule
the entire world, not just a goodly portion of it as Rome did long ago,
from its ultra-secret world headquarters in Germany. This group is
responsible for the death and suffering of over 180 million men, women
and children. They were responsible for World War I, World War II, the
Korean War, and Vietnam, etc. They have created periods of inflation
and deflation in order to confiscate and consolidate the wealth of the
world. They were responsible for the enslavement of over two billion
people in all communist nations—Russia, China, Eastern Europe,
etc., inasmuch as they were directly responsible for the creation of
communism in these nations. They built up and sustain these evil
totalitarian systems for private gain. They brought Hitler, Mussolini,
Stalin and Roosevelt to power and guided their governments from behind
the scenes to achieve a state of plunder unparalleled in world history.
They make Attila the Hun look like a kindergarten child compared to
their accomplishments. Six million Jews were tortured and killed in
order to confiscate billions of dollars in assets, gold, silver,
currency, diamonds and art work from the Tribe of Judah–a special
group of people. The people in Eastern Europe suffered a similar fate
as the armies of Hitler overran these countries, murdered, enslaved,
robbed and plundered the unique people who resided there. For the last
two and one half centuries wealth and power have been concentrating in
the hands of fewer and fewer men and women. This wealth is now being
used to construct and maintain the World Empire that is in the last
stages of development. The World Empire is partly visible and partly
invisible today.
The
chief architects of this
new World Empire are planning another war—World War III—to
eliminate any vestiges of political, economic or religious freedom from
the face of the earth. They will then completely control the earth. and
its natural resources. The people will be completely enslaved just as
the people were in the ancient Roman Empire. While the above may sound
like fiction, I can assure you that it is true. I wish it was fiction,
but it is not, it is reality.
The
above recitation is quite
blunt, perhaps more blunt than the professor would have liked, but he
knows and I know that what I have just written is true. However, most
people do not want to know that such a Machiavellian group of men,
spread strategically throughout the world, really exists. They prefer
to believe that all is well and that we are traveling down the road to
world peace, global interdependence and economic prosperity. This is
not true.
The
above professor describes
the network I have just described in elaborate detail—far too
elaborate for most people. That is why I am truly surprised that it was
ever published. The above fictional account of its publication may not
be far from the truth. The contents of the above book will probably
astound most people. Most people will undoubtedly not believe the
professor. That will be a great mistake. Why? Because many of the
tragedies of the future may be avoided with proper action.
If
all our efforts resulted in
saving just one life, wouldn't it be worth it? What if we could save
100 lives? What if we could save 1000 lives? What about 10,000 lives?
What about 1,000,000 lives? What if we could free the billions of
inhabitants of Tibet, China, Russia and other communist nations and
ensure the survival of the people of Taiwan and Israel? Would not all
our efforts be worth it? I believe so. The tragedies occurring today in
Russia, China, Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa, Western Europe or the
Middle East could be avoided.
The
apathy and indifference of
people in the Western World to the suffering, torture, misery, bondage
and death of millions and millions of people around the world in the
years ahead may be one of the greatest tragedies of the twenty first
century.
The
message of the above
volume is that the last century was a tragedy that could have been
avoided. The author argues that wars and depressions are man-made. The
hope is that we may avoid similar tragedies in the future. That will
not happen unless we give diligent heed to the warnings of the
professor. Unless we carefully study his book and learn the secret
history of the twentieth century and avoid allowing these same people,
their heirs and associates—the rulers of various financial,
corporate and governmental systems around the world—from ruining
the twenty first century, his work and the work of countless others
will have been in vain.
The
above professor was named Carroll Quigley and the book he wrote was
entitled, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our
Time.
It was published in 1966 and is clearly one of the most important books
ever written. Professor Quigley was an extraordinarily gifted historian
and geo-political analyst. The insights and information contained in
his massive study open the door to a true understanding of world
history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In fact, if the
scholar, student, businessman, businesswoman, government official and
general reader has not thoroughly studied Tragedy and Hope
there is no way they can understand the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. It is a work of exceptional scholarship and is truly a
classic. The author should have received a Nobel Prize for his work.
In
1961 Carroll Quigley published The Evolution of Civilizations.
It was derived from a course he taught on world history at Georgetown
University. One of Quigley’s closest friends was Harry J. Hogan.
In the foreword to The Evolution of Civilizations
he wrote:
"The
Evolution of Civilizations
expresses two dimensions of its author, Carroll Quigley, that most
extraordinary historian, philosopher, and teacher. In the first place,
its scope is wide-ranging, covering the whole of man's activities
throughout time. Second, it is analytic, not merely descriptive. It
attempts a categorization of man's activities in sequential fashion so
as to provide a causal explanation of the stages of civilization.
"Quigley
coupled enormous
capacity for work with a peculiarly "scientific" approach. He believed
that it should be possible to examine the data and draw conclusions. As
a boy at the Boston Latin School, his academic interests were
mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Yet during his senior year he was
also associate editor of the Register, the oldest
high school
paper in the country. His articles were singled out for national awards
by a national committee headed by George Gallup.
"At
Harvard, biochemistry was
to be his major. But Harvard, expressing then a belief regarding a
well-rounded education to which it has now returned, required a core
curriculum including a course in the humanities. Quigley chose a
history course, "Europe Since the Fall of Rome." Always a contrary man,
he was graded at the top of his class in physics and calculus and drew
a C in the history course. But the development of ideas began to assert
its fascination for him, so he elected to major in history. He
graduated magna cum laude as the top history
student in his class.
"Quigley
was always impatient.
He stood for his doctorate oral examination at the end of his second
year of graduate studies. Charles Howard McIlwain, chairman of the
examining board, was very impressed by Quigley's answer to his opening
question; the answer included a long quotation in Latin from Robert
Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln in the thirteenth century. Professor
McIlwain sent Quigley to Princeton University as a graduate student
instructor.
"In
the spring of 1937 I was a
student in my senior year at Princeton. Quigley was my preceptor in
medieval history. He was Boston Irish; I was New York Irish. Both of
us, Catholics adventuring in a strangely Protestant establishment
world, were fascinated by the Western intellectual tradition anchored
in Augustine, Abelard, and Aquinas that seemed to have so much more
richness and depth than contemporary liberalism. We became very close
in a treasured friendship that was terminated only by his death.
"In
the course of rereading The Evolution of Civilizations
I was reminded of the intensity of our dialogue. In Quigley's view,
which I shared, our age was one of irrationality. That spring we talked
about what career decisions I should make. At his urging I applied to
and was admitted by the Harvard Graduate School in History. But I had
reservations about an academic career in the study of the history that
I loved, on the ground that on Quigley’s own analysis the social
decisions of importance in our lifetime would be made in ad hoc
irrational fashion in the street. On that reasoning, finally I
transferred to law school.
"In
Princeton, Carroll Quigley
met and married Lillian Fox. They spent their honeymoon in Paris and
Italy on a fellowship to write his doctoral dissertation, a study of
the public administration of the Kingdom of Italy, 1805-14. The
development of the state in western Europe over the last thousand years
always fascinated Quigley. He regarded the development of public
administration in the Napoleonic states as a major step in the
evolution of the modern state. It always frustrated him that each
nation, including our own, regards its own history as unique and the
history of other nations as irrelevant to it.
"In
1938-41, Quigley served a
stint at Harvard, tutoring graduate students in ancient and medieval
history. It offered little opportunity for the development of cosmic
views and he was less than completely content there. It was, however, a
happy experience for me. I had entered Harvard Law School. We began the
practice of having breakfast together at Carroll and Lillian's
apartment.
"In
1941 Quigley accepted a
teaching appointment at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service. It was
to engage his primary energies throughout the rest of his busy life.
There he became an almost legendary teacher. He chose to teach a
course, "The Development of Civilization," required of the incoming
class, and that course ultimately provided the structure and substance
for The Evolution of Civilizations. As a course in
his hands,
it was a vital intellectual experience for young students, a
mind-opening adventure. Foreign Service School graduates, meeting years
later in careers around the world, would establish rapport with each
other by describing their experience in his class. It was an
intellectual initiation with remembered impact that could be shared by
people who had graduated years apart.
"The
fortunes of life brought
us together again. During World War II, I served as a very junior
officer on Admiral King's staff in Washington. Carroll and I saw each
other frequently. Twenty years later, after practicing law in Oregon, I
came into the government with President Kennedy. Our eldest daughter
became a student under Carroll at Georgetown University. We bought a
house close by Carroll and Lillian. I had Sunday breakfast with them
for years and renewed our discussions of the affairs of a
disintegrating world.
"Superb
teacher Quigley was,
and could justify a lifetime of prodigious work on that success alone.
But ultimately he was more. To me he was a figure—he would scoff
at this— like Augustine, Abelard, and Aquinas, searching for the
truth through examination of ultimate reality as it was revealed in
history. Long ago, he left the church in the formal sense. Spiritually
and intellectually he never left it. He never swerved from his search
for the meaning of life. He never placed any goal in higher priority.
If the God of the Western civilization that Quigley spent so many years
studying does exist in the terms that he saw ascribed to him by our
civilization, that God will now have welcomed Quigley as one who has
pleased him." (Carroll Quigley, The Evolution of Civilizations. New
York: Macmillan, 1961, pp. 13-16.)
Carroll
Quigley was a
professor of history at the Foreign Service School of Georgetown
University. He taught at Princeton and at Harvard. He had done
extensive research in the archives of France, Italy, and England. He
was a member of the editorial board of Current History.
He was
a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
American Anthropological Association and the American Economic
Association. For many years he lectured on Russian history at the
Industrial College of the Armed Forces and on Africa at the Brookings
Institution. He was also a frequent lecturer at the U.S. Naval Weapons
Laboratory, the Foreign Service Institute at the U. S. State
Department, and the Naval College at Norfolk, Virginia. In 1958 he
served as a consultant to the Congressional Select Committee which set
up the National Space Agency. He was a historical advisor to the
Smithsonian Institution and was involved with the establishment of the
new Museum of History and Technology. In the summer of 1964 he was a
consultant at the Navy Post-Graduate School, Monterey, California on
Project Seabed. The project was created to visualize the status of
future American weapons systems.
Tragedy
and Hope will
enlighten the mind of every sincere seeker of truth and will unveil the
secret powers that have been carefully manipulating the Western
Hemisphere, America, Europe, Asia, Russia, China and the Middle East
for over 250 years.
In
1996 I published a 24 volume study entitled Global
Governance in the Twenty First Century. The
multi-volume work was the result of my extensive travels and research
throughout the United States, Europe and Middle East. It fully
collaborates the assertions and statements made by professor Carroll
Quigley in Tragedy and Hope. It is my sincere hope
the reader
will take the time to carefully peruse and ponder the words of this
rather remarkable book. And afterwards, I hope the reader will have a
desire to thoroughly read and ponder the contents of Global
Governance in the Twenty First Century.
Preface
The
expression "contemporary
history" is probably self-contradictory, because what is contemporary
is not history, and what is history is not contemporary. Sensible
historians usually refrain from writing accounts of very recent events
because they realize that the source materials for such events,
especially the indispensable official documents, are not available and
that, even with the documentation which is available, it is very
difficult for anyone to obtain the necessary perspective on the events
of one's own mature life. But I must clearly not be a sensible or, at
least, an ordinary historian, for, having covered, in an earlier book,
the whole of human history in a mere 271 pages, I now use more than
1300 pages for the events of a single lifetime. There is a connection
here. It will be evident to any attentive reader that I have devoted
long years of study and much original research, even where adequate
documentation is not available, but it should be equally evident that
whatever value this present work has rests on its broad perspective. I
have tried to remedy deficiencies of evidence by perspective, not only
by projecting the patterns of past history into the present and the
future but also by trying to place the events of the present in their
total context by examining all the varied aspects of these events, not
merely the political and economic, as is so frequently done, but by my
efforts to bring into the picture the military, technological, social,
and intellectual elements as well.
The
result of all this, I
hope, is an interpretation of the present as well as the immediate past
and the near future, which is free from the accepted cliches, slogans,
and self-justifications which mar so much of "contemporary history."
Much of my adult life has been devoted to training undergraduates in
techniques of historical analysis which will help them to free their
understanding of history from the accepted categories and cognitive
classifications of the society in which we live, since these, however
necessary they may be for our processes of thought and for the concepts
and symbols needed for us to communicate about reality, nevertheless do
often serve as barriers which shield us from recognition of the
underlying realities themselves. The present work is the result of such
an attempt to look at the real situations which lie beneath the
conceptual and verbal symbols. I feel that it does provide, as a
consequence of this effort, a fresher, somewhat different, and (I hope)
more satisfying explanation of how we arrived at the situation in which
we now find ourselves.
More
than twenty years have
gone into the writing of this work. Although most of it is based on the
usual accounts of these events, some portions are based on fairly
intensive personal research (including research among manuscript
materials). These portions include the following: the nature and
techniques of financial capitalism, the economic structure of France
under the Third Republic, the social history of the United States, and
the membership and activities of the English Establishment. On other
subjects, my reading has been as wide as I could make it, and I have
tried consistently to view all subjects from as wide and as varied
points of view as I am capable. Although I regard myself, for purposes
of classification, as a historian, I did a great deal of study in
political science at Harvard, have persisted in the private study of
modern psychological theory for more than thirty years, and have been a
member of the American Anthropological Association, the American
Economic Association, and the American Association for the Advancement
of Science, as well as the American Historical Association for many
years.
Thus
my chief justification
for writing a lengthy work on contemporary history, despite the
necessarily restricted nature of the documentation, must be based on my
efforts to remedy this inevitable deficiency by using historical
perspective to permit me to project the tendencies of the past into the
present and even the future and my efforts to give this attempt a more
solid basis by using all the evidence from a wide variety of academic
disciplines.
As
a consequence of these
efforts to use this broad, and perhaps complex, method, this book is
almost inexcusably lengthy. For this I must apologize, with the excuse
that I did not have time to make it shorter and that an admittedly
tentative and interpretative work must necessarily be longer than a
more definite or more dogmatic presentation. To those who find the
length excessive, I can only say that I omitted chapters, which were
already written, on three topics: the agricultural history of Europe,
the domestic history of France and Italy, and the intellectual history
of the twentieth century in general. To do this I introduced enough on
these subjects into other chapters.
Although
I project the
interpretation into the near future on a number of occasions, the
historical narrative ceases in 1964, not because the date of writing
caught up with the march of historical events but because the period
1862-1864 seems to me to mark the end of an era of historical
development and a period of pause before a quite different era with
quite different problems begins. This change is evident in a number of
obvious events, such as the fact that the leaders of all the major
countries (except Red China and France) and of many lesser ones (such
as Canada, India, West Germany, the Vatican, Brazil, and Israel) were
changed in this period. Much more important is the fact that the Cold
War, which culminated in the Cuban crisis of October 1962, began to
dwindle toward its end during the next two years, a process which w as
evident in a number of events, such as the rapid replacement of the
Cold War by "Competitive Coexistence"; the disintegration of the two
super-blocs which had faced each other during the Cold War; the rise of
neutralism, both within the super-blocs and in the buffer fringe of
third-bloc powers between them; the swamping of the United Nations
General Assembly under a flood of newly independent, sometimes
microscopic, pseudo-powers; the growing parallelism of the Soviet Union
and the United States; and the growing emphasis in all parts of the
world on problems of living standards, of social maladjustments, and of
mental health, replacing the previous emphasis on armaments, nuclear
tensions, and heavy industrialization. At such a period, when one era
seems to be ending and a different, if yet indistinct era appearing, it
seemed to me as good a time as any to evaluate the past and to seek
some explanation of how we arrived where we are.
In
any preface such as this,
it is customary to conclude with acknowledgment of personal
obligations. My sense of these is so broad that I find it invidious to
single out some and to omit others. But four must be mentioned. Much of
this book was typed, in her usual faultless way, by my wife. This was
done originally and in revised versions, in spite of the constant
distractions of her domestic obligations, of her own professional
career in a different university, and of her own writing and
publication. For her cheerful assumption of this great burden, I am
very grateful.
Similarly,
I am grateful to
the patience, enthusiasm, and amazingly wide knowledge of my editor at
The Macmillan Company, Peter V. Ritner.
I
wish to express my gratitude
to the University Grants Committee of Georgetown University, which
twice provided funds for summer research.
And,
finally, I must say a
word of thanks to my students over many years who forced me to keep up
with the rapidly changing customs and outlook of our young people and
sometimes also compelled me to recognize that my way of looking at the
world is not necessarily the only way, or even the best way, to look at
it. Many of these students, past, present, and future, are included in
the dedication of this book.
Carroll
Quigley
Washington,
D. C.
March
8, 1965
Part One—Introduction: Western Civilization
In Its World Setting
Chapter 1—Cultural Evolution in Civilizations
There
have always been men who
have asked, "Where are we going?" But never, it would seem, have there
been so many of them. And surely never before have these myriads of
questioners asked their question in such dolorous tones or rephrased
their question in such despairing words: "Can man survive?" Even on a
less cosmic basis, questioners appear on all sides, seeking "meaning"
or "identity," or even, on the most narrowly egocentric basis, "trying
to find myself."
One
of these persistent
questions is typical of the twentieth century rather than of earlier
times: Can our way of life survive? Is our civilization doomed to
vanish, as did that of the Incas, the Sumerians, and the Romans? From
Giovanni Battista Vico in the early eighteenth century to Oswald
Spengler in the early twentieth century and Arnold J. Toynbee in our
own day, men have been puzzling over the problem whether civilizations
have a life cycle and follow a similar pattern of change. From this
discussion has emerged a fairly general agreement that men live in
separately organized societies, each with its own distinct culture;
that some of these societies, having writing and city life, exist on a
higher level of culture than the rest, and should be called by the
different term "civilizations"; and that these civilizations tend to
pass through a common pattern of experience.
From
these studies it would
seem that civilizations pass through a process of evolution which can
be analyzed briefly as follows: each civilization is born in some
inexplicable fashion and, after a slow start, enters a period of
vigorous expansion, increasing its size and power, both internally and
at the expense of its neighbors, until gradually a crisis of
organization appears. When this crisis has passed and the civilization
has been reorganized, it seems somewhat different. Its vigor and morale
have weakened. It becomes stabilized and eventually stagnant. After a
Golden Age of peace and prosperity, internal crises again arise. At
this point there appears, for the first time, a moral and physical
weakness which raises, also for the first time, questions about the
civilization's ability to defend itself against external enemies.
Racked by internal struggles of a social and constitutional character,
weakened by loss of faith in its older ideologies and by the challenge
of newer ideas incompatible with its past nature, the civilization
grows steadily weaker until it is submerged by outside enemies, and
eventually disappears.
When
we come to apply this
process, even in this rather vague form, to our own civilization,
Western Civilization, we can see that certain modifications are needed.
Like other civilizations, our civilization began with a period of
mixture of cultural elements from other societies, formed these
elements into a culture distinctly its own, began to expand with
growing rapidity as others had done, and passed from this period of
expansion into a period of crisis. But at that point the pattern
changed.
In
more than a dozen other
civilizations the Age of Expansion was followed by an Age of Crisis,
and this, in turn, by a period of Universal Empire in which a single
political unit ruled the whole extent of the civilization. Western
Civilization, on the contrary, did not pass from the Age of Crisis to
the Age of Universal Empire, but instead was able to reform itself and
entered upon a new period of expansion. Moreover, Western Civilization
did this not once, but several times. It was this ability to reform or
reorganize itself again and again which made Western Civilization the
dominant factor in the world at the beginning of the twentieth century.
As
we look at the three ages
forming the central portion of the life cycle of a civilization, we can
see a common pattern. The Age of Expansion is generally marked by four
kinds of expansion: (1) of population, (2) of geographic area, (3) of
production, and (4) of knowledge. The expansion of production and the
expansion of knowledge give rise to the expansion of population, and
the three of these together give rise to the expansion of geographic
extent. This geographic expansion is of some importance because it
gives the civilization a kind of nuclear structure made up of an older
core area (which had existed as part of the civilization even before
the period of expansion) and a newer peripheral area (which became part
of the civilization only in the period of expansion and later). If we
wish, we can make, as an additional refinement, a third,
semi-peripheral area between the core area and the fully peripheral
area.
These
various areas are
readily discernible in various civilizations of the past, and have
played a vital role in historic change in these civilizations. In
Mesopotamian Civilization (6000 B.C.-300 B.C.) the core area was the
lower valley of Mesopotamia; the semi-peripheral area was the middle
and upper valley, while the peripheral area included the highlands
surrounding this valley, and more remote areas like Iran, Syria, and
even Anatolia. The core area of Cretan Civilization (3500 B.C.-1100
B.C.) was the island of Crete, while the peripheral area included the
Aegean islands and the Balkan coasts. In Classical Civilization the
core area was the shores of the Aegean Sea; the semi-peripheral area
was the rest of the northern portion of the eastern Mediterranean Sea,
while the peripheral area covered the rest of the Mediterranean shores
and ultimately Spain, North Africa, and Gaul. In Canaanite Civilization
(2200 B.C.-100 B.C.) the core area was the Levant, while the peripheral
area was in the western Mediterranean at Tunis, western Sicily, and
eastern Spain. The core area of Western Civilization (A.D. 400 to some
time in the future) has been the northern half of Italy, France, the
extreme western part of Germany, and England; the semi-peripheral area
has been central, eastern, and southern Europe and the Iberian
peninsula, while the peripheral areas have included North and South
America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and some other areas.
This
distinction of at least
two geographic areas in each civilization is of major importance. The
process of expansion, which begins in the core area, also begins to
slow up in the core at a time when the peripheral area is still
expanding. In consequence, by the latter part of the Age of Expansion,
the peripheral areas of a civilization tend to become wealthier and
more powerful than the core area. Another way of saying this is that
the core passes from the Age of Expansion to the Age of Conflict before
the periphery does. Eventually, in most civilizations the rate of
expansion begins to decline everywhere.
It
is this decline in the rate
of expansion of a civilization which marks its passage from the Age of
Expansion to the Age of Conflict. This latter is the most complex, most
interesting, and most critical of all the periods of the life cycle of
a civilization. It is marked by four chief characteristics: (a) it is a
period of declining rate of expansion; (b) it is a period of growing
tensions and class conflicts; (c) it is a period of increasingly
frequent and increasingly violent imperialist wars; and (d) it is a
period of growing irrationality, pessimism, superstitions, and
otherworldliness. All these phenomena appear in the core area of a
civilization before they appear in more peripheral portions of the
society.
The
decreasing rate of
expansion of the Age of Conflict gives rise to the other
characteristics of the age, in part at least. After the long years of
the Age of Expansion, people's minds and their social organizations are
adjusted to expansion, and it is a very difficult thing to readjust
these to a decreasing rate of expansion. Social classes and political
units within the civilization try to compensate for the slowing of
expansion through normal growth by the use of violence against other
social classes or against other political units. From this come class
struggles and imperialist wars. The outcomes of these struggles within
the civilization are not of vital significance for the future of the
civilization itself. What would be of such significance would be the
reorganization of the structure of the civilization so that the process
of normal growth would be resumed. Because such a reorganization
requires the removal of the causes of the civilization's decline, the
triumph of one social class over another or of one political unit over
another, within the civilization, will not usually have any major
influence on the causes of the decline, and will not (except by
accident) result in such a reorganization of structure as will give
rise to a new period of expansion. Indeed, the class struggles and
imperialist wars of the Age of Conflict will probably serve to increase
the speed of the civilization's decline because they dissipate capital
and divert wealth and energies from productive to nonproductive
activities.
In
most civilizations the
long-drawn agony of the Age of Conflict finally ends in a new period,
the Age of the Universal Empire. As a result of the imperialist wars of
the Age of Conflict, the number of political units in the civilization
are reduced by conquest. Eventually one emerges triumphant. When this
occurs we have one political unit for the whole civilization. Just at
the core area passes from the Age of Expansion to the Age of Conflict
earlier than the peripheral areas, sometimes the core area is conquered
by a single state before the whole civilization is conquered by the
Universal Empire. When this occurs the core empire is generally a
semi-peripheral state, while the Universal Empire is generally a
peripheral state. Thus, Mesopotamia's core was conquered by
semi-peripheral Babylonia about 1700 B.C., while the whole of
Mesopotamian civilization was conquered by more peripheral Assyria
about 7 2 5 H.C. (replaced by fully peripheral Persia about 525 B.C.).
In Classical Civilization the core area was conquered by
semi-peripheral Macedonia about 336 B.C., while the whole civilization
was conquered by peripheral Rome about 146 B.C. In other civilizations
the Universal Empire has consistently been a peripheral state even when
there was no earlier conquest of the core area by a semi-peripheral
state. In Mayan Civilization (1000 B.C.-A.D. 1550) the core area was
apparently in Yucatan and Guatemala, but the Universal Empire of the
Aztecs centered in the peripheral highlands of central Mexico. In
Andean Civilization (1500 B.C.-A.D. 1600) the core areas were on the
lower slopes and valleys of the central and northern Andes, but the
Universal Empire of the Incas centered in the highest Andes, a
peripheral area. The Canaanite Civilization (2200 B.C.-146 B.C.) had
its core area in the Levant, but its Universal Empire, the Punic
Empire, centered at Carthage in the western Mediterranean. If we turn
to the Far East we see no less than three civilizations. Of these the
earliest, Sinic Civilization, rose in the valley of the Yellow River
after 2000 B.C., culminated in the Chin and Han empires after 200 B.C.,
and was largely destroyed by Ural-Altaic invaders after A.D. 400. From
this Sinic Civilization, in the same way in which Classical
Civilization emerged from Cretan Civilization or Western Civilization
emerged from Classical Civilization, there emerged two other
civilizations: (a) Chinese Civilization, which began
about A.D.
400, culminated in the Manchu Empire after 1644, and was disrupted by
European invaders in the period 1790-1930, and (b)
Japanese
Civilization, which began about the time of Christ, culminated in the
Tokugawa Empire after 1600, and may have been completely disrupted by
invaders from Western Civilization in the century following 1853.
In
India, as in China, two
civilizations have followed one another. Although we know relatively
little about the earlier of the two, the later (as in China) culminated
in a Universal Empire ruled by an alien and peripheral people. Indic
Civilization, which began about 3500 B.C., was destroyed by Aryan
invaders about 1700 B.C. Hindu Civilization, which emerged from Indic
Civilization about 1700 B.C., culminated in the Mogul Empire and was
destroyed by invaders from Western Civilization in the period 1500-1900.
Turning
to the extremely
complicated area of the Near East, we can see a similar pattern.
Islamic Civilization, which began about A.D. 500, culminated in the
Ottoman Empire in the period 1300-1600 and has been in the process of
being destroyed by invaders from Western Civilization since about 1750.
Expressed
in this way, these
patterns in the life cycles of various civilizations may seem confused.
But if we tabulate them, the pattern emerges with some simplicity.
From
this table a most
extraordinary fact emerges. Of approximately twenty civilizations which
have existed in all of human history, we have listed sixteen. Of these
sixteen, twelve, possibly fourteen, are already dead or dying, their
cultures destroyed by outsiders able to come in with sufficient power
to disrupt the civilization, destroy its established modes of thought
and action, and eventually wipe it out. Of these twelve dead or dying
cultures, six have been destroyed by Europeans bearing the culture of
Western Civilization. When we consider the untold numbers of other
societies, simpler than civilizations, which Western Civilization has
destroyed or is now destroying, societies such as the Hottentots, the
Iroquois, the Tasmanians, the Navahos, the Caribs, and countless
others, the full frightening power of Western Civilization becomes
obvious.
Universal
Final Their
Civilization Its
Dates Empire Invasion Dates
Mesopotamian 6000
B.C.- Assyrian/ Greeks 335
B.C.-
300
B.C. Persian— 300
B.C.
725-333
B.C.
Egyptian 5500
B.
C.- Egyptian Greeks 334
B. C.-
300
B.
C. 300
B. C.
Cretan 3500
B.
C.- Minoan- Dorian 1200
B. C.-
1150
B.
C. Mycenaean Greeks 1000
B. C.
Indic 3500
B. C.
- Harappa? Aryans 1800
B. C.-
1700
B.
C. 1600
B. C.
Canaanite 2200
B. C.
- Punic
Romans 264
B. C. -
100
B.
C. 146
B. C.
Sinic 2000
B. C. -
Chin/ Ural-Altaic A.
D. 200
A.
D.
400 Han 500
Hittite 1800
- Hittite Indo- 1200
B. C. -
1150 European A.
D. 1000
Classical 1150
B. C.
- Roman Germanic A.
D. 350 -
A.
D.
500 600
Andean 1500
B. C. -
Inca Europeans 1534
A.
D. 1600
Mayan 1000
B. C.
- Aztec Europeans 1519
A.
D. 1550
Hindu 1800
B. C. -
Mogul Europeans 1500
-
A.
D.
1900 1900
Chinese 400
- Manchu Europeans 1790
-
1930 1930
Japanese 850
B. C. -
? Tokugawa Europeans 1853
-
Islamic 500
B. C. -
? Ottoman Europeans 1750
-
Western 350
-
? United
States? Future? ?
Orthodox 350
-
? Soviet Future? ?
One
cause, although by no
means the chief cause, of the ability of Western Civilization to
destroy other cultures rests on the fact that it has been expanding for
a long time. This fact, in turn, rests on another condition to which we
have already alluded, the fact that Western Civilization has passed
through three periods of expansion, has entered into an Age of Conflict
three times, each time has had its core area conquered almost
completely by a single political unit, but has failed to go on to the
Age of the Universal Empire because from the confusion of the Age of
Conflict there emerged each time a new organization of society capable
of expanding by its own organizational powers, with the result that the
four phenomena characteristic of the Age of Conflict (decreasing rate
of expansion, class conflicts, imperialist wars, irrationality) were
gradually replaced once again by the four kinds of expansion typical of
an Age of Expansion (demographic, geographic, production, knowledge).
From a narrowly technical point of view, this shift from an Age of
Conflict to an Age of Expansion is marked by a resumption of the
investment of capital and the accumulation of capital on a large scale,
just as the earlier shift from the Age of Expansion to the Age of
Conflict was marked by a decreasing rate of investment and eventually
by a decreasing rate of accumulation of capital.
Western
Civilization began, as
all civilizations do, in a period of cultural mixture. In this
particular case it was a mixture resulting from the barbarian invasions
which destroyed Classical Civilization in the period 350-700. By
creating a new culture from the various elements offered from the
barbarian tribes, the Roman world, the Saracen world, and above all the
Jewish world (Christianity), Western Civilization became a new society.
This
society became a
civilization when it became organized, in the period 700-970, so that
there was accumulation of capital and the beginnings of the investment
of this capital in new methods of production. These new methods are
associated with a change from infantry forces to mounted warriors in
defense, from manpower (and thus slavery) to animal power in energy
use, from the scratch plow and two-field, fallow agricultural
technology of Mediterranean Europe to the eight-oxen, gang plow and
three-field system of the Germanic peoples, and from the centralized,
state-centered political orientation of the Roman world to the
decentralized, private-power feudal network of the medieval world. In
the new system a small number of men, equipped and trained to fight,
received dues and services from the overwhelming majority of men who
were expected to till the soil. From this inequitable but effective
defensive system emerged an inequitable distribution of political power
and, in turn, an inequitable distribution of the social economic
income. This, in time, resulted in an accumulation of capital, which,
by giving rise to demand for luxury goods of remote origin, began to
shift the whole economic emphasis of the society from its earlier
organization in self-sufficient agrarian units (manors) to commercial
interchange, economic specialization, and, by the thirteenth century,
to an entirely new pattern of society with towns, a bourgeois class,
spreading literacy, growing freedom of alternative social choices, and
new, often disturbing, thoughts.
From
all this came the first
period of expansion of Western Civilization, covering the years
970-1270. At the end of this period, the organization of society was
becoming a petrified collection of vested interests, investment was
decreasing, and the rate of expansion was beginning to fall.
Accordingly, Western Civilization, for the first time, entered upon the
Age of Conflict. This period, the time of the Hundred Years' War, the
Black Death, the great heresies, and severe class conflicts, lasted
from about 1270 to 1420. By the end of it, efforts were arising from
England and Burgundy to conquer the eve of Western Civilization. But,
just at that moment, a new Age of Expansion, using a new organization
of society which circumvented the old vested interests of the
feudal-manorial system, began.
This
new Age of Expansion,
frequently called the period of commercial capitalism, lasted from
about 1440 to about 1680. The real impetus to economic expansion during
the period came from efforts to obtain profits by the interchange of
goods, especially semi-luxury or luxury goods, over long distances. In
time, this system of commercial capitalism became petrified into a
structure of vested interests in which profits were sought by imposing
restrictions on the production or interchange of goods rather than by
encouraging these activities. This new vested-interest structure,
usually called mercantilism, became such a burden on economic
activities that the rate of expansion of economic life declined and
even gave rise to a period of economic decline in the decades
immediately following 1690. The class struggles and imperialist wars
engendered by this Age of Conflict are sometimes called the Second
Hundred Years' War. The wars continued until 1815, and the class
struggles even later. As a result of the former, France by 1810 had
conquered most of the eve of Western Civilization. But here, just as
had occurred in 1420 when England had also conquered part of the core
of the civilization toward the latter portion of an Age of Conflict,
the victory was made meaningless because a new period of expansion
began. Just as commercial capitalism had circumvented the petrified
institution of the feudal-manorial system (chivalry) after 1440, so
industrial capitalism circumvented the petrified institution of
commercial capitalism (mercantilism) after 1820.
The
new Age of Expansion which
made Napoleon's military-political victory of 1810 impossible to
maintain had begun in England long before. It appeared as the
Agricultural Revolution about 1725 and as the Industrial Revolution
about 1775, but it did not get started as a great burst of expansion
until after 1820. Once started, it moved forward with an impetus such
as the world had never seen before, and it looked as if Western
Civilization might cover the whole globe. The dates of this third Age
of Expansion might be fixed at 1770-1929, following upon the second Age
of Conflict of 1690-1815. The social organization which was at the
center of this new development might be called "industrial capitalism."
In the course of the last decade of the nineteenth century, it began to
become a structure of vested interests to which we might give the name
"monopoly capitalism." As early, perhaps, as 1890, certain aspects of a
new Age of Conflict, the third in Western Civilization, began to
appear, especially in the core area, with a revival of imperialism, of
class struggle, of violent warfare, and of irrationalities.
By
1930 it was clear that
Western Civilization was again in an Age of Conflict; by 1942 a
semi-peripheral state, Germany, had conquered much of the core of the
civilization. That effort was defeated by calling into the fray a
peripheral state (the United States) and another, outside civilization
(the Soviet society). It is not yet clear whether Western Civilization
will continue along the path marked by so many earlier civilizations,
or whether it will be able to reorganize itself sufficiently to enter
upon a new, fourth, Age of Expansion. If the former occurs, this Age of
Conflict will undoubtedly continue with the fourfold characteristics of
class struggle, war, irrationality, and declining progress. In this
case, we shall undoubtedly get a Universal Empire in which the United
States will rule most of Western Civilization. This will be followed,
as in other civilizations, by a period of decay and ultimately, as the
civilization grows weaker, by invasions and the total destruction of
Western culture. On the other hand, if Western Civilization is able to
reorganize itself and enters upon a fourth Age of Expansion, the
ability of Western Civilization to survive and go on to increasing
prosperity and power will be bright. Leaving aside this hypothetical
future, it would appear thus that Western Civilization, in
approximately fifteen hundred years, has passed through eight periods,
thus:
1. Mixture
350-700
2. Gestation,
700-970
3A. First
Expansion, 970-1270
4A. First
Conflict, 1270-1440
Core
Empire: England, 1420
3B. Second
Expansion, 1440-1690
4B. Second
Conflict, 1690-1815
Core
Empire: France, 1810
3C. Third
Expansion, 1770-1929
4C. Third
Conflict, 1893-
Core
Empire: Germany, 1942
The
two possibilities which lie in the future can be listed as follows:
Reorganization Continuation
of the Process
3D. Fourth
Expansion,
1944- 5.
Universal Empire (the United States)
6.
Decay
7.
Invasion (end of the civilization)
From
the list of civilizations
previously given, it becomes somewhat easier to see how Western
Civilization was able to destroy (or is still destroying) the cultures
of six other civilizations. In each of these six cases the victim
civilization had already passed the period of Universal Empire and was
deep in the Age of Decay. In such a situation Western Civilization
played a role as invader similar to that played by the Germanic tribes
in Classical Civilization, by the Dorians in Cretan Civilization, by
the Greeks in Mesopotamian or Egyptian Civilization, by the Romans in
Canaanite Civilization, or by the Ayrans in Indic Civilization. The
Westerners who burst in upon the Aztecs in 1519, on the Incas in 1534,
on the Mogul Empire in the eighteenth century, on the Manchu Empire
after 1790, on the Ottoman Empire after 1774, and on the Tokugawa
Empire after 1853 were performing the same role as the Visigoths and
the other barbarian tribes to the Roman Empire after 377. In each case,
the results of the collision of two civilizations, one in the Age of
Expansion and the other in the Age of Decay, was a foregone conclusion.
Expansion would destroy Decay.
In
the course of its various
expansions Western Civilization has collided with only one civilization
which was not already in the stage of decay. This exception was its
half-brother, so to speak, the civilization now represented by the
Soviet Empire. It is not clear what stage this "Orthodox" Civilization
is in, but it clearly is not in its stage of decay. It would appear
that Orthodox Civilization began as a period of mixture (500-1300) and
is now in its second period of expansion. The first period of
expansion, covering 1500-1900, had just begun to change into an Age of
Conflict (1900-1920) when the vested interests of the society were
wiped away by the defeat at the hands of Germany in 1917 and replaced
by a new organization of society which gave rise to a second Age of
Expansion (since 1921). During much of the last four hundred years
culminating in the twentieth century, the fringes of Asia have been
occupied by a semicircle of old dying civilizations (Islamic, Hindu,
Chinese, Japanese). These have been under pressure from Western
Civilization coming in from the oceans and from Orthodox Civilization
pushing outward from the heart of the Eurasian land mass. The Oceanic
pressure began with Vasco da Gama in India in 1498, culminated aboard
the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay in 1945, and
still
continued with the Anglo-French attack on Suez in 1956. The Russian
pressure from the continental heartland was applied to the inner
frontiers of China, Iran, and Turkey from the seventeenth century to
the present. Much of the world's history in the twentieth century has
arisen from the interactions of these three factors (the continental
heartland of Russian power, the shattered cultures of the Buffer Fringe
of Asia, and the oceanic powers of Western Civilization).
Chapter 2—Cultural Diffusion in Western
Civilization
We
have said that the culture
of a civilization is created in its core area originally and moves
outward into peripheral areas which thus become part of the
civilization. This movement of cultural elements is called "diffusion"
by students of the subject. It is noteworthy that material elements of
a culture, such as tools, weapons, vehicles, and such, diffuse more
readily and thus more rapidly than do the nonmaterial elements such as
ideas, art forms, religious outlook, or patterns of social behavior.
For this reason the peripheral portions of a civilization (such as
Assyria in Mesopotamian Civilization, Rome or Spain in Classical
Civilization, and the United States or Australia in Western
Civilization) tend to have a somewhat cruder and more material culture
than the core area of the same civilization.
Material
elements of a culture
also diffuse beyond the boundaries of a civilization into other
societies, and do so much more readily than the nonmaterial elements of
the culture. For this reason the nonmaterial and spiritual elements of
a culture are what give it its distinctive character rather than its
tools and weapons which can be so easily exported to entirely different
societies. Thus, the distinctive character of Western Civilization
rests on its Christian heritage, its scientific outlook, its
humanitarian elements, and its distinctive point of view in regard to
the rights of the individual and respect for women rather than in such
material things as firearms, tractors, plumbing fixtures, or
skyscrapers, all of which are exportable commodities.
The
export of material
elements in a culture, across its peripheral areas and beyond, to the
peoples of totally different societies has strange results. As elements
of material culture move from core to periphery inside a civilization,
they tend, in the long run, to strengthen the periphery at the expense
of the core because the core is more hampered in the use of material
innovations by the strength of past vested interests and because the
core devotes a much greater part of its wealth and energy to
nonmaterial culture. Thus, such aspects of the Industrial Revolution as
automobiles and radios are European rather than American inventions,
but have been developed and utilized to a far greater extent in America
because this area was not hampered in their use by surviving elements
of feudalism, of church domination, of rigid class distinctions (for
example, in education), or by widespread attention to music, poetry,
art, or religion such as we find in Europe. A similar contrast can be
seen in Classical Civilization between Greek and Roman or in
Mesopotamian Civilization between Sumerian and Assyrian or in Mayan
Civilization between Mayan and Aztec.
The
diffusion of culture
elements beyond the boundaries of one society into the culture of
another society presents quite a different case. The boundaries between
societies present relatively little hindrance to the diffusion of
material elements, and relatively greater hindrance to the diffusion of
nonmaterial elements. Indeed, it is this fact which determines the
boundary of the society, for, if the nonmaterial elements also
diffused, the new area into which they flowed would be a peripheral
portion of the old society rather than a part of a quite different
society.
The
diffusion of material
elements from one society to another has a complex effect on the
importing society. In the short run it is usually benefitted by the
importation, but in the long run it is frequently disorganized and
weakened. When white men first came to North America, material elements
from Western Civilization spread rapidly among the different Indian
tribes. The Plains Indians, for example, were weak and impoverished
before 1543, but in that year the horse began to diffuse northward from
the Spaniards in Mexico. Within a century the Plains Indians were
raised to a much higher standard of living (because of ability to hunt
buffalo from horseback) and were immensely strengthened in their
ability to resist Americans coming westward across the continent. In
the meantime, the trans-Appalachian Indians who had been very powerful
in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries began to receive
firearms, steel traps, measles, and eventually whiskey from the French
and later the English by way of the St. Lawrence. These greatly
weakened the woods Indians of the trans-Appalachian area and ultimately
weakened the Plains Indians of the trans-Mississippi area, because
measles and whiskey were devastating and demoralizing and because the
use of traps and guns by certain tribes made them dependent on whites
for supplies at the same time that they allowed them to put great
physical pressure on the more remote tribes which had not yet received
guns or traps. Any united front of reds against whites was impossible,
and the Indians were disrupted, demoralized, and destroyed. In general,
importation of an element of material culture from one society to
another is helpful to the importing society in the long run only if it
is (a) productive, (b) can be
made within the society itself, and (c)
can be fitted into the nonmaterial culture of the importing society
without demoralizing it. The destructive impact of Western Civilization
upon so many other societies rests on its ability to demoralize their
ideological and spiritual culture as much as its ability to destroy
them in a material sense with firearms.
When
one society is destroyed
by the impact of another society, the people are left in a debris of
cultural elements derived from their own shattered culture as well as
from the invading culture. These elements generally provide the
instruments for fulfilling the material needs of these people, but they
cannot be organized into a functioning society because of the lack of
an ideology and spiritual cohesive. Such people either perish or are
incorporated as individuals and small groups into some other culture,
whose ideology they adopt for themselves and, above all, for their
children. In some cases, however, the people left with the debris of a
shattered culture are able to reintegrate the cultural elements into a
new society and a new culture. They are able to do this because they
obtain a new nonmaterial culture and thus a new ideology and morale
which serve as a cohesive for the scattered elements of past culture
they have at hand. Such a new ideology may be imported or may be
indigenous, but in either case it becomes sufficiently integrated with
the necessary elements of material culture to form a functioning whole
and thus a new society. It is by some such process as this that all new
societies, and thus all new civilizations, have been born. In this way,
Classical Civilization was born from the wreckage of Cretan
Civilization in the period 1150 B.C.—900 B.C., and Western
Civilization was born from the wreckage of Classical Civilization in
the period A.D. 350—700. It is possible that new civilizations
may be born in the debris from the civilizations wrecked by Western
Civilization on the fringes of Asia. In this wreckage is debris from
Islamic, Hindu, Chinese, and Japanese civilizations. lt would appear at
the present time that new civilizations may be in the throes of birth
in Japan, possibly in China, less likely in India, and dubiously in
Turkey or Indonesia. The birth of a powerful civilization at any or
several of these points would be of primary significance in world
history, since it would serve as a counterbalance to the expansion of
Soviet Civilization on the land mass of Eurasia.
Turning
from a hypothetical
future to a historical past, we can trace the diffusion of cultural
elements within Western Civilization from its core area across
peripheral areas and outward to other societies. Some of these elements
are sufficiently important to command a more detailed examination.
Among
the elements of the
Western tradition which have diffused only very slowly or not at all
are a closely related nexus of ideas at the basis of Western ideology.
These include Christianity, the scientific outlook, humanitarianism,
and the idea of the unique value and rights of the individual. But from
this nexus of ideas have sprung a number of elements of material
culture of which the most noteworthy are associated with technology.
These have diffused readily, even to other societies. This ability of
Western technology to emigrate and the inability of the scientific
outlook, with which such technology is fairly closely associated, to do
so have created an anomalous situation: societies such as Soviet Russia
which have, because of lack of the tradition of scientific method,
shown little inventiveness in technology are nevertheless able to
threaten Western Civilization by the use, on a gigantic scale, of a
technology almost entirely imported from Western Civilization. A
similar situation may well develop in any new civilizations which come
into existence on the fringes of Asia.
The
most important parts of Western technology can be listed under four
headings:
1.
Ability to kill: development of weapons
2.
Ability to preserve life: development of sanitation and medical services
3.
Ability to produce both food and industrial goods
4.
Improvements in transportation and communications
We
have already spoken of the
diffusion of Western firearms. The impact which these have had on
peripheral areas and other societies, from Cortez's invasion of Mexico,
in 1519 to the use of the first atom bomb on Japan in 1945, is obvious.
Less obvious, but in the long run of much greater significance, is the
ability of Western Civilization to conquer disease and to postpone
death hy sanitation and medical advances. These advances began in the
core of Western Civilization before 1500 but have exercised their full
impact only since about 1750 with the advent of vaccination, the
conquest of plague, and the steady advance in saving lives through the
discovery of antisepsis in the nineteenth century and of the
antibiotics in the twentieth century. These discoveries and techniques
have diffused outward from the core of Western Civilization and have
resulted in a fall in the death rate in western Europe and America
almost immediately, in southern Europe and eastern Europe somewhat
later, and in Asia only in the period since 1900. The world-shaking
significance of this diffusion will be discussed in a moment.
Western
Civilization's
conquest of the techniques of production are so outstanding that they
have been honored by the term "revolution" in all history books
concerned with the subject. The conquest of the problem of producing
food, known as the Agricultural Revolution, began in England as long
ago as the early eighteenth century, say about 1725. The conquest of
the problem of producing manufactured goods, known as the Industrial
Revolution, also began in England, about fifty years after the
Agricultural Revolution, say about 1775. The relationship of these two
"revolutions" to each other and to the "revolution" in sanitation and
public health and the differing rates at which these three
"revolutions" diffused is of the greatest importance for understanding
both the history of Western Civilization and its impact on other
societies.
Agricultural
activities, which
provide the chief food supply of all civilizations, drain the nutritive
elements from the soil. Unless these elements are replaced, the
productivity of the soil will be reduced to a dangerously low level. In
the medieval and early modern period of European history, these
nutritive elements, especially nitrogen, were replaced through the
action of the weather by leaving the land fallow either one year in
three or even every second year. This had the effect of reducing the
arable land by half or one-third. The Agricultural Revolution was an
immense step forward, since it replaced the year of fallowing with a
leguminous crop whose roots increased the supply of nitrogen in the
soil by capturing this gas from the air and fixing it in the soil in a
form usable by plant life. Since the leguminous crop which replaced the
fallow year of the older agricultural cycle was generally a crop like
alfalfa, clover, or sainfoin which provided feed for cattle, this
Agricultural Revolution not only increased the nitrogen content of the
soil for subsequent crops of grain but also increased the number and
quality of farm animals, thus increasing the supply of meat and animal
products for food, and also increasing the fertility of the soil by
increasing the supply of animal manure for fertilizers. The net result
of the whole Agricultural Revolution was an increase in both the
quantity and the quality of food. Fewer men were able to produce so
much more food that many men were released from the burden of producing
it and could devote their attention to other activities, such as
government, education, science, or business. It has been said that in
1700 the agricultural labor of twenty persons was required in order to
produce enough food for twenty-one persons, while in some areas, by
1900, three persons could produce enough food for twenty-one persons,
thus releasing seventeen persons for nonagricultural activities.
This
Agricultural Revolution
which began in England before 1725 reached France after 1800, but did
not reach Germany or northern Italy until after 1830. As late as 1900
it had hardly spread at all into Spain, southern Italy and Sicily, the
Balkans, or eastern Europe generally. In Germany, about 1840, this
Agricultural Revolution was given a new boost forward by the
introduction of the use of chemical fertilizers, and received another
boost in the United States after 1880 by the introduction of farm
machinery which reduced the need for human labor. These same two areas,
with contributions from some other countries, gave another considerable
boost to agricultural output after 1900 by the introduction of new
seeds and better crops through seed selection and hybridization.
These
great agricultural
advances after 1725 made possible the advances in industrial production
after 1775 by providing the food and thus the labor for the growth of
the factory system and the rise of industrial cities. Improvements in
sanitation and medical services after 1775 contributed to the same end
by reducing the death rate and by making it possible for large numbers
of persons to live in cities without the danger of epidemics.
The
"Transportation
Revolution" also contributed its share to making the modern world. This
contribution began, slowly enough, about 1750, with the construction of
canals and the building of turnpikes by the new methods of road
construction devised by John L. McAdam ("macadamized" roads). Coal came
by canal and food by the new roads to the new industrial cities after
1800. After 1825 both were greatly improved by the growth of a network
of railroads, while communications were speeded by the use of the
telegraph (after 1837) and the cable (after 1850). This "conquest of
distance" was unbelievably accelerated in the twentieth century by the
use of internal-combustion engines in automobiles, aircraft, and ships
and by the advent of telephones and radio communications. The chief
result of this tremendous speeding up of communications and
transportation was that all parts of the world were brought closer
together, and the impact of European culture on the non-European world
was greatly intensified. This impact was made even more overwhelming by
the fact that the Transportation Revolution spread outward from Europe
extremely rapidly, diffusing almost as rapidly as the spread of
European weapons, somewhat more rapidly than the spread of European
sanitation and medical services, and much more rapidly than the spread
of European industrialism, European agricultural techniques, or
European ideology. As we shall see in a moment, many of the problems
which the world faced at the middle of the twentieth century were
rooted in the fact that these different aspects of the European way of
life spread outward into the non-European world at such different
speeds that the non-European world obtained them in an entirely
different order from that in which Europe had obtained them.
One
example of this difference
can be seen in the fact that in Europe the Industrial Revolution
generally took place before the Transportation Revolution, but in the
non-European world this sequence was reversed.
This
means that Europe was
able to produce its own iron, steel, and copper to build its own
railroads and telegraph wires, but the non-European world could
construct these things only by obtaining the necessary industrial
materials from Europe and thus becoming the debtor of Europe. The speed
with which the Transportation Revolution spread out from Europe can be
seen in the fact that in Europe the railroad began before 1830, the
telegraph before 1840, the automobile about 1890, and the wireless
about 1900. The transcontinental railroad in the United States opened
in 1869; by 1900 the Trans-Siberian Railway and the Cape-to-Cairo
railroad were under full construction, and the Berlin-to-Baghdad
enterprise was just beginning. By that same
date—1900—India, the Balkans, China, and Japan were being
covered with a network of railroads, although none of these areas, at
that date, was sufficiently developed in an industrial sense to provide
itself with the steel or copper to construct or to maintain such a
network. Later stages in the Transportation Revolution, such as
automobiles or radios, spread even more rapidly and were being used to
cross the deserts of the Sahara or of Arabia within a generation of
their advent in Europe.
Another
important example of
this situation can be seen in the fact that in Europe the Agricultural
Revolution began before the Industrial Revolution. Because of this,
Europe was able to increase its output of food and thus the supply of
labor necessary for industrialization. But in the non-European world
(except North America) the effort to industrialize generally began
before there had been any notable success in obtaining a more
productive agricultural system. As a result, the increased supply of
food (and thus of labor) needed for the growth of industrial cities in
the non-European world has generally been obtained, not from increased
output of food so much as from a reduction of the peasants' share of
the food produced. In the Soviet Union, especially, the high speed of
industrialization in the period 1926-1940 was achieved by a merciless
oppression of the rural community in which millions of peasants lost
their lives. The effort to copy this Soviet method in Communist China
in the 1950'5 brought that area to the verge of disaster.
The
most important example of
such differential diffusion rates of two European developments appears
in the difference between the spread of the food-producing revolution
and the spread of the revolution in sanitation and medical services.
This difference became of such worldshaking consequences by the middle
of the twentieth century that we must spend considerable time examining
it.
In
Europe the Agricultural
Revolution which served to increase the supply of food began at least
fifty years before the beginnings of the revolution in sanitation and
medical services which decreased the number of deaths and thus
increased the number of the population. The two dates for these two
beginnings might be put roughly at 1725 and 1775. As a result of this
difference, Europe generally had sufficient food to feed its increased
population. When the population reached a point where Europe itself
could no longer feed its own people (say about 1850), the outlying
areas of the European and non-European worlds were so eager to be
industrialized (or to obtain railroads) that Europe was able to obtain
non-European food in exchange for European industrial products. This
sequence of events was a very happy combination for Europe. But the
sequence of events in tile non-European world was quite different and
much less happy. Not only did the non-European world get
industrialization before it got the revolution in food production; it
also got the revolution in sanitation and medical services before it
got a sufficient increase in food to take care of the resulting
increase in population. As a result, the demographic explosion which
began in northwestern Europe early in the nineteenth century spread
outward to eastern Europe and to Asia with increasingly unhappy
consequences as it spread. The result was to create the greatest social
problem of the twentieth-century world.
Most
stable and primitive
societies, such as the American Indians before 1492 or medieval Europe,
have no great population problem because the birthrate is balanced by
the death rate. In such societies both of these are high, the
population is stable, and the major portion of that population is young
(below eighteen years of age). This kind of society (frequently called
Population Type A) is what existed in Europe in the medieval period
(say about 1400) or even in part of the early modern period (say about
1700). As a result of the increased supply of food in Europe after
1725, and of men's increased ability to save lives because of advances
in sanitation and medicine after 1775, the death rate began to fall,
the birthrate remained high, the population began to increase, and the
number of older persons in the society increased. This gave rise to
what we have called the demographic explosion (or Population Type B).
As a result of it, the population of Europe (beginning in western
Europe) increased in the nineteenth century, and the major portion of
that population was in the prime of life (ages eighteen to forty-five),
the arms-bearing years for men and the childbearing years for women.
At
this point the demographic
cycle of an expanding population goes into a third stage (Population
Type C) in which the birthrate also begins to fall. The reasons for
this fall in the birthrate have never been explained in a satisfactory
way, but, as a consequence of it, there appears a new demographic
condition marked by a falling birthrate, a low death rate, and a
stabilizing and aging population whose major part is in the mature
years from thirty to sixty. As the population gets older because of the
decrease in births and the increase in expectation of life, a larger
and larger part of the population has passed the years of hearing
children or bearing arms. This causes the birthrate to decline even
more rapidly, and eventually gives a population so old that the death
rate begins to rise again because of the great increase in deaths from
old age or from the casualties of inevitable senility. Accordingly, the
society passes into a fourth stage of the demographic cycle (Population
Type D). This stage is marked by a declining birthrate, a rising death
rate, a decreasing population, and a population in which the major part
is over fifty years of age.
It
must be confessed that the
nature of the fourth stage of this demographic cycle is based on
theoretical considerations rather than on empirical observation,
because even western Europe, where the cycle is most advanced, has not
yet reached this fourth stage. However, it seems quite likely that it
will pass into such a stage by the year 2000, and already the
increasing number of older persons has given rise to new problems and
to a new science called geriatrics both in western Europe and in the
eastern United States.
As
we have said, Europe has
already experienced the first three stages of this demographic cycle as
a result of the Agricultural Revolution after 1725 and the
Sanitation-Medical Revolution after 1775. As these two revolutions have
diffused outward from western Europe to more peripheral areas of the
world (the lifesaving revolution passing the food-producing revolution
in the process), these more remote areas have entered, one by one, upon
the demographic cycle. This means that the demographic explosion
(Population Type B) has moved outward from western Europe to Central
Europe to eastern Europe and finally to Asia and Africa. By the middle
of the twentieth century, India was fully in the grasp of the
demographic explosion, with its population shooting upward at a rate of
about 5 million a year, while Japan's population rose from 55 million
in 1920 to 94 million in 1960. A fine example of the working of this
process can be seen in Ceylon where in 1920 the birthrate was 40 per
thousand and the death rate was 32 per thousand, but in 1950 the
birthrate was still at 40 while the death rate had fallen to 12. Before
we examine the impact of this development on world history in the
twentieth century let us look at two brief tables which will clarify
this process.
The
demographic cycle may be
divided into four stages which we have designated by the first four
letters of the alphabet. These four stages can be distinguished in
respect to four traits: the birthrate, the death rate, the number of
the population, and its age distribution. The nature of the four stages
in these four respects can be seen in the following table:
The
Demographic Cycle
Stage A B C D
Birthrate High High Falling Low
Death
rate High Falling Low Rising
Numbers
Stable Rising Stable Falling
Age
Many
young Many in
prime Many
Middle-aged Many old
Distribution (Below
18) (18-45) (Over
30) (Over
50)
The
consequences of this
demographic cycle (and the resulting demographic explosion) as it
diffuses outward from western Europe to more peripheral areas of the
world may be gathered from the following table which sets out the
chronology of this movement in the four areas of western Europe,
central Europe, eastern Europe, and Asia:
Diffusion of
the Demographic Cycle
Areas
Western Central Eastern
Dates Europe Europe Europe Asia
1700 A A A A
1800 B A A A
_______
1850 B
| B A A
|________________
1900 C B
| B A
|________________
1950 C C B
| B
|____________
2000 D D C B
In
this table the line of
greatest population pressure (the demographic explosion of Type B
population) has been marked by a dotted line. This shows that there has
been a sequence, at intervals of about fifty years, of four successive
population pressures which might be designated with the following names:
Anglo-French
pressure, about 1850
Germanic-Italian
pressure, about 1900
Slavic
pressure, about 1950
Asiatic
pressure, about 2000
This
diffusion of pressure
outward from the western European core of Western Civilization can
contribute a great deal toward a richer understanding of the period
1850-2000. It helps to explain the Anglo-French rivalry about 1850, the
Anglo-French alliance based on fear of Germany after 1900, the
free-world alliance based on fear of Soviet Russia after 1950, and the
danger to both Western Civilization and Soviet Civilization from
Asiatic pressure by 2000.
These
examples show how our
understanding of the problems of the twentieth century world can be
illuminated by a study of the various developments of western Europe
and of the varying rates by which they diffused outward to the more
peripheral portions of Western Civilization and ultimately to the .
non-Western world. In a rough fashion we might list these developments
in the order in which they appeared in western Europe as well as the
order in which they appeared in the more remote non-Western world:
Developments
in Western Europe
1.
Western ideology
2.
Revolution in weapons (especially firearms)
3.
Agricultural Revolution
4.
Industrial Revolution
5.
Revolution in sanitation and medicine
6.
Demographic explosion
7.
Revolution in transportation and communications
Developments
in Asia
1.
Revolution in weapons
2.
Revolution in transport and communications
3.
Revolution in sanitation and medicine
4.
Industrial Revolution
5.
Demographic explosion
6.
Agricultural Revolution
7.
And last (if at all), Western ideology
Naturally,
these two lists are
only a rough approximation to the truth. In the European list it should
be quite clear that each development is listed in the order of its
first beginning and that each of these traits has been a continuing
process of development since. In the Asiatic list it should be clear
that the order of arrival of the different traits is quite different in
different areas and that the order given on this list is merely one
which seems to apply to several important areas. Naturally, the
problems arising from the advent of these traits in Asiatic areas
depend on the order in which the traits arrive, and thus are quite
different in areas where this order of arrival is different. The chief
difference arises from a reversal of order between items 3 and 4.
The
fact that Asia obtained
these traits in a different order from that of Europe is of the
greatest significance. We shall devote much of the rest of this book to
examining this subject. At this point we might point out two aspects of
it. In 1830 democracy was growing rapidly in Europe and in America. At
that time the development of weapons had reached a point where
governments could not get weapons which were much more effective than
those which private individuals could get. Moreover, private
individuals could obtain good weapons because they had a high enough
standard of living to afford it (as a result of the Agricultural
Revolution) and such weapons were cheap (as a result of the Industrial
Revolution). By 1930 (and even more by 1950) the development of weapons
had advanced to the point where governments could obtain more effective
weapons (dive-bombers, armored cars, flamethrowers, poisonous gases,
and such) than private individuals. Moreover, in Asia, these better
weapons arrived before standards of living could be raised by the
Agricultural Revolution or costs of weapons reduced sufficiently by the
Industrial Revolution. Moreover, standards of living were held down in
Asia because the Sanitation Medical Revolution and the demographic
explosion arrived before the Agricultural Revolution. As a result,
governments in Europe in 1830 hardly dared to oppress the people, and
democracy was growing; hut in the non-European world by 1930 (and even
more by 1950) governments did dare to, and could, oppress their
peoples, who could do little to prevent it. When we add to this picture
the fact that the ideology of Western Europe had strong democratic
elements derived from its Christian and scientific traditions, while
Asiatic countries had authoritarian traditions in political life, we
can see that democracy had a hopeful future in Europe in 1830 but a
very dubious future in Asia m 1950.
From
another point of view we
can sec that in Europe the sequence of
Agricultural-Industrial-Transportation revolutions made it possible for
Europe to have rising standards of living and little rural oppression,
since the Agricultural Revolution provided the food and thus the labor
for industrialism and for transport facilities. But in Asia, where the
sequence of these three revolutions was different (generally:
Transportation-Industrial-Agricultural), labor could be obtained from
the Sanitary-Medical Revolution, hut food for this labor could be
obtained only by oppressing the rural population and preventing any
real improvements in standards of living. Some countries tried to avoid
this by borrowing capital for railroads and steel mills from European
countries rather than by raising capital from the savings of their own
people, but this meant that these countries became the debtors (and
thus to some extent the subordinates) of Europe. Asiatic nationalism
usually came to resent this debtor role and to prefer the role of rural
oppression of its own people by its own government. The most striking
example of this preference for rural oppression over foreign
indebtedness was made in the Soviet Union in 1928 with the opening of
the Five-Year plans. Somewhat similar but less drastic choices were
made even earlier in Japan and much later in China. But we must never
forget that these and other difficult choices had to be made by
Asiatics because they obtained the diffused traits of Western
Civilization in an order different from that in which Europe obtained
them.
Chapter 3—Europe's Shift to the Twentieth
Century
While
Europe's traits were
diffusing outward to the non-European world, Europe was also undergoing
profound changes and facing difficult choices at home. These choices
were associated with drastic changes, in some cases we might say
reversals, of Europe's point of view. These changes may be examined
under eight headings. The nineteenth century was marked by (2) belief
in the innate goodness of man; (2) secularism; (3) belief in progress;
(4) liberalism; (5) capitalism; (6) faith in science; (7) democracy;
(8) nationalism. In general, these eight factors went along together in
the nineteenth century. They were generally regarded as being
compatible with one another; the friends of one were generally the
friends of the others; and the enemies of one were generally the
enemies of the rest. Metternich and De Maistre were generally opposed
to all eight; Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill were generally in
favor of all eight..
The
belief in the innate
goodness of man had its roots in the eighteenth century when it
appeared to many that man was born good and free but was everywhere
distorted, corrupted, and enslaved by bad institutions and conventions.
As Rousseau said, "Man is born free yet everywhere he is in chains."
Thus arose the belief in the "noble savage," the romantic nostalgia for
nature and for the simple nobility and honesty of the inhabitants of a
faraway land. If only man could be freed, they felt, freed from the
corruption of society and its artificial conventions, freed from the
burden of property, of the state, of the clergy, and of the rules of
matrimony, then man, it seemed clear, could rise to heights undreamed
of before—could, indeed, become a kind of superman, practically a
god. It was this spirit which set loose the French Revolution. It was
this spirit which prompted the outburst of self-reliance and optimism
so characteristic of the whole period from 1770 to 1914.
Obviously,
if man is innately
good and needs but to be freed from social restrictions, he is capable
of tremendous achievements in this world of time, and does not need to
postpone his hopes of personal salvation into eternity. Obviously, if
man is a god-like creature whose ungod-like actions are due only to the
frustrations of social conventions, there is no need to worry about
service to God or devotion to any other worldly end. Man can accomplish
most by service to himself and devotion to the goals of this world.
Thus came the triumph of secularism.
Closely
related to these
nineteenth century beliefs that human nature is good, that society is
bad, and that optimism and secularism were reasonable attitudes were
certain theories about the nature of evil..
To
the nineteenth century mind
evil, or sin, was a negative conception. It merely indicated a lack or,
at most, a distortion of good. Any idea of sin or evil as a malignant
positive force opposed to good, and capable of existing by its own
nature, was completely lacking in the typical nineteenth-century mind.
To such a mind the only evil was frustration and the only sin,
repression.
Just
as the negative idea of
the nature of evil flowed from the belief that human nature was good,
so the idea of liberalism flowed from the belief that society was bad.
For, if society was bad, the state, which was the organized coercive
power of society, was doubly bad, and if man was good, he should be
freed, above all, from the coercive power of the state. Liberalism was
the crop which emerged from this soil. In its broadest aspect
liberalism believed that men should be freed from coercive power as
completely as possible. In its narrowest aspect liberalism believed
that the economic activities of man should be freed completely from
"state interference." This latter belief, summed up in the battle-cry
"No government in business," was commonly called "laissez-faire."
Liberalism, which included laissez-faire, was a wider term because it
would have freed men from the coercive power of any church, army, or
other institution, and would have left to society little power beyond
that required to prevent the strong from physically oppressing the weak.
From
either aspect liberalism
was based on an almost universally accepted nineteenth-century
superstition known as the "community of interests." This strange, and
unexamined, belief held that there really existed, in the long run, a
community of interests between the members of a society. It maintained
that, in the long run, what was good for one member of society was good
for all and that what was bad for one w as had for all. But it went
much further than this. The theory of the "community of interests"
believed that there did exist a possible social pattern in which each
member of society would be secure, free, and prosperous, and that this
pattern could be achieved by a process of adjustment so that each
person could fall into that place in the pattern to which his innate
abilities entitled him. This implied two corollaries which the
nineteenth century was prepared to accept: (1) that human abilities are
innate and can only be distorted or suppressed by social discipline and
(2) that each individual is the best judge of his own self-interest.
All these together form the doctrine of the "community of interests," a
doctrine which maintained that if each individual does what seems best
for himself the result, in the long run, will be best for society as a
whole..
Closely
related to the idea of
the "community of interests" were two other beliefs of the nineteenth
century: the belief in progress and in democracy. The average man of
1880 was convinced that he was the culmination of a long process of
inevitable progress which had been going on for untold millennia and
which would continue indefinitely into the future. This belief in
progress was so fixed that it tended to regard progress as both
inevitable and automatic. Out of the struggles and conflicts of the
universe better things were constantly emerging, and the wishes or
plans of the objects themselves had little to do with the process.
The
idea of democracy was also
accepted as inevitable, although not always as desirable, for the
nineteenth century could not completely submerge a lingering feeling
that rule by the best or rule by the strong would be better than rule
by the majority. But the facts of political development made rule by
the majority unavoidable, and it came to he accepted, at least in
western Europe, especially since it was compatible with liberalism and
with the community of interests.
Liberalism,
community of
interests, and the belief in progress led almost inevitably to the
practice and theory of capitalism. Capitalism was an economic system in
which the motivating force was the desire for private profit as
determined in a price system. Such a system, it was felt, by seeking
the aggrandization of profits for each individual, would give
unprecedented economic progress under liberalism and in accord with the
community of interests. In the nineteenth century this system, in
association with the unprecedented advance of natural science, had
given rise to industrialism (that is, power production) and urbanism
(that is, city life), both of which were regarded as inevitable
concomitants of progress by most people, but with the greatest
suspicion by a persistent and vocal minority.
The
nineteenth century was
also an age of science. By this term we mean the belief that the
universe obeyed rational laws which could be found by observation and
could be used to control it. This belief was closely connected with the
optimism of the period, with its belief in inevitable progress, and
with secularism. The latter appeared as a tendency toward materialism.
This could be defined as the belief that all reality is ultimately
explicable in terms of the physical and chemical laws which apply to
temporal matter.
The
last attribute of the
nineteenth century is by no means the least: nationalism. It was the
great age of nationalism, a movement which has been discussed in many
lengthy and inconclusive books but which can be defined for our
purposes as "a movement for political unity with those with whom we
believe we are akin." As such, nationalism in the nineteenth century
had a dynamic force which worked in two directions. On the one side, it
served to bind persons of the same nationality together into a tight,
emotionally satisfying, unit. On the other side, it served to divide
persons of different nationality into antagonistic groups, often to the
injury of their real mutual political, economic, or cultural
advantages. Thus, in the period to which we refer, nationalism
sometimes acted as a cohesive force, creating a united Germany and a
united Italy out of a medley of distinct political units. But
sometimes, on the other hand, nationalism acted as a disruptive force
within such dynastic states as the Habsburg Empire or the Ottoman
Empire, splitting these great states into a number of distinctive
political units.
These
characteristics of the
nineteenth century have been so largely modified in the twentieth
century that it might appear, at first glance, as if the latter were
nothing more than the opposite of the former. This is not completely
accurate, but there can be no doubt that most of these characteristics
have been drastically modified in the twentieth century. This change
has arisen from a series of shattering experiences which have
profoundly disturbed patterns of behavior and of belief, of social
organizations and human hopes. Of these shattering experiences the
chief were the trauma of the First World War, the long-drawn-out agony
of the world depression, and the unprecedented violence of destruction
of the Second World War. Of these three, the First World War was
undoubtedly the most important. To a people who believed in the innate
goodness of man, in inevitable progress, in the community of interests,
and in evil as merely the absence of good, the First World War, with
its millions of persons dead and its billions of dollars wasted, was a
blow so terrible as to be beyond human ability to comprehend. As a
matter of fact, no real success was achieved in comprehending it. The
people of the day regarded it as a temporary and inexplicable
aberration to be ended as soon as possible and forgotten as soon as
ended. Accordingly, men were almost unanimous, in 1919, in their
determination to restore the world of 1913. This effort was a failure.
After ten years of effort to conceal the new reality of social life by
a facade painted to look like 1913, the facts burst through the
pretense, and men were forced, willingly or not, to face the grim
reality of the twentieth century. The events which destroyed the pretty
dream world of 1919-1929 were the stock-market crash, the world
depression, the world financial crisis, and ultimately the martial
clamor of rearmament and aggression. Thus depression and war forced men
to realize that the old world of the nineteenth century had passed
forever, and made them seek to create a new world in accordance with
the facts of present-day conditions. This new world, the child of the
period of 1914-1945, assumed its recognizable form only as the first
half of the century drew to a close.
In
contrast with the
nineteenth-century belief that human nature is innately good and that
society is corrupting, the twentieth century came to believe that human
nature is, if not innately bad, at least capable of being very evil.
Left to himself, it seems today, man falls very easily to the level of
the jungle or even lower, and this result can be prevented only by
training and the coercive power of society. Thus, man is capable of
great evil, but society can prevent this. Along with this change from
good men and bad society to bad men and good society has appeared a
reaction from optimism to pessimism and from secularism to religion. At
the same time the view that evil is merely the absence of good has been
replaced with the idea that evil is a very positive force which must
'ne resisted and overcome. The horrors of Hitler's concentration camps
and of Stalin's slave-labor units are chiefly responsible for this
change.
Associated
with these changes
are a number of others. The belief that human abilities are innate and
should be left free from social duress in order to display themselves
has been replaced by the idea that human abilities are the result of
social training and must be directed to socially acceptable ends. Thus
liberalism and laissez-faire are to be replaced, apparently, by social
discipline and planning. The community of interests which would appear
if men were merely left to pursue their own desires has been replaced
by the idea of the welfare community, which must be created by
conscious organizing action. The belief in progress has been replaced
by the fear of social retrogression or even human annihilation. The old
march of democracy now yields to the insidious advance of
authoritarianism, and the individual capitalism of the profit motive
seems about to be replaced by the state capitalism of the welfare
economy. Science, on all sides, is challenged by mysticisms, some of
which march under the banner of science itself; urbanism has passed its
peak and is replaced by suburbanism or even "flight to the country";
and nationalism finds its patriotic appeal challenged by appeals to
much wider groups of class, ideological, or continental scope..
We
have already given some
attention to the fashion in which a number of western-European
innovations, such as industrialism and the demographic explosion,
diffused outward to the peripheral non-European world at such different
rates of speed that they arrived in Asia in quite a different order
from that in which they had left western Europe. The same phenomenon
can be seen within Western Civilization in regard to the
nineteenth-century characteristics of Europe which we have enumerated.
For example, nationalism was already evident in England at the time of
the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588; it raged through France in
the period after 1789; it reached Germany and Italy only after 1815,
became a potent force in Russia and the Balkans toward the end of the
nineteenth century, and was noticeable in China, India, and Indonesia,
and even Negro Africa, only in the twentieth century. Somewhat similar
patterns of diffusion can be found in regard to the spread of
democracy, of parliamentary government, of liberalism, and of
secularism. The rule, however, is not so general or so simple as it
appears at first glance. The exceptions and the complications appear
more numerous as we approach the twentieth century. Even earlier it was
evident that the arrival of the sovereign state did not follow this
pattern, enlightened despotism and the growth of supreme public
authority appearing in Germany, and even in Italy, before it appeared
in France. Universal free education also appeared in central Europe
before it appeared in a western country like England. Socialism also is
a product of central Europe rather than of western Europe, and moved
from the former to the latter only in the fifth decade of the twentieth
century. These exceptions to the general rule about the eastward
movement of modern historical developments have various explanations.
Some of these are obvious, but others are very complicated. As an
example of such a complication we might mention that in Western Europe
nationalism, industrialism, liberalism, and democracy were generally
reached in this order. But in Germany they all appeared about the same
time. To the Germans it appeared that they could achieve nationalism
and industrialism (both of which they wanted) more rapidly and more
successfully if they sacrificed liberalism and democracy. Thus, in
Germany nationalism was achieved in an undemocratic way, by "blood and
iron," as Bismarck put it, while industrialism was achieved under state
auspices rather than through liberalism. This selection of elements and
the resulting playing off of elements against one another was possible
in more peripheral areas only because these areas had the earlier
experience of western Europe to study, copy, avoid, or modify.
Sometimes they had to modify these traits as they developed. This can
be seen from the following considerations. When the Industrial
Revolution began in England and France, these countries were able to
raise the necessary capital for new factories because they already had
the Agricultural Revolution and because, as the earliest producers of
industrial goods, they made excessive profits which could he used to
provide capital. But in Germany and in Russia, capital was much more
difficult to find, because they obtained the Industrial Revolution
later, when they had to compete with England and France, and could not
earn such large profits and also because they did not already have an
established Agricultural Revolution on which to build their Industrial
Revolution. Accordingly, while western Europe, with plenty of capital
and cheap, democratic weapons, could finance its industrialization with
liberalism and democracy, central and eastern Europe had difficulty
financing industrialism, and there the process was delayed to a period
when cheap and simple democratic weapons were being replaced by
expensive and complicated weapons. This meant that the capital for
railroads and factories had to be raised with government assistance;
liberalism waned; rising nationalism encouraged this tendency; and the
undemocratic nature of existing weapons made it clear that both
liberalism and democracy were living a most precarious existence.
As
a consequence of situations
such as this, some of the traits which arose in western Europe in the
nineteenth century moved outward to more peripheral areas of Europe and
Asia with great difficulty and for only a brief period. Among these
less sturdy traits of western Europe's great century we might mention
liberalism, democracy, the parliamentary system, optimism, and the
belief in inevitable progress. These were, we might say, flowers of
such delicate nature that they could not survive any extended period of
stormy weather. That the twentieth century subjected them to long
periods of very stormy weather is clear when we consider that it
brought a world economic depression sandwiched between two world wars.
Part Two—Western Civilization to 1914
Chapter 4—The Pattern of Change
In
order to obtain perspective we sometimes divide the culture of a
society,
in a somewhat arbitrary fashion, into several different aspects. For
example, we can divide a society into six aspects: military, political,
economic, social, religious, intellectual. Naturally there are very
close connections between these various aspects; and in each aspect
there are very close connections between what exists today and what
existed in an earlier day. For example, we might want to talk about
democracy as a fact on the political level (or aspect). In order to
talk about it in an intelligent way we would not only have to know what
it is today we would also have to see what relationship it has to
earlier facts on the political level as well as its
relationship
to various facts on the other five levels of the society. Naturally we
cannot talk intelligently unless we have a fairly clear idea of what we
mean by the words we use. For that reason we shall frequently define
the terms we use in discussing this subject.
The
Organization of Power
The
military level is
concerned with the organization of force, the political level with the
organization of power, and the economic level with the organization of
wealth. By the "organization of power" in a society we mean the ways in
which obedience and consent (or acquiescence) are obtained. The close
relationships between levels can be seen from the fact that there are
three basic ways to win obedience: by force, by buying consent with
wealth, and by persuasion. Each of these three leads us to another
level (military, economic, or intellectual) outside the political
level. At the same time, the organization of power today (that is, of
the methods for obtaining obedience in the society) is a development of
the methods used to obtain obedience in the society in an earlier
period.
Major Change
in the 20th Century
These
relationships are
important because in the twentieth century in Western Civilization all
six levels are changing with amazing rapidity, and the relationships
between levels are also shifting with great speed. When we add to this
confusing picture of Western Civilization the fact that other societies
are influencing it or being influenced by it, it would seem that the
world in the twentieth century is almost too complicated to understand.
This is indeed true, and we shall have to simplify (perhaps even
oversimplify) these complexities in order to reach a low level of
understanding. When we have reached such a low level perhaps we shall
be able to raise the level of our understanding by bringing into our
minds, little by little, some of the complexities which do exist in the
world itself.
The Military
Level in Western Civilization
On
the military level in
Western Civilization in the twentieth century the chief development has
been a steady increase in the complexity and the cost of weapons. When
weapons are cheap to get and so easy to use that almost anyone can use
them after a short period of training, armies are generally made up of
large masses of amateur soldiers. Such weapons we call "amateur
weapons," and such armies we might call "mass armies of
citizen-soldiers." The Age of Pericles in Classical Greece and the
nineteenth century in Western Civilization were periods of amateur
weapons and citizen-soldiers. But the nineteenth century was preceded
(as was the Age of Pericles also) by a period in which weapons were
expensive and required long training in their use. Such weapons we call
"specialist" weapons. Periods of specialist weapons are generally
periods of small armies of professional soldiers (usually mercenaries).
In a period of specialist weapons the minority who have such weapons
can usually force the majority who lack them to obey; thus a period of
specialist weapons tends to give rise to a period of minority rule and
authoritarian government. But a period of amateur weapons is a period
in which all men are roughly equal in military power, a majority can
compel a minority to yield, and majority rule or even democratic
government tends to rise. The medieval period in which the best weapon
was usually a mounted knight on horseback (clearly a specialist weapon)
was a period of minority rule and authoritarian government. Even when
the medieval knight was made obsolete (along with his stone castle) by
the invention of gunpowder and the appearance of firearms, these new
weapons were so expensive and so difficult to use (until 1800) that
minority rule and authoritarian government continued even though that
government sought to enforce its rule by shifting from mounted knights
to professional pike-men and musketeers. But after 1800, guns became
cheaper to obtain and easier to use. By 1840 a Colt revolver sold for
$27 and a Springfield musket for not much more, and these were about as
good weapons as anyone could get at that time. Thus, mass armies of
citizens, equipped with these cheap and easily used weapons, began to
replace armies of professional soldiers, beginning about 1800 in Europe
and even earlier in America. At the same time, democratic government
began to replace authoritarian governments (but chiefly in those areas
where the cheap new weapons were available and local standards of
living were high enough to allow people to obtain them).
The
arrival of the mass army
of citizen-soldiers in the nineteenth century created a difficult
problem of control, because techniques of transportation and of
communications had not reached a high-enough level to allow any
flexibility of control in a mass army. Such an army could be moved on
its own feet or by railroad; the government could communicate with its
various units only by letter post or by telegram. The problem of
handling a mass army by such techniques was solved partially in the
American Civil War of 1861-1865 and completely by Helmuth von Moltke
for the Kingdom of Prussia in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. The
solution was a rigid one: a plan of campaign was prepared beforehand
against a specific opponent, with an established timetable and detailed
instructions for each military unit; communications were prepared and
even issued beforehand, to be used according to the timetable. This
plan was so inflexible that the signal to mobilize was practically a
signal to attack a specified neighboring state because the plan, once
initiated, could not be changed and could hardly even be slowed up.
With this rigid method Prussia created the German Empire by smashing
Austria in 1866 and France in 1871. By 1900 all the states of Europe
had adopted the same method and had fixed plans in which the signal for
mobilization constituted an attack on some neighbor—a neighbor,
in some cases (as in the German invasion of Belgium), with whom the
attacker had no real quarrel. Thus, when the signal for mobilization
was given in 1914 the states of Europe leaped at each other.
The Rise of
Authoritarian Government
In
the twentieth century the
military situation was drastically changed in two ways. On the one
hand, communications and transportation were so improved by the
invention of the radio and the internal-combustion engine that control
and movement of troops and even of individual soldiers became very
flexible; mobilization ceased to be equivalent to attack, and attack
ceased to be equivalent to total war. On the other hand, beginning with
the first use of tanks, gas, high-explosive shells, and tactical
bombing from the air in 1915-1918, and continuing with all the
innovations in weapons leading up to the first atomic bomb in 1945,
specialist weapons became superior to amateur weapons. This had a
double result which was still working itself out at mid-century: the
drafted army of citizen-soldiers began to be replaced by a smaller army
of professional specialist soldiers, and authoritarian government began
to replace democratic government.
The Political
Level in Western Civilization
On
the political level equally
profound changes took place in the twentieth century. These changes
were associated with the basis on which an appeal for allegiance could
be placed, and especially with the need to find a basis of allegiance
which could win loyalty over larger and larger areas from more numerous
groups of people. In the early Middle Ages when there had been no state
and no public authority, political organization had been the feudal
system which was held together by obligations of personal fealty among
a small number of people. With the reappearance of the state and of
public authority, new patterns of political behavior were organized in
what is called the "feudal monarchy." This allowed the state to
reappear for the first time since the collapse of Charlemagne's Empire
in the ninth century, but with restricted allegiance to a relatively
small number of persons over a relatively small area. The development
of weapons and the steady improvement in transportation and in
communications made it possible to compel obedience over wider and
wider areas, and made it necessary to base allegiance on something
wider than personal fealty to a feudal monarch. Accordingly, the feudal
monarchy was replaced by the dynastic monarchy. In this system subjects
owed allegiance to a royal family (dynasty), although the real basis of
the dynasty rested on the loyalty of a professional army of pike-men
and musketeers.
The Rise of
the Nation State
The
shift from the
professional army of mercenaries to the mass army of citizen-soldiers,
along with other factors acting on other levels of culture, made it
necessary to broaden the basis of allegiance once again after 1800. The
new basis was nationalism, and gave rise to the national state as the
typical political unit of the nineteenth century. This shift was not
possible for the larger dynastic states which ruled over many different
language and national groups. By the year 1900 three old dynastic
monarchies were being threatened with disintegration by the rising tide
of nationalistic agitation. These three, the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
the Ottoman Empire, and the Russian Empire of the Romanovs, did
disintegrate as a consequence of the defeats of the First World War.
But the smaller territorial units which replaced them, states like
Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Lithuania, organized largely on the basis of
language groups, may have reflected adequately enough the nationalistic
sentiments of the nineteenth century, but they reflected very
inadequately the developments in weapons, in communications, in
transportation, and in economics of the twentieth century. By the
middle of this latter century these developments were reaching a point
where states which could produce the latest instruments of coercion
were in a position to compel obedience over areas much larger than
those occupied by peoples speaking the same language or otherwise
regarding themselves as sharing a common nationality. Even as early as
1940 it began to appear that some new basis more continental in scope
than existing nationality groups must be found for the new super-states
which were beginning
to be born. It became clear that the basis of allegiance for these new
super-states of continental scope must be ideological rather than
national. Thus the nineteenth century's national state began to be
replaced by the twentieth century's ideological bloc. At the same time,
the shift from amateur to specialist weapons made it likely that the
new form of organization would be authoritarian rather than democratic
as the earlier national state had been. However, the prestige of
Britain's power and influence in the nineteenth century was so great in
the first third of the twentieth century that the British parliamentary
system continued to be copied everywhere that people were called upon
to set up a new form of government. This happened in Russia in 1917, in
Turkey in 1908, in Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1918-1919 and in most
of the states of Asia (such as China in 1911).
The Economic
Level of Western Civilization
When
we turn to the economic
level, we turn to a series of complex developments. It would be
pleasant if we could just ignore these, but obviously we cannot,
because economic issues have been of paramount importance in the
twentieth century, and no one can understand the period without at
least a rudimentary grasp of the economic issues. In order to simplify
these somewhat, we may divide them into four aspects: (a) energy; (b)
materials; (c) organization; and (d) control.
It
is quite clear that no
economic goods can be made without the use of energy and of materials.
The history of the former falls into two chief parts each of which is
divided into two sub-parts. The main division, about 1830, separates an
earlier period when production used the energy delivered through living
bodies and a later period when production used energy from fossil fuels
delivered through engines. The first half is subdivided into an earlier
period of manpower (and slavery) and a later period using the energy of
draft animals. This subdivision occurred roughly about A. D. 1000. The
second half (since 1830) is subdivided into a period which used coal in
steam engines, and a period which used petroleum in internal-combustion
engines. This subdivision occurred about 1900 or a little later.
The
development of the use of
materials is familiar to everyone. We can speak of an age of iron
(before 1830), an age of steel (1830-1910), and an age of alloys, light
metals, and synthetics (since 1910). Naturally, all these dates are
arbitrary and approximate, since the different periods commenced at
different dates in different areas, diffusing outward from their origin
in the core area of Western Civilization in northwestern Europe.
Six Periods
of Development
When
we turn to the
developments which took place in economic organization, we approach a
subject of great significance. Here again we can see a sequence of
several periods. There were six of these periods, each with its own
typical form of economic organization. At the beginning, in the early
Middle Ages, Western Civilization had an economic system which was
almost entirely agricultural, organized in self-sufficient manors, with
almost no commerce or industry. To this manorial-agrarian system there
was added, after about 1050, a new economic system based on trade in
luxury goods of remote origin for the sake of profits. This we might
call commercial capitalism. It had two periods of expansion, one in the
period 1050-1270, and the other in the period 1440-1690. The typical
organization of these two periods was the trading company (in the
second we might say the chartered trading company,
like the
Massachusetts Bay Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, or the various
East India companies). The next period of economic organization was the
stage of industrial capitalism, beginning about 1770, and characterized
by owner management through the single-proprietorship or the
partnership. The third period we might call financial capitalism. It
began about 1850, reached its peak about 1914, and ended about 1932.
Its typical forms of economic organization were the limited-liability
corporation and the holding company. It was a period of financial or
banker management rather than one of owner management as in the earlier
period of industrial capitalism. This period of financial capitalism
was followed by a period of monopoly capitalism. In this fourth period,
typical forms of economic organization were cartels and trade
associations. This period began to appear about 1890, took over control
of the economic system from the bankers about 1932, and is
distinguished as a period of managerial dominance in contrast with the
owner management and the financial management of the two periods
immediately preceding it. Many of its characteristics continue, even
today, but the dramatic events of World War II and the post-war period
put it in such a different social and historical context as to create a
new, sixth, period of economic organization which might be called "the
pluralist economy." The features of this sixth period will be described
later.
Stages of
Economic Development
The
approximate relationship of these various stages may be seen in the
following table:
Typical
Name Dates Organization Management
Manorial 6701 Manor Custom
Commercial
capitalism a.
1050-1270 Company Municipal
mercantilism
b.
440-1690 Chartered State
mercantilism
company
Industrial
capitalism 1770-1870 Private
firm Owners
or
partnership
Financial
capitalism 1850-1932 Corporation
and Bankers
holding
company
Monopoly
capitalism 1890-1950 Cartels
and trade Managers
association
Pluralist
economy 1934-present Lobbying
groups Technocrats
Finance and
Monopoly Capitalism
Two
things should be noted. In
the first place, these various stages or periods are additive in a
sense. and there are many survivals of earlier stages into later ones.
As late as 1925 there was a manor still functioning in England, and
Cecil Rhodes's chartered company which opened up Rhodesia (the British
South Africa Company) was chartered as late as 1889. In the same way
owner-managed private firms engaging in industrial activities, or
corporations and holding companies engaging in financial activities,
could be created today. In the second place all the later periods are
called capitalism. This term means "an economic system motivated by the
pursuit of profits within a price system." The commercial capitalist
sought profits from the exchange of goods; the industrial capitalist
sought profits from the manufacture of goods; the financial capitalist
sought profits from the manipulation of claims on money; and the
monopoly capitalist sought profits from manipulation of the market to
make the market price and the amount sold such that his profits would
be maximized.
Four Major
Stages of Economic Expansion
It
is interesting to note
that, as a consequence of these various stages of economic
organization, Western Civilization has passed through four major stages
of economic expansion marked by the approximate dates 970-1270,
1440-1690, 1770-1928, and since 1950. Three of these stages of
expansion were followed by the outbreak of imperialist wars, as the
stage of expansion reached its conclusion. These were the Hundred
Years' War and the Italian Wars (1338-1445, 1494-1559), the Second
Hundred Years' War (1667-1815), and the world wars (1914-1945). The
economic background of the third of these will be examined later in
this chapter, but now we must continue our general survey of the
conditions of Western Civilization in regard to other aspects of
culture. One of these is the fourth and last portion of the economic
level, that concerned with economic control.
Four Stages
of Economic Control
Economic
control has passed
through four stages in Western Civilization. Of these the first and
third were periods of "automatic control" in the sense that there was
no conscious effort at a centralized system of economic control, while
the second and fourth stages were periods of conscious efforts at
control. These stages, with approximate dates, were as follows:
1.
Automatic control: manorial custom, 650-1150
2. Conscious control a. municipal mercantilism,
1150-1450 b. state mercantilism, 1450-1815
3.
Automatic control: laissez-faire in the competitive market, 1815-1934
4.
Conscious control: planning (both public and private), 1934
It
should be evident that
these five stages of economic control are closely associated with the
stages previously mentioned in regard to kinds of weapons on the
military level or the forms of government on the political level. The
same five stages of economic control have a complex relationship to the
six stages of economic organization already mentioned, the important
stage of industrial capitalism overlapping the transition from state
mercantilism to laissez-faire.
The Social
Level of a Culture
When
we turn to the social
level of a culture, we can note a number of different phenomena, such
as changes in growth of population, changes in aggregates of this
population (such as rise or decline of cities), and changes in social
classes. Most of these things are far too complicated for us to attempt
to treat them in any thorough fashion here. We have already discussed
the various stages in population growth, and shown that Europe was,
about 1900, generally passing from a stage of population growth with
many persons in the prime of life (Type B), to a stage of population
stabilization with a larger percentage of middle-aged persons (Type C).
This shift from Type B to Type C population in Europe can be placed
most roughly at the time that the nineteenth century gave rise to the
twentieth century. At about the same time or shortly after, and closely
associated with the rise of monopoly capitalism (with its emphasis on
automobiles, telephones, radio, and such), was a shift in the
aggregation of population. This shift was from the period we might call
"the rise of the city" (in which, year by year, a larger portion of the
population lived in cities) to what we might call "the rise of the
suburbs" or even "the period of megapolis" (in which the growth of
residential concentration moved outward from the city itself into the
surrounding area).
Changes in
Social Classes
The
third aspect of the social
level to which we might turn our attention is concerned with changes in
social classes. Each of the stages in the development of economic
organization was accompanied by the rise to prominence of a new social
class. The medieval system had provided the feudal nobility based on
the manorial agrarian system. The growth of commercial capitalism (in
two stages) gave a new class of commercial bourgeoisie. The growth of
industrial capitalism gave rise to two new classes, the industrial
bourgeoisie and the industrial workers (or proletariat, as they were
sometimes called in Europe). The development of financial and monopoly
capitalism provided a new group of managerial technicians. The
distinction between industrial bourgeoisie and managers essentially
rests on the fact that the former control industry and possess power
because they are owners, while managers control industry (and also
government or labor unions or public opinion) because they are skilled
or trained in certain techniques. As we shall see later, the shift from
one to the other was associated with a separation of control from
ownership in economic life. The shift was also associated with what we
might call a change from a two-class society to a middle-class society.
Under industrial capitalism and the early part of financial capitalism,
society began to develop into a polarized two-class society in which an
entrenched bourgeoisie stood opposed to a mass proletariat. It was on
the basis of this development that Karl Marx, about 1850, formed his
ideas of an inevitable class struggle in which the group of owners
would become fewer and fewer and richer and richer while the mass of
workers became poorer and poorer but more and more numerous, until
finally the mass would rise up and take ownership and control from the
privileged minority. By 1900 social developments took a direction so
different from that expected by Marx that his analysis became almost
worthless, and his system had to be imposed by force in a most backward
industrial country (Russia) instead of occurring inevitably in the most
advanced industrial country as he had expected.
The Shift of
Control
The
social developments which
made Marx's theories obsolete were the result of technological and
economic developments which Marx had not foreseen. The energy for
production was derived more and more from inanimate sources of power
and less and less from human labor. As a result, mass production
required less labor. But mass production required mass consumption so
that the products of the new technology had to be distributed to the
working groups as well as to others so that rising standards of living
for the masses made the proletariat fewer and fewer and richer and
richer. At the same time, the need for managerial and white-collar
workers of the middle levels of the economic system raised the
proletariat into the middle class in large numbers. The spread of the
corporate form of industrial enterprise allowed control to be separated
from ownership and allowed the latter to be dispersed over a much wider
group, so that, in effect, owners became more and more numerous and
poorer and poorer. And, finally, control shifted from owners to
managers. The result was that the polarized two-class society envisaged
by Marx was, after 1900, increasingly replaced by a mass middle-class
society, with fewer poor and, if not fewer rich, at least a more
numerous group of rich who were relatively less rich than in an earlier
period. This process of leveling up the poor and leveling down the rich
originated in economic forces but was speeded up and extended by
governmental policies in regard to taxation and social welfare,
especially after 1945.
The Religious
and Intellectual Stages of Culture
When
we turn to the higher
levels of culture, such as the religious and intellectual aspects, we
can discern a sequence of stages similar to those which have been found
in the more material levels. We shall make no extended examination of
these at this time except to say that the religious level has seen a
shift from a basically secularist, materialist, and antireligious
outlook in the late nineteenth century to a much more spiritualist and
religious point of view in the course of the twentieth century. At the
same time a very complex development on the intellectual level has
shown a profound shift in outlook from an optimistic and scientific
point of view in the period 1860-1890 to a much more pessimistic and
irrationalist point of view in the period following 1890. This shift in
point of view, which began in a rather restricted group forming an
intellectual vanguard about 1890, a group which included such figures
as Freud, Sorel, Bergson, and Proust, spread downward to larger and
larger sections of Western society in the course of the new century as
a result of the devastating experience of two world wars and the great
depression. The results of this process can be seen in the striking
contrast between the typical outlook of Europe in the nineteenth
century and in the twentieth century as outlined in the preceding
chapter.
Chapter 5—European Economic Developments
Commercial
Capitalism
Western
Civilization is the
richest and most powerful social organization ever made by man. One
reason for this success has been its economic organization. This, as we
have said, has passed through six successive stages, of which at least
four are called "capitalism." Three features are notable about this
development as a whole.
In
the first place, each stage
crated the conditions which tended to bring about the next stage;
therefore we could say, in a sense, that each stage committed suicide.
The original economic organization of self-sufficient agrarian units
(manors) was in a society organized so that its upper ranks—the
lords, lay and ecclesiastical—found their desires for necessities
so well met that they sought to exchange their surpluses of necessities
for luxuries of remote origin. This gave rise to a trade in foreign
luxuries (spices, fine textiles, fine metals) which was the first
evidence of the stage of commercial capitalism. In this second stage,
mercantile profits and widening markets created a demand for textiles
and other goods which could be met only by application of power to
production. This gave the third stage: industrial capitalism. The stage
of industrial capitalism soon gave rise to such an insatiable demand
for heavy fixed capital, like railroad lines, steel mills, shipyards,
and so on, that these investments could not be financed from the
profits and private fortunes of individual proprietors. New instruments
for financing industry came into existence in the form of
limited-liability corporations and investment banks. These were soon in
a position to control the chief parts of the industrial system, since
they provided capital to it. This gave rise to financial capitalism.
The control of financial capitalism was used to integrate the
industrial system into ever-larger units with interlinking financial
controls. This made possible a reduction of competition with a
resulting increase in profits. As a result, the industrial system soon
found that it was again able to finance its own expansion from its own
profits, and, with this achievement, financial controls were weakened,
and the stage of monopoly capitalism arrived. In this fifth stage,
great industrial units, working together either directly or through
cartels and trade associations, were in a position to exploit the
majority of the people. The result was a great economic crisis which
soon developed into a struggle for control of the state—the
minority hoping to use political power to defend their privileged
position, the majority hoping to use the state to curtail the power and
privileges of the minority. Both hoped to use the power of the state to
find some solution to the economic aspects of the crisis. This dualist
struggle dwindled with the rise of economic and social pluralism after
1945.
A Depression
Accompanies Transition to Various Stages
The
second notable feature of
this whole development is that the transition of each stage to the next
was associated with a period of depression or low economic activity.
This was because each stage, after an earlier progressive phase, became
later, in its final phase, an organization of vested interests more
concerned with protecting its established modes of action than in
continuing progressive changes by the application of resources to new,
improved methods. This is inevitable in any social organization, but is
peculiarly so in regard to capitalism.
The Primary
Goal of Capitalism
The
third notable feature of
the whole development is closely related to this special nature of
capitalism. Capitalism provides very powerful motivations for economic
activity because it associates economic motivations so closely with
self-interest. But this same feature, which is a source of strength in
providing economic motivation through the pursuit of profits, is also a
source of weakness owing to the fact that so self-centered a motivation
contributes very readily to a loss of economic coordination. Each
individual, just because he is so powerfully motivated by
self-interest, easily loses sight of the role which his own activities
play in the economic system as a whole, and tends to act as if his
activities were the whole, with inevitable injury
to that
whole. We could indicate this by pointing out that capitalism, because
it seeks profits as its primary goal, is never primarily seeking to
achieve prosperity, high production, high consumption, political power,
patriotic improvement, or moral uplift. Any of these may be achieved
under capitalism, and any (or all) of them may he sacrificed and lost
under capitalism, depending on this relationship to the primary goal of
capitalist activity—the pursuit of profits. During the
nine-hundred-year history of capitalism, it has, at various times,
contributed both to the achievement and to the destruction of these
other social goals.
Commercial
Capitalism
The
different stages of
capitalism have sought to win profits by different kinds of economic
activities. The original stage, which we call commercial capitalism,
sought profits by moving goods from one place to another. In this
effort, goods went from places where they were less valuable to places
where they were more valuable, while money, doing the same thing, moved
in the opposite direction. This valuation, which determined the
movement both of goods and of money and which made them move in
opposite directions, was
measured by the relationship between these two things. Thus the value
of goods was expressed in money. and the value of money was expressed
in goods. Goods moved from low-price areas to high-price areas, and
money moved from high-price areas to low-price areas, because goods
were more valuable where prices were high and money was more
valuable where prices were low.
Money and
Goods Are Different
Thus,
clearly, money
and goods are not the same thing but are, on the contrary, exactly
opposite things. Most confusion in economic thinking arises from
failure to recognize this fact. Goods are wealth which you have, while
money is a claim on wealth which you do not have.
Thus goods
are an asset; money is a debt. If goods are wealth; money is not
wealth, or negative wealth, or even anti-wealth. They always behave in
opposite ways, just as they usually move in opposite directions. If the
value of one goes up, the value of the other goes down, and in the same
proportion. The value of goods, expressed in money, is called "prices,"
while the value of money, expressed in goods, is called "value."
The Rise of
Commercial Capitalism
Commercial
capitalism arose
when merchants, carrying goods from one area to another, were able to
sell these goods at their destination for a price which covered
original cost, all costs of moving the goods, including the merchant's
expenses, and a profit. This development, which
began as the
movement of luxury goods, increased wealth because it led to
specialization of activities both in crafts and in agriculture, which
increased skills and output, and also brought into the market new
commodities.
The
Development of Mercantilism
Eventually,
this stage of
commercial capitalism became institutionalized into a restrictive
system, sometimes called "mercantilism," in which merchants sought to
gain profits, not from the movements of goods but from restricting the
movements of goods. Thus the pursuit of profits, which had earlier led
to increased prosperity by increasing trade and production, became a
restriction on both trade and production, because profit became an end
in itself rather than an accessory mechanism in the economic system as
a whole.
The
way in which commercial
capitalism (an expanding economic organization) was transformed into
mercantilism (a restrictive economic organization) twice in our past
history is very revealing not only of the nature of economic systems,
and of men themselves, but also of the nature of economic crisis and
what can be done about it.
Merchants
Restrict Trade to Increase Profits
Under
commercial capitalism,
merchants soon discovered that an increasing flow of goods from a
low-price area to a high-price area tended to raise prices in the
former and to lower prices in the latter. Every time a shipment of
spices came into London, the price of spices there began to fall, while
the arrival of buyers and ships in Malacca gave prices there an upward
spurt. This trend toward equalization of price levels between two areas
because of the double, and reciprocal, movement of goods and money
jeopardized profits for merchants, however much it may have satisfied
producers and consumers at either end. It did this by reducing the
price differential between the two areas and thus reducing the margin
within which the merchant could make his profit. It did not take shrewd
merchants long to realize that they could maintain this price
differential, and thus their profits, if they could restrict the flow
of goods, so that an equal volume of money flowed for a reduced volume
of goods. In this way, shipments were decreased, costs were reduced,
but profits were maintained.
Two
things are notable in this
mercantilist situation. In the first place, the merchant, by his
restrictive practices, was, in essence, increasing his own satisfaction
by reducing that of the producer at one end and of the consumer at the
other end; he was able to do this because he was in the middle between
them. ln the second place, so long as the merchant, in his home port,
was concerned with goods, he was eager that the prices of goods should
be, and remain, high.
Merchants
Became Concerned with Lending of Money
In
the course of time,
however, some merchants began to shift their attention from the goods
aspect of commercial interchange to the other, monetary, side of the
exchange. They began to accumulate the profits of these transactions,
and became increasingly concerned, not with the shipment and exchange
of goods, but with the shipment and exchange of moneys. In time they
became concerned with the lending of money to merchants to finance
their ships and their activities, advancing money for both, at high
interest rates, secured by claims on ships or goods as collateral for
repayment.
The New
Bankers Were Eager for High Interest Rates
In
this process the attitudes
and interests of these new bankers became totally opposed to those of
the merchants (although few of either recognized the situation). Where
the merchant had been eager for high prices and was increasingly eager
for low interest rates, the banker was eager for a high value of money
(that is, low prices) and high interest rates. Each was concerned to
maintain or to increase the value of the half of the transaction (goods
for money) with which he was directly concerned, with relative neglect
of the transaction itself (which was of course the concern of the
producers and the consumers).
The
Operations of Banking and Finance Were Concealed So
They Appeared
Difficult to Master
In
sum, specialization of
economic activities, by breaking up the economic process, had made it
possible for people to concentrate on one portion of the process and,
by maximizing that portion, to jeopardize the rest. The process was not
only broken up into producers, exchangers, and consumers but there were
also two kinds of exchangers (one concerned with goods, the other with
money), with almost antithetical, short-term, aims.
The
problems which inevitably arose could be solved and the system reformed
only by reference to the system as a whole. Unfortunately, however,
three parts of the system, concerned with the production, transfer, and
consumption of goods, were concrete and clearly visible so that almost
anyone could grasp them simply by examining them, while the operations
of banking and finance were concealed, scattered, and abstract so that
they appeared to many to be difficult. To add to this, bankers
themselves did everything they could to make their activities more
secret and more esoteric. Their activities were reflected in mysterious
marks in ledgers which were never opened to the curious outsider.
The
Relationship Between Goods and Money
Is Clear to
Bankers
In
the course of time the
central fact of the developing economic system, the relationship
between goods and money, became clear, at least to bankers. This
relationship, the price system, depended upon five things: the supply
and the demand for goods, the supply and the demand for money, and the
speed of exchange between money and goods. An increase in three of
these (demand for goods, supply of money, speed of circulation) would
move the prices of goods up and the value of money down. This inflation
was objectionable to bankers, although desirable to producers and
merchants. On the other hand, a decrease in the same three items would
be deflationary and would please bankers, worry producers and
merchants, and delight consumers (who obtained more goods for less
money). The other factors worked in the opposite direction, so that an
increase in them (supply of goods, demand for money, and slowness of
circulation or exchange) would be deflationary.
Inflationary
and Deflationary Prices Have Been a Major
Force in
History for 600 Years
Such
changes of prices, either
inflationary or deflationary, have been major forces in history for the
last six centuries at least. Over that long period, their power to
modify men's lives and human history has been increasing. This has been
reflected in two ways. On the one hand, rises in prices have generally
encouraged increased economic activity, especially the production of
goods, while, on the other hand, price changes have served to
redistribute wealth within the economic system. Inflation, especially a
slow steady rise in prices, encourages producers, because it means that
they can commit themselves to costs of production on one price level
and then, later, offer the finished product for sale at a somewhat
higher price level. This situation encourages production because it
gives confidence of an almost certain profit margin. On the other hand,
production is discouraged in a period of falling prices, unless the
producer is in the very unusual situation where his costs are falling
more rapidly than the prices of his product.
Bankers
Obsessed With Maintaining Value of Money
The
redistribution of wealth
by changing prices is equally important but attracts much less
attention. Rising prices benefit debtors and injure creditors, while
falling prices do the opposite. A debtor called upon to pay a debt at a
time when prices are higher than when he contracted the debt must yield
up less goods and services than he obtained at the earlier date, on a
lower price level when he borrowed the money. A creditor, such as a
bank, which has lent money—equivalent to a certain quantity of
goods and services—on one price level, gets back the same amount
of money—but a smaller quantity of goods and services—when
repayment comes at a higher price level, because the money repaid is
then less valuable. This is why bankers, as creditors in money terms,
have been obsessed with maintaining the value of money, although the
reason they have traditionally given for this obsession—that
"sound money" maintains "business confidence"—has been
propagandist rather than accurate.
The Two Major
Goals of Bankers
Hundreds
of years ago, bankers
began to specialize, with the richer and more influential ones
associated increasingly with foreign trade and foreign-exchange
transactions. Since these were richer and more cosmopolitan and
increasingly concerned with questions of political significance, such
as stability and debasement of currencies, war and peace, dynastic
marriages, and worldwide trading monopolies, they became the financiers
and financial advisers of governments. Moreover, since their
relationships with governments were always in monetary terms and not
real terms, and since they were always obsessed with the stability of
monetary exchanges between one country's money and another, they used
their power and influence to do two things: (1) to get all money and
debts expressed in terms of a strictly limited
commodity—ultimately gold; and (2) to get all monetary matters
out of the control of governments and political authority, on the
ground that they would be handled better by private banking interests
in terms of such a stable value as gold.
These
efforts ... [were
accelerated] with the shift of commercial capitalism into mercantilism
and the destruction of the whole pattern of social organization based
on dynastic monarchy, professional mercenary armies, and mercantilism,
in the series of wars which shook Europe from the middle of the
seventeenth century to 1815. Commercial capitalism passed through two
periods of expansion each of which deteriorated into a later phase of
war, class struggles, and retrogression. The first stage, associated
with the Mediterranean Sea, was dominated by the North Italians and
Catalonians but ended in a phase of crisis after 1300, which was not
finally ended until 1558. The second stage of commercial capitalism,
which was associated with the Atlantic Ocean, was dominated by the West
Iberians, the Netherlanders, and the English. It had begun to expand by
1440, was in full swing by 1600, but by the end of the seventeenth
century had become entangled in the restrictive struggles of state
mercantilism and the series of wars which ravaged Europe from 1667 to
1815.
Supremacy of
Charter Companies
The
commercial capitalism of
the 1440-1815 period was marked by the supremacy of the Chartered
Companies, such as the Hudson's Bay, the Dutch and British East Indian
companies, the Virginia Company, and the Association of Merchant
Adventurers (Muscovy Company). England's greatest rivals in all these
activities were defeated by England's greater power, and, above all,
its greater security derived from its insular position.
Industrial
Capitalism 1770-1850
Britain's
victories over Louis
XIV in the period 1667-1715 and over the French Revolutionary
governments and Napoleon in 1792-1815 had many causes, such as its
insular position, its ability to retain control of the sea, its ability
to present itself to the world as the defender of the freedoms and
rights of small nations and of diverse social and religious groups.
Among these numerous causes, there were a financial one and an economic
one. Financially, England had discovered the secret of credit.
Economically, England had embarked on the Industrial Revolution.
The Founding
of the Bank of England Is One of the
Great Dates
in World History
Credit
had been known to the
Italians and Netherlanders long before it became one of the instruments
of English world supremacy. Nevertheless, the founding of the Bank of
England by William Paterson and his friends in 1694 is one of the great
dates in world history. For generations men had sought to avoid the one
drawback of gold, its heaviness, by using pieces of paper to represent
specific pieces of gold. Today we call such pieces of paper gold
certificates. Such a certificate entitles its bearer to exchange it for
its piece of gold on demand, but in view of the convenience of paper,
only a small fraction of certificate holders ever did make such
demands. It early became clear that gold need be held on hand only to
the amount needed to cover the fraction of certificates likely to be
presented for payment; accordingly, the rest of the gold could be used
for business purposes, or, what amounts to the same thing, a volume of
certificates could be issued greater than the volume of gold reserved
for payment of demands against them. Such an excess volume of paper
claims against reserves we now call bank notes.
Bankers
Create Money Out of Nothing
In
effect, this creation of
paper claims greater than the reserves available means that bankers
were creating money out of nothing. The same thing could be done in
another way, not by note-issuing banks but by deposit banks. Deposit
bankers discovered that orders and checks drawn against deposits by
depositors and given to third persons were often not cashed by the
latter but were deposited to their own accounts. Thus there were no
actual movements of funds, and payments were made simply by bookkeeping
transactions on the accounts. Accordingly, it was necessary for the
banker to keep on hand in actual money (gold, certificates, and notes)
no more than the fraction of deposits likely to be drawn upon and
cashed; the
rest could be used for loans, and if these loans were made by creating
a deposit for the borrower, who in turn would draw checks upon it
rather than withdraw it in money, such "created deposits" or loans
could also be covered adequately by retaining reserves to only a
fraction of their value. Such created deposits also were a creation of
money out of nothing, although bankers usually refused to express their
actions, either note issuing or deposit lending, in these terms.
William Paterson, however, on obtaining the charter of the Bank of
England in 1694, to use the moneys he had won in privateering, said,
"The Bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out
of nothing." This was repeated by Sir Edward Holden, founder of the
Midland Bank, on December 18, 1907, and is, of course, generally
admitted today.
The Creation
of Credit
This
organizational structure
for creating means of payment out of nothing, which we call credit, was
not invented by England but was developed by her to become one of her
chief weapons in the victory over Napoleon in 1815. The emperor, as the
last great mercantilist, could not see money in any but concrete terms,
and was convinced that his efforts to fight wars on the basis of "sound
money," by avoiding the creation of credit, would ultimately win him a
victory by bankrupting England. He was wrong, although the lesson has
had to be relearned by modern financiers in the twentieth century.
Britain's
Victory Over Napoleon
Britain's
victory over
Napoleon was also helped by two economic innovations: the Agricultural
Revolution, which was well established there in 1720, and the
Industrial Revolution, which was equally well established there by
1776, when Watt patented his steam engine. The Industrial Revolution,
like the Credit Revolution, has been much misunderstood, both at the
time and since. This is unfortunate, as each of these has great
significance, both to advanced and to underdeveloped countries, in the
twentieth century. The Industrial Revolution was accompanied by a
number of incidental features, such as growth of cities through the
factory system, the rapid growth of an unskilled labor supply (the
proletariat), the reduction of labor to the status of a commodity in
the competitive market, and the shifting of ownership of tools and
equipment from laborers to a new social class of entrepreneurs. None of
these constituted the essential feature of industrialism, which was, in
fact, the application of nonliving power to the productive process.
This application, symbolized in the steam engine and the water wheel,
in the long run served to reduce or eliminate the relative significance
of unskilled labor and the use of human or animal energy in the
productive process (automation) and to disperse the productive process
from cities, but did so, throughout, by intensifying the vital feature
of the system, the use of energy from sources other than living bodies.
The Rise of
Large Industrial Enterprises in Britain
In
this continuing process,
Britain's early achievement of industrialism gave it such great profits
that these, combined with the profits derived earlier from commercial
capitalism and the simultaneous profits derived from the unearned rise
in land values from new cities and mines, made its early industrial
enterprises largely self-financed or at least locally financed. They
were organized in proprietorships and partnerships, had contact with
local deposit banks for short-term current loans, but had little to do
with international bankers, investment banks, central governments, or
corporative forms of business organization.
This
early stage of industrial
capitalism, which lasted in England from about 1770 to about 1850, was
shared to some extent with Belgium and even France, but took quite
different forms in the United States, Germany, and Italy, and almost
totally different forms in Russia or Asia. The chief reason for these
differences was the need for raising funds (capital) to pay for the
rearrangement of the factors of production (]and, labor, materials,
skill, equipment, and so on) which industrialism required. Northwestern
Europe, and above all England, had large savings for such new
enterprises. Central Europe and North America had much less, while
eastern and southern Europe had very little in private hands.
The Role of
the International Investment Banker
The
more difficulty an area
had in mobilizing capital for industrialization, the more significant
was the role of investment bankers and of governments in the industrial
process. In fact, the early forms of industrialism based on textiles,
iron, coal, and steam spread so slowly from England to Europe that
England was itself entering upon the next stage, financial capitalism,
by the time Germany and the United States (about 1850) were just
beginning to industrialize. This new stage of financial capitalism,
which continued to dominate England, France, and the United States as
late as 1930, was made necessary by the great mobilizations of capital
needed for railroad building after 1830. The capital needed for
railroads, with their enormous expenditures on track and equipment,
could not be raised from single proprietorships or partnerships or
locally, but, instead, required a new form of enterprise—the
limited-liability stock corporation—and a new source of
funds—the international investment banker who had, until then,
concentrated his attention almost entirely on international flotations
of government bonds. The demands of railroads for equipment carried
this same development, almost at once, into steel manufacturing and
coal mining.
Financial
Capitalism, 1850 - 1931
This
third stage of capitalism
is of such overwhelming significance in the history of the twentieth
century, and its ramifications and influences have been so subterranean
and even occult, that we may be excused if we devote considerate
attention to its organization and methods. Essentially what it did was
to take the old disorganized and localized methods of handling money
and credit and organize them into an integrated system, on an
international basis, which worked with incredible and well-oiled
facility for many decades. The center of that system was in London,
with major offshoots in New York and Paris, and it has left, as its
greatest achievement, an integrated banking system and a heavily
capitalized—if now largely obsolescent—framework of heavy
industry, reflected in railroads, steel mills, coal mines, and
electrical utilities.
This
system had its center in
London for four chief reasons. First was the great volume of savings in
England, resting on England's early successes in commercial and
industrial capitalism. Second was England's oligarchic social structure
(especially as reflected in its concentrated landownership and limited
access to educational opportunities) which provided a very inequitable
distribution of incomes with large surpluses coming to the control of a
small, energetic upper class. Third was the fact that this upper class
was aristocratic but not noble, and thus, based on traditions rather
than birth, was quite willing to recruit both money and ability from
lower levels of society and even from outside the country, welcoming
American heiresses and central-European Jews to its ranks, almost as
willingly as it welcomed monied, able, and conformist recruits from the
lower classes of Englishmen, whose disabilities from educational
deprivation, provincialism, and Nonconformist (that is non-Anglican)
religious background generally excluded them from the privileged
aristocracy. Fourth (and by no means last) in significance was the
skill in financial manipulation, especially on the international scene,
which the small group of merchant bankers of London had acquired in the
period of commercial and industrial capitalism and which lay ready for
use when the need for financial capitalist innovation became urgent.
The Dynasties
of International Bankers
The
merchant bankers of London
had already at hand in 1810-1850 the Stock Exchange, the Bank of
England, and the London money market when the needs of advancing
industrialism called all of these into the industrial world which they
had hitherto ignored. In time they brought into their financial network
the provincial banking centers, organized as commercial banks and
savings banks, as well as insurance companies, to form all of these
into a single financial system on an international scale which
manipulated the quantity and flow of money so that they were able to
influence, if not control, governments on one side and industries on
the other. The men who did this, looking backward toward the period of
dynastic monarchy in which they had their own roots, aspired to
establish dynasties of international bankers and were at least as
successful at this as were many of the dynastic political rulers. The
greatest of these dynasties, of course, were the descendants of Meyer
Amschel Rothschild (1743-1812) of Frankfort, whose male descendants,
for at least two generations, generally married first cousins or even
nieces. Rothschild's five sons, established at branches in Vienna,
London, Naples, and Paris, as well as Frankfort, cooperated together in
ways which other international banking dynasties copied but rarely
excelled.
The Financial
Activities of International Bankers
In
concentrating, as we must,
on the financial or economic activities of international bankers, we
must not totally ignore their other attributes. They were, especially
in later generations, cosmopolitan rather than nationalistic.... They
were usually highly civilized, cultured gentlemen, patrons of education
and of the arts, so that today colleges, professorships, opera
companies, symphonies, libraries, and museum collections still reflect
their munificence. For these purposes they set a pattern of endowed
foundations which still surround us today.
The Key
International Banking Families
The
names of some of these
banking families are familiar to all of us and should he more so. They
include Raring, Lazard, Erlanger, Warburg, Schroder, Seligman, the
Speyers, Mirabaud, Mallet, Fould, and above all Rothschild and Morgan.
Even after these banking families became fully involved in domestic
industry by the emergence of financial capitalism, they remained
different from ordinary bankers in distinctive ways: (1) they were
cosmopolitan and international; (2) they were close to governments and
were particularly concerned with questions of government debts,
including foreign government debts, even in areas which seemed, at
first glance, poor risks, like Egypt, Persia, Ottoman Turkey, Imperial
China, and Latin America; (3) their interests were almost exclusively
in bonds and very rarely in goods, since they admired "liquidity" and
regarded commitments in commodities or even real estate as the first
step toward bankruptcy; (4) they were, accordingly, fanatical devotees
of deflation (which they called "sound" money from its close
associations with high interest rates and a high value of money) and of
the gold standard, which, in their eyes, symbolized and ensured these
values; and (5) they were almost equally devoted to secrecy and the
secret use of financial influence in political life. These bankers came
to be called "international bankers" and, more particularly, were known
as "merchant bankers" in England, "private bankers" in France, and
"investment bankers" in the United States. In all countries they
carried on various kinds of banking and exchange activities, but
everywhere they were sharply distinguishable from other, more obvious,
kinds of banks, such as savings banks or commercial banks.
The
International Banking Fraternity Operates
As Secretive
Private Firms
One
of their less obvious
characteristics was that they remained as private unincorporated firms,
usually partnerships, until relatively recently, offering no shares, no
reports, and usually no advertising to the public. This risky status,
which deprived them of limited liability, was retained, in most cases,
until modern inheritance taxes made it essential to surround such
family wealth with the immortality of corporate status for
tax-avoidance purposes. This persistence as private firms continued
because it ensured the maximum of anonymity and secrecy to persons of
tremendous public power who dreaded public knowledge of their
activities as an evil almost as great as inflation. As a consequence,
ordinary people had no way of knowing the wealth or areas of operation
of such firms, and often were somewhat hazy as to their membership.
Thus, people of considerable political knowledge might not associate
the names Walter Burns, Clinton Dawkins, Edward Grenfell, Willard
Straight, Thomas Lamont, Dwight Morrow, Nelson Perkins, Russell
Leffingwell, Elihu Root, John W. Davis, John Foster Dulles, and S.
Parker Gilbert with the name "Morgan," yet all these and many others
were parts of the system of influence which centered on the J. P.
Morgan office at :3 Wall Street. This firm, like others of the
international banking fraternity, constantly operated through
corporations and governments, yet remained itself an obscure private
partnership until international financial capitalism was passing from
its deathbed to the grave. J. P. Morgan and Company, originally founded
in London as George Peabody and Company in 1838, was not incorporated
until March 21, 1940, and went out of existence as a separate entity on
April 24, 1959, when it merged with its most important commercial bank
subsidiary, the Guaranty Trust Company. The London affiliate, Morgan
Grenfell, was incorporated in , and still exists.
International
Bankers Felt Politicians Could Not Be Trusted
With Control
of the Monetary System
The
influence of financial
capitalism and of the international bankers who created it was
exercised both on business and on governments, but could have done
neither if it had not been able to persuade both these to accept two
"axioms" of its own ideology. Both of these were based on the
assumption that politicians were too weak and too subject to temporary
popular pressures to be trusted with control of the money system;
accordingly, the sanctity of all values and the soundness of money must
be protected in two ways: by basing the value of money on gold and by
allowing bankers to control the supply of money. To do this it was
necessary to conceal, or even to mislead, both governments and people
about the nature of money and its methods of operation.
The Gold
Standard
For
example, bankers called
the process of establishing a monetary system on gold "stabilization,"
and implied that this covered, as a single consequence, stabilization
of exchanges and stabilization of prices. It really achieved only
stabilization of exchanges, while its influence on prices were quite
independent and incidental, and might be un-stabilizing (from its usual
tendency to force prices downward by limiting the supply of money). As
a consequence, many persons, including financiers and even economists,
were astonished to discover, in the twentieth century, that the gold
standard gave stable exchanges and unstable prices. It had, however,
already contributed to a similar, but less extreme, situation in much
of the nineteenth century.
Exchanges
were stabilized on
the gold standard because by law, in various countries, the monetary
unit was made equal to a fixed quantity of gold, and the two were made
exchangeable at that legal ratio. In the period before 1914, currency
was stabilized in certain countries as follows:
In
Britain: 77s.
10 ½ d. equaled a standard ounce (11/12 pure gold).
In
the United States:
$20.67
equaled a fine ounce (12/12 pure gold).
In
France: 3,447.74
francs equaled a fine kilogram of gold.
In
Germany: 2,790
marks equaled a fine kilogram of gold.
These
relationships were
established by the legal requirement that a person who brought gold,
gold coins, or certificates to the public treasury (or other designated
places) could convert any one of these into either of the others in
unlimited amounts for no cost. As a result, on a full gold standard,
gold had a unique position: it was, at the same time, in the sphere of
money and in the sphere of wealth. In the sphere of money, the value of
all other kinds of money was expressed in terms of gold: and, in the
sphere of real wealth, the values of all other kinds of goods were
expressed in terms of gold as money. If we regard the relationships
between money and goods as a seesaw in which each of these was at
opposite ends, so that the value of one rose just as much as the value
of the other declined, then we must see gold as the fulcrum of the
seesaw on which this relationship balances, but which does not itself
go up or down.
It Is
Impossible to Understand World History Without an
Understanding
of Money
Since
it is quite impossible
to understand the history of the twentieth century without some
understanding of the role played by money in domestic affairs and in
foreign affairs, as well as the role played by bankers in economic life
and in political life, we must take at least a glance at each of these
four subjects.
Central Banks
Were Private Institutions Owned by Shareholders
In
each country the supply of
money took the form of an inverted pyramid or cone balanced on its
point. In the point was a supply of gold and its equivalent
certificates; on the intermediate levels was a much larger supply of
notes; and at the top, with an open and expandable upper surface, was
an even greater supply of deposits. Each level used the levels below it
as its reserves, and, since these lower levels had smaller quantities
of money, they were "sounder." A holder of claims on the middle or
upper level could increase his confidence in his claims on wealth by
reducing them to a lower level, although, of course, if everyone, or
any considerable number of persons, tried to do this at the same time
the volume of reserves would be totally inadequate. Notes were issued
by "banks of emission" or "banks of issue," and were secured by
reserves of gold or certificates held in their own coffers or in some
central reserve. The fraction of such a note issue held in reserve
depended upon custom, banking regulations (including the terms of a
bank's charter), or statute law. There were formerly many banks of
issue, but this function is now generally restricted to a few or even
to a single "central bank" in each country. Such banks, even central
banks, were private institutions, owned by shareholders who profited by
their operations. In the 1914-1939 period, in the United States,
Federal Reserve Notes were covered by gold certificates to 40 percent
of their value, but this was reduced to 25 percent in 1945. The Bank of
England, by an Act of 1928, had its notes uncovered up to [250 million,
and covered by gold for 100 percent value over that amount. The Bank of
France, in the same year, set its note cover at 35 percent. These
provisions could always be set aside or changed in an emergency, such
as war.
Determining
the Volume of Money in the Community
Deposits
on the upper level of
the pyramid were called by this name, with typical bankers' ambiguity,
in spite of the fact that they consisted of two utterly different kinds
of relationships: (1) "lodged deposits," which were real claims left by
a depositor in a bank, on which the depositor might receive interest,
since such deposits were debts owed by the bank to the depositor; and
(2) "created deposits," which were claims created by the bank out of
nothing as loans from the bank to "depositors" who had to pay interest
on them, since these represented debt from them to the bank. In both
cases, of course, checks could be drawn against such deposits to make
payments to third parties, which is why both were called by the same
name. Both form part of the money supply. Lodged deposits as a form of
savings are deflationary, while created deposits, being an addition to
the money supply, are inflationary. The volume of the latter depends on
a number of factors of which the chief are the rate of interest and the
demand for such credit. These two play a very significant role in
determining the volume of money in the community, since a large portion
of that volume, in an advanced economic community, is made up of checks
drawn against deposits. The volume of deposits banks can create, like
the amount of notes they can issue, depends upon the volume of reserves
available to pay whatever fraction of checks are cashed rather than
deposited. These matters may be regulated by laws, by bankers' rules,
or simply by local customs. In the United States deposits were
traditionally limited to ten times reserves of notes and gold. In
Britain it was usually nearer twenty times such reserves. In all
countries the demand for and volume of such credit was larger in time
of a boom and less in time of a depression. This to a considerable
extent explains the inflationary aspect of a depression, the
combination helping to form the so-called "business cycle."
Central Banks
Surrounded by Invisible Private
Investment
Banking Firms
In
the course of the
nineteenth century, with the full establishment of the gold standard
and of the modern banking system, there grew up around the fluctuating
inverted pyramid of the money supply a plethora of financial
establishments which came to assume the configurations of a solar
system; that is, of a central bank surrounded by satellite financial
institutions. In most countries the central bank was surrounded closely
by the almost invisible private investment banking firms. These, like
the planet Mercury, could hardly be seen in the dazzle emitted by the
central bank which they, in fact, often dominated. Yet a close observer
could hardly fail to notice the close private associations
between these private, international bankers and the central bank
itself. In France, for example, in 1936 when the Bank of France was
reformed, its Board of Regents (directors) was still dominated by the
names of the families who had originally set it up in 1800; to these
had been added a few more recent names, such as Rothschild (added in
1819); in some cases the name might not be readily recognized because
it was that of a son-in-law rather than that of a son. Otherwise, in
1914, the names, frequently those of Protestants of Swiss origin (who
arrived in the eighteenth century) or of Jews of German origin (who
arrived in the nineteenth century), had been much the same for more
than a century.
The Bank of
England and Its Private Banking Firms
In
England a somewhat similar
situation existed, so that even in the middle of the twentieth century
the Members of the Court of the Bank of England were chiefly associates
of the various old "merchant banking" firms such as Baring Brothers,
Morgan Grenfell, Lazard Brothers, and others.
Commercial
Banks Operate Outside Central Banks and Private Banking Firms
In
a secondary position,
outside the central core, are the commercial banks, called in England
the "joint-stock banks," and on the Continent frequently known as
"deposit banks." These include such famous names as Midland Bank,
Lloyd's Bank, Barclays Bank in England, the National City Bank in the
United States, the Credit Lyonnais in France, and the Darmstädter
Bank in Germany.
Savings
Banks, Insurance Funds and Trust Companies
Operate on
the Outside Ring
Outside
this secondary ring is
a third, more peripheral, assemblage of institutions that have little
financial power but do have the very significant function of mobilizing
funds from the public. This includes a wide variety of savings banks,
insurance firms, and trust companies.
Naturally,
these arrangements
vary greatly from place to place, especially as the division of banking
functions and powers are not the same in all countries. In France and
England the private bankers exercised their powers through the central
bank and had much more influence on the government and on foreign
policy and much less influence on industry, because in these two
countries, unlike Germany, Italy, the United States, or Russia, private
savings were sufficient to allow much of industry to finance itself
without recourse either to bankers or government. In the United States
much industry was financed by investment bankers directly, and the
power of these both on industry and on government was very great, while
the central bank (the New York Federal Reserve Bank) was established
late (1913) and became powerful much later (after financial capitalism
was passing from the scene). In Germany industry was financed and
controlled by the discount banks, while the central bank was of little
power or significance before 1914. In Russia the role of the government
was dominant in much of economic life, while in Italy the situation was
backward and complicated.
The Supply of
Money
We
have said that two of the
five factors which determined the value of money (and thus the price
level of goods) are the supply and the demand for money. The supply of
money in a single country was subject to no centralized, responsible
control in most countries over recent centuries. Instead, there were a
variety of controls of which some could be influenced by bankers, some
could be influenced by the government, and some could hardly be
influenced by either. Thus, the various parts of the pyramid of money
were but loosely related to each other. Moreover, much of this
looseness arose from the fact that the controls were compulsive in a
deflationary direction and were only permissive in an inflationary
direction.
This
last point can be seen in
the fact that the supply of gold could be decreased but could hardly be
increased. If an ounce of gold was added to the point of the pyramid in
a system where law and custom allowed To percent reserves on each
level, it could permit an increase of deposits
equivalent to
$2067 on the uppermost level. If such an ounce of gold were withdrawn
from a fully expanded pyramid of money, this would compel a
reduction of deposits by at least this amount, probably by a refusal to
renew loans.
The Money
Power Persuaded Governments to Establish a
Deflationary
Monetary Unit
Throughout
modern history the
influence of the gold standard has been deflationary, because the
natural output of gold each year, except in extraordinary times, has
not kept pace with the increase in output of goods. Only new supplies
of gold, or the suspension of the gold standard in wartime, or the
development of new kinds of money (like notes and checks) which
economize the use of gold, have saved our civilization from steady
price deflation over the last couple of centuries. As it was, we had
two long periods of such deflation from 1818 to 1850 and from 1872 to
about 1897. The three surrounding periods of inflation (1790-1817,
1850-1872, 1897-1921) were caused by (1) the wars of the French
Revolution and Napoleon when most countries were not on gold; (2) the
new gold strikes of California and Alaska in 1849-1850, followed by a
series of wars, which included the Crimean War of 1854-1856, the
Austrian-French War of 1859, the American Civil War of 1861-1865, the
Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars of 1866 and 1870, and even the
Russo-Turkish War of 1877; and (3) the Klondike and Transvaal gold
strikes of the late 1890's, supplemented by the new cyanide method of
refining gold (about 1897) and the series of wars from the
Spanish-American War of 1898-1899, the Boer War of 1899-1902, and the
Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, to the almost uninterrupted series of
wars in the decade 1911-1921. In each case, the three great periods of
war ended with an extreme deflationary crisis (1819, 1873, 1921) as the
influential Money Power persuaded governments to reestablish a
deflationary monetary unit with a high gold content.
Money Power
Is More Concerned With Money Than Goods
The
obsession of the Money
Power with deflation was partly a result of their concern with money
rather than with goods, but was also founded on other factors, one of
which was paradoxical. The paradox arose from the fact that the basic
economic conditions of the nineteenth century were deflationary, with a
money system based on gold and an industrial system pouring out
increasing supplies of goods, but in spite of falling prices (with its
increasing value of money) the interest rate tended to fall rather than
to rise. This occurred because the relative limiting of the supply of
money in business was not reflected in the world of finance where
excess profits of finance made excess funds available for lending.
Moreover, the old traditions of merchant banking continued to prevail
in financial capitalism even to its end in 1931. It continued to
emphasize bonds rather than equity securities (stocks), to favor
government issues rather than private offerings, and to look to foreign
rather than to domestic investments. Until 1825, government bonds made
up almost the whole of securities on the London Stock Exchange. In
1843, such bonds, usually foreign, were 80 percent of the securities
registered, and in 1875 they were still 68 percent. The funds available
for such loans were so great that there were, in the nineteenth
century, sometimes riots by subscribers seeking opportunities to buy
security flotations; and offerings from many remote places and obscure
activities commanded a ready sale. The excess of savings led to a fall
in the price necessary to hire money, so that the interest rate on
British government bonds fell from 4.42 percent in 1820 to 3.11 in 1850
to 2.76 in 1900. This tended to drive savings into foreign fields
where, on the whole, they continued to seek government issues and fixed
interest securities. All this served to strengthen the merchant
bankers' obsession both with government influence and with deflation
(which would increase value of money and interest rates).
Banker
Policies Lead to Inflation and Deflation
Another
paradox of banking
practice arose from the fact that bankers, who loved deflation, often
acted in an inflationary fashion from their eagerness to lend money at
interest. Since they make money out of loans, they are eager to
increase the amounts of bank credit on loan. But this is inflationary.
The conflict between the deflationary ideas and inflationary practices
of bankers had profound repercussions on business. The bankers made
loans to business so that the volume of money increased faster than the
increase in goods. The result was inflation. When this became clearly
noticeable, the bankers would flee to notes or specie by curtailing
credit and raising discount rates. This was beneficial to bankers in
the short run (since it allowed them to foreclose on collateral held
for loans), but it could be disastrous to them in the long run (by
forcing the value of the collateral below the amount of the loans it
secured). But such bankers' deflation was destructive to business and
industry in the short run as well as the long run.
Changing the
Quality of Money
The
resulting
fluctuation in the supply of money, chiefly deposits, was a prominent
aspect of the "business cycle." The quantity of money could be changed
by changing reserve requirements or discount (interest) rates. In the
United States, for example, an upper limit has been set on deposits by
requiring Federal Reserve member banks to keep a certain percentage of
their deposits as reserves with the local Federal Reserve Bank. The
percentage (usually from 7 to 26 percent) varies with the locality and
the decisions of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.
Central Banks
Vary Money in Circulation
Central
banks can usually vary
the amount of money in circulation by "open market operations" or by
influencing the discount rates of lesser banks. In open market
operations, a central bank buys or sells government bonds in the open
market. If it buys, it releases money into the economic system; if it
sells it reduces the amount of money in the community. The change is
greater than the price paid for the securities. For example, if the
Federal Reserve Bank buys government securities in the open market, it
pays for these by check which is soon deposited in a bank. It thus
increases this bank's reserves with the Federal Reserve Bank. Since
banks are permitted to issue loans for several times the value of their
reserves with the Federal Reserve Bank, such a transaction permits them
to issue loans for a much larger sum.
Central Banks
Raise and Lower Interest Rates
Central
banks can also change
the quantity of money by influencing the credit policies of other
banks. This can be done by various methods, such as changing the
re-discount rate or changing reserve requirements. By changing the
re-discount rate we mean the interest rate which central banks charge
lesser banks for loans backed by commercial paper or other security
which these lesser banks have taken in return for loans. By raising the
re-discount rate the central bank forces the
lesser bank to
raise its discount rate in order to operate at a profit; such a raise
in interest rates tends to reduce the demand for credit and thus the
amount of deposits (money). Lowering the re-discount rate permits
an opposite result.
Central Banks
Force Local Banks to Decrease Credit
Changing
the reserve
requirements as a method by which central banks can influence the
credit policies of other banks is possible only in those places (like
the United States) where there is a statutory limit on reserves.
Increasing reserve requirements curtails the ability of lesser banks to
grant credit, while decreasing it expands that ability.
It
is to be noted that the
control of the central bank over the credit policies of local banks are
permissive in one direction and compulsive in the other. They can
compel these local banks to curtail credit and can only permit them to
increase credit. This means that they have control powers against
inflation and not deflation—a reflection of the old banking idea
that inflation was bad and deflation was good.
The Powers of
Government Over Money
The
powers of governments over the quantity of money are of various kinds,
and include (a) control over a central bank, (b)
control over public taxation, and (c)
control over public spending. The control of governments over central
banks varies greatly from one country to another, but on the whole has
been increasing. Since most central banks have been (technically)
private institutions, this control is frequently based on custom rather
than on law. In any case, the control over the supply of money which
governments have through centra! banks is exercised by the regular
banking procedures we have discussed. The powers of the government over
the quantity of money in the community exercised through taxation and
public spending are largely independent of banking control. Taxation
tends to reduce the amount of money in a community and is usually a
deflationary force; government spending tends to increase the amount of
money in a community and is usually an inflationary force. The total
effects of a government's policy will depend on which item is greater.
An unbalanced budget will be inflationary; a budget with a surplus will
be deflationary.
A
government can also change
the amount of money in a community by other, more drastic, methods. By
changing the gold content of the monetary unit they can change the
amount of money in the community by a much greater amount. If, for
example, the gold content of the dollar is cut in half, the amount of
gold certificates will be able to be doubled, and the amount of notes
and deposits reared on this basis will be increased many fold,
depending on the customs of the community in respect to reserve
requirements. Moreover, if a government goes off the gold standard
completely—that is, refuses to exchange certificates and notes
for specie—the amount of notes and deposits can be increased
indefinitely because these are no longer limited by limited amounts of
gold reserves.
The Money
Power—Controlled by International Investment Bankers—
Dominates
Business and Government
In
the various actions which
increase or decrease the supply of money, governments, bankers, and
industrialists have not always seen eye to eye. On the whole, in the
period up to 1931, bankers, especially the Money Power controlled by
the international investment bankers, were able to dominate both
business and government. They could dominate business, especially in
activities and in areas where industry could not finance its own needs
for capital, because investment bankers had the ability to supply or
refuse to supply such capital. Thus, Rothschild interests came to
dominate many of the railroads of Europe, while Morgan dominated at
least 26,000 miles of American railroads. Such bankers went further
than this. In return for flotations of securities of industry, they
took seats on the boards of directors of industrial firms, as they had
already done on commercial banks, savings banks, insurance firms, and
finance companies. From these lesser institutions they funneled capital
to enterprises which yielded control and away from those who resisted.
These firms were controlled through interlocking directorships, holding
companies, and lesser banks. They engineered amalgamations and
generally reduced competition, until by the early twentieth century
many activities were so monopolized that they could raise their
noncompetitive prices above costs to obtain sufficient profits to
become self-financing and were thus able to eliminate the control of
bankers. But before that stage was reached a relatively small number of
bankers were in positions of immense influence in European and American
economic life. As early as 1909, Walter Rathenau, who was in a position
to know (since he had inherited from his father control of the German
General Electric Company and held scores of directorships himself),
said, "Three hundred men, all of whom know one another, direct the
economic destiny of Europe and choose their successors from among
themselves."
The Power of
Investment Bankers Over Governments
The
power of investment
bankers over governments rests on a number of factors, of which the
most significant, perhaps, is the need of governments to issue
short-term treasury bills as well as long-term government bonds. Just
as businessmen go to commercial banks for current capital advances to
smooth over the discrepancies between their irregular and intermittent
incomes and their periodic and persistent outgoes (such as monthly
rents, annual mortgage payments, and weekly wages), so a government has
to go to merchant bankers (or institutions controlled by them) to tide
over the shallow places caused by irregular tax receipts. As experts in
government bonds, the international bankers not only handled the
necessary advances but provided advice to government officials and, on
many occasions, placed their own members in official posts for varied
periods to deal with special problems. This is so widely accepted even
today that in 1961 a Republican investment banker became Secretary of
the Treasury in a Democratic Administration in Washington without
significant comment from any direction.
The Money
Power Reigns Supreme and Unquestioned
Naturally,
the influence of
bankers over governments during the age of financial capitalism
(roughly 1850-1931) was not something about which anyone talked freely,
but it has been admitted frequently enough by those on the inside,
especially in England. In 1852 Gladstone, chancellor of the Exchequer,
declared, "The hinge of the whole situation was this: the government
itself was not to be a substantive power in matters of Finance, but was
to leave the Money Power supreme and unquestioned." On September 26,
1921, The Financial Times wrote, "Half a dozen men
at the top
of the Big Five Banks could upset the whole fabric of government
finance by refraining from renewing Treasury Bills." In 1924 Sir
Drummond Fraser, vice-president of the Institute of Bankers, stated,
"The Governor of the Bank of England must be the autocrat who dictates
the terms upon which alone the Government can obtain borrowed money."
Montagu
Norman and J. P. Morgan Dominate the Financial World
In
addition to their power
over government based on government financing and personal influence,
bankers could steer governments in ways they wished them to go by other
pressures. Since most government officials felt ignorant of finance,
they sought advice from bankers whom they considered to be experts in
the field. The history of the last century shows, as we shall see
later, that the advice given to governments by bankers, like the advice
they gave to industrialists, was consistently good for bankers, but was
often disastrous for governments, businessmen, and the people
generally. Such advice could be enforced if necessary by manipulation
of exchanges, gold flows, discount rates, and even levels of business
activity. Thus Morgan dominated Cleveland's second administration by
gold withdrawals, and in 1936-1938 French foreign exchange manipulators
paralyzed the Popular Front governments. As we shall see, the powers of
these international bankers reached their peak in the last decade of
their supremacy, 1919-1931, when Montagu Norman and J. P. Morgan
dominated not only the financial world but international relations and
other matters as well. On November I l, 1927, the Wall Street
Journal called
Mr. Norman "the currency dictator of Europe." This was admitted by Mr.
Norman himself before the Court of the Bank on March Zl, 1930, and
before the Macmillan Committee of the House of Commons five days later.
On one occasion, just before international financial capitalism ran, at
full speed, on the rocks which sank it, Mr. Norman is reported to have
said, "I hold the hegemony of the world." At the time, some Englishmen
spoke of "the second Norman Conquest of England" in reference to the
fact that Norman's brother was head of the British Broadcasting
Corporation. It might be added that Governor Norman rarely acted in
major world problems without consulting with J. P. Morgan's
representatives, and as a consequence he was one of the most widely
traveled men of his day.
The
Development of Monopoly Capitalism
This
conflict of interests
between bankers and industrialists has resulted in most European
countries in the subordination of the former either to the latter or to
the government (after 1931). This subordination was accomplished by the
adoption of "unorthodox financial policies"—that is, financial
policies not in accordance with the short-run interests of bankers.
This shift by which bankers were made subordinate reflected a
fundamental development in modern economic history—a development
which can be described as the growth from financial capitalism to
monopoly capitalism. This took place in Germany earlier than in any
other country and was well under way by 1926. It came in Britain only
after 1931 and in Italy only in 1934. It did not occur in France to a
comparable extent at all, and this explains the economic weakness of
France in 1938-1940 to a considerable degree.
International
Financial Practices
The
financial
principals which apply to the relationships between different countries
are an expansion of those which apply within a single country. When
goods are exchanged between countries, they must be paid for by
commodities or gold. They cannot be paid for by the notes,
certificates, and checks of the purchaser's country, since these are of
value only in the country of issue. To avoid shipment of gold with
every purchase, bills of exchange are used. These are claims against a
person in another country which are sold to a person in the same
country. The latter will buy such a claim if he wants to satisfy a
claim against himself held by a person in the other country. He can
satisfy such a claim by sending to his creditor in the other country
the claim which he has bought against another person in that other
country, and let his creditor use that claim to satisfy his own claim.
Thus, instead of importers in one country sending money to exporters in
another country, importers in one country pay their debts to exporters
in their own country, and their creditors in the other country receive
payment for the goods they have exported from importers in their own
country. Thus, payment for goods in an international trade is made by
merging single transactions involving two persons into double
transactions involving four persons. In many cases, payment is made by
involving a multitude of transactions, frequently in several different
countries. These transactions were carried on in the so-called
foreign-exchange market. An exporter of goods sold bills of exchange
into that market and thus drew out of it money in his own country's
units. An importer bought such bills of exchange to send to his
creditor, and thus he put his own country's monetary units into the
market. Since the bills available in any market were drawn in the
monetary units of many different foreign countries, there arose
exchange relationships between the amounts of money available in the
country's own units (put there by importers) and the variety of bills
drawn in foreign moneys and put into the market by exporters. The
supply and demand for bills (or money) of any country in terms of the
supply and demand of the country's own money available in the
foreign-exchange market determined the value of the other countries'
moneys in relation to domestic money. These values could
fluctuate—widely for countries not on the gold standard, but only
narrowly (as we shall see) for those on gold.
The Foreign
Exchange Market Acted as Regulator of International Trade
Under
normal conditions a
foreign-exchange market served to pay for goods and services of
foreigners without any international shipment of money (gold). It also
acted as a regulator of international trade. If the imports of any
country steadily exceeded exports to another country, more importers
would be in the market offering domestic money for bills of exchange
drawn in the money of their foreign creditor. There thus would be an
increased supply of domestic money and an increased demand for that
foreign money. As a result, importers would have to offer more of their
money for these foreign bills, and the value of domestic money would
fall, while the value of the foreign money would rise in the
foreign-exchange market. This rise (or fall) on a gold relationship
would be measured in terms of "par" (the exact gold content equivalent
of the two currencies).
As
the value of the domestic
currency sagged below par in relationship to that of some foreign
currency, domestic exporters to that foreign country will increase
their activities, because when they receive payment in the form of a
bill of exchange they can sell it for more of their own currency than
they usually expect and can thus increase their profits. A surplus of
imports, by lowering the foreign-exchange value of the importing
country's money, will lead eventually to an increase in exports which,
by providing more bills of exchange, will tend to restore the
relationship of the moneys back toward par. Such a restoration of
parity in foreign exchange will reflect a restoration of balance in
international obligations, and this in turn will reflect a restored
balance in the exchange of goods and services between the two
countries. This means, under normal conditions, that a trade
disequilibrium will create trade conditions which will tend to restore
trade equilibrium.
Wide
Fluctuations in Foreign Exchange Market
When
countries are not on the
gold standard, this foreign-exchange disequilibrium (that is, the
decline in the value of one monetary unit in relation to the other
unit) can go on to very wide fluctuations—in fact, to whatever
degree is necessary to restore the trade equilibrium by encouraging
importers to buy in the other country because its money is so low in
value that the prices of goods in that country are irresistible to
importers in the other country.
Foreign
Exchange Market Does Not Fluctuate on the Gold Standard
But
when countries are on the
gold standard, the result is quite different. In this case the value of
a country's money will never go below the amount equal to the cost of
shipping gold between the two countries. An importer who wishes to pay
his trade partner in the other country will not offer more and more of
his own country's money for foreign-exchange bills, but will bid up the
price of such bills only to the point where it becomes cheaper for him
to buy gold from a bank and pay the costs of shipping and insurance on
the gold as it goes to his foreign creditor. Thus, on the gold
standard, foreign-exchange quotations do not fluctuate widely, but move
only between the two gold points which are only slightly above (gold
export point) and slightly below (gold import point) parity (the legal
gold relationship of the two currencies).
Since
the cost of packing,
shipping and insuring gold used to be about ½ percent of its
value, the gold export and import points were about this amount above
and below the parity point. In the case of the dollar-pound
relationship, when parity was at £ 1 = $4.866, the
gold export point was about $4.885 and the gold import point was about
$4.845. Thus:
Gold
export
point $4.885
(excess
demand for bills by importers)
Parity $4.866
Gold
import
point $4.845
(excess
supply of bills by exporters)
The
situation which we have
described is overly simplified. In practice the situation is made more
complicated by several factors. Among these are the following: (1)
middlemen buy and sell foreign exchange for present or future delivery
as a speculative activity; (2) the total supply of foreign exchange
available in the market depends on much more than the international
exchange of commodities. It depends on the sum total of all
international payments, such as interest, payment for services, tourist
spending, borrowings, sales of securities, immigrant remittances, and
so on; (3) the total exchange balance depends on the total of the
relationships of all countries, not merely between two.
Elimination
of the Gold Standard
The
flow of gold from country
to country resulting from unbalanced trade tends to create a situation
which counteracts the flow. If a country exports more than it imports
so that gold flows in to cover the difference, this gold will become
the basis for an increased quantity of money, and this will cause a
rise of prices within the country sufficient to reduce exports and
increase imports. At the same time, the gold by flowing out of some
other country will reduce the quantity of money there and will cause a
fall in prices within that country. These shifts in prices will cause
shifts in the flow of goods because of the obvious fact that goods tend
to flow to higher-priced areas and cease to flow to lower-priced areas.
These shifts in the flow of goods will counteract the original
unbalance in trade which caused the flow of gold. As a result, the flow
of gold will cease, and a balanced international trade at slightly
different price levels will result. The whole process illustrates the
subordination of internal price stability to stability of exchanges. It
was this subordination which was rejected by most countries after 1931.
This rejection was signified by (a) abandonment of
the gold standard at least in part, (b) efforts at
control of domestic prices, and (c)
efforts at exchange control. All these were done because of a desire to
free the economic system from the restricting influence of a
gold-dominated financial system.
Major
Countries Forced to Abandon Gold Standard
This
wonderful, automatic
mechanism of international payments represents one of the greatest
social instruments ever devised by man. It requires, however, a very
special group of conditions for its effective functioning and, as we
shall show, these conditions were disappearing by 1900 and were largely
wiped away as a result of the economic changes brought about by the
First World War. Because of these changes it became impossible to
restore the financial system which had existed before 1914. Efforts to
restore it were made with great determination, but by 1933 they had
obviously failed, and all major countries had been forced to abandon
the gold standard and automatic exchanges.
When
the gold standard is
abandoned, gold flows between countries like any other commodity, and
the value of foreign exchanges (no longer tied to gold) can fluctuate
much more widely. In theory an unbalance of international payments can
be rectified either through a shift in exchange rates or through a
shift in internal price levels. On the gold standard this rectification
is made by shifts in exchange rates only between the gold points. When
the unbalance is so great that exchanges would be forced beyond the
gold points, the rectification is made by means of changing internal
prices caused by the fact that gold flows at the gold points, instead
of the exchanges passing beyond the gold points. On the other hand,
when a currency is off the gold standard, fluctuation of exchanges is
not confined between any two points but can go indefinitely in either
direction. In such a case, the unbalance of international payments is
worked out largely by a shift in exchange rates and only remotely by
shifts in internal prices. In the period of 1929-1936, the countries of
the world went off gold because they preferred to bring their
international balances toward equilibrium by means of fluctuating
exchanges rather than by means of fluctuating price levels. They feared
these last because changing (especially falling) prices led to declines
in business activity and shifts in the utilization of economic
resources (such as labor, land, and capital) from one activity to
another.
Reestablishing
the Balance of International Payments
The
reestablishment of the
balance of international payments when a currency is off gold can be
seen from an example. If the value of the pound sterling falls to $4.00
or $3.00, Americans will buy in England increasingly because English
prices are cheap for them, but Englishmen will buy in America only with
reluctance because they have to pay so much for American money. This
will serve to rectify the original excess of exports to England which
gave the great supply of pound sterling necessary to drive its value
down to $3.00. Such a depreciation in the exchange value of a currency
will cause a rise in prices within the country as a result of the
increase in demand for the goods of that country.
The Situation
before 1914
The
key to the world situation
in the period before 1914 is to be found in the dominant position of
Great Britain. This position was more real than apparent. In many
fields (such as naval or financial) the supremacy of Britain was so
complete that it almost never had to be declared by her or admitted by
others. It was tacitly assumed by both. As an unchallenged ruler in
these fields, Britain could afford to be a benevolent ruler. Sure of
herself and of her position, she could be satisfied with substance
rather than forms. If others accepted her dominance in fact, she was
quite willing to leave to them independence and autonomy in law.
The Supremacy
of Britain
This
supremacy of Britain was
not an achievement of the nineteenth century alone. Its origins go back
to the sixteenth century—to the period in which the discovery of
America made the Atlantic more important than the Mediterranean as a
route of commerce and a road to wealth. In the Atlantic, Britain's
position was unique, not merely because of her westernmost position,
but much more because she was an island. This last fact made it
possible for her to watch Europe embroil itself in internal squabbles
while she retained freedom to exploit the new worlds across the seas.
On this basis, Britain had built up a naval supremacy which made her
ruler of the seas by 1900. Along with this was her preeminence in
merchant shipping which gave her control of the avenues of world
transportation and ownership of 39 percent of the world's oceangoing
vessels (three times the number of her nearest rival).
To
her supremacy in these
spheres, won in the period before 1815, Britain added new spheres of
dominance in the period after 1815. These arose from her early
achievement of the Industrial Revolution. This was applied to
transportation and communications as well as to industrial production.
In the first it gave the world the railroad and the steamboat; in the
second it gave the telegraph, the cable, and the telephone; in the
third it gave the factory system.
The
Industrial Revolution
The
Industrial Revolution
existed in Britain for almost two generations before it spread
elsewhere. It gave a great increase in output of manufactured goods and
a great demand for raw materials and food; it also gave a great
increase in wealth and savings. As a result of the first two and the
improved methods of transportation, Britain developed a world trade of
which it was the center and which consisted chiefly of the export of
manufactured goods and the import of raw materials and food. At the
same time, the savings of Britain tended to flow out to North America,
South America, and Asia, seeking to increase the output of raw
materials and food in these areas. By 1914 these exports of capital had
reached such an amount that they were greater than the foreign
investments of all other countries put together. In 1914 British
overseas investment was about $20 billion (or about one-quarter of
Britain's national wealth, yielding about a tenth of the total national
income). The French overseas investment at the same time was about $9
billion (or one-sixth the French national wealth, yielding 6 percent of
the national income), while Germany had about $5 billion invested
overseas (one-fifteenth the national wealth, yielding 3 percent of the
national income). The United States at that time was a large-scale
debtor.
The World's
Great Commercial Markets Were in Britain
The
dominant position of
Britain in the world of 1913 was, as I have said, more real than
apparent. In all parts of the world people slept more securely' worked
more productively, and lived more fully because Britain existed.
British naval vessels in the Indian Ocean and the Far East suppressed
slave raiders, pirates, and headhunters. Small nations like Portugal,
the Netherlands, or Belgium retained their overseas possessions under
the protection of the British fleet. Even the United States, without
realizing it, remained secure and upheld the Monroe Doctrine behind the
shield of the British Navy. Small nations were able to preserve their
independence in the gaps between the Great Powers, kept in precarious
balance by the Foreign Office's rather diffident balance-of-power
tactics. Mos; of the world's great commercial markets, even in
commodities like cotton, rubber, and tin, which she did not produce in
quantities herself, were in England, the world price being set from the
auction bidding of skilled specialist traders there. If a man in Peru
wished to send money to a man in Afghanistan, the final payment, as
like as not, would be made by a bookkeeping transaction in London. The
English parliamentary system and some aspects of the English judicial
system, such as the rule of law, were being copied, as best as could
be, in all parts of the world.
Britain Was
the Center of World Finance and World Trade
The
profitability of capital
outside Britain—a fact which caused the great export of
capital—was matched by a profitability of labor. As a result, the
flow of capital from Britain and Europe was matched by a flow of
persons. Both of these served to build up non-European areas on a
modified European pattern. In export of men, as in export of capital,
Britain was easily first (over 20 million persons emigrating from the
United Kingdom in the period 1815-1938). As a result of both, Britain
became the center of world finance as well as the center of world
commerce. The system of international financial relations, which we
described earlier, was based on the system of industrial, commercial,
and credit relationships which we have just described. The former thus
required for its existence a very special group of
circumstances—a group which could not be expected to continue
forever. In addition, it required a group of secondary characteristics
which were also far from permanent. Among these were the following: (1)
all the countries concerned must be on the full gold standard; (2)
there must be freedom from public or private interference with the
domestic economy of any country; that is, prices must be free to rise
and fall in accordance with the supply and demand for both goods and
money; (3) there must also be free flow of international trade so that
both goods and money can go without hindrance to those areas where each
is most valuable; (4) the international financial economy must be
organized about one center with numerous subordinate centers, so that
it would be possible to cancel out international claims against one
another in some clearinghouse and thus reduce the flow of gold to a
minimum; (5) the flow of goods and funds in international matters
should be controlled by economic factors and not be subject to
political, psychological, or ideological influences.
These
conditions, which made
the international financial and commercial system function so
beautifully before 1914, had begun to change by 1890. The fundamental
economic and commercial conditions changed first, and were noticeably
modified by 1910; the group of secondary characteristics of the system
were changed by the events of the First World War. As a result, the
system of early international financial capitalism is now only a dim
memory. Imagine a period without passports or visas, and with almost no
immigration or customs restrictions. Certainly the system had many
incidental drawbacks, but they were incidental.
Socialized if
not social, civilized if not cultured, the system allowed individuals
to breathe freely and develop their individual talents in a way unknown
before and in jeopardy since.
Chapter 6—The United States to 1917
Just
as Classical culture
spread westward from the Greeks who created it to the Roman peoples who
adopted and changed it, so Europe's culture spread westward to the New
World, where it was profoundly modified while still remaining basically
European. The central fact of American history is that people of
European origin and culture came to occupy and use the immensely rich
wilderness between the Atlantic and the Pacific. In this process the
wilderness was developed and exploited area by area, the Tidewater, the
Piedmont, the trans-Appalachian forest, the trans-Mississippi prairies,
the Pacific Coast, and finally the Great Plains. By 1900 the period of
occupation which had begun in 1607 was finished, but the era of
development continued on an intensive rather than extensive basis. This
shift from extensive to intensive development, frequently called the
"closing of the frontier," required a readjustment of social outlook
and behavior from a largely individualistic to a more cooperative basis
and from an emphasis on mere physical prowess to emphasis on other less
tangible talents of managerial skills, scientific training, and
intellectual capacity able to fill the
newly occupied
frontiers with a denser population, producing a higher standard of
living, and utilizing more extensive leisure.
The
ability of the people of
the United States to make this readjustment of social outlook and
behavior at the "ending of the frontier" about 1900 was hampered by a
number of factors from its earlier historical experience. Among these
we should mention the growth of sectionalism, past political and
constitutional experiences, isolationism, and emphasis on physical
prowess and unrealistic idealism.
Three Major
Geographic Sections Arise in U.S.
The
occupation of the United
States had given rise to three chief geographic sections: a commercial
and later financial and industrial East, an agrarian and later
industrial West, and an agrarian South. Unfortunately, the two agrarian
sections were organized quite differently, the South on the basis of
slave labor and the West on the basis of free labor. On this question
the East allied with the West to defeat the South in the Civil War
(1861-1865) and to subject it to a prolonged military occupation as a
conquered territory (1865-1877). Since the war and the occupation were
controlled by the new Republican Party, the political organization of
the country became split on a sectional basis: the South refused to
vote Republican until 1928, and the West refused to vote Democratic
until 1932. In the East the older families which inclined toward the
Republican Party because of the Civil War were largely submerged by
waves of new immigrants from Europe, beginning with Irish and Germans
after 1846 and continuing with even greater numbers from eastern Europe
and Mediterranean Europe after 1890. These new immigrants of the
eastern cities voted Democratic because of religious, economic, and
cultural opposition to the upper-class Republicans of the same eastern
section. The class basis in voting patterns in the East and the
sectional basis in voting in the South and West proved to be of major
political significance after 1880.
Major Changes
in Government Occur in 1830
The
Founding Fathers had
assumed that the political control of the country would be conducted by
men of property and leisure who would generally know each other
personally and, facing no need for urgent decisions, would move
government to action when they agreed and be able to prevent it from
acting, without serious damage, when they could not agree. The American
Constitution, with its provisions for division of powers and selection
of the chief executive by an electoral college, reflected this point of
view. So also did the use of the party caucus of legislative assemblies
for nomination to public office and the election of senators by the
same assemblies. The arrival of a mass democracy after 1830 changed
this situation, establishing the use of party conventions for
nominations and the use of entrenched political party machines,
supported on the patronage of public office, to mobilize sufficient
votes to elect their candidates.
Forces of
Finance and Business Grow in Wealth and Power
As
a result of this situation,
the elected official from 1840 to 1880 found himself under pressure
from three directions: from the popular electorate which provided him
with the votes necessary for election, from the party machine which
provided him with the nomination to run for office as well as the
patronage appointments by which he could reward his followers, and from
the wealthy economic interests which gave him the money for campaign
expenses with, perhaps, a certain surplus for his own pocket. This was
a fairly workable system, since the three forces were approximately
equal, the advantage, if any, resting with the party machine. This
advantage became so great in the period 1865-1880 that the forces of
finance, commerce, and industry were forced to contribute
ever-increasing largesse to the political machines in order to obtain
the services from government which they regarded as their due, services
such as higher tariffs, land grants to railroads, better postal
services, and mining or timber concessions. The fact that these forces
of finance and business were themselves growing in wealth and power
made them increasingly restive under the need to make constantly larger
contributions to party political machines. Moreover, these economic
tycoons increasingly felt it to be unseemly that they should be unable
to issue orders but instead have to negotiate as equals in order to
obtain services or favors from party bosses.
The U.S.
Government Was Controlled by the Forces of
Investment
Banking and Industry
By
the late 1870's business
leaders determined to make an end to this situation by cutting with one
blow the taproot of the system of party machines, namely, the patronage
system. This system, which they called by the derogatory term "spoils
system," was objectionable to big business not so much because it led
to dishonesty or inefficiency but because it made the party machines
independent of business control by giving them a source of income
(campaign contributions from government employees) which was
independent of business control. If this source could be cut off or
even sensibly reduced, politicians would be much more dependent upon
business contributions for campaign expenses. At a time when the growth
of a mass press and of the use of chartered trains for political
candidates were greatly increasing the expense of campaigning for
office, any reduction in campaign contributions from officeholders
would inevitably make politicians more subservient to business. It was
with this aim in view that civil service reform began in the Federal
government with the Pendleton Bill of 1883. As a result, the government
was controlled with varying degrees of completeness by the forces of
investment banking and heavy industry from 1884 to 1933.
A Group of
400 Individuals Mobilize Enormous Wealth and Power
This
period, 1884-1933, was
the period of financial capitalism in which investment bankers moving
into commercial banking and insurance on one side and into railroading
and heavy industry on the other were able to mobilize enormous wealth
and wield enormous economic, political, and social power. Popularly
known as "Society," or the "400," they lived a life of dazzling
splendor. Sailing the ocean in great private yachts or traveling on
land by private trains, they moved in a ceremonious round between their
spectacular estates and town houses in Palm Beach, Long Island, the
Berkshires, Newport, and Bar Harbor; assembling from their
fortress-like New York residences to attend the Metropolitan Opera
under the critical eye of Mrs. Astor; or gathering for business
meetings of the highest strategic level in the awesome presence of J.
P. Morgan himself.
Big Banking
and Business Control the Federal Government
The
structure of financial
controls created by the tycoons of "Big Banking" and "Big Business" in
the period 1880-1933 was of extraordinary complexity, one business fief
being built on another, both being allied with semi-independent
associates, the whole rearing upward into two pinnacles of economic and
financial power, of which one, centered in New York, was headed by J.
P. Morgan and Company, and the other, in Ohio, was headed by the
Rockefeller family. When these two cooperated, as they generally did,
they could influence the economic life of the country to a large degree
and could almost control its political life, at least on the Federal
level. The former point can be illustrated by a few facts. In the
United States the number of billion-dollar corporations rose from one
in 1909 (United States Steel, controlled by Morgan) to fifteen in 1930.
The share of all corporation assets held by the 200 largest
corporations rose from 32 percent in 1909 to 49 percent in 1930 and
reached 57 percent in 1939. By 1930 these 200 largest corporations held
49.2 percent of the assets of all 40,000 corporations in the country
($81 billion out of $165 billion); they held 38 percent of all business
wealth, incorporated or unincorporated (or $81 billion out of $212
billion); and they held 22 percent of all the wealth in the country (or
$81 billion out of $367 billion). In fact, in 1930, one corporation
(American Telephone and Telegraph, controlled by Morgan) had greater
assets than the total wealth in twenty-one states of the Union.
The Influence
and Power of the Morgan and Rockefeller Groups
The
influence of these
business leaders was so great that the Morgan and Rockefeller groups
acting together, or even Morgan acting alone, could have wrecked the
economic system of the country merely by throwing securities on the
stock market for sale, and, having precipitated a stock-market panic,
could then have bought back the securities they had sold but at a lower
price. Naturally, they were not so foolish as to do this, although
Morgan came very close to it in precipitating the "panic of 1907," but
they did not hesitate to wreck individual corporations, at the expense
of the holders of common stocks, by driving them to bankruptcy. In this
way, to take only two examples, Morgan wrecked the New York, New Haven,
and Hartford Railroad before 1914 by selling to it, at high prices, the
largely valueless securities of myriad New England steamship and
trolley lines; and William Rockefeller and his friends wrecked the
Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Pacific Railroad before 1925 by
selling to it, at excessive prices, plans to electrify to the Pacific,
copper, electricity, and a worthless branch railroad (the Gary Line).
These are but examples of the discovery by financial capitalists that
they made money out of issuing and selling securities rather than out
of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and
accordingly led them to the point where they discovered that the
exploiting of an operating company by excessive issuance of securities
or the issuance of bonds rather than equity securities not only was
profitable to them but made it possible for them to increase their
profits by bankruptcy of the firm, providing fees and commissions of
reorganization as well as the opportunity to issue new securities.
Control of
Political Parties in America
When
the business interests,
led by William C. Whitney, pushed through the first installment of
civil service reform in 1883, they expected that they would be able to
control both political parties equally. Indeed, some of them intended
to contribute to both and to allow an alternation of the two parties in
public office in order to conceal their own influence, inhibit any
exhibition of independence by politicians, and allow the electorate to
believe that they were exercising their own free choice. Such an
alternation of the parties on the Federal scene occurred in the period
1880-1896, with business influence (or at least Morgan's influence) as
great in Democratic as in Republican administrations. But in 1896 came
a shocking experience. The business interests discovered that they
could control the Republican Party to a large degree but could not be
nearly so confident of controlling the Democratic Party. The reason for
this difference lay in the existence of the Solid South as a Democratic
section with almost no Republican voters. This section sent delegates
to the Republican National Convention as did the rest of the country,
but, since these delegates did not represent voters, they came to
represent those who were prepared to pay their expenses to the
Republican National Convention. In this way these delegates came to
represent the business interests of the North, whose money they
accepted. Mark Hanna has told us in detail how he spent much of the
winter of 1895-1896 in Georgia buying over two hundred delegates for
McKinley to the Republican National Convention of 1896. As a result of
this system, about a quarter of the votes in a Republican Convention
were "controlled" votes from the Solid South, not representing the
electorate. After the split in the Republican Party in 1912, this
portion of the delegates was reduced to about 17 percent.
The Monetary
Tactics of the Banking Oligarchy
The
inability of the
investment bankers and their industrial allies to control the
Democratic Convention of 1896 was a result of the agrarian discontent
of the period 1868-1896. This discontent in turn was based, very
largely, on the monetary tactics of the banking oligarchy. The bankers
were wedded to the gold standard for reasons we have already explained.
Accordingly, at the end of the Civil War, they persuaded the Grant
Administration to curb the postwar inflation and go back on the gold
standard (crash of 1873 and resumption of specie payments in 1875).
This gave the bankers a control of the supply of money which they did
not hesitate to use for their own purposes, as Morgan ruthlessly
pressurized Cleveland in 1893-1896. The bankers' affection for low
prices was not shared by the farmers, since each time prices of farm
products went down the burden of farmers' debts (especially mortgages)
became greater. Moreover, farm prices, being much more competitive than
industrial prices, and not protected by a tariff, fell much faster than
industrial prices, and farmers could not reduce costs or modify their
production plans nearly so rapidly as industrialists could. The result
was a systematic exploitation of the agrarian sectors of the community
by the financial and industrial sectors. This exploitation took the
form of high industrial prices, high (and discriminatory) railroad
rates, high interest charges, low farm prices, and a very low level of
farm services by railroads and the government. Unable to resist by
economic weapons, the farmers of the West turned to political relief,
but were greatly hampered by their reluctance to vote Democratic
(because of their memories of the Civil War). Instead, they tried to
work on the state political level through local legislation (so-called
Granger Laws) and set up third-party movements (like the Greenback
Party in 1878 or the Populist Party in 1892). By 1896, however,
agrarian discontent rose so high that it began to overcome the memory
of the Democratic role in the Civil War. The capture of the Democratic
Party by these forces of discontent under William Jennings Bryan in
1896, who was determined to obtain higher prices by increasing the
supply of money on a bimetallic rather than a gold basis, presented the
electorate with an election on a social and economic issue for the
first time in a generation. Though the forces of high finance and of
big business were in a state of near panic, by a mighty effort
involving large-scale spending they were successful in electing
McKinley.
Money Power
Seeks to Control Both Political Parties
The
inability of plutocracy to
control the Democratic Party as it had demonstrated it could control
the Republican Party, made it advisable for them to adopt a one-party
outlook on political affairs, although they continued to contribute to
some extent to both parties and did not cease their efforts to control
both. In fact on two occasions, in 1904 and in 1924, J. P. Morgan was
able to sit back with a feeling of satisfaction to watch a presidential
election in which the candidates of both parties were in his sphere of
influence. In 1924 the Democratic candidate was one of his chief
lawyers, while the Republican candidate was the classmate and
handpicked choice of his partner, Dwight Morrow. Usually, Morgan had to
share this political influence with other sectors of the business
oligarchy, especially with the Rockefeller interest (as was done, for
example, by dividing the ticket between them in 1900 and in 1920).
The Growth of
Monopolies and the Excesses of Wall Street
The
agrarian discontent, the
growth of monopolies, the oppression of labor, and the excesses of Wall
Street financiers made the country very restless in the period
1890-1900. All this could have been alleviated merely by increasing the
supply of money sufficiently to raise prices somewhat, but the
financiers in this period, just as thirty years later, were determined
to defend the gold standard no matter what happened. In looking about
for some issue which would distract public discontent from domestic
economic issues, what better solution than a crisis in foreign affairs?
Cleveland had stumbled upon this alternative, more or less
accidentally, in 1895 when he stirred up a controversy with Great
Britain over Venezuela. The great opportunity, however, came with the
Cuban revolt against Spain in 1895. While the "yellow press," led by
William Randolph Hearst, roused public opinion, Henry Cabot Lodge and
Theodore Roosevelt plotted how they could best get the United States
into the fracas. They got the excuse they needed when the American
battleship Maine was sunk by a mysterious
explosion in Havana
harbor in February 1898. In two months the United States declared war
on Spain to fight for Cuban independence. The resulting victory
revealed the United States as a world naval power, established it is an
imperialist power with possession of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the
Philippines, whetted some appetites for imperialist glory, and covered
the transition from the long-drawn age of semi-depression to a new
period of prosperity. This new period of prosperity was spurred to some
extent by the increased demand for industrial products arising from the
war, but even more by the new period of rising prices associated with a
considerable increase in the world production of gold from. South
Africa and Alaska after 1895.
America's
entrance upon the
stage as a world power continued with the annexation of Hawaii in 1808,
the intervention in the Boxer uprising in 1900, the seizure of Panama
in 1903, the diplomatic intervention in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905,
the round-the-world cruise of the American Navy in 1908, the military
occupation of Nicaragua in 1912, the opening of the Panama Canal in
1914, and military intervention in Mexico in 1916.
The Birth of
the Progressive Movement
During
this same period, there
appeared a new movement for economic and political reform known as
Progressivism. The Progressive movement resulted from a combination of
forces, some new and some old. Its foundation rested on the remains of
agrarian and labor discontent which had struggled so vainly before
1897. There was also, as a kind of afterthought on the part of
successful business leaders, a weakening of acquisitive selfishness and
a revival of the older sense of social obligation and idealism. To some
extent this feeling was mixed with a realization that the position and
privileges of the very wealthy could be preserved better with
superficial concessions and increased opportunity for the discontented
to blow off steam than from any policy of blind obstructionism on the
part of the rich. As an example of the more idealistic impulse we might
mention the creation of the various Carnegie foundations to work for
universal peace or to extend scholarly work in science and social
studies. As an example of the more practical point of view we might
mention the founding of The New Republic, a
"liberal weekly
paper," by an agent of Morgan financed with Whitney money (1914).
Somewhat similar to this last point was the growth of a new "liberal
press," which found it profitable to print the writings of
"muckrakers," and thus expose to the public eye the seamy side of Big
Business and of human nature itself. But the great opportunity for the
Progressive forces arose from a split within Big Business between the
older forces of financial capitalism led by Morgan and the newer forces
of monopoly capitalism organized around the Rockefeller bloc. As a
consequence, the Republican Party was split between the followers of
Theodore Roosevelt and those of William Howard Taft, so that the
combined forces of the liberal East and the agrarian West were able to
capture the Presidency under Woodrow Wilson in 1912.
The
Establishment of the Income Tax and the Federal Reserve System
Wilson
roused a good deal of
popular enthusiasm with his talk of "New Freedom" and the rights of the
underdog, but his program amounted to little more than an attempt to
establish on a Federal basis those reforms which agrarian and labor
discontent had been seeking on a state basis for many years. Wilson was
by no means a radical (after all, he had been accepting money for his
personal income from rich industrialists like Cleveland Dodge and Cyrus
Hall McCormick during his professorship at Princeton, and this kind of
thing by no means ceased when he entered politics in 1910), and there
was a good deal of unconscious hypocrisy in many of his resounding
public speeches. Be this as it may, his political and administrative
reforms were a good deal more effective than his economic or social
reforms. The Clayton Antitrust Act and the Federal Trade Commission Act
(1913) were soon tightly wrapped in litigation and futility. On the
other hand, the direct election of senators, the establishment of an
income tax and of the Federal Reserve System, and the creation of a
Federal Farm Loan System (1916) and of rural delivery of mail and
parcel post, as well as the first steps toward various laboring
enactments, like minimum wages for merchant seamen, restrictions on
child labor, and an eight-hour day for railroad workers, justified the
support which Progressives had given to Wilson.
The Wilson
Administration
The
first Administration of
Wilson (1913-1917) and the earlier Administration of Theodore Roosevelt
(1901-1909) made a substantial contribution to the process by which the
United States redirected its aim from extensive expansion of physical
frontiers to an intensive exploitation of its natural and moral
resources. The earlier Roosevelt used his genius as a showman to
publicize the need to conserve the country's natural resources, while
Wilson, in his own professorial fashion, did much to extend equality of
opportunity to wider groups of the American people. These people were
so absorbed in the controversies engendered by these efforts that they
hardly noticed the rising international tensions in Europe or even the
outbreak of war in August, 1914, until by 1915 the clamorous
controversy of the threat of war quite eclipsed the older domestic
controversies. By the end of 1915 America was being summoned, in no
gentle fashion, to play a role on the world's stage. This is a story to
which we must return in a later chapter.
Part
Three—The Russian Empire to 1917
Chapter
7—Creation of the Russian Civilization
In
the nineteenth century most
historians regarded Russia as part of Europe but it is now becoming
increasingly clear that Russia is another civilization quite separate
from Western Civilization. Both of these civilizations are descended
from Classical Civilization, but the connection with this predecessor
was made so differently that two quite different traditions came into
existence. Russian traditions were derived from Byzantium directly;
Western traditions were derived from the more moderate Classical
Civilization indirectly, having passed through the Dark Ages when there
was no state or government in the West.
Russian
civilization was
created from three sources originally: (1) the Slav people, (2) Viking
invaders from the north, and (3) the Byzantine tradition from the
south. These three were fused together as the result of a common
experience arising from Russia's exposed geographical position on the
western edge of a great flat-land stretching for thousands of miles to
the east. This flat-land is divided horizontally into three zones of
which the most southern is open plain, while the most northern is open
bush and tundra. The middle zone is forest. The southern zone (or
steppes) consists of two parts: the southern is a salty plain which is
practically useless, while the northern part, next to the forest, is
the famous black-earth region of rich agricultural soil. Unfortunately
the eastern portion of this great Eurasian plain has been getting
steadily drier for thousands of years, with the consequence that the
Ural-Altaic-speaking peoples of central and east-central Asia, peoples
like the Huns, Bulgars, Magyars, Mongols, and Turks, have pushed
westward repeatedly along the steppe corridor between the Urals and the
Caspian Sea, making the black-earth steppes dangerous for sedentary
agricultural peoples.
The
Slavs first appeared more
than two thousand years ago as a peaceful, evasive people, with an
economy based on hunting and rudimentary agriculture, in the forests of
eastern Poland. These people slowly increased in numbers, moving
northeastward through the forests, mixing with the scattered Finnish
hunting people who were there already. About A.D. 700 or so, the
Northmen, whom we know as Vikings, came down from the Baltic Sea, by
way of the rivers of eastern Europe, and eventually reached the Black
Sea and attacked Constantinople. These Northmen were trying to make a
way of life out of militarism, seizing booty and slaves, imposing
tribute on conquered peoples, collecting furs, honey, and wax from the
timid Slavs lurking in their forests, and exchanging these for the
colorful products of the Byzantine south. In time the Northmen set up
fortified trading posts along their river highways, notably at Novgorod
in the north, at Smolensk in the center, and at Kiev in the south. They
married Slav women and imposed on the rudimentary agricultural-hunting
economy of the Slavs a superstructure of a tribute-collecting state
with an exploitative, militaristic, commercial economy. This created
the pattern of a two-class Russian society which has continued ever
since, much intensified by subsequent historical events.
In
time the ruling class of
Russia became acquainted with Byzantine culture. They were dazzled by
it, and sought to import it into their wilderness domains in the north.
In this way they imposed on the Slav peoples many of the accessories of
the Byzantine Empire, such as Orthodox Christianity, the Byzantine
alphabet, the Byzantine calendar, the used of domed ecclesiastical
architecture, the name Czar (Caesar) for their ruler, and innumerable
other traits. Most important of all, they imported the Byzantine
totalitarian autocracy, under which all aspects of life, including
political, economic, intellectual, and religious, were regarded as
departments of government, under the control of an autocratic ruler.
These beliefs were part of the Greek tradition, and were based
ultimately on Greek inability to distinguish between state and society.
Since society includes all human activities, the Greeks had assumed
that the state must include all human activities. In the days of
Classical Greece this all-inclusive entity was called the polis,
a term which meant both society and state; in the later Roman period
this all-inclusive entity was called the imperium.
The only difference was that the polis was
sometimes (as in Pericles's Athens about 450 B.C.) democratic, while
the imperium
was always a military autocracy. Both were totalitarian, so that
religion and economic life were regarded as spheres of governmental
activity. This totalitarian autocratic tradition was carried on to the
Byzantine Empire and passed from it to the Russian state in the north
and to the later Ottoman Empire in the south. In the north this
Byzantine tradition combined with the experience of the Northmen to
intensify the two-class structure of Slav society. In the new Slav (or
Orthodox) Civilization this fusion, fitting together the Byzantine
tradition and the Viking tradition, created Russia. From Byzantium came
autocracy and the idea of the state as an absolute power and as a
totalitarian power, as well as such important applications of these
principles as the idea that the state should control thought and
religion, that the Church should be a branch of the government, that
law is an enactment of the state, and that the ruler is semi-divine.
From the Vikings came the idea that the state is a foreign importation,
based on militarism and supported by booty and tribute, that economic
innovations are the function of the government, that power rather than
law is the basis of social life, and that society, with its people and
its property, is the private property of a foreign ruler.
These
concepts of the Russian
system must be emphasized because they are so foreign to our own
traditions. In the West, the Roman Empire (which continued in the East
as the Byzantine Empire) disappeared in 476 and, although many efforts
were made to revive it, there was clearly a period, about goo, when
there was no empire, no state, and no public authority in the West. The
state disappeared, yet society continued. So also, religious and
economic life continued. This clearly showed that the state and society
were not the same thing, that society was the basic entity, and that
the state was a crowning, but not essential, cap to the social
structure. This experience had revolutionary effects. It was discovered
that man can live without a state; this became the basis of Western
liberalism. It was discovered that the state, if it exists, must serve
men and that it is incorrect to believe that the purpose of men is to
serve the state. It was discovered that economic life, religious life,
law, and private property can all exist and function effectively
without a state. From this emerged laissez-faire, separation of Church
and State, rule of law, and the sanctity of private property. In Rome,
in Byzantium, and in Russia, law was regarded as an enactment of a
supreme power. In the West, when no supreme power existed, it was
discovered that law still existed as the body of rules which govern
social life. Thus law was found by observation in the West, not enacted
by autocracy as in the East. This meant that authority was established
by law and under the law in the West, while authority was established
by power and above the law in the East. The West felt that the rules of
economic life were found and not enacted; that individuals had rights
independent of, and even opposed to, public authority; that groups
could exist, as the Church existed, by right and not by privilege, and
without the need to have any charter of incorporation entitling them to
exist as a group or act as a group; that groups or individuals could
own property as a right and not as a privilege and that such property
could not be taken by force but must be taken by established process of
law. It was emphasized in the West that the way a thing was done was
more important than what was done, while in the East what was done was
far more significant than the way in which it was done.
There
was also another basic
distinction between Western Civilization and Russian Civilization. This
was derived from the history of Christianity. This new faith came into
Classical Civilization from Semitic society. In its origin it was a
this-worldly religion, believing that the world and the flesh were
basically good, or at least filled with good potentialities, because
both were made by God; the body was made in the image of God; God
became Man in this world with a human body, to save men as individuals,
and to establish "Peace on earth." The early Christians intensified the
"this-worldly" tradition, insisting that salvation was possible only
because God lived and died in a human body in this world, that the
individual could be saved only through God's help (grace) and by living
correctly in this body on this earth (good works), that there would be,
some day, a millennium on this earth and that, at that Last Judgment,
there would be a resurrection of the body and life everlasting. In this
way the world of space and time, which God had made at the beginning
with the statement, "It was good" (Book of Genesis), would, at the end,
be restored to its original condition.
This
optimistic,
"this-worldly" religion was taken into Classical Civilization at a time
when the philosophic outlook of that society was quite incompatible
with the religious outlook of Christianity. The Classical philosophic
outlook, which we might call Neoplatonic, was derived from the
teachings of Persian Zoroastrianism, Pythagorean rationalism, and
Platonism. It was dualistic, dividing the universe into two opposed
worlds, the world of matter and flesh and the world of spirit and
ideas. The former world was changeable, unknowable, illusionary, and
evil; the latter world was eternal, knowable, real, and good. Truth, to
these people, could be found by the use of reason and logic alone, not
hy use of the body or the senses, since these were prone to error, and
must be spurned. The body, as Plato said, was the "tomb of the soul."
Thus
the Classical world into
which Christianity came about A.D. 60 believed that the world and the
body were unreal, unknowable, corrupt, and hopeless and that no truth
or success could be found by the use of the body, the senses, or
matter. A small minority, derived from Democritus and the early Ionian
scientists through Aristotle, Epicurus, and Lucretius, rejected the
Platonic dualism, preferring materialism as an explanation of reality.
These materialists were equally incompatible with the new Christian
religion. Moreover, even the ordinary citizen of Rome had an outlook
whose implications were not compatible with the Christian religion. To
give one simple example: while the Christians spoke of a millennium in
the future, the average Roman continued to think of a "Golden Age" in
the past, just as Homer had.
As
a consequence of the fact
that Christian religion came into a society with an incompatible
philosophic outlook, the Christian religion was ravaged by theological
and dogmatic disputes and shot through with "otherworldly" heresies. In
general, these heresies felt that God was so perfect and so remote and
man was so imperfect and such a worm that the gap between God and man
could not be bridged by any act of man, that salvation depended on
grace rather than on good works, and that, if God ever did so lower
Himself as to occupy a human body, this was not an ordinary body, and
that, accordingly, Christ could be either True God or True Man but
could not be both. This point of view was opposed by the Christian
Fathers of the Church, not always successfully; but in the decisive
battle, at the first Church Council, held at Nicaea in 325, the
Christian point of view was enacted into the formal dogma of the
Church. Although the Church continued to exist for centuries thereafter
in a society whose philosophic outlook was ill adapted to the Christian
religion, and obtained a compatible philosophy only in the medieval
period, the basic outlook of Christianity reinforced the experience of
the Dark Ages to create the outlook of Western Civilization. Some of
the elements of this outlook which were of great importance were the
following: (1) the importance of the individual, since he alone is
saved; (2) the potential goodness of the material world and of the
body; (3) the need to seek salvation by use of the body and the senses
in this world (good works); (4) faith in the reliability of the senses
(which contributed much to Western science); (5) faith in the reality
of ideas (which contributed much to Western mathematics); (6) mundane
optimism and millennianism (which contributed much to faith in the
future and the idea of progress); (7) the belief that God (and not the
devil) reigns over this world by a system of established rules (which
contributed much to the ideas of natural law, natural science, and the
rule of law).
These
ideas which became part
of the tradition of the West did not become part of the tradition of
Russia. The influence of Greek philosophic thought remained strong in
the East. The Latin West before goo used a language which was not, at
that time, fitted for abstract discussion, and almost all the dogmatic
debates which arose from the incompatibility of Greek philosophy and
Christian religion were carried on in the Greek language and fed on the
Greek philosophic tradition. In the West the Latin language reflected a
quite different tradition, based on the Roman emphasis on
administrative procedures and ethical ideas about human behavior to
one's fellow man. As a result, the Greek philosophic tradition remained
strong in the East, continued to permeate the Greek-speaking Church,
and went with that Church into the Slavic north. The schism between the
Latin Church and the Greek Church strengthened their different points
of view, the former being more this-worldly, more concerned with human
behavior, and continuing to believe in the efficacy of good works,
while the latter was more otherworldly, more concerned with God's
majesty and power, and emphasized the evilness and weakness of the body
and the world and the efficacy of God's grace. As a result, the
religious outlook and, accordingly, the world outlook of Slav religion
and philosophy developed in quite a different direction from that in
the West. The body, this world, pain, personal comfort, and even death
were of little importance; man could do little to change his lot, which
was determined by forces more powerful than he; resignation to Fate,
pessimism, and a belief in the overwhelming power of sin and of the
devil dominated the East.
To
this point we have seen the
Slavs formed into Russian civilization as the result of several
factors. Before we go on we should, perhaps, recapitulate. The Slavs
were subjected at first to the Viking exploitative system. These
Vikings copied Byzantine culture, and did it very consciously, in their
religion, in their writing, in their state, in their laws, in art,
architecture, philosophy, and literature. These rulers were outsiders
who innovated all the political, religious, economic, and intellectual
life of the new civilization. There was no state: foreigners brought
one in. There was no organized religion: one was imported from
Byzantium and imposed on the Slavs. The Slav economic life was on a low
level, a forest subsistence economy with hunting and rudimentary
agriculture: on this the Vikings imposed an international trading
system. There was no religious-philosophic outlook: the new
State-Church superstructure imposed on the Slavs an outlook derived
from Greek dualistic idealism. And, finally, the East never experienced
a Dark Ages to show it that society is distinct from the state and more
fundamental than the state.
This
summary brings Russian
society down to about 1200. In the next six hundred years new
experiences merely intensified the Russian development. These
experiences arose from the fact that the new Russian society found
itself caught between the population pressures of the raiders from the
steppes to the east and the pressure of the advancing technology of
Western Civilization.
The
pressure of the
Ural-Altaic speakers from the eastern steppes culminated in the Mongol
(Tarter) invasions after 1200. The Mongols conquered Russia and
established a tribute-gathering system which continued for generations.
Thus there continued to be a foreign exploiting system imposed over the
Slav people. In time the Mongols made the princes of Moscow their chief
tribute collectors for most of Russia. A little later the Mongols made
a court of highest appeal in Moscow, so that both money and judicial
cases flowed to Moscow. These continued to flow even after the princes
of Moscow (1380) led the successful revolt which ejected the Mongols.
As
the population pressure
from the East decreased, the technological pressure from the West
increased (after 1500). By Western technology we mean such things as
gunpowder and firearms, better agriculture, counting and public
finance, sanitation, printing, and the spread of education. Russia did
not get the full impact of these pressures until late, and then from
secondary sources, such as Sweden and Poland, rather than from England
or France. However, Russia was hammered out between the pressures from
the East and those from the West. The result of this hammering was the
Russian autocracy, a military, tribute-gathering machine superimposed
on the Slav population. The poverty of this population made it
impossible for them to get firearms or any other advantages of Western
technology. Only the state had these things, but the state could afford
them only by draining wealth from the people. This draining of wealth
from below upward provided arms and Western technology for the rulers
but kept the ruled too poor to obtain these things, so that all power
was concentrated at the top. The continued pressure from the West made
it impossible for the rulers to use the wealth that accumulated in
their hands to finance economic improvements which might have raised
the standards of living of the ruled, since this accumulation had to be
used to increase Russian power rather than Russian wealth. As a
consequence, pressure downward increased and the autocracy became more
autocratic. In order to get a bureaucracy for the army and for
government service, the landlords were given personal powers over the
peasants, creating a system of serfdom in the East just at the time
that medieval serfdom was disappearing in the West. Private property,
personal freedom, and direct contact with the state (for taxation or
for justice) were lost to the Russian serfs. The landlords were given
these powers so that the landlords would be free to fight and willing
to fight for Moscow or to serve in Moscow's autocracy.
By
1730 the direct pressure of
the West upon Russia began to weaken somewhat because of the decline of
Sweden, of Poland, and of Turkey, while Prussia was too occupied with
Austria and with France to press very forcibly on Russia. Thus, the
Slavs, using an adopted Western technology of a rudimentary character,
were able to impose their supremacy on the peoples to the East. The
peasants of Russia, seeking to escape from the pressures of serfdom in
the area west of the Urals, began to flee eastward, and eventually
reached the Pacific. The Russian state made every effort to stop this
movement because it felt that the peasants must remain to work the land
and pay taxes if the landlords were to be able to maintain the military
autocracy which was considered necessary. Eventually the autocracy
followed the peasants eastward, and Russian society came to occupy the
whole of northern Asia.
As
the pressure from the East
and the pressure from the West declined, the autocracy, inspired
perhaps by powerful religious feelings, began to have a bad conscience
toward its own people. At the same time it still sought to westernize
itself. It became increasingly clear that this process of
westernization could not be restricted to the autocracy itself, but
must be extended downward to include the Russian people. The autocracy
found, in 1812, that it could not defeat Napoleon's army without
calling on the Russian people. Its inability to defeat the Western
allies in the Crimean War of 1854-1856, and the growing threat of the
Central Powers after the Austro-German alliance of 1879, made it clear
that Russia must be westernized, in technology if not in ideology,
throughout all classes of the society, in order to survive. This meant,
very specifically, that Russia had to obtain the Agricultural
Revolution and industrialism; but these in turn required that ability
to read and write be extended to the peasants and that the rural
population be reduced and the urban population be increased. These
needs, again, meant that serfdom had to be abolished and that modern
sanitation had to be introduced. Thus one need led to another, so that
the whole society had to be reformed. In typically Russian fashion all
these things were undertaken by government action, but as one reform
led to another it became a question whether the autocracy and the
landed upper classes would be willing to allow the reform movement to
go so far as to jeopardize their power and privileges. For example, the
abolition of serfdom made it necessary for the landed nobility to cease
to regard the peasants as private property whose only contact with the
state was through themselves. Similarly, industrialism and urbanism
would create new social classes of bourgeoisie and workers. These new
classes inevitably would make political and social demands very
distasteful to the autocracy and the landed nobility. If the reforms
led to demands for nationalism, how could a dynastic monarchy such as
the Romanov autocracy yield to such demands without risking the loss of
Finland, Poland, the Ukraine, or Armenia?
As
long as the desire to
westernize and the bad conscience of the upper classes worked together,
reform advanced. But as soon as the lower classes began to make
demands, reaction appeared. On this basis the history of Russia was an
alternation of reform and reaction from the eighteenth century to the
Revolution of 1917. Peter the Great (1689-1725) and Catherine the Great
(1762-1796) were supporters of westernization and reform. Paul I
(1796-1801) was a reactionary. Alexander I (1801-1825) and Alexander II
(1855-1881) were reformers, while Nicholas I (1825-1855) and Alexander
III (1881-1894) were reactionaries. As a consequence of these various
activities, by r 864 serfdom had been abolished, and a fairly modern
system of law, of justice, and of education had been established; local
government had been somewhat modernized; a fairly good financial and
fiscal system had been established; and an army based on universal
military service (but lacking in equipment) had been created. On the
other hand, the autocracy continued, with full power in the hands of
weak men, subject to all kinds of personal intrigues of the basest
kind; the freed serfs had no adequate lands; the newly literate were
subject to a ruthless censorship which tried to control their reading,
writing, and thinking; the newly freed and newly urbanized were subject
to constant police supervision; the non-Russian peoples of the empire
were subjected to waves of Russification and Pan-Slavism; the judicial
system and the fiscal system were administered with an arbitrary
disregard of all personal rights or equity; and, in general, the
autocracy was both tyrannical and weak.
The
first period of reform in
the nineteenth century, that under Alexander I, resulted from a fusion
of two factors: the "conscience-stricken gentry" and the westernizing
autocracy. Alexander himself represented both factors. As a result of
his reforms and those of his grandmother, Catherine the Great, even
earlier, there appeared in Russia, for the first time, a new educated
class which was wider than the gentry, being recruited from sons of
Orthodox priests or of state officials (including army officers) and,
in general, from the fringes of the autocracy and the gentry. When the
autocracy became reactionary under Nicholas I, this newly educated
group, with some support from the conscience-stricken gentry, formed a
revolutionary group generally called the "Intelligentsia." At first
this new group was pro-Western, but later it became increasingly
anti-Western and "Slavophile" because of its disillusionment with the
West. In general, the Westernizers argued that Russia was merely a
backward and barbaric fringe of Western Civilization, that it had made
no cultural contribution of its own in its past, and that it must pass
through the same economic, political, and social developments as the
West. The Westernizers wished to speed up these developments.
The
Slavophiles insisted that
Russia was an entirely different civilization from Western Civilization
and was much superior because it had a profound spirituality (as
contrasted with Western materialism), it had a deep irrationality in
intimate touch with vital forces and simple living virtues (in contrast
to Western rationality, artificiality, and hypocrisy), it had its own
native form of social organization, the peasant village (commune)
providing a fully satisfying social and emotional life (in contrast to
Western frustration of atomistic individualism in sordid cities); and
that a Socialist society could be built in Russia out of the simple
self-governing, cooperative peasant commune without any need to pass
along the Western route marked by industrialism, bourgeoisie supremacy,
or parliamentary democracy.
As
industrialism grew in the
West, in the period 1830-1850, the Russian Westernizers like P. Y.
Chaadayev (1793-1856) and Alexander Herzen (1812-1870) became
increasingly disillusioned with the West, especially with its urban
slums, factory system, social disorganization, middle-class
money-grubbing and pettiness, its absolutist state, and its advanced
weapons. Originally the Westernizers in Russia had been inspired by
French thinkers, while the Slavophiles had been inspired by German
thinkers like Schelling and Hegel, so that the shift from Westernizers
to Slavophiles marked a shift from French to Germanic teachers.
The
Slavophiles supported
orthodoxy and monarchy, although they were very critical of the
existing Orthodox Church and of the existing autocracy. They claimed
that the latter was a Germanic importation, and that the former,
instead of remaining a native organic growth of Slavic spirituality,
had become little more than a tool of autocracy. Instead of supporting
these institutions, many Slavophiles went out into the villages to get
in touch with pure Slavic spirituality and virtue in the shape of the
untutored peasant. These missionaries, called "narodniki," were greeted
with unconcealed suspicion and distaste by the peasants, because they
were city-bred strangers, were educated, and expressed anti-Church and
anti-governmental ideas.
Already
disillusioned with the
West, the Church, and the government, and now rejected by the peasants,
the Intelligentsia could find no social group on which to base a reform
program. The result was the growth of nihilism and of anarchism.
Nihilism
was a rejection of
all conventions in the name of individualism, both of these concepts
understood in a Russian sense. Since man is a man and not an animal
because of his individual development and growth in a society made up
of conventions, the nihilist rejection of conventions served to destroy
man rather than to liberate him as they expected. The destruction of
conventions would not raise man to be an angel, but would lower him to
be an animal. Moreover, the individual that the nihilists sought to
liberate by this destruction of conventions was not what Western
culture understands by the word "individual." Rather it was "humanity."
The nihilists had no respect whatever for the concrete individual or
for individual personality. Rather, by destroying all conventions and
stripping all persons naked of all conventional distinctions, they
hoped to sink everyone, and especially themselves, into the amorphous,
indistinguishable mass of humanity. The nihilists were completely
atheist materialist, irrational, doctrinaire, despotic, and violent.
They rejected all thought of self so long as humanity suffered; they
"became atheists because they could not accept a Creator Who made an
evil, incomplete world full of suffering"; they rejected all thought,
all art, all idealism, all conventions, because these were superficial,
unnecessary luxuries and therefore evil; they rejected marriage,
because it was conventional bondage on the freedom of love; they
rejected private property, because it was a tool of individual
oppression; some even rejected clothing as a corruption of natural
innocence; they rejected vice and licentiousness as unnecessary
upper-class luxuries; as Nikolai Berdyaev put it: "It is Orthodox
asceticism turned inside out, and asceticism without Grace. At the base
of Russian nihilism, when grasped in its purity and depth, lies the
Orthodox rejection of the world . . ., the acknowledgment of the
sinfulness of all riches and luxury, of all creative profusion in art
and in thought.... Nihilism considers as sinful luxury not only art,
metaphysics, and spiritual values, but religion also.... Nihilism is a
demand for nakedness, for the stripping of oneself of all the trappings
of culture, for the annihilation of all historical traditions, for the
setting free of the natural man.... The intellectual asceticism of
nihilism found expression in materialism; any more subtle philosophy
was proclaimed a sin.... Not to be a materialist was to be taken as a
moral suspect. If you were not a materialist, then you were in favour
of the enslavement of man both intellectually and politically." [N.
Berdyaev, Origin of Russian Communism (London,
Geoffrey Bles, 1948), p. 45.]
This
fantastic philosophy is
of great significance because it prepared the ground for Bolshevism.
Out of the same spiritual sickness which produced nihilism emerged
anarchism. To the anarchist, as revealed by the founder of the
movement, Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876), the chief of all enslaving and
needless conventionalities was the state. The discovery that the state
was not identical with society, a discovery which the West had made a
thousand years earlier than Russia, could have been a liberating
discovery to Russia if, like the West, the Russians had been willing to
accept both state and society, each in its proper place. But this was
quite impossible in the Russian tradition of fanatical totalitarianism.
To this tradition the totalitarian state had been found evil and must,
accordingly, be completely destroyed, and replaced by the totalitarian
society in which the individual could be absorbed. Anarchism was the
next step after the disillusionment of the narodniki and the agitations
of the nihilists. The revolutionary Intelligentsia, unable to find any
social group on which to base a reform program, and convinced of the
evil of all conventional establishments and of the latent perfection in
the Russian masses, adopted a program of pure political direct action
of the simplest kind: assassination. Merely by killing the leaders of
states (not only in Russia but throughout the world), governments could
be eliminated and the masses freed for social cooperation and agrarian
Socialism. From this background came the assassination of Czar
Alexander II in 1881, of King Humbert of Italy in 1900, of President
McKinley in 1901, as well as many anarchist outrages in Russia, Spain,
and Italy in the period 1890-1910. The failure of governments to
disappear in the face of this terrorist agitation, especially in
Russia, where the oppression of autocracy increased after 1881, led,
little by little, to a fading of the Intelligentsia’s faith in
destructive violence as a constructive action, as well as in the
satisfying peasant commune, and in the survival of natural innocence in
the unthinking masses.
Just
at this point, about
1890, a great change began in Russia. Western industrialism began to
grow under governmental and foreign auspices; an urban proletariat
began to appear, and Marxist social theory came in from Germany. The
growth of industrialism settled the violent academic dispute between
Westerners and Slavophiles as to whether Russia must follow the path of
Western development or could escape it by falling back on some native
Slavic solutions hidden in the peasant commune; the growth of a
proletariat gave the revolutionaries once again a social group on which
to build; and Marxist theory gave the Intelligentsia an ideology which
they could fanatically embrace. These new developments, by lifting
Russia from the impasse it had reached in 1885, were generally
welcomed. Even the autocracy lifted the censorship to allow Marxist
theory to circulate, in the belief that it would alleviate terrorist
pressure since it eschewed direct political action, especially
assassination, and postponed revolution until after industrialization
had proceeded far enough to create a fully developed bourgeois class
and a fully developed proletariat. To be sure, the theory created by
Marx's mid-nineteenth century Germanic background was (as we shall see)
gradually changed by the age-long Russian outlook, at first by the
Leninist Bolshevik triumph over the Mensheviks and later by Stalin's
Russian nationalist victory over Lenin's more Western rationalism, but
in the period 1890-1914 the stalemate of opposed violence was broken,
and progress, punctuated by violence and intolerance, appeared.
This
period of progress
punctuated by violence which lasted from 1890 to 1914 has a number of
aspects. Of these, the economic and social development will be
discussed first, followed by the political and, lastly, the ideological.
As
late as the liberation of
the serfs in 1863, Russia was practically untouched by the industrial
process, and was indeed more backward by far than Britain and France
had been before the invention of the steam engine itself. Owing to lack
of roads, transportation was very poor except for the excellent system
of rivers, and these were frozen for months each year. Mud tracks,
impassable for part of the year and only barely passable for the rest
of the time, left villages relatively isolated, with the result that
almost all handicraft products and much agricultural produce were
locally produced and locally consumed. The serfs were impoverished
after liberation, and held at a low standard of living by having a
large part of their produce taken from them as rents to landlords and
as taxes to the state bureaucracy. This served to drain a considerable
fraction of the country's agricultural and mineral production to the
cities and to the export market. This fraction provided capital for the
growth of a modern economy after 1863, being exported to pay for the
import of the necessary machinery and industrial raw materials. This
was supplemented by the direct importation of capital from abroad,
especially from Belgium and France, while much capital, especially for
railroads, was provided by the government. Foreign capital amounted to
about one-third of all industrial capital in 1890 and rose to almost
one-half by 1900. The proportions varied from one activity to another,
the foreign portion being, in 1900, at 70 percent in the field of
mining, 42 percent in the field of metallurgical industry, but less
than lo percent in textiles. At the same date the entire capital of the
railroads amounted to 4,700 million rubles, of which 3,500 belonged to
the government. These two sources were of very great importance
because, except in textiles, most industrial development was based on
the railroads, and the earliest enterprises in heavy industry, apart
from the old charcoal metallurgy of the Ural Mountains, were foreign.
The first great railroad concession, that of the Main Company for 2,650
miles of line, was given to a French company in 1857. A British
corporation opened the exploitation of the great southern iron ore
basin at Krivoi Rog, while the German Nobel brothers began the
development of the petroleum industry at Baku (both about 1880).
As
a consequence of these
factors the Russian economy remained largely, but decreasingly, a
colonial economy for most of the period 1863-1914. There was a very low
standard of living for the Russian people, with excessive exportation
of consumers' commodities, even those badly needed by the Russian
people themselves, these being used to obtain foreign exchange to buy
industrial or luxury commodities of foreign origin to be owned by the
very small ruling class. This pattern of Russian economic organization
has continued under the Soviet regime since 1917.
The
first Russian railroad
opened in 1838, but growth was slow until the establishment of a
rational plan of development in 1857. This plan sought to penetrate the
chief agricultural regions, especially the black-earth region of the
south, in order to connect them with the chief cities of the north and
the export ports. At that time there were only 663 miles of railroads,
but this figure went up over tenfold by 1871, doubled again by 1881
(with 14,000 miles), reached 37,000 by 1901, and 46,600 by 1915. This
building took place in two great waves, the first in the decade
18661875 and the second in the fifteen years 1891-1905. In these two
periods averages of over 1,400 miles of track were constructed
annually, while in the intervening fifteen years, from 1876 to 1890,
the average construction was only 631 miles per year. The decrease in
this middle period resulted from the "great depression" in western
Europe in 1873-1893, and culminated, in Russia, in the terrible famine
of 1891. After this last date, railroad construction was pushed
vigorously by Count Sergei Witte, who advanced from station-master to
Minister of Finance, holding the latter post from 1892 to 1903. His
greatest achievement was the single-tracked Trans-Siberian line, which
ran 6,365 miles from the Polish frontier to Vladivostok and was built
in the fourteen years 1891-1905. This line, by permitting Russia to
increase her political pressure in the Far East, brought Britain into
an alliance with Japan (1902) and brought Russia into war with Japan
(1904-1905).
The
railroads had a most
profound effect on Russia from every point of view, binding one-sixth
of the earth's surface into a single political unit and transforming
that country's economic, political, and social life. New areas, chiefly
in the steppes, which had previously been too far from markets to be
used for any purpose but pastoral activities, were brought under
cultivation (chiefly for grains and cotton), thus competing with the
central black-soil area. The drain of wealth from the peasants to the
urban and export markets was increased, especially in the period before
1890. This process was assisted hy the advent of a money economy to
those rural areas which had previously been closer to a self-sufficient
or a barter basis. This increased agricultural specialization and
weakened handicraft activities. The collection of rural products, which
had previously been in the hands of a few large commercial operators
who worked slowly on a long-term basis, largely through Russia's more
than six thousand annual fairs, w ere, after 1870, thanks to the
railroad replaced hy a horde of small, quick-turnover middlemen who
swarmed like ants through the countryside, offering the contents of
their small pouches of money for grain, hemp, hides, fats, bristles,
and feathers. This drain of goods from the rural areas was encouraged
by the government through quotas and restrictions, price differentials
and different railroad rates and taxes for the same commodities with
different destinations. As a result, Russian sugar sold in London for
about 40 percent of its price in Russia itself. Russia, with a domestic
consumption of 10.5 pounds of sugar per capita compared to
England’s 92 pounds per capita, nevertheless exported in 1900 a
quarter of its total production of 1,802 million pounds. In the same
year Russia exported almost 12 million pounds of cotton goods (chiefly
to Persia and China), although domestic consumption of cotton in Russia
was only 5.3 pounds per capita compared to England's 39 pounds. In
petroleum products, where Russia had 48 percent of the total world
production in 1900, about 13.3 percent was exported, although Russian
consumption was only 12 pounds per capita each year compared to
Germany’s 42 pounds. In one of these products kerosene (where
Russia had the strongest potential domestic demand), almost 60 percent
of the domestic production was exported. The full extent of this drain
of wealth from the rural areas can be judged from the export figures in
general. In 1891-1895 rural products formed 75 percent (and cereals 40
percent) of the total value of all Russian exports. Moreover, it was
the better grains which were exported, a quarter of the wheat drop
compared to one-fifteenth of the crop in 1900. That there was a certain
improvement in this respect, as time passed, can be seen from the fact
that the portion of the wheat crop exported fell from half in the
1800's to one-sixth in 1912-1913.
This
policy of siphoning
wealth into the export market gave Russia a favorable balance of trade
(that is, excess of exports over imports) for the whole period after
1875, providing gold and foreign exchange which allowed the country to
build up its gold reserve and to provide capital for its industrial
development. In addition, billions of rubles were obtained by sales of
bonds of the Russian government, largely in France as part of the
French effort to build up the Triple Entente. The State Bank, which had
increased its gold reserve from 475 million to 1,095 million rubles in
the period 1890-1897, was made a bank of issue in 1897 and was required
by law to redeem its notes in gold, thus placing Russia on the
international gold standard. The number of corporations in Russia
increased from 504 with 912 million rubles capital (of which 215
million was foreign) in 1889 to 1,181 corporations with 1,737 million
rubles capital (of which over 800 million was foreign) in 1899. The
proportion of industrial concerns among these corporations steadily
increased, being 58 percent of the new capital flotations in 1874-1881
as compared to only 11 percent in 1861-1873.
Much
of the impetus to
industrial advance came from the railroads, since these, in the last
decade of the nineteenth century, were by far tile chief purchasers of
ferrous metals, coal, and petroleum products. As a result, there was a
spectacular outburst of economic productivity in this decade, followed
by a decade of lower prosperity after 1900. The production of pig iron
in the period 1860-1870 ranged about 350 thousand tons a year, rose to
997 thousand tons in 1890, to almost 1.6 million tons in 1895, and
reached a peak of 3.3 million tons in 1900. During this period, iron
production shifted from the charcoal foundries of the Urals to the
modern coke furnaces of the Ukraine, the percentages of the total
Russian production being 67 percent from the Urals to 6 percent from
the south in 1870 and 20 percent from the Urals with 67 percent from
the south in 1913. The production figure for 1900 was not exceeded
during the next decade, but rose after 1909 to reach 4.6 million tons
in 1913. This compared with 14.4 million tons in Germany, 31.5 million
in the United States, or almost 9 million in the United Kingdom.
Coal
production presents a
somewhat similar picture, except that its growth continued through the
decade 1900-1910. Production rose from 750 thousand tons in 1870 to
over 3.6 million tons in 1880 and reached almost 7 million in 1890 and
almost 17.5 million in 1900. From this point, coal production, unlike
pig iron, continued upward to 26.2 million tons in 1908 and to 36
million in 1913. This last figure compares to Germany's production of
190 million tons, American production of 517 million tons, and British
production of 287 million tons in that same year of 1913. In coal, as
in pig iron, there was a geographic shift of the center of production,
one-third of the Russian coal coming from the Donetz area in 1860 while
more than two-thirds came from that area in 1900 and 70 percent in 1913.
In
petroleum there was a
somewhat similar geographic shift in the center of production, Baku
having better than go percent of the total in every year from 1870
until after 1900 when the new Grozny fields and a steady decline in
Baku's output reduced the latter's percentage to 85 in 1910 and to 83
in 1913. Because of this decline in Baku's output, Russian production
of petroleum, which soared until 1901, declined after that year.
Production was only 35,000 tons in 1 870, rose to 600,000 tons in 1880,
then leaped to 4.8 million tons in 1890, to 11.3 million in 1900, and
reached its peak of over 12 million tons in the following year. For the
next twelve years output hovered somewhat below 8.4 million tons.
Because
the
industrialization of Russia came so late, it was (except in textiles)
on a large-scale basis from the beginning and was organized on a basis
of financial capitalism after 1870 and of monopoly capitalism after
1902. Although factories employing over 500 workers amounted
to
only 3 percent of all factories in the 1890's, 4 percent in 1903, and 5
percent in 1910, these factories generally employed over half of all
factory workers. This was a far higher percentage than in Germany or
the United States, and made it easier for labor agitators to organize
the workers in these Russian factories. Moreover, although Russia as a
whole was not highly industrialized and output per worker or per unit
for Russia as a whole was low (because of the continued existence of
older forms of production), the new Russian factories were built with
the most advanced technological equipment, sometimes to a degree which
the untrained labor supply could not utilize. In 1912 the output of pig
iron per furnace in the Ukraine was higher than in western Europe by a
large margin, although smaller than in the United States by an equally
large margin. Although the quantity of mechanical power available on a
per capita basis for the average Russian was low in 1908 compared to
western Europe or America (being only 1.6 horsepower per 100 persons in
Russia compared to 25 in the United States, 24 in England, and 13 in
Germany), the horsepower per industrial worker was higher in Russia
than in any other continental country (being 92 horsepower per 100
workers in Russia compared to 85 in France, 73 in Germany, 153 in
England, and 282 in the United States). All this made the Russian
economy an economy of contradictions. Though the range of technical
methods was very wide, advanced techniques were lacking completely in
some fields, and even whole fields of necessary industrial activities
(such as machine tools or automobiles) were lacking. The economy w as
poorly integrated, was extremely dependent on foreign trade (both for
markets and for essential products), and was very dependent on
government assistance, especially on government spending
While
the great mass of the
Russian people continued, as late as 1914, to live much as they had
lived for generations, a small number lived in a new, and very
insecure, world of industrialism, where they were at the mercy of
foreign or governmental forces over which they had little control. The
managers of this new world sought to improve their positions, not by
any effort to create a mass market in the other, more primitive,
Russian economic world by improved methods of distribution, by
reduction of prices, or by rising standards of living, but rather
sought to increase their own profit margins on a narrow market by
ruthless reduction of costs, especially wages, and by monopolistic
combinations to raise prices. These efforts led to labor agitation on
one hand and to monopolistic capitalism on the other. Economic
progress, except in some lines, was slowed up for these reasons during
the whole decade 1900-1909. Only in 1909, when a largely monopolistic
structure of industry had been created, was the increase in output of
goods resumed and the struggle with labor somewhat abated. The
earliest Russian cartels were formed with the encouragement of the
Russian government and in those activities where foreign interests were
most prevalent. In 1887 a sugar cartel was formed in order to permit
foreign dumping of this commodity. A similar agency was set up for
kerosene in 1892, but the great period of formation of such
organizations (usually in the form of joint-selling agencies) began
after the crisis of 1901. In 1902 a cartel created by a dozen iron and
steel firms handled almost three-fourths of all Russian sales of these
products. It was controlled by four foreign banking groups. A similar
cartel, ruled from Berlin, took over the sales of almost all Russian
production of iron pipe. Six Ukraine iron-ore firms in 1908 set up a
cartel controlling 80 percent of Russia's ore production. In 1907 a
cartel was created to control about three-quarters of Russia's
agricultural implements. Others handled 97 percent
of railway
cars, 94 percent of locomotives, and 94 percent of copper sales.
Eighteen Donetz coal firms in 1906 set up a cartel which sold
three-quarters of the coal output of that area.
The
creation of monopoly
was aided by a change in tariff policy. Free trade, which had been
established in the tariff of 1857, was curtailed in 1877 and abandoned
in 1891. The protective tariff of this latter year resulted
in a
severe tariff war with Germany as the Germans sought to exclude Russian
agricultural products in retaliation for the Russian tariff on
manufactured goods. This "war" was settled in 1894 by a series of
compromises, but the reopening of the German market to Russian grain
led to political agitation for protection on the part of German
landlords. They were successful, as we shall see, in 1900 as a result
of a deal with the German industrialists to support Tirpitz's naval
building program.
On
the eve of the First World
War, the Russian economy was in a very dubious state of health. As we
have said, it was a patchwork affair, very much lacking in integration,
very dependent on foreign and government support, racked by labor
disturbances, and, what was even more threatening, by labor
disturbances based on political rather than on economic motives, and
shot through with all kinds of technological weaknesses and discords. As
an example of the last, we might mention the fact that over half of
Russia's pig iron was made with charcoal as late as 1900 and some of
Russia's most promising natural resources were left unused as a result
of the restrictive outlook of monopoly capitalists. The
failure to
develop a domestic market left costs of distribution fantastically high
and left the Russian per capita consumption of almost all important
commodities fantastically low. Moreover, to make matters worse, Russia
as a consequence of these things was losing ground in the race of
production with France, Germany, and the United States.
These
economic developments
had profound political effects under the weak-willed Czar Nicholas II
(1894-1917). For about a decade Nicholas tried to combine ruthless
civil repression, economic advance, and an imperialist foreign policy
in the Balkans and the Far East, with pious worldwide publicity for
peace and universal disarmament, domestic distractions like
anti-Semitic massacres (pogroms), forged terroristic documents, and
faked terroristic attempts on the lives of high officials, including
himself. This unlikely melange collapsed completely in 1905-1908. When
Count Witte attempted to begin some kind of constitutional development
by getting in touch with the functioning units of local government (the
zemstvos, which had been effective in the famine of 1891), he was
ousted from his position by an intrigue led by the murderous Minister
of Interior Vyacheslav Plehve (1903). The civil head of the Orthodox
Church, Konstantin Pobedonostsev (1827-1907) persecuted all dissenting
religions, while allowing the Orthodox Church to become enveloped in
ignorance and corruption. Most Roman Catholic monasteries in Poland
were confiscated, while priests of that religion were forbidden to
leave their villages. In Finland construction of Lutheran churches was
forbidden, and schools of this religion were taken over by the Moscow
government. The Jews were persecuted, restricted to certain provinces
(the Pale), excluded form most economic activities, subjected to heavy
taxes (even on their religious activities), and allowed to form only
ten percent of the pupils in schools (eve in villages which were almost
completely Jewish and where the schools were supported entirely by
Jewish taxes). Hundreds of Jews were massacred and thousands of their
buildings wrecked in systematic three-day pogroms tolerated and
sometimes encouraged by the police. Marriages (and children) of Roman
Catholic Uniates were made illegitimate. The Moslems in Asia and
elsewhere were also persecuted.
Every
effort was made to
Russify non-Russian national groups, especially on the western
frontiers. The Finns, Baltic Germans, and Poles were not allowed to use
their own languages in public life, and had to use Russian even in
private schools and even on the primary level. Administrative autonomy
in these areas, even that solemnly promised to Finland long before, was
destroyed, and they were dominated by Russian police, Russian
education, and the Russian Army. The peoples of these areas were
subjected to military conscription more rigorously than the Russians
themselves, and were Russified while in the ranks.
Against
the Russians
themselves, unbelievable extremes of espionage, counterespionage,
censorship, provocation, imprisonment without trial, and outright
brutality were employed. The revolutionaries responded with similar
measures crowned by assassination. No one could trust anyone else,
because revolutionaries were in the police, and members of the police
were in the highest ranks of the revolutionaries. Georgi Gapon, a
priest secretly in the pay of the government, was encouraged to form
labor unions and lead workers' agitations in order to increase the
employers' dependence on the autocracy, but when, in 1905, Gapon led a
mass march of workers to the Winter Palace to present a petition to the
czar, they were attacked by the troops and hundreds were shot. Gapon
was murdered the following year by the revolutionaries as a traitor. In
order to discredit the revolutionaries, the central Police Department
in St. Petersburg "printed at the government expense violent appeals to
riot" which were circulated all over the country by an organization of
reactionaries. In one year (1906) the government exiled 35,000 persons
without trial and executed over 600 persons under a new decree which
fixed the death penalty for ordinary crimes like robbery or insults to
officials. In the three years 1906-1908, 5,140 officials were killed or
wounded, and 2,328 arrested persons were executed. In 1909 it was
revealed that a police agent, Azeff, had been a member of the Central
Committee of the Socialist Revolutionaries for years and had
participated in plots to murder high officials, including Plehve and
the Grand Duke Sergius, without warning these. The former chief of
police who revealed this fact was sent to prison for doing so.
Under
conditions such as these
no sensible government was possible and all appeals for moderation were
crushed between the extremists from both sides. The defeats of Russian
forces in the war with Japan in 1904-1905 brought events to a head. All
dissatisfied groups began to agitate, culminating in a successful
general strike in October 1905. The emperor began to offer political
reforms, although what was extended one day was frequently taken back
shortly after. A consultative assembly, the Duma, was established,
elected on a broad suffrage but by very complicated procedures designed
to reduce the democratic element. In the face of agrarian atrocities,
endless strikes, and mutinies in both the army and navy, the censorship
was temporarily lifted, and the first Duma met (May 1906). It had a
number of able men and was dominated by two hastily organized political
parties, the Cadets (somewhat left of Center) and the Octobrists
(somewhat right of Center). Plans for wholesale reform were in the
w-ind, and, when the czar's chief minister rejected such plans, he was
overwhelmingly censured by the Duma. After weeks of agitation the czar
tried to form an Octobrist ministry, but this group refused to govern
without Cadet cooperation, and the latter refused to join a coalition
government. The czar named Pëtr Stolypin chief minister, dissolved
the first Duma, and called for election of a new one. Stolypin was a
severe man, willing to move slowly in the direction of economic and
political reform but determined to crush without mercy any suspicion of
violence or illegal actions. The full power of the government was used
to get a second Duma more to its taste, outlawing most of the Cadets,
previously the largest party, and preventing certain classes and groups
from campaigning or voting. The result was a new Duma of much less
ability, much less discipline, and with many unknown faces. The Cadets
were reduced from 150 to 123, the Octobrists from about 42 to 32, while
there were 46 extreme Right, 54 Marxist Social Democrats, 35 Social
Revolutionaries, at least 100 assorted Laborites, and scattered others.
This group devoted much of its time to debating whether terrorist
violence should be condemned. W hen Stolypin demanded that the Social
Democrats (Marxists) should be kicked out, the Duma referred the matter
to a committee; the assembly was immediately dissolved, and new
elections were fixed for a third Duma (June, 1908). Under powerful
government intimidation, which included sending 31 Social Democrats to
Siberia, the third Duma was elected. It was mostly an upperclass and
upper-middle-class body, with the largest groups being 154 Octobrists
and 54 Cadets. This body was sufficiently docile to remain for five
years (1907-1912). During this period both the Duma and the government
followed a policy of drift, except for Stolypin. Until 1910 this
energetic administrator continued his efforts to combine oppression and
reform, especially agrarian reform. Rural credit banks were
established; various measures were taken to place larger amounts of
land in the hands of peasants; restrictions on the migration of
peasants, especially to Siberia, were removed; participation in local
government was opened to lower social classes previously excluded;
education, especially technical education, w as made more accessible;
and certain provisions for social insurance were enacted into law.
After the Bosnian crisis of 1908 (to be discussed later), foreign
affairs became increasingly absorbing, and by 1910 Stolypin had lost
his enthusiasm for reform, replacing it by senseless efforts at
Russification of the numerous minority groups. He was assassinated in
the presence of the czar in 1911.
The
fourth Duma (1912-1916)
was similar to the third, elected by complicated procedures and on a
restricted suffrage. The policy of drift continued, and was more
obvious since no energetic figure like Stolypin was to be found. On the
contrary, the autocracy sank deeper into a morass of superstition and
corruption. The influence of the czarina became more pervasive, and
through her was extended the power of a number of religious mystics and
charlatans, especially Rasputin. The imperial couple had ardently
desired a son from their marriage in 1894. After the births of four
daughters, their wish was fulfilled in 1904. Unfortunately, the new
czarevich, Alexis, had inherited from his mother an incurable disease,
hemophilia. Since his blood would not clot, the slightest cut
endangered his life. This weakness merely exaggerated the czarina's
fanatical devotion to her son and her determination to see him become
czar with the powers of that office undiminished by any constitutional
or parliamentary innovations. After 1907 she fell under the influence
of a strange wanderer, Rasputin, a man whose personal habits and
appearance were both vicious and filthy but who had the power, she
believed, to stop the czarevich’s bleeding. The czarina fell
completely under Rasputin’s control and, since the czar was
completely under her control, Rasputin became the ruler of Russia,
intermittently at first, but then completely. This situation lasted
until he was murdered in December 1916. Rasputin used his power to
satisfy his personal vices, to accumulate wealth by corruption, and to
interfere in every branch of the government, always in a destructive
and unprogressive sense. As Sir Bernard Pares put it, speaking of the
czarina, "Her letters to Nicholas day by day contain the instructions
which Rasputin gave on every detail of administration of the
Empire—the Church, the Ministers, finance, railways, food supply,
appointments, military operations, and above all the Duma, and a simple
comparison of the dates with the events which followed shows that in
almost every case they were carried out. In all her recommendations for
ministerial posts, most of which are adopted, one of the primary
considerations is always the attitude of the given candidate to
Rasputin."
As
the autocracy became
increasingly corrupt and irresponsible in this way, the slow growth
toward a constitutional system which might have developed from the
zemstvo system of local government and the able membership of the first
Duma was destroyed. The resumption of economic expansion after 1909
could not counterbalance the pernicious influence of the political
paralysis. This situation was made even more hopeless by the growing
importance of foreign affairs after 1908 and the failure of
intellectual life to grow in any constructive fashion. The first of
these complications will be discussed later; the second deserves a few
words here.
The
general trend of
intellectual development in Russia in the years before 1914 could
hardly be regarded as hopeful. To be sure, there were considerable
advances in some fields such as literacy, natural science, mathematics,
and economic thought, but these contributed little to any growth of
moderation or to Russia's greatest intellectual need, a more integrated
outlook on life. The influence of the old Orthodox religious attitude
continued even in those who most emphatically rejected it. The basic
attitude of the Western tradition had grown toward diversity and
toleration, based on the belief that every aspect of life and of human
experience and every individual has some place in the complex structure
of reality if that place can only be found and that, accordingly, unity
of the whole of life can be reached by way of diversity rather than by
any compulsory uniformity. This idea was entirely foreign to the
Russian mind. Any Russian thinker, and hordes of other Russians with no
capacity for thought, were driven by an insatiable thirst to find the
"key" to life and to truth. Once this "key" has been found, all other
aspects of human experience must be rejected as evil, and all men must
be compelled to accept that key as the whole of life in a dreadful
unity of uniformity. To make matters worse' many Russian thinkers
sought to analyze the complexities of human experience by polarizing
these into antitheses of mutually exclusive dualisms: Westerners versus
Slavophiles, individualism versus community, freedom versus fate,
revolutionary versus reactionary, nature versus conventions, autocracy
versus anarchy, and such. There was no logical correlation between
these, so that individual thinkers frequently embraced either side of
any antithesis, forming an incredible mixture of emotionally held
faiths. Moreover, individual thinkers frequently shifted from one side
to another, or even oscillated back and forth between the extremes of
these dualisms. In the most typical Russian minds both extremes were
held simultaneously, regardless of logical compatibility, in some kind
of higher mystic unity beyond rational analysis. Thus, Russian thought
provides us with striking examples of God-intoxicated atheists,
revolutionary reactionaries, violent non-resisters, belligerent
pacifists, compulsory liberators, and individualistic totalitarians.
The
basic characteristic of
Russian thought is its extremism. This took two forms: (1) any portion
of human experience to which allegiance was given became the whole
truth, demanding total allegiance, all else being evil deception; and
(2) every living person was expected to accept this same portion or be
damned as a minion of anti-Christ. Those who embraced the state were
expected to embrace it as an autocracy in which the individual had no
rights, else their allegiance was not pure; those who denied the state
were expected to reject it utterly by adopting anarchism. Those who
became materialists had to become complete nihilists without place for
any convention, ceremony, or sentiment. Those who questioned some minor
aspect of the religious system were expected to become militant
atheists, and if they did not take this step themselves, were driven to
it by the clergy. Those who were considered to be spiritual or said
they were spiritual were forgiven every kind of corruption and lechery
(like Rasputin) because such material aspects were irrelevant. Those
who sympathized with the oppressed were expected to bury themselves in
the masses, living like them, eating dike them, dressing like them, and
renouncing all culture and thought (if they believed the masses lacked
these things).
The
extremism of Russian
thinkers can be seen in their attitudes toward such basic aspects of
human experience as property, reason, the state, art, sex, or power.
Always there was a fanatical tendency to eliminate as sinful and evil
anything except the one aspect which the thinker considered to be the
key to the cosmos. Alexei Khomyakov (1804-1860), a Slavophile, wanted
to reject reason completely, regarding it as “the mortal sin of
the West,” while Fëdor Dostoevski (1821-1881) went so far in
this direction that he wished to destroy all logic and all arithmetic,
seeking, he said, “to free humanity from the tyranny of two plus
two equals four.” Many Russian thinkers, long before the Soviets,
regarded all property as sinful. Others felt the same way about sex.
Leo Tolstoi, the great novelist and essayist (1828-1910), considered
all property and all sex to be evil. Western thought, which has usually
tried to find a place in the cosmos for everything and has felt that
anything is acceptable in its proper place, recoils from such
fanaticism. The West, for example, has rarely felt it necessary to
justify the existence of art, but many thinkers in Russia (like Plato
long ago) have rejected all art as evil. Tolstoi, among others, had
moments (as in the essay What Is Art? Of 1897 or On
Shakespeare and the Drama of
1903) when he denounced most art and literature, including his own
novels, as vain, irrelevant, and satanic. Similarly the West, while it
has sometimes looked askance at sex and more frequently has
over-emphasized it, has generally felt that sex had a proper function
in its proper place. In Russia, however, many thinkers including once
again Tolstoi (The Kreutzer Sonata of 1889), have
insisted that
sex was evil in all places and under all circumstances, and most sinful
in marriage. The disruptive effects of such ideas upon social or family
life can be seen in the later years of Tolstoi's personal life,
culminating in his last final hatred of his long-suffering wife whom he
came to regard as the instrument of his fall from grace. But while
Tolstoi praised marriage without sex, other Russians, with even greater
vehemence, praised sex without marriage, regarding this social
institution as an unnecessary impediment in the path of pure human
impulse.
In
some ways we find in
Tolstoi the culmination of Russian thought. He rejected all power, all
violence, most art, all sex, all public authority, and all property as
evil. To him the key of the universe was to he found in Christ's
injunction, "Resist not evil." All other aspects of Christ's teachings
except those which flow directly from this were rejected, including any
belief in Christ's divinity or in a personal God. From this injunction
flowed Tolstoi's ideas of nonviolence and nonresistance and his faith
that only in this way could man's capacity for a spiritual love so
powerful that it could solve all social problems he liberated. This
idea of Tolstoi, although based on Christ's injunction, is not so much
a reflection of Christianity as it is of the basic Russian assumption
that any physical defeat must represent a spiritual victory, and that
the latter could be achieved only through the former.
Such
a point of view could be
held only by persons to whom all prosperity or happiness is not only
irrelevant but sinful. And this point of view could be held with such
fanaticism only by persons to whom life, family, or any objective gain
is worthless. This is a dominant idea in all the Russian
Intelligentsia, an idea going back through Plato to ancient Asia: All
objective reality is of no importance except as symbols for some
subjective truth. This was, of course, the point of view of the
Neoplatonic thinkers of the early Christian period. It was generally
the point of view of the early Christian heretics and of those Western
heretics like the Cathari (Albigenses) who were derived from this
Eastern philosophic position. In modern Russian thought it is well
represented by Dostoevski, who while chronologically earlier than
Tolstoi is spiritually later. To Dostoevski every object and every act
is merely a symbol for some elusive spiritual truth. From this point of
view comes an outlook which makes his characters almost
incomprehensible to the average person in the Western tradition: if
such a character obtains a fortune, he cries, "I am ruined!" If he is
acquitted on a murder charge, or seems likely to be, he exclaims, "I am
condemned," and seeks to incriminate himself in order to ensure the
punishment which is so necessary for his own spiritual self-acquittal.
If he deliberately misses his opponent in a duel, he has a guilty
conscience, and says, "I should not have injured him thus; I should
have killed him!" In each case the speaker cares nothing about
property, punishment, or life. He cares only about spiritual values:
asceticism, guilt, remorse, injury to one's self-respect. In the same
way, the early religious thinkers, both Christian and non-Christian,
regarded all objects as symbols for spiritual values, all temporal
success as an inhibition on spiritual life, and felt that wealth could
be obtained only by getting rid of property, life could be found only
by dying (a direct quotation from Plato), eternity could be found only
if time ended, and the soul could be freed only if the body were
enslaved. Thus, as late as 1910 when Tolstoi died, Russia remained true
to its Greek-Byzantine intellectual tradition.
We
have noted that Dostoevski,
who lived slightly before Tolstoi, nevertheless had ideas which were
chronologically in advance of Tolstoi's ideas. In fact, in many ways,
Dostoevski was a precursor of the Bolsheviks. Concentrating his
attention on poverty, crime, and human misery, always seeking the real
meaning behind every overt act or word, he eventually reached a
position where the distinction between appearance and significance
became so wide that these two were in contradiction with each other.
This contradiction was really the struggle between God and the Devil in
the soul of man. Since this struggle is without end, there is no
solution to men's problems except to face suffering resolutely. Such
suffering purges men of all artificiality and joins them together in
one mass. In this mass the Russian people, because of their greater
suffering and their greater spirituality, are the hope of the world and
must save the world from the materialism, violence, and selfishness of
Western civilization. The Russian people, on the other hand, filled
with self-sacrifice, and with no allegiance to luxury or material gain,
and purified by suffering which makes them the brothers of all other
suffering people, will save the world by taking up the sword of
righteousness against the forces of evil stemming from Europe.
Constantinople will be seized, all the Slavs will be liberated, and
Europe and the world will be forced into freedom by conquest, so that
Moscow many become the Third Rome. Before Russia is fit to save the
world in this way, however, the Russian intellectuals must merge
themselves in the great mass of the suffering Russian people, and the
Russian people must adopt Europe's science and technology
uncontaminated by any European ideology. The blood spilled in this
effort to extend Slav brotherhood to the whole world by force will aid
the cause, for suffering shared will make men one.
This
mystical Slav imperialism
with its apocalyptical overtones was by no means uniquely Dostoevski's.
It was held in a vague and implicit fashion by many Russian thinkers,
and had a wide appeal to the unthinking masses. It was implied in much
of the propaganda of Pan-Slavism, and became semiofficial with the
growth of this propaganda after 1908. It was widespread among the
Orthodox clergy, who emphasized the reign of righteousness which would
follow the millennialist establishment of Moscow as the "Third Rome."
It was explicitly stated in a book, Russia and Europe,
published in 1869 by Nicholas Danilevsky (1822-1885). Such ideas, as we
shall see, did not die out with the passing of the Romanov autocracy in
1917, but became even more influential, merging with the Leninist
revision of Marxism to provide the ideology of Soviet Russia after 1917.
Part Four—The
Buffer Fringe
In
the first half of the
twentieth century the power structure of the world was entirely
transformed. In 1900, European civilization, led by Britain and
followed by other states at varying distances, was still spreading
outward, disrupting the cultures of other societies unable to resist
and frequently without any desire to resist. The European structure
which pushed outward formed a hierarchy of power, wealth, and prestige
with Britain at the top, followed by a secondary rank of other Great
Powers, by a tertiary rank of the wealthy secondary Powers (like
Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden), and by a quaternary rank of the
lesser or decadent Powers (like Portugal or Spain, whose world
positions were sustained by British power).
At
the turn of the twentieth
century the first cracklings of impending disaster were emitted from
this power structure but were generally ignored: in 1896 the Italians
were massacred by the Ethiopians at Adowa; in 1899-1902 the whole might
of Britain was held in check by the small Boer republics in the South
African War; and in 1904-1905 Russia was defeated by a resurgent Japan.
These omens were generally not heeded, and European civilization
continued on its course to Armageddon.
By
the second half of the
twentieth century, the power structure of the world presented a quite
different picture. In this new situation the world consisted of three
great zones: (1) Orthodox civilization under the Soviet Empire,
occupying the heartland of Eurasia; (2) surrounding this, a fringe of
dying and shattered cultures: Islamic, Hindu, Malayan, Chinese,
Japanese, Indonesian, and others: and (3) outside this fringe, and
chiefly responsible for shattering its cultures, Western Civilization.
Moreover, Western Civilization had been profoundly modified. In 1900 it
had consisted of a core area in Europe with peripheral areas in the
Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and the fringes of Africa. By 1950
Western Civilization had its center of power in America, the fringes in
Africa were being lost, and Europe had been so reduced in power, in
wealth, and in prestige that it seemed to many that it must make a
choice between becoming a satellite in an American-dominated Western
Civilization or joining with the buffer fringe to try to create a Third
Force able to hold a balance of power between America and the Soviet
bloc. This impression was mistaken, and by the late 1950's Europe was
in a position, once again, to play an independent role in world affairs.
In
previous chapters we have
examined the background of Western Civilization and of the Russian
Empire to the second decade of the twentieth century. In the present
chapter we shall examine the situation in the buffer fringe until about
the end of that same decade. At the beginning of the twentieth century
the areas which were to become the buff r fringe consisted of (1) the
Near East dominated by the Ottoman Empire, (2) the Middle East
dominated by the British Empire in India, and (3) the Far East,
consisting of two old civilizations, China and Japan. On the outskirts
of these were the lesser colonial areas of Africa, Malaysia, and
Indonesia. At this point we shall consider the three major areas of the
buffer fringe with a brief glance at Africa.
Chapter
8—The Near East to 1914
For
the space of over a
century, from shortly after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815
until 1922, the relationships of the Great Powers were exacerbated by
what was known as the "Near East Question." This problem, which arose
from the growing weakness of the Ottoman Empire, was concerned with the
question of what would become of the lands and peoples left without
government by the retreat of Turkish power. The problem was made more
complex by the fact that Turkish power did not withdraw but rather
decayed right were it was, so that in many areas it continued to exist
in law when it had already ceased to function in fact because of the
weakness and corruption of the sultan's government. The Turks
themselves sought to maintain their position, not by remedying their
weakness and corruption by reform, but by playing off one European
state against another and hy using cruel and arbitrary actions against
any of their subject peoples who dared to become restive under their
rule.
The
Ottoman Empire reached its
peak in the period 1526-1533 with the conquest of Hungary and the first
siege of Vienna. A second siege, also unsuccessful, came in 1683. From
this point Turkish power declined and Turkish sovereignty withdrew, but
unfortunately the decline was much more rapid than the withdrawal, with
the result that subject peoples were encouraged to revolt and foreign
Powers were encouraged to intervene because of the weakness of Turkish
power in areas which were still nominally under the sultan's
sovereignty.
At
its height the Ottoman
Empire was larger than any contemporary European state in both area and
population. South of the Mediterranean it stretched from the Atlantic
Ocean in Morocco to the Persian Gulf; north of the Mediterranean it
stretched from the Adriatic Sea to the Caspian Sea, including the
Balkans as far north as Poland and the whole northern shore of the
Black Sea. This vast empire was divided into twenty-one governments and
subdivided into seventy vilayets, each under a pasha. The whole
structure was held together as a tribute-gathering military system by
the fact that the rulers in all parts were Muslims. The supreme ruler
in Constantinople was not only sultan (and thus head of the empire) but
was also caliph (and thus defender of the Muslim creed). In most of the
empire the mass of the people were Muslims like their rulers, but in
much of the empire the masses of the peoples were non-Muslims, being
Roman Christians, Orthodox Christians, Jews, or other creeds.
Linguistic
variations were
even more notable than religious distinctions. Only the peoples of
Anatolia generally spoke Turkish, while those of North Africa and the
Near East spoke various Semitic and Hamitic dialects of which the most
prevalent was Arabic. From Syria to the Caspian Sea across the base of
Anatolia were several languages, of which the chief were Kurdish and
Armenian. The shores of the Aegean Sea, especially the western, were
generally Greek-speaking. The northern shore was a confused mixture of
Turkish, Greek, and Bulgarian speaking peoples. The eastern shore of
the Adriatic was Greek-speaking up to the 40th parallel, then Albanian
for almost three degrees of latitude, merging gradually into various
South Slav languages like Croat, Slovens, and (in the interior) Serb.
The Dalmatian shore and Istria had many Italian speakers. On the Black
Sea shore Thrace itself was a mixture of Turkish, Greek, and Bulgar
from the Bosporus to the 42nd parallel where there was a solid mass of
Bulgarians. The central Balkans w as a confused area, especially in
Macedonia where Turkish, Greek, Albanian, Serb, and Bulgar met and
mingled. North of the Bulgarian-speaking groups, and generally
separated from them by the Danube, were Romanians. North of the
Croatians and Serbs, and generally separated from them by the Drava
River, were the Hungarians. The district where the Hungarians and
Romanians met, Transylvania, was confused, with great blocs of one
language being separated from their fellows by blocs of the other, the
confusion being compounded by the presence of considerable numbers of
Germans and Gypsies.
The
religious and linguistic
divisions of the Ottoman Empire were complicated by geographic, social,
and cultural divisions, especially in the Balkans. This last-named area
provided such contrasts as the relatively advanced commercial and
mercantile activities of the Greeks; primitive pastoral groups like
Albanian goat-herders; subsistence farmers scratching a living from
small plots of Macedonia's rocky soils; peasant-size farms on the
better soils of Serbia and Romania; great rich landed estates producing
for a commercial market and worked by serf labor in Hungary and
Romania. Such diversity made any hopes of political unity by consent or
by federation almost impossible in the Balkans. Indeed, it was almost
impossible to draw any political lines which would coincide with
geographic and linguistic or religious lines, because linguistic and
religious distinctions frequently indicated class distinctions. Thus
the upper and lower classes or the commercial and the agricultural
groups even in the same district often had different languages or
different religions. Such a pattern of diversity could be held together
most easily by a simple display of military force. This was what the
Turks provided. Militarism and fiscalism were the two keynotes of
Turkish rule, and were quite sufficient to hold the empire together as
long as both remained effective and the empire was free from outside
interference. But in the course of the eighteenth century Turkish
administration became ineffective and outside interference became
important.
The
sultan, who was a
completely absolute ruler, became very quickly a completely arbitrary
ruler. This characteristic extended to all his activities. He filled
his harem with any women who pleased his fancy, without any formal
ceremony. Such numerous and temporary liaisons produced numerous
children, of whom many were neglected or even forgotten. Accordingly,
the succession to the throne never became established and was never
based on primogeniture. As a consequence, the sultan came to fear
murder from almost any direction. To avoid this, he tended to surround
himself with persons who could have no possible chance of succeeding
him: women, children, Negroes, eunuchs, and Christians. All the sultans
from 1451 onward were born of slave mothers and only one sultan after
this date even bothered to contract a formal marriage. Such a way of
life isolated the sultan from his subjects completely.
This
isolation applied to the
process of government as well as to the ruler's personal life. Most of
the sultans paid little heed to government, leaving this to their grand
viziers and the local pashas. The former had no tenure, being appointed
or removed in accordance with the whims of harem intrigue. The pashas
tended to become increasingly independent, since they collected local
taxes and raised local military forces. The fact that the sultan was
also caliph (and thus religious successor to Muhammad), and the
religious belief that the government was under divine guidance and
should be obeyed, however unjust and tyrannical, made all religious
thinking on political or social questions take the form of
justification of the status quo, and made any kind
of reform
almost impossible. Reform could come only from the Sultan, but his
ignorance and isolation from society made reform unlikely. In
consequence the whole system became increasingly weak and corrupt. The
administration was chaotic, inefficient, and arbitrary. Almost nothing
could be done without gifts and bribes to officials, and it was not
always possible to know what official or series of officials were the
correct ones to reward.
The
chaos and weakness which
we have described were in full blossom by the seventeenth century, and
grew worse during the next two hundred years. As early as 1699 the
sultan lost Hungary, Transylvania, Croatia, and Slavonia to the
Habsburgs, parts of the western Balkans to Venice, and districts in the
north to Poland. In the course of the eighteenth century, Russia
acquired areas north of the Black Sea, notably the Crimea.
During
the nineteenth century,
the Near East question became increasingly acute. Russia emerged from
the Napoleonic Wars as a Great Power, able to increase its pressure on
Turkey. This pressure resulted from three motivations. Russian
imperialism sought to win an outlet to open waters in the south by
dominating the Black Sea and by winning access to the Aegean through
the acquisition of the Straits and Constantinople. Later this effort
was supplemented by economic and diplomatic pressure on Persia in order
to reach the Persian Gulf. At the same time, Russia regarded itself as
the protector of the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, and as
early as 1774 had obtained the sultan's consent to this protective
role. Moreover, as the most powerful Slav state, Russia had ambitions
to be regarded as the protector of the Slavs in the sultan's domains.
These
Russian ambitions could
never have been thwarted by the sultan alone, but he did not need to
stand alone. He generally found support from Britain and increasingly
from France. Britain was obsessed with the need to defend India, which
was a manpower pool and military staging area vital to the defense of
the whole empire. From 1840 to 1907, it faced the nightmare possibility
that Russia might attempt to cross Afghanistan to northwest India, or
cross Persia to the Persian Gulf, or penetrate through the Dardanelles
and the Aegean onto the British "lifeline to India" by way of the
Mediterranean. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 increased the
importance of this Mediterranean route to the east in British eyes. It
was protected by British forces in Gibraltar, Malta (acquired 1800),
Cyprus (1878), and Egypt (1882). In general, in spite of English
humanitarian sympathy for the peoples subject to the tyranny of the
Turk, and in spite of England's regard for the merits of good
government, British imperial policy considered that its interests would
be safer with a weak, if corrupt, Turkey in the Near East than they
would be with any Great Power in that area or with the area broken up
into small independent states which might fall under the influence of
the Great Powers.
The
French concern with
the Near East was parallel to, but weaker than, that of Britain. They
had cultural and trade relations with the Levant going back, in some
cases, to the Crusades. In addition the French had ancient claims,
revived in 1854, to he considered the protectors of Roman Catholics in
the Ottoman Empire and of the "holy places" in Jerusalem.
Three
other influences which
became increasingly strong in the Near East were the growth of
nationalism and the growing interests of Austria (after 1866) and of
Germany (after 1889). The first stirrings of Balkan nationalism can be
seen in the revolt of the Serbs in 1804-1812. By seizing Bessarabia
from Turkey in 1812, Russia won the right for local self-government for
the Serbs. Unfortunately, these latter began almost immediately to
fight one another, the chief split being between a Russophile group led
by Milan Obrenovich and a Serb nationalist group led by George
Petroviæ (better known as Karageorge). The Serb state, formally
established in 1830, was bounded by the rivers Dvina, Save, Danube, and
Timok. With local autonomy under Turkish suzerainty, it continued to
pay tribute to the sultan and to support garrisons of Turkish troops.
The vicious feud between Obrenovich and Karageorgevic continued after
Serbia obtained complete independence in 1878. The Obrenovich dynasty
ruled in 1817-1842 and 1858-1903, while the Karageorgevic group ruled
in 1842-1858 and 1903-1945. The intrigues of these two against each
other broadened into a constitutional conflict in which the Obrenovich
group supported the somewhat less liberal constitution of 1869, while
the Karageorgevic group supported the somewhat more liberal
constitution of 1889. The former constitution was in effect in 1869
1889 and again in 1894-1903, while the latter was in effect in
1889-1894 and again in 1903-1921. In order to win popular support by an
appeal to nationalist sentiments, both groups plotted against Turkey
and later against Austria-Hungary.
A
second example of Balkan
nationalism appeared in the Greek struggle for independence from the
sultan (1821-1830). After Greeks and Muslims had massacred each other
by the thousands, Greek independence was established with a
constitutional monarchy under the guarantee of the three Great Powers.
A Bavarian prince was placed on the throne and began to establish a
centralized, bureaucratic, constitutional state which was quite
unsuited for a country with such unconstitutional traditions, poor
transportation and communications, a low level of literacy, and a high
level of partisan localism. After thirty turbulent years (1832-1862),
Otto of Bavaria was deposed and replaced by a Danish prince and a
completely democratic unicameral government which functioned only
slightly better. The Danish dynasty continues to rule, although
supplanted by a republic in 1924-1935 and by military dictatorships on
sundry occasions, notably that of Joannes Metaxas (1936-1941).
The
first beginnings of Balkan
nationalism must not be overemphasized. While the inhabitants of the
area have always been unfriendly to outsiders and resentful of
burdensome governments, these sentiments deserve to be regarded as
provincialism or localism rather than nationalism. Such feelings are
prevalent among all primitive peoples and must not be regarded as
nationalism unless they are so wide as to embrace loyalty to all
peoples of the same language and culture and are organized in such
fashion that this loyalty is directed toward the state as the core of
nationalist strivings. Understood in this way, nationalism became a
very potent factor in the disruption of the Ottoman Empire only after
1878.
Closely
related to the
beginnings of Balkan nationalism were the beginnings of Pan-Slavism and
the various "pan-movements" in reaction to this, such as Pan-Islamism.
These rose to a significant level only at the very end of the
nineteenth century. Simply defined, Pan-Slavism was a movement for
cultural unity, and, perhaps in the long run, political unity among the
Slavs. In practice it came to mean the right of Russia to assume the
role of protector of the Slav peoples outside Russia itself. At times
it was difficult for some peoples, especially Russia's enemies, to
distinguish between Pan-Slavism and Russian imperialism. Equally simply
defined, Pan-Islamism was a movement for unity or at least cooperation
among all the Muslim peoples in order to resist the encroachments of
the European Powers on Muslim territories. In concrete terms it sought
to give the caliph a religious leadership, and perhaps in time a
political leadership such as he had really never previously possessed.
Both of these pan-movements are of no importance until the end of the
nineteenth century, while Balkan nationalism was only slightly earlier
than they in its rise to importance.
These
Balkan nationalists had
romantic dreams about uniting peoples of the same language, and
generally looked back, with a distorted historical perspective, to some
period when their co-linguists had played a more important political
role. The Greeks dreamed of a revived Byzantine state or even of a
Periclean Athenian Empire. The Serbs dreamed of the days of Stephen
Dushan, while the Bulgars went further back to the days of the
Bulgarian Empire of Symeon in the early tenth century. However, we must
remember that even as late as the beginning of the twentieth century
such dreams were found only among the educated minority of Balkan
peoples. In the nineteenth century, agitation in the Balkans was much
more likely to be caused by Turkish misgovernment than by any stirrings
of national feeling. Moreover, when national feeling did appear it was
just as likely to appear as a feeling of animosity against neighbors
who were different, rather than a feeling of unity with peoples who
were the same in culture and religion. And at all times localism and
class antagonisms (especially rural hostility against urban groups)
remained at a high level.
Russia
made war on Turkey five
times in the nineteenth century. On the last two occasions the Great
Powers intervened to prevent Russia from imposing its will on the
sultan. The first intervention led to the Crimean War (1854-1856) and
the Congress of Paris (1856), while the second intervention, at the
Congress of Berlin in 1878, rewrote a peace treaty which the czar had
just imposed on the sultan (Treaty of San Stefano, 1877) .
In
1853 the czar, as protector
of the Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire, occupied the
principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia north of the Danube and east
of the Carpathians. Under British pressure the sultan declared war on
Russia, and was supported by Britain, France, and Sardinia in the
ensuing "Crimean War." Under threat of joining the anti-Russian forces,
Austria forced the czar to evacuate the principalities and occupied
them herself, thus exposing an Austro-Russian rivalry in the Balkans
which continued for two generations and ultimately precipitated the
World War of 1914-1918.
The
Congress of Paris of 1856
sought to remove all possibility of any future Russian intervention in
Turkish affairs. The integrity of Turkey was guaranteed, Russia gave up
its claim as protector of the sultan's Christian subjects, the Black
Sea was "neutralized" by prohibiting all naval vessels and naval
arsenals on its waters and shores, an International Commission was set
up to assure free navigation of the Danube, and in 1862, after several
years of indecision, the two principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia,
along with Bessarabia, were allowed to form the state of Romania. The
new state remained technically under Turkish suzerainty until 1878. It
was the most progressive of the successor states of the Ottoman Empire,
with advanced educational and judicial systems based on those of
Napoleonic France, and a thorough-going agrarian reform. This last,
which was executed in two stages (1863-1866 and 1918-1921), divided up
the great estates of the Church and the nobility, and wiped away all
vestiges of manorial dues or serfdom. Under a liberal, but not
democratic, constitution, a German prince, Charles of
Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen (1866-1914), established a new dynasty which
was ended only in 1948. During this whole period the cultural and
educational systems of the country continued to be orientated toward
France in sharp contrast to the inclinations of the ruling dynasty,
which had German sympathies. The Romanian possession of Bessarabia and
their general pride in their Latin heritage, as reflected in the name
of the country, set up a barrier to good relations with Russia,
although the majority of Romanians were members of the Orthodox Church.
The
political and military
weakness of the Ottoman Empire in the face of Russian pressure and
Balkan nationalisms made it obvious that it must westernize and it must
reform, if it was going to survive. Broad verbal promises in this
direction were made by the sultan in the period 1839-1877, and there
were even certain efforts to execute these promises. The army was
reorganized on a European basis with the assistance of Prussia. Local
government was reorganized and centralized, and the fiscal system
greatly improved, chiefly by curtailing the use of tax farmers;
government officials were shifted from a fee-paid basis to a salaried
basis; the slave market was abolished, although this meant a large
reduction in the sultan's income; the religious monopoly in education
was curtailed and a considerable impetus given to secular technical
education. Finally, in 1856, in an edict forced on the sultan by the
Great Powers, an effort was made to establish a secular state in Turkey
by abolishing all inequalities based on creed in respect to personal
freedom, law, property, taxation, and eligibility for office or
military service.
In
practice, none of these
paper reforms was very effective. It was not possible to change the
customs of the Turkish people by paper enactments. Indeed, any attempt
to do so aroused the anger of many Muslims to the point where their
personal conduct toward non-Muslims became worse. At the same time,
these promises led the non-Muslims to expect better treatment, so that
relations between the various groups were exacerbated. Even if the
sultan had had every intention of carrying out his stated reforms, he
would have had extraordinary difficulties in doing so because of the
structure of Turkish society and the complete lack of trained
administrators or even of literate people. The Turkish state was a
theocratic state, and Turkish society was a patriarchal or even a
tribal society. Any movement toward secularization or toward social
equality could easily result, not in reform, but in complete
destruction of the society by dissolving the religious and
authoritarian relationships which held both the state and society
together. But the movement toward reform lacked the wholehearted
support of the sultan; it aroused the opposition of the more
conservative, and in some ways more loyal, groups of Muslims; it
aroused the opposition of many liberal Turks because it was derived
from Western pressure on Turkey; it aroused opposition from many
Christian or non-Turkish groups who feared that a successful reform
might weaken their chances of breaking up the Ottoman Empire
completely; and the efforts at reform, being aimed at the theocratic
character of the Turkish state, counteracted the sultan's efforts to
make himself the leader of Pan-Islamism and to use his title of caliph
to mobilize non-Ottoman Muslims in India, Russia, and the East to
support him in his struggles with the European Great Powers.
On
the other hand, it was
equally clear that Turkey could not meet any European state on a basis
of military equality until it was westernized. At the same time, the
cheap machinery-made industrial products of the Western Powers began to
pour into Turkey and to destroy the ability of the handicraft artisans
of Turkey to make a living. This could not be prevented by tariff
protection because the sultan was bound by international agreements to
keep his customs duties at a low level. At the same time, the appeal of
Western ways of life began to be felt by some of the sultan's subjects
who knew them. These began to agitate for industrialism or for railroad
construction, for wider opportunities in education, especially
technical education, for reforms in the Turkish language, and for new,
less formal, kinds of Turkish literature, for honest and impersonal
methods of administration in justice and public finance, and for all
those things which, by making the Western Powers strong, made them a
danger to Turkey.
The
sultan made feeble efforts
to reform in the period 1838-1875, but by the latter date he was
completely disillusioned with these efforts, and shifted over to a
policy of ruthless censorship and repression; this repression led, at
last, to the so-called "Young Turk" rebellion of 1908.
The
shift from feeble reform
to merciless repression coincided with a renewal of the Russian attacks
on Turkey. These attacks were incited by Turkish butchery of Bulgarian
agitators in Macedonia and a successful Turkish war on Serbia.
Appealing to the doctrine of Pan-Slavism, Russia came to the rescue of
the Bulgars and Serbs, and quickly defeated the Turks, forcing them to
accept the Treaty of San Stefano before any of the Western Powers could
intervene (1877). Among other provisions, this treaty set up a large
state of Bulgaria, including much of Macedonia, independent of Turkey
and under Russian military occupation.
This
Treaty of San Stefano,
especially the provision for a large Bulgarian state, which, it was
feared, would be nothing more than a Russian tool, was completely
unacceptable to England and Austria. Joining with France, Germany, and
Italy, they forced Russia to come to a conference at Berlin where the
treaty was completely rewritten (1878). The independence of Serbia,
Montenegro, and Romania was accepted, as were the Russian acquisitions
of Kars and Batum, east of the Black Sea. Romania had to give
Bessarabia to Russia, but received Dobruja from the sultan. Bulgaria
itself, the crucial issue of the conference, was divided into three
parts: (a) the strip between the Danube and the
Balkan mountains
was set up as an autonomous and tribute-paying state under Turkish
suzerainty; (b) the portion of Bulgaria south of the
mountains
was restored to the sultan as the province of Eastern Rumelia to be
ruled by a Christian governor approved by the Powers; and (c)
Macedonia, still farther south, was restored to Turkey in return for
promises of administrative reforms. Austria was given the right to
occupy Bosnia, Herzegovina, and the Sanjak of Novi-Bazar (a strip
between Serbia and Montenegro). The English, by a separate agreement
with Turkey, received the island of Cyprus to hold as long as Russia
held Batum and Kars. The other states received nothing, although Greece
submitted claims to Crete, Thessaly, Epirus, and Macedonia, while
France talked about her interest in Tunis, and Italy made no secret of
her ambitions in Tripoli and Albania. Only Germany asked for nothing,
and received the sultan's thanks and friendship for its moderation.
The
Treaty of Berlin of 1878
was a disaster from almost every point of view because it left every
state, except Austria, with its appetite whetted and its hunger
unsatisfied. The Pan-Slavs, the Romanians, the Bulgars, the South
Slavs, the Greeks, and the Turks were all disgruntled with the
settlement. The agreement turned the Balkans into an open powder keg
from which the spark was kept away only with great difficulty and only
for twenty years. It also opened up the prospect of the liquidation of
the Turkish possessions in North Africa, thus inciting a rivalry
between the Great Powers which was a constant danger to the peace in
the period 1878-1912. The Romanian loss of Bessarabia, the Bulgarian
loss of Eastern Rumelia, the South Slav loss of its hope of reaching
the Adriatic or even of reaching Montenegro (because of the Austrian
occupation of Bosnia and Novi-Bazar), the Greek failure to get Thessaly
or Crete, and the complete discomfiture of the Turks created an
atmosphere of general dissatisfaction. In the midst of this, the
promise of reforms to Macedonia without any provision for enforcing
this promise called forth hopes and agitations which could neither be
satisfied nor quieted. Even Austria, which, on the face of it, had
obtained more than she could really have expected, had obtained in
Bosnia the instrument which was to lead eventually to the total
destruction of the Habsburg Empire. This acquisition had been
encouraged by Bismarck as a method of diverting Austrian ambitions
southward to the Adriatic and out of Germany. But by placing Austria,
in this way, in the position of being the chief obstacle in the path of
the South Slav dreams of unity, Bismarck was also creating the occasion
for the destruction of the Hohenzollern Empire. It is clear that
European diplomatic history from 1878 to 1919 is little more than a
commentary on the mistakes of the Congress of Berlin.
To
Russia the events of 1878
were a bitter disappointment. Even the small Bulgarian state which
emerged from the settlement gave them little satisfaction. With a
constitution dictated by Russia and under a prince, Alexander of
Battenberg, who was a nephew of the czar, the Bulgarians showed an
uncooperative spirit which profoundly distressed the Russians. As a
result, when Eastern Rumelia revolted in 188; and demanded union with
Bulgaria, the change was opposed by Russia and encouraged by Austria.
Serbia, in its bitterness, went to war with Bulgaria but was defeated
and forced to make peace by Austria. The union of Bulgaria and Eastern
Rumelia was accepted, on face-saving terms, by the sultan. Russian
objections were kept within limits by the power of Austria and England
but were strong enough to force the abdication of Alexander of
Battenberg. Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was elected to
succeed Alexander, but was unacceptable to Russia and was recognized by
none of the Powers until his reconciliation with Russia in 1896. The
state was generally in turmoil during this period, plots and
assassinations steadily following one another. A Macedonian
revolutionary organization known as IMRO, working for independence for
their area, adopted an increasingly terrorist policy, killing any
Bulgarian or Romanian statesman who did not work wholeheartedly in
cooperation with their efforts. Agitated Bulgarians formed insurgent
bands which made raids into Macedonia, and insurrection became endemic
in the province, bursting out in full force in 1902. By that date Serb
and Greek bands had joined in the confusion. The Powers intervened at
that point to inaugurate a program of reform in Macedonia under
Austro-Russian supervision.
The
Congress of Berlin began
the liquidation of the Turkish position in North Africa. France, which
had been occupying Algeria since 1830, established a French
protectorate over Tunis as well in 1881. This led to the British
occupation of Egypt the following year. Not to be outdone, Italy put in
a claim for Tripoli but could get no more than an exchange of notes,
known as the Mediterranean Agreement of 1887, by which England, Italy,
Austria, Spain, and Germany promised to maintain the status quo in the
Mediterranean, the Adriatic, the Aegean, and the Black seas, unless all
parties agreed to changes. The only concrete advantage to Italy in this
was a British promise of support in North Africa in return for Italian
support of the British position in Egypt. This provided only tenuous
satisfaction for the Italian ambitions in Tripoli, but it was
reinforced in 1900 by a French-Italian agreement by which Italy gave
France a free hand in Morocco in return for a free hand in Tripoli.
Berlin to
Baghdad Railroad Scheme
By
1900 an entirely new factor
began to intrude into the Eastern Question. Under Bismarck (1862-1890)
Germany had avoided all non-European adventures. Under William II
(1888-1918) any kind of adventure, especially a remote and uncertain
one, was welcomed. In the earlier period Germany had concerned itself
with the Near East Question only as a member of the European "concert
of Powers" and with a few incidental issues such as the use of German
officers to train the Turkish Army. After 1889 the situation was
different. Economically, the Germans began to invade Anatolia by
establishing trading agencies and banking facilities; politically,
Germany sought to strengthen Turkey's international position in every
way. This effort was symbolized by the German Kaiser's two visits to
the sultan in 1889 and 1898. On the latter occasion he solemnly
promised his friendship to "the Sultan Abdul Hamid and the three
hundred million Muhammadans who revere him as caliph." Most important,
perhaps, was the projected "Berlin to Bagdad" railway scheme which
completed its main trunk line from the Austro-Hungarian border to
Nusaybin in northern Mesopotamia by September 1918. This project was of
the greatest economic, strategic, and political importance not only to
the Ottoman Empire and the Near East but to the whole of Europe.
Economically, it tapped a region of great mineral and agricultural
resources, including the world's greatest petroleum reserves. These
were brought into contact with Constantinople and, beyond that, with
central and northwestern Europe. Germany, which was industrialized
late, had a great, unsatisfied demand for food and raw materials and a
great capacity to manufacture industrial products which could be
exported to pay for such food and raw materials. Efforts had been made
and continued to be made by Germany to find a solution to this problem
by opening trade relations with South America, the Far East, and North
America. Banking facilities and a merchant marine were being
established to encourage such trade relations. But the Germans, with
their strong strategic sense, knew well that relations with the areas
mentioned were at the mercy of the British fleet, which would, almost
unquestionably, control the seas during wartime. The Berlin-to-Baghdad
Railway solved these crucial problems. It put the German metallurgical
industry in touch with the great metal resources of Anatolia; it put
the German textile industry in touch with the supplies of wool, cotton,
and hemp of the Balkans, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia; in fact, it brought
to almost every branch of German industry the possibility of finding a
solution for its critical market and raw-material problems. Best of
all, these connections, being almost entirely overland, would be within
reach of the German Army and beyond the reach of the British Navy.
For
Turkey itself the railway
was equally significant. Strategically it made it possible, for the
first time, for Turkey to mobilize her full power in the Balkans, the
Caucasus area, the Persian Gulf, or the Levant. It greatly increased
the economic prosperity of the whole country; it could be run (as it
was after 1911) on Mesopotamian petroleum; it provided markets and thus
incentives for increased production of agricultural and mineral
products; it greatly reduced political discontent, public disorder, and
banditry in the areas through which it ran; it greatly increased the
revenues of the Ottoman treasury in spite of the government's
engagement to pay subsidies to the railroad for each mile of track
built and for a guaranteed income per mile each year.
The Ottoman
Empire Was Divided into Exclusive Spheres of
Influence by
Money Powers
The
Great Powers showed mild
approval of the Baghdad Railway until about 1900. Then, for more than
ten years, Russia, Britain, and France showed violent disapproval, and
did all they could to obstruct the project. After 1910 this disapproval
was largely removed by a series of agreements by which the Ottoman
Empire was divided into exclusive spheres of influence. During the
period of disapproval the Great Powers concerned issued such a barrage
of propaganda against the plan that it is necessary, even today, to
warn against its influence. They described the Baghdad Railway as the
entering wedge of German imperialist aggression seeking to weaken and
destroy the Ottoman Empire and the stakes of the other Powers in the
area. The evidence shows quite the contrary. Germany was the only Great
Power which wanted the Ottoman Empire to be strong and intact. Britain
wanted it to be weak and intact. France generally shared the British
point of view, although the French, with a $500,000,000 investment in
the area, wanted Turkey to be prosperous as well. Russia wanted it to
be weak and partitioned, a view which was shared by the Italians and,
to some extent, by the Austrians.
The Baghdad
Railway
The
Germans were not only
favorably inclined toward Turkey; their conduct seems to have been
completely fair in regard to the administration of the Baghdad Railway
itself. At a time when American and other railways were practicing
wholesale discrimination between customers in regard to rates and
freight handling, the Germans had the same rates and same treatment for
all, including Germans and non-Germans. They worked to make the
railroad efficient and profitable, although their income from it was
guaranteed by the Turkish government. In consequence the Turkish
payments to the railroad steadily declined, and the government was able
to share in its profits to the extent of almost three million francs in
1914. Moreover, the Germans did not seek to monopolize control of the
railroad, offering to share equally with France and England and
eventually with other Powers. France accepted this offer in 1899, but
Britain continued to refuse, and placed every obstacle in the path of
the project. When the Ottoman government in 1911 sought to raise their
customs duties from 1 l to 14 percent in order to finance the continued
construction of the railway, Britain prevented this. In order to carry
on the project, the Germans sold their railroad interests in the
Balkans and gave up the Ottoman building subsidy of $275,000 a
kilometer. In striking contrast to this attitude, the Russians forced
the Turks to change the original route of the line from northern
Anatolia to southern Anatolia by threatening to take immediate measures
to collect all the arrears, amounting to over 57 million francs, due to
the czar from Turkey under the Treaty of 1878. The Russians regarded
the projected railway as a strategic threat to their Armenian frontier.
Ultimately, in 1900, they forced the sultan to promise to grant no
concessions to build railways in northern Anatolia or Armenia except
with Russian approval. The French government, in spite of the French
investments in Turkey of :.5 billion francs, refused to allow Baghdad
Railway securities to be handled on the Paris Stock Exchange: To block
the growth of German Catholic missionary activities in the Ottoman
Empire, the French persuaded the Pope to issue an encyclical ordering
all missionaries in that empire to communicate with the Vatican through
the French consulates. The British opposition became intense only in
April, 1903. Early in that month Prime Minister Arthur Balfour and
Foreign Secretary Lord Lansdowne made an agreement for joint German,
French, and British control of the railroad. Within three weeks this
agreement was repudiated by the government because of newspaper
protests against it, although it would have reduced the Turks and
Germans together to only fourteen out of thirty votes on the board of
directors of the railway. When the Turkish government in 1910 tried to
borrow abroad $30 million, secured by the customs receipts of the
country, it was summarily rebuffed in Paris and London, but obtained
the sum without hesitation in Berlin. In view of these facts, the
growth of German prestige and the decline in favor of the Western
Powers at the sultan's court is not surprising, and goes far to explain
the Turkish intervention on the side of the Central Powers in the war
of 1914-1918.
Secret
Agreement Divides Turkey into Spheres of Foreign Influence
The
Baghdad Railway played no
real role in the outbreak of the war of 1914 because the Germans in the
period 1910-1914 were able to reduce the Great Powers' objections to
the scheme. This was done through a series of agreements which divided
Turkey into spheres of foreign influence. In November, 1910, a
German-Russian agreement at Potsdam gave Russia a free hand in northern
Persia, withdrew all Russian opposition to the Baghdad Railway, and
pledged both parties to support equal trade opportunities for all (the
"open-door" policy) in their respective areas of influence in the Near
East. The French were given 2,000 miles of railway concessions in
western and northern Anatolia and in Syria in 1910-1912 and signed a
secret agreement with the Germans in February 1914, by which these
regions were recognized as French "spheres of influence," while the
route of the Baghdad Railway was recognized as a German sphere of
influence; both Powers promised to work to increase the Ottoman tax
receipts; the French withdrew their opposition to the railway; and the
French gave the Germans the 70-million-franc investment which the
French already had in the Baghdad Railway in return for an equal amount
in the Turkish bond issue of 1911, which France had earlier rebuffed,
plus a lucrative discount on a new Ottoman bond issue of 1914.
Various
Monopolies Over Natural Resources Established
The
British drove a much
harder bargain with the Germans. By an agreement of June 1914, Britain
withdrew her opposition to the Baghdad Railway, allowed Turkey to raise
her customs from 11 percent to 15 percent, and accepted a German sphere
of interest along the railway route in return for promises (1) that the
railway would not be extended to the Persian Gulf 'out would stop at
Basra on the Tigris River, (2) that British capitalists would be given
a monopoly on the navigation of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and
exclusive control over irrigation projects based on these rivers, (3)
that two British subjects would be given seats on the board of
directors of the Baghdad Railway, (4) that Britain would have exclusive
control over the commercial activities of Kuwait, the only good port on
the upper Persian Gulf: (5) that a monopoly over the oil resources of
the area from Mosul to Baghdad would be given to a new corporation in
which British finances would have a half-interest, Royal Dutch Shell
Company a quarter-interest, and the Germans a quarter-interest; and (6)
that both Powers would support the "open-door" policy in commercial
activities in Asiatic Turkey. Unfortunately, this agreement, as well as
the earlier ones with other Powers, became worthless with the outbreak
of the First World War in 1914. However, it is still important to
recognize that the Entente Powers forced upon the Germans a settlement
dividing Turkey into "spheres of interest" in place of the projected
German settlement based on international cooperation in the economic
reconstruction of the area.
The Struggles
of the Money Powers for Profit and Influence
These
struggles of the Great
Powers for profit and influence in the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire
could not fail to have profound effects in Turkish domestic affairs.
Probably the great mass of the sultan's subjects were still untouched
by these events, but an animated minority was deeply stirred. This
minority received no encouragement from the despotic Abdul-Hamid II,
sultan from 1876 to 1909. While eager for economic improvements,
Abdul-Hamid II was opposed to the spread of the Western ideas of
liberalism, constitutionalism, nationalism, or democracy, and did all
he could to prevent their propagation by censorship, by restrictions on
foreign travel or study abroad by Turks, and by an elaborate system of
arbitrary police rule and governmental espionage. As a result, the
minority of liberal, nationalistic, or progressive Turks had to
organize abroad. This they did at Geneva in 1891 in a group which is
generally known as the "Young Turks." Their chief difficulty was to
reconcile the animosities which existed between the many linguistic
groups among the sultan's subjects. This was done in a series of
congresses held in Paris, notably in 190' and in 1907. At the latter
meeting were representatives of the Turks, Armenians, Bulgars, Jews,
Arabs, and Albanians. In the meantime, this secret organization had
penetrated the sultan's army, which was seething with discontent. The
plotters were so successful that they were able to revolt in July 1908,
and force the sultan to reestablish the Constitution of 1876. At once
divisions appeared among the rebel leaders, notably between those who
wished a centralized state and those who accepted the subject
nationalities' demands for decentralization. Moreover, the orthodox
Muslims formed a league to resist secularization, and the army soon saw
that its chief demands for better pay and improved living conditions
were not going to be met. Abdul-Hamid took advantage of these divisions
to organize a violent counterrevolution (April 1909). It was crushed,
the sultan was deposed, and the Young Turks began to impose their ideas
of a dictatorial Turkish national state with ruthless severity. A wave
of resistance arose from the non-Turkish groups and the orthodox
Muslims. No settlement of these disputes was achieved by the outbreak
of the World War in 1914. Indeed, as we shall see in a later chapter,
the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 precipitated a series of
international crises of which the outbreak of war in 1914 was the
latest and most disastrous.
Chapter 9—The British Imperial Crisis:Africa, Ireland, and India to 1926
Introduction
The
old statement that England
acquired its empire in a fit of absentmindedness is amusing but does
not explain very much. It does, however, contain an element of truth:
much of the empire was acquired by private individuals and commercial
firms, and was taken over by the British government much later. The
motives which impelled the government to annex areas which its citizens
had been exploiting were varied, both in time and in place, and were
frequently much different from what an outsider might believe.
Britain
acquired the world's
greatest empire because it possessed certain advantages which other
countries lacked. We mention three of these advantages: (1) that it was
an island, (2) that it was in the Atlantic, and (3) that its social
traditions at home produced the will and the talents for imperial
acquisition.
English
Channel Provides Security for Britain
As
an island off the coast of
Europe, Britain had security as long as it had control of the narrow
seas. It had such control from the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588
until the creation of new weapons based on air power in the period
after 1935. The rise of the German Air Force under Hitler, the
invention of the long-range rocket projectiles (V-2 weapon) in 1944,
and the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs in 1945-1955
destroyed England's security by reducing the defensive effectiveness of
the English Channel. But in the period 1588-1942, in which Britain
controlled the seas, the Channel gave England security and made its
international position entirely different from that of any continental
Power. Because Britain had security, it had freedom of action. That
means it had a choice whether to intervene or to stay out of the
various disputes which arose on the Continent of Europe or elsewhere in
the world. Moreover, if it intervened, it could do so on a limited
commitment, restricting its contribution of men, energy, money, and
wealth to whatever amount it wished. If such a limited commitment were
exhausted or lost, so long as the British fleet controlled the seas,
Britain had security, and thus had freedom to choose if it would break
off its intervention or increase its commitment. Moreover, England
could make even a small commitment of its resources of decisive
importance by using this commitment in support of the second strongest
Power on the Continent against the strongest Power, thus hampering the
strongest Power and making the second Power temporarily the strongest,
as long as it acted in accord with Britain's wishes. In this way, by
following balance-of-power tactics, Britain was able to play a decisive
role on the Continent, keep the Continent divided and embroiled in its
own disputes, and do this with a limited commitment of Britain's own
resources, leaving a considerable surplus of energy, manpower, and
wealth available for acquiring an empire overseas. In addition,
Britain's unique advantage in having security through a limited
commitment of resources by control of the sea was one of the
contributing factors which allowed Britain to develop its unique social
structure, its parliamentary system, its wide range of civil liberties,
and its great economic advance.
European Wars
The
Powers on the Continent
had none of these advantages. Since each could be invaded by its
neighbors at any time, each had security, and thus freedom of action,
only on rare and brief occasions. When the security of a continental
Power was threatened by a neighbor, it had no freedom of action, but
had to defend itself with all its resources. Clearly, it would be
impossible for France to say to itself, "We shall oppose German
hegemony on the Continent only to the extent of 50,000 men or of $10
million." Yet as late as 1939, Chamberlain informed France that
England's commitment on the Continent for this purpose would be no more
than two divisions.
European
Powers Focus on the Continent
Since
the continental Powers
had neither security nor freedom of action, their position on the
Continent always was paramount over their ambitions for world empire,
and these latter always had to be sacrificed for the sake of the former
whenever a conflict arose. France was unable to hold on to its
possessions in India or in North America in the eighteenth century
because so much of its resources had to be used to bolster French
security against Prussia or Austria. Napoleon sold Louisiana to the
United States in 1803 because his primary concern had to be his
position on the Continent. Bismarck tried to discourage Germany from
embarking on any overseas adventures in the period after 1871 because
he saw that Germany must be a continental power or be nothing. Again,
France in 1882 had to yield Egypt to Britain, and in 1898 had to yield
the Sudan in the same way, because it saw that it could not engage in
any colonial dispute with Britain while the German Army stood across
the Rhineland. This situation was so clear that all the lesser
continental Powers with overseas colonial possessions, such as
Portugal, Belgium, or the Netherlands, had to collaborate with Britain,
or, at the very least, be carefully neutral. So long as the ocean
highway from these countries to their overseas empires was controlled
by the British fleet, they could not afford to embark on a policy
hostile to Britain, regardless of their personal feelings on the
subject. It is no accident that Britain's most constant international
backing in the two centuries following the Methuen Treaty of 1703 came
from Portugal and that Britain has felt free to negotiate with a third
Power, like Germany, regarding the disposition of the Portuguese
colonies, as she did in 1898 and tried to do in 1937-1939.
Britain's
Control of the Sea
Britain's
position on the
Atlantic, combined with her naval control of the sea, gave her a great
advantage when the new lands to the west of that ocean became one of
the chief sources of commercial and naval wealth in the period after
1588. Lumber, tar, and ships were supplied from the American colonies
to Britain in the period before the advent of iron, steam-driven ships
(after 1860), and these ships helped to establish Britain's mercantile
supremacy. At the same time, Britain's insular position deprived her
monarchy of any need for a large professional, mercenary army such as
the kings on the Continent used as the chief bulwark of royal
absolutism. As a result, the kings of England were unable to prevent
the landed gentry from taking over the control of the government in the
period 1642-1690, and the kings of England became constitutional
monarchs. Britain's security behind her navy allowed this struggle to
go to a decision without any important outside interference, and
permitted a rivalry between monarch and aristocracy which would have
been suicidal on the insecure grounds of continental Europe.
The Landed
Oligarchy in Britain
Britain's
security combined
with the political triumph of the landed oligarchy to create a social
tradition entirely unlike that on the Continent. One result of these
two factors was that England did not obtain a bureaucracy such as
appeared on the Continent. This lack of a separate bureaucracy loyal to
the monarch can be seen in the weakness of the professional army
(already mentioned) and also in the lack of a bureaucratic judicial
system. In England, the gentry and the younger sons of the landed
oligarchy studied law in the Inns of Court and obtained a feeling for
tradition and the sanctity of due process of law while still remaining
a part of the landed class. In fact this class became the landed class
in England just because they obtained control of the bar and the bench
and were, thus, in a position to judge all disputes about real property
in their own favor. Control of the courts and of the Parliament made it
possible for this ruling group in England to override the rights of the
peasants in land, to eject them from the land, to enclose the open
fields of the medieval system, to deprive the cultivators of their
manorial rights and thus to reduce them to the condition of landless
rural laborers or of tenants. This advance of the enclosure movement in
England made possible the Agricultural Revolution, greatly depopulated
the rural areas of England (as described in The Deserted
Village of
Oliver Goldsmith), and provided a surplus population for the cities,
the mercantile and naval marine, and for overseas colonization.
The Unique
Status of the Landed Oligarchy in Britain
The
landed oligarchy which
arose in England differed from the landed aristocracy of continental
Europe in the three points already mentioned: (1) it got control of the
government; (2) it was not opposed by a professional army, a
bureaucracy, or a professional judicial system, but, on the contrary,
it took over the control of these adjuncts of government itself,
generally serving without pay, and making access to these positions
difficult for outsiders by making such access expensive; and (3) it
obtained complete control of the land as well as political, religious,
and social control of the villages. In addition, the landed oligarchy
of England was different from that on the Continent because it was not
a nobility. This lack was reflected in three important factors. On the
Continent a noble was excluded from marrying outside his class or from
engaging in commercial enterprise; moreover, access to the nobility by
persons of non-noble birth was very difficult, and could hardly be
achieved in much less than three generations. In England, the landed
oligarchy could engage in any kind of commerce or business and could
marry anyone without question (provided she was rich); moreover, while
access to the gentry in England was a slow process which might require
generations of effort acquiring land-holdings in a single locality,
access to the peerage by act of the government took only a moment, and
could be achieved on the basis of either wealth or service. As a
consequence of all these differences, the landed upper class in England
was open to the influx of new talent, new money, and new blood, while
the continental nobility was deprived of these valuable acquisitions.
England
Developed an Aristocracy
While
the landed upper class
of England was unable to become a nobility (that is, a caste based on
exalted birth), it was able to become an aristocracy (that is, an upper
class distinguished by traditions and behavior). The chief attributes
of this aristocratic upper class in England were (1) that it should be
trained in an expensive, exclusive, masculine, and relatively Spartan
educational system centering about the great boys' schools like Eton,
Harrow, or Winchester; (2) that it should imbibe from this educational
system certain distinctive attitudes of leadership, courage,
sportsmanship, team play, self-sacrifice, disdain for physical
comforts, and devotion to duty; (3) that it should be prepared in later
life to devote a great deal of time and energy to unpaid tasks of
public significance, as justices of the peace, on county councils, in
the county militia, or in other services. Since all the sons of the
upper classes received the same training, while only the oldest, by
primogeniture, was entitled to take over the income-yielding property
of the family, all the younger sons had to go out into the world to
seek their fortunes, and, as likely as not, would do their seeking
overseas. At the same time, the uneventful life of the typical English
village or county, completely controlled by the upperclass oligarchy,
made it necessary for the more ambitious members of the lower classes
to seek advancement outside the county and even outside England. From
these two sources were recruited the men who acquired Britain's empire
and the men who colonized it.
The British
Empire
The
English have not always
been unanimous in regarding the empire as a source of pride and
benefit. In fact, the middle generation of the nineteenth century was
filled with persons, such as Gladstone, who regarded the empire with
profound suspicion. They felt that it was a source of great expense;
they were convinced that it involved England in remote strategic
problems which could easily lead to wars England had no need to fight;
they could see no economic advantage in having an empire, since the
existence of free trade (which this generation accepted) would allow
commerce to flow no matter who held colonial areas; they were convinced
that any colonial areas, no matter at what cost they might be acquired,
would eventually separate from the mother country, voluntarily if they
were given the rights of Englishmen, or by rebellion, as the American
colonies had done, if they were deprived of such rights. In general,
the "Little Englanders," as they were called, were averse to colonial
expansion on the grounds of cost.
Colonies
Could Be a Source of Riches
Although
upholders of the
"Little England" point of view, men like Gladstone or Sir William
Harcourt, continued in political prominence until 1895, this point of
view was in steady retreat after 1870. In the Liberal Party the Little
Englanders were opposed by imperialists like Lord Rosebery even before
1895; after that date, a younger group of imperialists, like Asquith,
Grey, and Haldane took over the party. In the Conservative Party, where
the anti-imperialist idea had never been strong, moderate imperialists
like Lord Salisbury were followed by more active imperialists like
Joseph Chamberlain, or Lords Curzon, Selborne, and Milner. There were
many factors which led to the growth of imperialism after 1870, and
many obvious manifestations of that growth. The Royal Colonial
Institute was founded in 1868 to fight the "Little England" idea;
Disraeli as prime minister (1874-1880) dramatized the profit and
glamour of empire by such acts as the purchase of control of the Suez
Canal and by granting Queen Victoria the title of Empress of India;
after 1870 it became increasingly evident that, however expensive
colonies might be to a government, they could be fantastically
profitable to individuals and companies supported by such governments;
moreover, with the spread of democracy and the growing influence of the
press and the expanding need for campaign contributions, individuals
who made fantastic profits in overseas adventures could obtain
favorable support from their governments by contributing some part of
their profits to politicians' expenses; the efforts of King Leopold II
of Belgium, using Henry Stanley, to obtain the Congo area as his own
preserve in 1876-1880, started a contagious fever of colony-grabbing in
Africa which lasted for more than thirty years; the discovery of
diamonds (in 1869) and of gold (in 1886) in South Africa, especially in
the Boer Transvaal Republic, intensified this fever.
John Ruskin
The
new imperialism after 1870
was quite different in tone from that which the Little Englanders had
opposed earlier. The chief changes were that it was justified on
grounds of moral duty and of social reform and not, as earlier, on
grounds of missionary activity and material advantage. The man most
responsible for this change was John Ruskin.
Until
1870 there was no
professorship of fine arts at Oxford, but in that year, thanks to the
Slade bequest, John Ruskin was named to such a chair. He hit Oxford
like an earthquake, not so much because he talked about fine arts, but
because he talked also about the empire and England's downtrodden
masses, and above all because he talked about all three of these things
as moral issues. Until the end of the nineteenth century the
poverty-stricken masses in the cities of England lived in want,
ignorance, and crime very much as they have been described by Charles
Dickens. Ruskin spoke to the Oxford undergraduates as members of the
privileged, ruling class. He told them that they were the possessors of
a magnificent tradition of education, beauty, rule of law, freedom,
decency, and self-discipline but that this tradition could not be
saved, and did not deserve to be saved, unless it could be extended to
the lower classes in England itself and to the non-English masses
throughout the world. If this precious tradition were not extended to
these two great majorities, the minority of upper-class Englishmen
would ultimately be submerged by these majorities and the tradition
lost. To prevent this, the tradition must be extended to the masses and
to the empire.
Cecil Rhodes
Sets Up a Monopoly Over the Gold and
Diamond Mines
in South Africa
Ruskin's
message had a
sensational impact. His inaugural lecture was copied out in longhand by
one undergraduate, Cecil Rhodes, who kept it with him for thirty years.
Rhodes (1853-1902) feverishly exploited the diamond and goldfields of
South Africa, rose to be prime minister of the Cape Colony (1890-1896),
contributed money to political parties, controlled parliamentary seats
both in England and in South Africa, and sought to win a strip of
British territory across Africa from the Cape of Good Hope to Egypt and
to join these two extremes together with a telegraph line and
ultimately with a Cape-to-Cairo Railway. Rhodes inspired devoted
support for his goals from others in South Africa and in England. With
financial support from Lord Rothschild and Alfred Beit, he was able to
monopolize the diamond mines of South Africa as De Beers Consolidated
Mines and to build up a great gold mining enterprise as Consolidated
Gold Fields. In the middle 1890's Rhodes had a personal income of at
least a million pounds sterling a year (then about five million
dollars) which was spent so freely for his mysterious purposes that he
was usually overdrawn on his account. These purposes centered on his
desire to federate the English-speaking peoples and to bring all the
habitable portions of the world under their control. For this purpose
Rhodes left part of his great fortune to found the Rhodes Scholarships
at Oxford in order to spread the English ruling class tradition
throughout the English-speaking world as Ruskin had wanted.
Cecil Rhodes
Organized a Secret Society in 1891
Among
Ruskin's most devoted
disciples at Oxford were a group of intimate friends including Arnold
Toynbee, Alfred (later Lord) Milner, Arthur Glazebrook, George (later
Sir George) Parkin, Philip Lyttelton Gell, and Henry (later Sir Henry)
Birchenough. These were so moved by Ruskin that they devoted the rest
of their lives to carrying out his ideas. A similar group of Cambridge
men including Reginald Baliol Brett (Lord Esher), Sir John B. Seeley,
Albert (Lord) Grey, and Edmund Garrett were also aroused by Ruskin's
message and devoted their lives to extension of the British Empire and
uplift of England's urban masses as two parts of one project which they
called "extension of the English-speaking idea." They were remarkably
successful in these aims because England's most sensational journalist
William T. Stead (1849-1912), an ardent social reformer and
imperialist, brought them into association with Rhodes. This
association was formally established on February 5, 1891, when Rhodes
and Stead organized a secret society of which Rhodes had been dreaming
for sixteen years. In this secret society Rhodes was to be leader;
Stead, Brett (Lord Esher), and Milner were to form an executive
committee; Arthur (Lord) Balfour, (Sir) Harry Johnston, Lord
Rothschild, Albert (Lord) Grey, and others were listed as potential
members of a "Circle of Initiates"; while there was to be an outer
circle known as the "Association of Helpers" (later organized by Milner
as the Round Table organization). Brett was invited to join this
organization the same day and Milner a couple of weeks later, on his
return from Egypt. Both accepted with enthusiasm. Thus the central part
of the secret society was established by March 1891. It continued to
function as a formal group, although the outer circle was, apparently,
not organized until 1909-1913.
Financial
Backing of the Secret Society
This group was able to get
access to Rhodes's money after his death in 1902 and also to the funds
of loyal Rhodes supporters like Alfred Beit (1853-1906) and Sir Abe
Bailey (1864-1940). With this backing they sought to extend and execute
the ideals that Rhodes had obtained from Ruskin and Stead. Milner was
the chief Rhodes Trustee and Parkin was Organizing Secretary of the
Rhodes Trust after 1902, while Gell and Birchenough, as well as others
with similar ideas, became officials of the British South Africa
Company. They were joined in their efforts by other Ruskinite friends
of Stead's like Lord Grey, Lord Esher, and Flora Shaw (later Lady
Lugard). In 1890, by a stratagem too elaborate to describe here, Miss
Shaw became Head of the Colonial Department of The Times while
still remaining on the payroll of Stead's Pall Mall Gazette, In
this post she played a major role in the next ten years in carrying
into execution the imperial schemes of Cecil Rhodes, to whom Stead had
introduced her in 1889.
The Toynbee
Hall Is Set Up
In
the meantime, in 1884,
acting under Ruskin's inspiration, a group which included Arnold
Toynbee, Milner, Gell, Grey, Seeley, and Michael Glazebrook founded the
first "settlement house," an organization by which educated,
upper-class people could live in the slums in order to assist,
instruct, and guide the poor, with particular emphasis on social
welfare and adult education. The new enterprise, set up in East London
with P. L. Gell as chairman, was named Toynbee Hall after Arnold
Toynbee who died, aged 31, in 1883. This was the original model for the
thousands of settlement houses, such as Hull House in Chicago, now
found throughout the world, and was one of the seeds from which the
modern movement for adult education and university extension grew.
Roundtable
Group Established
As
governor-general and high
commissioner of South Africa in the period 1897-1905, Milner recruited
a group of young men, chiefly from Oxford and from Toynbee Hall, to
assist him in organizing his administration. Through his influence
these men were able to win influential posts in government and
international finance and became the dominant influence in British
imperial and foreign affairs up to 1939. Under Milner in South Africa
they were known as Milner's Kindergarten until 1910. In 1909-1913 they
organized semi-secret groups, known as Round Table Groups, in the chief
British dependencies and the United States. These still function in
eight countries. They kept in touch with each other by personal
correspondence and frequent visits, and through an influential
quarterly magazine, The Round Table, founded in
1910 and largely supported by Sir Abe Bailey's money.
The Royal
Institute and Council on Foreign Relations Are Set Up
In
1919 they founded the Royal
Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) for which the chief
financial supporters were Sir Abe Bailey and the Astor family (owners
of The Times). Similar Institutes of International
Affairs were
established in the chief British dominions and in the United States
(where it is known as the Council on Foreign Relations) in the period
1919-1927. After 1925 a somewhat similar structure of organizations,
known as the Institute of Pacific Relations, was set up in twelve
countries holding territory in the Pacific area, the units in each
British dominion existing on an interlocking basis with the Round Table
Group and the Royal Institute of International Affairs in the same
country. In Canada the nucleus of this group consisted of Milner's
undergraduate friends at Oxford (such as Arthur Glazebrook and George
Parkin), while in South Africa and India the nucleus was made up of
former members of Milner's Kindergarten. These included (Sir) Patrick
Duncan, B. K. Long, Richard Feetham, and (Sir) Dougal Malcolm in South
Africa and (Sir) William Marris, James (Lord) Meston, and their friend
Malcolm (Lord) Hailey in India. The groups in Australia and New Zealand
had been recruited by Stead (through his magazine The Review
of Reviews) as
early as 1890-1893; by Parkin, at Milner instigation, in the period
1889-1910, and by Lionel Curtis, also at Milner's request, in
1910-1919. The power and influence of this Rhodes-Milner group in
British imperial affairs and in foreign policy since 1889, although not
widely recognized, can hardly be exaggerated. We might mention as an
example that this group dominated The Times from
1890 to 191, and has controlled it completely since 1912 (except for
the years 1919-1922). Because The Times has
been owned by the Astor family since 1922, this Rhodes-Milner group was
sometimes spoken of as the "Cliveden Set," named after the Astor
country house where they sometimes assembled. Numerous other papers and
journals have been under the control or influence of this group since
1889. They have also established and influenced numerous university and
other chairs of imperial affairs and international relations. Some of
these are the Beit chairs at Oxford, the Montague Burton chair at
Oxford, the Rhodes chair at London, the Stevenson chair at Chatham
House, the Wilson chair at Aberystwyth, and others, as well as such
important sources of influence as Rhodes House at Oxford.
Roundtable
Groups Seek to Extend the British Empire
From
1884 to about 1915 the
members of this group worked valiantly to extend the British Empire and
to organize it in a federal system. They were constantly harping on the
lessons to be learned from the failure of the American Revolution and
the success of the Canadian federation of 1867, and hoped to federate
the various parts of the empire as seemed feasible, then confederate
the whole of it, with the United Kingdom, into a single organization.
They also hoped to bring the United States into this organization to
whatever degree was possible. Stead was able to get Rhodes to accept,
in principle, a solution which might have made Washington the capital
of the whole organization or allow parts of the empire to become states
of the American Union. The varied character of the British imperial
possessions, the backwardness of many of the native peoples involved,
the independence of many of the white colonists overseas, and the
growing international tension which culminated in the First World War
made it impossible to carry out the plan for Imperial Federation,
although the five colonies in Australia were joined into the
Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 and the four colonies in South Africa
were joined into the Union of South Africa in 1910.
Egypt and the
Sudan to 1922
Disraeli's
purchase, with
Rothschild money, of 176,602 shares of Suez Canal stock for
£3,680,000 from the Khedive of Egypt in 1875 was motivated by
concern for the British communications with India, just as the British
acquisition of the Cape of Good Hope in 1814 had resulted from the same
concern. But in imperial matters one step leads to another, and every
acquisition obtained to protect an earlier acquisition requires a new
advance at a later date to protect it. This was clearly true in Africa
where such motivations gradually extended British control southward
from Egypt and northward from the Cape until these were joined in
central Africa with the conquest of German Tanganyika in 1916.
The
extravagances of the
Khedive Ismail (1863-1879), which had compelled the sale of his Suez
Canal shares, led ultimately to the creation of an Anglo-French
condominium to manage the Egyptian foreign debt and to the deposition
of the khedive by his suzerain, the Sultan of Turkey. The condominium
led to disputes and finally to open fighting between Egyptian
nationalists and Anglo-French forces. When the French refused to join
the British in a joint bombardment of Alexandria in 1882, the
condominium was broken, and Britain reorganized the country in such a
fashion that, while all public positions were held by Egyptians, a
British army was in occupation, British "advisers" controlled all the
chief governmental posts, and a British "resident," Sir Evelyn Baring
(known as Lord Cromer after 1892), controlled all finances and really
ruled the country until 1907.
Inspired
by fanatical Muslim
religious agitators (dervishes), the Mahdi Muhammad Ahmed led a
Sudanese revolt against Egyptian control in 1883, massacred a British
force under General Charles ("Chinese") Gordon at Khartoum, and
maintained an independent Sudan for fifteen years. In 1898 a British
force under (Lord) Kitchener, seeking to protect the Nile water supply
of Egypt, fought its way southward against fanatical Sudanese tribesmen
and won a decisive victory at Omdurman. An Anglo-Egyptian convention
established a condominium known as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in the area
between Egypt and the Congo River. This area, which had lived in
disorder for centuries, was gradually pacified, brought under the rule
of law, irrigated by extensive hydraulic works, and brought under
cultivation, producing, chiefly, long staple cotton.
East Central
Africa to 19 10
South
and east of the Sudan
the struggle for a British Africa was largely in the hands of H. H.
(Sir Harry) Johnston (1858-1927) and Frederick (later Lord) Lugard
(1858-1945). These two, chiefly using private funds but frequently
holding official positions, fought all over tropical Africa, ostensibly
seeking to pacify it and to wipe out the Arab slave trade, but always
possessing a burning desire to extend British rule. Frequently, these
ambitions led to rivalries with supporters of French and German
ambitions in the same regions. In 1884 Johnston obtained many
concessions from native chiefs in the Kenya area, turning these over to
the British East Africa Company in 1887. When this company went
bankrupt in '895, most of its rights were taken over by the British
government. In the meantime, Johnston had moved south, into a chaos of
Arab slavers' intrigues and native unrest in Nyasaland (1888). Here his
exploits were largely financed by Rhodes (1889-1893) in order to
prevent the Portuguese Mozambique Company from pushing westward toward
the Portuguese West African colony of Angola to block the Cape-to-Cairo
route. Lord Salisbury made Nyasaland a British Protectorate after a
deal with Rhodes in which the South African promised to pay
£1,000 a year toward the cost of the new territory. About the
same time Rhodes gave the Liberal Party a substantial financial
contribution in return for a promise that they would not abandon Egypt.
He had already (1888) given £10,000 to the Irish Home Rule Party
on condition that it seek Home Rule for Ireland while keeping Irish
members in the British Parliament as a step toward Imperial Federation.
Rhodes's
plans received a
terrible blow in 1890-1891 when Lord Salisbury sought to end the
African disputes with Germany and Portugal by delimiting their
territorial claims in South and East Africa. The Portuguese agreement
of 1891 was never ratified, but the Anglo-German agreement of 1890
blocked Rhodes's route to Egypt by extending German East Africa
(Tanganyika) west to the Belgium Congo. By the same agreement Germany
abandoned Nyasaland, Uganda, and Zanzibar to Britain in return for the
island of Heligoland in the Baltic Sea and an advantageous boundary in
German Southwest Africa.
As
soon as the German
agreement was published, Lugard was sent by the British East Africa
Company to overcome the resistance of native chiefs and slavers in
Uganda (1890-1894). The bankruptcy of this company in 1895 seemed
likely to lead to the abandonment of Uganda because of the Little
Englander sentiment in the Liberal Party (which was in office in
1892-1895). Rhodes offered to take the area over himself and run it for
£25,000 a year, but was refused. As a result of complex and
secret negotiations in which Lord Rosebery was the chief figure,
Britain kept Uganda, Rhodes was made a privy councilor, Rosebery
replaced his father-in-law, Lord Rothschild, in Rhodes's
secret group and was made a Trustee under Rhodes's next (and last) will.
Rosebery tried to obtain a route for Rhodes's railway to the north
across the Belgian Congo; Rosebery was informed of Rhodes's plans to
finance an uprising of the English within the Transvaal (Boer) Republic
and to send Dr. Jameson on a raid into that country "to restore order";
and, finally, Rhodes found the money to finance Kitchener's railway
from Egypt to Uganda, using the South African gauge and engines given
by Rhodes.
The
economic strength which
allowed Rhodes to do these things rested in his diamond and gold mines,
the latter in the Transvaal, and thus not in British territory. North
of Cape Colony, across the Orange River, was a Boer republic, the
Orange Free State. Beyond this, and separated by the Vaal River, was
another Boer republic, the Transvaal. Beyond this, across the Limpopo
River and continuing northward to the Zambezi River, was the savage
native kingdom of the Matabeles. With great personal daring,
unscrupulous opportunism, and extravagant expenditure of money, Rhodes
obtained an opening to the north, passing west of the Boer republics,
by getting British control in Griqualand West (1880), Bechuanaland, and
the Bechuanaland Protectorate (1885). In 1888 Rhodes obtained a vague
but extensive mining concession from the Matabeles' chief, Lobengula,
and gave it to the British South Africa Company organized for the
purpose (1889). Rhodes obtained a charter so worded that the company
had very extensive powers in an area without any northern limits beyond
Bechuanaland Protectorate. Four years later the Matabeles were attacked
and destroyed by Dr. Jameson, and their lands taken by the company. The
company, however, was not a commercial success, and paid no dividends
for thirty-five years (1889-1924) and only 12.5 shillings in forty-six
years. This compares with 793.5 percent dividends paid by Rhodes's
Consolidated Gold Fields in the five years 1889-1894 and the 125
percent dividend it paid in 1896. Most of the South Africa Company's
money was used on public improvements like roads and schools, and no
rich mines were found in its territory (known as Rhodesia) compared to
those farther south in the Transvaal.
In
spite of the terms of the
Rhodes wills, Rhodes himself was not a racist. Nor was he a political
democrat. He worked as easily and as closely with Jews, black natives,
or Boers as he did with English. But he had a passionate belief in the
value of a liberal education, and was attached to a restricted suffrage
and even to a non-secret ballot. In South Africa he was a staunch
friend of the Dutch and of the blacks, found his chief political
support among the Boers, until at least 1895, and wanted restrictions
on natives put on an educational rather than on a color basis. These
ideas have generally been held by his group since and have played an
important role in British imperial history. His greatest weakness
rested on the fact that his passionate attachment to his goals made him
overly tolerant in regard to methods. He did not hesitate to use either
bribery or force to attain his ends if he judged they would be
effective. This weakness led to his greatest errors, the Jameson Raid
of 1895 and the Boer War of 1899-1902, errors which were disastrous for
the future of the empire he loved.
South Africa,
1895-1933
By
1895 the Transvaal Republic
presented an acute problem. All political control was in the hands of a
rural, backward, Bible-reading, racist minority of Boers, while all
economic wealth was in the hands of a violent, aggressive majority of
foreigners (Uitlanders), most of whom lived in the new city of
Johannesburg. The Uitlanders, who were twice as numerous as the Boers
and owned two-thirds of the land and nine-tenths of the wealth of the
country, were prevented from participating in political life or from
becoming citizens (except after fourteen years' residence) and were
irritated by a series of minor pinpricks and extortions such as tax
differentials, a dynamite monopoly, and transportation restrictions)
and by rumors that the Transvaal president, Paul Kruger, was intriguing
to obtain some kind of German intervention and protection. At this
point in 1895, Rhodes made his plans to overthrow Kruger's government
by an uprising in Johannesburg, financed by himself and Beit, and led
by his brother Frank Rhodes, Abe Bailey, and other supporters, followed
by an invasion of the Transvaal by a force led by Jameson from
Bechuanaland and Rhodesia. Flora Shaw used The Times to prepare public
opinion in England, while Albert Grey and others negotiated with
Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain for the official support that was
necessary. Unfortunately, when the revolt fizzled out in Johannesburg,
Jameson raided anyway in an effort to revive it, and was easily
captured by the Boers. The public officials involved denounced the
plot, loudly proclaimed their surprise at the event, and were able to
whitewash most of the participants in the subsequent parliamentary
inquiry. A telegram from the German Kaiser to President Kruger of the
Transvaal, congratulating him on his success "in preserving the
independence of his country without the need to call for aid from his
friends," was built up by The Times into an example
of brazen German interference in British affairs, and almost eclipsed
Jameson's aggression.
Rhodes
was stopped only
temporarily, but he had lost the support of many of the Boers. For
almost two years he and his friends stayed quiet, waiting for the storm
to blow over. Then they began to act again. Propaganda, most of it
true, about the plight of Uitlanders in the Transvaal Republic flooded
England and South Africa from Flora Shaw, W. T. Stead, Edmund Garrett,
and others; Milner was made high commissioner of South Africa (1897);
Brett worked his way into the confidence of the monarchy to become its
chief political adviser during a period of more than twenty-five years
(he wrote almost daily letters of advice to King Edward during his
reign, 1901-1910). By a process whose details are still obscure, a
brilliant, young graduate of Cambridge, Jan Smuts, who had been a
vigorous supporter of Rhodes and acted as his agent in Kimberley as
late as 1895 and who was one of the most important members of the
Rhodes-Milner group in the period 1908-1950, went to the Transvaal and,
by violent anti-British agitation, became state secretary of that
country (although a British subject) and chief political adviser to
President Kruger; Milner made provocative troop movements on the Boer
frontiers in spite of the vigorous protests of his commanding general
in South Africa, who had to be removed; and, finally, war was
precipitated when Smuts drew up an ultimatum insisting that the British
troop movements cease and when this was rejected by Milner.
The
Boer War (1899-1902) was
one of the most important events in British imperial history. The
ability of 40,000 Boer farmers to hold off ten times as many British
for three years, inflicting a series of defeats on them over that
period, destroyed faith in British power. Although the Boer republics
were defeated and annexed in 1902, Britain's confidence was so shaken
that it made a treaty with Japan in the same year providing that if
either signer became engaged in war with two enemies in the Far East
the other signer would come to the rescue. This treaty, which allowed
Japan to attack Russia in 1904, lasted for twenty years, being extended
to the Middle East in 1912. At the same time Germany's obvious sympathy
with the Boers, combined with the German naval construction program of
1900, alienated the British people from the Germans and contributed
greatly toward the Anglo-French entente of 1904.
Milner
took over the two
defeated Boer republics and administered them as occupied territory
until 1905, using a civil service of young men recruited for the
purpose. This group, known as "Milner's Kindergarten," reorganized the
government and administration of the Transvaal and Orange River Colony
and played a major role in South African life generally. When Milner
left public life in 1905 to devote himself to international finance and
the Rhodes enterprises, Lord Selborne, his successor as high
commissioner, took over the Kindergarten and continued to use it. In
1906 a new Liberal government in London granted self-government to the
two Boer states. The Kindergarten spent the next four years in a
successful effort to create a South African Federation. The task was
not an easy one, even with such powerful backing as Selborne, Smuts
(who was now the dominant political figure in the Transvaal, although
Botha held the position of prime minister), and Jameson (who was the
prime minister of the Cape Colony in 1904-1908). The subject was
broached through a prearranged public interchange of letters between
Jameson and Selborne. Then Selborne published a memorandum, written by
Philip Kerr (Lothian) and Lionel Curtis, calling for a union of the
four colonies. Kerr founded a periodical (The State,
financed by
Sir Abe Bailey) which advocated federation in every issue; Curtis and
others scurried about organizing "Closer Union" societies; Robert H.
(Lord) Brand and (Sir) Patrick Duncan laid the groundwork for the new
constitution. At the Durban constitutional convention (where Duncan and
B. K. Long were legal advisers) the Transvaal delegation was controlled
by Smuts and the Kindergarten. This delegation, which was heavily
financed, tightly organized, and knew exactly what it wanted, dominated
the convention, wrote the constitution for the Union of South Africa,
and succeeded in having it ratified (1910). Local animosities were
compromised in a series of ingenious arrangements, including one by
which the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the new
government were placed in three different cities. The Rhodes-Milner
group recognized that Boer nationalism and color intolerance were
threats to the future stability and loyalty of South Africa, but they
had faith in the political influence of Smuts and Botha, of Rhodes's
allies, and of the four members of the Kindergarten who stayed in South
Africa to hold off these problems until time could moderate the
irreconcilable Boers. In this they were mistaken, because, as men like
Jameson (1917), Botha (1919), Duncan (1943), Long (1943), and Smuts
(1950) died off, they were not replaced by men of equal loyalty and
ability, with the result that the Boer extremists under D. F. Malan
came to power in 1948.
The
first Cabinet of the Union
of South Africa was formed in 1910 by the South African Party, which
was largely Boer, with Louis Botha as prime minister. The real master
of the government was Smuts, who held three out of nine portfolios, all
important ones, and completely dominated Botha. Their policy of
reconciliation with the English and of loyal support for the British
connection was violently opposed by the Boer Nationalists within the
party led by J. B. M. Hertzog. Hertzog was eager to get independence
from Britain and to reserve political control in a South African
republic to Boers only. He obtained growing support by agitating on the
language and educational issues, insisting that all government
officials must speak Afrikaans and that it be a compulsory language in
schools, with English a voluntary, second language.
The
opposition party, known as
Unionist, was largely English and was led by Jameson supported by
Duncan, Richard Feetham, Hugh Wyndham, and Long. Financed by Milner's
allies and the Rhodes Trust, its leaders considered that their chief
task was "to support the prime minister against the extremists of his
own party." Long, as the best speaker, was ordered to attack Hertzog
constantly. When Hertzog struck back with too violent language in 1912,
he was dropped from the Cabinet and soon seceded from the South African
Party, joining with the irreconcilable Boer republicans like Christiaan
De Wet to form the Nationalist Party. The new party adopted an
extremist anti-English and anti-native platform.
Jameson's
party, under his
successor, Sir Thomas Smartt (a paid agent of the Rhodes organization),
had dissident elements because of the growth of white labor unions
which insisted on anti-native legislation. By 1914 these formed a
separate Labour Party under F. H. P. Creswell, and were able to win
from Smuts a law excluding natives from most semiskilled or skilled
work or any high-paving positions (1911). The natives were compelled to
work for wages, however low, by the need to obtain cash for taxes and
by the inadequacy of the native reserves to support them from their own
agricultural activities. By the Land Act of 1913 about 7 percent of the
land area was reserved for future land purchases by natives and the
other 93 percent for purchase by whites. At that time the native
population exceeded the whites by at least fourfold.
As
a result of such
discriminations, the wages of natives were about one-tenth those of
whites. This discrepancy in remuneration permitted white workers to
earn salaries comparable to those earned in North America, although
national income was low and productivity per capita was very low (about
$125 per year).
The
Botha-Smuts government of
1910-1924 did little to cope with the almost insoluble problems which
faced South Africa. As it became weaker, and the Hertzog Nationalists
grew stronger, it had to rely with increasing frequency on the support
of the Unionist party. In 1920 a coalition was formed, and three
members of the Unionist party, including Duncan, took seats in Smuts's
Cabinet. In the next election in 1924 Cresswell's Labourites and
Hertzog's Nationalists formed an agreement which dropped the
republican-imperial issue and emphasized the importance of economic and
native questions. This alliance defeated Smuts's party and formed a
Cabinet which held office for nine years. It was replaced in March 1933
by a Smuts-Hertzog coalition formed to deal with the economic crisis
arising from the world depression of 1929-1935.
The
defeat of the Smuts group
in 1924 resulted from four factors, besides his own imperious
personality. These were (1 ) his violence toward labor unions and
strikers; (2) his strong support for the imperial connection,
especially during the war of 1914-1918; (3) his refusal to show any
enthusiasm for an anti-native program, and (4) the economic hardships
of the postwar depression and the droughts of 1919-1923. A miners'
strike in 1913 was followed by a general strike in 1914; in both, Smuts
used martial law and machine-gun bullets against the strikers and in
the latter case illegally deported nine union leaders to England. This
problem had hardly subsided before the government entered the war
against Germany and actively participated in the conquest of German
Africa as w ell as in the fighting in France. Opposition from Boer
extremists to this evidence of the English connection was so violent
that it resulted in open revolt against the government and mutiny by
various military contingents which sought to join the small German
forces in Southwest Africa. The rebels were crushed, and thousands of
their supporters lost their political rights for ten years.
Botha
and, even more, Smuts
played major roles in the Imperial War Cabinet in London and at the
Peace Conference of 1919. The former died as soon as he returned home,
leaving Smuts, as prime minister, to face the acute postwar problems.
The economic collapse of 1920-1923 was especially heavy in South Africa
as the ostrich-feather and diamond markets were wiped out, the gold and
export markets were badly injured, and years of drought were prevalent.
Efforts to reduce costs in the mines by increased use of native labor
led to strikes and eventually to a revolution on the Rand (1922). Over
200 rebels were killed. As a result, the popularity of Smuts in his own
country reached a low ebb just at the time when he was being praised
almost daily in England as one of the world's greatest men.
These
political shifts in
South Africa's domestic affairs did little to relieve any of the acute
economic and social problems which faced that country. On the contrary
these grew worse year by year. In 1921 the Union had only 1.5 million
whites, 4.7 million natives, 545 thousand mulattoes ("coloured"), and
166 thousand Indians. By 1936 the whites had increased by only half a
million, while the number of natives had gone up almost two million.
These natives lived on inadequate and eroded reserves or in horrible
urban slums, and were drastically restricted in movements, residence,
or economic opportunities, and had almost no political or even civil
rights. By 1950 most of the native workers of Johannesburg lived in a
distant suburb where 90,000 Africans were crowded onto 600 acres of
shacks with no sanitation, with almost no running water, and with such
inadequate bus service that they had to stand in line for hours to get
a bus into the city to work. In this way the natives were steadily
"detribalized," abandoning allegiance to their own customs and beliefs
(including religion) without assuming the customs or beliefs of the
whites. Indeed, they were generally excluded from this because of the
obstacles placed in their path to education or property ownership. The
result was that the natives were steadily ground downward to the point
where they were denied all opportunity except for animal survival and
reproduction.
Almost
half of the whites and
many of the blacks were farmers, but agricultural practices w ere so
deplorable that water shortages and erosion grew with frightening
rapidity, and rivers which had flowed steadily in 1880 largely
disappeared by 1950. As lands became too dry to farm, they were turned
to grazing, especially under the spur of high wool prices during the
two great wars, but the soil continued to drift away as dust.
Because
of low standards of
living for the blacks, there was little domestic market either for farm
products or for industrial goods. As a result, most products of both
black and white labor were exported, the receipts being used to pay for
goods which were locally unavailable or for luxuries for whites. But
most of the export trade was precarious. The gold mines and diamond
mines had to dig so deeply (below 7,000-foot levels) that costs arose
sharply, while the demand for both products fluctuated widely, since
neither was a necessity of life. Nonetheless, each year over half of
the Union's annual production of all goods was exported, with about
one-third of the total represented by gold.
The
basic problem was lack of
labor, not so much the lack of hands but the low level of productivity
of those hands. This in turn resulted from lack of capitalization and
from the color bar which refused to allow native labor to become
skilled. Moreover, the cheapness of unskilled labor, especially on the
farms, meant that most work was left to blacks, and many whites fell
into lazy habits. Unskilled whites, unwilling and unable to compete as
labor with the blacks, became indolent "poor whites." Milner's
Kindergarten had, at the end of the Boer War, the sum of £3
million provided by the peace treaty to be used to restore Boer
families from concentration camps to their farms. They were shocked to
discover that one-tenth of the Boers were "poor whites," had no land
and wanted none. The Kindergarten decided that this sad condition
resulted from the competition of cheap black labor, a conclusion which
was incorporated into the report of a commission established by
Selborne to study the problem.
This
famous Report of the Transvaal Indigency Commission,
published in 1908, was written by Philip Kerr (Lothian) and republished
by the Union government twenty years later. About the same time, the
group became convinced that black labor not only demoralized white
labor and prevented it from acquiring the physical skills necessary for
self-reliance and high personal morale but that blacks were capable of
learning such skills as well as whites were. As Curtis expressed it in
1952: "I came to see how the colour bar reacted on Whites and Blacks.
Exempt from drudgery by custom and law, Whites acquire no skill in
crafts, because the school of skill is drudgery. The Blacks, by doing
drudgery, acquire skill. All skilled work in mines such as
rock-drilling was done by miners imported from Cornwall who worked
subject to the colour bar. The heavy drills were fixed and driven under
their direction by Natives. These Cornish miners earned £1 a day,
the Natives about 2s. The Cornish miners struck for higher pay, but the
Blacks, who in doing the drudgery had learned how to work the drills,
kept the mines running at a lower cost."
Accordingly,
the Milner-Round
Table group worked out a scheme to reserve the tropical portions of
Africa north of the Zambezi River for natives under such attractive
conditions that the blacks south of that river would be enticed to
migrate northward. As Curtis envisioned this plan, an international
state or administrative body "would take over the British, French,
Belgian, and Portuguese dependencies in tropical Africa.... Its policy
would be to found north of the Zambezi a Negro Dominion in which Blacks
could own land, enter professions, and stand on a footing of equality
with Whites. The inevitable consequence would be that Black laborers
south of the Zambezi would rapidly emigrate from South Africa and leave
South African Whites to do their own drudgery which would be the
salvation of the Whites." Although this project has not been achieved,
it provides the key to Britain's native and central-African policies
from 1917 onward. For example, in 19371939 Britain made many vain
efforts to negotiate a settlement of Germany's colonial claims under
which Germany would renounce forever its claims on Tanganyika and be
allowed to participate as a member of an international administration
of all tropical Africa (including the Belgian Congo and Portuguese
Angola as well as British and French territory) as a single unit in
which native rights would be paramount.
The
British tradition of fair
conduct toward natives and nonwhites generally was found most
frequently among the best educated of the English upper class and among
those lower-class groups, such as missionaries, where religious
influences were strongest. This tradition was greatly strengthened by
the actions of the Rhodes-Milner group, especially after 1920. Rhodes
aroused considerable ill-feeling among the whites of South Africa when
he announced that his program included "equal rights for all civilized
men south of the Zambezi," and went on to indicate that "civilized men"
included ambitious, literate Negroes. When Milner took over the Boer
states in 1901, he tried to follow the same policy. The peace treaty of
1902 promised that the native franchise would not be forced on the
defeated Boers, but Milner tried to organize the governments of
municipalities, beginning with Johannesburg, so that natives could
vote. This was blocked by the Kindergarten (led by Curtis who was in
charge of municipal reorganization in 1901-1906) because they
considered reconciliation with the Boers as a preliminary to a South
African Union to be more urgent. Similarly, Smuts as the chief
political figure in South Africa after 1910 had to play down native
rights in order to win Boer and English labor support for the rest of
his program.
The
Rhodes-Milner group,
however, was in a better position to carry out its plans in the
non-self-governing portions of Africa outside the Union. In South
Africa the three native protectorates of Swaziland, Bechuanaland, and
Basutoland were retained by the imperial authorities as areas where
native rights were paramount and where tribal forms of living could be
maintained at least partially. However, certain tribal customs, such as
those which required a youth to prove his manhood by undergoing inhuman
suffering or engaging in warfare or cattle stealing before he could
marry or become a full-fledged member of the tribe, had to be
curtailed. They were replaced in the twentieth century by the custom of
taking work in the mines of South Africa as contract laborers for a
period of years. Such labor was as onerous and killing as tribal
warfare had been earlier because deaths from disease and accident were
very high. But, by undergoing this test for about five years, the
survivors obtained sufficient savings to allow them to return to their
tribes and buy sufficient cattle and wives to support them as full
members of the tribe for the rest of their days. Unfortunately, this
procedure did not result in good agricultural practices but rather in
overgrazing, growing drought and erosion, and great population pressure
in the native reserves. It also left the mines without any assured
labor supply so that it became necessary to recruit contract labor
farther and farther north. Efforts by the Union government to set
northern limits beyond which labor recruiting was forbidden led to
controversy with employers, frequent changes in regulations, and
widespread evasions. As a consequence of an agreement made by Milner
with Portuguese authorities, about a quarter of the natives working in
South African mines came from Portuguese East Africa even as late as
1936.
Making the
Commonwealth, 1910-1926
As
soon as South Africa was
united in 1910, the Kindergarten returned to London to try to federate
the whole empire by the same methods. They were in a hurry to achieve
this before the war with Germany which they believed to be approaching.
With Abe Bailey money they founded The Round
Table under
Kerr's (Lothian's) editorship, met in formal conclaves presided over by
Milner to decide the fate of the empire, and recruited new members to
their group, chiefly from New College, of which Milner was a fellow.
The new recruits included a historian, F. S. Oliver, (Sir) Alfred
Zimmern, (Sir) Reginald Coupland, Lord Lovat, and Waldorf (Lord) Astor.
Curtis and others were sent around the world to organize Round Table
groups in the chief British dependencies.
For
several years (1910 1916)
the Round Table groups worked desperately trying to find an acceptable
formula for federating the empire. Three books and many articles
emerged from these discussions, but gradually it became clear that
federation was not acceptable to the English-speaking dependencies.
Gradually, it was decided to dissolve all formal bonds between these
dependencies, except, perhaps, allegiance to the Crow-n, and depend on
the common outlook of Englishmen to keep the empire together. This
involved changing the name "British Empire" to "Commonwealth of
Nations," as in the title of Curtis's book of 1916, giving the chief
dependencies, including India and Ireland, their complete independence
(but gradually- and by free gift rather than under duress), working to
bring the United States more closely into this same orientation, and
seeking to solidify the intangible links of sentiment by propaganda
among financial, educational, and political leaders in each country.
Efforts
to bring the
dependencies into a closer relationship with the mother country were by
no means new in 1910, nor were they supported only by the Rhodes-Milner
group. Nevertheless, the actions of this group were all-pervasive. The
poor military performance of British forces during the Boer War led to
the creation of a commission to investigate the South African War, with
Lord Esher (Brett) as chairman (1903). Among other items, this
commission recommended creation of a permanent Committee of Imperial
Defence. Esher became (unofficial) chairman of this committee, holding
the position for the rest of his life (1905-1930). He was able to
establish an Imperial General Staff in 1907 and to get a complete
reorganization of the military forces of New Zealand, Australia, and
South Africa so that they could be incorporated into the imperial
forces in an emergency (1909- 1912). On the committee itself he created
an able secretariat which cooperated loyally with the Rhodes-Milner
group thereafter. These men included (Sir) Maurice (later Lord) Hankey
and (Sir) Ernest Swinton (who invented the tank in 1915). When, in
1916-1917, Milner and Esher persuaded the Cabinet to create a
secretariat for the first time, the task was largely given to this
secretariat from the Committee on Imperial Defence. Thus Hankey was
secretary to the committee for thirty years (1908-1938), to the Cabinet
for twenty-two years (1916-1938), clerk to the Privy Council for
fifteen years (1923-1938), secretary-general of the five imperial
conferences held between 1921 and 1937, secretary to the British
delegation to almost every important international conference held
between the Versailles Conference of 1919 and the Lausanne Conference
of 1932, and one of the leading advisers to the Conservative
governments after 1939.
Until
1907 the overseas
portions of the Empire (except India) communicated with the imperial
government through the secretary of state for colonies. To supplement
this relationship, conferences of the prime ministers of the
self-governing colonies were held in London to discuss common problems
in 1887, 1897, 1902, 1907, 1911, 1917, and 1918. In 1907 it was decided
to hold such conferences every four years, to call the self-governing
colonies "Dominions," and to by-pass the Colonial Secretary by
establishing a new Dominion Department. Ruskin's influence, among
others, could be seen in the emphasis of the Imperial Conference of
1911 that the Empire rested on a triple foundation of (1) rule of law,
(2) local autonomy, and (3) trusteeship of the interests and fortunes
of those fellow subjects who had not yet attained self -government.
The
Conference of 1915 could
not be held because of the war, but as soon as Milner became one of the
four members of the War Cabinet in 1915 his influence began to be felt
everywhere. We have mentioned that he established a Cabinet secretariat
in 1916-1917 consisting of two proteges of Esher (Hankey and Swinton)
and two of his own (his secretaries, Leopold Amery and W. G. A.
Ormsby-Gore, later Lord Harlech). At the same time he gave the Prime
Minister, Lloyd George, a secretariat from the Round Table, consisting
of Kerr (Lothian), Grigg (Lord Altrincham), W. G. S. Adams (Fellow of
All Souls College), and Astor. He created an Imperial War Cabinet by
adding Dominion Prime Ministers (particularly Smuts) to the United
Kingdom War Cabinet. He also called the Imperial Conferences of 1917
and 1918 and invited the dominions to establish Resident Ministers in
London. A' the war drew to a close in 1918, Milner took the office of
Colonia] Secretary, with Amery as his assistant, negotiated an
agreement providing independence for Egypt, set up a new
self-government constitution in Malta, sent Curtis to India (where he
drew up the chief provisions of the Government of India Act of 1919),
appointed Curtis to the post of Adviser on Irish Affairs (where he
played an important role in granting dominion status to southern
Ireland in 1921), gave Canada permission to establish separate
diplomatic relations with the United States (the firs minister being
the son-in-law of Milner's closest collaborator on the Rhodes Trust),
and called the Imperial Conference of 1921.
During
this decade 1919-1929
the Rhodes-Milner group gave the chief impetus toward transforming the
British Empire into the Commonwealth of Nations and launching India on
the road to responsible self-government. The creation of the Round
Table groups by Milner's Kindergarten in 1909-1913 opened a new day in
both these fields, although the whole group was so secretive that, even
today, many close students of the subject are not aware of its
significance. These men had formed their intellectual growth at Oxford
on Pericle's funeral oration as described in a book by a member of the
group, (Sir) Alfred Zimmern's The Greek Commonwealth
(1911), on Edmund Burke's On Conciliation with America,
on Sir J. B. Seeley's Growth of British Policy, on
A. V. Dicey's The Law and Custom of the
Constitution,
and on The New Testament's "Sermon on the Mount." The last was
especially influential on Lionel Curtis. He had a fanatical conviction
that with the proper spirit and the proper organization (local
self-government and federalism), the Kingdom of God could be
established on earth. He was sure that if people were trusted just a
bit beyond what they deserve they would respond by proving worthy of
such trust. As he wrote in The Problem of a Commonwealth
(1916), "if political power is granted to groups before they are fit
they will tend to rise to the need." This was the spirit which Milner's
group tried to use toward the Boers in 1902-1910, toward India in 1910
1947, and, unfortunately, toward Hitler in 1933-1939. This point of
view was reflected in Curtis's three volumes on world history,
published as Civitas Dei in 1938. In the case of
Hitler, at
least, these high ideals led to disaster; this seems also to be the
case in South Africa; whether this group succeeded in transforming the
British Empire into a Commonwealth of Nations or merely succeeded in
destroying the British Empire is not yet clear, but one seems as likely
as the other.
That
these ideas were not
solely those of Curtis but were held by the group as a whole will be
clear to all who study it. When Lord Lothian died in Washington in
1940, Curtis published a volume of his speeches and included the
obituary which Grigg had written for The Round Table.
Of
Lothian this said, "He held that men should strive to build the Kingdom
of Heaven here upon this earth, and that the leadership in that task
must fall first and foremost upon the English-speaking peoples." Other
attitudes of this influential group can be gathered from some
quotations from four books published by Curtis in 1916-1920: "The rule
of law as contrasted with the rule of an individual is the
distinguishing mark of the Commonwealth. In despotisms government rests
on the authority of the ruler or of the invisible and uncontrollable
power behind him. In a commonwealth rulers derive their authority from
the law, and the law from a public opinion which is competent to change
it . . . The idea that the principle of the Commonwealth implies
universal suffrage betrays an ignorance of its real nature. That
principle simply means that government rests on the duty of the
citizens to each other, and is to be vested in those who are capable of
setting public interests before their own.... The task of preparing for
freedom the races which cannot as yet govern themselves is the supreme
duty of those who can. It is the spiritual end for which the
Commonwealth exists, and material order is nothing except as a means to
it.... The peoples of India and Egypt, no less than those of the
British Isles and Dominions, must be gradually schooled in the
management of their national affairs.... The whole effect of the war
[of 1914-1918] has been to bring movements long gathering to a sudden
head.... Companionship in arms has fanned . . . long smouldering
resentment against the presumption that Europeans are destined to
dominate the rest of the world. In every part of Asia and Africa it is
bursting into flames. . . . Personally I regard this challenge to the
long unquestioned claim of the white man to dominate the world as
inevitable and wholesome, especially to ourselves.... The world is in
the throes which precede creation or death. Our whole race has outgrown
the merely national state and, as surely as day follows night or night
the day, will pass either to a Commonwealth of Nations or else to an
empire of slaves. And the issue of these agonies rests with us."
In
this spirit the
Rhodes-Milner group tried to draw plans for a federation of the British
Empire in 1909-1916. Gradually this project was replaced or postponed
in favor of the commonwealth project of free cooperation. Milner seems
to have accepted the lesser aim after a meeting, sponsored by the
Empire Parliamentary Association, on July 28, 1916, at which he
outlined the project for federation with many references to the
writings of Curtis, but found that not one Dominion member present
would accept it. At the Imperial Conference of 1917, under his
guidance, it was resolved that "any re-adjustment of constitutional
relations . . . should be based on a full recognition of the Dominions
as autonomous nations of an Imperial Commonwealth and of India as an
important portion of the same, should recognize the right of the
Dominions and India to an adequate voice in foreign policy and in
foreign relations, and should provide effective arrangements for
continuous consultation in all important matters of common Imperial
concern." Another resolution called for full representation for India
in future Imperial Conferences. This was done in 1918. At this second
wartime Imperial Conference it was resolved that Prime Ministers of
Dominions could communicate directly with the Prime Minister of the
United Kingdom and that each dominion (and India) could establish
Resident Ministers in London who would have seats on the Imperial War
Cabinet. Milner was the chief motivating force in these developments.
He hoped that the Imperial War Cabinet would continue to meet annually
after the war but this did not occur.
During
these years 1917-1918,
a declaration was drawn up establishing complete independence for the
dominions except for allegiance to the crown. This was not issued until
1926. Instead, on July 9, 1919 Milner issued an official statement
which said, "The United Kingdom and the Dominions are partner nations;
not yet indeed of equal power, but for good and all of equal status....
The only possibility of a continuance of the British Empire is on a
basis of absolute out-and-out equal partnership between the United
Kingdom and the Dominions. I say that without any kind of reservation
whatsoever." This point of view was restated in the so-called Balfour
Declaration of 1926 and was enacted into law as the Statute of
Westminster in 1931. B. K. Long of the South African Round Table group
(who was Colonial Editor of The Times in 1913-1921
and Editor of Rhodes's paper, The Cape Times,
in South Africa in 1922-1935) tells us that the provisions of the
declaration of 1926 were agreed on in 1917 during the Imperial
Conference convoked by Milner. They were formulated by John W. Dafoe,
editor of the Winnipeg Free Press for 43 years and
the most
influential journalist in Canada for much of that period. Dafoe
persuaded the Canadian Prime Minister, Sir Robert Borden, to accept his
ideas and then brought in Long and Dawson (Editor of The Times).
Dawson negotiated the agreement with Milner, Smuts, and others.
Although Australia and New Zealand were far from satisfied, the
influence of Canada and of South Africa carried the agreement. Nine
years later it was issued under Balfour's name at a conference convoked
by Amery.
East Africa,
1910-1931
In
the dependent empire,
especially in tropical Africa north of the Zambezi River, the
Rhodes-Milner group was unable to achieve most of its desires, but was
able to win wide publicity for them, especially for its views on native
questions. It dominated the Colonial Office in London, at least for the
decade 1919-1929. There Milner was secretary of state in 1919-1921 and
Amery in 1924-1929, while the post of parliamentary under-secretary was
held by three members of the group for most of the decade. Publicity
for their views on civilizing the natives and training them for
eventual self-government received wide dissemination, not only by
official sources but also by the academic, scholarly, and journalistic
organizations they dominated. As examples of this we might mention the
writings of Coupland, Hailey, Curtis, Grigg, Amery, and Lothian, all
Round Tablers. In 1938 Lord Hailey edited a gigantic volume of 1,837
pages called An Africa Survey. This work was first
suggested by
Smuts at Rhodes House, Oxford, in 1929, had a foreword by Lothian, and
an editorial board of Lothian, Hailey, Coupland, Curtis, and others. It
remains the greatest single book on modern Africa. These people, and
others, through The Times, The Round Table,
The Observer,
Chatham House, and other conduits, became the chief source of ideas on
colonial problems in the English-speaking world. Nevertheless, they
were unable to achieve their program.
In
the course of the 1920's
the Round Table program for East Africa was paralyzed by a debate on
the priority which should be given to the three aspects of
group’s project for a Negro Dominion north of the Zambezi. The
three parts were (1) native rights, (2) “Closer Union,” and
(3) international trusteeship. Generally, the group gave priority to
Closer Union (federation of Kenya with Uganda and Tanganyika), but the
ambiguity of their ideas on native rights made it possible for Dr.
Joseph H. Oldham, spokesman for the organized Nonconformist missionary
groups, to organize a successful opposition movement to federation of
East Africa. In this effort Oldham found a powerful ally in Lord
Lugard, and considerable support from other informed persons, including
Margery Perham.
The
Round Tablers, who had no
firsthand knowledge of native life or even of tropical Africa, were
devoted supporters of the English way of life, and could see no greater
benefit conferred on natives than to help them to move in that
direction. This, however, would inevitably destroy the tribal
organization of life, as well as the native systems of land tenure,
which were generally based on tribal holding of land. The white
settlers were eager to see these things disappear, since they generally
wished to bring the native labor force and African lands into the
commercial market. Oldham and Lugard opposed this, since they felt it
would lead to white ownership of large tracts of land on which
detribalized and demoralized natives would subsist as wage slaves.
Moreover, to Lugard, economy in colonial administration required that
natives be governed under his system of "indirect rule" through tribal
chiefs. Closer Union became a controversial target in this dispute
because it involved a gradual increase in local self-government which
would lead to a greater degree of white settler rule.
The
opposition to Closer Union
in East Africa was successful in holding up this project in spite of
the Round Table domination of the Colonial Office, chiefly because of
Prime Minister Baldwin's refusal to move quickly. This delayed change
until the Labour government took over in 1929; in this the pro-native,
nonconformist (especially Quaker) influence was stronger.
The
trusteeship issue came
into this controversy because Britain was bound, as a mandate Power, to
maintain native rights in Tanganyika to the satisfaction of the
Mandates Commission of the League of Nations. This placed a major
obstacle in the path of Round Table efforts to join Tanganyika with
Kenya and Uganda into a Negro Dominion which would be under quite a
different kind of trusteeship of the African colonial Powers. Father
south, in the Rhodesias and Nyasaland, the Round Table obsession with
federation did not meet this obstacle, and that area was eventually
federated, over native protests, in 1953, but this creation, the
Central African Federation, broke up again in 1964. Strangely enough,
the League of Nations Mandate System which became such an obstacle to
the Round Table plans was largely a creation of the Round Table itself.
The
Milner Group used the
defeat of Germany in 1918 as an opportunity to impose an international
obligation on certain Powers to treat the natives fairly in the regions
taken from Germany. This opportunity was of great significance because
just at that time the earlier impetus in this direction arising from
missionaries was beginning to weaken as a consequence of the general
weakening of religious feeling in European culture.
The
chief problem in East
Africa arose from the position of the white settlers of Kenya. Although
this colony rests directly on the equator, its interior highlands,
4,000 to 10,000 feet up, were well adapted to white settlement and to
European agricultural methods. The situation was dangerous by 1920, and
grew steadily worse as the years passed, until by 1950 Kenya had the
most critical native problem in Africa. It differed from South Africa
in that it lacked self-government, rich mines, or a divided white
population, but it had many common problems, such as overcrowded native
reserves, soil erosion, and discontented and detribalized blacks
working for low wages on lands owned by whites. It had about two
million blacks and only 3,000 whites in 1910. Forty years later it had
about 4 million blacks, 100,000 Indians, 24,000 Arabs, and only 30,000
whites (of which 40 percent were government employees). But what the
whites lacked in numbers they made up in determination. The healthful
highlands were reserved for white ownership as early as 1908, although
they were not delimited and guaranteed until 1939. They were organized
as very large, mostly undeveloped, farms of which there were only 2,000
covering 10,000 square miles in 1940. Many of these farms were of more
than 30,000 acres and had been obtained from the government, either by
purchase or on very long (999-year) leases for only nominal costs
(rents about two cents per year per acre). The native reserves amounted
to about 50,000 square miles of generally poorer land, or five times as
much land for the blacks, although they had at least 150 times as many
people. The Indians, chiefly in commerce and crafts, were so
industrious that they gradually came to own most of the commercial
areas both in the towns and in the native reserves.
The
two great subjects of
controversy in Kenya were concerned with the supply of labor and the
problem of self-government, although less agitated problems, like
agricultural technology, sanitation, and education were of vital
significance. The whites tried to increase the pressure on natives to
work on white farms rather than to seek to make a living on their own
lands within the reserves, by forcing them to pay taxes in cash, by
curtailing the size or quality of the reserves, by restricting
improvements in native agricultural techniques, and by personal and
political pressure and compulsion. The effort to use political
compulsion reached a peak in 1919 and was stopped by Milner, although
his group, like Rhodes in South Africa, was eager to make natives more
industrious and more ambitious by any kinds of social, educational, or
economic pressures. The settlers encouraged natives to live off the
reserves in various ways: for example, hy permitting them to settle as
squatters on white estates in return for at least 180 clays of work a
year at the usual low wage rates. To help both back and white farmers,
not only in Kenya but throughout the world, Milner created, as a
research organization, an Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture at
Trinidad in 1919.
As
a consequence of various
pressures which we have mentioned, notably the need to pay taxes which
averaged, perhaps, one month's wages a year and, in the aggregate, took
from the natives a larger sum than that realized from the sale of
native products, the percentage of adult males working off the
reservations increased from about 35 percent in 1925 to over 80 percent
in 1940. This had very deleterious effects on tribal life, family life,
native morality, and family discipline, although it seems to have had
beneficial effects on native health and general education.
The
real crux of controversy
before the Mau Mau uprising of 1948-1955 was the problem of
self-government. Pointing to South Africa, the settlers in Kenya
demanded self-rule which would allow them to enforce restrictions on
nonwhites. A local colonial government was organized under the Colonial
Office in 1906; as was usual in such cases it consisted of an
appointive governor assisted by an appointed Executive Council and
advised by a legislative Council. The latter had, also as usual, a
majority of officials and a minority of "unofficial" outsiders. Only in
1922 did the unofficial portion become elective, and only in 1949 did
it become a majority of the whole body. The efforts to establish an
elective element in the Legislative Council in 1919-1923 resulted in
violent controversy. The draft drawn by the council itself provided for
only European members elected by a European electorate. Milner added
two Indian members elected by a separate Indian electorate. In the
resulting controversy the settlers sought to obtain their original
plan, while London sought a single electoral roll restricted in size by
educational and property qualifications but without mention of race. To
resist this, the settlers organized a Vigilance Committee and planned
to seize the colony, abduct the governor, and form a republic federated
in some way with South Africa. From this controversy came eventually a
compromise, the famous Kenya White Paper of 1923, and the appointment
of Sir Edward Grigg as governor for the period of 1925-1931. The
compromise gave Kenya a Legislative Council containing representatives
of the imperial government, the white settlers, the Indians, the Arabs,
and a white missionary to represent the blacks. Except for the settlers
and Indians, most of these were nominated rather than elected, but by
1949, as the membership was enlarged, election was extended, and only
the official and Negro members (4 out of 41) were nominated.
The
Kenya White Paper of 1923
arose from a specific problem in a single colony, but remained the
formal statement of imperial policy in tropical Africa. It said:
"Primarily Kenya is an African territory, and His Majesty's Government
think it necessary definitely to record their considered opinion that
the interests of the African natives must be paramount, and that if and
when those interests and the interests of the immigrant races should
conflict, the former should prevail.... In the administration of Kenya
His Majesty's Government regard themselves as exercising a trust on
behalf of the African population, and they are unable to delegate or
share this trust, the object of which may be defined as the protection
and advancement of the native races."
As
a result of these troubles
in Kenya and the continued encroachment of white settlers on native
reserves, Amery sent one of the most important members of Milner's
group to the colony as governor and commander in chief. This was Sir
Edward Grigg (Lord Altrincham), who had been a member of Milner's
Kindergarten, an editor of The Round Table and of The
Times
(1903-1905, 1908-1913), a secretary to Lloyd George and to the Rhodes
Trustees (1923-1925), and a prolific writer on British imperial,
colonial, and foreign affairs. In Kenya he tried to protect native
reserves while still forcing natives to develop habits of industry by
steady work, to shift white attention from political to technical
problems such as agriculture, and to work toward a consolidation of
tropical Africa into a single territorial unit. He forced through the
Colonial Legislature in 1930 the Native Land Trust Ordinance which
guaranteed native reserves. But these reserves remained inadequate and
were increasingly damaged by bad agricultural practices. Only in 1925
did any sustained effort to improve such practices by natives begin.
About the same time efforts were made to extend the use of native
courts, native advisory councils, and to train natives for an
administrative service. All of these met slow, varied, and (on the
whole) indifferent success, chiefly because of natives' reluctance to
cooperate and the natives' growing suspicion of white men's motives
even when these whites were most eager to help. The chief cause of this
growing suspicion (which in some cases reached a psychotic level) would
seem to be the native's insatiable hunger for religion and his
conviction that the whites were hypocrites who taught a religion that
they did not obey, were traitors to Christ's teachings, and were using
these to control the natives and to betray their interests, under cover
of religious ideas which the whites themselves did not observe in
practice.
India to 1926
In
the decade 1910-1920,
the two greatest problems to be faced in creating a Commonwealth of
Nations were India and Ireland. There can be no doubt that India
provided a puzzle infinitely more complex, as it was more remote and
less clearly envisioned, than Ireland. When the British East
India
Company became the dominant power in India about the middle of the
eighteenth century, the Mogul Empire was in the last stages of
disintegration. Provincial rulers had only nominal titles, sufficient
to bring them immense treasure in taxes and rents, but they generally
lacked either the will or the strength to maintain order. The more
vigorous tried to expand their domains at the expense of the more
feeble, oppressing the peace-loving peasantry in the process, while all
legal power was challenged by roaming upstart bands and plundering
tribes. Of these willful tribes, the most important were the Marathas.
These systematically devastated much of south-central India in the last
half of the eighteenth century, forcing each village to buy temporary
immunity from destruction, but steadily reducing the capacity of the
countryside to meet their demands because of the trail of death and
economic disorganization they left in their wake. By 1900 only
one-fifth of the land in some areas was cultivated.
Although
the East India
Company was a commercial firm, primarily interested in profits, and
thus reluctant to assume a political role in this chaotic countryside,
it had to intervene again and again to restore order, replacing one
nominal ruler by another and even taking over the government of those
areas where it was more immediately concerned. In addition
the
cupidity of many of its employees led them to intervene as political
powers in order to divert to their own pockets some of the fabulous
wealth which they saw flowing by. For these two reasons the areas under
company rule, although not contiguous, expanded steadily until by 1858
they covered three-fifths of the country. Outside the British
areas
were over five hundred princely domains, some no larger than a single
village but others as extensive as some states of Europe. At this
point, in 1857-1858, a sudden, violent insurrection of native forces,
known as the Great Mutiny, resulted in the end of the Mogul Empire and
of the East India Company, the British government taking over their
political activities. From this flowed a number of important
consequences. Annexation of native principalities ceased, leaving 562
outside British India, but under British protection and subject to
British intervention to ensure good government; within British India
itself, good government became increasingly dominant and commercial
profit decreasingly so for the whole period 1858-1947; British
political prestige rose to new heights from 1858 to 1890 and then began
to dwindle, f ailing precipitously in 1919-1922.
The
task of good government in
India was not an easy one. In this great subcontinent with a population
amounting to almost one-fifth of the human race were to be found an
almost unbelievable diversity of cultures, religions, languages, and
attitudes. Even in 1950 modern locomotives linked together great cities
with advanced industrial production by passing through jungles
inhabited by tigers, elephants, and primitive pagan tribes. The
population, which increased from 284 million in 1901 to 389 million in
1941 and reached 530 million in 1961, spoke more than a dozen major
languages divided into hundreds of dialects, and were members of dozens
of antithetical religious beliefs. There were, in 1941, 255 million
Hindus, 92 million Muslims, 6.3 million Christians, 5.7 million Sikhs,
1.5 million Jains, and almost 26 million pagan animists of various
kinds. In addition, the Hindus and even some of the
non-Hindus were
divided into four major hereditary castes subdivided into thousands of
sub-castes, plus a lowest group of outcastes ("untouchables"),
amounting to at least 30 million persons in 1900 and twice this number
in 1950. These thousands of groups were endogamous, practiced
hereditary economic activities, frequently had distinctive marks or
garb, and were usually forbidden to marry, eat or drink with, or even
to associate with, persons of different caste. Untouchables were
generally forbidden to come in contact, even indirectly, with members
of other groups and were, accordingly, forbidden to enter many temples
or public buildings, to draw water from the public wells, even to allow
their shadows to fall on any person of a different group, and were
subject to other restrictions, all designed to avoid a personal
pollution which could be removed only by religious rituals of varying
degrees of elaborateness. Most sub-castes were occupational groups
covering all kinds of activities, so that there were hereditary groups
of carrion collectors, thieves, high-way robbers, or murderers (thugs),
as well a farmers, fishermen, storekeepers, drug mixers, or copper
smelters. For most peoples of India, cast was the most important fact
of life, submerging their individuality into a group from which they
could never escape, and regulating all their activities from birth to
death. As a result, India, even as late as 1900, was a society in which
status was dominant, each individual having a place in a group which,
in turn, had a place in society. This place, known to all and accepted
by all, operated by established procedures in its relationships with
other groups so that there was in spite of diversity, a minimum of
intergroup friction and a certain peaceful tolerance so long as
intergroup etiquette was known and accepted.
The
diversity of social
groups and beliefs was naturally reflected in an extraordinarily wide
range of social behavior from the most degraded and bestial activities
based on crude superstitions to even more astounding levels of exalted
spiritual self-sacrifice and cooperation. Although the British
refrained from interfering with religious practices, in the course of
the nineteenth century they abolished or greatly reduced the practice
of thuggism (in which a secret caste strangled strangers in honor of
the goddess Kali), suttee (in which the widow of a deceased Hindu was
expected to destroy herself on his funeral pyre), infanticide, temple
prostitution, and child marriages. At the other extreme, most Hindus
abstained from all violence; many had such a respect for life that they
would eat no meat, not even eggs, while a few carried this belief so
far that they would not molest a cobra about to strike, a mosquito
about to sting, or even walk about at night, less they unknowingly step
on an ant or worm. Hindus, who considered cows so sacred that
the
worse crime would be to cause the death of one (even by accident), who
allowed millions of these beasts to have free run of the country to the
great detriment of cleanliness or standards of living, who would not
wear shoes of leather, and would rather die than taste beef, ate pork
and associated daily with Muslims who ate beef but considered pigs to
be polluting. In general, most Indians lived in abject poverty and
want; only about one in a hundred could read in 1858, while
considerably less could understand the English language. The
overwhelming majority at that time were peasants, pressed down by
onerous taxes and rents, isolated in small villages unconnected by
roads, and decimated at irregular intervals by famine or disease.
British
rule in the period
1858-1947 tied India together by railroads, roads, and telegraph lines.
It brought the country into contact with the Western world, and
especially with world markets, by establishing a uniform system of
money, steamboat connections with Europe by the Suez Canal, cable
connections throughout the world, and the use of English as the
language of government and administration. Best of all, Britain
established the rule of law, equality before the law, and a tradition
of judicial fairness to replace the older practice of inequality and
arbitrary, violence. A certain degree of efficiency, and a certain
ambitious, if discontented, energy directed toward change replaced the
older abject resignation to inevitable fate.
The
modern postal,
telegraphic, and railroad systems all began in 1854. The first grew to
such dimensions that by the outbreak of war in 1939 it handled over a
billion pieces of mail and forty million rupees in money orders each
year. The railroad grew from zoo miles in 1855 to 9,000 in 1880, to
25,000 in 1901, and to 43,000 in 1939. This, the third largest railroad
system in the world, carried 600 million passengers and go million tons
of freight a year. About the same time, the dirt tracks of 1858 had
been partly replaced by over 300,000 miles of highways, of which only
about a quarter could be rated as first class. From 1925 onward, these
highways were used increasingly by passenger buses, crowded and
ramshackle in many cases, but steadily breaking down the isolation of
the villages.
Improved
communications and
public order served to merge the isolated village markets, smoothing
out the earlier alternations of scarcity and glut with their
accompanying phenomena of waste and of starvation in the midst of
plenty. All this led to a great extension of cultivation into more
remote areas and the growing of a greater variety of crops. Sparsely
settled areas of forests and hills, especially in Assam and the
Northwest Provinces, were occupied, without the devastation of
deforestation (as in China or in non-Indian Nepal) because of a highly
developed forestry conservation service. Migration, permanent and
seasonal, became regular features of Indian life, the earnings of the
migrants being sent back to their families in the villages they had
left. A magnificent system of canals, chiefly for irrigation, was
constructed, populating desolate wastes, especially in the northwestern
parts of the country, and encouraging whole tribes which had previously
been pastoral freebooters to settle down as cultivators. By 1939 almost
60 million acres of land were irrigated. For this and other reasons,
the sown area of India increased from 195 to 228 million acres in about
forty years (1900-1939). Increases in yields were much less
satisfactory because of reluctance to change, lack of knowledge or
capital, and organizational problems.
The
tax on land traditionally
had been the major part of public revenue in India, and remained near
so percent as late as 1900. Under the Moguls these land revenues had
been collected by tax farmers. In many areas, notably Bengal, the
British tended to regard these land revenues as rents rather than
taxes, and thus regarded the revenue collectors as the owners of the
land. Once this was established, these new landlords used their powers
to raise rents, to evict cultivators who had been on the same land for
years or even generations, and to create an unstable rural proletariat
of tenants and laborers unable or unwilling to improve their methods.
Numerous legislative enactments sought, without great success, to
improve these conditions. Such efforts were counterbalanced by the
growth of population, the great rise in the value of land, the
inability of industry or commerce to drain surplus population from the
land as fast as it increased, the tendency of the government to favor
industry or commerce over agriculture by tariffs, taxation, and public
expenditures, the growing frequency of famines (from droughts), of
malaria (from irrigation projects), and of plague (from trade with the
Far East) which wiped out in one year gains made in several years, the
growing burden of peasant debt at onerous terms and at high interest
rates, and the growing inability to supplement incomes from cultivation
by incomes from household crafts because of the growing competition
from cheap industrial goods. Although slavery was abolished in 1843,
many of the poor were reduced to peonage by contracting debts at unfair
terms and binding themselves and their heirs to work for their
creditors until the debt was paid. Such a debt could never be paid, in
many cases, because the rate at which it was reduced was left to the
creditor and could rarely be questioned by the illiterate debtor.
All
of these misfortunes
culminated in the period 1895-1901. There had been a long period of
declining prices in 1873-1896, which increased the burden on debtors
and stagnated economic activities. In 1897 the monsoon rains failed,
with a loss of 18 million tons of food crops and of one million lives
from famine. This disaster was repeated in 1899-1900. Bubonic plague
was introduced to Bombay from China in 1895 and killed about two
million persons in the next six years.
From
this low point in 1901,
economic conditions improved fairly steadily, except for a brief period
in 1919-1922 and the long burden of the world depression in 1929-1934.
The rise in prices in 1900 1914 benefitted India more than others, as
the prices of her exports rose more rapidly. The war of 1914-1918 gave
India a great economic opportunity, especially by increasing the demand
for her textiles. Tariffs were raised steadily after 1916, providing
protection for industry, especially in metals, textiles, cement, and
paper. The customs became the largest single source of revenue,
alleviating to some extent the pressure of taxation on cultivators.
However, the agrarian problem remained acute, for most of the factors
listed above remained in force. In 1931 it was estimated that, in the
United Provinces, 30 percent of the cultivators could not make a diving
from their holdings even in good years, while 52 percent could make a
living in good years but not in bad ones.
There
was great economic
advance in mining, industry, commerce, and finance in the period after
1900. Coal output went up from 6 to 21 million tons in 1900-1924, and
petroleum output (chiefly from Burma) \vent up from 37 to 294 million
gallons. Production in the protected industries also improved in the
same period until, by 1932, India could produce three-quarters of her
cotton cloth, three-quarters of her steel, and most of her cement,
matches, and sugar. In one product, jute, India became the chief source
for the world's supply, and this became the leading export after 1925.
A
notable feature of the
growth of manufacturing in India after 1900 lies in the fact that Hindu
capital largely replaced British capital, chiefly for political
reasons. In spite of India's poverty, there was a considerable volume
of saving, arising chiefly from the inequitable distribution of income
to the landlord class and to the moneylenders (if these two groups can
be separated in this way). Naturally, these groups preferred to invest
their incomes back in the activities whence they had been derived, but,
after 1919, nationalist agitation and especially Gandhi's influence
inclined many Hindus to make contributions to their country's strength
by investing in industry.
The
growth of industry should
not be exaggerated, and its influences were considerably less than one
might believe at first glance. There was little growth of an urban
proletariat or of a permanent class of factory workers, although this
did exist. Increases in output came largely from power production
rather than from increases in the labor force. This labor force
continued to be rural in its psychological and social orientation,
being generally temporary migrants from the villages, living under
urban industrial conditions only for a few years, with every intention
of returning to the village eventually, and generally sending savings
back to their families and visiting them for weeks or even months each
year (generally at the harvest season). This class of industrial
laborers did not adopt either an urban or a proletarian point of view,
were almost wholly illiterate, formed labor organizations only
reluctantly (because of refusal to pay dues), and rarely acquired
industrial skills. After 1915 labor unions did appear, but membership
remained small, and they were organized and controlled by non-laboring
persons, frequently middle-class intellectuals. Moreover, industry
remained a widely scattered activity found in a few cities but absent
from the rest. Although India had 35 cities of over 100,000 population
in 19:1, most of these remained commercial and administrative centers
and not manufacturing centers. That the chief emphasis remained on
rural activities can be seen from the fact that these 35 centers of
population had a total of 8.2 million inhabitants compared to 310.7
million outside their limits in 1921. In fact, only 30 million persons
lived in the 1,623 centers of over 5,000 persons each, while 289
million lived in centers smaller than 5,000 persons.
One
of the chief ways in which
the impact of Western culture reached India was by education. The
charge has frequently been made that the British neglected education in
India or that they made an error in emphasizing education in English
for the upper classes rather than education in the vernacular languages
for the masses of the people. History does not sustain the justice of
these charges. In England itself the government assumed little
responsibility for education until 1902, and in general had a more
advanced policy in this field in India than in England until well into
the present century. Until 1835 the English did try to encourage native
traditions of education, but their vernacular schools failed from lack
of patronage; the Indians themselves objected to being excluded, as
they regarded it, from English education. Accordingly, from 1835 the
British offered English-language education on the higher levels in the
hope that Western science, technology, and political attitudes could be
introduced without disrupting religious or social life and that these
innovations would "infiltrate" downward into the population. Because of
the expense, government-sponsored education had to be restricted to the
higher levels, although encouragement for vernacular schools on the
lower levels began (without much financial obligation) in 1854. The
"infiltration downward" theory was quite mistaken because those who
acquired knowledge of English used it as a passport to advancement in
government service or professional life and became renegades from,
rather than missionaries to, the lower classes of Indian society. In a
sense the use of English on the university level of education did not
lead to its spread in Indian society but removed those who acquired it
from that society, leaving them in a kind of barren ground which was
neither Indian nor Western but hovered uncomfortably between the two.
The fact that knowledge of English and possession of a university
degree could free one from the physical drudgery of Indian life by
opening the door to public service or the professions created a
veritable passion to obtain these keys (but only in a minority).
The
British had little choice
but to use English as the language of government and higher education.
In India the languages used in these two fields had been foreign ones
for centuries. The language of government and of the courts was Persian
until 1837. Advanced and middle-level education had always been
foreign, in Sanskrit for the Hindus and in Arabic for the Muslims.
Sanskrit, a "dead" language, was that of Hindu religious literature,
while Arabic was the language of the Koran, the only writing the
ordinary Muslim would wish to read. In fact, the allegiance of the
Muslims to the Koran and to Arabic was so intense that they refused to
participate in the new English-language educational system and, in
consequence, had been excluded from government, the professions, and
much of the economic life of the country by 1900.
No
vernacular language could
have been used to teach the really valuable contributions of the West,
such as science, technology, economics, agricultural science, or
political science, because the necessary vocabulary was lacking in the
vernaculars. When the university of the native state of Hyderabad tried
to translate Western works into Urdu for teaching purposes after 1920,
it was necessary to create about 40,000 new words. Moreover, the large
number of vernacular languages would have made the choice of any one of
them for the purpose of higher education invidious. And, finally, the
natives themselves had no desire to learn to read their vernacular
languages, at least during the nineteenth century; they wanted to learn
English because it provided access to knowledge, to government
positions, and to social advancement as no vernacular could. But it
must be remembered that it was the exceptional Indian, not the average
one, who wanted to learn to read at all. The average native was content
to remain illiterate, at least until deep into the twentieth century.
Only then did the desire to read spread under the stimulus of growing
nationalism, political awareness, and growing concern with political
and religious tensions. These fostered the desire to read, in order to
read newspapers, but this had adverse effects: each political or
religious group had its own press and presented its own biased version
of world events so that, by 1940, these different groups had entirely
different ideas of reality.
Moreover,
the new enthusiasm
for the vernacular languages, the influence of extreme Hindu
nationalists like B. G. Tilak (1859-1920) or anti-Westerners like M. K.
Gandhi (1869-1948), led to a wholesale rejection of all that was best
in British or in European culture. At the same time, those who sought
power, advancement, or knowledge continued to learn English as the key
to these ambitions. Unfortunately, these semi-westernized Indians
neglected much of the practical side of the European way of life and
tended to be intellectualist and doctrinaire and to despise practical
learning and physical labor. They lived, as we have said, in a middle
world which was neither Indian nor Western, spoiled for the Indian way
of life, but often unable to find a position in Indian society which
would allow them to live their own version of a Western way of life. At
the university they studied literature, law, and political science, all
subjects which emphasized verbal accomplishments. Since India did not
provide sufficient jobs for such accomplishments, there was a great
deal of ''academic unemployment," with resulting discontent and growing
radicalism. The career of Gandhi was a result of the efforts of one man
to avoid this problem by fusing certain elements of Western teaching
with a purified Hinduism to create a nationalist Indian way of life on
a basically moral foundation.
It
is obvious that one of the
chief effects of British educational policy has been to increase the
social tensions within India and to give them a political orientation.
This change is usually called the "rise of Indian nationalism," but it
is considerably more complex than this simple name might imply. It
began to rise about 1890, possibly under the influence of the
misfortunes at the end of the century, grew steadily until it reached
the crisis stage after 1917, and finally emerged in the long-drawn
crisis of 1930-1947.
India's
outlook was
fundamentally religious, just as the British outlook was fundamentally
political. The average Indian derived from his religious outlook a
profound conviction that the material world and physical comfort were
irrelevant and unimportant in contrast with such spiritual matters as
the proper preparation for the life to come after the body's death.
From his English education the average Indian student derived the
conviction that liberty and self-government were the highest goods of
life and must be sought by such resistance to authority as had been
shown in the Magna Carta, the opposition to Charles I, the "Glorious
Revolution" of 1689, the writings of John Locke and of John Stuart
Mill, and the general resistance to public authority found in
nineteenth century liberalism and laissez-faire. These two points of
view tended to merge in the minds of Indian intellectuals into a point
of view in which it seemed that English political ideals should be
sought by Indian methods of religious fervor, self-sacrifice, and
contempt for material welfare or physical comforts. As a result,
political and social tensions were acerbated between British and
Indians, between Westernizers and Nationalists, between Hindus and
Muslims, between Brahmins and lower castes, and between caste members
and outcastes.
In
the early part of the
nineteenth century there had been a revival of interest in Indian
languages and literatures. This revival soon revealed that many Hindu
ideas and practices had no real support in the earliest evidence. Since
these later innovations included some of the most objectionable
features of Hindu life, such as suttee, child marriage, female
inferiority, image worship, and extreme polytheism, a movement began
that sought to free Hinduism from these extraneous elements and to
restore it to its earlier "purity" by emphasizing ethics, monotheism,
and an abstract idea of deity. This tendency was reinforced by the
influence of Christianity and of Islam, so that the revived Hinduism w
as really a synthesis of these three religions. As a consequence of
these influences, the old, and basic, Hindu idea of Karma was played
down. This idea maintained that each individual soul reappeared again
and again, throughout eternity, in a different physical form and in a
different social status, each difference being a reward or punishment
for the soul's conduct at its previous appearance. There was no real
hope for escape from this cycle, except by a gradual improvement
through a long series of successive appearances to the ultimate goal of
complete obliteration of personality (Nirvana) by
ultimate mergence in the soul of the universe (Brahma).
This release (moksha)
from the endless cycle of existence could be achieved only by the
suppression of all desire, of all individuality, and of all will to
live.
The
belief in Karma was the
key to Hindu ideology and to Hindu society, explaining not only the
emphasis on fate and resignation to fate, the idea that man was a part
of nature and brother to the beasts, the submergence of individuality
and the lack of personal ambition, but also specific social
institutions such as caste or even suttee. How could castes be ended if
these are God-given gradations for the rewards or punishments earned in
an earlier existence? How could suttee be ended if a wife is a wife
through all eternity, and must pass from one life to another when her
husband does?
The
influence of Christianity
and of Islam, of Western ideas and of British education, in changing
Hindu society was largely a consequence of their ability to reduce the
average Hindu's faith in Karma. One of the earliest figures in this
growing synthesis of Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam was Ram Mohan
Roy (1772-1833), founder of the Brahma Samaj Society in 1828. Another
was Keshab Chandra Sen (1841-1884), who hoped to unite Asia and Europe
into a common culture on the basis of a synthesis of the common
elements of these three religions. There were many reformers of this
type. Their most notable feature was that they were universalist rather
than nationalist and were Westernizers in their basic inclinations.
About 1870 a change began to appear, perhaps from the influence of Rama
Krishna (1834-1886) and his disciple Swami Vivekananda (1862-1902),
founder of Vedanta. This new tendency emphasized India's spiritual
power as a higher value than the material power of the West. It
advocated simplicity, asceticism, self-sacrifice, cooperation, and
India's mission to spread these virtues to the world. One of the
disciples of this movement was Gopal Krishna Gokhale ( 1866-1915),
founder of the Servants of India Society (1905). This was a small band
of devoted persons who took vows of poverty and obedience, to regard
all Indians as brothers irrespective of caste or creed, and to engage
in no personal quarrels. The members scattered among the most diverse
groups of India to teach, to weld India into a single spiritual unit,
and to seek social reform.
In
time these movements became
increasingly nationalistic and anti-Western, tending to defend orthodox
Hinduism rather than to purify it and to oppose Westerners rather than
to copy them. This tendency culminated in Bal Gangathar Tilak
(1859-1920), a Marathi journalist of Poona, who started his career in
mathematics and law but slowly developed a passionate love for
Hinduism, even in its most degrading details, and insisted that it must
be defended against outsiders, even with violence. He was not opposed
to reforms which appeared as spontaneous developments of Indian
sentiment, but he was violently opposed to any attempt to legislate
reform from above or to bring in foreign influences from European or
Christian sources. He first became a political figure in 1891
when
he vigorously opposed a government bill which would have curtailed
child marriage by fixing the age of consent for girls at twelve years.
By 1897 he was using his paper to incite to murder and riots against
government officials.
A
British official w ho
foresaw this movement toward violent nationalism as early as 1878
sought to divert it into more legal and more constructive channels by
establishing the Indian National Congress in 1885. The official in
question, Allan Octavian Hume (1829-1912), had the secret support of
the viceroy, Lord Dufferin. They hoped to assemble each year an
unofficial congress of Indian leaders to discuss Indian political
matters in the hope that this experience would provide training in the
working of representative institutions and parliamentary government.
For twenty years the Congress agitated for extension of Indian
participation in the administration, and for the extension of
representation and eventually of parliamentary government within the
British system. It is notable that this movement renounced violent
methods, did not seek separation from Britain, and aspired to form a
government based on the British pattern.
Support
for the movement grew
very slowly at first, even among Hindus, and there was open opposition,
led by Sir Saiyid Ahmad Khan, among the Muslims. As the movement
gathered momentum, after 1890, many British officials began to oppose
it. At the same time, under pressure from Tilak, the Congress itself
advanced its demands and began to use economic pressure to obtain
these. As a result, after 1900, fewer Muslims joined the Congress:
there were 156 Muslims out of 702 delegates in 1890, but only 17 out of
756 in 1905. All these forces came to a head in 1904-1907 when the
Congress, for the first time, demanded self-government within the
empire for India and approved the use of economic pressures (boycott)
against Britain.
The
Japanese victory over
Russia in 1905, which was regarded as an Asiatic triumph over Europe,
the Russian revolt of 1905, the growing power of Tilak over Gokhale in
the Indian National Congress, and public agitation over Lord Curzon's
efforts to push through an administrative division of the huge-province
of Bengal (population 78 million) brought matters to a head. There was
open agitation by Hindu extremists to spill English blood to satisfy
the goddess of destruction, Kali. In the Indian National Congress of
1907, the followers of Tilak stormed the platform and disrupted the
meeting. Much impressed with the revolutionary violence in Russia
against the czar and in Ireland against the English, this group
advocated the use of terrorism rather than of petitions in India. The
viceroy, Lord Hardinge, was wounded by a bomb in 1912. For many Nears,
racial intolerance against Indians by English residents in India had
been growing, and was increasingly manifested in studied insults and
even physical assaults. In 1906 a Muslim League was formed in
opposition to tile Hindu extremists and in support of the British
position, but in 1913 it also demanded self-government. Tilak's group
boycotted the Indian National Congress for nine years (1907-1916), and
Tilak himself was in prison for sedition for six years (1908-1914).
The
constitutional development
of India did not stand still during this tumult. In 1861 appointive
councils with advisory powers had been created, both at the center to
assist the viceroy and in the provinces. These had nonofficial as well
as official members, and the provincial ones had certain legislative
powers, but all these activities were under strict executive control
and veto. In 1892 these powers were widened to allow discussion of
administrative questions, and various non-governmental groups (called
"communities") were allowed to suggest individuals for the unofficial
seats in the councils.
A
third act, of 1909, passed
by the Liberal government with John (Lord) Morley as secretary of state
and Lord Minto as viceroy, enlarged the councils, making a nonofficial
majority in the provincial councils, allowed the councils to vote on
all issues, and gave the right to elect the nonofficial members to
various communal groups, including Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, on a
fixed ratio. This last provision was a disaster. By establishing
separate electoral lists for various religious groups, it encouraged
religious extremism in all groups, made it likely that the more
extremist candidates would be successful, and made religious
differences the basic and irreconcilable fact of political life. By
giving religious minorities more seats than their actual proportions of
the electorate entitled them to (a principle known as "weightage"), it
made it politically advantageous to he a minority. By emphasizing
minority rights (in which they did believe) over majority rule (in
which they did not believe) the British made religion a permanently
disruptive force in political life, and encouraged the resulting
acerbated extremism to work out its rivalries outside the
constitutional framework and the scope of legal action in riots rather
than at the polls or in political assemblies. Moreover, as soon as the
British had given the Muslims this special constitutional position in
1909 they lost the support of the Muslim community in 1911-1919. This
loss of Muslim support was the result of several factors. Curzon's
division of Bengal, which the Muslims had supported (since it gave them
East Bengal as a separate area with a Muslim majority) was
countermanded in 1911 without any notice to the Muslims. British
foreign policy after 1911 was increasingly anti-Turkish, and thus
opposed to the caliph (the religious leader of the Muslims). As a
result the Muslim League called for self-government for India for the
first time in 1913, and four years later formed an alliance with the
Indian National Congress which continued until 1924.
In
1909, while Philip Kerr
(Lothian), Lionel Curtis, and (Sir) William Marris were in Canada
laying the foundations for the Round Table organization there, Marris
persuaded Curtis that "self-government, . . . however far distant was
the only intelligible goal of British policy in India...the existence
of political unrest in India, so far from being a reason for pessimism,
was the surest sign that the British, with all their manifest failings,
had not shirked their primary duty of extending western education to
India and so preparing Indians to govern themselves." Four years later
the Round Table group in London decided to investigate how this could
be done. It formed a study group of eight members, under Curtis, adding
to the group three officials from the India Office. This group decided,
in 1915, to issue a public declaration favoring "the progressive
realization of responsible government in India." A declaration to this
effect was drawn up by Lord Milner and was issued on August 20, 1917,
by Secretary of State for India Edwin S. Montagu. It said that "the
policy of His Majesty's Government, with which the Government of India
are in complete accord, is that of the increasing association of
Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual
development of self-governing institutions with a view to the
progressive realization of responsible government in India as an
integral part of the British Empire."
This
declaration was
revolutionary because, for the first time, it specifically enunciated
British hopes for India's future and because it used, for the first
time, the words "responsible government." The British had spoken
vaguely for over a century about "self-government" for India; they had
spoken increasingly about "representative government"; but they had
consistently avoided the expression "responsible government." This
latter term meant parliamentary government, which most English
conservatives regarded as quite unsuited for Indian conditions, since
it required, they believed, an educated electorate and a homogeneous
social system, both of which were lacking in India. The conservatives
had talked for years about ultimate self-government for India on some
indigenous Indian model, but had done nothing to find such a model.
Then, without any clear conception of where they were going, they had
introduced "representative government," in which the executive
consulted with public opinion through representatives of the people
(either appointed, as in 1871, or elected, as in 1909), but with the
executive still autocratic and in no way responsible to these
representatives. The use of the expression "responsible government" in
the declaration of 1917 went back to the Round Table group and
ultimately to the Marris-Curtis conversation in the Canadian Rockies in
1909.
In
the meantime, the Round
Table study-group had worked for three years (1913-1916) on methods for
carrying out this promise. Through the influence of Curtis and F. S.
Oliver the federal constitution of the United States contributed a good
deal to the drafts which were made, especially to provisions for
dividing governmental activities into central and provincial portions,
with gradual Indianization of the latter and 166 ultimately of the
former. This approach to the problem was named "dyarchy" by Curtis. The
Round Table draft was sent to the Governor of New South Wales, Lord
Chelmsford, a Fellow of All Souls College, who believed that it came
from an official committee of the India Office. After he accepted it in
principle he was made Viceroy of India in 1916. Curtis went to India
immediately to consult with local authorities there (including Meston,
Marris, Hailey, and the retired Times Foreign
Editor, Sir
Valentine Chirol) as well as with Indians. From these conferences
emerged a report, written by Marris, which was issued as the
Montagu-Chelmsford Report in 1917. The provisions of this report were
drawn up as a bill, passed by Parliament (after substantial revision by
a Joint Committee under Lord Selborne) and became the Government of
India Act of 1919.
The
Act of 1919 was the most
important law in Indian constitutional history before 1935. It divided
governmental activities into "central" and "provincial." The former
included defense, foreign affairs, railways and communications,
commerce, civil and criminal law and procedures and others; the latter
included public order and police, irrigation, forests, education,
public health, public works, and other activities. Furthermore, the
provincial activities were divided into "transferred" departments and
"reserved" departments, the former being entrusted to native ministers
who were responsible to provincial assemblies. The central government
remained in the hands of the governor-general and viceroy, who was
responsible to Britain and not to the Indian Legislature. His Cabinet
(Executive Council) usually had three Indian members after 1921. The
legislature was bicameral, consisting of a Council of State and a
Legislative Assembly. In both, some members were appointed officials,
but the majority were elected on a very restricted suffrage. There
were, on the electoral lists, no more than 900,000 voters for the lower
chamber and only 16,000 for the upper chamber. The provincial
unicameral legislatures had a wider, but still limited, franchise, with
about a million on the list of voters in Bengal, half as many in
Bombay. Moreover, certain seats, on the principle of "weightage," were
reserved to Muslims elected by a separate Muslim electoral list. Both
legislatures had the power to enact laws, subject to rather extensive
powers of veto and of decree in the hands of the governor-general and
the appointed provincial governors. Only the "transferred" departments
of the provincial governments were responsible to elective assemblies,
the "reserved" activities on the provincial level and all activities in
the central administration being responsible to the appointed governors
and governor-general and ultimately to Britain.
It
was hoped that the Act of
1919 would provide opportunities in parliamentary procedures,
responsible government, and administration to Indians so that
self-government could be extended by successive steps later, but these
hopes were destroyed in the disasters of 1919-1922. The violence of
British reactionaries collided with the nonviolent refusal to cooperate
of Mahatma Gandhi, crushing out the hopes of the Round Table reformers
between them.
Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi
(1869-1948), known as "Mahatma," or "Great Soul," was the son and
grandson of prime ministers of a minute princely state in western
India. Of the Vaisya caste (third of the four), he grew up in a very
religious and ascetic atmosphere of Hinduism. Married at thirteen and a
father at fifteen, Gandhi was sent to England to study law by his older
brother when he was seventeen. Such a voyage was forbidden by
the
rules of his caste, and he was expelled from it for going. Before he
left he gave a vow to his family not to touch wine, women, or meat.
After three years in England he passed the bar at Inner Temple. Most of
his time in Europe was passed in dilettante fads, experimenting with
vegetarian diets and self-administered medicines or in religious or
ethical discussions with English faddists and Indiophiles. He was much
troubled by religious scruples and feelings of guilt. Back in India in
1891, he was a failure as a lawyer because of his inarticulate lack of
assurance and his real lack of interest in the law. In 1893 a Muslim
firm sent him to Natal, South Africa, on a case. There Gandhi found his
vocation.
The
population of Natal in
1896 consisted of 50,000 Europeans, mostly English, 400,000 African
natives, and 51,000 Indians, chiefly outcastes. The last group had been
imported from India, chiefly as indentured workers on three or
five-year contracts, to work the humid low land plantations where the
Negroes refused to work. Most of the Indians stayed, after their
contracts were fulfilled, and were so industrious and intelligent that
they began to rise very rapidly in an economic sense, especially in the
retail trades. The whites, who were often indolent, resented such
competition from dark-skinned persons and were generally indignant at
Indian economic success. As Lionel Curtis told Gandhi in the Transvaal
in 1903, "It is not the vices of Indians that Europeans in this country
fear but their virtues."
When
Gandhi first arrived in
Natal in 1893, he found that that country, like most of South Africa,
was rent with color hatred and group animosities. All political rights
were in the hands of whites, while the nonwhites were subjected to
various kinds of social and economic discriminations and segregations.
When Gandhi first appeared in court. the judge ordered him to remove
his turban (worn with European clothes); Gandhi refused, and left.
Later, traveling on business in a first-class railway carriage to the
Transvaal, he was ejected from the train at the insistence of a white
passenger. He spent a bitterly cold night on the railway platform
rather than move to a second- or third-class compartment when he had
been sold a first-class ticket. For the rest of his life he traveled
only third class. In the Transvaal he was unable to get a room in a
hotel because of his color. These episodes gave him his new vocation:
to establish that Indians were citizens of the British Empire and
therefore entitled to equality under its laws. He was determined to use
only peaceful methods of passive mass non-cooperation to achieve his
goal. His chief weapon would be love and submissiveness, even to those
who treated him most brutally. His refusal to fear death or to avoid
pain and his efforts to return love to those who tried to inflict
injuries upon him made a powerful weapon, especially if it were
practiced on a mass basis.
Gandhi's
methods were
really derived from his own Hindu tradition, but certain elements in
this tradition had been reinforced by reading Ruskin, Thoreau, Tolstoi,
and the Sermon on the Mount. When he was brutally beaten by whites in
Natal in 1897, he refused to prosecute, saying that it was not their
fault that they had been taught evil ideas.
These
methods gave the Indians
of South Africa a temporary respite from the burden of intolerance
under Gandhi's leadership in the period 1893-1914. When the Transvaal
proposed an ordinance compelling all Indians to register, be
fingerprinted, and carry identity cards at all times, Gandhi organized
a mass, peaceful refusal to register. Hundreds went to jail. Smuts
worked out a compromise with Gandhi: if the Indians would register
"voluntarily" the Transvaal would repeal the ordinance. After Gandhi
had persuaded his compatriots to register, Smuts failed to carry out
his part of the agreement, and the Indians solemnly burned their
registration cards at a mass meeting. Then, to test the Transvaal ban
on Indian immigration, Gandhi organized mass marches of Indians into
the Transvaal from Natal. Others went from the Transvaal to Natal and
returned, being arrested for crossing the frontier. At one time 2,500
of the 13,000 Indians in the Transvaal were in jail and 6,000 were in
exile.
The
struggle was intensified
after the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 because the
Transvaal restrictions on Indians, which forbade them to own land, to
live outside segregated districts, or to vote, were not repealed, and a
Supreme Court decision of 1913 declared all non-Christian marriages to
be legally invalid. This last decision deprived most nonwhite wives and
children of all legal protection of their family rights. Mass civil
disobedience by Indians increased, including a march by 6,000 from
Natal to the Transvaal. Finally, after much controversy, Gandhi and
Smuts worked out an elaborate compromise agreement in 1914. This
revoked some of the discriminations against Indians in South Africa,
recognized Indian marriages, annulled a discriminatory £3 annual
tax on Indians, and stopped all importation of indentured labor from
India in 1920. Peace was restored in this civil controversy just in
time to permit a united front in the external war with Germany. But in
South Africa by 1914 Gandhi had worked out the techniques he would use
against the British in India after 1919.
Until
1919 Gandhi Noms very
loyal to the British connection. Both in South Africa and in India he
had found that the English from England were much more tolerant and
understanding than most of the English-speaking whites of middle-class
origin in the overseas areas. In the Boer War he was the active leader
of an 1,100-man Indian ambulance corps which worked with inspiring
courage even under fire on the field of battle. During World War I, he
worked constantly on recruiting campaigns for the British forces. On
one of these in 1915 he said, "I discovered that the British Empire had
certain ideals with which I have fallen in love, and one of these
ideals is that every subject of the British Empire has the freest scope
possible for his energy and honor and whatever he thinks is due to his
conscience." By 1918 this apostle of nonviolence was saying: "We are
regarded as a cowardly people. If we want to become free from that
reproach, we should learn to use arms.... Partnership in the Empire is
our definite goal. We should suffer to the utmost of our ability and
even lay down our lives to defend the Empire. If the Empire perishes,
with it perishes our cherished aspiration."
During
this period Gandhi's
asceticism and his opposition to all kinds of discrimination were
winning him an outstanding moral position among the Indian people. He
was opposed to all violence and bloodshed, to alcohol, meat, and
tobacco, even to the eating of milk and eggs, and to sex (even in
marriage). More than this, he was opposed to Western industrialism, to
Western science and medicine, and to the use of Western rather than
Indian languages. He demanded that his followers make fixed quotas of
homespun cotton each day, wore a minimum of homespun clothing himself,
spun on a small wheel throughout all his daily activities, and took the
small hand spinning wheel as the symbol of his movement— all this
in order to signify the honorable nature of handwork, the need for
Indian economic self-sufficiency, and his opposition to Western
industrialism. He worked for equality for the untouchables, calling
them "God's children" (Harijans), associating with them whenever he
could, taking them into his own home, even adopting one as his own
daughter. He worked to relieve economic oppression, organizing strikes
against low wages or miserable working conditions, supporting the
strikers with money he had gathered from India's richest Hindu
industrialists. He attacked Western medicine and sanitation, supported
all kinds of native medical nostrums and even quackery, yet went to a
Western-trained surgeon for an operation when he had appendicitis
himself. Similarly he preached against the use of milk, but drank
goat's milk for his health much of his life. These inconsistencies he
attributed to his own weak sinfulness. Similarly, he permitted
hand-spun cotton to be sewn on Singer sewing machines, and conceded
that Western-type factories were necessary to provide such machines.
During
this period he
discovered that his personal fasts from food, which he had long
practiced, could be used as moral weapons against those who opposed him
while they strengthened his moral hold over those who supported him. "I
fasted," he said, "to reform those who loved me. You cannot fast
against a tyrant." Gandhi never seemed to recognize that his fasting
and nonviolent civil disobedience were effective against the British in
India and in South Africa only to the degree that the British had the
qualities of humanity, decency, generosity, and fair play which he most
admired, but that by attacking the British through these virtues he was
weakening Britain and the class which possessed these virtues and
making it more likely that they would be replaced by nations and by
leaders who did not have these virtues. Certainly Hitler and the
Germans who exterminated six million Jews in cold blood during World
War II would not have shared the reluctance of Smuts to imprison a few
thousand Indians or Lord Halifax's reluctance to see Gandhi starve
himself to death. This was the fatal weakness of Gandhi's aims and his
methods, but these aims and methods were so dear to Indian hearts and
so selflessly pursued by Gandhi that he rapidly became the spiritual
leader of the Indian National Congress after Gokhale's death in 1915.
In this position Gandhi by his spiritual power succeeded in something
which no earlier Indian leader had achieved and few had hoped for: he
spread political awareness and nationalist feeling from the educated
class down into the great uneducated mass of the Indian people.
This
mass and Gandhi expected
and demanded a greater degree of self-government after the end of World
War I. The Act of 1919 provided that, and probably provided as much of
it as the political experience of Indians entitled them to. Moreover,
the Act anticipated expansion of the areas of self-government as Indian
political experience increased. But the Act was largely a failure,
because Gandhi had aroused political ambitions in great masses of
Indians who lacked experience in political activities, and these
demands gave rise to intense opposition to Indian self-government in
British circles which did not share the ideals of the Round Table
group. Finally, the actions of this British opposition drove Gandhi
from "nonresistance" through complete "non-cooperation," to "civil
disobedience," thus destroying the whole purpose of the Act of 1919.
Many
British conservatives
both at home and in India opposed the Act of 1919. Lord Ampthill, who
had long experience in India and had valiantly supported Gandhi in
South Africa, attacked the Act and Lionel Curtis for making it. In the
House of Lords he said: "The incredible fact is that, but for the
chance visit to India of a globe-trotting doctrinaire with a positive
mania for constitution-mongering [Curtis], nobody in the world would
ever have thought of so peculiar a notion as Dyarchy. And yet the Joint
[Selborne] Committee tells us in an airy manner that no better plan can
be conceived." In India men like the governor of the Punjab, Sir
Michael O’Dwyer, were even more emphatically opposed to Indian
self-government or Indian nationalist agitation. Many Conservatives who
were determined to maintain the empire intact could not see how this
could be done without India as the major jewel in it, as in the
nineteenth century. India not only provided a large share of the
manpower in the peacetime imperial army, hut this army was largely
stationed in India and paid for out of the revenues of the Government
of India. Moreover, this self-paying manpower pool was beyond
the
scrutiny of the British reformer as well as the British taxpayers. The
older Tories, with their strong army connections, and others, like
Winston Churchill, with an appreciation of military matters, did not
see how England could face the military demands of the twentieth
century without Indian military manpower, at least in colonial areas.
Instead
of getting more
freedom at the end of the war in 1918, the Indians got less. The
conservative group pushed through the Rowlatt Act in March 1919. This
continued most of the wartime restrictions on civil liberties in India,
to be used to control nationalist agitations. Gandhi called for civil
disobedience and a series of scattered local general strikes (hartels)
in protest. These actions led to violence, especially to Indian attacks
on the British. Gandhi bewailed this violence, and inflicted a
seventy-two-hour fast on himself as penance.
In
Amritsar an Englishwoman
was attacked in the street (April 10, 1919). The Congress Party leaders
in the city were deported, and Brigadier R. E. H. Dyer was sent to
restore order. On arrival he prohibited all processions and meetings;
then, without waiting for the order to be publicized, went with fifty
men to disperse with gunfire a meeting already in progress (April 13,
1919). He fired 1,650 bullets into a dense crowd packed in a square
with inadequate exits, inflicting 1,516 casualties, of which 379 met
death. Leaving the wounded untended on the ground, General Dyer
returned to his office and issued an order that all Indians passing
through the street where the Englishwoman had been assaulted a week
before must do so by crawling on hands and knees. There is no doubt
that General Dyer was looking for trouble. In his own words: "I had
made up my mind I would do all men to death.... It was no longer a
question of merely dispersing the crowd, but one of producing a
sufficient moral effect from a military point of view not only on those
who were present, but more especially throughout the Punjab."
The
situation might still have
been saved from Dyer's barbarity but the Hunter Committee, which
investigated the atrocity, refused to condemn Dyer except for "a grave
error of judgment" and "an honest but mistaken conception of duty." A
majority of the House of Lords approved his action by refusing to
censure him, and, when the government forced him to resign from the
army, his admirers in England presented him with a sword and a purse of
120,000.
At
this point Gandhi committed
a grave error of judgment. In order to solidify the alliance of Hindu
and Muslim which had been in existence since 1917, he supported the
Khilafat movement of Indian Muslims to obtain a lenient peace treaty
for the Turkish sultan (and caliph) following World War I. Gandhi
suggested that the Khilafat adopt "non-cooperation" against Britain to
enforce its demands. This would have involved a boycott of British
goods, schools, law courts, offices, honors, and of all goods subject
to British taxes (such as alcohol). This was an error of judgment
because the sultan was soon overthrown by his own people organized in a
Turkish Nationalist movement and seeking a secularized Turkish state,
in spite of all Britain was already doing (both in public and in
private) to support him. Thus, the Khilafat movement was seeking to
force Britain to do something it already wanted to do and was not able
to do. Moreover, by bringing up "non-cooperation" as a weapon against
the British, Gandhi had opened a number of doors he had no desire to
open, with very bad consequences for India.
At
the Indian National
Congress of December, 1919, Tilak and Gandhi were the leading figures.
Both were willing to accept the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, Tilak
because he believed this would be the best way to prove that they were
not adequate. But on August I, 1920, Gandhi proclaimed
"non-cooperation" in behalf of the Khilafat movement. On the same day
Tilak died, leaving Gandhi as undisputed leader of the Congress. At the
1920 meeting he won unanimous approval for "non-cooperation," and then
moved a resolution for swaraj (self-rule) either
within or
outside the British Empire. The Muslims in Congress, led by Muhammad
Ali Jinnah, refused to accept an independent India outside the British
Empire because this would subject the Muslims to a Hindu majority
without Britain's protecting restraint. As a result, from that point,
many Muslims left the Congress.
Non-cooperation
was a great
public success. But it did not get self-rule for India, and made the
country less fitted for self-rule by making it impossible for Indians
to get experience in government under the Act of 1919. Thousands of
Indians gave up medals and honors, gave up the practice of law in
British courts, left the British schools, and burned British goods.
Gandhi held great mass meetings at which thousands of persons stripped
themselves of their foreign clothing to throw it on raging bonfires.
This did not, however, give them training in government. It merely
roused nationalist violence. On February 1, 1922, Gandhi informed the
viceroy that he was about to begin mass civil disobedience, in one
district at a time, beginning in Bardoli near Bombay. Civil
disobedience, including refusal to pay taxes or obey the laws, was a
step beyond non-cooperation, since it involved illegal acts rather than
legal ones. On February 5, 1922, a Hindu mob attacked twenty-two police
constables and killed them by burning the police station down over
their heads. In horror Gandhi canceled the campaign against Britain. He
was at once arrested and condemned to six years in prison for sedition.
Very
great damage had been
done by the events of 1919-1922. Britain and India were alienated to
the point where they no longer trusted one another. The Congress Party
itself had been split, the moderates forming a new group called the
Indian Liberal Federation. The Muslims had also left the Congress Party
to a large extent and gone to strengthen the Muslim League. From this
point onward, Muslim-Hindu riots were annual occurrences in India. And
finally the boycott had crippled the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, almost
two-thirds of the eligible voters refusing to vote in the Councils
elections of November, 1920.
Ireland to
1939
While
the Indian crisis was at
its height in 1919-1922, an even more violent crisis was raging in
Ireland. Throughout the nineteenth century Ireland had been agitated by
grievances of long standing. The three major problems were agrarian,
religious, and political. The Cromwellian conquest of Ireland in the
seventeenth century had transferred much Irish land, as plunder of war,
to absentee English landlords. In consequence high rents, insecure
tenure, lack of improvements, and legalized economic exploitation,
supported by English judges and English soldiers, gave rise to violent
agrarian unrest and rural atrocities against English lives and
properties.
Beginning
with Gladstone's
Land Act of 1870, the agrarian problems were slowly alleviated and, by
1914, were well in hand. The religious problem arose from the fact that
Ireland was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, and resented being ruled by
persons of a different religion. Moreover, until the Irish (Episcopal)
Church was dis-established in 1869, Irish Catholics had to support a
structure of Anglican clergy and bishops, most of whom had few or no
parishioners in Ireland and resided in England, supported by incomes
from Ireland. Finally, the Act of Union of 1801 had made Ireland a part
of the United Kingdom, with representatives in the Parliament at
Westminster.
By
1871 those representatives
who were opposed to union with England formed the Irish Home Rule
Party. It sought to obtain separation by obstructing the functions of
Parliament and disrupting its proceedings. At times this group
exercised considerable influence in Parliament by holding a balance of
power between Liberals and Conservatives. The Gladstone Liberals were
willing to give Ireland Home Rule, with no representatives at
Westminster; the Conservatives (with the support of a majority of
Englishmen) were opposed to Home Rule; the Rhodes-Milner group wanted
self-government for the Irish in their home affairs with Irish
representatives retained at Westminster for foreign and imperial
matters. The Liberal government of 1906- 1916 tried to enact a Home
Rule bill with continued Irish representation in the House of Commons,
but was repeatedly blocked by the opposition of the House of Lords; the
bill did not become law until September, 1914.
The
chief opposition arose
from the fact that Protestant Ulster (Northern Ireland) would be
submerged in an overwhelmingly Catholic Ireland. The Ulster opposition,
led by Sir Edward (later Lord) Carson, organized a private army, armed
it with guns smuggled from Germany, and prepared to seize control of
Belfast at a signal from London. Carson was on his way to the telegraph
station to send this signal in 1914 when he received a message from the
prime minister that war was about to break out with Germany.
Accordingly, the Ulster revolt was canceled and the Home Rule Act was
suspended until six months after the peace with Germany. As a
consequence the revolt with German arms in Ireland was made by the
Irish Nationalists in 1916, instead of by their Ulster opponents in
1914. This so-called Easter Revolt of 1916 was crushed and its leaders
executed, but discontent continued to simmer in Ireland, with violence
only slightly below the surface.
In
the parliamentary election
of 1918, Ireland elected 6 Nationalists (who wanted Home Rule for all
Ireland), 73 Sinn Fein (who wanted an Irish Republic free from
England), and 23 Unionists (who wanted to remain part of Britain).
Instead of going to Westminster, the Sinn Fein organized their own
Parliament in Dublin. Efforts to arrest its members led to open civil
war. This was a struggle of assassination, treachery, and reprisal,
fought out in back alleys and on moonlit fields. Sixty thousand British
troops could not maintain order. Thousands of lives were lost, with
brutal inhumanity on both sides, and property damage rose to £50
million in value.
Lionel
Curtis, who helped edit The Round Table
in 1919-1921, advocated in the March 1920 issue that Northern Ireland
and Southern Ireland be separated and each given Home Rule as
autonomous parts of Great Britain. This was enacted into law eight
months later as the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, but was rejected
by the Irish Republicans led by Eamon de Valera. The civil war
continued. The Round Table group worked valiantly to stop the
extremists on both sides, but with only moderate success. Amery's
brother-in-law, Hamar (Lord) Greenwood, was appointed chief secretary
for Ireland, the last incumbent of that post, while Curtis was
appointed adviser on Irish affairs to the Colonial Office (which was
headed by Milner and Amery). The Times and The
Round Table
condemned British repression in Ireland, the latter saying, "If the
British Commonwealth can only be preserved by such means, it would
become a negation of the principle for which it has stood." But British
violence could not be curtailed until Irish violence could be
curtailed. One of the chief leaders of the Irish Republicans was
Erskine Childers, an old schoolboy friend of Curtis who had been with
him in South Africa, but nothing could be done through him, since he
had become fanatically anti-British. Accordingly, Smuts was called in.
He wrote a conciliatory speech for King George to deliver at the
opening of the Ulster Parliament, and made a secret visit to the rebel
hiding place in Ireland to try to persuade the Irish Republican leaders
to be reasonable. He contrasted the insecurity of the Transvaal
Republic before 1895 with its happy condition under dominion status
since 1910, saying: "Make no mistake about it, you have more privilege,
more power, more peace, more security in such a sisterhood of equal
nations than in a small, nervous republic having all the time to rely
on the good will and perhaps the assistance of foreigners. What sort of
independence do you call that?"
Smuts
arranged an armistice
and a conference to negotiate a settlement. From this conference, at
which Curtis was secretary, came the Articles of Agreement of December,
1921, which gave Southern Ireland dominion status as the Irish Free
State, Northern Ireland continuing under the Act of 1920. The boundary
line between the two countries was drawn by a committee of three of
which the British member (and chairman) was Richard Feetham of Milner's
Kindergarten and the Round Table group, later Supreme Court judge in
South Africa.
De
Valera's Irish Republicans
refused to accept the settlement, and went into insurrection, this time
against the moderate Irish leaders, Arthur Griffith and Michael
Collins. Collins was assassinated, and Griffith died, exhausted by the
strain, but the Irish people themselves were now tired of turmoil. De
Valera's forces were driven underground and were defeated in the
election of 1922. When De Valera's party' the Fianna Fail, did win an
election in 1932 and he became President of Ireland, he abolished the
oath of loyalty to the king and the office of governor-general, ended
annual payments on seized English lands and appeals to the Privy
Council, engaged in a bitter tariff war with Britain, and continued to
demand the annexation of Ulster. One of the last links with Britain was
ended in 1938, when the British naval bases in Eire were turned over to
the Irish, to the great benefit of German submarines in 1939-1945
Chapter
10—The Far East to World War I
The Collapse
of China to 1920
The
destruction of traditional
Chinese culture under the impact of Western Civilization was
considerably later than the similar destruction of Indian culture by
Europeans. This delay arose from the fact that European pressure on
India was applied fairly steadily from the early sixteenth century,
while in the Far East, in Japan even more completely than in China,
this pressure was relaxed from the early seventeenth century for almost
two hundred years, to 1794 in the case of China and to 1854 in the case
of Japan. As a result, we can see the process by which European culture
was able to destroy the traditional native cultures of Asia more
clearly in China than almost anywhere else.
The
traditional culture of
China, as elsewhere in Asia, consisted of a military and bureaucratic
hierarchy superimposed on a great mass of hardworking peasantry. It is
customary, in studying this subject, to divide this hierarchy into
three levels. Politically, these three levels consisted of the imperial
authority at the top, an enormous hierarchy of imperial and provincial
officials in the middle, and the myriad of semi-patriarchal,
semi-democratic local villages at the bottom. Socially, this hierarchy
was similarly divided into the ruling class, the gentry, and the
peasants. And, economically, there was a parallel division, the
uppermost group deriving its incomes as tribute and taxes from its
possession of military and political power, while the middle group
derived its incomes from economic sources, as interest on loans, rents
from lands, and the profits of commercial enterprise, as well as from
the salaries, graft, and other emoluments arising from his middle
group's control of the bureaucracy. At the bottom the peasantry, which
was the only really productive group in the society, derived its
incomes from the sweat of its collective brows, and had to survive on
what was left to it after a substantial fraction of its product had
gone to the two higher groups in the form of rents, taxes, interest,
customary bribes (called "squeeze"), and excessive profits on such
purchased "necessities" of life as salt, iron, or opium.
Although
the peasants were
clearly an exploited group in the traditional society of China, this
exploitation was impersonal and traditional and this more easily borne
shall if it had been personal or arbitrary. In the course of time, a
workable system of customary relationships had come into existence
among the three levels of society. Each group knew its established
relationships with the others, and used those relationships to avoid
any sudden or excessive pressures which might disrupt the established
patterns of the society. The political and military force of the
imperial regime rarely impinged directly on the peasantry, since the
bureaucracy intervened between them as a protecting buffer. This buffer
followed a pattern of deliberate amorphous inefficiency so that the
military and political force from above had been diffused, dispersed,
and blunted by the time it reached down to the peasant villages. The
bureaucracy followed this pattern because it recognized that the
peasantry was the source of its incomes, and it had no desire to create
such discontent as would jeopardize the productive process or the
payments of rents, taxes, and interest on which it lived. Furthermore,
the inefficiency of the system was both customary and deliberate, since
it allowed a large portion of the wealth which was being drained from
the peasantry to be diverted and diffused among the middle class of
gentry before the remnants of it reached the imperial group at the top.
This
imperial group, in its
turn, had to accept this system of inefficiency and diversion of
incomes and its own basic remoteness from the peasantry because of the
great size of China, the ineffectiveness of its systems of
transportation and communications, and the impossibility of keeping
records of population, or of incomes and taxes except through the
indirect mediation of the bureaucracy. The semi-autonomous position of
the bureaucracy depended, to a considerable extent, on the fact that
the Chinese system of writing was so cumbersome, so inefficient, and so
difficult to learn that the central government could not possibly have
kept any records or have administered tax collection, public order, or
justice except through a bureaucracy of trained experts. This
bureaucracy was recruited from the gentry because the complex systems
of writing, of law, and of administrative traditions could be mastered
only by a group possessing leisure based on unearned incomes. To be
sure, in time, the training for this bureaucracy and for the
examinations admitting to it became quite unrealistic, consisting
largely of memorizing of ancient literary texts for examination
purposes rather than for any cultural or administrative ends. This was
not so bad as it sounds, for many of the memorized texts contained a
good deal of ancient wisdom with an ethical or practical slant, and the
possession of this store of knowledge engendered in its possessors a
respect for moderation and for tradition which was just what the system
required. No one regretted that the system of education and of
examinations leading to the bureaucracy did not engender a thirst for
efficiency, because efficiency was not a quality which anyone desired.
The bureaucracy itself did not desire efficiency because this would
have reduced its ability to divert the funds flowing upward from the
peasantry.
The
peasantry surely did not
want any increase in efficiency, which would have led to an increase in
pressure on it and would have made it less easy to blunt or to avoid
the impact of imperial power. The imperial power itself had little
desire for any increased efficiency in its bureaucracy, since this
might have led to increased independence on the part of the
bureaucracy. So long as the imperial superstructure of Chinese society
obtained its share of the wealth flowing upward from the peasantry, it
was satisfied. The share of this wealth which the imperial group
obtained was very large, in absolute figures, although proportionately
it was only a small part of the total amount which left the peasant
class, the larger part being diverted by the gentry and bureaucracy on
its upward flow.
The
exploitative nature of
this three-class social system was alleviated, as we have seen, by
inefficiency, by traditional moderation and accepted ethical ideas, by
a sense of social interdependence, and by the power of traditional law
and custom which protected the ordinary peasant from arbitrary
treatment or the direct impact of force. Most important of all,
perhaps, the system was alleviated by the existence of careers open to
talent. China never became organized into hereditary groups or castes,
being in this respect like England and quite unlike India. The way was
open to the top in Chinese society, not for any individual peasant in
his own lifetime, but to any individual peasant family over a period of
several generations. Thus an individual's position in society depended,
not on the efforts of his own youth, but on the efforts of his father
and grandfather.
If
a Chinese peasant was
diligent, shrewd, and lucky, he could expect to accumulate some small
surplus beyond the subsistence of his own family and the drain to the
upper classes. This surplus could be invested in activities such as
iron-making, opium selling, lumber or fuel selling, pig-trading and
such. The profits from these activities could then be invested in small
bits of land to be rented out to less fortunate peasants or in loans to
other peasants. If times remained good, the owner of the surpluses
began to receive rents and interest from his neighbors; if times became
bad he still had his land or could take over his debtor's land as
forfeited collateral on his loan. In good times or bad, the growth of
population in China kept the demand for land high, and peasants were
able to rise in the social scale from peasantry to gentry by slowly
expanding their legal claims over land. Once in the gentry, one's
children or grandchildren could be educated to pass the bureaucratic
examinations and be admitted to the group of mandarins. A family which
had a member or two in this group gained access to the whole system of
"squeeze" and of bureaucratic diversion of income flows, so that the
family as a whole could continue to rise in the social and economic
structure. Eventually some member of the family might move into the
imperial center from the provincial level on which this rise began, and
might even gain access to the imperial ruling group itself.
In
these higher levels of the
social structure many families were able to maintain a position for
generations, but in general there was a steady, if slow, "circulation
of the elite," most families remaining in a high social position for
only a couple of generations, after about three generations of climb,
to be followed by a couple of generations of decline. Thus, the old
American saying that it took only three generations "from shirt-sleeves
to shirt-sleeves" would, in the old China, have to be extended to allow
about six or seven generations from the rice paddy's drudgery back to
the rice paddy again. But the hope of such a rise contributed much to
increase individual diligence and family solidarity and to reduce
peasant discontent. Only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century did peasants in China come to regard their positions as so
hopeless that violence became preferable to diligence or conformity.
This change arose from the fact, as we shall see, that the impact of
Western culture on China did, in fact, make the peasant’s
position economically hopeless.
In
traditional Chinese society
the bureaucrats recruited through examinations from the gentry class
were called mandarins. They became, for all practical purposes, the
dominant element in Chinese society. Since their social and economic
position did not rest on political or military power but on traditions,
the legal structure, social stability, accepted ethical teachings, and
the rights of property, this middle-level group gave Chinese society a
powerful traditionalist orientation. Respect for old traditions, for
the accepted modes of thought and action, for the ancestors in society
and religion, and for the father in the family became the salient
characteristics of Chinese society. That this society was a complex
network of vested interests, was unprogressive, and was shot through
with corruption was no more objectionable to the average Chinese, on
any level, than the fact that it was also shot through with
inefficiency.
These
things became
objectionable only when Chinese society came directly in contact with
European culture during the nineteenth century. As these two societies
collided, inefficiency, unprogressiveness, corruption, and the whole
nexus of vested interests and traditions which constituted Chinese
society was unable to survive in contact with the efficiency, the
progressiveness, and the instruments of penetration and domination of
Europeans. A system could not hope to survive which could not
provide itself with firearms in large quantities or with mass armies of
loyal soldiers to use such weapons, a system which could not increase
its taxes or its output of wealth or which could not keep track of its
own population or its own incomes by effective records or which had no
effective methods of communication and transportation over an area of
3.5 million square miles.
The
society of the West which
began to impinge on China about 1800 was powerful, efficient, and
progressive. It had no respect for the corruption, the traditions, the
property rights, the family solidarity, or the ethical moderation of
traditional Chinese society. As the weapons of the West, along with its
efficient methods of sanitation, of writing, of transportation and
communications, of individual self-interest, and of corrosive
intellectual rationalism came into contact with Chinese society, they
began to dissolve it. On the one hand, Chinese society w as too weak to
defend itself against the West. When it tried to do so, as in the Opium
Wars and other struggles of 1841-1861, or in the Boxer uprising of
1900, such Chinese resistance to European penetration was crushed by
the armaments of the Western Powers, and all kinds of concessions to
these Powers were imposed on China.
Until
1841 Canton was the only
port allowed for foreign imports, and opium was illegal. As a
consequence of Chinese destruction of illegal Indian opium and the
commercial exactions of Cantonese authorities, Britain imposed on China
the treaties of Nanking (1842) and of Tientsin (1858). These forced
China to cede Hong Kong to Britain and to open sixteen ports to foreign
trade, to impose a uniform import tariff of no more than 5 percent, to
pay an indemnity of about $100 million, to permit foreign legations in
Peking, to allow a British official to act as head of the Chinese
customs service, and to legalize the import of opium. Other agreements
were imposed by which China lost various fringe areas such as Burma (to
Britain), Indochina (to France), Formosa and the Pescadores (to Japan),
and Macao (to Portugal), while other areas were taken on leases of
various durations, from twenty-five to ninety-nine years. In this way
Germany took Kiaochow, Russia took southern Liaotung (including Port
Arthur), France took Kwangcho-wan, and Britain took Kowloon and
Weihaiwei. In this same period various Powers imposed on China a system
of extraterritorial courts under which foreigners, in judicial cases,
could not be tried in Chinese courts or under Chinese law.
The
political impact of
Western civilization on China, great as it was, was overshadowed by the
economic impact. We have already indicated that China was a largely
agrarian country. Years of cultivation and the slow growth of
population had given rise to a relentless pressure on the soil and to a
destructive exploitation of its vegetative resources. .Most of the
country was deforested, resulting in shortage of fuel, rapid runoff of
precipitation, constant danger of floods, and large-scale erosion of
the soil. Cultivation had been extended to remote valleys and up the
slopes of hills by population pressures, with a great increase in the
same destructive consequences, in spite of the fact that many slopes
were rebuilt in terraces. The fact that the southern portion of the
country depended on rice cultivation created many problems, since this
crop, of relatively low nutritive value, required great expenditure of
labor (transplanting and weeding) under conditions which were
destructive of good health. Long periods of wading in rice paddies
exposed most peasants to various kinds of joint diseases, and to
water-borne infections such as malaria or parasitical flukes.
The
pressure on the soil was
intensified by the fact that 60 percent of China was over 6,000 feet
above sea level, too high for cultivation, while more than half the
land had inadequate rainfall (below twenty inches a year). Moreover,
the rainfall was provided by the erratic monsoon winds which frequently
brought floods and occasionally failed completely, causing wholesale
famine. In the United States 140 million people were supported by the
labor of 6.5 million farmers on 365 million acres of cultivated land in
1945; China, about the same time, had almost 500 million persons
supported by the labor of 65 million farmers on only 217 million acres
of cultivated land. In China the average farm was only a little over
four acres (compared to 157 in the United States) but was divided into
five or six separate fields and had, on the average, 6.2 persons living
on it (compared to 4.2 persons on the immensely larger American farm).
As a result, in China there was only about half an acre of land for
each person living on the land, compared to the American figure of 15.7
acres per person.
As
a consequence of this
pressure on the land, the average Chinese peasant had, even in earlier
times, no margin above the subsistence level, especially when we recall
that a certain part of his income flowed upward to the upper classes.
Since, on his agricultural account alone, the average Chinese peasant
was below the subsistence level, he had to use various ingenious
devices to get up to that level. All purchases of goods produced off
the farm were kept at an absolute minimum. Every wisp of grass, fallen
leaf, or crop residue was collected to serve as fuel. All human waste
products, including those of the cities, were carefully collected and
restored to the soil as fertilizer. For this reason, farmlands around
cities, because of the greater supply of such wastes, were more
productive than more remote farms which were dependent on local
supplies of such human wastes. Collection and sale of such wastes
became an important link in the agricultural economics of China. Since
the human digestive system extracts only part of the nutritive elements
in food, the remaining elements were frequently extracted by feeding
such wastes to swine, thus passing them through the pig's digestive
system before these wastes returned to the soil to provide nourishment
for new crops and, thus, for new food. Every peasant farm had at least
one pig which was purchased young, lived in the farm latrine until it
was full grown, and then was sold into the city to provide a cash
margin for such necessary purchases as salt, sugar, oils, or iron
products. In a somewhat similar way the rice paddy was able to
contribute to the farmer's supply of proteins by acting as a fishpond
and an aquarium for minute freshwater shrimp.
In
China, as in Europe, the
aims of agricultural efficiency were quite different from the aims of
agricultural efficiency in new countries, such as the United States,
Canada, Argentina, or Australia. In these newer countries there was a
shortage of labor and a surplus of land, while in Europe and Asia there
was a shortage of land and a surplus of labor. Accordingly, the aim of
agricultural efficiency in newer lands was high output of crops per
unit of labor. It was for this reason that American agriculture put
such emphasis on labor-saving agricultural machinery and
soil-exhausting agricultural practices, while Asiatic agriculture put
immense amounts of hand labor on small amounts of land in order to save
the soil and to win the maximum crop from the limited amount of land.
In America the farmer could afford to spend large sums for farm
machinery because the labor such machinery replaced would have been
expensive anyway and because the cost of that machinery was spread over
such a large acreage that its cost per acre was relatively moderate. In
Asia there was no capital for such expenditures on machinery because
there was no margin of surplus above subsistence in the hands of the
peasantry and because the average farm was so small that the cost of
machinery per acre (either to buy or even to operate) would have been
prohibitive. The only surplus in Asia was of labor, and every effort
was made, by putting more and more labor on the land, to make the
limited amount of land more productive. One result of this investment
of labor in land in China can be seen in the fact that about half of
the Chinese farm acreage was irrigated while about a quarter of it was
terraced. Another result of this excess concentration of labor on land
was that such labor was underemployed and semi-idle for about
three-quarters of the year, being fully busy only in the planting and
harvest seasons. From this semi-idleness of the Asiatic rural
population came the most important effort to supplement peasant incomes
through rural handicrafts. Before we turn to this crucial point, we
should glance at the relative success of China's efforts to achieve
high-unit yields in agriculture.
In
the United States, about
1940, each acre of wheat required 1.2 man-days of work each year; in
China an acre of wheat took 26 man-days of labor. The rewards of such
expenditures of labor were quite different. In China the output of
grain for each man-year of labor was 3,080 pounds; in the United States
the output was 44,000 pounds per man-year of labor. This low
productivity of agricultural labor in China would have been perfectly
acceptable if China had, instead, achieved high output per acre.
Unfortunately, even in this alternative aim China was only moderately
successful, more successful than the United States, it is true, but far
less successful than European countries which aimed at the same type of
agricultural efficiency (high yields per acre) as China did. This can
be seen from the following figures:
Output Per
Acre
In
Rice In
Wheat
United
States 47
bushes United
States 14
bushels
China 67
bushes China 16
bushels
Italy 93
bushels England 32
bushels
These
figures indicate the
relative failure of Chinese (and other Asiatic) agriculture even in
terms of its own aims. This relative failure was not caused by lack of
effort, but by such factors as (I) farms too small for efficient
operation; (2) excessive population pressure which forced farming onto
less productive soil and which drew more nutritive elements out of the
soil than could be replaced, even by wholesale use of human wastes as
fertilizer; ( 3) lack of such scientific agricultural techniques as
seed selection or crop rotation; and (4) the erratic character of a
monsoon climate on a deforested and semi-eroded land.
Because
of the relatively low
productivity of Chinese (and all Asiatic) agriculture, the whole
population was close to the margin of subsistence and, at irregular
intervals, was forced below that margin into widespread famine. In
China the situation was alleviated to some extent by three forces. In
the first place, the irregular famines which we have mentioned, and
somewhat more frequent onslaughts of plague disease, kept the
population within manageable bounds. These two irregular occurrences
reduced the population by millions, in both China and India, when they
occurred. Even in ordinary years the death rate was high, about 30 per
thousand in China compared to 25 in India, 12.3 in England, or 8.7 in
Australia. Infant mortality (in the first year of life) was about 159
per thousand in China compared to 240 in India, about 70 in western
Europe, and about 32 in New Zealand. At birth an infant could be
expected to live less than 27 years in India, less than 35 years in
China, about 60 years in England or the United States, and about 66
years in New Zealand (all figures are about 1930). In spite of this
"expectation of death" in China, the population was maintained at a
high level by a birth rate of about 38 per thousand of the population
compared to 34 in India, 18 in the United States or Australia, and 15
in England. The skyrocketing effect which the use of modern sanitary or
medical practices might have upon China's population figures can be
gathered from the fact that about three-quarters of Chinese deaths are
from causes which are preventable (usually easily preventable) in the
West. For example, a quarter of all deaths are from diseases spread by
human wastes; about 10 percent come from childhood diseases like
smallpox, measles, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and whooping cough; about
15 percent arise from tuberculosis; and about 7 percent are in
childbirth..
The
birthrate was kept up, in
traditional Chinese society as a consequence of a group of ideas which
are usually known as "ancestor worship." Every Chinese family had, as
its most powerful motivation, the conviction that the family line must
be continued in order to have descendants to keep up the family
shrines, to maintain the ancestral graves, and to support the living
members of the family after their productive years had ended. The
expense of such shrines, graves, and old persons was a considerable
burden on the average Chinese family and a cumulative burden as well,
since the diligence of earlier generations frequently left a family
with shrines and graves so elaborate that upkeep alone was a heavy
expense to later generations. At the same time the urge to have sons
kept the birth rate up and led to such undesirable social practices, in
traditional Chinese society, as infanticide, abandonment, or sale of
female offspring. Another consequence of these ideas was that more
well-to-do families in China tended to have more children than poor
families. This was the exact opposite of the situation in Western
civilization, where a rise in the economic scale resulted in the
acquisition of a middle-class outlook which included restriction of the
family's offspring.
The
pressure of China's
population on the level of subsistence was relieved to some extent by
wholesale Chinese emigration in the period after 1800. This outward
movement was toward the less settled areas of Manchuria, Mongolia, and
southwestern China, overseas to America and Europe, and, above all, to
the tropical areas of southeastern Asia (especially to Malaya and
Indonesia). In these areas, the diligence, frugality, and shrewdness of
the Chinese provided them with a good living and in some cases with
considerable wealth. They generally acted as a commercial middle class
pushing inward between the native Malaysian or Indonesian peasants and
the upper group of ruling whites. This movement, which began centuries
ago, steadily accelerated after 1900 and gave rise to unfavorable
reactions from the non-Chinese residents of these areas. The Malay,
Siamese, and Indonesians, for example, came to regard the Chinese as
economically oppressive and exploitative, while the white rulers of
these areas, especially in Australia and New Zealand, regarded them
with suspicion for political and racial reasons. Among the causes of
this political suspicion were that emigrant Chinese remained loyal to
their families at home and to the homeland itself, that they were
generally excluded from citizenship in areas to which they emigrated,
and that they continued to be regarded as citizens by successive
Chinese governments. The loyalty of emigrant Chinese to their families
at home became an important source of economic strength to these
families and to China itself, because emigrant Chinese sent very large
savings back to their families.
We
have already mentioned the
important role played by peasant handicrafts in traditional Chinese
society. It would, perhaps, not be any real exaggeration to say that
peasant handicrafts were the factor which permitted the traditional
form of society to continue, not only in China but in all of Asia. This
society was based on an inefficient agricultural system in which the
political, military, legal, and economic claims of the upper classes
drained from the peasantry such a large proportion of their
agricultural produce that the peasant was kept pressed down to the
subsistence level (and, in much of China, below this level). Only by
this process could Asia support its large urban populations and its
large numbers of rulers, soldiers, bureaucrats, traders, priests, and
scholars (none of whom produced the food, clothing, or shelter they
were consuming). In all Asiatic countries the peasants on the land were
underemployed in agricultural activities, because of the seasonal
nature of their work. In the course of time there had grown up a
solution to this social-agrarian problem: in their spare time the
peasantry occupied themselves with handicrafts and other
nonagricultural activities and then sold the products of their labor to
the cities for money to be used to buy necessities. In real terms this
meant that the agricultural products which were flowing from the
peasantry to the upper classes (and generally from rural areas to the
cities) were replaced in part by handicrafts, leaving a somewhat larger
share of the peasants' agricultural products in the hands of peasants.
It was this arrangement which made it possible for the Chinese
peasantry to raise their incomes up to the subsistence level.
The
importance of this
relationship should be obvious. If it were destroyed, the peasant would
be faced with a cruel alternative: either he could perish by falling
below the subsistence level or he could turn to violence in order to
reduce the claims which the upper classes had on his agricultural
products. In the long run every peasant group was driven toward the
second of these alternatives. As a result, all Asia by 1940 was in the
grip of a profound political and social upheaval because, a generation
earlier the demand for the products of peasants' handicrafts had been
reduced.
The
destruction of this
delicately balanced system occurred when cheap, machine-made products
of Western manufacture began to flow into Asiatic countries. Native
products such as textiles, metal goods, paper, wood carvings, pottery,
hats, baskets, and such found it increasingly difficult to compete with
Western manufactures in the markets of their own cities. As a result,
the peasantry found it increasingly difficult to shift the legal and
economic claims which the upper, urban, classes held against them from
agricultural products to handicraft products. And, as a consequence of
this, the percentage of their agricultural products which was being
taken from the peasantry by the claims of other classes began to rise..
This
destruction of the local
market for native handicrafts could have been prevented if high customs
duties had been imposed on European industrial goods. But one point on
which the European Powers were agreed was that they would not allow
"backward" countries to exclude their products with tariffs. In India,
Indonesia, and some of the lesser states of southeastern Asia this was
prevented by the European Powers taking over the government of the
areas; in China, Egypt, Turkey, Persia, and some Malay states the
European Powers took over no more than the financial system or the
customs service. As a result, countries like China, Japan, and Turkey
had to sign treaties maintaining their tariffs at 5 or 8 percent and
allowing Europeans to control these services. Sir Robert Hart was head
of the Chinese customs from 1863 to 1906, just as Sir Evelyn Baring
(Lord Cromer) was head of the Egyptian financial system from 1879 to
1907, and Sir Edgar Vincent (Lord D'Abernon) was the chief figure in
the Turkish financial system from 1882 to 1897.
As
a consequence of the
factors we have described, the position of the Chinese peasant was
desperate by 1900, and became steadily worse. A moderate estimate
(published in 1940) showed that lo percent of the farm population owned
53 percent of the cultivated land, while the other go percent had only
47 percent of the land. The majority of Chinese farmers had to rent at
least some land, for which they paid, as rent, from one-third to
one-half of the crop. Since their incomes were not adequate, more than
half of all Chinese farmers had to borrow each year. On borrowed grain
the interest rate was 85 percent a year; on money loans the interest
rate was variable, being over 20 percent a year on nine-tenths of all
loans made and over so percent a year on one-eighth of the loans made.
Under such conditions of landownership, rental rates, and interest
charges, the future was hopeless for the majority of Chinese farmers
long before 1940. Yet the social revolution in China did not come until
after 1940.
The
slow growth of the social
revolution in China was the result of many influences. Chinese
population pressure was relieved to some extent in the last half of the
nineteenth century by the famines of 1877-1879 (which killed about 12
million people), by the political disturbances of the Tai-Ping and
other rebellions in 1848-1875 (which depopulated large areas), and by
the continued high death rate. The continued influence of traditional
ideas, especially Confucianism and respect for ancestral ways, held the
lid on this boiling pot until this influence was destroyed in the
period after 1900. Hope that some solution might be found by the
republican regime after the collapse of the imperial regime in 1911 had
a similar effect. And, lastly, the distribution of European weapons in
Chinese society was such as to hinder rather than to assist revolution
until well into the twentieth century. Then this distribution turned in
a direction quite different from that in Western civilization. These
last three points are sufficiently important to warrant a closer
examination.
We
have already mentioned that
effective weapons which are difficult to use or expensive to obtain
encourage the development of authoritarian regimes in any society. In
the late medieval period, in Asia, cavalry provided such a weapon.
Since the most effective cavalry was that of the pastoral
Ural-Altaic-speaking peoples of central Asia, these peoples were able
to conquer the peasant peoples of Russia, of Anatolia, of India, and of
China. In the course of time, the alien regimes of three of these areas
(not in Russia) were able to strengthen their authority by the
acquisition of effective, and expensive, artillery. In Russia, the
princes of Moscow, having been the agents of the Mongols, replaced them
by becoming their imitators, and made the same transition to a
mercenary army, based on cavalry and artillery, as the backbone of the
ruling despotism. In Western civilization similar despotisms, but based
on infantry and artillery, were controlled by figures like Louis XIV,
Frederick the Great, or Gustavus Adolphus. In Western Civilization,
however, the Agricultural Revolution after 1725 raised standards of
living, while the Industrial Revolution after 1800 so lowered the cost
of firearms that the ordinary citizen of western Europe and of North
America could acquire the most effective weapon existing (the musket).
As a result of this, and other factors, democracy came to these areas,
along with mass armies of citizen-soldiers. In central and southern
Europe where the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions came late or
not at all, the victory of democracy was also late and incomplete.
In
Asia generally, the
revolution in weapons (meaning muskets and later rifles) came before
the Agricultural Revolution or the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, most
firearms were not locally made, but were imported and, being imported,
came into the possession of the upper class of rulers, bureaucrats, and
landlords and not into the hands of peasants or city masses. As a
result, these ruling groups were generally able to maintain their
position against their own masses even when they could not defend
themselves against European Powers. As a consequence of this, any hope
of partial reform or of a successful revolution early enough to be a
moderate revolution became quite unlikely. In Russia and in Turkey it
required defeat in a foreign war with European states to destroy the
corrupt imperial regimes (1917-1921). Earlier, the czar had been able
to crush the revolt of 1905, because the army remained loyal to the
regime, while the sultan, in 1908, had to yield to a reform movement
because it was supported by the army. In India, Malaya, and Indonesia
the disarmed native peoples offered no threat of revolt to the ruling
European Powers before 1940. In Japan the army, as we shall see,
remained loyal to the regime and was able to dominate events so that no
revolution was conceivable before 1940. But in China the trend of
events was much more complex.
In
China the people could not
get weapons because of their low standards of living and the high cost
of imported arms. As a result, power remained in the hands of the army,
except for small groups who were financed by emigrant Chinese with
relatively high incomes overseas. By 1911 the prestige of the imperial
regime had fallen so low that it obtained support from almost no one,
and the army refused to sustain it. As a result, the revolutionaries,
supported by overseas money, were able to overthrow the imperial regime
in an almost bloodless revolution, but were not able to control the
army after they had technically come to power. The army, leaving the
politicians to squabble over forms of government or areas of
jurisdiction, became independent political powers loyal to their own
chiefs ("warlords"), and supported themselves and maintained their
supply of imported arms by exploiting the peasantry of the provinces.
The result was a period of "warlordism" from 1920 to 1941.
In
this period the Republican
government was in nominal control of the whole country but was actually
in control only of the seacoast and river valleys, chiefly in the
south, while various warlords, operating as bandits, were in control of
the interior and most of the north. In order to restore its control to
the whole country, the Republican regime needed money and imported
arms. Accordingly, it tried two expedients in sequence. The first
expedient, in the period 1920-1927, sought to restore its power in
China by obtaining financial and military support from foreign
countries (Western countries, Japan, or Soviet Russia). This expedient
failed, either because these foreign Powers were unwilling to assist or
(in the case of Japan and Soviet Russia) were willing to help only on
terms which would have ended China's independent political status. As a
consequence, after 1927, the Republican regime underwent a profound
change, shifting from a democratic to an authoritarian organization,
changing its name from Republican to Nationalist, and seeking the money
and arms to restore its control over the country by making an alliance
with the landlord, commercial, and banking classes of the eastern
Chinese cities. These propertied classes could provide the Republican
regime with the money to obtain foreign arms in order to fight the
warlords of the west and north, but these groups would not support any
Republican effort to deal with the social and economic problems facing
the great mass of the Chinese peoples.
While
the Republican armies
and the warlords were struggling with each other over the prostrate
backs of the Chinese masses, the Japanese attacked China in 1931 and
1937. In order to resist the Japanese it became necessary, after 1940,
to arm the Chinese masses. This arming of the masses of Chinese in
order to defeat Japan in 1941-1945 made it impossible to continue the
Republican regime after 1945 so long as it continued to be allied with
the upper economic and social groups of China, since the masses
regarded these groups as exploiters. At the same time, changes to more
expensive and more complex weapons made it impossible either for
warlordism to revive or for the Chinese masses to use their weapons to
establish a democratic regime. The new weapons, like airplanes and
tanks, could not be supported by peasants on a provincial basis nor
could they be operated by peasants. The former fact ended warlordism,
while the latter fact ended any possibility of democracy. In view of
the low productivity of Chinese agriculture and the difficulty of
accumulating sufficient capital either to buy or to manufacture such
expensive weapons, these weapons (in either way) could be acquired only
by a government in control of most of China and could be used only by a
professional army loyal to that government. Under such conditions it
was to be expected that such a government would be authoritarian and
would continue to exploit the peasantry (in order to accumulate capital
either to buy such weapons abroad or to industrialize enough to make
them at home, or both).
From
this point of view the
history of China in the twentieth century presents five phases, as
follows:
1.
The collapse of the imperial regime, to 1911
2.
The failure of the Republic, 1911-1920
3.
The struggle with warlordism, 1920-1941
a.
Efforts to obtain support abroad, 1920-1927
b.
Efforts to obtain support form the propertied groups, 1927-1941
4.
The struggle with Japan, 1931-1945
5.
The authoritarian triumph, 1945—
The
collapse of the imperial
regime has already been discussed as a political and economic
development. It was also an ideological development. The authoritarian
and traditionalist ideology of the old China, in which social
conservatism, Confucianist philosophy, and ancestor worship were
intimately blended together, was well fitted to resist the intrusion of
new ideas and new patterns of action. The failure of the imperial
regime to resist the military, economic, and political penetration of
Western Civilization gave a fatal blow to this ideology. New ideas of
Western origin were introduced, at first by Christian missionaries and
later by Chinese students who had studied abroad. By 1900 there were
thousands of such students. They had acquired Western ideas which were
completely incompatible with the older Chinese system. In general, such
Western ideas were not traditionalist or authoritarian, and were, thus,
destructive to the Chinese patriarchal family, to ancestor worship, or
to the imperial autocracy. The students brought back from abroad
Western ideas of science, of democracy, of parliamentarianism, of
empiricism, of self-reliance, of liberalism, of individualism, and of
pragmatism. Their possession of such ideas made it impossible for them
to fit into their own country. As a result, they attempted to change
it, developing a revolutionary fervor which merged with the
anti-dynastic secret societies which had existed in China since the
Manchus took over the country in 1644.
Japan's
victory over China in
1894-1895 in a war arising from a dispute over Korea, and especially
the Japanese victory over Russia in the war of 1904-1905, gave a great
impetus to the revolutionary spirit in China because these events
seemed to show that an Oriental country could adopt Western techniques
successfully. The failure of the Boxer movement in 1900 to expel
Westerners without using such Western techniques also increased the
revolutionary fervor in China. As a consequence of such events, the
supporters of the imperial regime began to lose faith in their own
system and in their own ideology. They began to install piecemeal,
hesitant, and ineffective reforms which disrupted the imperial system
without in any way strengthening it. Marriage between Manchu and
Chinese was sanctioned for the first time (1902); Manchuria was opened
to settlement by Chinese (1907); the system of imperial examinations
based on the old literary scholarship for admission to the civil
service and the mandarinate were abolished and a Ministry of Education,
copied from Japan, was established (1905); a drafted constitution was
published providing for provincial assemblies and a future national
parliament (1908); the law was codified (1910).
These
concessions did not
strengthen the imperial regime, but merely intensified the
revolutionary feeling. The death of the emperor and of Dowager Empress
Tzu Hsi, who had been the real ruler of the country (1908), brought to
the throne a two-year-old child, P'u-I. The reactionary elements made
use of the regency to obstruct reform, dismissing the conservative
reform minister Yüan Shih-k’ai (1859-1916). Discovery of the
headquarters of the revolutionists at Hankow in 1911 precipitated the
revolution. While Dr. Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) hurried back to China
from abroad, whence he had directed the revolutionary movement for many
years, the tottering imperial regime recalled Yuan Shih-K'ai to take
command of the anti-revolutionary armies. Instead he cooperated with
the revolutionists, forced the abdication of the Manchu dynasty, and
plotted to have himself elected as president of the Chinese Republic.
Sun Yat-sen who had already been elected provisional president by the
National Assembly at Nanking, accepted this situation, retiring from
office, and calling on all Chinese to support President Yuan.
The
contrast between Dr. Sun
and General Yüan, the first and second presidents of the Chinese
Republic, was as sharp as could be. Dr. Sun was a believer in Western
ideas, especially in science, democracy, parliamentary government, and
socialism, and had lived for most of his life as an exile overseas. He
was self-sacrificing, idealistic, and somewhat impractical. General
Yuan, on the other hand, was purely Chinese, a product of the imperial
bureaucracy, who had no knowledge of Western ideas and no faith in
either democracy or parliamentary government. He was vigorous, corrupt,
realistic, and ambitious. The real basis of his power rested in the new
westernized army which he had built up as governor-general of Chihli in
1901-1907. In this force there were five divisions, well trained and
completely loyal to Yüan. The officers of these units had been
picked and trained by Yuan, and played principal roles in Chinese
politics after 1916.
As
president, Yüan
opposed almost everything for which Dr. Sun had dreamed. He expanded
the army, bribed politicians, and eliminated those who could not be
bribed. The chief support of his policies came from a £25 million
loan from Britain, France, Russia, and Japan in 1913. This made him
independent of the assembly and of Dr. Sun's political party, the
Kuomintang, which dominated the assembly. In 1913 one element of Sun's
followers revolted against Yuan but were crushed. Yuan dissolved the
Kuomintang, arrested its members, dismissed the Parliament, and revised
the constitution to give himself dictatorial powers as president for
life, with the right to name his own successor. He was arranging to
have himself proclaimed emperor when he died m 1916.
As
soon as Yüan died, the
military leaders stationed in various parts of the country began to
consolidate their power on a local basis. One of them even restored the
Manchu dynasty, but it was removed again within two weeks. By the end
of 1916 China was under the nominal rule of two governments, one at
Peking under Feng Kuo-chang (one of Yuan's militarists) and a secession
government at Canton under Dr. Sun. Both of these functioned under a
series of fluctuating paper constitutions, but the real power of both
was based on the loyalty of local armies. Because in both cases the
armies of more remote areas were semi-independent, government in those
areas was a matter of negotiation rather than of commands from the
capital. Even Dr. Sun saw this situation sufficiently clearly to
organize the Cantonese government as a military system with himself as
generalissimo (1917). Dr. Sun was so unfitted for this military post
that on two occasions he had to flee from his own generals to security
in the French concession at Shanghai (1918-1922). Under such conditions
Dr. Sun was unable to achieve any of his pet schemes, such as the
vigorous political education of the Chinese people, a widespread
network of Chinese railways built with foreign capital, or the
industrialization of China on a socialist basis. Instead, by 1920,
warlordism was supreme, and the Westernized Chinese found opportunity
to exercise their new knowledge only in education and in the diplomatic
service. Within China itself, command of a well-drilled army in control
of a compact group of local provinces was far more valuable than any
Westernized knowledge acquired as a student abroad.
The
Resurgence of Japan to 1918
The
history of Japan in the
twentieth century is quite distinct from that of the other Asiatic
peoples. Among the latter the impact of the West led to the disruption
of the social and economic structure, the abandonment of the
traditional ideologies, and the revelation of the weakness of native
political and military systems. In Japan these events either did not
occur or occurred in a quite different fashion. Until 1945 Japan's
political and military systems were strengthened by Western influences;
the older Japanese ideology was retained, relatively intact, even by
those who were most energetic copiers of Western ways; and the changes
in the older social and economic structure were kept within manageable
limits and were directed in a progressive direction. The real reason
for these differences probably rests in the ideological
factor—that the Japanese, even the vigorous Westernizers,
retained the old Japanese point of view and, as a consequence, were
allied with the older Japanese political, economic, and social
structure rather than opposed to it (as, for example, Westernizers were
in India, in China, or in Turkey). The ability of the Japanese to
westernize without going into opposition to the basic core of the older
system gave a degree of discipline and a sense of unquestioning
direction to their lives which allowed Japan to achieve a phenomenal
amount of westernization without weakening the older structure or
without disrupting it. In a sense until about 1950, Japan took from
Western culture only superficial and material details in an imitative
way and amalgamated these newly acquired items around the older
ideological, political, military, and social structure to make it more
powerful and effective. The essential item which the Japanese retained
from their traditional society and did not adopt from Western
civilization was the ideology. In time, as we shall see, this was very
dangerous to both of the societies concerned, to Japan and to the West.
Originally
Japan came into
contact with Western civilization in the sixteenth century, about as
early as any other Asiatic peoples, but, within a hundred years, Japan
was able to eject the West, to exterminate most of its Christian
converts, and to slam its doors against the entrance of any Western
influences. A very limited amount of trade was permitted on a
restricted basis, but only with the Dutch and only through the single
port of Nagasaki.
Japan Is
Dominated by the Tokugawa Family
Japan,
thus isolated from the
world, was dominated by the military dictatorship (or shogunate) of the
Tokugawa family. The imperial family had been retired to a largely
religious seclusion whence it reigned but did not rule. Beneath the
shogun the country was organized in a hereditary hierarchy, headed by
local feudal lords. Beneath these lords there were, in descending
ranks, armed retainers (samurai), peasants, artisans, and merchants.
The whole system was, in theory at least, rigid and unchanging, being
based on the double justification of blood and of religion. This was in
obvious and sharp contrast with the social organization of China, which
was based, in theory, on virtue and on educational training. In Japan
virtue and ability were considered to be hereditary rather than
acquired characteristics, and, accordingly, each social class had
innate differences which had to be maintained by restrictions on
intermarriage. The emperor was of the highest level, being descended
from the supreme sun goddess, while the lesser lords were descended
from lesser gods of varying degrees of remoteness from the sun goddess.
Such a point of view discouraged all revolution or social change and
all "circulation of the elites," with the result that China's
multiplicity of dynasties and rise and fall of families was matched in
Japan by a single dynasty whose origins ran back into the remote past,
while the dominant individuals of Japanese public life in the twentieth
century were members of the same families and clans which were
dominating Japanese life centuries ago.
All
Non-Japanese Are Basically Inferior Beings
From
this basic idea flowed a
number of beliefs which continued to be accepted by most Japanese
almost to the present. Most fundamental was the belief that all
Japanese were members of a single breed consisting of many different
branches or clans of superior or inferior status, depending on their
degree of relationship to the imperial family. The individual was of no
real significance, while the families and the breed were of major
significance, for individuals lived but briefly and possessed little
beyond what they received from their ancestors to pass on to their
descendants. In this fashion it was accepted by all Japanese that
society was more important than any individual and could demand any
sacrifice from him, that men were by nature unequal and should be
prepared to serve loyally in the particular status into which each had
been born, that society is nothing but a great patriarchal system, that
in this system authority is based on the personal superiority of man
over man and not on any rule of law, that, accordingly, all law is
little more than some temporary order from some superior being, and
that all non-Japanese, lacking divine ancestry, are basically inferior
beings, existing only one cut above the level of animals and,
accordingly, having no basis on which to claim any consideration,
loyalty, or consistency of treatment at the hands of Japanese.
Japanese
World View Is Anti-thetical to Christian World View
This
Japanese ideology was as
anti-thetical to the outlook of the Christian West as any which the
West encountered in its contacts with other civilizations. It was also
an ideology which was peculiarly fitted to resist the intrusion of
Western ideas. As a result, Japan was able to accept and to incorporate
into its way of life all kinds of Western techniques and material
culture without disorganizing its own outlook or its own basic social
structure.
The
Tokugawa Shogunate was
already long past its prime when, in 1853, the "black ships" of
Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay. That these vessels could
move against the wind, and carried guns more powerful than any the
Japanese had ever imagined, was a great shock to the natives of Nippon.
The feudal lords who had been growing restive under Tokugawa rule used
this event as an excuse to end that rule. These lords, especially the
representatives of four western clans, demanded that the emergency be
met by abolishing the shogunate and restoring all authority to the
hands of the emperor. For more than a decade the decision whether to
open Japan to the West or to try to continue the policy of exclusion
hung in the balance. In 1863-1866 a series of naval demonstrations and
bombardments of Japanese ports by Western Powers forced the opening of
Japan and imposed on the country a tariff agreement which restricted
import duties to 5 percent until 1899. A new and vigorous emperor came
to the throne and accepted the resignation of the last shogun (1867).
Japan at once embarked on a policy of rapid Westernization.
Shift in
Power from the Shogun to Four Western Japanese Clans
The
period in Japanese history
from the so-called Meiji Restoration of 1867 to the granting of a
constitution in 1889 is of the most vital importance. In theory what
had occurred had been a restoration of Japan's rule from the hands of
the shogun back into the hands of the emperor. In fact what occurred
was a shift in power from the shogun to the leaders of four western
Japanese clans who proceeded to rule Japan in the emperor's name and
from the emperor's shadow. These four clans of Satsuma, Choshu, Hizen,
and Tosa won the support of certain nobles of the imperial court (such
as Saionji and Konoe) and of the richer mercantile families (such as
Mitsui) and were able to overthrow the shogun, crush his supporters (in
the Battle of Uemo in 1868), and win control of the government and of
the emperor himself. The emperor did not assume control of the
government, but remained in a semi-religious seclusion, too exalted to
concern himself with the functioning of the governmental system except
in critical emergencies. In such emergencies the emperor generally did
no more than issue a statement or order ("imperial rescript") which had
been drawn up by the leaders of the Restoration.
The Meiji
Oligarchy
These
leaders, organized in a
shadowy group known as the Meiji oligarchy, had obtained complete
domination of Japan by 1889. To cover this fact with camouflage, they
unleashed a vigorous propaganda of revived Shintoism and of abject
submission to the emperor which culminated in the extreme emperor
worship of 1941-1945. To provide an administrative basis for their
rule, the oligarchy created an extensive governmental bureaucracy
recruited from their supporters and inferior members. To provide an
economic basis for their rule, this oligarchy used their political
influence to pay themselves extensive pensions and governmental grants
(presumably as compensation for the ending of their feudal incomes) and
to engage in corrupt business relationships with their allies in the
commercial classes (like Mitsui or Mitsubishi). To provide a military
basis for their rule, the oligarchy created a new imperial army and
navy and penetrated the upper ranks of these so that they were able to
dominate these forces as they dominated the civil bureaucracy. To
provide a social basis for their rule, the oligarchy created an
entirely new peerage of five ranks of nobility recruited from their own
members and supporters.
The Japanese
Oligarchy Draw Up a Constitution That Would Conceal Their
Political
Domination of the Country
Having
thus assured their
dominant position in the administrative, economic, military, and social
life of Japan, the oligarchy in 1889 drew up a constitution which would
assure, and yet conceal, their political domination of the country.
This constitution did not pretend to be a product of the Japanese
people or of the Japanese nation; popular sovereignty and democracy had
no place in it. Instead this constitution pretended to be an emission
from the emperor, setting up a system in which all government would be
in his name, and all officials would be personally responsible to him.
It provided for a bicameral Diet as a legislature. The House of Peers
consisted of the new nobility which had been created in 1884, while the
House of Representatives was to be elected "according to the law." All
legislation had to pass each house by majority vote and be signed by a
minister of state.
These
ministers, established
as a Council of State in 1885, were responsible to the emperor and not
to the Diet. Their tasks were carried out through the bureaucracy which
was already established. All money appropriations, like other laws, had
to obtain the assent of the Diet, but, if the budget was not accepted
by this body, the budget of the preceding year was repeated
automatically for the following year. The emperor had extensive powers
to issue ordinances which had the force of law and required a
minister's signature, as did other laws.
Japanese
Constitution Based upon the Constitution of Imperial Germany
This
constitution of 1889 was
based on the constitution of Imperial Germany and was forced on Japan
by the Meiji oligarchy in order to circumvent and anticipate any future
agitation for a more liberal constitution based on British, American,
or French models. Basically, the form and functioning of the
constitution was of little significance, for the country continued to
be run by the Meiji oligarchy through their domination of the army and
navy, the bureaucracy, economic and social life, and the
opinion-forming agencies such as education and religion. In political
life this oligarchy was able to control the emperor, the Privy Council,
the House of Peers, the judiciary, and the bureaucracy.
The
Oligarchy's Chief Aim Was to Westernize Japan
This
left only one possible
organ of government, the Diet, through which the oligarchy might be
challenged. Moreover, the Diet had only one means (its right to pass
the annual budget) by which it could strike back at the oligarchy. This
right was of little significance so long as the oligarchy did not want
to increase the budget, since the budget of the previous year would be
repeated if the Diet rejected the budget of the following year.
However, the oligarchy could not be satisfied with a repetition of an
earlier budget, for the oligarchy's chief aim, after they had ensured
their own wealth and power, was to westernize Japan rapidly enough to
be able to defend it against the pressure of the Great Powers of the
West.
Controlling
the Elections to the Diet
All
these things required a
constantly growing budget, and thus gave the Diet a more important role
than it would otherwise have had. This role, however, was more of a
nuisance than a serious restriction on the power of the Meiji oligarchy
because the power of the Diet could be overcome in various ways.
Originally, the oligarchy planned to give the Imperial Household such a
large endowment of property that its income would be sufficient to
support the army and navy outside the national budget. This plan was
abandoned as impractical, although the Imperial Household and all its
rules were put outside the scope of the constitution. Accordingly, an
alternative plan was adopted: to control the elections to the Diet so
that its membership would be docile to the wishes of the Meiji
oligarchy. As we shall see, controlling the elections to the Diet was
possible, but ensuring its docility was quite a different matter.
The Meiji
Oligarchy Controls the Police and the Government
The
elections to the Diet
could be controlled in three ways: by a restricted suffrage, by
campaign contributions, and by bureaucratic manipulation of the
elections and the returns. The suffrage was restricted for many years
on a property basis, so that, in 1900, only one person in a hundred had
the right to vote. The close alliance between the Meiji oligarchy and
the richest members of the expanding economic system made it perfectly
easy to control the flow of campaign contributions. And if these two
methods failed, the Meiji oligarchy controlled both the police and the
prefectural bureaucracy which supervised the elections and counted the
returns. In case of need, they did not hesitate to use these
instruments, censoring opposition papers, prohibiting opposition
meetings, using violence, if necessary, to prevent opposition voting,
and reporting, through the prefects, as elected candidates who had
clearly failed to obtain the largest vote.
The Meiji
Oligarchy Controls the Emperor
These
methods were used from
the beginning. In the first Diet of 1889, gangsters employed by the
oligarchy prevented opposition members from entering the Diet chamber,
and at least twenty-eight other members were bribed to shift their
votes. In the elections of 189: violence was used, mostly in districts
opposed to the government, so that 25 persons were killed and 388 were
injured. The government still lost that election but continued to
control the Cabinet. It even dismissed eleven prefectural governors who
had been stealing votes, as much for their failure to steal enough as
for their action in stealing any. When the resulting Diet refused to
appropriate for an enlarged navy, it was sent home for eighteen days,
and then reassembled to receive an imperial rescript which gave 1.8
million yen over a six-year period from the Imperial Household for the
project and went on to order all public officials to contribute
one-tenth of their salaries each year for the duration of the naval
building program which the Diet had refused to finance. In this
fashion, the Diet's control of increased appropriations was
circumvented by the Meiji oligarchy's control of the emperor.
In
view of the dominant
position of the Meiji oligarchy in Japanese life from 1867 until after
1992, it would be a mistake to interpret such occurrences as unruly
Diets, the growth of political parties, or even the establishment of
adult manhood suffrage (in 1925) as such events would be interpreted in
European history. In the West we are accustomed to narrations about
heroic struggles for civil rights and individual liberties, or about
the efforts of commercial and industrial capitalists to capture at
least a share of political and social power from the hands of the
landed aristocracy, the feudal nobility, or the Church. We are
acquainted with movements by the masses for political democracy, and
with agitations by peasants and workers for economic advantages. All
these movements, which fill the pages of European history books, are
either absent or have an entirely different significance in Japanese
history.
Shintoism Was
Promoted by the Meiji Oligarchy to Control the People
In
Japan history presents a
basic solidarity of outlook and of purpose, punctuated with brief
conflicting outbursts which seem to be contradictory and inexplicable.
The explanation of this is to be found in the fact that there was,
indeed, a solidarity of outlook but that this solidarity was
considerably less solid than it appeared, for, beneath it, Japanese
society was filled with fissures and discontents. The solidarity of
outlook rested on the ideology which we have mentioned. This ideology,
sometimes called Shintoism, was propagated by the upper classes,
especially by the Meiji oligarchy but was more sincerely embraced by
the lower classes, especially by the rural masses, than it was by the
oligarchy which propagated it. This ideology accepted an authoritarian,
hierarchical, patriarchal society, based on families, clans, and
nation, culminating in respect and subordination to the emperor. In
this system there was no place for individualism, self-interest, human
liberties, or civil rights.
Shintoism
Allowed the Meiji Oligarchy to Pursue Policies of Self-Aggrandizement
In
general, this system was
accepted by the mass of the Japanese peoples. As a consequence, these
masses allowed the oligarchy to pursue policies of selfish
self-aggrandizement, of ruthless exploitation, and of revolutionary
economic and social change with little resistance. The peasants were
oppressed by universal military service, by high taxes and high
interest rates, by low farm prices and high industrial prices, and by
the destruction of the market for peasant handicrafts. They revolted
briefly and locally in 1884-1885, but were crushed and never revolted
again, although they continued to be exploited. All earlier legislation
seeking to protect peasant proprietors or to prevent monopolization of
the land was revoked in the 1870's.
In
the 1880's there was a
drastic reduction in the number of landowners, through heavy taxes,
high interest rates, and low prices for farm products. At the same time
the growth of urban industry began to destroy the market for peasant
handicrafts and the rural "putting-out system" of manufacture. In seven
years, 1883-1890, about 360,000 peasant proprietors were dispossessed
of 5 million yen worth of land because of total tax arrears of only
114,178 yen (or arrears of only one-third yen, that is, 17 American
cents, per person). In the same period, owners were dispossessed of
about one hundred times as much land by foreclosure of mortgages. This
process continued at varying rates, until, by 1940, three-quarters of
Japanese peasants were tenants or part-tenants paying rents of at least
half of their annual crop.
Pressures on
Japanese Peasants
In
spite of their acceptance
of authority and Shinto ideology, the pressures on Japanese peasants
would have reached the explosive point if safety valves had not been
provided for them. Among these pressures we must take notice of that
arising from population increase, a problem arising, as in most Asiatic
countries, from the introduction of Western medicine and sanitation.
Before the opening of Japan, its population had remained fairly stable
at 28-30 million for several centuries. This stability arose from a
high death rate supplemented by frequent famines and the practice of
infanticide and abortion. By 1870 the population began to grow, rising
from 30 million to 56 million in 1920, to 73 million in 1940, and
reaching 87 million in 1955.
Meiji
Oligarchy Controls Shipping, Railroads, Industry and Services
The
safety valve in the
Japanese peasant world resided in the fact that opportunities were
opened, with increasing rapidity, in nonagricultural activities in the
period 1870-1920. These nonagricultural activities were made available
from the fact that the exploiting oligarchy used its own growing income
to create such activities by investment in shipping, railroads,
industry, and services. These activities made it possible to drain the
growing peasant population from the rural areas into the cities. A law
of 1873 which established primogeniture in the inheritance of peasant
property made it evident that the rural population which migrated to
the cities would be second and third sons rather than heads of
families. This had numerous social and psychological results, of which
the chief was that the new urban population consisted of men detached
from the discipline of the patriarchal family and thus less under the
influence of the general authoritarian Japanese psychology and more
under the influence of demoralizing urban forces. As a consequence,
this group, after 1920, became a challenge to the stability of Japanese
society.
Exploitation
of Japanese Society
In
the cities the working
masses of Japanese society continued to be exploited, but now by low
wages rather than by high rents, taxes, or interest rates. These urban
masses, like the rural masses whence they had been drawn, submitted to
such exploitation without resistance for a much longer period than
Europeans would have done because they continued to accept the
authoritarian, submissive Shintoist ideology. They were excluded from
participation in political life until the establishment of adult
manhood suffrage in 1925. It was not until after this date that any
noticeable weakening of the authoritarian Japanese ideology began to
appear among the urban masses.
Resistance
of the urban masses
to exploitation through economic or social organizations was weakened
by the restrictions on workers' organizations of all kinds. The general
restrictions on the press, on assemblies, on freedom of speech, and on
the establishment of "secret" societies were enforced quite strictly
against all groups and doubly so against laboring groups. There were
minor socialistic and laborers' agitations in the twenty years
1890-1910. These were brought to a violent end in 1910 by the execution
of twelve persons for anarchistic agitations. The labor movement did
not raise its head again until the economic crisis of 1919-1922.
The Low-Wage
Policy of Japanese Originated in the Self-Interest of the Elite
The
low-wage policy of the
Japanese industrial system originated in the self-interest of the early
capitalists, but came to be justified with the argument that the only
commodity Japan had to offer the world, and the only one on which it
would construct a status as a Great Power, was its large supply of
cheap labor. Japan's mineral resources, including coal, iron, or
petroleum, were poor in both quality and quantity; of textile raw
materials it had only silk, and lacked both cotton and wool. It had no
natural resources of importance for which there was world demand such
as were to be found in the tin of Malaya, the rubber of Indonesia, or
the cocoa of West Africa; it had neither the land nor the fodder to
produce either dairy or animal products as Argentina, Denmark, New
Zealand, or Australia. The only important resources it had which could
be used to provide export goods to exchange for imported coal, iron, or
oil were silk, forest products, and products of the sea. All these
required a considerable expenditure of labor, and these products could
be sold abroad only if prices were kept low by keeping wage rates down.
Since
these products did not
command sufficient foreign exchange to allow Japan to pay for the
imports of coal, iron, and oil which a Great Power must have, Japan had
to find some method by which it could export its labor and obtain pay
for it. This led to the growth of manufacturing industries based on
imported raw materials and the development of such service activities
as fishing and ocean shipping. At an early date Japan began to develop
an industrial system in which raw materials such as coal, wrought iron,
raw cotton, or wool were imported, fabricated into more expensive and
complex forms, and exported again for a higher price in the form of
machinery or finished textiles. Other products which were exported
included such forest products as tea, carved woods, or raw silk, or
such products of Japanese labor as finished silks, canned fish, or
shipping services.
The Meiji
Oligarchy Is Controlled by a Small Group of Men
The
political and economic
decisions which led to these developments and which exploited the rural
and urban masses of Japan were made by the Meiji oligarchy and their
supporters. The decision-making powers in this oligarchy were
concentrated in a surprisingly small group of men, in all, no more than
a dozen in number, and made up, chiefly, of the leaders of the four
western clans which had led the movement against the shogun in 1867.
These leaders came in time to form a formal, if extralegal, group known
as the Genro (or Council of Elder Statesmen). Of
this group
Robert Reischauer wrote in 1938: "It is these men who have been the
real power behind the Throne. It became customary for their opinion to
be asked and, more important still, to be followed in all matters of
great significance to the welfare of the state. No Premier was ever
appointed except from the recommendation of these men who became known
as Genro. Until 1922 no important domestic
legislation, no
important foreign treaty escaped their perusal and sanction before it
was signed by the Emperor. These men, in their time, were the actual
rulers of Japan."
The Eight
Members of the Genro Control Japan
The
importance of this group
can be seen from the fact that the Genro had only eight members, yet
the office of prime minister was held by a Genro from 1885 to 1916, and
the important post of president of the Privy Council was held by a
Genro from its creation in 1889 to 1922 (except for the years 1890-1892
when Count Oki of the Hizen clan held it for Okuma). If we list the
eight Genro with three of their close associates, we shall be setting
down the chief personnel of Japanese history in the period covered by
this chapter. To such a list we might add certain other significant
facts, such as the social origins of these men, the dates of their
deaths, and their dominant connections with the two branches of the
defense forces and with the two greatest Japanese
industrial
monopolies. The significance of these connections will appear in a
moment.
The Meij
Oligarchy
Name Date
Social (Genro of Linked
Origin Marked*) Death Dominated With
*Ito 1909
Choshu *Yamagata 1922
Army Mitsui
*Inoue 1915
*Katsura 1913
*Oyama 1916
*Matsukata 1924
Satsuma
Kuroda Navy
Yamamoto
Progressive
Hizen Okuma 1922 Party
from 1882
Liberal
Party
Tosa
Itagaki 1920 from
1881 Mitsubishi
Noble
Saionji 1940 Last
of the
Court Genro" Sumitomo
(1924-1940)
The
Unofficial Rules of Japan
Japanese
history from 1890 to
1940 is largely a commentary on this table. We have said that the Meiji
Restoration of 1868 resulted from an alliance of four western clans and
some court nobles against the shogunate and that this alliance was
financed by commercial groups led by Mitsui. The leaders of this
movement who were still alive after 1890 came to form the Genro, the
real but unofficial rulers of Japan. As the years passed and the Genro
became older and died, their power became weaker, and there arose two
claimants to succeed them: the militarists and the political parties.
In this struggle the social groups behind the political parties were so
diverse and so corrupt that their success was never in the realm of
practical politics. In spite of this fact, the struggle between the
militarists and the political parties looked fairly even until 1935,
not because of any strength or natural ability in the ranks of the
latter but simply because Saionji, the "Last of the Genro" and the only
non-clan member in that select group, did all he could to delay or to
avoid the almost inevitable triumph of the militarists.
All
the factors in this
struggle and the political events of Japanese history arising from the
interplay of these factors go back to their roots in the Genro as it
existed before 1900. The political parties and Mitsubishi were built up
as Hizen-Tosa weapons to combat the Choshu-Satsuma domination of the
power nexus organized on the civilian-military bureaucracy allied with
Mitsui; the army-navy rivalry (which appeared in 1912 and became acute
after 1931) had its roots in an old competition between Choshu and
Satsuma within the Genro; while the civilian-militarist struggle went
back to the personal rivalry between Ito and Yamagata before 1900. Yet,
in spite of these fissures and rivalries, the oligarchy as a whole
generally presented a united front against outside groups (such as
peasants, workers, intellectuals, or Christians) in Japan itself or
against non-Japanese.
Ito—the Most
Powerful Man in Japan
From
1882 to 1898 Ito was the
dominant figure in the Meiji oligarchy, and the most powerful figure in
Japan. As minister of the Imperial Household, he was charged with the
task of drawing up the constitution of 1889; as president of the Privy
Council, he guided the deliberations of the assembly which ratified
this constitution; and as first prime minister of the new Japan, he
established the foundations on which it would operate. In the process
he entrenched the Sat-Cho oligarchy so firmly in power that the
supporters of Tosa and Hizen began to agitate against the government,
seeking to obtain what they regarded as their proper share of the plums
of office.
Political
Parties Arise in Japan
In
order to build up
opposition to the government, they organized the first real political
parties, the Liberal Party of Itagaki (1881) and the Progressive Party
of Okuma (1882). These parties adopted liberal and popular ideologies
from bourgeois Europe, but, generally, these were not sincerely held or
clearly understood. The real aim of these two groups was to make
themselves so much of a nuisance to the prevailing oligarchy that they
could obtain, as a price for relaxing their attacks, a share of the
patronage of public office and of government contracts. Accordingly,
the leaders of these parties, again and again, sold out their party
followers in return for these concessions, generally dissolving their
parties, to re-create them at some later date when their discontent
with the prevailing oligarchy had risen once again. As a result, the
opposition parties vanished and reappeared, and their leaders moved
into and out of public office in accordance with the whims of satisfied
or discontented personal ambitions.
The Great
Monopolies of Japan
Just
as Mitsui became the
greatest industrial monopoly of Japan on the basis of its political
connections with the prevalent Sat-Cho oligarchy, so Mitsubishi became
Japan's second greatest monopoly on the basis of its political
connections with the opposition groups of Tosa-Hizen. Indeed,
Mitsubishi began its career as the commercial firm of the Tosa clan,
and Y. Iwasaki, who had managed it in the latter role, continued to
manage it when it blossomed into Mitsubishi. Both of these firms, and a
handful of other monopolistic organizations which grew up later, were
completely dependent for their profits and growth on political
connections.
The Rise of
the Zaibatsu
The
task of building Japan
into a modern industrial power in a single lifetime required enormous
capital and stable markets. In a poor country like Japan, coming late
into the industrial era, both of these requirements could be obtained
from the government, and in no other way. As a result business
enterprise became organized in a few very large monopolistic
structures, and these (in spite of their size) never acted as
independent powers, even in economic matters, but cooperated in a
docile fashion with those who controlled government expenditures and
government contracts. Thus they cooperated with the Meiji oligarchy
before 1922, with the political party leaders in 1922-1932, and with
the militarists after 1932. Taken together, these monopolistic
industrial and financial organizations were known as zaibatsu.
There
were eight important organizations of this kind in the period after
World War I, but three were so powerful that they dominated the other
five, as well as the whole economic system. These three were Mitsui,
Mitsubishi, and Sumitomo (controlled by Saionji's relatives). These
competed with one another in a halfhearted fashion, but such
competition was political rather than economic, and always remained
within the rules of a system which they all accepted.
The Elite
Oligarchy Maintains Control of Japan
In
the period 1885-1901,
during which Ito was premier four times, Matsukata twice, and Yamagata
twice, it became evident that the oligarchy could not be controlled by
the Diet or by the Tosa-Hizen political parties but could always rule
Japan through its control of the emperor, the armed forces, and the
civil bureaucracy. This victory was hardly established before a rivalry
appeared between Ito, supported by the civil bureaucracy, and Yamagata,
supported by the armed services. By 1900 Yamagata won a decisive
victory over Ito and formed his second Cabinet (1898-1900), from which
the Ito group was, for the first time, completely excluded. During this
administration Yamagata extended the franchise from half a million to a
million voters in order to obtain city support for imposing taxes on
rural lands to pay for military expansion. Far more important than
this, he established a law that the ministries of the army and the navy
must be headed by Cabinet posts held by active generals and admirals of
the highest rank. This law made civilian rule of
Japan
impossible thereafter because no prime minister or member of the
Cabinet could fill the two defense posts unless they made concessions
to the armed services.
Internal
Feuds for Power
In
retaliation for this
defeat, Ito made an alliance with the Liberal Party of Itagaki (1900)
and took office as prime minister for the third time (1900-1901). But
he had little freedom of action, since the minister of war, in
accordance with the new law, was Yamagata's man, Katsura, and the
minister of the navy was Admiral Yamamoto.
In
1903 Yamagata obtained an
imperial rescript forcing Ito to retire from active political life to
the shelter of the Privy Council. Ito did so, leaving the Liberal Party
and the leadership of the civilian forces to his protégé,
Saionji. Yamagata had already retired behind the scenes, but still
dominated political life through his protégé, Katsura.
The
period 1901-1913 saw an
alternation of Katsura and Saionji governments, in which the former
clearly controlled the government, while the latter, through the
Liberal Party, won large and meaningless victories at the polls. Both
in 1908 and in 1912 Saionji's party won easy victories in general
elections held while he was in office, and in both cases Katsura forced
him out of office in spite of his majority in the Diet.
At
this point Katsura's
ruthless use of the emperor and the militarists to increase the size
and power of the army brought a new factor into Japanese political life
by leading to a split with the navy. In 1912, when Saionji and Katsura
had each headed two governments since 1901, the former refused to
increase the army by two divisions (for service in Korea). Katsura at
once threw the Saionji government out of office by having the minister
of war resign. When Saionji could find no eligible general willing to
serve, Katsura formed his third Cabinet (1912-1913) and created the new
divisions.
The
navy, alienated by the
army's high-handed political tactics, tried to keep Katsura out of
office in 1912 by refusing to provide an admiral to serve as minister
of the navy. They were defeated when Katsura produced an imperial
rescript from the new Emperor Taisho (1912-1926) ordering them to
provide an admiral. The navy retaliated the following year by forming
an alliance with the Liberals and other anti-Katsura forces, on the
grounds that his frequent use of imperial intervention in behalf of the
lowest partisan politics was an insult to the exalted sanctity of the
imperial position. For the first and only time, in 1913, an imperial
rescript was refused acceptance, by the Liberal Party; Katsura had to
resign, and a new Cabinet, under Admiral Yamamoto, was formed
(1913-1914). This alliance of the navy, the Satsuma clan, and the
Liberal Party so enraged the Choshu clan that the military and civilian
wings of that group came together on an anti-Satsuma basis.
Japanese
Officials Receive Bribes from Foreign Munitions Firms
In
1914 it was revealed that
several high admirals had accepted bribes from foreign munitions firms
such as German Siemens and British Vickers. Choshu used this as a club
to force Yamamoto to resign, but since they could not form a government
themselves they called Okuma out of retirement to form a temporary
government completely dependent on them. The old man was given a
majority in the Diet by turning the existing Liberal Party majority out
of office and, in a completely corrupt election, providing a majority
for a new Constitutional Believers' Party, which Katsura had created in
1913. Okuma was completely dependent on the Choshu oligarchy (which
meant on Yamagata, as Ito died in 1909 and Inoue in 1915). He gave them
two new army divisions and a strong anti-Chinese policy, but was
replaced by General Terauchi, a Choshu militarist and favorite of
Yamagata, in 1916. To provide this new government with less obviously
corrupt party support, a deal was made with the Liberal Party. In
return for seats in the Diet, places in the bureaucracy, and Mitsui
money, this old Tosa party sold out to Choshu militarism, and was
provided, by the prefectural governors, with a satisfying majority in
the general election of 1916.
Control of
Japan under Domination of One Man
Under
the Terauchi government,
Choshu militarism and Yamagata's personal power reached their
culmination. By that time every high officer in the army owed his
position to Yamagata's patronage. His old civilian rivals, like Ito or
Inoue, were dead. Of the four remaining Genro, only Yamagata, aged
eighty-one in 1918, still had his hands on the tiller; Matsukata, aged
eighty-four, was a weakling; Okuma, aged eighty-one, was an outsider;
and Saionji, aged seventy, was a semi-outsider. The emperor, as a
result of the protests of 1913, no longer intervened in political life.
The political parties were demoralized and subservient, prepared to
sacrifice any principle for a few jobs. The economic organizations, led
by the great zaibatsu, were completely dependent
on government
subsidies and government contracts. In a word, the controls of the
Meiji oligarchy had come almost completely into the hands of one man.
The
Incredible Degree of Concentration of Power in Japan
It
would be difficult to
exaggerate the degree of concentration of power in Japan in the period
covered by this chapter. In thirty-three years of Cabinet government,
there had been eighteen Cabinets but only nine different premiers. Of
these nine premiers, only two (Saionji and Okuma) were not of Choshu or
Satsuma, while five were military men.
The
growing militarization of
Japanese life in the period ending in 1918 had ominous implications for
the future. Not only did militarists control growing sectors of
Japanese life; they had also succeeded in merging loyalty to the
emperor and subservience to militarism into a single loyalty which no
Japanese could reject without, at the same time, rejecting his country,
his family, and his whole tradition. Even more ominous was the growing
evidence that Japanese militarism was insanely aggressive, and prone to
find the solution for internal problems in foreign wars.
Japan Becomes
Aggressive
On
three occasions in thirty
years, against China in 1894-1895, against Russia in 1904-1905, and
against China and Germany in 1914-1918, Japan had entered upon warlike
action for purely aggressive purposes. As a consequence of the first
action, Japan acquired Formosa and the Pescadores and forced China to
recognize the independence of Korea (1895). The subsequent Japanese
penetration of Korea led to a rivalry with Russia, whose Trans-Siberian
Railway was encouraging her to compensate for her rebuffs in the
Balkans by increasing her pressure in the Far East.
In
order to isolate the
approaching conflict with Russia, Japan signed a treaty with Britain
(1902). By this treaty each signer could expect support from the other
if it became engaged in war with more than one enemy in the Far East.
With Russia thus isolated in the area, Japan attacked the czar's forces
in 1904. These forces were destroyed on land by Japanese armies under
the Satsuma Genro Oyama, while the Russian fleet of thirty-two vessels,
coming from Europe, was destroyed by the Satsuma Admiral Togo in
Tsushima Straits. By the Treaty of Portsmouth (1905) Russia renounced
her influence in Korea, yielded southern Sakhalin and the lease on
Liaotung to Japan, and agreed to a joint renunciation of Manchuria
(which was to be evacuated by both Powers and restored to China).
Korea, which had been made a Japanese protectorate in 1904, was annexed
in 1910.
Outbreak of
War in 1914
The
outbreak of war in 1914
provided a great opportunity for Japanese expansion. While all the
Great Powers were busy elsewhere, the Far East was left to Japan.
Declaring war on Germany on August 23, 1914, Nipponese troops seized
the German holdings on the Shantung Peninsula and the German Pacific
islands north of the equator (Marshall Islands, Marianas, and
Carolines). This was followed, almost immediately (January 1915), by
presentation of "Twenty-one Demands" on China. These demands at once
revealed Japan's aggressive ambitions on the continent of Asia, and led
to a decisive change in world opinion about Japan, especially in the
United States. As preparation for such demands Japan had been able to
build up a very pro-Japanese feeling in most of the Great Powers.
Formal agreements or notes had been made with these, recognizing, in
one way or another, Japan's special concern with East Asia. In respect
to Russia a series of agreements had established spheres of influence.
These gave northern Manchuria and western Inner Mongolia as spheres to
Russia, and southern Manchuria with eastern Inner Mongolia as spheres
for Japan.
Japanese
Agree upon an Open-Door Policy in China
A
number of diplomatic notes
between the United States and Japan had arranged a tacit American
acceptance of the Japanese position in Manchuria in return for a
Japanese acceptance of the "Open-Door" or free-trade policy in China.
The Twenty-one Demands broke this agreement with the United States
since they sought to create for Japan a special economic position in
China. In combination with the injury inflicted on Japanese pride by
the rigid American restrictions on Japanese immigration into the United
States, this marked a turning point in Japanese-American feeling from
the generally favorable tone which it had possessed before 1915 to the
growing unfavorable tone it assumed after 1915.
Unfavorable
world opinion
forced Japan to withdraw the most extreme of her Twenty-one Demands
(those which were concerned with the use of Japanese advisers in
various Chinese administrative functions), but many of the others were
accepted by China under pressure of a Japanese ultimatum. The chief of
these permitted Japan to arrange with Germany regarding the disposition
of the German concessions in China without interference from China
itself. Other demands, which were accepted, gave Japan numerous
commercial, mining, and industrial concessions, mostly in eastern Inner
Mongolia and southern Manchuria.
Japan Was the
Preeminent Power in East Asia
In
spite of her growing
alienation of world opinion in the years of the First World War, the
war brought Japan to a peak of prosperity and power it had not
previously attained. The demand for Japanese goods by the belligerent
countries resulted in a great industrial boom. The increase in the
Japanese fleet and in Japanese territories in the northern Pacific, as
well as the withdrawal of her European rivals from the area, gave Japan
a naval supremacy there which was formally accepted by the other naval
Powers in the Washington Agreements of 1922. And the Japanese advances
in northern China made her the preeminent Power in East Asian economic
and political life. All in all, the successors of the Meiji Restoration
of 1868 could look with profound satisfaction on Japan's progress by
1918.
Part
Five—The First World War: 1914: 1918
Chapter 11—The Growth of International
Tensions, 1871-1914
Introduction
The
unification of Germany in
the decade before 1871 ended a balance of power in Europe which had
existed for 250 or even 300 years. During this long period, covering
almost ten generations, Britain had been relatively secure and of
growing power. She had found this power challenged only by the states
of western Europe. Such a challenge had come from Spain under Philip
II, from France under Louis XIV and under Napoleon, and, in an economic
sense, from the Netherlands during much of the seventeenth century.
Such a challenge could arise because these states were as rich and
almost as unified as Britain herself, but, above all, it could arise
because the nations of the West could face seaward and challenge
England so long as central Europe was disunited and economically
backward.
The
unification of Germany by
Bismarck destroyed this situation politically, while the rapid economic
growth of that country after 1871 modified the situation economically.
For a long time Britain did not see this change but rather tended to
welcome the rise of Germany because it relieved her, to a great extent,
from the pressure of France in the political and colonial fields. This
failure to see the changed situation continued until after 1890 because
of Bismarck's diplomatic genius, and because of the general failure of
non-Germans to appreciate the marvelous organizing ability of the
Germans in industrial activities. After 1890 Bismarck's masterful grip
on the tiller was replaced by the vacillating hands of Kaiser William
II and a succession of puppet chancellors. These incompetents alarmed
and alienated Britain by challenging her in commercial, colonial, and
especially naval affairs. In commercial matters the British found
German salesmen and their agents offering better service, better terms,
and lower prices on goods of at least equal quality, and in metric
rather than Anglo-Saxon sizes and measurements. In the colonial field
after 1884, Germany acquired African colonies which threatened to cut
across the continent from east to west and thus checkmate the British
ambitions to build a railway from the Cape of Good Hope to Cairo. These
colonies included East Africa (Tanganyika), South-West Africa,
Cameroons, and Togo. The German threat became greater as a result of
German intrigues in the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique,
and above all by the German encouragement of the Boers of the Transvaal
and the Orange Free State before their war with Britain in 1899-1902.
In the Pacific area Germany acquired by 1902 the Caroline, Marshall,
and Marianas Islands, parts of New Guinea and Samoa, and a base of
naval and commercial importance at Kiaochau on the Shantung Peninsula
of China. In naval affairs Germany presented her greatest threat as a
result of the German Naval bills of 1898, 1900, and 1902, which were
designed to be an instrument of coercion against Britain. Fourteen
German battleships were launched between 1900 and 1905. As a
consequence of these activities Britain joined the anti-German
coalition by 1907, the Powers of Europe became divided into two
antagonistic coalitions, and a series of crises began which led, step
by step, to the catastrophe of 1914.
International
affairs in the
period 1871-1914 can be examined under four headings: (1) the creation
of the Triple Alliance, 1871-1890; (2) the creation of the Triple
Entente, 1890-1907; (3) the efforts to bridge the gap between the two
coalitions, 1890-1914; and (4) the series of international crises,
1905-1914. These are the headings under which we shall examine this
subject.
The Creation
of the Triple Alliance, 1871-1890
The
establishment of a German
Empire dominated by the Kingdom of Prussia left Bismarck politically
satisfied. He had no desire to annex any additional Germans to the new
empire, and the growing ambitions for colonies and a worldwide empire
left him cold. As a satisfied diplomat he concentrated on keeping what
he had, and realized that France, driven by fear and vengeance, was the
chief threat to the situation. His immediate aim, accordingly, was to
keep France isolated. This involved the more positive aim to keep
Germany in friendly relations with Russia and the Habsburg Empire and
to keep Britain friendly by abstaining from colonial or naval
adventures. As part of this policy Bismarck made two tripartite
agreements with Russia and Austro-Hungary: (a) the
Three Emperors' League of 1873 and (b)
the Three Emperors' Alliance of 1881. Both of these were disrupted by
the rivalry between Austria and Russia in southeastern Europe,
especially in Bulgaria. The Three Emperors' League broke down in 1878
at the Congress of Berlin because of Habsburg opposition to Russia's
efforts to create a great satellite state in Bulgaria after her victory
in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877. The Three Emperors' Alliance of 1881
broke down in the "Bulgarian crisis" of 1885. This crisis arose over
the Bulgarian annexation of Eastern Rumelia, a union which was opposed
by Russia but favored by Austria, thus reversing the attitude these
Powers had displayed at Berlin in 1878.
The
rivalry between Russia and
Austria in the Balkans made it clear to Bismarck that his efforts to
form a diplomatic front of the three great empires were based on weak
foundations. Accordingly, he made a second string for his bow. It was
this second string which became the Triple Alliance. Forced to choose
between Austria and Russia, Bismarck took the former because it was
weaker and thus easier to control. He made an Austro-German alliance in
1879, following the disruption of the Three Emperors' League, and in
188: expanded it into a Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy.
This alliance, originally made for five years, was renewed at intervals
until 1915. After the disruption of the Three Emperors' Alliance in
1885, the Triple Alliance became the chief weapon in Germany's
diplomatic armory, although Bismarck, in order to keep France isolated,
refused to permit Russia to drift completely out of the German sphere,
and tried to bind Germany and Russia together by a secret agreement of
friendship and neutrality known as the Reinsurance Treaty (1887). This
treaty, which ran for three years, was not renewed in 1890 after the
new Emperor, William II, had discharged Bismarck. The Kaiser argued
that the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia was not compatible with the
Triple Alliance with Austria and Italy, since Austria and Russia were
so unfriendly. By failing to renew, William left Russia and France both
isolated. From this condition they naturally moved together to form the
Dual Alliance of 1894. Subsequently, by antagonizing Britain, the
German government helped to transform this Dual Alliance into the
Triple Entente. Some of the reasons why Germany made these errors will
be examined in a subsequent chapter on Germany's internal history.
The Creation
of the Tripe Entente, 1890-1907
The
diplomatic isolation of
Russia and France combined with a number of more positive factors to
bring about the Dual Alliance of 1894. Russian antagonism toward
Austria in the Balkans and French fear of Germany along the Rhine were
increased by Germany's refusal to renew the Reinsurance Treaty and by
the early renewal of the Triple Alliance in 1891. Both powers were
alarmed by growing signs of Anglo-German friendship at the time of the
Heligoland Treaty (1890) and on the occasion of the Kaiser's visit to
London in 1891. Finally, Russia needed foreign loans for railroad
building and industrial construction, and these could be obtained most
readily in Paris. Accordingly, the agreement was closed during the New
Year celebrations of 1894 in the form of a military convention. This
provided that Russia would attack Germany if France were attacked by
Germany or by Italy supported by Germany, while France would attack
Germany if Russia were attacked by Germany or by Austria supported by
Germany..
This
Dual Alliance of France
and Russia became the base of a triangle whose other sides were
"ententes," that is, friendly agreements between France and Britain
(1904) and between Russia and Britain (1907).
To
us looking back on it, the
Entente Cordiale between France and Britain seems inevitable, yet to
contemporaries, as late as 1898, it must have appeared as a most
unlikely event. For many years Britain had followed a policy of
diplomatic isolation, maintaining a balance of power on the Continent
by shifting her own weight to whatever side of Europe's disputes seemed
the weaker. Because of her colonial rivalries with France in Africa and
southwest Asia and her disputes with Russia in the Near, Middle, and
Far East, Britain was generally friendly to the Triple Alliance and
estranged from the Dual Alliance as late as 1902. Her difficulties with
the Boers in South Africa, the growing strength of Russia in the Near
and Far East, and Germany's obvious sympathy with the Boers led Britain
to conclude the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 190 in order to obtain
support against Russia in China. About the same time, Britain became
convinced of the need and the possibility of an agreement with France.
The need arose from Germany's direct threat to Britain's most sensitive
spot by Tirpitz's naval-building program of 1898. The possibility of
agreement with France emerged in the wake of the most acute
Anglo-French crisis of modern times, the Fashoda crisis of 1898. At
Fashoda on the Nile, a band of French under Colonel Jean Marchand, who
had been crossing the Sahara from west to east, came face to face with
a force of British under General Kitchener, who had been moving up the
Nile from Egypt in order to subdue the tribes of the Sudan. Each
ordered the other to withdraw. Passions rose to fever heat while both
sides consulted their capitals for instructions. As a consequence of
these instructions the French withdrew. As passions cooled and the dust
settled, it became clear to both sides that their interests were
reconcilable, since France's primary interest was on the Continent,
where she faced Germany, while Britain's primary interest was in the
colonial field w here she increasingly found herself facing Germany.
France's refusal to engage in a colonial war with Britain while the
German Army sat across the Rhine made it clear that France could arrive
at a colonial agreement with Britain. This agreement was made in 1904
by putting all their disputes together on the negotiation table and
balancing one against another. The French recognized the British
occupation of Egypt in return for diplomatic support for their
ambitions in Morocco. They gave up ancient rights in Newfoundland in
return for new territories in Gabon and along the Niger River in
Africa. Their rights in Madagascar were recognized in return for
accepting a British "sphere of interests" in Siam. Thus, the ancient
Anglo-French enmity was toned down in the face of the rising power of
Germany. This Entente Cordiale was deepened in the period 1906-1914 by
a series of Anglo-French "military conversations," providing, at first,
for unofficial discussions regarding behavior in a quite hypothetical
war with Germany but hardening imperceptibly through the years into a
morally binding agreement for a British expeditionary force to cover
the French left wing in the event of a French war with Germany. These
"military conversations" were broadened after 1912 by a naval agreement
by which the British undertook to protect France from the North Sea in
order to free the French fleet for action against the Italian Navy in
the Mediterranean.
The
British agreement with
Russia in 1907 followed a course not dissimilar to that of the British
agreement with France in 1904. British suspicions of Russia had been
fed for years by their rivalry in the Near East. By 1904 these
suspicions were deepened by a growing Anglo-Russian rivalry in
Manchuria and North China, and were brought to a head by Russian
construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway (finished in 1905). A
violent crisis arose over the Dogger Bank incident of 1904, when the
Russian fleet, en route from the Baltic Sea to the Far East, fired on
British fishing vessels in the North Sea in the belief that they were
Japanese torpedo boats. The subsequent destruction of that Russian
fleet by the Japanese and the ensuing victory of Britain's ally in the
Russo-Japanese War of 1905 made clear to both parties that agreement
between them was possible. German naval rivalry with Britain and the
curtailment of Russian ambitions in Asia as a result of the defeat by
Japan made possible the agreement of 1907. By this agreement Persia was
divided into three zones of influence, of which the northern was
Russian, the southern was British, and the center was neutral.
Afghanistan was recognized as under British influence; Tibet was
declared to be under Chinese suzerainty; and Britain expressed her
willingness to modify the Straits Agreements in a direction favorable
to Russia.
One
influence which worked
to create and strengthen the Triple Entente was that of the
international banking fraternity. These were largely excluded from the
German economic development, but had growing links with France and
Russia. Prosperous enterprises like the Suez Canal Company, the
Rothschild copper enterprise, Rio Tinto, in Spain, and many newer joint
activities in Morocco created numerous unobtrusive links which both
preceded and strengthened the Triple Entente. The Rothschilds, close
friends of Edwards VII and of France, were linked to the French
investment bank, Banque de Paris et des Pays Bas. This, in turn, was
the chief influence in selling nine billion rubles of Russian bonds in
France before 1914. The most influential of London bankers, Sir Ernest
Cassel, a great and mysterious person (1852-1921), had come from
Germany to England at the age of seventeen, built up an immense
fortune, which he gave away with a lavish hand, was closely connected
with Egypt, Sweden, New York, Paris, and Latin America, became one of
King Edward’s closest personal friends and employer of the
greatest wire-puller of the period, the ubiquitous mole, Lord Esher.
These generally anti-Prussian influences around King Edward played a
significant part in building up the Triple Entente and in strengthening
it when Germany foolishly challenged their projects in Morocco in the
1904-1912 period.
Efforts to
Bridge the Gap between the Two Coalitions, 1890-1914
At
the beginning, and even up
to 1913, the two coalitions on the international scene were not rigid
or irreconcilably alienated. The links between the members of each
group were variable and ambiguous. The Triple Entente was called an
entente just because two of its three links were not alliances. The
Triple Alliance was by no means solid, especially in respect to Italy,
which had joined it originally to obtain support against the Papacy
over the Roman question but which soon tried to obtain support for an
aggressive Italian policy in the Mediterranean and North Africa.
Failure to obtain specific German support in these areas, and continued
enmity with Austro-Hungary in the Adriatic, made the Italian link with
the Central Powers rather tenuous.
We
shall mention at least a
dozen efforts to bridge the gap which was slowly forming in the
European "concert of the Powers." First in chronological order were the
Mediterranean Agreements of 1887. In a series of notes England, Italy,
Austria, and Spain agreed to preserve the status quo in the
Mediterranean and its adjoining seas or to see it modified only by
mutual agreement. These agreements were aimed at the French ambitions
in Morocco and the Russian ambitions at the Straits.
A
second agreement was the
Anglo-German Colonial Treaty of 1890 by which German claims in East
Africa, especially Zanzibar, were exchanged for the British title to
the island of Heligoland in the Baltic Sea. Subsequently, numerous
abortive efforts were made by the Kaiser and others on the German side,
and by Joseph Chamberlain and others on the British side, to reach some
agreement for a common front in world affairs. This resulted in a few
minor agreements, such as one of 1898 regarding a possible disposition
of the Portuguese colonies in Africa, one of 1899 dividing Samoa, and
one of 1900 to maintain the "Open Door" in China, but efforts to create
an alliance or even an entente broke down over the German naval
program, German colonial ambitions in Africa (especially Morocco), and
German economic penetration of the Near East along the route of the
Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway. German jealousy of England's world
supremacy, especially the Kaiser's resentment toward his uncle, King
Edward VII, was ill concealed.
Somewhat
similar negotiations
were conducted between Germany and Russia, but with meager results. A
Commercial Agreement of 1894 ended a long-drawn tariff war, much to the
chagrin of the German landlords who enjoyed the previous exclusion of
Russian grain, but efforts to achieve any substantial political
agreement failed because of the German alliance with Austria (which
faced Russia in the Balkans) and the Russian alliance with France
(which faced Germany along the Rhine). These obstacles wrecked the
so-called Bjorkö Treaty, a personal agreement between the Kaiser
and Nicholas made during a visit to each other's yachts in 1905,
although the Germans were able to secure Russian consent to the Baghdad
Railway by granting the Russians a free hand in northern Persia (1910).
Four
other lines of
negotiation arose out of the French ambitions to obtain Morocco, the
Italian desire to get Tripoli, the Austrian ambition to annex Bosnia,
and the Russian determination to open the Straits to their warships.
All four of these were associated with the declining power of Turkey,
and offered opportunities for the European Powers to support one
another's ambitions at the expense of the Ottoman Empire. In 1898 Italy
signed a commercial treaty with France, and followed this up, two years
later, by a political agreement which promised French support for the
Italian ambitions in Tripoli in return for Italian support for the
French designs in Morocco. The Italians further weakened the Triple
Alliance in 1902 by promising France to remain neutral in the event
that France was attacked or had to fight "in defense of her honor or of
her security."
In
a somewhat similar fashion
Russia and Austria tried to reconcile the former's desire to obtain an
outlet through the Dardanelles into the Aegean with the latter's desire
to control Slav nationalism in the Balkans and reach the Aegean at
Saloniki. In 1897 they reached an agreement to maintain the status
quo
in the Balkans or, failing this, to partition the area among the
existing Balkan states plus a new state of Albania. In 1903 these two
Powers agreed on a program of police and financial reform for the
disturbed Turkish province of Macedonia. In 1908 a disagreement over
Austrian efforts to construct a railway toward Saloniki was glossed
over briefly by an informal agreement between the respective foreign
ministers, Aleksandr Izvolski and Lexa von Aehrenthal, to exchange
Austrian approval of the right of Russian warships to traverse the
Straits for Russian approval of an Austrian annexation of the Turkish
provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. All this tentative goodwill
evaporated in the heat of the Bosnian crisis of 1908, as we shall see
in a moment.
After
1905 the recurrent
international crises and the growing solidarity of the coalitions
(except for Italy) made the efforts to bridge the gap between the two
coalitions less frequent and less fruitful. However, two episodes are
worthy of attention. These are the Haldane Mission of 1912 and the
Baghdad Railway agreement of 1914. In the former, British Secretary of
State for War Lord Haldane went to Berlin to try to restrain Tirpitz's
naval program. Although the German Navy had been built in the hope that
it would bring England to the conference table, and without any real
intention of using it in a war with England, the Germans were not able
to grasp the opportunity when it occurred. The Germans wanted a
conditional promise of British neutrality in a continental war as a
price for suspension of the new naval bill. Since this might lead to
German hegemony on the Continent, Haldane could not agree. He returned
to London convinced that the Germany of Goethe and Hegel which he had
learned to love in his student days was being swallowed up by the
German militarists. The last bridge between London and Berlin seemed
down, but in June, 1914, the two countries initialed the agreement by
which Britain withdrew her opposition to the Baghdad Railway in return
for a German promise to remain north of Basra and recognize Britain's
preeminence on the Euphrates and Persian Gulf. This solution to a
long-standing problem was lost in the outbreak of war six weeks later.
The
International Crisis, 1905 - 1914
The
decade from the Entente
Cordiale to the outbreak of war witnessed a series of political crises
which brought Europe periodically to the brink of war and hastened the
growth of armaments, popular hysteria, nationalistic chauvinism, and
solidity of alliances to a point where a relatively minor event in 1914
plunged the world into a war of unprecedented range and intensity.
There were nine of these crises which must be mentioned here. In
chronological order they are:
1905-1906 The
First Moroccan Crisis and the Algeciras Conference
1908 The
Bosnian Crisis
1911 Agadir
and the Second Moroccan Crisis
1912 The
First Balkan War
1913 The
Second Balkan War
1913 The
Albanian Crisis
1913 The
Liman von Sanders Affairs
1914 Sarajevo
The
first Moroccan crisis
arose from German opposition to French designs on Morocco. This
opposition was voiced by the Kaiser himself in a speech in Tangier,
after the French had won Italian, British, and Spanish acquiescence by
secret agreements with each of these countries. These agreements were
based on French willingness to yield Tripoli to Italy, Egypt to
Britain, and the Moroccan coast to Spain. The Germans insisted on an
international conference in the hope that their belligerence would
disrupt the Triple Entente and isolate France. Instead, when the
conference met at Algeciras, near Gilbraltar, in 1906, Germany found
herself supported only by Austria. The conference reiterated the
integrity of Morocco but set up a state bank and a police force, both
dominated by French influence. The crisis reached a very high pitch,
but in both France and Germany the leaders of the more belligerent bloc
(Théophile Delcassé and Friedrich von Holstein) were
removed from office at the critical moment.
The
Bosnian crisis of 1908
arose from the Young Turk revolt of the same year. Fearful that the new
Ottoman government might be able to strengthen the empire, Austria
determined to lose no time in annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina, which
had been under Austrian military occupation since the Congress of
Berlin (1878). Since the annexation would permanently cut Serbia off
from the Adriatic Sea, Aehrenthal, the Austrian foreign minister,
consulted with Serbia's protector, Russia. The czar's foreign minister,
Izvolski, was agreeable to the Austrian plan if Austria would yield to
Izvolski's desire to open the Straits to Russian warships, contrary to
the Congress of Berlin. Aehrenthal agreed, subject to Izvolski's
success in obtaining the consent of the other Powers. While Izvolski
was wending his way from Germany to Rome and Paris in an effort to
obtain this consent, Aehrenthal suddenly annexed the two districts,
leaving Izvolski without his Straits program (October 6, 1908). It soon
became clear that he could not get this program. About the same time,
Austria won Turkish consent to its annexation of Bosnia. A war crisis
ensued, fanned by the refusal of Serbia to accept the annexation and
its readiness to precipitate a general war to prevent it. The danger of
such a war was intensified by the eagerness of the military group in
Austria, led by Chief of Staff Conrad von Hötzendorff, to settle
the Serb irritation once and for all. A stiff German note to Russia
insisting that she abandon her support of Serbia and recognize the
annexation cleared the air, for Izvolski yielded and Serbia followed,
but it created a very bad psychological situation for the future.
The
second Moroccan crisis arose (July, 1911) when the Germans sent a
gunboat, the Panther,
to Agadir in order to force the French to evacuate Fez, which they had
occupied, in violation of the Algeciras agreement, in order to suppress
native disorders. The crisis became acute but subsided when the Germans
gave up their opposition to French plans in Morocco in return for the
cession of French territory in the Congo area (November 4, 1911).
As
soon as Italy saw the
French success in Morocco, it seized neighboring Tripoli, leading to
the Tripolitan war between Italy and Turkey (September 28, 1911). All
the Great Powers had agreements with Italy not to oppose her
acquisition of Tripoli, but they disapproved of her methods, and were
alarmed to varying degrees by her conquest of the Dodecanese Islands in
the Aegean and her bombardment of the Dardanelles (April, 1912).
The
Balkan States decided to
profit from the weakness of Turkey by driving her out of Europe
completely. Accordingly, Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Montenegro
attacked Turkey in the First Balkan War and had considerable success
(1912). The Triple Alliance opposed the Serbian advance to the
Adriatic, and suggested the creation of a new state in Albania to keep
Serbia from the sea. A brief war crisis died down when Russia again
abandoned the Serbian territorial claims and Austria was able to force
Serbia and Montenegro to withdraw from Durazzo and Scutari. By the
Treaty of London (1913) Turkey gave up most of her territory in Europe.
Serbia, embittered by her failure to obtain the Adriatic coast,
attempted to find compensation in Macedonia at the expense of
Bulgaria's gains from Turkey. This led to the Second Balkan War, in
which Serbia, Greece, Romania, and Turkey attacked Bulgaria. By the
ensuing treaties of Bucharest and Constantinople (August-September,
1913), Bulgaria lost most of Macedonia to Serbia and Greece, much of
Dobruja to Romania, and parts of Thrace to Turkey. Embittered at the
Slavs and their supporters, Bulgaria drifted rapidly toward the Triple
Alliance.
Ultimatums
from Austria and
from Austria and Italy jointly (October, 1913), forced Serbia and
Greece to evacuate Albania, and made it possible to organize that
country within frontiers agreeable to the Conference of Ambassadors at
London. This episode hardly had time to develop into a crisis when it
was eclipsed by the Liman von Sanders Affair.
Liman
von Sanders was the head
of a German military mission invited to the Ottoman Empire to
reorganize the Turkish Army, an obvious necessity in view of its record
in the Balkan Wars. When it became clear that Liman was to be actual
commander of the First Army Corps at Constantinople and practically
chief of staff in Turkey, Russia and France protested violently. The
crisis subsided in January, 1914, when Liman gave up his command at
Constantinople to become inspector-general of the Turkish Army.
The
series of crises from
April, 1911, to January, 1914, had been almost uninterrupted. The
spring of 1914, on the contrary, was a period of relative peace and
calm, on the surface at least. But appearances were misleading. Beneath
the surface each power was working to consolidate its own strength and
its links with its allies in order to ensure that it would have better,
or at least no worse, success in the next crisis, which everyone knew
was bound to come. And come it did, with shattering suddenness, when
the heir to the Habsburg throne, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, was
assassinated by Serb extremists in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo on the
28th of June, 1914. There followed a terrible month of fear,
indecision, and hysteria before the World War was begun by an Austrian
attack on Serbia on July 28, 1914.
Whole
volumes have been
written on the crisis of July, 1914, and it is hardly to be expected
that the story could be told in a few paragraphs. The facts themselves
are woven into a tangled skein, which historians have now unraveled;
but more important than the facts, and considerably more elusive, are
the psychological conditions surrounding these facts. The atmosphere of
nervous exhaustion after ten years of crisis; the physical exhaustion
from sleepless nights; the alternating moods of patriotic pride and
cold fear; the underlying feeling of horror that nineteenth century
optimism and progress were leading to such a disaster; the brief
moments of impatient rage at the enemy for starting the whole thing;
the nervous determination to avoid war if possible, but not to be
caught off guard when it came and, if possible, to catch your opponent
off guard instead; and, finally, the deep conviction that the whole
experience was only a nightmare and that at the last moment some power
would stop it—these were the sentiments which surged to and fro
in the minds of millions of Europeans in those five long weeks of
mounting tension.
A
number of forces made the
crises of the period before the outbreak of war more dangerous than
they would have been a generation or so earlier. Among these we should
mention the influence of the mass army, the influence of the alliance
system, the influence of democracy, the effort to obtain diplomatic
ends by intimidation, the mood of desperation among politicians, and,
lastly, the increasing influence of imperialism.
The
influence of the mass army
will be discussed more extensively in the next chapter. Briefly, the
mass army in a period in which communication was generally by telegraph
and travel was by rail was an unwieldy thing which could be handled
only in a rather rigid and inflexible fashion. As worked out by the
Germans, and used with such success in 1866 and in 1870, this fashion
required the creation, long before the war began, of detailed plans
executed in sequence from an original signal and organized in such a
way that every single person had his fixed role like a part in a great
and intricate machine. As used by the Germans in early wars, extended
by them and copied by others in the period before 1914, each soldier
began to move from his home at a given signal. As they advanced, hour
by hour, and day by day, these men assembled their equipment and
organized into larger and larger groups, at first in platoons,
companies, and regiments, then in divisions and armies. As they
assembled they were advancing along lines of strategic attack made long
before and, as likely as not, the convergence into armies would not be
accomplished until the advance had already penetrated deep into enemy
territory. As formulated in theory, the final assembly into a complete
fighting machine would take place only a brief period before the whole
mass hurled itself on an, as yet, only partially assembled enemy force.
The great drawback to this plan of mobilization was its inflexibility
and its complexity, these two qualities being so preponderant that,
once the original signal was given, it was almost impossible to stop
the forward thrust of the whole assemblage anywhere short of its
decisive impact on the enemy forces in their own country. This meant
that an order to mobilize was almost equivalent to a declaration of
war; that no country could allow its opponent to give the original
signal much before it gave its own signal; and that the decisions of
politicians were necessarily subordinate to the decisions of generals.
The
alliance system worsened
this situation in two ways. On the one hand, it meant that every local
dispute was potentially a world wear, because the signal to mobilize
given anywhere in Europe would start the machines of war everywhere. On
the other hand, it encouraged extremism, because a country with allies
would be bolder than a country with no allies, and because allies in
the long run did not act to restrain one another, either because they
feared that lukewarm support to an ally in his dispute would lead to
even cooler support from an ally in one's own dispute later or because
a restraining influence in an earlier dispute so weakened an alliance
that it was necessary to give unrestrained support in a later dispute
in order to save the alliance for the future. There can be little doubt
that Russia gave excessive support to Serbia in a bad dispute in 1914
to compensate for the fact that she had let Serbia down in the Albanian
disputes of 1913; moreover, Germany gave Austria a larger degree of
support in 1914, although lacking sympathy with the issue itself, to
compensate for the restraint which Germany had exercised on Austria
during the Balkan Wars.
The
influence of democracy
served to increase the tension of a crisis because elected politicians
felt it necessary to pander to the most irrational and crass
motivations of the electorate in order to ensure future election, and
did this by playing on hatred and fear of powerful neighbors or on such
appealing issues as territorial expansion, nationalistic pride, "a
place in the sun," "outlets to the sea," and other real or imagined
benefits. At the same time, the popular newspaper press, in order to
sell papers, played on the same motives and issues, arousing their
peoples, driving their own politicians to extremes, and alarming
neighboring states to the point where they hurried to adopt similar
kinds of action in the name of self-defense. Moreover, democracy made
it impossible to examine international disputes on their merits, but
instead transformed every petty argument into an affair of honor and
national prestige so that no dispute could be examined on its merits or
settled as a simple compromise because such a sensible approach would
at once be hailed by one's democratic opposition as a loss of face and
an unseemly compromise of exalted moral principles.
The
success of Bismarck's
policy of "blood and iron" tended to justify the use of force and
intimidation in international affairs, and to distort the role of
diplomacy so that the old type of diplomacy began to disappear. Instead
of a discussion between gentlemen to find a workable solution,
diplomacy became an effort to show the opposition how strong one was in
order to deter him from taking advantage of one's obvious weaknesses.
Metternich's old definition, that "a diplomat was a man who never
permitted himself the pleasure of a triumph," became lost completely,
although it was not until after 1930 that diplomacy became the practice
of polishing one's guns in the presence of the enemy.
The
mood of desperation among
politicians served to make international crises more acute in the
period after 1904. This desperation came from most of the factors we
have already discussed, especially the pressure of the mass army and
the pressure of the newspaper-reading electorate. But it was
intensified by a number of other influences. Among these was the belief
that war was inevitable. When an important politician, as, for example,
Poincaré, decides that war is inevitable, he acts as if it were
inevitable, and this makes it inevitable. Another kind of desperation
closely related to this is the feeling that war now is preferable to
war later, since time is on the side of the enemy. Frenchmen dreaming
of the recovery of Alsace and Lorraine, looked at the growing power and
population of Germany and felt that war would be better in 1914 than
later. Germans, dreaming of "a place in the sun" or fearing an "Entente
encirclement," looked at the Russian rearmament program and decided
that they would have more hope of victory in 1914 than in 1917 when
that rearmament program would be completed. Austria, as a dynastic
state, had her own kind of desperation based on the belief that
nationalistic agitation by the Slavs doomed her anyway if she did
nothing, and that it would be better to die fighting than to
disintegrate in peace.
Lastly,
the influence of
imperialism served to make the crises of 1905-1914 more acute than
those of an earlier period. This is a subject which has given rise to
much controversy since 1914 and has, in its crudest form, been
presented as the theory that war was a result of the machinations of
"international bankers" or of the international armaments merchants, or
was an inevitable result of the fact that the European capitalist
economic system had reached maturity. All these theories will be
examined in another place where it will be shown that they are, at
worst, untrue, or, at best, incomplete. However, one fact seems to be
beyond dispute. This is the fact that international economic
competition was, in the period before 1914, requiring increasing
political support. British gold and diamond miners in South Africa,
German railroad builders in the Near East, French tin miners in the
southwest Pacific, American oil prospectors in Mexico, British oil
prospectors in the Near East, even Serbian pork merchants in the
Habsburg domains sought and expected to get political support from
their home governments. It may be that things were always thus. But
before 1914 the number of such foreign entrepreneurs was greater than
ever, their demands more urgent, their own politicians more attentive,
with the result that international relations were exasperated.
It
was in an atmosphere such
as this that Vienna received news of the assassination of the heir to
the Habsburg throne on June 28, 1914. The Austrians were convinced of
the complicity of the Serbian government, although they had no real
proof. We now know that high officials of the Serbian government knew
of the plot and did little to prevent it. This lack of activity was not
caused by the fact that Francis Ferdinand was unfriendly to the Slavs
within the Habsburg Empire but, on the contrary, by the fact that he
was associated with plans to appease these Slavs by concessions toward
political autonomy within the Habsburg domains and had even considered
a project for changing the Dual Monarchy of Austrian and Hungarian into
a Triple Monarchy of Austrian, Hungarian, and Slav. This project was
feared by the Serbs because, by preventing the disintegration of
Austria-Hungary, it would force postponement of their dreams of making
Serbia the "Prussia of the Balkans." The project was also regarded with
distaste by the Hungarians, who had no desire for that demotion
associated with a shift from being one of two to being one of three
joint rulers. Within the Hapsburg Cabinet there was considerable doubt
as to what action to take toward Serbia. Hungary was reluctant to go to
war for fear that a victory might lead to the annexation of more Serbs,
thus accentuating the Slav problem within the empire and making the
establishment of a Triple Monarchy more likely. Ultimately, they were
reassured by the promise that no more Slavs would be annexed and that
Serbia itself would, after its defeat, be compelled to stop its
encouragement of Slav nationalist agitation within the empire and
could, if necessary, be weakened by transfer of part of its territory
to Bulgaria. On this irresponsible basis, Austria, having received a
promise of support from Germany, sent a forty-eight-hour ultimatum to
Belgrade. This document, delivered on July 23rd, was far-reaching. It
bound Serbia to suppress anti-Habsburg publications, societies, and
teaching; to remove from Serbian official positions persons to be named
later by Austria; to allow Hapsburg officials to cooperate with the
Serbs inside Serbia in apprehending and trying those implicated in the
Sarajevo plot; and to offer explanations of various anti-Austrian
utterances by Serbian officials.
Serbia,
confident of Russian
support, answered in a reply which was partly favorable, partly
evasive, and in one particular at least (use of Austrian judges in
Serbian tribunals) negative. Serbia mobilized before making her reply;
Austria mobilized against her as soon as it was received, and, on July
28th, declared war. The Russian czar, under severe pressure from his
generals, issued, retracted, modified, and reissued an order for
general mobilization. Since the German military timetable for a
two-front war provided that France must be defeated before Russian
mobilization was completed, France and Germany both ordered
mobilization on August 1st, and Germany declared war on Russia. As the
German armies began to pour westward, Germany declared war on France
(August 3rd) and Belgium (August 4th). Britain could not allow France
to be defeated, and in addition was morally entangled by the military
conversations of 1906-1914 and by the naval agreement of 1912.
Moreover, the German challenge on the high seas, in commercial
activities throughout the world, and in colonial activities in Africa
could not go unanswered. On August 4th Britain declared war on Germany,
emphasizing the iniquity of her attack on Belgium, although in the
Cabinet meeting of July 28th it had been agreed that such an attack
would not legally obligate Britain to go to war. Although this issue
was spread among the people, and endless discussions ensued about
Britain's obligation to defend Belgian neutrality under the Treaty of
1839, those who made the decision saw clearly that the real reason for
war was that Britain could not allow Germany to defeat France.
Chapter
12—Military History, 1914-1918
For
the general student of
history, the military history of the First World War is not merely the
narration of advancing armies, the struggles of men, their deaths,
triumphs, or defeats. Rather, it presents an extraordinary discrepancy
between the facts of modern warfare and the ideas on military tactics
which dominated the minds of men, especially the minds of military men.
This discrepancy existed for many years before the war and began to
disappear only in the course of 1918. As a result of its existence, the
first three years of the war witnessed the largest military casualties
in human history. These occurred as a result of the efforts of military
men to do things which were quite impossible to do.
The
German victories of 1866
and 1870 were the result of theoretical study, chiefly by the General
Staff, and exhaustive detailed training resulting from that study. They
were emphatically not based on experience, for the army of 1866 had had
no actual fighting experience for two generations, and was commanded by
a leader, Helmuth von Moltke, who had never commanded a unit so large
as a company previously. Moltke's great contribution was to be found in
the fact that, by using the railroad and the telegraph, he was able to
merge mobilization and attack into a single operation so that the final
concentration of his forces took place in the enemy country,
practically on the battlefield itself, just before contact with the
main enemy forces took place.
This
contribution of Moltke's
was accepted and expanded by Count von Schlieffen, chief of the Great
General Staff from 1891 to 1905. Schlieffen considered it essential to
overwhelm the enemy in one great initial onslaught. He assumed that
Germany would be outnumbered and economically smothered in any fighting
of extended duration, and sought to prevent this by a lightning war of
an exclusively offensive character. He assumed that the next war would
be a two-front war against France and Russia simultaneously and that
the former would have to be annihilated before the latter was
completely mobilized. Above all, he was determined to preserve the
existing social structure of Germany, especially the superiority of the
Junker class; accordingly, he rejected either an enormous mass army, in
which the Junker control of the Officers' Corps would be lost by simple
lack of numbers, or a long-drawn war of resources and attrition which
would require a reorganized German economy.
The
German emphasis on attack
was shared by the French Army command, hut in a much more extreme and
even mystical fashion. Under the influence of Ardant Du Picq and
Ferdinand Foch, the French General Staff came to believe that victory
depended only on attack and that the success of any attack depended on
morale and not on any physical factors. Du Picq went so far as to
insist that victory did not depend at all on physical assault or on
casualties, because the former never occurs and the latter occurs only
during flight after the defeat. According to him, victory was a matter
of morale, and went automatically to the side with the higher morale.
The sides charge at each other; there is never any shock of attack,
because one side breaks and flees before impact; this break is not the
result of casualties, because the flight occurs before casualties are
suffered and always begins in the rear ranks where no casualties could
be suffered; the casualties are suffered in the flight and pursuit
after the break. Thus the whole problem of war resolved itself into the
problem of how to screw up the morale of one's army to the point where
it is willing to fling itself headlong on the enemy. Technical problems
of equipment or maneuvers are of little importance.
These
ideas of Du Picq were
accepted by an influential group in the French Army as the only
possible explanation of the French defeat in 1870. This group, led by
Foch, propagated throughout the army the doctrine of morale and the
offensive à outrance.
Foch became professor at the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre in 1894,
and his teaching could be summed up in the four words, "Attaquez!
Attaquez! Toujours, attaquez! "
This
emphasis on the offensive à outrance by both sides
led to a concentration of attention on three factors which were
obsolete by 1914. These three were (a) cavalry, (b)
the bayonet, and (c) the headlong infantry assault.
These were obsolete in 1914 as the result of three technical
innovations: (a) rapid-fire guns, especially machine
guns; (b) barbed-wire entanglements, and (c)
trench warfare. The orthodox military leaders generally paid no
attention to the three innovations while concentrating all their
attention on the three obsolete factors. Foch, from his studies of the
Russo-Japanese War, decided that machine guns and barbed wire were of
no importance, and ignored completely the role of trenches. Although
cavalry was obsolete for assault by the time of the Crimean War (a fact
indicated in Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade"), and
although this was clearly demonstrated to be so in the American Civil
War (a fact explicitly recognized in The Army
and Navy Journal
for October 31, 1868), cavalry and cavalry officers continued to
dominate armies and military preparations. During the War of 1914-1918
many commanding officers, like John French, Douglas Haig, and John J.
Pershing, were cavalry officers and retained the mentality of such
officers. Haig, in his testimony before the Royal Commission on the War
in South Africa (1903), testified, "Cavalry will have a larger sphere
of action in future wars." Pershing insisted on the necessity to keep
large numbers of horses behind the lines, waiting for the
"breakthrough" which was to be obtained by bayonet charge. In every
army, transportation was one of the weakest points, yet feed for the
horses was the largest item transported, being greater than ammunition
or other supplies. Although transport across the Atlantic was
critically short throughout the war, one-third of all shipping space
was in feed for horses. Time for training recruits was also a critical
bottleneck, but most armies spent more time on bayonet practice than on
anything else. Yet casualties inflicted on the enemy by bayonet were so
few that they hardly appear in the statistics dealing with the subject.
The
belief of military men
that an assault made with high morale could roll through wire, machine
guns, and trenches was made even more unrealistic by their insistence
that such an offensive unit maintain a straight front. This meant that
it was not to be permitted to move further in a soft spot, but was to
hold back where advance was easy in order to break down the defensive
strong points so that the whole front could precede at approximately
the same rate. This was done, they explained, in order to avoid exposed
flanks and enemy cross fire on advanced salients.
There
was some opposition to
these unrealistic theories, especially in the German Army, and there
were important civilians in all countries who fought with their own
military leaders on these issues. Clemenceau in France, and, above all,
Lord Esher and the members of the Committee on Imperial Defence in
England should be-mentioned here.
At
the outbreak of war in
August 1914, both sides began to put into effect their complicated
strategic plans made much earlier. On the German side this plan, known
as the Schlieffen Plan, was drawn up in 1905 and modified by the
younger Helmuth von Moltke (nephew of the Moltke of 1870) after 1906.
On the French side the plan was known as Plan XVII, and was drawn up by
Joffre in 1912.
The
original Schlieffen Plan
proposed to hold the Russians, as best as could be done, with ten
divisions, and to face France with a stationary left wing of eight
divisions and a great wheeling right and center of fifty-three
divisions going through Holland and Belgium and coming down on the
flank and rear of the French armies by passing west of Paris. Moltke
modified this by adding two divisions to the right wing (one from the
Russian front and one new) and eight new divisions to the left. He also
cut out the passage through Holland, making it necessary for his right
wing to pass through the Liege gap, between the Maastricht appendix of
Holland and the forested terrain of the Ardennes.
The
French Plan XVII proposed
to stop an anticipated German attack into eastern France from Lorraine
by an assault of two enlarged French armies on its center, thus driving
victoriously into southern Germany whose Catholic and separatist
peoples were not expected to rally with much enthusiasm to the
Protestant, centralist cause of a Prussianized German Empire. While
this was taking place, a force of 800,000 Russians was to invade East
Prussia, and 150,000 British were to bolster the French left wing near
Belgium.
The
execution of these plans
did not completely fulfill the expectations of their supporters. The
French moved 3,781,000 men in 7,000 trains in 16 days (August 2-18),
opening their attack on Lorraine on 29 August 14th. By August 20th they
were shattered, and by August 25th, after eleven days of combat, had
suffered 300,000 casualties. This was almost 25 percent of the number
of men engaged, and represented the most rapid wastage of the war.
In
the meantime the Germans in
7 days (August 6-12) transported 1,500,000 men across the Rhine at the
rate of 550 trains a day. These men formed 70 divisions divided into 7
armies and forming a vast arc from northwest to southeast. Within this
arc were 49 French divisions organized in 5 armies and the British
Expeditionary Force (B.E.F.) of 4 divisions. The relationship of these
forces, the commanding generals of the respective armies, and their
relative strength can be seen from the following list:
Entente Forces (North
to South)
Army Commander Divisions
B.
E. F.
Sir
John
French 4
V Lanrezac 10
IV De
Langle de Cary/
III Ruffey 20
II Castelnau/
I Dubail 19
German Forces (North
to South)
Army Commander Divisions
I von
Kluck/
II von
Bülow/
III von
Hausen/ 34
IV Prince
Albrecht of Württemberg/
V Crown
Prince
Frederick 21
VI Prince
Rupprecht of Bavaria/
VII von
Heeringen 15
The
German right wing passed
Liege, without reducing that great fortress, on the night of August 5-6
under the instructions of General Erich Ludendorff of the General
Staff. The Belgian Army, instead of retreating southwestward before the
German wave, moved northwestward to cover Antwerp. This put them
ultimately on the rear of the advancing German forces. These forces
peeled off eight and a half divisions to reduce the Belgian forts and
seven divisions to cover the Belgian force before Antwerp. This reduced
the strength of the German right wing, which was increasingly exhausted
by the rapidity of its own advance. When the German plan became clear
on August 18th, Joffre formed a new Sixth Army, largely from garrison
troops, under Michel-Joseph Maunoury but really commanded by Joseph
Galliéni, Minitary Governor of Paris. By August 22nd the whole
French line west of Verdun was in retreat. Three days later, Moltke,
believing victory secure, sent two army corps to Russia from the Second
and Third armies. These arrived on the Eastern Front only after the
Russian advance into Prussia had been smashed at Tannenberg and around
the Masurian Lakes (August 26th-September Isth). In the meantime in the
west, Schlieffen's project swept onward toward fiasco. When Lanrezac
slowed up Bülow's advance on August 28th, Kluck, who was already a
day's march ahead of Bülow, tried to close the gap between the two
by turning southeastward. This brought his line of advance east of
Paris rather than est of that city as originally planned.
Galliéni, bringing the Sixth Army from Paris in any vehicles he
could commandeer, threw it at Kluck's exposed right flank. Kluck turned
again to face Galliéni, moving northwestward in a brilliant
maneuver in order to envelop him within the German arc before resuming
his advance southeastward. This operation was accompanied hy
considerable success except that it opened a gap thirty miles wide
between Kluck and Bülow. Opposite this gap was the B.E.F., which
was withdrawing southward with even greater speed than the French. On
September 5th the French retreat stopped; on the following day they
began a general counterattack, ordered by Joffre on the insistence of
Galliéni. Thus began the First Battle of the Marne.
Kluck
was meeting with
considerable success over the Sixth French Army, although Bülow
was being badly mauled by Lanrezac, when the B.E.F. began to move into
the gap between the First and Second German armies (September 8th). A
German staff officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Hentsch, ordered the whole
German right to fall back to the Aisne River where a front was formed
on September 13th by the arrival of some of the German forces which had
been attacking the Belgian forts. The Germans were willing to fall back
to the Aisne because they believed the advance could be resumed when
they wished to do so. In the next few months the Germans tried to
resume their advance, and the French tried to dislodge the Germans from
their positions. Neither was able to make any headway against the
firepower of the other. A succession of futile efforts to outflank each
other's positions merely succeeded in bringing the ends of the front to
the English Channel on one extreme and to Switzerland on the other. In
spite of millions of casualties, this line, from the sea to the
mountains across the fair face of France, remained almost unchanged for
over three years.
During
these terrible years,
the dream of military men was to break through the enemy line by
infantry assault, then roll up his flanks and disrupt his rearward
communications by pouring cavalry and other reserves through the gap.
This was never achieved. The effort to attain it led to one experiment
after another. In order these were: (1) bayonet assault, (2)
preliminary artillery barrage, (3) use of poison gas, (4) use of the
tank, (5) use of infiltration. The last four of these innovations were
devised alternately by the Allies and by the Central Powers.
Bayonet
assault was a failure
by the end of 1914. It merely created mountains of dead and wounded
without any real advance, although some officers continued to believe
that an assault would be successful if the morale of the attackers
could be brought to a sufficiently high pitch to overcome machine-gun
fire.
An
artillery barrage as a
necessary preliminary to infantry assault was used almost from the
beginning. It was ineffectual. At first no army had the necessary
quantity of munitions. Some armies insisted on ordering shrapnel rather
than high-explosive shells for such barrages. This resulted in a
violent controversy between Lloyd George and the generals, the former
trying to persuade the latter that shrapnel was not effective against
defensive forces in ground trenches. In time it should have become
clear that high-explosive barrages were not effective either, although
they were used in enormous quantities. They failed because: (1) earth
and concrete fortifications provided sufficient protection to the
defensive forces to allow them to use their own firepower against the
infantry assault which followed the barrage; (2) a barrage notified the
defense where to expect the following infantry assault, so that
reserves could be brought up to strengthen that position; and (3) the
doctrine of the continuous front made it impossible to penetrate the
enemy positions on a wide-enough front to break through. The efforts to
do so, however, resulted in enormous casualties. At Verdun in 1916 the
French lost 350,000 and the Germans 300,000. On the Eastern
Front the Russian General Aleksei Brusilov lost a million men in an
indecisive attack through Galicia
(June-August, 1916). On the Somme in the same year the British lost
410,000, the French lost 190,000, and the Germans lost 450,000 for a
maximum gain of 7 miles on a front about 25 miles wide (July-November,
1916). The following year the slaughter continued. At Chemin des Dames
in April, 1917, the French, under a new commander, Robert Nivelle,
fired 11 million shells in a 10-day barrage on a 30-mile front. The
attack failed, suffering losses of 118,000 men in a brief period. Many
corps mutinied, and large numbers of combatants were shot to enforce
discipline. Twenty-three civilian leaders were also executed. Nivelle
was replaced by Pétain. Shortly afterward, at Passchendaele
(Third Battle of Ypres), Haig used a barrage of 4 1/4 million shells,
almost 5 tons for every yard of an 1 r-mile front, but lost 400,000 men
in the ensuing assault (August-November, 1917).
The
failure of the barrage
made it necessary to devise new methods, but military men were
reluctant to try any innovations. In April, 1915, the Germans were
forced by civilian pressure to use poison gas, as had been suggested by
the famous chemist Fritz Haber. Accordingly, without any effort at
concealment and with no plans to exploit a breakthrough if it came,
they sent a wave of chlorine gas at the place where the French and
British lines joined. The junction was wiped out, and a great gap was
opened through the line. Although it was not closed for five weeks,
nothing was done by the Germans to use it. The first use of gas by the
Western Powers (the British) in September, 1915, was no more
successful. At the terrible Battle of Passchendaele in July 1917, the
Germans introduced mustard gas, a weapon which was copied by the
British in July 1918. This was the most effective gas used in the war,
but it served to strengthen the defense rather than the offense, and
was especially valuable to the Germans in their retreat in the autumn
of 1918, serving to slow up the pursuit and making difficult any really
decisive blow against them.
The
tank as an offensive
weapon devised to overcome the defensive strength of machine-gun fire
was invented by Ernest Swinton in 1915. Only his personal contacts with
the members of the Committee of Imperial Defence succeeded in bringing
his idea to some kind of realization. The suggestion was resisted by
the generals. When continued resistance proved impossible, the new
weapon was misused, orders for more were canceled, and all military
supporters of the new weapon were removed from responsible positions
and replaced by men who were distrustful or at least ignorant of the
tanks. Swinton sent detailed instructions to Headquarters, emphasizing
that they must be used for the first time in large numbers, in a
surprise assault, without any preliminary artillery barrage, and with
close support by infantry reserves. Instead they were used quite
incorrectly. While Swinton was still training crews for the first 150
tanks, fifty were taken to France, the commander who had been trained
in their use was replaced by an inexperienced man, and a mere eighteen
w-ere sent against the Germans. This occurred on September 15, 1916, in
the waning stages of the Battle of the Somme. An unfavorable report on
their performance was sent from General Headquarters to the War Office
in London and, as a result, an order for manufacture of a thousand more
was canceled without the knowledge of the Cabinet. This was overruled
only by direct orders from Lloyd George. Only on November 20, 1917,
were tanks used as Swinton had instructed. On that day 381 tanks
supported by six infantry divisions struck the Hindenburg Line before
Cambrai and burst through into open country. These forces were
exhausted by a five-mile gain, and stopped. The gap in the German line
was not utilized, for the only available reserves were two divisions of
cavalry which were ineffective. Thus the opportunity was lost. Only in
1918 were massed tank attacks used with any success and in the fashion
indicated by Swinton.
The
year 1917 was a bad one.
The French and British suffered through their great disasters at Chemin
des Dames and Passchendaele. Romania entered the war and was almost
completely overrun, Bucharest being captured on December 5th. Russia
suffered a double revolution, and was obliged to surrender to Germany.
The Italian Front was completely shattered by a surprise attack at
Caporetto and only by a miracle was it reestablished along the Piave
(October-December, 1917). The only bright spots in the year were the
British conquests of Palestine and Mesopotamia and the entrance into
the war of the United States, but the former was not important and the
latter was a promise for the future rather than a help to 1917.
Nowhere,
perhaps, is the
unrealistic character of the thinking of most high military leaders of
World War I revealed more clearly than in the British commander in
chief, Field Marshal Sir Douglas (later Earl) Haig, scion of a Scottish
distillery family. In June, 1917, in spite of a decision of May 4th by
the Inter-Allied Conference at Paris against any British offensive, and
at a time when Russia and Serbia had been knocked out of the war,
French military morale was shattered after the fiasco of the Nivelle
offensive, and American help was almost a year in the future, Haig
determined on a major offensive against the Germans to win the war. He
ignored all discouraging information from his intelligence, wiped from
the record the known figures about German reserves, and deceived the
Cabinet, both in respect to the situation and to his own plans.
Throughout the discussion the civilian political leaders, who were
almost universally despised as ignorant amateurs by the military men,
were proved more correct in their judgments and expectations. Haig
obtained permission for his Passchendaele offensive only because
General (later Field Marshal and Baronet) William Robertson, Chief of
the Imperial General Staff, covered up Haig's falsifications about
German reserves and because First Sea Lord Admiral John Jellicoe told
the Cabinet that unless Haig could capture the- submarine bases on the
Belgian coast (an utterly impossible objective) he considered it
"improbable that we could go on with the war next year for lack of
shipping." On this basis, Haig won approval for a "step by step"
offensive "not involving heavy losses." He was so optimistic that he
told his generals that "opportunities for the employment of cavalry in
masses are likely to offer." The offensive, opened on July 31st,
developed into the most horrible struggle of the war, fought week after
week in a sea of mud, with casualties mounting to 400,000 men after
three months. In October, when the situation had been hopeless for
weeks, Haig still insisted that the Germans were at the point of
collapse, that their casualties were double the British (they were
considerably less than the British), and that the breakdown of the
Germans, and the opportunity for the tanks and cavalry to rush through
them, might come at any moment.
One
of the chief reasons for
the failure of these offensives was the doctrine of the continuous
front, which led commanders to hold back their offensives where
resistance was weak and to throw their reserves against the enemy's
strong points. This doctrine was completely reversed by Ludendorff in
the spring of 1918 in a new tactic known as "infiltration." By this
method advance was to be made around strong points by penetrating as
quickly as possible and with maximum strength through weak resistance,
leaving the centers of strong resistance surrounded and isolated for
later attention. Although Ludendorff did not carry out this plan with
sufficient conviction to give it full success, he did achieve amazing
results. The great losses by the British and French in 1917, added to
the increase in German strength from forces arriving from the defunct
Russian and Romanian fronts, made it possible for Ludendorff to strike
a series of sledgehammer blows along the Western Front between Douai
and Verdun in March and April 1918. Finally, on May 27th, after a brief
but overwhelming bombardment, the German flood burst over Chemin des
Dames, poured across the Aisne, and moved relentlessly toward Paris. By
May 30th it was on the Marne, thirty-seven miles from the capital.
There, in the Second Battle of the Marne, were reenacted the events of
September 1914. On June 4th the German advance was stopped temporarily
by the Second American Division at Château-Thierry. In the next
six weeks a series of counterattacks aided by nine American divisions
were made on the northern flank of the German penetration. The Germans
fell back behind the Vesle River, militarily intact, but so ravaged by
influenza that many companies had only thirty men. The crown prince
demanded that the war be ended. Before this could be done, on August 8,
1918—"the black day of the German Army," as Ludendorff called
it—the British broke the German line at Amiens by a sudden
assault with 456 tanks supported by 13 infantry and 3 cavalry
divisions. When the Germans rushed up 18 reserve divisions to support
the six which were attacked, the Allied Powers repeated their assault
at Saint-Quentin (August 31st) and in Flanders (September 2nd). A
German Crown Council, meeting at Spa, decided that victory was no
longer possible, but neither civil government nor army leaders would
assume the responsibility for opening negotiations for peace. The story
of these negotiations will be examined in a moment, as the last of a
long series of diplomatic conversations which continued throughout the
war.
Looking
back on the military
history of the First World War, it is clear that the whole war was a
siege operation against Germany. Once the original German onslaught was
stopped on the Marne, victory for Germany became impossible because she
could not resume her advance. On the other hand, the Entente Powers
could not eject the German spearhead from French soil, although they
sacrificed millions of men and billions of dollars in the effort to do
so. Any effort to break in on Germany from some other front was
regarded as futile, and was made difficult by the continuing German
pressure in France. Accordingly, although sporadic attacks were made on
the Italian Front, in the Arab areas of the Ottoman Empire, on the
Dardanelles directly in 1915, against Bulgaria through Saloniki in
1915- 1918, and along the whole Russian Front, both sides continued to
regard northeastern France as the vital area. And in that area, clearly
no decision could be reached.
To
weaken Germany the Entente
Powers began a blockade of the Central Powers, controlling the sea
directly, in spite of the indecisive German naval challenge at Jutland
in 1916, and limiting the imports of neutrals near Germany, like the
Netherlands. To resist this blockade, Germany used a four-pronged
instrument. On the home front every effort was made to control economic
life so that all goods would be used in the most effective fashion
possible and so that food, leather, and other necessities would be
distributed fairly to all. The success of this struggle on
the home
front was due to the ability of two German Jews. Haber, the chemist,
devised a method for extracting nitrogen from the air, and thus
obtained an adequate supply of the most necessary constituent of all
fertilizers and all explosives. Before 1914 the chief source of
nitrogen had been in the guano deposits of Chile, and, but for Haber,
the British blockade would have compelled a German defeat in 1915 from
lack of nitrates. Walter Rathenau, director of the German Electric
Company and of some five dozen other enterprises, organized the German
economic system in a mobilization which made it possible for Germany to
fight on with slowly dwindling resources.
On
the military side Germany
made a threefold reply to the British blockade. It tried to open the
blockade by defeating its enemies to the south and east (Russia,
Romania, and Italy). In 1917 this effort was largely successful, but it
was too late. Simultaneously, Germany tried to wear down her Western
foes by a policy of attrition in the trenches and to force Britain out
of the war by a retaliatory submarine blockade directed at British
shipping. The submarine attack, as a new method of naval warfare, was
applied with hesitation and ineffectiveness until 1917. Then it was
applied with such ruthless efficiency that almost a million tons of
shipping was sunk in the month of April 1917, and Britain was driven
within three weeks of exhaustion of her food supply. This danger of a
British defeat, dressed in the propaganda clothing of moral outrage at
the iniquity of submarine attacks, brought the United States into the
war on the side of the Entente in that critical month of April, 1917.
In the meantime the Germany policy of military attrition on the Western
Front worked well until 1918. By January of that year Germany had been
losing men at about half her rate of replacement and at about half the
rate at which she was inflicting losses on the Entente Powers. Thus the
period 1914-1918 saw a race between the economic attrition of Germany
by the blockade and the personal attrition of the Entente by military
action. This race was never settled on its merits because three new
factors entered the picture in 1917. These were the German
counter-blockade by submarines on Britain, the increase in German
manpower in the West resulting from her victory in the East, and the
arrival on the Western Front of new American forces. The first two of
these factors were overbalanced in the period March-September, 1918, by
the third. By August of 1918 Germany had given her best, and it had not
been adequate. The blockade and the rising tide of American manpower
gave the German leaders the choice of surrender or complete economic
and social upheaval. Without exception, led by the Junker military
commanders, they chose surrender.
Chapter
13—Diplomatic History, 1914-1 918
The
beginnings of military
action in August 1914 did not mark the end of diplomatic action, even
between the chief opponents. Diplomatic activity continued, and was
aimed, very largely, at two goals: (a) to bring new countries into the
military activities or, on the contrary, to keep them out, and (b) to
attempt to make peace by negotiations. Closely related to the first of
these aims were negotiations concerned with the disposition of enemy
territories after the fighting ceased.
Back
of all the diplomatic
activities of the period 1914-1918 was a fact which impressed itself on
the belligerents relatively slowly. This was the changed character of
modern warfare. With certain exceptions the wars of the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries had been struggles of limited resources for
limited objectives. The growth of political democracy, the rise of
nationalism, and the industrialization of war led to total war with
total mobilization and unlimited objectives. In the eighteenth century,
when rulers were relatively free from popular influences, they could
wage wars for limited objectives and could negotiate peace on a
compromise basis when these were objectives were attained or appeared
unattainable. Using a mercenary army which fought for pay, they could
put that army into war or out of war, as seemed necessary, without
vitally affecting its morale or its fighting qualities. The arrival of
democracy and of the mass army required that the great body of the
citizens give wholehearted support for any war effort, and made it
impossible to wage wars for limited objectives. Such popular support
could be won only in behalf of great moral goals or universal
philosophic values or, at the very least, for survival. At the same
time the growing industrialization and economic integration of modern
society made it impossible to mobilize for war except on a very
extensive basis which approached total mobilization. This mobilization
could not be directed toward limited objectives. From these factors
came total war with total mobilization and unlimited objectives,
including the total destruction or unconditional surrender of the
enemy. Having adopted such grandiose goals and such gigantic plans, it
became almost impossible to allow the continued existence of
noncombatants within the belligerent countries or neutrals outside
them. It became almost axiomatic that "who is not with me is against
me." At the same time, it became almost impossible to compromise
sufficiently to obtain the much more limited goals which would permit a
negotiated peace. As Charles Seymour put it: "Each side had
promised itself a peace of victory. The very phrase 'negotiated peace'
became synonymous with treachery." Moreover, the popular basis of
modern war required a high morale which might easily be lowered if the
news leaked out that the government was negotiating peace in the middle
of the fighting. As a consequence of these conditions, efforts to
negotiate peace during the First World War were generally very secret
and very unsuccessful.
The
change from limited wars
with limited objectives fought with mercenary troops to unlimited wars
of economic attrition with unlimited objectives fought with national
armies had far-reaching consequences. The distinction between
combatants and noncombatants and between belligerents and neutrals
became blurred and ultimately undistinguishable. International law,
which had grown up in the period of limited dynastic wars, made a great
deal of these distinctions. Noncombatants had extensive rights which
sought to protect their ways of life as much as possible during periods
of warfare; neutrals had similar rights. In return, strict duties to
remain both noncombatant and neutral rested on these "outsiders." All
these distinctions broke down in 1914-1915, with the result that both
sides indulged in wholesale violations of existing international law.
Probably on the whole these violations were more extensive (although
less widely publicized) on the part of the Entente than on the part of
the Central Powers. The reasons for this were that the Germans still
maintained the older traditions of a professional army, and their
position, both as an invader and as a "Central Power" with limited
manpower and economic resources, made it to their advantage to maintain
the distinctions between combatant and noncombatant and between
belligerent and neutral. If they could have maintained the former
distinction, they would have had to fight the enemy army and not the
enemy civilian population, and, once the former was defeated, would
have had little to fear from the latter, which could have been
controlled by a minimum of troops. If they could have maintained the
distinction between belligerent and neutral, it would have been
impossible to blockade Germany, since basic supplies could have been
imported through neutral countries. It was for this reason that
Schlieffen's original plans for an attack on France through Holland and
Belgium were changed by Moltke to an attack through Belgium alone.
Neutral Holland was to remain as a channel of supply for civilian
goods. This was possible because international law made a distinction
between war goods, which could be declared contraband, and civilian
goods (including food), which could not be so declared. Moreover, the
German plans, as we have indicated, called for a short, decisive war
against the enemy armed forces, and they neither expected nor desired a
total economic mobilization or even a total military mobilization,
since these might disrupt the existing social and political structure
in Germany. For these reasons, Germany made no plans for industrial or
economic mobilization, for a long war, or for withstanding a blockade,
and hoped to mobilize a smaller proportion of its manpower than its
immediate enemies.
The
failure of the Schlieffen
plan showed the error of these ideas. Not only did the prospect of a
long war make economic mobilization necessary, but the occupation of
Belgium showed that national feeling was tending to make the
distinction between combatant and noncombatant academic. When Belgian
civilians shot at German soldiers, the latter took civilian hostages
and practiced reprisals on civilians. These German actions were
publicized throughout the world by the British propaganda machine as
"atrocities" and violations of international law (which they were),
while the Belgian civilian snipers were excused as loyal patriots (
although their actions were even more clearly violations of
international law and, as such, justified severe German reactions).
These "atrocities" were used by the British to justify their own
violations of international law. As early as August 20, 1914, they were
treating food as contraband and interfering with neutral shipments of
food to Europe. On November 5, 1914, they declared the whole sea from
Scotland to Iceland a "war zone," covered it with fields of explosive
floating mines, and ordered all ships going to the Baltic, Scandinavia,
or the Low Countries to go by way of the English Channel, where they
were stopped, searched, and much of their cargoes seized, even when
these cargoes could not be declared contraband under existing
international law. In reprisal the Germans on February 18, 1915
declared the English Channel a "war zone," announced that their
submarines would sink shipping in that area, and ordered shipping for
the Baltic area to use the route north of Scotland. The United States,
which rejected a Scandinavian invitation to protest against the British
war zone closed with mines north of Scotland, protested violently
against the German war zone closed with submarines on the Narrow Seas,
although, as one American senator put it, the "humanity of the
submarine was certainly on a higher level than that of the floating
mine, which could exercise neither discretion nor judgment."
The
United States accepted the
British "war zone," and prevented its ships from using it. On the other
hand, it refused to accept the German war zone, and insisted that
American lives and property were under American protection even when
traveling on armed belligerent ships in this war zone. Moreover, the
United States insisted that German submarines must obey the laws of the
sea as drawn for surface vessels. These laws provided that merchant
ships could be stopped by a war vessel and inspected, and could be
sunk, if carrying contraband, after the passengers and the ships'
papers were put in a place of safety. A place of safety was not the
ships' boats, except in sight of land or of other vessels in a calm
sea. The merchant vessel so stopped obtained these rights only if it
made no act of hostility against the enemy war vessel. It was not only
difficult, or even impossible, for German submarines to meet these
conditions; it was often dangerous, since British merchant ships
received instructions to attack German submarines at sight, by ramming
if possible. It was even dangerous for the German submarines to apply
the established law of neutral vessels; for British vessels, with these
aggressive orders, frequently flew neutral flags and posed as neutrals
as long as possible. Nevertheless, the United States continued to
insist that the Germans obey the old laws, while condoning British
violations of the same laws to the extent that the distinction between
war vessels and merchant ships was blurred. Accordingly, German
submarines began to sink British merchant ships with little or no
warning. Their attempts to justify this failure to distinguish between
combatants and noncombatants on the ground that British floating mines,
the British food blockade, and the British instructions to merchant
ships to attack submarines made no such distinction were no more
successful than their efforts to show that their severity against the
civilian population of Belgium was justified by civilian attacks on
German troops. They were trying to carry on legal distinctions
remaining from an earlier period when conditions were entirely
different, and their ultimate abandonment of these distinctions on the
grounds that their enemies had already abandoned them merely made
matters worse, because if neutrals became belligerents and
noncombatants became combatants, Germany and her allies would suffer
much more than Britain and her friends. In the final analysis this is
why the distinctions were destroyed; but beneath all legal questions
was to be found the ominous fact that war, by becoming total, had made
both neutrality and negotiated peace almost impossible. We shall now
turn our attention to this struggle over neutrality and the struggle
over negotiated peace.
So
far as legal or diplomatic
commitments went, Germany, in July, 1914, had the right to expect that
Austria-Hungary, Italy, Romania, and perhaps Turkey would be at her
side and that her opponents would consist of Serbia, Montenegro,
Russia, and France, with England maintaining neutrality, at the
beginning, at least. Instead, Italy and Romania fought against her, a
loss which was not balanced by the accession of Bulgaria to her side.
In addition, she found her opponents reinforced by England, Belgium,
Greece, the United States, China, Japan, the Arabs, and twenty other
"Allied and Associated Powers." The process by which the reality turned
out to be so different from Germany's legitimate expectations will now
take our attention.
Turkey,
which had been growing
closer to Germany since before 1890, offered Germany an alliance on
July 27, 1914, when the Sarajevo crisis was at its height. The document
was signed secretly on August 1st, and bound Turkey to enter the war
against Russia if Russia attacked Germany or Austria. In the meantime,
Turkey deceived the Entente Powers by conducting long negotiations with
them regarding its attitude toward the war. On October 29th it removed
its mask of neutrality by attacking Russia, thus cutting her off from
her Western allies by the southern route. To relieve the pressure on
Russia, the British made an ineffectual attack on Gallipoli at the
Dardanelles (February-December, 1915). Only at the end of 1916 did any
real attack on Turkey begin, this time from Egypt into Mesopotamia,
where Baghdad was captured in March 1917, and the way opened up the
valley as well as across Palestine to Syria. Jerusalem fell to General
Allenby in December 1917, and the chief cities of Syria fell the
following October (1918)..
Bulgaria,
still smarting from
the Second Balkan War (1913), in which it had lost territory to
Romania, Serbia, Greece, and Turkey, was from the outbreak of war in
1914 inclined toward Germany, and was strengthened in that inclination
by the Turkish attack on Russia in October. Both sides tried to buy
Bulgaria's allegiance, a process in which the Entente Powers were
hampered by the fact that Bulgaria's ambitions could be satisfied only
at the expense of Greece, Romania, or Serbia, whose support they also
desired. Bulgaria wanted Thrace from the Maritsa River to the Vardar,
including Kavalla and Saloniki (which were Greek), most of Macedonia
(which was Greek or Serbian), and Dobruja (from Romania). The Entente
Powers offered Thrace to the Vardar in November 1914, and added some of
Macedonia in May 1915, compensating Serbia with an offer of Bosnia,
Herzegovina, and the Dalmatian coast. Germany, on the other hand, gave
Bulgaria a strip of Turkish territory along the Maritsa River in July
1915, added to this a loan of 200,000,000 francs six weeks later, and,
in September 1915, accepted all Bulgaria's demands provided they were
at the expense of belligerent countries. Within a month Bulgaria
entered the war by attacking Serbia (October Il, 1915). It had
considerable success, driving westward across Serbia into Albania, but
exposed its left flank in this process to an attack from Entente forces
which were already based on Saloniki. This attack came in September
1918, and within a month forced Bulgaria to ask for an armistice
(September 30th). This marked the first break in the united front of
the Central Powers.
When
war began in 1914,
Romania remained neutral, in spite of the fact that it had joined the
Triple Alliance in 1883. This adherence had been made because of the
Germanic sympathies of the royal family, and was so secret that only a
handful of people even knew about it. The Romanian people themselves
were sympathetic to France. At that time Romania consisted of three
parts (Moldavia, Wallachia, and Dobruja) and had ambitions to acquire
Bessarabia from Russia and Transylvania from Hungary. It did not seem
possible that Romania could get both of these, yet that is exactly what
happened, because Russia was defeated by Germany and ostracized by the
Entente Powers after its revolution in 1917, while Hungary was defeated
by the Entente Powers in 1918. The Romanians were strongly anti-Russian
after 1878, but this feeling decreased in the course of time, while
animosities against the Central Powers rose, because of the Hungarian
mistreatment of the Romanian minority in Transylvania. As a result,
Romania remained neutral in 1914. Efforts by the Entente Powers to win
her to their side were vain until after the death of King Carol in
October 1914. The Romanians asked, as the price of their intervention
on the Entente side, Transylvania, parts of Bukovina and the Banat of
Temesvar, 500,000 Entente troops in the Balkans, 200,000 Russian troops
in Bessarabia, and equal status with the Great Powers at the Peace
Conference. For this they promised to attack the Central Powers and not
to make a separate peace. Only the heavy casualties suffered by the
Entente Powers in 1916 brought them to the point of accepting these
terms. They did so in August of that year, and Romania entered the war
ten days later. The Central Powers at once overran the country,
capturing Bucharest in December. The Romanians refused to make peace
until the German advance to the Marne in the spring of 1918 convinced
them that the Central Powers were going to win. Accordingly, they
signed the Treaty of Bucharest with Germany (May 7, 1918) by which they
gave Dobruja to Bulgaria, but obtained a claim to Bessarabia,, which
Germany had previously taken from Russia. Germany also obtained a
ninety-year lease on the Romanian oil wells.
Though
the Entente efforts to
get Greece into the war were the most protracted and most unscrupulous
of the period, they were unsuccessful so long as King Constantine
remained on the throne (to June 1917). Greece was offered Smyrna in
Turkey if it would give Kavalla to Bulgaria and support Serbia. Prime
Minister Eleutherios Venizelos was favorable, but could not persuade
the king, and soon was forced to resign (March 1915). He returned to
office in August, after winning a parliamentary election in June. When
Serbia asked Greece for the 150,000 men promised in the Serb-Greek
treaty of 1913 as protection against a Bulgarian attack on Serbia,
Venizelos tried to obtain these forces from the Entente Powers. Four
French-British divisions landed at Saloniki (October 1915), but
Venizelos was at once forced out of office by King Constantine. The
Entente then offered to cede Cyprus to Greece in return for Greek
support against Bulgaria but were refused (October 20, 1915). When
German and Bulgarian forces began to occupy portions of Greek
Macedonia, the Entente Powers blockaded Greece and sent an ultimatum
asking for demobilization of the Greek Army and a responsible
government in Athens (June, 1916). The Greeks at once accepted, since
demobilization made it less likely they could be forced to make war on
Bulgaria, and the demand for responsible-government could be met
without bringing Venizelos beck 'to office. Thus frustrated, the
Entente Powers established a new provisional Greek government under
Venizelos at their base at Saloniki. There he declared war on the
Central Powers (November 1916). The Entente then demanded that the
envoys of the Central Powers be expelled from Athens and that war
materials within control of the Athenian government be surrendered.
These demands were rejected (November 30, 1916). Entente forces landed
at the port of Athens (Piraeus) on the same day, but stayed only
overnight, being replaced by an Entente blockade of Greece. The
Venizelos government was recognized by Britain (December 1916), but the
situation dragged on unchanged. In June 1917, a new ultimatum was sent
to Athens demanding the abdication of King Constantine. It was backed
up by a seizure of Thessaly and Corinth, and was accepted at once.
Venizelos became premier of the Athens government, and declared war on
the Central Powers the next day (June 27, 1917) This gave the Entente a
sufficient base to drive up the Vardar Valley, under French General
Louis Franchet d'Esperey, and force Bulgaria out of the war.
At
the outbreak of war in
1914, Italy declared its neutrality on the grounds that the Triple
Alliance of 1882, as renewed in 1912, bound it to support the Central
Powers only in case of a defensive war and that the Austrian action
against Serbia did not fall in this category. To the Italians, the
Triple Alliance was still in full force and thus they were entitled, as
provided in Article VII, to compensation for any Austrian territorial
gains in the Balkans. As a guarantee of this provision, the Italians
occupied the Valona district of Albania in November 1914. Efforts of
the Central Powers to bribe Italy into the wear were difficult because
the Italian demands were largely at the expense of Austria. These
demands included the South Tyrol, Gorizia, the Dalmatian Islands, and
Valona, with Trieste a free city. A great public controversy took place
in Italy between those who supported intervention in the war on the
Entente side and those who wished to remain neutral. By skillful
expenditure of money, the Entente governments were able to win
considerable support. Their chief achievement was in splitting the
normally pacifist Socialist Party by large money grants to Benito
Mussolini. A rabid Socialist who had been a pacifist leader in the
Tripolitan War of 1911 Mussolini was editor of the chief Socialist
paper, Avanti. He was expelled from the party when
he supported
intervention on the Entente side, but, using French money, he
established his own paper, Popolo d'ltalia,
and embarked upon the unprincipled career which ultimately made him
dictator of Italy.
By
the secret Treaty of London
(April 26, 1915), Italy's demands as listed above were accepted by the
Entente Powers and extended to provide that Italy should also obtain
Trentino, Trieste, Istria (but not Fiume), South Dalmatia, Albania as a
protectorate, the Dodecanese Islands, Adalia in Asia Minor,
compensatory areas in Africa if the Entente Powers made any
acquisitions on that continent, a loan of £50 million, part of
the war indemnity, and exclusion of the Pope from any of the
negotiations leading toward peace. For these extensive promises Italy
agreed to make war on all the Central Powers within a month. It
declared war on Austria-Hungary on May 23, 1915, but on Germany only in
August, 1916.
The
Treaty of London is of the
utmost importance because its ghost haunted the chancelleries of Europe
for more than twenty-five years. It was used as an excuse for the
Italian attack on Ethiopia in 1935 and on France in 1940.
The
Italian war effort was
devoted to an attempt to force the Habsburg forces back from the head
of the Adriatic Sea. In a series of at least twelve battles on the
Isonzo River, on very difficult terrain, the Italians were notably
unsuccessful. In the autumn of 1917 Germany gave the Austrians
sufficient reinforcements to allow them to break through on to the rear
of the Italian lines at Caporetto. The Italian defense collapsed and
was reestablished along the Piave River only after losses of over
600,000 men, the majority by desertion. Austria was unable to pursue
this advantage because of her war-weariness, her inability to mobilize
her domestic economy successfully for war purposes, and, above all, by
the growing unrest of the nationalities subject to Habsburg rule. These
groups set up governmental committees in Entente capitals and organized
"Legions" to fight on the Entente side. Italy organized a great meeting
of these peoples at Rome in April 1918. They signed the "Pact of Rome,"
promising to work for self-determination of subject peoples and
agreeing to draw the frontier between the Italians and the South Slavs
on nationality lines.
Russia,
like Romania, was
forced out of the war in 1917, and forced to sign a separate peace by
Germany in 1918. The Russian attack on Germany in 1914 had been
completely shattered at the battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian
Lakes in August and September, but their ability to hold their own
against Austrian forces in Galicia made it impossible to bring the war
in the east to a conclusion. Russian casualties were very heavy because
of inadequate supplies and munitions, while the Austrians lost
considerable forces, especially of Slavs, by desertion to the Russians.
This last factor made it possible for Russia to organize a "Czech
Legion" of over 100,000 men. German reinforcements to the Austrian
front in Galicia in 1915 made possible a great Austro-German offensive
which crossed Galicia and by September had taken all of Poland and
Lithuania. In these operations the Russians lost about a million men.
They lost a million more in the "Brusilov" counterattack in 1916 which
reached the Carpathians before it was stopped by the arrival of German
reinforcements from France. By this time the prestige of the czarist
government had fallen so low that it was easily replaced by a
parliamentary government under Kerensky in March 1917. The new
government tried to carry on the war, but misjudged the temper of the
Russian people. As a result the extreme Communist group, known as
Bolsheviks, were able to seize the government in November 1917, and
hold it by promising the weary Russian people both peace and land. The
German demands, dictated by the German General Staff, were so severe
that the Bolsheviks refused to sign a formal peace, but on March 3,
1918, were forced to accept the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. By this treaty
Russia lost Finland, Lithuania, the Baltic Provinces, Poland, the
Ukraine and Transcaucasia. German efforts to exploit these areas in an
economic sense during the war were not successful.
The
Japanese intervention in
the war on August 23, 1914, was determined completely by its ambitions
in the Far East and the Pacific area. It intended to use the
opportunity arising from the Great Powers' concern with Europe to win
concessions from China and Russia and to replace Germany, not only in
its colonial possessions in the East but also to take over its
commercial position so far as possible. The German island colonies
north of the equator were seized at once, and the German concession at
Kiaochow was captured after a brief siege. In January 1915, "Twenty-one
Demands" were presented to China in the form of an ultimatum, and
largely accepted. These demands covered accession to the German
position in Shantung, extension of Japanese leases in Manchuria, with
complete commercial liberty for the Japanese in that area, extensive
rights in certain existing iron and steel enterprises of North China,
and the closing of China's coast to any future foreign concessions. A
demand for the use of Japanese advisers in Chinese political, military,
and financial matters was rejected, and withdrawn. On July 3, 1916,
Japan won Russian recognition of its new position in China in return
for her recognition of the Russian penetration into Outer Mongolia. New
concessions were won from China in February 1917, and accepted by the
United States in November in the so-called Lansing-Ishii Notes. In
these notes the Japanese gave verbal support to the American insistence
on the maintenance of China's territorial integrity, political
independence, and the "Open Door" policy in commercial matters.
The
outbreak of the Bolshevik
Revolution in Russia, followed by the German victory over that country,
and the beginning of civil war, gave the Japanese an opportunity in the
Far East which they did not hesitate to exploit. With the support of
Great Britain and the United States, they landed at Vladivostok in
April 1918, and began to move westward along the route of the
Trans-Siberian Railway. The Czech Legion on the Russian front had
already rebelled against Bolshevik rule and was fighting its way
eastward along the same railroad. The Czechs were eventually evacuated
to Europe, while the Japanese continued to hold the eastern end of the
railroad, and gave support to the anti-Bolshevik factions in the civil
war. After a year or more of confused fighting, it became clear that
the anti-Bolshevik factions would be defeated and that the Japanese
could expect no further concessions from the Bolsheviks. Accordingly,
they evacuated Vladivostok in October 1922.
Undoubtedly,
the most numerous
diplomatic agreements of the wartime period were concerned with the
disposition of the Ottoman Empire. As early as February 1915, Russia
and France signed an agreement by which Russia was given a free hand in
the East in return for giving France a free hand in the West. This
meant that Russia could annex Constantinople and block the movement for
an independent Poland, while France could take Alsace-Lorraine from
Germany and set up a new, independent state under French influence in
the Rhineland. A month later, in March 1915, Britain and France agreed
to allow Russia to annex the Straits and Constantinople. The immediate
activities of the Entente Powers, however, were devoted to plans to
encourage the Arabs to rebel against the sultan's authority or at least
abstain from supporting his war efforts. The chances of success in
these activities were increased hy the fact that the Arabian portions
of the Ottoman Empire, while nominally subject to the sultan, were
already breaking up into numerous petty spheres of authority, some
virtually independent. The Arabs, who were a completely separate people
from the Turks, speaking a Semitic rather than a Ural-Altaic language
and who had remained largely nomadic in their mode of life while the
Turks had become almost completely a peasant people, were united to the
Ottoman peoples by little more than their common allegiance to the
Muslim religion. This connection had been weakened by the efforts to
secularize the Ottoman state and by the growth of Turkish nationalism
which called forth a spirit of Arabic nationalism as a reaction to it.
In
1915-1916 the British high
commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, entered into correspondence
with the Sherif Hussein of Mecca. While no binding agreement was
signed, the gist of their discussions was that Britain would recognize
the independence of the Arabs if they revolted against Turkey. The area
covered by the agreement included those parts of the Ottoman Empire
south of the 37th degree of latitude except Adana, Alexandretta, and
"those portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of
Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo, [which] cannot be said to be purely
Arab." In addition, Aden was excepted, while Baghdad and Basra were to
have a "special administration." The rights of France in the whole area
were reserved, the existing British agreements with various local
sultans along the shores of the Persian Gulf were to be maintained, and
Hussein was to use British advisers exclusively after the war. Extended
controversy has risen from this division of areas, the chief point at
issue being whether the statement as worded included Palestine in the
area which was granted to the Arabs or in the area which was reserved.
The interpretation of these terms to exclude Palestine from Arab hands
was subsequently made by McMahon on several occasions after 1922 and
most explicitly in 1937.
While
McMahon was negotiating
with Hussein, the Government of India, through Percy Cox, was
negotiating with Ibn-Saud of Nejd, and, in an agreement of December 26,
1915, recognized his independence in return for a promise of neutrality
in the war. Shortly afterward, on May 16, 1916, an agreement, known as
the Sykes-Picot agreement from the names of the chief negotiators, was
signed between Russia, France, and Britain. Early in 1917 Italy was
added to the settlement. It partitioned the Ottoman Empire in such a
way that little was left to the Turks except the area within 200 or 250
miles of Ankara. Russia was to get Constantinople and the Straits, as
well as northeastern Anatolia, including the Black Sea coast; Italy was
to get the southwestern coast of Anatolia from Smyrna to Adalia; France
was to get most of eastern Anatolia, including Mersin, Adana, and
Cilicia, as well as Kurdistan, Alexandretta, Syria, and northern
Mesopotamia, including Mosul; Britain was to get the Levant from Gaza
south to the Red Sea, Transjordan, most of the Syrian Desert, all of
Mesopotamia south of Kirkuk (including Baghdad and Basra), and most of
the Persian Gulf coast of Arabia. It was also envisaged that western
Anatolia around Smyrna would go to Greece. The Holy Land itself was to
be internationalized.
The
next document concerned
with the disposition of the Ottoman Empire was the famous "Balfour
Declaration" of November 1917. Probably no document of the wartime
period, except Wilson's Fourteen Points, has given rise to more
disputes than this brief statement of less than eleven lines. Much of
the controversy arises from the belief that it promised something to
somebody and that this promise was in conflict with other promises,
notably with the "McMahon Pledge" to Sherif Hussein. The
Balfour
Declaration took the form of a letter from British Foreign Secretary
Arthur James Balfour to Lord Rothschild, one of the leading figures in
the British Zionist movement. This movement, which was much stronger in
Austria and Germany than in Britain, had aspirations for creating in
Palestine, or perhaps elsewhere, some territory to which refugees from
anti-Semitic persecution or other Jews could go to find "a national
home.'' Balfour's letter said, "His Majesty's Government view with
favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish
people and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement
of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done
which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing
non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status
enjoyed by Jews in any other country." It is to be noted that this was
neither an agreement nor a promise but merely a unilateral declaration,
that it did not promise a Jewish state in Palestine or even Palestine
as a home for the Jews, but merely proposed such a home in Palestine,
and that it reserved certain rights for the existing groups in the
area. Hussein was so distressed when he heard of it that he asked for
an explanation, and was assured by D. G. Hogarth, on behalf of the
British government, that "Jewish settlement in Palestine would only be
allowed in so far as would be consistent with the political and
economic freedom of the Arab population." This reassurance apparently
was acceptable to Hussein, but doubts continued among other Arab
leaders. In answer to a request from seven such leaders, on June 16,
1918, Britain gave a public answer which divided the Arab territories
into three parts: (a) the Arabian peninsula from
Aden to Akabah
(at the head of the Red Sea), where the "complete and sovereign
independence of the Arabs" was recognized; (b) the
area under
British military occupation, covering southern Palestine and southern
Mesopotamia, where Britain accepted the principle that government
should be based "on the consent of the governed"; and (c)
the
area still under Turkish control, including Syria and northern
Mesopotamia, where Britain assumed the obligation to strive for
"freedom and independence." Somewhat similar in
tone was a joint
Anglo-French Declaration of November 7, 1918, just four days before
hostilities ended in the war. It promised "the complete and final
liberation of the peoples who have for so long been oppressed by the
Turk and the setting up of national governments and administrations
that shall derive their authority from the free exercise of the
initiative and choice of the indigenous populations."
There
have been extended
discussions of the compatibility of the various agreements and
statements made by the Great Powers regarding the disposition of the
Ottoman Empire after the war. This is a difficult problem in view of
the inaccuracy and ambiguity of the wording of most of these documents.
On the other hand, certain facts are quite evident. There is a sharp
contrast between the imperialist avarice to be found in the secret
agreements like Sykes-Picot and the altruistic tone of the publicly
issued statements; there is also a sharp contrast between the tenor of
the British negotiations with the Jews and those with the Arabs
regarding the disposition of Palestine, with the result that Jews and
Arabs were each justified in believing that Britain would promote their
conflicting political ambitions in that area: these beliefs, whether
based on misunderstanding or deliberate deception, subsequently served
to reduce the stature of Britain in the eyes of both groups, although
both had previously held a higher opinion of British fairness and
generosity than of any other Power; lastly, the raising of false Arab
hopes and the failure to reach any clear and honest understanding
regarding Syria led to a long period of conflict between the Syrians
and the French government, which held the area as a mandate of the
League of Nations after 1923.
As
a result of his
understanding of the negotiations with McMahon, Hussein began an Arab
revolt against Turkey on June 5, 1916. From that point on, he received
a subsidy of £225,000 a month from Britain. The famous T. E.
Lawrence, known as "Lawrence of Arabia," who had been an archaeologist
in the Near East in 1914, had nothing to do with the negotiations with
Hussein, and did not join the revolt until October 1916. When Hussein
did not obtain the concessions he expected at the Paris Peace
Conference of 1919, Lawrence sickened of the whole affair and
eventually changed his name to Shaw and tried to vanish from public
view.
The
Arab territories remained
under military occupation until the legal establishment of peace with
Turkey in 1923. Arabia itself was under a number of sheiks, of which
the chief were Hussein in Hejaz and Ibn-Saud in Nejd. Palestine and
Mesopotamia (now called Iraq) were under British military occupation.
The coast of Syria was under French military occupation, while the
interior of Syria (including the Aleppo-Damascus railway line) and
Transjordan were under an Arab force led by Emir Feisal, third son of
Hussein of Mecca. Although an American commission of inquiry, known as
the King-Crane Commission (1919), and a "General Syrian Congress" of
Arabs from the whole Fertile Crescent recommended that France be
excluded from the area, that Syria-Palestine be joined to form a single
state with Feisal as king, that the Zionists be excluded from Palestine
in any political role, as well as other points, a meeting of the Great
Powers at San Remo in April 1920 set up two French and two British
mandates. Syria and Lebanon went to France, while Iraq and Palestine
(including Transjordan) went to Britain. There were Arab uprisings and
great local unrest following these decisions. The resistance in Syria
was crushed by the French, who then advanced to occupy' the interior of
Syria and sent Feisal into exile. The British, who by this time were
engaged in a rivalry (over petroleum resources and other issues) with
the French, set Feisal up as king in Iraq under British protection
(1921) and placed his brother Abdullah in a similar position as King of
Transjordan (1923). The father of the two new kings, Hussein, was
attacked by Ibn-Saud of Nejd and forced to abdicate in 1924. His
kingdom of Hejaz was annexed by Ibn-Saud in 1924.
After
1932 this whole area was known as Saudi Arabia.
The
most important diplomatic
event of the latter part of the First World War was the intervention of
the United States on the side of the Entente Powers in April 1917. The
causes of this event have been analyzed at great length. In general
there have been four chief reasons given for the intervention from four
quite different points of view. These might be summarized as follows:
(1) The German submarine attacks on neutral shipping made it necessary
for the United States to go to war to secure "freedom of the seas"; (2)
the United States was influenced by subtle British propaganda conducted
in drawing rooms, universities, and the press of the eastern part of
the country where Anglophilism was rampant among the more influential
social groups; (3) the United States was inveigled into the war by a
conspiracy of international bankers and munitions manufacturers eager
to protect their loans to the Entente Powers or their wartime profits
from sales to these Powers; and (4) Balance of Power principles made it
impossible for the United States to allow Great Britain to be defeated
by Germany. Whatever the weight of these four in the final decision, it
is quite clear that neither the government nor the people of the United
States were prepared to accept a defeat of the Entente at the hands of
the Central Powers. Indeed, in spite of the government's efforts to act
with a certain semblance of neutrality, it was clear in 1914 that this
was the view of the chief leaders in the government with the single
exception of Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan. Without
analyzing the four factors mentioned above, it is quite clear that the
United States could not allow Britain to be defeated by any other
Power. Separated from all other Great Powers by the Atlantic and
Pacific oceans, the security of America required either that the
control of those oceans be in its own hands or in the hands of a
friendly Power. For almost a century before 1917 the United States had
been willing to allow British control of the sea to go unchallenged,
because it was clear that British control of the sea provided no threat
to the United States, but on the contrary, provided security for the
United States at a smaller cost in wealth and responsibility than
security could have been obtained by any other method. The presence of
Canada as a British territory adjacent to the United States, and
exposed to invasion by land from the United States, constituted a
hostage for British naval behavior acceptable to the United States. The
German submarine assault on Britain early in 1917 drove Britain close
to the door of starvation by its ruthless sinking of the merchant
shipping upon which Britain's existence depended. Defeat of Britain
could not be permitted because the United States was not prepared to
take over control of the sea itself and could not permit German control
of the sea because it had no assurance regarding the nature of such
German control. The fact that the German submarines w-ere acting in
retaliation for the illegal British blockade of the continent of Europe
and British violations of international law and neutral rights on the
high seas, the fact that the Anglo-Saxon heritage of the United States
and the Anglophilism of its influential classes made it impossible for
the average American to see world events except through the spectacles
made by British propaganda; the fact that Americans had lent the
Entente billions of dollars which would be jeopardized by a German
victory, the fact that the enormous Entente purchases of war materiel
had created a boom of prosperity and inflation which would collapse the
very day that the Entente collapsed— all these factors were able
to bring weight to bear on the American decision only because the
balance-of-power issue laid a foundation on which they could work. The
important fact was that Britain was close to defeat in April 1917, and
on that basis the United States entered the war. The unconscious
assumption by American leaders that an Entente victory was both
necessary and inevitable was at the bottom of their failure to enforce
the same rules of neutrality and international law against Britain as
against Germany. They constantly assumed that British violations of
these rules could be compensated with monetary damages, while German
violations of these rules must be resisted, by force if necessary.
Since they could not admit this unconscious assumption or publicly
defend the legitimate basis of international power politics on which it
rested, they finally went to war on an excuse which w as legally weak,
although emotionally satisfying. As John Bassett Moore, America's most
famous international lawyer, put it, "What most decisively contributed
to the involvement of the United States in the war was the assertion of
a right to protect belligerent ships on which Americans saw fit to
travel and the treatment of armed belligerent merchantmen as peaceful
vessels. Both assumptions were contrary to reason and to settled law,
and no other professed neutral advanced them.''
The
Germans at first tried to
use the established rules of international law regarding destruction of
merchant vessels. This proved so dangerous, because of the peculiar
character of the submarine itself, British control of the high seas,
the British instructions to merchant ships to attack submarines, and
the difficulty of distinguishing between British ships and neutral
ships, that most German submarines tended to attack without warning.
American protests reached a peak when the Lusitania
was sunk in this way nine miles off the English coast on May 7, 1915.
The Lusitania
was a British merchant vessel "constructed with Government funds as
[an] auxiliary cruiser, . . . expressly included in the navy list
published by the British Admiralty," with "bases laid for mounting guns
of six-inch caliber," carrying a cargo of 2,400 cases of rifle
cartridges and 1,250 cases of shrapnel, and with orders to attack
German submarines whenever possible. Seven hundred and eighty-five of
1,257 passengers, including 128 of 197 Americans, lost their lives. The
incompetence of the acting captain contributed to the heavy loss, as
did also a mysterious "second explosion" after the German torpedo
struck. The vessel, which had been declared "unsinkable," went down in
eighteen minutes. The captain was on a course he had orders to avoid;
he was running at reduced speed; he had an inexperienced crew; the
portholes had been left open; the lifeboats had not been swung out; and
no lifeboat drills had been held.
The
propaganda agencies of the Entente Powers made full use of the
occasion. The Times
of London announced that "four-fifths of her passengers were citizens
of the United States" (the actual proportion was 15.6 percent); the
British manufactured and distributed a medal which they pretended had
been awarded to the submarine crew by the German government; a French
paper published a picture of the crowds in Berlin at the outbreak of
war in 1914 as a picture of Germans "rejoicing" at news of the sinking
of the Lusitania.
The
United States protested
violently against the submarine warfare while brushing aside German
arguments based on the British blockade. It was so irreconcilable in
these protests that Germany sent Wilson a note on May 4, 1916, in which
it promised that "in the future merchant vessels within and without the
war zone shall not be sunk without warning and without safeguarding
human lives, unless these ships attempt to escape or offer resistance."
In return the German government hoped that the United States would put
pressure on Britain to follow the established rules of international
law in regard to blockade and freedom of the sea. Wilson refused to do
so. Accordingly, it became clear to the Germans that they would he
starved into defeat unless they could defeat Britain first by
unrestricted submarine warfare. Since they were aware that resort to
this method would probably bring the United States into the war against
them, they made another effort to negotiate peace before resorting to
it. When their offer to negotiate, made on December 12, 1916, was
rejected hy the Entente Powers on December 27th, the group in the
German government which had been advocating ruthless submarine warfare
came into a position to control affairs, and ordered the resumption of
unrestricted submarine attacks on February 1, 1917. Wilson was notified
of this decision on January 31st. He broke off
diplomatic relations with Germany on February 3rd,
and, after two months of indecision, asked the Congress for a
declaration of war April 3, 1917. The final decision was influenced by
the constant pressure of his closest associates, the realization that
Britain was reaching the end of her resources of men, money, and ships,
and the knowledge that Germany was planning to seek an alliance with
Mexico if war began.
While
the diplomacy of
neutrality and intervention was moving along the lines we have
described, a parallel diplomatic effort was being directed toward
efforts to negotiate peace. These efforts were a failure but are,
nonetheless, of considerable significance because they reveal the
motivations and war aims of the belligerents. They were a failure
because any negotiated peace requires a willingness on both sides to
make those concessions which will permit the continued survival of the
enemy. In 1914-1918, however, in order to win public support for total
mobilization, each country's propaganda had been directed toward a
total victory for itself and total defeat for the enemy. In time, both
sides became so enmeshed in their own propaganda that it became
impossible to admit publicly one's readiness to accept such lesser aims
as any negotiated peace would require. Moreover, as the tide of battle
waxed and waned, giving alternate periods of elation and discouragement
to both sides, the side which was temporarily elated became
increasingly attached to the fetish of total victory and unwilling to
accept the lesser aim of a negotiated peace. Accordingly, peace became
possible only when war weariness had reached the point where one side
concluded that even defeat was preferable to continuation of the war.
This point was reached in Russia in 1917 and in Germany and Austria in
1918. In Germany this point of view was greatly reinforced by the
realization that military defeat and political change were preferable
to the economic revolution and social upheaval which would accompany
any effort to continue the war in pursuit of an increasingly
unattainable victory.
From
the various efforts to
negotiate peace it is clear that Britain was unwilling to accept any
peace which would not include the restoration of Belgium or which would
leave Germany supreme on the Continent or in a position to resume the
commercial, naval, and colonial rivalry which had existed before 1914;
France was unwilling to accept any solution which did not restore
Alsace-Lorraine to her; the German High Command and the German
industrialists were determined not to give up all the occupied
territory in the west, but were hoping to retain Lorraine, part of
Alsace, Luxembourg, part of Belgium, and Longwy in France because of
the mineral and industrial resources of these areas. The fact that
Germany had an excellent supply of coking coal with an inadequate
supply of iron ore, while the occupied areas had plenty of the latter
but an inadequate supply of the former, had a great deal to do with the
German objections to a negotiated peace and the ambiguous terms in
which their war aims were discussed. Austria was, until the death of
Emperor Francis Joseph in 1916, unwilling to accept any peace which
would leave the Slavs, especially the Serbs, free to continue their
nationalistic agitations for the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire.
On the other hand, Italy was determined to exclude the Habsburg Empire
from the shores of the Adriatic Sea, while the Serbs were even more
determined to reach those shores by the acquisition of Habsburg-ruled
Slav areas in the Western Balkans. After the Russian revolutions of
19,7, many of these obstacles to a negotiated peace became weaker. The
Vatican, working through Cardinal Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII) sought
a negotiated peace which would prevent the destruction of the Habsburg
Empire, the last Catholic Great Power in Europe. Prominent men in all
countries, like Lord Lansdowne (British foreign secretary before 1914),
became so alarmed at the spread of Socialism that they were willing to
make almost any concessions to stop the destruction of civilized ways
of life by continued warfare. Humanitarians like Henry Ford or Romain
Rolland became increasingly alarmed at the continued slaughter. But,
for the reasons we have already mentioned, peace remained elusive until
the great German offensives of 1918 had been broken.
After
what Ludendorff called
"the black day of the German Army" (August 8, 1918), a German Crown
Council, meeting at Spa, decided victory was no longer possible, and
decided to negotiate for an armistice. This was not done because of a
controversy between the crown prince and Ludendorff in which the former
advised an immediate retreat to the "Hindenburg Line" twenty miles to
the rear, while the latter wished to make a slow withdrawal so that the
Entente could not organize an attack on the Hindenburg Line before
winter. Two Entente victories, at Saint-Quentin (August 31st) and in
Flanders (September 2nd) made this dispute moot. The Germans began an
involuntary retreat, drenching the ground they evacuated with "mustard
gas" in order to slow up the Entente pursuit, especially the tanks. The
German High Command removed the chancellor, Hertling, and put in the
more democratic Prince Max of Baden with orders to make an immediate
armistice or face military disaster (September 29-October 1, 1918). On
October 5th a German note to President Wilson asked for an armistice on
the basis of the Fourteen Points of January 8, 1918, and his subsequent
principles of September 27, 1918. These statements of Wilson had
captured the imaginations of idealistic persons and subject peoples
everywhere. The Fourteen Points promised the end of secret diplomacy;
freedom of the seas; freedom of commerce; disarmament; a fair
settlement of colonial claims, with the interests of the native peoples
receiving equal weight with the titles of imperialist Powers; the
evacuation of Russia; the evacuation and restoration of Belgium; the
evacuation of France and the restoration to her of Alsace-Lorraine as
in 1870; the readjustment of the Italian frontiers on nationality
lines; free and autonomous development for the peoples of the Habsburg
Empire; the evacuation, restoration, and guarantee of Romania,
Montenegro, and Serbia, with the last-named securing free access to the
sea; international guarantees to keep the Straits permanently opened to
the ships and commerce of all nations; freedom for the autonomous
development of the non-Turkish nationalities of the Ottoman Empire,
along with a secure sovereignty for the Turks themselves; an
independent Polish state with free access to the sea and with
international guarantees; a League of Nations to afford "mutual
guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great
and small states alike"; and no destruction of Germany or even any
alteration of her institutions except those necessary to make it clear
when her spokesmen spoke for the Reichstag majority and when they
"speak for the military party and the men whose creed is imperial
domination."
In
a series of notes between
Germany and the United States, Wilson made it clear that he would grant
an armistice only if Germany would withdraw from all occupied
territory, make an end to submarine attacks, accept the Fourteen
Points, establish a responsible government, and accept terms which
would preserve the existing Entente military superiority. He was most
insistent on the responsible government, warning that if he had to deal
"with military masters or monarchical autocrats" he would demand "not
negotiations but surrender." The German constitution was changed to
give all powers to the Reichstag; Ludendorff was fired; the German Navy
at Kiel mutinied, and the Kaiser fled from Berlin (October 28th). In
the meantime, the Entente Supreme War Council refused to accept the
Fourteen Points as the basis for peace until Colonel House threatened
that the United States would makes a separate peace with Germany. They
then demanded and received a definition of the meaning of each term,
made a reservation on "the freedom of the seas," and expanded the
meaning of "restoration of invaded territory" to include compensation
to the civilian population for their war losses. On this basis an
armistice commission met German negotiators on November 7th. The German
Revolution was spreading, and the Kaiser abdicated on November 8th. The
German negotiators received the Entente military terms and asked for an
immediate ending of hostilities and of the economic blockade and a
reduction in the Entente demand for machine guns from 30,000 to 25,000
on the grounds that the difference of 5,000 was needed to suppress the
German Revolution. The last point was conceded, but the other two
refused. The armistice was signed on November 11, 1918, at 5:00 a.m. to
take effect at 11:00 a.m. It provided that the Germans must evacuate
all occupied territory (including Alsace-Lorraine) within fourteen
days, and the left bank of the Rhine plus three bridgeheads on the
right bank within thirty-one days, that they surrender huge specified
amounts of war equipment, trucks, locomotives, all submarines, the
chief naval vessels, all prisoners of war, and captured merchant ships,
as w-ell as the Baltic fortresses, and all valuables and securities
taken in occupied territory, including the Russian and Romanian gold
reserves. The Germans were also required to renounce the treaties of
Brest-Litovsk and of Bucharest, which they had imposed on Russia and on
Romania, and to promise to repair the damage of occupied territories.
This last point was of considerable importance, as the Germans had
systematically looted or destroyed the areas they evacuated in the last
few months of the war.
The
negotiations with Wilson
leading up to the Armistice of 1918 are of great significance, since
they formed one of the chief factors in subsequent German resentment at
the Treaty of Versailles. In these negotiations Wilson had clearly
promised that the peace treaty with Germany would be negotiated and
would be based on the Fourteen Points; as we shall see, the Treaty of
Versailles was imposed without negotiation, and the Fourteen Points
fared very poorly in its provisions. An additional factor connected
with these events lies in the subsequent claim of the German
militarists that the German Army was never defeated but was "stabbed in
the back" by the home front through a combination of international
Catholics, international Jews, and international Socialists. There is
no merit whatever in these contentions. The German Army was clearly
beaten in the field; the negotiations for an armistice were commenced
by the civilian government at the insistence of the High Command, and
the Treaty of Versailles itself was subsequently signed, rather than
rejected, at the insistence of the same High Command in order to avoid
a military occupation of Germany. By these tactics the German Army was
able to escape the military occupation of Germany which they so
dreaded. Although the last enemy forces did not leave German soil until
1931, no portions of Germany were occupied beyond those signified in
the armistice itself (the Rhineland and the three bridgeheads on the
right hank of the Rhine) except for a brief occupation of the Ruhr
district in 1932.
Chapter
14—The Home Front, 1914-1918
The
First World War was a
catastrophe of such magnitude that, even today, the imagination has
some difficulty grasping it. In the year 1916, in two battles (Verdun
and the Somme) casualties of over 1,700,000 were suffered by both
sides. In the artillery barrage which opened the French attack on
Chemin des Dames in April 1917, 11,000,000 shells were fired on a
30-mile front in 10 days. Three months later, on an 11-mile front at
Passchendaele, the British fired 4,250,000 shells costing
£22,000,000 in a preliminary barrage, and lost 400,000 men in the
ensuing infantry assault. In the German attack of March 1918, 62
divisions with 4,500 heavy guns and 1,000 planes were hurled on a front
only 45 miles wide. On all fronts in the whole war almost 13,000,000
men in the various armed forces died from wounds and disease. It has
been estimated by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace that
the war destroyed over $400,000,000,000 of property at a time when the
value of every object in France and Belgium was not worth over
$75,000,000,000.
Obviously,
expenditures of men
and wealth at rates like these required a tremendous mobilization of
resources throughout the world, and could not fail to have far-reaching
effects on the patterns of thought and modes of action of people forced
to undergo such a strain. Some states were destroyed or permanently
crippled. There were profound modifications in finance, in economic
life, in social relations, in intellectual outlook, and in emotional
patterns. Nevertheless, two facts should be recognized. The war brought
nothing really new into the world; rather it sped up processes of
change which had been going on for a considerable period and would have
continued anyway, with the result that changes which would have taken
place over a period of thirty or even fifty years in peacetime were
brought about in five years during the war. Also, the changes were much
greater in objective facts and in the organization of society than they
were in men's ideas of these facts or organization. It was as if the
changes were too rapid for men's minds to accept them, or, what is more
likely, that men, seeing the great changes which were occurring on all
sides, recognized them, but assumed that they were merely temporary
wartime aberrations, and that, when peace came, they would pass away
and everyone could go back to the slow, pleasant world of 1913. This
point of view, which dominated the thinking of the 1920's, was
widespread and very dangerous. In their efforts to go back to 1913, men
refused to recognize that the wartime changes were more or less
permanent, and, instead of trying to solve the problems arising from
these changes, set up a false facade of pretense, painted to look like
1913, to cover up the great changes which had taken place. Then, by
acting as if this facade were reality, and by neglecting the
maladjusted reality which was moving beneath it, the people of the
1920'S drifted in a hectic world of unreality until the world
depression of 1929-1935, and the international crises which followed,
tore away the facade and showed the horrible, long-neglected reality
beneath it.
The
magnitude of the war and
the fact that it might last for more than six months were quite
unexpected for both sides and were impressed upon them only gradually.
It first became clear in regard to consumption of supplies, especially
ammunition, and in the problem of how to pay for these supplies. In
July 1914, the military men were confident that a decision would be
reached in six months because their military plans and the examples of
1866 and 1870 indicated an immediate decision. This belief was
supported by the financial experts who, while greatly underestimating
the cost of fighting, were confident that the financial resources of
all states would be exhausted in six months. By "financial resources"
they meant the gold reserves of the various nations. These were clearly
limited; all the Great Powers were on the gold standard under which
bank notes and paper money could be converted into gold on demand.
However, each country suspended the gold standard at the outbreak of
war. This removed the automatic limitation on the supply of paper
money. Then each country proceeded to pay for the war by borrowing from
the banks. The banks created the money which they lent by merely giving
the government a deposit of any size against which the government could
draw checks. The banks were no longer limited in the amount of credit
they could create because they no longer had to pay out gold for checks
on demand. Thus the creation of money in the form of credit by the
banks was limited only by the demands of its borrowers. Naturally, as
governments borrowed to pay for their needs, private businesses
borrowed in order to be able to fill the government's orders. The gold
which could no longer be demanded merely rested in the vaults, except
where some of it was exported to pay for supplies from neutral
countries or from fellow belligerents. As a result, the percentage of
outstanding bank notes covered by gold reserves steadily fell, and the
percentage of bank credit covered by either gold or bank notes fell
even further.
Naturally,
when the supply of
money was increased in this fashion faster than the supply of goods,
prices rose because a larger supply of money was competing for a
smaller supply of goods. This effect was made worse by the fact that
the supply of goods tended to be reduced by wartime destruction. People
received money for making capital goods, consumers' goods, and
munitions, but they could spend their money only to buy consumers'
goods, since capital goods and munitions were not offered for sale.
Since governments tried to reduce the supply of consumers' goods while
increasing the supply of the other two products, the problem of rising
prices (inflation) became acute. At the same time the problem of public
debt became steadily worse because governments were financing such a
large part of their activities by bank credit. These two problems,
inflation and public debt, continued to grow, even after the fighting
stopped, because of the continued disruption of economic life and the
need to pay for past activities. Only in the period 1920-1925 did these
two stop increasing in most countries, and they remained problems long
after that.
Inflation
indicates not only
an increase in the prices of goods but also a decrease in the value of
money (since it will buy less goods). Accordingly, people in an
inflation seek to get goods and to get rid of money. Thus inflation
increases production and purchases for consumption or hoarding, but it
reduces saving or creation of capital. It benefits debtors (by making a
fixed-money debt less of a burden) but injures creditors (by reducing
the value of their savings and credits). Since the middle classes of
European society, with their bank savings, checking deposits,
mortgages, insurance, and bond holdings, were the creditor class, they
were injured and even ruined by the wartime inflation. In Germany,
Poland, Hungary, and Russia, where the inflation went so far that the
monetary unit became completely valueless by 1924, the middle classes
were largely destroyed, and their members were driven to desperation or
at least to an almost psychopathic hatred of the form of government or
the social class that they believed to be responsible for their plight.
Since the last stages of inflation which dealt the fatal blow to the
middle classes occurred after the war rather than during it (in 1923 in
Germany), this hatred was directed against the parliamentary
governments which were functioning after 1918 rather than against the
monarchical governments which functioned in 1914-1918. In France and
Italy, where the inflation went so far that the franc or fire was
reduced permanently to one-fifth of its prewar value, the hatred of the
injured middle classes was directed against the parliamentary regime
which had functioned both during and after the war and against the
working class which they felt had profited by their misfortunes. These
things were not true in Britain or the United States, where the
inflation was brought under control and the monetary unit restored to
most of its prewar value. Even in these countries, prices rose by 200
to 300 percent, while public debts rose about 1,000 percent.
The
economic effects of the
war were more complicated. Resources of all kinds, including land,
labor, and raw materials, had to be diverted from peacetime purposes to
wartime production; or, in some cases, resources previously not used at
all had to be brought into the productive system. Before the war, the
allotment of resources to production had been made by the automatic
processes of the price system; labor and raw materials going, for
example, to manufacture those goods which were most profitable rather
than to those goods which were most serviceable or socially beneficial,
or in best taste. In wartime, however, governments had to have certain
specific goods for military purposes; they tried to get these goods
produced by making them more profitable than nonmilitary goods using
the same resources, but they were not always successful. The excess of
purchasing power in the hands of consumers caused a great rise in
demand for goods of a semi-luxury nature, like white cotton shirts for
laborers. This frequently made it more profitable for manufacturers to
use cotton for making shirts to sell at high prices than to use it to
make explosives.
Situations
such as these made
it necessary for governments to intervene directly in the economic
process to secure those results which could not be obtained by the free
price system or to reduce those evil effects which emerged from wartime
disruption. They appealed to the patriotism of manufacturers to make
things that were needed rather than things which were profitable, or to
the patriotism of consumers to put their money into government bonds
rather than into goods in short supply. They began to build
government-owned plants for war production, either using them for such
purposes themselves or leasing them out to private manufacturers at
attractive terms. They began to ration consumers' goods which were in
short supply, like articles of food. They began to monopolize essential
raw materials and allot them to manufacturers who had war contracts
rather than allow them to flow where prices w ere highest. The
materials so treated were generally fuels, steel, rubber, copper, wool,
cotton, nitrates, and such, although they varied from country to
country, depending upon the supply. Governments began to regulate
imports and exports in order to ensure that necessary materials staved
in the country and, above all, did not go to enemy states. This ]ed to
the British blockade of Europe, the rationing of exports to neutrals,
and complicated negotiations to see that goods in neutral countries
were not re-exported to enemy countries. Bribery, bargaining, and even
force came into these negotiations, as when the British set quotas on
the imports of Holland based on the figures for prewar years or cut
down necessary shipments of British coal to Sweden until they obtained
the concessions they wished regarding sales of Swedish goods to
Germany. Shipping and railroad transportation had to be taken over
almost completely in most countries in order to ensure that the
inadequate space for cargo and freight would be used as effectively as
possible, that loading and unloading would be speeded up, and that
goods essential to the war effort would be shipped earlier and faster
than less essential goods. Labor had to be regulated and directed into
essential activities. The rapid rise in prices led to demands for
raises in wages. This led to a growth and strengthening of labor unions
and increasing threats of strikes. There was no guarantee that the
wages of essential workers would go up faster than the wages of
nonessential workers. Certainly the wages of soldiers, who were the
most essential of all, went up very little. Thus there was no guarantee
that labor, if left solely to the influence of wage levels, as was
usual before 1914, would flow to the occupations where it was most
urgently needed. Accordingly, the governments began to intervene in
labor problems, seeking to avoid strikes but also to direct the flow of
labor to more essential activities. There were general registrations of
men in most countries, at first as part of the draft of men for
military service, but later to control services in essential
activities. Generally, the right to leave an essential job was
restricted, and eventually people were directed into essential jobs
from nonessential activities. The high wages and shortage of labor
brought into the labor market many persons who would not have been in
it in peacetime, such as old persons, youths, clergy, and, above all,
women. This flow of women from homes into factories or other services
had the most profound effects on social life and modes of living,
revolutionizing the relations of the sexes, bringing women up to a
level of social, legal, and political equality closer than previously
to that of men, obtaining for them the right to vote in some countries,
the right to own or dispose of property in other more backward ones,
changing the appearance and costume of women by such innovations as
shorter skirts, shorter hair, less frills, and generally a drastic
reduction in the amount of clothing they wore.
Because
of the large number of
enterprises involved and the small size of many of them, direct
regulation by the government was less likely in the field of
agriculture. Here conditions were generally more competitive than in
industry, with the result that farm prices had shown a growing tendency
to fluctuate more widely than industrial prices. This continued during
the war, as agricultural regulation was left more completely to the
influence of price changes than other parts of the economy. As farm
prices soared, farmers became more prosperous than they had been in
decades, and sought madly to increase their share of the rain of money
by bringing larger and larger amounts of land under cultivation. This
was not possible in Europe because of the lack of men, equipment, and
fertilizers; but in Canada, the United States, Australia, and South
America land was brought under the plow which, because of lack of
rainfall or its inaccessibility to peacetime markets, should never have
been brought under cultivation. In Canada the increase in wheat acreage
was from 9.9 million in the years 1909-1913 to 22.1 million in the
years 1921-25. In the United States the increase in wheat acreage was
from 47.0 million to 58.1 million in the same period. Canada increased
her share of the world's wheat crop from 14 percent to 39 percent in
this decade. Farmers went into debt to obtain these lands, and by 1920
were buried under a mountain of mortgages which would have been
considered unbearable before 1914 but which in the boom of wartime
prosperity and high prices was hardly given a second thought.
In
Europe such expansion of
acreage was not possible, although grasslands were plowed up in Britain
and some other countries. In Europe as a whole, acreage under
cultivation declined, by 15 percent for cereals in 1913-1919. Livestock
numbers were also reduced (swine by 22 percent and cattle by 7 percent
in 1913-1920). Woodlands were cut for fuel when importation of coal was
stopped from England, Germany, or Poland. Since most of Europe was cut
off from Chile, which had been the chief prewar source of nitrates, or
from North Africa and Germany, which had produced much of the prewar
supply of phosphates, the use of these and other fertilizers was
reduced. This resulted in an exhaustion of the soil so great that in
some countries, like Germany, the soil had not recovered its fertility
by 1930. When the German chemist Haber discovered a method for
extracting nitrogen from the air which made it possible for his country
to survive the cutting off of Chilean nitrates, the new supply was used
almost entirely to produce explosives, with little left over for
fertilizers. The declining fertility of the soil and the fact that new
lands of lesser natural fertility were brought under cultivation led to
drastic declines in agricultural output per acre (in cereals about 15
percent in 1914-1919).
These
adverse influences were
most evident in Germany, where the number of hogs fell from 25.3
million in 1914 to 5.7 million in 1918; the average weight of
slaughtered cattle fell from 250 kilos in 1913 to 130 in 1918; the
acreage in sugar beets fell from 592,843 hectares in 1914 to 366,505 in
1919, while the yield of sugar beets per hectare fell from 31,800 kilos
in 1914 to 16,350 kilos in 1920. German's prewar imports of about 6
½ million tons of cereals each year ceased, and her home
production of these fell by 3 million tons per year. Her prewar imports
of over 2 million tons of oil concentrates and other feed for farm
animals stopped. The results of the blockade were devastating.
Continued for nine months after the armistice, it caused the deaths of
800,000 persons, according to Max Sering. In addition, reparations took
about 108,000 horses, 205,000 cattle, 426,000 sheep, and 240,000 fowl.
More
damaging than the
reduction in the number of farm animals (which was made up in six or
seven years), or the drain on the fertility of the soil (which could be
made up in twelve or fifteen years), was the disruption of Europe's
integration of agricultural production (which was never made up). The
blockade of the Central Powers tore the heart out of the prewar
integration. When the war ended, it was impossible to replace this,
because there were many new political boundaries; these boundaries were
marked by constantly rising tariff restrictions, and the non-European
world had increased both its agricultural and industrial output to a
point where it was much less dependent on Europe.
The
heavy casualties, the
growing shortages, the slow decline in quality of goods, and the
gradual growth of the use of substitutes, as well as the constantly
increasing pressure of governments on the activities of their
citizens—all these placed a great strain on the morale of the
various European peoples. The importance of this question was just as
great in the autocratic and semi-democratic countries as it was in the
ones with fully democratic and parliamentary regimes. The latter did
not generally permit any general elections during the war, but both
types required the full support of their peoples in order to maintain
their battle lines and economic activities at full effectiveness. At
the beginning, the fever of patriotism and national enthusiasm was so
great that this was no problem. Ancient and deadly political rivals
clasped hands, or even sat in the same Cabinet, and pledged a united
front to the enemy of their fatherland. But disillusionment was quick,
and appeared as early as the winter of 1914. This change was parallel
to the growth of the realization that the war was to be a long one and
not the lightning stroke of a single campaign and a single battle which
all had expected. The inadequacies of the preparations to deal with the
heavy casualties or to provide munitions for the needs of modern war,
as well as the shortage or disruption of the supply of civilian goods,
led to public agitation. Committees were formed, but proved relatively
ineffective, and in most activities in most countries were replaced by
single-headed agencies equipped with extensive controls. The use of
voluntary or semi-voluntary methods of control generally vanished with
the committees and were replaced by compulsion, however covert. In
governments as w holes a somewhat similar shifting of personnel took
place until each Cabinet came to be dominated by a single man, endowed
with greater energy, or a greater willingness to make quick decisions
on scanty information than his fellows. In this way Lloyd George
replaced Asquith in England; Clemenceau replaced a series of lesser
leaders in France; Wilson strengthened his control on his own
government in the United States; and, in a distinctly German way,
Ludendorff came to dominate the government of his country. In order to
build up the morale of their own peoples and to lower that of their
enemies, countries engaged in a variety of activities designed to
regulate the flow of information to these peoples. This involved
censorship, propaganda, and curtailment of civil liberties. These were
established in all countries, without a hitch in the Central Powers and
Russia where there were long traditions of extensive police authority,
but no less effectively in France and Britain. In France a State of
Siege was proclaimed on August 2, 1914. This gave the government the
right to rule by decree, established censorship, and placed the police
under military control. In general, French censorship was not so severe
as the German nor so skillful as the British, while their propaganda
was far better than the German but could not compare with the British.
The complexities of French political life and the slow movement of its
bureaucracy allowed all kinds of delays and evasions of control,
especially by influential persons. When Clemenceau was in opposition to
the government in the early days of the war, his paper, L'homme
libre, was suspended; he continued to publish it with
impunity under the name L'homme enchainé.
The British censorship was established on August 5, 1914, and at once
intercepted all cables and private mail which it could reach, including
that of neutral countries. These at once became an important source of
military and economic intelligence. A Defence of the Realm Act
(familiarly known as DORA) was passed giving the government the power
to censor all information. A Press Censorship Committee was set up in
1914 and was replaced by the Press Bureau under Frederick E. Smith
(later Lord Birkenhead) in 1916. Established in Crewe House, it was
able to control all news printed in the press, acting as the direct
agent of the Admiralty and War Offices. The censorship of printed books
was fairly lenient, and was much more so for books to be read in
England than for books for export, with the result that "best sellers"
in England were unknown in America. Parallel with the censorship was
the War Propaganda Bureau under Sir Charles Masterman, which had an
American Bureau of Information under Sir Gilbert Parker at Wellington
House. This last agency was able to control almost all information
going to the American press, and by 1916 was acting as an international
news service itself, distributing European news to about 35 American
papers which had no foreign reporters of their own.
The
Censorship and the
Propaganda bureaus worked together in Britain as well as elsewhere. The
former concealed all stories of Entente violations of the laws of war
or of the rules of humanity, and reports on their own military mistakes
or their own war plans and less altruistic war aims, while the
Propaganda Bureau widely publicized the violations and crudities of the
Central Powers, their prewar schemes for mobilization, and their
agreements regarding war aims. The German violation of Belgian
neutrality w as constantly bewailed, while nothing was said of the
Entente violation of Greek neutrality. A great deal was made of the
Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, while the Russian mobilization which had
precipitated the war was hardly mentioned. In the Central Powers a
great deal was made of the Entente “encirclement,” while
nothing was said of the Kaiser's demands for "a place in the sun" or
the High Command's refusal to renounce annexation of any part of
Belgium. In general, manufacture or outright lies by propaganda
agencies was infrequent, and the desired picture of the enemy was built
up by a process of selection and distortion of evidence until, by 1918,
many in the West regarded the Germans as bloodthirsty and sadistic
militarists, while the Germans regarded the Russians as ''subhuman
monsters." A great deal was made, especially by the British, of
"atrocity" propaganda; stories of German mutilation of bodies,
violation of women, cutting off of children's hands, desecration of
churches and shrines, and crucifixions of Belgians were widely believed
in the West by 1916. Lord Bryce headed a committee which produced a
volume of such stories in 1915, and it is quite evident that this
well-educated man, "the greatest English authority on the United
States," was completely taken in by his own stories. Here, again,
outright manufacture of falsehoods was infrequent, although General
Henry Charteris in 1917 created a story that the Germans were cooking
human bodies to extract glycerine, and produced pictures to prove it.
Again, photographs of mutilated bodies in a Russian anti-Semitic
outrage in 1905 were circulated as pictures of Belgians in 1915. There
were several reasons for the use of such atrocity stories: (a)
to build up the fighting spirit of the mass army; (b)
to stiffen civilian morale; (c) to encourage
enlistments, especially in England, where volunteers were used for one
and a half years; (d) to increase subscriptions for
war bonds; (e) to justify one's own breaches of
international law or the customs of war; (f)
to destroy the chances of negotiating peace (as in December 1916) or to
justify a severe final peace (as Germany did in respect to
Brest-Litovsk); and (g) to win the support of
neutrals. On the
whole, the relative innocence and credulity of the average person, who
was not yet immunized to propaganda assaults through mediums of mass
communication in 1914, made the use of such stories relatively
effective. But the discovery, in the period after 1919, that they had
been hoaxed gave rise to a skepticism toward all government
communications which was especially noticeable in the Second World War.
Part Six—The Versailles System and the
Return to Normalcy: 1919-1929
Chapter
15—The Peace Settlements, 1919-1923
The
First World War was ended
by dozens of treaties signed in the period 1919-1923. Of these, the
five chief documents were the five treaties of peace with the defeated
Powers, named from the sites in the neighborhood of Paris where they
were signed. These were:
Treaty
of Versailles with Germany, June 28, 1919
Treaty
of Saint-Germain with Austria, September 10, 1919
Treaty
of Neuilly with Bulgaria, November 27, 1919
Treaty
of Trianon with Hungary, June 4, 1920
Treaty
of Sèvres with Turkey, August 20, 1920
The
last of these, the Treaty
of Sèvres with Turkey, was never ratified and was replaced by a
new treaty, signed at Lausanne in 1923.
The
peace settlements made in
this period were subjected to vigorous and detailed criticism in the
two decades 1919-1939. This criticism was as ardent from the victors as
from the vanquished. Although this attack was largely aimed at the
terms of the treaties, the real causes of the attack did not lie in
these terms, which were neither unfair nor ruthless, were far more
lenient than any settlement which might have emerged from a German
victory, and which created a new Europe which was, at least
politically, more just than the Europe of 1914. The causes of the
discontent with the settlements of 1919-1923 rested on the procedures
which were used to make these settlements rather than on the terms of
the settlements themselves. Above all, there was discontent at the
contrast between the procedures which were used and the procedures
which pretended to he used, as well as between the high-minded
principles which were supposed to be applied and those which really
were applied
The
peoples of the victorious
nations had taken to heart their wartime propaganda about the rights of
small nations, making the world safe for democracy, and putting an end
both to power politics and to secret diplomacy. These ideals had been
given concrete form in Wilson's Fourteen Points. Whether the defeated
Powers felt the same enthusiasm for these high ideals is subject to
dispute, but they had been promised, on November 5, 1918, that the
peace settlements would be negotiated and would be based on the
Fourteen Points. When it became clear that the settlements were to be
imposed rather than negotiated, that the Fourteen Points had been lost
in the confusion, and that the terms of the settlements had been
reached by a process of secret negotiations from which the small
nations had been excluded and in which power politics played a much
larger role than the safety of democracy, there was a revulsion of
feeling against the treaties.
In
Britain and in Germany,
propaganda barrages were aimed against these settlements until, by
1929, most of the Western World had feelings of guilt and shame
whenever they thought of the Treaty of Versailles. There was a good
deal of sincerity in these feelings, especially in England and in the
United States, but there was also a great deal of insincerity behind
them in all countries. In England the same groups, often the same
people, who had made the wartime propaganda and the peace settlements
were loudest in their complaint that the latter had fallen far below
the ideals of the former, while all the while their real aims were to
use power politics to the benefit of Britain. Certainly there were
grounds for criticism, and, equally certainly, the terms of the peace
settlements were far from perfect; but criticism should have been
directed rather at the hypocrisy and lack of realism in the ideals of
the wartime propaganda and at the lack of honesty of the chief
negotiators in carrying on the pretense that these ideals were still in
effect while they violated them daily, and necessarily violated them.
The settlements were clearly made by secret negotiations, by the Great
Powers exclusively, and by power politics. They had to be. No
settlements could ever have been made on any other bases. The failure
of the chief negotiators (at least the Anglo-Americans) to admit this
is regrettable, but behind their reluctance to admit it is the even
more regrettable fact that the lack of political experience and
political education of the American and English electorates made it
dangerous for the negotiators to admit the facts of life in
international political relationships.
It
is clear that the peace
settlements were made by an organization which was chaotic and by a
procedure which was fraudulent.... The normal way to make peace after a
war in which the victors form a coalition would be for the victors to
hold a conference, agree on the terms they hope to get from the
defeated, then have a congress with these latter to impose these terms,
either with or without discussion and compromise. It was tacitly
assumed in October and November, 1918, that this method was to be used
to end the existing war. But this congress method could not be used in
1919 for several reasons. The members of the victorious coalition were
so numerous (thirty-two Allied and Associated Powers) that they could
have agreed on terms only slowly and after considerable preliminary
organization. This preliminary organization never occurred, largely
because President Wilson was too busy to participate in the process,
was unwilling to delegate any real authority to others, and, with a
relatively few, intensely held ideas (like the League of Nations,
democracy, and self-determination), had no taste for the details of
organization. Wilson was convinced that if he could only get the League
of Nations accepted, any undesirable details in the terms of the
treaties could be remedied later through the League. Lloyd George and
Clemenceau made use of this conviction to obtain numerous provisions in
the terms which were undesirable to Wilson but highly desirable to them.
The
time necessary for a
preliminary conference or preliminary planning was also lacking. Lloyd
George wanted to carry out his campaign pledge of immediate
demobilization, and Wilson wanted to get back to his duties as
President of the United States. Moreover, if the terms had been drawn
up at a preliminary conference, they would have resulted from
compromises between the many Powers concerned, and these compromises
would have broken down as soon as any effort was made to negotiate with
the Germans later. Since the Germans had been promised the right to
negotiate, it became clear that the terms could not first be made the
subject of public compromise in a full preliminary conference.
Unfortunately, by the time the victorious Great Powers realized all
this, and decided to make the terms by secret negotiations among
themselves, invitations had already been sent to all the victorious
Powers to come to an Inter-Allied Conference to make preliminary terms.
As a solution to this embarrassing situation, the peace was made on two
levels. On one level, in the full glare of publicity' the Inter-Allied
Conference became the Plenary Peace Conference, and, with considerable
fanfare, did nothing. On the other level, the Great Powers worked out
their peace terms in secret and, when they were ready, imposed them
simultaneously on the conference and on the Germans....
As
late as February 22nd,
Balfour, the British foreign secretary, still believed they were
working on "preliminary peace terms," and the Germans believed the same
on April 15th.
While
the Great Powers were
negotiating in secret the full conference met several times under rigid
rules designed to prevent action. These sessions were governed by the
iron hand of Clemenceau, who heard the motions he wanted, jammed
through those he desired, and answered protests by outright threats to
make peace without any consultation with the Lesser Powers at all and
dark references to the millions of men the Great Powers had under arms.
On February 14th the conference was given the draft of the Covenant of
the League of Nations, and on April 11th the draft of the International
Labor Office; both were accepted on April 28th. On May 6th came the
text of the Treaty of Versailles, only one day before it was given to
the Germans; at the end of May came the draft of the Treaty of
Saint-Germain with Austria.
While
this futile show was
going on in public, the Great Powers were making peace in secret. Their
meetings were highly informal. When the military leaders were present
the meetings were known as the Supreme War Council; when the military
leaders were absent (as they usually were after January 12th) the group
was known as the Supreme Council or the Council of Ten. It consisted of
the head of the government and the foreign minister of each of the five
Great Powers (Britain, the United States, France, Italy, and Japan).
This group met forty-six times from January 12th to March 24, 1919. It
worked very ineffectively. At the middle of March, because a sharp
dispute over the German-Polish frontier leaked to the press, the
Council of Ten was reduced to a Council of Four (Lloyd George, Wilson,
Clemenceau, Orlando). These four, with Orlando frequently absent, held
over two hundred meetings in a period of thirteen weeks (March 27th to
June 28th). They put the Treaty of Versailles into form in three weeks
and did the preliminary work on the treaty with Austria.
When
the treaty with Germany
was signed on June 2 8, 1919, the heads of governments left Paris and
the Council of Ten ended. So also did the Plenary Conference. The five
foreign ministers (Balfour, Lansing, Pichon, Tittoni, and Makino) were
left in Paris as the Council of Heads of Delegations, with full powers
to complete the peace settlements. This group finished the treaties
with Austria and Bulgaria and had them both signed. They disbanded on
January lo, 1920, leaving behind an executive committee, the Conference
of Ambassadors. This consisted of the ambassadors of the four Great
Powers in Paris plus a French representative. This group held two
hundred meetings in the next three years and continued to meet until
1931. It supervised the execution of the three peace treaties already
signed, negotiated the peace treaty with Hungary, and performed many
purely political acts which had no treaty basis, such as drawing the
Albanian frontier in November 1921. In general, in the decade after the
Peace Conference, the Conference of Ambassadors was the organization by
which the Great Powers ruled Europe. It acted with power, speed, and
secrecy in all issues delegated to it. When issues arose which were too
important to be treated in this way, the Supreme Council was
occasionally reunited. This was done about twenty-five times in the
three years 1920-1922, usually in regard to reparations, economic
reconstruction, and acute political problems. The most important of
these meetings of the Supreme Council were held at Paris, London, San
Remo, Boulogne, and Spa in 1920; at Paris and London in 1921; and at
Paris, Genoa, The Hague, and London in 1922. This valuable practice was
ended by Britain in 1923 in protest against the French determination to
use force to compel Germany to fulfill the reparations clauses of the
peace treaty.
At
all of these meetings, as
at the Peace Conference itself, the political leaders were assisted by
groups of experts and interested persons, sometimes self-appointed.
Many of these "experts" were members or associates of the
international-banking fraternity. At the Paris Peace Conference the
experts numbered thousands and were organized into official staffs by
most countries, even before the war ended. These experts were of the
greatest importance. They were formed into committees at Paris and
given problem after problem, especially boundary problems, usually
without any indication as to what principles should guide their
decisions. The importance of these committees of experts can he seen in
the fact that in every case hut one where a committee of experts
submitted a unanimous report, the Supreme Council accepted its
recommendation and incorporated it in the treaty. In cases where the
report was not unanimous, the problem was generally resubmitted to the
experts for further consideration. The one case where a unanimous
report was not accepted was concerned with the Polish Corridor, the
same issue which had forced the Supreme Council to be cut down to the
Council of Four in 1919 and the issue which led to the Second World War
twenty years later. In this case, the experts were much harsher on
Germany than the final decision of the politicians.
The
treaty with Germany was
made by the Council of Four assembling the reports of the various
committees, fitting the parts together, and ironing out various
disagreements. The chief disagreements were over the size and nature of
German reparations, the nature of German disarmament, the nature of the
League of Nations, and the territorial settlements in six specific
areas: the Polish Corridor, Upper Silesia, the Saar, Fiume, the
Rhineland, and Shantung. When the dispute over Fiume reached a peak,
Wilson appealed to the Italian people over the heads of the Italian
delegation at Paris, in the belief that the people were less
nationalistic and more favorable to his idealistic principles than
their rather hard-boiled delegation. This appeal was a failure, but the
Italian delegation left the conference and returned to Rome in protest
against Wilson's action. Thus the Italians were absent from Paris at
the time that the German colonial territories were being distributed
and, accordingly, did not obtain any colonies. Thus Italy failed to
obtain compensation in Africa for the French and British gains in
territory on that continent, as promised in the Treaty of London in
1915. This disappointment was given by Mussolini as one of the chief
justifications for the Italian attack on Ethiopia in 1935.
The
Treaty of Versailles was
presented to the Plenary Conference on May 6, 1919, and to the German
delegation the next day. The conference was supposed to accept it
without comment, but General Foch, commander in chief of the French
armies and of the Entente forces in the war, made a severe attack on
the treaty in regard to its provisions for enforcement. These
provisions gave little more than the occupation of the Rhineland and
three bridgeheads on the right bank of the Rhine as already existed
under the Armistice of November Il, 1918. According to the treaty,
these areas were to be occupied for from five to fifteen years to
enforce a treaty whose substantive provisions required Germany to pay
reparations for at least a generation and to remain disarmed forever.
Foch insisted that he needed the left bank of the Rhine and the three
bridgeheads on the right bank for at least thirty years. Clemenceau, as
soon as the meeting was over, rebuked Foch for disrupting the harmony
of the assembly, but Foch had put his finger on the weakest, yet most
vital, portion of the treaty.
The
presentation of the text
of the treaty to the Germans the next day was no happier. Having
received the document, the chief of the German delegation, Foreign
Minister Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, made a long speech in
which he protested bitterly against the failure to negotiate and the
violation of the pre-armistice commitments. As a deliberate insult to
his listeners, he spoke from a seated position..
The
German delegation sent the
victorious Powers short notes of detailed criticism during May and
exhaustive counter-proposals on May 28th. Running to 443 pages of
German text, these counter-proposals, criticized the treaty, clause by
clause, accused the victors of bad faith in violating the Fourteen
Points, and offered to accept the League of Nations, the disarmament
sections, and reparations of 100 thousand million marks if the Allies
would withdraw any statement that Germany had, alone, caused the war
and would readmit Germany to the world's markets. Most of the
territorial changes were rejected except where they could be shown to
be based on self-determination (thus adopting Wilson's point of view).
These
proposals led to one of
the most severe crises of the conference as Lloyd George, who had been
reelected in December on his promise to the British people to squeeze
Germany dry and had done his share in this direction from December to
May, now began to fear that Germany would refuse to sign and adopt a
passive resistance which would require the Allies to use force. Since
the British armies were being disbanded, such a need of force would
fall largely on the French and would be highly welcome to people like
Foch who favored duress against Germany. Lloyd George was afraid that
any occupation of Germany by French armies would lead to complete
French hegemony on the continent of Europe and that these occupation
forces might never be withdrawn, having achieved, with British
connivance, what Britain had fought so vigorously to prevent at the
time of Louis XIV and Napoleon. In other words, the reduction in
German's power as a consequence of her defeat was leading Britain back
to her old balance-of-power policies under which Britain opposed the
strongest Power on the continent by building up the strength of the
second strongest. At the same time, Lloyd George was eager to continue
the British demobilization in order to satisfy the British people and
to reduce the financial burden on Britain so that the country could
balance its budget, deflate, and go back on the gold standard. For
these reasons, Lloyd George suggested that the treaty be weakened by
reducing the Rhineland occupation from fifteen years to two, that a
plebiscite be held in Upper Silesia (which had been given to Poland),
that Germany be admitted to the League of Nations at once, and that the
reparations burden be reduced. He obtained only the plebiscite in Upper
Silesia and certain other disputed areas, Wilson rejecting the other
suggestions and upbraiding the prime minister for his sudden change of
attitude.
Accordingly,
the Allied answer
to the German counter-proposals (written by Philip Kerr, later Lord
Lothian) made only minor modifications in the original terms (chiefly
the addition of five plebiscites in Upper Silesia, Allenstein,
Marienwerder, North Schleswig, and the Saar, of which the last was to
be held in 1935, the others immediately). It also accused the Germans
of sole guilt in causing the war and of inhuman practices during it,
and gave them a five-day ultimatum for signing the treaty as it stood.
The German delegation at once returned to Germany and recommended a
refusal to sign. The Cabinet resigned rather than sign, but a new
Cabinet was formed of Catholics and Socialists. Both of these groups
were fearful that an Allied invasion of Germany would lead to chaos and
confusion which would encourage Bolshevism in the east and separatism
in the west; they voted to sign if the articles on war guilt and war
criminals could be struck from the treaty. When the Allies refused
these concessions, the Catholic Center Party voted 64-14 not to sign.
At this critical moment, when rejection seemed certain, the High
Command of the German Army, through Chief of Staff Wilhelm Groener,
ordered the Cabinet to sign in order to prevent a military occupation
of Germany. On June 28, 1919, exactly five years after the
assassination at Sarajevo, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles where
the German Empire had been proclaimed in 1871, the Treaty of Versailles
was signed by all the delegations except the Chinese. The latter
refused, protest against the disposition of the prewar German
concessions in Shantung.
The
Austrian Treaty was signed
by a delegation headed by Karl Renner but only after the victors had
rejected a claim that Austria was a succession state rather than a
defeated Po\ver and had forced the country to change its name from the
newly adopted "German Austria" to the title "Republic of Austria." The
new country was forbidden to make any movement toward union with
Germany without the approval of the League of Nations.
The
Treaty of Neuilly was
signed by a single Bulgarian delegate, the Peasants' Party leader
Aleksandr Stamboliski. By this agreement Bulgaria lost western Thrace,
her outlet to the Aegean, which had been annexed from Turkey in 1912,
as well as certain mountain passes in the west which were ceded from
Bulgaria to Yugoslavia for strategic reasons.
The
Treaty of Trianon signed
in 1920 was the most severe of the peace treaties and the most rigidly
enforced. For these and other reasons Hungary was the most active
political force for revision of treaties during the period 1924-1934
and was encouraged in this attitude by Italy from 1927 to 1934 in the
hope that there might he profitable fishing in such troubled waters.
Hungary had good reason to he discontented. The fall of the Habsburg
dynasty in 1918 and the uprisings of the subject peoples of Hungary,
like the Poles, Slovaks, Romanians, and Croatians, brought to power in
Budapest a liberal government under Count Michael Károlyi. This
government was at once threatened by a Bolshevik uprising under
Béla Kun. In order to protect itself, the Károlyi
government asked for an Allied occupation force until after the
elections scheduled for April 1919. This request was refused by General
Franchet d'Esperey, under the influence of a reactionary Hungarian
politician, Count Stephen Bethlen. The Károlyi regime fell
before the attacks of Béla Kun and the Romanians in consequence
of lack of support from the West. After Béla Kun's reign of Red
terrorism, which lasted six months (March-August, 1920), and his flight
before a Romanian invasion of Hungary, the reactionaries came to power
with Admiral Miklós Horthy as regent and head of the state (1920
1944) and Count Bethlen as prime minister (1921-1931). Count
Károlyi, who was pro-Allied, anti-German, pacifist, democratic,
and liberal, realized that no progress was possible in Hungary without
some solution of the agrarian question and the peasant discontent
arising from the monopolization of the land. Because the Allies refused
to support this program, Hungary fell into the hands of Horthy and
Bethlen, who were anti-Allied, pro-German, undemocratic, militaristic,
and unprogressive. This group was persuaded to sign the Treaty of
Trianon hy a trick and ever afterward repudiated it. Maurice
Paléologue, secretary-general of the French Ministry of Foreign
Affairs (but acting on behalf of France's greatest industrialist,
Eugene Schneider), made a deal with the Hungarians that if they would
sign the Treaty of Trianon as it stood and give Schneider control of
the Hungarian state railways, the port of Budapest, and the Hungarian
General Credit Bank (which had a stranglehold on Hungarian industry)
France would eventually make Hungary one of the mainstays of its
anti-German bloc in eastern Europe, would sign a military convention
with Hungary, and would, at the proper time, obtain a drastic revision
of the Treaty of Trianon. The Hungarian side of this complex deal was
largely carried out, but British and Italian objections to the
extension of French economic control into central Europe disrupted the
negotiations and prevented Hungary from obtaining its reward.
Paléologue, although forced to resign and replaced at the Quai
d'Orsay by the anti-Hungarian and pro-Czech Philippe Berthelot,
received his reward from Schneider. He was made a director of
Schneider's personal holding company for his central-European
interests, the Union européene industrielle et financière.
The
Treaty of Sèvres
with Turkey was the last one made and the only one never ratified.
There w-ere three reasons for the delay: (1) the uncertainty about the
role of the United States, which was expected to accept control of the
Straits and a mandate for Armenia, thus forming a buffer against Soviet
Russia; (2) the instability of the Turkish government, which was
threatened hy a nationalist uprising led by Mustafa Kemal; and (3) the
scandal caused by the Bolshevik publication of the secret treaties
regarding the Ottoman Empire, since these treaties contrasted so
sharply with the expressed war aims of the Allies. The news that the
United States refused to participate in the Near East settlement made
it possible to draw up a treaty. This was begun by the Supreme Council
at its London Conference of February 1920, and continued at San Remo in
April. It was signed by the sultan’s government on August 20,
1920, but the Nationalists under Mustafa Kemal refused to accept it and
set up an insurgent government at Ankara. The Greeks and Italians, with
Allied support, invaded Turkey and attempted to force the treaty of the
Nationalists, but they were much weakened by dissension behind the
facade of Entente solidarity. The French believed that greater economic
concessions could be obtained from the Kemalist government, while the
British felt that richer prospects were to be obtained from the sultan.
In particular, the French were prepared to support the claims of
Standard Oil to such concessions, while the British were prepared to
support Royal-Dutch Shell. The Nationalist forces made good use of
these dissensions. After buying off the Italians and French with
economic concessions, they launched a counteroffensive against the
Greeks. Although England came to the rescue of the Greeks, it received
no support from the other Powers, while the Turks had the support of
Soviet Russia. The Turks destroyed the Greeks, burned Smyrna. and came
face-to-face with the British at Chanak. At this critical moment, the
Dominions, in answer to Curzon's telegraphed appeal, refused to support
a war with Turkey. The Treaty of Sèvres, already in tatters, had
to be discarded. A new conference at Lausanne in November 1922 produced
a moderate and negotiated treaty which was signed by the Kemalist
government on July 24, 1923. This act ended, in a formal way, the First
World War. It also took a most vital step toward establishing a new
Turkey which would serve as a powerful force for peace and stability in
the Near East. The decline of Turkey, which had continued for four
hundred years, was finally ended.
By
this Treaty of Lausanne,
Turkey gave up all non-Turkish territory except Kurdistan, losing
Arabia, Mesopotamia, the Levant, western Thrace, and some islands of
the Aegean. The capitulations were abolished in return for a promise of
judicial reform. There were no reparations and no disarmament, except
that the Straits were demilitarized and were to be open to all ships
except those of belligerents if Turkey was at war. Turkey accepted a
minorities treaty and agreed to a compulsory exchange with Greece of
Greek and Turkish minorities judged on the basis of membership in the
Greek Orthodox or Muslim religions. Under this last provision, over
1,250,000 Greeks were removed from Turkey by 1930. Unfortunately, most
of these had been urban shopkeepers in Turkey and were settled as
farmers on the un-hospitable soil of Macedonia. The Bulgarian peasants
who had previously lived in Macedonia were unceremoniously dumped into
Bulgaria where they were tinder for the sparks of a revolutionary
Bulgarian secret society called the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary
Organization (IMRO), whose chief method of political action was
assassination.
As
a result of the rising tide
of aggression in the 1930'5, the clause regarding the demilitarization
of the Straits was revoked at the Montreux Convention of July 1936.
This gave Turkey full sovereignty over the Straits, including the right
to fortify them.
All
the original peace treaties consisted of five chief parts: (a)
the Covenant of the League of Nations; (b) the
territorial provisions; (c) the disarmament
provision; (d) the reparations provisions; and (e)
penalties and guarantees. The first of these must be reserved until
later, but the others should be mentioned here.
In
theory, the territorial
provisions of the treaties were based on "self-determination," but in
fact they were usually based on other considerations: strategic,
economic, punitive, legal power, or compensation. By
"self-determination" the peacemakers usually meant "nationality," and
by "nationality" they usually meant "language," except in the Ottoman
Empire where "nationality" usually meant "religion." The six cases
where self-determination (that is, plebiscites) was actually used
showed that the peoples of these areas were not so nationalistic as the
peacemakers believed. Because in Allenstein, where Polish-speaking
people were 40 percent of the population, only 2 percent voted to join
Poland, the area was returned to Germany; in Upper Silesia, where the
comparable figures were 65 percent and 40 percent, the area was split,
the more industrial eastern portion going to Poland, while the more
rural western part was returned to Germany; in Klagenfurt, where
Slovene-speakers formed 68 percent of the population, only 40 percent
wanted to join Yugoslavia, so the area was left in Austria. Somewhat
similar results occurred in Marienwerder, but not in northern
Schleswig, which voted to join Denmark. In each case, the voters,
probably for economic reasons, chose to join the economically more
prosperous state rather than the one sharing the same language.
In
addition to the areas
mentioned, Germany had to return Alsace and Lorraine to France, give
three small districts to Belgium, and abandon the northern edge of East
Prussia around Memel to the Allied Powers. This last area was given to
the new state of Lithuania in 1924 by the Conference of Ambassadors.
The
chief territorial disputes
arose over the Polish Corridor, the Rhineland, and the Saar. The
Fourteen Points had promised to establish an independent Poland with
access to the Baltic Sea. It had been French policy, since about 1500,
to oppose any strong state in central Europe by seeking allies in
eastern Europe. With the collapse of Russia in 1917, the French sought
a substitute ally in Poland. Accordingly, Foch wanted to give all of
East Prussia to Poland. Instead, the experts (who were very pro-Polish)
gave Poland access to the sea by severing East Prussia from the rest of
Germany by creating a Polish Corridor in the valley of the Vistula.
Most of the area was Polish-speaking, and German commerce with East
Prussia was largely by sea. However, the city of Danzig, at the mouth
of the Vistula, was clearly a German city. Lloyd George refused to give
it to Poland. Instead, it was made a Free City under the protection of
the League of Nations.
The
French wished to detach
the whole of Germany west of the Rhine (the so-called Rhineland) to
create a separate state and increase French security against Germany.
They gave up their separatist agitation in return for Wilson's promise
of March 14, 1919 to give a joint Anglo-American guarantee against a
German attack. This promise was signed in treaty form on June 28, 1919,
but fell through when the United States Senate did not ratify the
agreement. Since Clemenceau had been able to persuade Foch and
Poincaré to accept the Rhine settlement only because of this
guarantee, its failure to materialize ended his political career. The
Rhineland settlement as it stood had two quite separate provisions. On
the one hand, the Rhineland and three bridgeheads on the right bank of
the Rhine were to be occupied by Allied troops for from five to fifteen
years. On the other hand the Rhineland and a zone fifty kilometers wide
along the right bank were to be permanently demilitarized and any
violation of this could be regarded as a hostile act by the signers of
the treaty. This meant that any German troops or fortifications were
excluded from this area forever. This was the most important clause of
the Treaty of Versailles. So long as it remained in effect, the great
industrial region of the Ruhr on the right bank of the Rhine, the
economic backbone of Germany's ability to wage warfare, was exposed to
a quick French military thrust from the west, and Germany could not
threaten France or move eastward against Czechoslovakia or Poland if
France objected.
Of
these two clauses, the
military occupation of the Rhineland and the bridgeheads was ended in
1930, five years ahead of schedule. This made it possible for Hitler to
destroy the second provision, the demilitarization of western Germany,
by remilitarizing the area in March 1936.
The
last disputed territorial
change of the Treaty of Versailles was concerned with the Saar Basin,
rich in industry and coal. Although its population was clearly German,
the French claimed most of it in 1919 on the grounds that two-thirds of
it had been inside the French frontiers of 1814 and that they should
obtain the coal mines as compensation for the French mines destroyed by
the Germans in 1918. They did get the mines, but the area was separated
politically from both countries to be ruled by the League of Nations
for fifteen years and then given a plebiscite. When the plebiscite was
held in 1935, after an admirable League administration, only about
2,000 out of about 528,000 voted to join France, while about go percent
wished to join Germany, the remainder indicating their desire to
continue under League rule. The Germans, as a result of this vote,
agreed to buy back the coal mines from France for goo million francs,
payable in coal over a five-year period.
The
territorial provisions of
the treaties of Saint-Germain and Trianon were such as to destroy
completely the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Austria was reduced from
115,000 square miles with 30 million inhabitants to 32,000 square miles
with 6.5 million inhabitants. To Czechoslovakia went Bohemia, Moravia,
parts of Lower Austria, and Austrian Silesia. To Yugoslavia went
Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Dalmatia. To Romania went Bukovina. To Italy
went South Tyrol, Trentino, Istria, and an extensive area north of the
Adriatic, including Trieste.
The
Treaty of Trianon reduced
Hungary from 125,000 square miles with 21 million inhabitants to 35,000
square miles with 8 million inhabitants. To Czechoslovakia went
Slovakia and Ruthenia; to Romania went Transylvania, part of the
Hungarian plain, and most of the Banat; to Yugoslavia went the rest of
the Banat, Croatia-Slavonia, and some other districts.
The
treaties of peace set the
boundaries of the defeated states but not those of the new states.
These latter were fixed by a number of treaties made in the years
following 1918. The process lcd to disputes and even to violent clashes
of arms, and some issues are still subjects of discord to the present
time.
The
most violent controversies
arose in regard to the boundaries of Poland. Of these, only that with
Germany was set by the Treaty of Versailles. The Poles refused to
accept their other frontiers as suggested by the Allies at Paris, and
by 1920 were at war with Lithuania over Vilna, with Russia over the
eastern border, with the Ukrainians over Galicia, and with
Czechoslovakia over Teschen. The struggle over Vilna began in 1919 when
the Poles took the district from the Russians but soon lost it again.
The Russians yielded it to the Lithuanians in 1920, and this was
accepted by Poland, but within three months it was seized by Polish
freebooters. A plebiscite, ordered by the League of Nations, was held
in January 1922 under Polish control and gave a Polish majority. The
Lithuanians refused to accept the validity of this vote or a decision
of the Conference of Ambassadors of March 1923, giving the area to
Poland. Instead, Lithuania continued to consider itself at war with
Poland until December 1927.
Poland
did not fare so well at
the other end of its frontier. There fighting broke out between Czech
and Polish forces over Teschen in January 1919. The Conference of
Ambassadors divided the area between the two claimants, but gave the
valuable coal mines to Czechoslovakia (July ).
Poland's
eastern frontier was
settled only after a bloody war with the Soviet Union. The Supreme
Council in December 1919 had laid down the so-called "Curzon Line" as
the eastern boundary of Polish administration, but within six months
the Polish armies had crossed this and advanced beyond Kiev. A Russia n
counterattack soon drove the Poles back, and Polish territory \vas
invaded in its turn. The Poles appealed in panic to the Supreme
Council, which was reluctant to intervene. The French, however, did not
hesitate, and sent General Weygand with supplies to defend Warsaw. The
Russian offensive was broken on the Vistula, and peace negotiations
began. The final settlement, signed at Riga in March 1921, gave Poland
a frontier 150 miles farther east than the Curzon Line and brought into
Poland many non-Polish peoples, including one million White Russians
and four million Ukrainians.
Romania
also had a dispute
with Russia arising from the Romanian occupation of Bessarabia in 1918.
In October 1920, the Conference of Ambassadors recognized Bessarabia as
part of Romania. Russia protested, and the United States refused to
accept the transfer. In view of these disturbances Poland and Romania
signed a defensive alliance against Russia in March 1921.
The
most important dispute of
this kind arose over the disposition of Fiume. This problem was acute
because one of the Great Powers was involved. The Italians had yielded
Fiume to Yugoslavia in the Treaty of London of 1915 and had promised,
in November 1918, to draw the Italian-Yugoslav boundary on lines of
nationality. Thus they had little claim to Fiume. Nevertheless, at
Paris they insisted on it, for political and economic reasons. Having
just excluded the Habsburg Empire from the Adriatic Sea, and not
wishing to see any new Power rise in its place, they did all they could
to hamper Yugoslavia and to curtail its access to the Adriatic.
Moreover, the Italian acquisition of Trieste gave them a great seaport
with no future, since it was separated by a political boundary from the
hinterland whence it could draw its trade. To protect Trieste, Italy
wanted to control all the possible competing ports in the area. The
city of Fiume itself was largely Italian, but the suburbs and
surrounding countryside were overwhelmingly Slav. The experts at Paris
wished to give Italy neither Fiume nor Dalmatia, but Colonel House
tried to overrule the experts in order to obtain Italian support for
the League of Nations in return. Wilson overruled House and issued his
famous appeal to the Italian people which resulted in the temporary
withdrawal of the Italian delegation from Paris. After their return,
the issue was left unsettled. In September 1919 an erratic Italian
poet, Gabriele D'Annunzio, with a band of freebooters, seized Fiume and
set up an independent government on a comic-opera basis. The dispute
between Italy and Yugoslavia continued with decreasing bitterness until
November 1920, when they signed a treaty at Rapallo dividing the area
but leaving Fiume itself a free city. This settlement was not
satisfactory. A group of Fascists from Italy (where this party was not
yet in office) seized the city in March 1922 and were removed by the
Italian Army three weeks later. The problem was finally settled by the
Treaty of Rome of January 1924, by which Fiume was granted to Italy,
but the suburb of Port Baros and a fifty-year lease on one of the three
harbor basins went to Yugoslavia.
These
territorial disputes are
of importance because they continued to lacerate relationships between
neighboring states until well into the period of World War II and even
later. The names of Fiume, Thrace, Bessarabia, Epirus, Transylvania,
Memel, Vilna, Teschen, the Saar, Danzig, and Macedonia were still
echoing as battle-cries of overheated nationalists twenty years after
the Peace Conference assembled at Paris. The work of that conference
had undoubtedly reduced the numbers of minority peoples, but this had
only served to increase the intensity of feeling of the minorities
remaining. The numbers of these remained large. There were over
1,000,000 Germans in Poland, 550,000 in Hungary, 3,100,000 in
Czechoslovakia, about 700,000 in Romania, 500,000 in Yugoslavia, and
250,000 in Italy. There were 450,000 Magyars in Yugoslavia, 750,000 in
Czechoslovakia, and about 1,500,000 in Romania. There were about
5,000,000 White Russians and Ukrainians in Poland and about 1,100,000
of these in Romania. To protect these minorities the Allied and
Associated Powers forced the new states of central and eastern Europe
to sign minority treaties, by which these minorities were granted a
certain minimum of cultural and political rights. These treaties were
guaranteed by the League of Nations, but there was no power to enforce
observation of their terms. The most that could be done was to issue a
public reprimand against the offending government, as was done, more
than once, for example, against Poland.
The
disarmament provisions of
the peace treaties were much easier to draw up than to enforce. It was
clearly understood that the disarmament of the defeated Powers was but
the first step toward the general disarmament of the victor nations as
well. In the case of the Germans this connection was explicitly made in
the treaty so that it was necessary, in order to keep Germany legally
disarmed, for the other signers of the treaty to work constantly toward
general disarmament after 1919 lest the Germans claim that they were no
longer bound to remain disarmed.
In
all of the treaties,
certain weapons like tanks, poisonous gas, airplanes, heavy artillery,
and warships over a certain size, as well as all international trade in
arms, were forbidden. Germany was allowed a small navy fixed in number
and size of vessels, while Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria were allowed
no navy worthy of the name. Each army was restricted in size, Germany
to 100,000 men, Austria to 30,000, Hungary to 35,000, and Bulgaria to
20,000. Moreover, these men had to be volunteers on twelve-year
enlistments, and all compulsory military training, general staffs, or
mobilization plans were forbidden. These training provisions were a
mistake, forced through by the Anglo-Americans over the vigorous
protests of the French. The Anglo-Americans regarded compulsory
military training as "militaristic"; the French considered it the
natural concomitant of universal manhood suffrage and had no objections
to its use in Germany, since it would provide only a large number of
poorly trained men; they did, however, object to the twelve-year
enlistment favored by the British, since this would provide Germany
with a large number of highly trained men who could be used as officers
in any revived German Army. On this, as in so many issues where the
French were overruled by the Anglo-Americans, time was to prove that
the French position was correct.
The
reparations provisions of
the treaties caused some of the most violent arguments at the Peace
Conference and were a prolific source of controversy for more than a
dozen years after the conference ended. The efforts of the Americans to
establish some rational basis for reparations, either by an engineering
survey of the actual damage to be repaired or an economic survey of
Germany's capacity to pay reparations, were shunted aside, largely
because of French objections. At the same time, American efforts to
restrict reparations to war damages, and not allow them to be extended
to cover the much larger total of war costs, were blocked by the
British, who would have obtained much less under damages than under
costs. By proving to the French that the German capacity to pay was, in
fact, limited, and that the French would get a much larger fraction of
Germany's payments under "damages" than under "costs," the Americans
were able to cut down on the British demands, although the South
African delegate, General Smuts, was able to get military pensions
inserted as one of the categories for which Germany had to pay. The
French were torn between a desire to obtain as large a fraction as
possible of Germany's payments and a desire to pile on Germany such a
crushing burden of indebtedness that Germany would be ruined beyond the
point where it could threaten French security again.
The
British delegation was
sharply divided. The chief British financial delegates, Lords Cunliffe
and Sumner, were so astronomically unrealistic in their estimates of
Germany's ability to pay that they were called the "heavenly twins,"
while many younger members of the delegation led by John Maynard (later
Lord) Keynes, either saw important economic limits on Germany's ability
to pay or felt that a policy of fellowship and fraternity should
incline Britain toward a lo\v estimate of Germany's obligations.
Feeling was so high on this issue that it proved impossible to set an
exact figure for Germany's reparations in the treaty itself. Instead a
compromise, originally suggested by the American John Foster Dulles,
was adopted. By this, Germany was forced to admit an unlimited,
theoretical obligation to pay but was actually bound to pay for only a
limited list of ten categories of obligations. The former admission has
gone down in history as the "war-guilt clause" (Article 231 of the
treaty). By it Germany accepted "the responsibility of Germany and her
allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and
Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a
consequence of the war imposed upon them hy the aggression of Germany
and her allies."
The
following clause, Article
232, was concerned with the reparations obligation, listing ten
categories of damages of which the tenth, concerned with pensions and
inserted hy General Smuts, represented a liability larger than the
aggregate of the preceding nine categories together. Since a
considerable period was needed for the Reparations Commission to
discover the value of these categories, the Germans were required to
begin immediate delivery to the victors of large quantities of
property, chiefly coal and timber. Only in May 1921 was the
full
reparations obligation presented to the Germans. Amounting to 132
thousand million gold marks (about 32.5 billion dollars), this bill was
accepted by Germany under pressure of a six-day ultimatum, which
threatened to occupy the Ruhr Valley.
The
reparations clauses of the other treaties were of little significance.
Austria
was unable to pay any
reparations because of the weakened economic condition of that stump of
the Habsburg Empire. Bulgaria and Hungary paid only small fractions of
their obligations before all reparations were wiped out in the
financial debacle of 1931-1932.
The
treaties made at Paris had
no enforcement provisions worthy of the name except for the highly
inadequate Rhineland clauses which we have already mentioned. It is
quite clear that the defeated Powers could be made to fulfill the
provisions of these treaties only if the coalition which had won the
war were to continue to work as a unit. This did not occur. The United
States left the coalition as a result of the Republican victory over
Wilson in the congressional elections of 1918 and the presidential
election of 1920. Italy was alienated by the failure of the treaty to
satisfy her ambitions in the Mediterranean and Africa. But these were
only details. If the Anglo-French Entente had been maintained, the
treaties could have been enforced without either the United States or
Italy. It was not maintained. Britain and France saw the world from
points of view so different that it was almost impossible to believe
that they were looking at the same world. The reason for this was
simple, although it had many complex consequences and implications.
Britain,
after 1918; felt
secure, while France felt completely insecure in the face of Germany.
As a consequence of the war, even before the Treaty of Versailles was
signed, Britain had obtained all her chief ambitions in respect to
Germany. The German Navy was at the bottom of Scapa Flow, scuttled by
the Germans themselves; the German merchant fleet was scattered,
captured, and destroyed; the German colonial rivalry w-as ended and its
areas occupied; the German commercial rivalry was crippled by the loss
of its patents and industrial techniques, the destruction of all its
commercial outlets and banking connections throughout the world, and
the loss of its rapidly growing prewar markets. Britain had obtained
these aims by December 1918 and needed no treaty to retain them.
France,
on the other hand, had
not obtained the one thing it wanted: security. In population and
industrial strength Germany was far stronger than France, and still
growing. It was evident that France had been able to defeat Germany
only hy a narrow margin in 1914-1918 and only because of the help of
Britain, Russia, Italy, Belgium, and the United States. France had no
guarantee that all these or even any of them would be at its side in
any future war with Germany. In fact, it was quite clear that Russia
and Italy would not be at its side. The refusal of the United States
and Britain to give any guarantee to France against German aggression
made it dubious that they would be ready to help either. Even if they
were prepared to come to the rescue ultimately, there was no guarantee
that France would be able to withstand the initial German assault in
any future war as she had withstood, by the barest margin, the assault
of 1914. Even if it could be withstood, and if Britain ultimately came
to the rescue, France would have to fight, once again, as in the period
1914-1918, with the richest portion of France under enemy military
occupation. In such circumstances, what guarantee would there be even
of ultimate success? Doubts of this kind gave France a feeling of
insecurity which practically became a psychosis, especially as France
found its efforts to increase its security blocked at every turn by
Britain. It seemed to France that the Treaty of Versailles, which had
given Britain everything it could want from Germany, did not give
France the one thing it wanted. As a result, it proved impossible to
obtain any solution to the two other chief problems of international
politics in the period 1919-1929. To these three problems of security,
disarmament, and reparations, we now turn.
Chapter
16—Security, 1919-1935
France
sought security after
1918 by a series of alternatives. As a first choice, it wanted to
detach the Rhineland from Germany; this was prevented by the
Anglo-Americans. As a second choice, France wanted a "League with
teeth," that is, a League of Nations with an international police force
empowered to take automatic and immediate action against an aggressor;
this was blocked by the Anglo-Americans. As compensation for the loss
of these first two choices, France accepted, as a third choice, an
Anglo-American treaty of guarantee, but this was lost in 1919 by the
refusal of the United States Senate to ratify the agreement and the
refusal of Britain to assume the burden alone. In consequence, the
French were forced back on a fourth choice—allies to the east of
Germany. The chief steps in this were the creation of a "Little
Entente" to enforce the Treaty of Trianon against Hungary in 1920-1921
and the bringing of France and Poland into this system to make it a
coalition of "satisfied Powers." The Little Entente was formed by a
series of bilateral alliances between Romania, Czechoslovakia, and
Yugoslavia. This was widened by a French-Polish Treaty (February 1921)
and a French-Czechoslovak Treaty (January 1924). This system
contributed relatively little to French security because of the
weakness of these allies (except Czechoslovakia) and the opposition of
Britain to any French pressure against Germany along the Rhine, the
only way in which France could guarantee Poland or Czechoslovakia
against Germany. In consequence, France continued its agitation both
for a British guarantee and to "put teeth" into the League of Nations.
Thus
France wanted security,
while Britain had security. France needed Britain, while Britain
regarded France as a rival outside Europe (especially in the Near East)
and the chief challenge to Britain's customary balance-of-power policy
in Europe. After 1919 the British, and even some Americans, spoke of
"French hegemony" on the Continent of Europe. The first rule of British
foreign policy for four centuries had been to oppose any hegemony on
the Continent and to do so by seeking to strengthen the second
strongest Power against the strongest; after 1919 Britain regarded
Germany as the second strongest Power and France as the strongest, a
quite mistaken view in the light of the population, industrial
productivity, and general organizations of the two countries.
Because
France lacked
security, its chief concern in every issue was political; because
Britain had security, its chief concern was economic. The political
desires of France required that Germany should be weakened; the
economic desires of Britain required that Germany should be
strengthened in order to increase the prosperity of all Europe. While
the chief political threat to France was Germany, the chief economic
and social threat to Britain was Bolshevism. In any struggle with
Bolshevist Russia, Britain tended to regard Germany as a potential
ally, especially if it were prosperous and powerful. This was the
primary concern of Lord D'Abernon, British ambassador in Berlin in the
critical years 1920-1926. On the other hand, while France was
completely opposed to the economic and social system of the Soviet
Union and could not easily forget the immense French investments which
had been lost in that country, it still tended to regard the Russians
as potential allies against any revival of Germany (although France did
not make an alliance with the Soviet Union until 1935).
Because
of its insecurity
France tended to regard the Treaty of Versailles as a permanent
settlement, wh le Britain regarded it as a temporary arrangement
subject to modification. Although dissatisfied with the treaty, France
felt that it was the best it could hope to get, especially in view of
the narrow margin by which Germany had decided to sign it, even when
faced with a worldwide coalition. Britain, which had obtained all of
her desires before the treaty was signed, had no reluctance to modify
it, although it was only in 1935 (with the Anglo-German naval
agreement) that it attempted to modify the colonial, naval, or
merchant-marine clauses from which it had benefitted. But in 1935 it
had, for more than fifteen years, been seeking to modify the clauses
from which France had benefitted.
The
French believed that peace
in Europe was indivisible, while the British believed that it was
divisible. That means that the French believed that the peace of
eastern Europe was a primary concern of the states of western Europe
and that the latter states could not allow Germany to move eastward
because that would permit her to gain strength to strike back westward.
The British believed that the peace of eastern Europe and that of
western Europe were quite separate things and that it was their concern
to maintain peace in the west but that any effort to extend this to
eastern Europe would merely involve the West in "every little squabble"
of these continually squabbling "backward" peoples and could, as
happened in 1914, make a world war out of a local dispute. The Locarno
Pacts of 1925 were the first concrete achievement of this British point
of view, as we shall see. To the French argument that Germany would get
stronger and thus more able to strike westward if allowed to grow
eastward the British usually replied that the Germans were equally
likely to become satisfied or get mired down in the great open spaces
of the East.
France
believed that Germany
could be made to keep the peace by duress, while Britain believed that
Germany could be persuaded to keep the peace by concessions. The
French, especially the political Right in France, could see no
difference between the Germans of the empire and the Germans of the
Weimar Republic: "Scratch a German and you will find a Hun," they said.
The British, especially the political Left, regarded the Germans of the
Weimar Republic as totally different from the Germans of the empire,
purified by suffering and freed from the tyranny of the imperial
autocracy; they were prepared to clasp these new Germans to their
hearts and to make any concession to encourage them to proceed on the
path of democracy and liberalism. When the British began to talk in
this fashion, appealing to high principles of international cooperation
and conciliation, the French tended to regard them as hypocrites,
pointing out that the British appeal to principles did not appear until
British interests had been satisfied and until these principles could
be used as obstacles to the satisfaction of French interests. The
British tended to reply to the French remarks about the dangers of
English hypocrisy with a few remarks of their own about the dangers of
French militarism. In this sad fashion, the core of the coalition which
had beaten Germany dissolved in a confusion of misunderstandings and
recriminations.
This
contrast between the
French and the British attitudes on foreign policy is an
oversimplification of both. About 1935 there appeared a considerable
change in both countries, and, long before that date, there were
differences between different groups within each country.
In
both Britain and France
(before 1935) there was a difference of opinion in international
politics which followed general political outlooks (and even class
lines) rather closely. In Britain, persons who were of the Left tended
to believe in revision of the Treaty of Versailles in favor of Germany,
collective security, general disarmament, and friendship with the
Soviet Union. In the same period, the Right were impatient with
policies based on humanitarianism, idealism, or friendship for the
Soviet Union, and wanted to pursue a policy of "national interest," by
which they meant emphasis on strengthening the empire, conducting an
aggressive commercial policy against outsiders, and adopting relative
isolationism in general policy with no European political commitments
except west of the Rhine (where Britain's interests were immediate).
The groups of the Left were in office in Britain for only about two
years in the twenty years 1919-1939 and then only as a minority
government (1924, 1929-1931); the groups of the Right were in power for
eighteen of these twenty years, usually with an absolute majority.
However, during these twenty years the people of Britain were generally
sympathetic to the point of view of the Left in foreign policy,
although they generally voted in elections on the basis of domestic
rather than foreign politics. This means that the people were in favor
of revision of Versailles, of collective security, of international
cooperation, and of disarmament.
Knowing
this, the British
governments of the Right began to follow a double policy: a public
policy in which they spoke loudly in support of what we have called the
foreign policy of the Left, and a secret policy in which they acted in
support of what we have called the foreign policy of the Right. Thus
the stated policy of the government and the policy of the British
people were based on support of the League of Nations, of international
cooperation, and of disarmament. Yet the real policy was quite
different. Lord Curzon, who was foreign secretary for four years
(1919-1923) called the League of Nations "a good joke"; Britain
rejected every effort of France and Czechoslovakia to strengthen the
system of collective security; while openly supporting the Naval
Disarmament Conference at Geneva (1927) and the World Disarmament
Conference (1926-1935), Britain signed a secret agreement with France
which blocked disarmament on land as well as on the sea (July 1928) and
signed an agreement with Germany which released her from her naval
disarmament (1935). After 1935 the contrast between the public policy
and the secret policy became so sharp that the authorized biographer of
Lord Halifax (foreign secretary in 1938-1940) coined the name "dyarchy"
for it. Also, after 1935, the policies of both Right and Left were
changed, the Left becoming anti-revisionist as early as 1934,
continuing to support disarmament until (in some cases) 1939, and
strengthening its insistence on collective security, while the Right
became more insistent on revisionism (by that time called
"appeasement") and opposition to the Soviet Union.
In
France the contrasts
between Right and Left were less sharp than in Britain and the
exceptions more numerous, not only because of the comparative
complexity of French political parties and political ideology, but also
because foreign policy in France was not an academic or secondary issue
but was an immediate, frightening concern of every Frenchman.
Consequently, differences of opinion, however noisy and intense, were
really rather slight. One thing all Frenchmen agreed upon: "It must not
happen again." Never again must the Hun be permitted to become strong
enough to assault France as in 1870 and in 1914. To prevent this, the
Right and the Left agreed, there were two methods: by the collective
action of all nations and by France's own military power. The two sides
differed in the order in which these two should be used, the Left
wanting to use collective action first and France's own power as a
supplement or a substitute, the Right wanting to use France's own power
first, with support from the League or other allies as a supplement. In
addition, the Left tried to distinguish between the old imperial
Germany and the new republican Germany, hoping to placate the latter
and turn its mind away from revisionism by cooperative friendship and
collective action. The Right, on the other hand, found it impossible to
distinguish one Germany from another or even one German from another,
believing that all were equally incapable of understanding any policy
but force. Accordingly, the Right wanted to use force to compel Germany
to fulfill the Treaty of Versailles, even if France had to act alone.
The
policy of the Right was
the policy of Poincaré and Barthou; the policy of the Left was
the policy of Briand. The former was used in 1918-1924 and, briefly, in
1934-1935; the latter was used in 1924-1929. The policy of the Right
failed in 1924 when Poincaré's occupation of the Ruhr in order
to force Germany to pay reparations was ended. This showed that France
could not act alone even against a weak Germany because of the
opposition of Britain and the danger of alienating world opinion.
Accordingly, France turned to a policy of the Left (1924-1929). In this
period, which is known as the "Period of Fulfillment," Briand, as
foreign minister of France, and Stresemann, as foreign minister of
Germany, cooperated in friendly terms. This period ended in 1929, not,
as is usually said, because Stresemann died and Briand fell from
office, but because of a growing realization that the whole policy of
fulfillment (1924-1929) had been based on a misunderstanding. Briand
followed a policy of conciliation toward Germany in order to win
Germany from any desire to revise Versailles; Stresemann followed his
policy of fulfillment toward France in order to win from France a
revision of the treaty. It was a relationship of cross-purposes,
because on the crucial issue (revision of Versailles) Briand stood
adamant, like most Frenchmen, and Stresemann was irreconcilable, like
most Germans.
In
France, as a result of the
failure of the policy of the Right in 1924 and of the policy of the
Left in 1929, it became clear that France could not act alone toward
Germany. It became clear that France did not have freedom of action in
foreign affairs and was dependent on Britain for its security. To win
this support, which Britain always held out as a bait but did not give
until 1939, Britain forced France to adopt the policy of appeasement of
the British Right after 1935. This policy forced France to give away
every advantage which it held over Germany: Germany was allowed to
rearm (1935); Germany was allowed to remilitarize the Rhineland (1936);
Italy was alienated (1935); France lost its last secure land frontier
(Spain, 1936-1939); France lost all her allies to the east of Germany,
including her one strong ally (Czechoslovakia, 19381939); France had to
accept the union of Austria with Germany which she had vetoed in 1931
(March 1938); the power and prestige of the League of Nations was
broken and the whole system of collective security abandoned
(1931-1939); the Soviet Union, which had allied with France and
Czechoslovakia against Germany in 1935, was treated as a pariah among
nations and lost to the anti-German coalition (1937-1939). And finally,
when all these had been lost, public opinion in England forced the
British government to abandon the Right's policy of appeasement and
adopt the old French policy of resistance. This change was made on a
poor issue (Poland, 1939) after the possibility of using the policy of
resistance had been destroyed by Britain and after France itself had
almost abandoned it.
In
France, as in Britain,
there were changes in the foreign policies of the Right and the Left
after Hitler came to power in Germany (1933). The Left became more
anti-German and abandoned Briand's policy of conciliation, while the
Right, in some sections, sought to make a virtue of necessity and began
to toy with the idea that, if Germany was to become strong anyway, a
solution to the French problem of security might be found by turning
Germany against the Soviet Union. This idea, which already had
adherents in the Right in Britain, was more acceptable to the Right
than to the Left in France, because, while the Right was conscious of
the political threat from Germany, it was equally conscious of the
social and economic threat from Bolshevism. Some members of the Right
in France even went so far as to picture France as an ally of Germany
in the assault on the Soviet Union. On the other hand, many persons of
the Right in France continued to insist that the chief, or even the
only, threat to France was from the danger of German aggression.
In
France, as in Britain,
there appeared a double policy but only after 1935, and, even then, it
was more of an attempt to pretend that France was following a policy of
her own instead of a policy made in Britain than it was an attempt to
pretend it was following a policy of loyalty to collective security and
French allies rather than a policy of appeasement. While France
continued to talk of her international obligations, of collective
security, and of the sanctity of treaties (especially Versailles), this
was largely for public consumption, for in fact from the autumn of 1935
to the spring of 1940 France had no policy in Europe independent of
Britain's policy of appeasement.
Thus
French foreign policy in
the whole period 1919-1939 was dominated by the problem of security.
These twenty years can be divided into five sub-periods as follows:
1919-1924,
Policy of the Right
1924-1929,
Policy of the Left
1929-1934,
Confusion and Transition
1934-1935,
Policy of the Right
1935-1939,
Dual Policy of Appeasement
The
French feeling that they
lacked security was so powerful in 1919 that they were quite willing to
sacrifice the sovereignty of the French state and its freedom of action
in order to get a League of Nations possessing the powers of a world
government. Accordingly, at the first meeting of the League of Nations
Committee at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the French tried to
establish a League with its own army, its own general staff, and its
own powers of police action against aggressors without the permission
of the member states. The Anglo-Americans were horrified at what they
regarded as an inexcusable example of "power politics and militarism."
They rode roughshod over the French and drew up their own draft
Covenant in which there was no sacrifice of state sovereignty and where
the new world organization had no powers of its own and no right to
take action without the consent of the parties concerned. War was not
outlawed but merely subjected to certain procedural delays in making
it, nor were peaceful procedures for settling international disputes
made compulsory but instead were merely provided for those who wished
to use them. Finally, no real political sanctions were provided to
force nations to use peaceful procedures or even to use the delaying
procedures of the Covenant itself. Economic sanctions were expected to
be used by member nations against aggressor states which violated the
delaying procedures of the Covenant, but no military sanctions could be
used except as contributed by each state itself. The League was thus
far from being a world government, although both its friends and its
enemies, for opposite reasons, tried to pretend that it was more
powerful, and more important, than it really was. The Covenant,
especially the critical articles l o- 16, had been worded by a skillful
British lawyer, Cecil Hurst, who filled it with loopholes cleverly
concealed under a mass of impressive verbiage, so that no state's
freedom of action was vitally restricted by the document. The
politicians knew this, although it was not widely publicized and, from
the beginning, those states which wanted a real international
organization began to seek to amend the Covenant, to "plug the
loopholes" in it. Any real international political organization needed
three things: (1) peaceful procedures for settling all disputes, (2)
outlawry of non-peaceful procedures for this purpose, and (3) effective
military sanctions to compel use of the peaceful procedures and to
prevent the use of warlike procedures.
The
League of Nations
consisted of three parts: (1) the Assembly of all members of the
League, meeting generally in September of each year; (2) the Council,
consisting of the Great Powers with permanent seats and a number of
Lesser Powers holding elective seats for three-year terms; and (3) the
Secretariat, consisting of an international bureaucracy devoted to all
kinds of international cooperation and having its headquarters in
Geneva. The Assembly, in spite of its large numbers and its infrequent
meetings, proved to be a lively and valuable institution, full of
hard-working and ingenious members, especially from the secondary
Powers, like Spain, Greece, and Czechoslovakia. The Council was less
effective, was dominated by the Great Powers, and spent much of its
time trying to prevent action without being too obvious about it.
Originally, it consisted of four permanent and four nonpermanent
members, the former including Britain, France, Italy, and Japan.
Germany was added in 1926; Japan and Germany withdrew in 1933; the
Soviet Union was admitted in 1934 and was expelled in 1939 after its
attack on Finland. Since the number of nonpermanent members was
increased during this period, the Council ended up in 1940 with two
permanent and eleven nonpermanent members.
The
Secretariat was slowly
built up and, by 1938, consisted of more than eight hundred persons
from fifty-two countries. Most of these were idealistically devoted to
the principles of international cooperation, and displayed considerable
ability and amazing loyalty during the brief existence of the League.
They were concerned with every type of international activity,
including disarmament, child welfare, education, the drug traffic,
slavery, refugees, minorities, the codification of international law,
the protection of wild life and natural resources, cultural
cooperation, and many others.
Attached
to the League were a
number of dependent organizations. Two, the Permanent Court of
International Justice and the International Labor Office, were
semi-autonomous. Others included the Economic and Financial
Organization, the Organization for Communications and Transit, the
International Health Organization with offices in Paris, and the
Intellectual Cooperation Organization with branches in Paris, Geneva,
and Rome.
Many
efforts were made,
chiefly by France and Czechoslovakia, to "plug the gaps in the
Covenant." The chief of these were the Draft Treaty of Mutual
Assistance (1923), the Geneva Protocol (1924), and the Locarno Pacts
(1925). The Draft Treaty bound its signers to renounce aggressive war
as an international crime and to bring military assistance to any
signer the Council of the League designated to be the victim of an
aggression. This project was destroyed in 1924 by the veto of the
British Labour government on the grounds that the agreement would
increase the burden on the British Empire without increasing its
security. The Assembly at once formulated a better agreement known as
the Geneva Protocol. This sought to plug all the gaps in the Covenant.
It bound its signers to settle international disputes by methods
provided in the treaty, defined as aggressor any state which refused to
use these peaceful procedures, bound its members to use military
sanctions against such aggressors, and ended the "veto" power in the
Council by providing that the necessary unanimity for Council decisions
could be achieved without counting the votes of the parties to the
dispute. This agreement was destroyed by the objections of a newly
installed Conservative government in London. The chief British
opposition to the Protocol came from the Dominions, especially from
Canada, which feared that the agreement might force them, at some time,
to apply sanctions against the United States. This was a very remote
possibility in view of the fact that the British Commonwealth generally
had two seats on the Council and one at least could use its vote to
prevent action even if the vote of the other was nullified by being a
party to the dispute.
The
fact that both the Draft
Treaty and the Geneva Protocol had been destroyed by Britain led to an
adverse public opinion throughout the world. To counteract this, the
British devised a complicated alternative known as the Locarno Pacts.
Conceived in the same London circles which had been opposing France,
supporting Germany, and sabotaging the League, the Locarno Pacts were
the result of a complex international intrigue in which General Smuts
played a chief role. On the face of it, these agreements appeared to
guarantee the Rhine frontiers, to provide peaceful procedures for all
disputes between Germany and her neighbors, and to admit Germany to the
League of Nations on a basis of equality with the Great Powers. The
Pacts consisted of nine documents of which four were arbitration
treaties between Germany and her neighbors (Belgium, France, Poland and
Czechoslovakia); two were treaties between France and her eastern
allies (Poland and Czechoslovakia); the seventh was a note releasing
Germany from any need to apply the sanctions clause of the Covenant
against any aggressor nation on the grounds that Germany, being
disarmed by the Treaty of Versailles, could not be expected to assume
the same obligations as other members of the League; the eighth
document v.:as a general introduction to the Pacts j and the ninth
document was the "Rhine Pact," the real heart of the agreement. This
"Rhine Pact" guaranteed the frontier between Germany and Belgium-France
against attack from either side. The guarantee was signed by Britain
and Italy, as well as by the three states directly concerned, and
covered the demilitarized condition of the Rhineland as established in
1919. This meant that if any one of the three frontier Powers violated
the frontier or the demilitarized zone, this violation would bring the
four other Powers into action against the violator.
The
Locarno Pacts were
designed by Britain to give France the security against Germany on the
Rhine which France so urgently desired and at the same time (since the
guarantee worked both ways) to prevent France from ever occupying the
Ruhr or any other part of Germany, as had been done over the violent
objections of Britain in 1923-1924. Moreover, by refusing to guarantee
Germany's eastern frontier with Poland and Czechoslovakia, Britain
established in law the distinction between peace in the east and peace
in the west, on which she had been insisting since 1919, and greatly
weakened the French alliances with Poland and Czechoslovakia by making
it almost impossible for France to honor her alliances with these two
countries or to put pressure on Germany in the west if Germany began to
put pressure on these French allies in the east, unless Britain
consented. Thus, the Locarno Pacts, which were presented at the time
throughout the English-speaking world as a sensational contribution to
the peace and stability of Europe, really formed the background for the
events of 1938 when Czechoslovakia was destroyed at Munich. The only
reason why France accepted the Locarno Pacts was that they guaranteed
explicitly the demilitarized condition of the Rhineland. So long as
this condition continued, France held a complete veto over any movement
of Germany either east or west because Germany's chief industrial
districts in the Ruhr were unprotected. Unfortunately, as we have
indicated, when the guarantee of Locarno became due in March 1936
Britain dishonored its agreement, the Rhine was remilitarized, and the
way was opened for Germany to move eastward.
The
Locarno Pacts caused
considerable alarm in eastern Europe, especially in Poland and Russia.
Poland protested violently, issued a long legal justification of her
own frontiers, sent her foreign minister to take up residence in Paris,
and signed three agreements with Czechoslovakia (ending the dispute
over Teschen, as well as a commercial treaty and an arbitration
convention). Poland was alarmed by the refusal to guarantee her
frontiers, the weakening of her alliance with France, and the special
status given to Germany within the League of Nations and on the Council
of the League (where Germany could prevent sanctions against Russia, if
Russia ever attacked Poland). To assuage this alarm a deal was made
with Poland by which this country also received a seat on the Council
of the League for the next twelve years (1926-1938).
The
Locarno Pacts and the
admission of Germany into the League also alarmed the Soviet Union.
This country from 1917 had had a feeling of insecurity and isolation
which at times assumed the dimensions of mania. For this, there was
some justification. Subject to the attacks of propaganda, diplomatic,
economic, and even military action, the Soviet Union had struggled for
survival for years. By the end of 1921, most of the invading armies had
withdrawn (except the Japanese), but Russia continued in isolation and
in fear of a worldwide anti-Bolshevik alliance. Germany, at the time,
was in similar isolation. The two outcast Powers drifted together and
sealed their friendship by a treaty signed at Rapallo in April 1922.
This agreement caused great alarm in western Europe, since a union of
German technology and organizing ability with Soviet manpower and raw
materials would make it impossible to enforce the Treaty of Versailles
and might expose much of Europe or even the world to the triumph of
Bolshevism. Such a union of Germany and Soviet Russia remained the
chief nightmare of much of western Europe from 1919 to 1939. On this
last date it was brought into existence by the actions of these same
western Powers.
In
order to assuage Russia's
alarm at Locarno, Stresemann signed a commercial treaty with Russia,
promised to obtain a special position for Germany within the League so
that it could block any passage of troops as sanctions of the League
against Russia, and signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union
(April 1926). The Soviet Union, in its turn, as a result of Locarno
signed a treaty of friendship and neutrality with Turkey in which the
latter country was practically barred from entering the League.
The
"Locarno spirit," as it
came to be called, gave rise to a feeling of optimism, at least in the
western countries. In this favorable atmosphere, on the tenth
anniversary of America's entry into the World War, Briand, the foreign
minister of France, suggested that the United States and France
renounce the use of war between the two countries. This was extended by
Frank B. Kellogg, the American secretary of state, into a multilateral
agreement by which all countries could "renounce the use of war as an
instrument of national policy." France agreed to this extension only
after a reservation that the rights of self-defense and of prior
obligations were not weakened. The British government reserved certain
areas, notably in the Middle East, where it wished to be able to wage
wars which could not be termed self-defense in a strict sense. The
United States also made a reservation preserving its right to make war
under the Monroe Doctrine. None of these reservations was included in
the text of the Kellogg-Briand Pact itself, and the British reservation
was rejected by Canada, Ireland, Russia, Egypt, and Persia. The net
result was that only aggressive war was renounced.
The
Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928)
was a weak and rather hypocritical document and advanced further toward
the destruction of international law as it had existed in 1900. We have
seen that the First World War did much to destroy the legal
distinctions between belligerents and neutrals and between combatants
and noncombatants. The Kellogg-Briand Pact took one of the first steps
toward destroying the legal distinction between war and peace, since
the Powers, having renounced the use of war, began to wage wars without
declaring them, as was done by Japan in China in 1937, by Italy in
Spain in 1936-1939, and by everyone in Korea in 1950.
The
Kellogg-Briand Pact was
signed by fifteen nations which were invited to do so, while
forty-eight nations were invited to adhere to its terms. Ultimately,
sixty-four nations (all those invited except Argentina and Brazil)
signed the pact. The Soviet Union was not invited to sign but only to
adhere. It was, however, so enthusiastic about the pact that it was the
first country of either group to ratify and, when several months passed
with no ratifications by the original signers, it attempted to put the
terms of the pact into effect in eastern Europe by a separate
agreement. Known as the Litvinoff Protocol after the Soviet foreign
minister, this agreement was signed by nine countries (Russia, Poland,
Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Lithuania, Turkey, Danzig, and Persia, but
not by Finland, which refused), although Poland had no diplomatic
relations with Lithuania and the Soviet Union had none with Romania.
The
Litvinoff Protocol was one
of the first concrete evidences of a shift in Soviet foreign policy
which occurred about 1927-1928 Previously, Russia had refused to
cooperate with any system of collective security or disarmament on the
grounds that these were just "capitalistic tricks." It had regarded
foreign relations as a kind of jungle competition and had directed its
own foreign policy toward efforts to foment domestic disturbances and
revolution in other countries of the world. This was based on the
belief that these other Powers were constantly conspiring among
themselves to attack the Soviet Union. To the Russians, internal
revolution within these countries seemed a kind of self-defense, while
the animosity of these countries seemed to them to be a defense against
the Soviet plans for world revolution. In 1927 there came a shift in
Soviet policy: "world revolution" was replaced by a policy of
"Communism in a single country" and a growing support for collective
security. This new policy continued for more than a decade and was
based on the belief that Communism in a single country could best be
secured within a system of collective security. Emphasis on this last
point increased after Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 and
reached its peak in the so-called "Popular Front" movement of 1935-1937
The
Kellogg Pact gave rise to
a proliferation of efforts to establish peaceful methods for settling
international disputes. A "General Act for the Pacific Settlement of
International Disputes" was accepted by twenty-three states and came
into force in August 1929. About a hundred bilateral agreements for the
same purpose were signed in the five years 1924-1929, compared to a
dozen or so in the five years 1919-1924. A codification of
international law was begun in 1927 and continued for several years,
but no portions of it ever came into force because of insufficient
ratifications.
The
outlawry of war and the
establishment of peaceful procedures for settling disputes were
relatively meaningless unless some sanctions could be established to
compel the use of peaceful methods. Efforts in this direction were
nullified by the reluctance of Britain to commit itself to the use of
force against some unspecified country at some indefinite date or to
allow the establishment of an international police force for this
purpose. Even a modest step in this direction in the form of an
international agreement providing financial assistance for any state
which was a victim of aggression, a suggestion first made by Finland,
was destroyed by a British amendment that it was not to go into effect
until the achievement of a general disarmament agreement. This
reluctance to use sanctions against aggression came to the forefront in
the fall of 1931 at the time of the Japanese attack on Manchuria. As a
result the "peace structure" based on Versailles, which had been
extended by so many well-intended, if usually misdirected, efforts for
twelve years, began a process of disintegration which destroyed it
completely in eight years (1931-1939).
Chapter
17—Disarmament, 1919-1935
The
failure to achieve a
workable system of collective security in the period 1919-1935
prevented the achievement of any system of general disarmament in the
same period. Obviously, countries which feel insecure are not going to
disarm. This point, however obvious, was lost on the English-speaking
countries, and the disarmament efforts of the whole period 1919-1935
were weakened by the failure of these countries to see this point and
their insistence that disarmament must precede security rather than
follow it. Thus disarmament efforts, while continuous in this period
(in accordance with the promise made to the Germans in 1919), were
stultified by disagreements between the "pacifists" and the "realists"
on procedural matters. The "pacifists," including the English-speaking
nations, argued that armaments cause wars and insecurity and that the
proper way to disarm is simply to disarm. They advocated a "direct" or
"technical" approach to the problem, and believed that armaments could
be measured and reduced by direct international agreement. The
"realists," on the other hand, including most of the countries in
Europe, led by France and the Little Entente, argued that armaments are
caused by war and the fear of war and that the proper way to disarm is
to make nations secure. They advocated an "indirect" or "political"
approach to the problem, and believed that once security had been
achieved disarmament would present no problem..
The
reasons for this
difference of opinion are to be found in the fact that the nations
which advocated the direct method, like Britain, the United States, and
Japan, already had security and could proceed directly to the problem
of disarmament, while the nations which felt insecure were bound to
seek security before they would bind themselves to reduce the armaments
they had. Since the nations with security were all naval powers, the
use of the direct method proved to be fairly effective in regard to
naval disarmament, while the failure to obtain security for those who
lacked it made most of the international efforts for disarmament on
land or in the air relatively futile.
The
history of naval
disarmament is marked by four episodes in the period between the wars:
(1) the Washington Conference of 1922; (2) the abortive Geneva
Conference of 1927; (3) the London Conference of 1930; and (4) the
London Conference of 1936.
The
Washington Conference was
the most successful disarmament conference of the inter-war period
because such a variety of issues came together at that point that it
was possible to bargain successfully. Britain wished (1) to avoid a
naval race with the United States because of the financial burden, (2)
to get rid of the Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902, which was no longer
needed in view of the collapse of both Germany and Russia, and (3) to
reduce the Japanese naval threat in the southwestern Pacific. The
United States wished (1) to get Japan out of East Asia and restore the
"open door" in China, (2) to prevent the Japanese from fortifying the
German-mandated islands which stretched across the American
communications from Hawaii to the Philippines, and (3) to reduce the
Japanese naval threat to the Philippines. Japan wanted (1) to get out
of eastern Siberia without appearing to retreat, (2) to prevent the
United States from fortifying Wake Island and Guam, its two bases on
the route from Pearl Harbor to Manila, and (3) to reduce American naval
power in the extreme western Pacific. By bargaining one of these for
another, all three Powers were able to obtain their wishes, although
this was possible only because of the goodwill between Britain and the
United States and, above all, because at that time, before the use of
fleet-tankers and the present techniques of supplying a fleet at sea,
the range of any battle fleet was limited by the position of its bases
(to which it had to return for supplies at relatively short intervals).
Probably
the key to the whole
settlement rested in the relative positions of the British and American
navies. At the end of 1918, the United States had in its battle line 16
capital ships with 168 guns of 12 to 14 inches; Britain had 42 capital
ships with 376 guns of 12 to 15 inches, but the building programs of
the two Powers would have given the United States practical equality by
1926. In order to avoid a naval race which would have made it
impossible for Britain to balance its budget or get back on the prewar
gold standard, that country gave the United States equality in capital
ships (with 15 each), while Japan was given 60 percent as much (or 9
capital ships). This small Japanese fleet, however, provided the
Japanese with naval supremacy in their home waters, because of an
agreement not to build new fortifications or naval bases within
striking distance of Japan. The same 10-10-6 ratio of capital ships was
also applied to aircraft carriers. France and Italy were brought into
the agreements by granting them one-third as much tonnage as the two
greatest naval Powers in these two categories of vessels. The two
categories themselves were strictly defined and thus limited. Capital
ships were combat vessels of from 10,000 to 35,000 tons displacement
with guns of not over 16 inches, while carriers were to be limited to
27,000 tons each with guns of no more than 6 inches. The five great
naval Powers were to have capital ships and carriers as follows:
Tons
of Number
of Tons
of
Country Ratio Capital
Ships Capital
Ships Carriers
U.S.A. 5 525,000 15 135,000
Britain 5 525,000 15 135,000
Japan 3 315,000 9 81,000
France 1.67 175,000
not
fixed 60,000
Italy 1.67 175,000
not
fixed 60,000
These
limits were to be
achieved by 1931. This required that 76 capital ships, built or
projected, be scrapped by that date. Of these the United States
scrapped 15 built and 13 building, or 28; the British Empire scrapped
20 built and 4 building, or 24; and Japan scrapped lo built and 14
building, or 24. The areas in which new fortifications in the Pacific
were forbidden included (a) all United States
possessions west of Hawaii, (b) all British
possessions east of 110° East longitude except Canada, New Zealand, and
Australia with its territories, and (c) all Japanese
possessions except the "home islands" of Japan.
Among
the six treaties and
thirteen resolutions made at Washington during the six weeks of the
conference (November 1921—February 1922) were a Nine-Power Treaty
to maintain the integrity of China, an agreement between China and
Japan over Shantung, another between the United States and Japan over
the Mandated Pacific Islands, and an agreement regarding the Chinese
customs. In consequence of these, the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of 1902 was
ended, and Japan evacuated eastern Siberia.
Efforts
to limit other
categories of vessels at Washington failed because of France. This
country had accepted equality with Italy in capital ships only on the
understanding that its possession of lesser vessels would not be
curtailed. France argued that it needed a larger navy than Italy
because it had a world empire (while Italy did not) and required
protection of its home coasts both in the Atlantic and in the
Mediterranean) (while Italy could concentrate its navy in the
Mediterranean). The same objections led both of these Powers to refuse
the American invitation to the Geneva Disarmament Conference of 1927.
The
Geneva Conference of 1927
tried to limit other categories of vessels beyond capital ships and
carriers. It failed because of a violent dispute between Britain and
the United States regarding cruisers. The United States, with few
offshore bases and a "high-seas" navy, wanted "heavy" cruisers of about
10,000 tons each, carrying 8-inch guns. The British, with many
scattered naval bases, wanted many "light" cruisers of 7,500 tons each
with 6-inch guns, and were eager to limit "heavy" cruisers in order to
increase the naval importance of their million tons of fast merchant
ships (which could be armed with 6-inch guns in an emergency). The
United States accepted the British division of cruisers into two
classes, but asked for limitation of both in accordance with the
Washington ratios and with the lowest possible maximum tonnage. Britain
wished to limit only 'heavy" cruisers, and fixed her own "absolute"
cruiser needs at 70 vessels aggregating 562,000 tons, or twice the
total suggested by the Americans. The British argued that their cruiser
needs had nothing to do with the relative size of the American cruiser
fleet, but depended on such "absolute" values as the size of the earth
and the miles of shipping lanes to be patrolled. On this point Winston
Churchill was adamant and was able to force the chief British delegate
to the Geneva Conference (Lord Robert Cecil, who wanted to compromise)
to resign from the Cabinet.
The
conference broke up in a
recriminatory atmosphere, to the great joy of the lobbyists of
shipbuilding companies and "patriotic" societies. These had harassed
the delegates throughout the conference. Three American shipbuilding
companies stood to lost contracts worth almost $54 million if the
conference had been a success, and they did not hesitate to spend part
of that sum to ensure that it would not be a success. Later they were
sued for more money by their chief lobbyist at the conference, Mr.
William B. Shearer. As a sequel to the conference, Britain signed a
secret agreement with France by which France promised to support
Britain against the United States on the cruiser and other issues, and
Britain promised to support France in preventing limitation of trained
infantry reserves at the approaching World Disarmament Conference. This
agreement, signed in July 1928, was revealed by pro-American employees
of the French Foreign Ministry to William Randolph Hearst and published
in his newspapers within two months of its signature. France deported
the Hearst reporter in Paris at once, deported Hearst himself on his
next visit to France in 1930, and published the text of the agreement
with Britain (October 1928).
The
London Naval Conference of
1930 was able to reach the agreement which Geneva had failed to
achieve. The publicity about Shearer's activities and about the
Anglo-French agreement, as well as the arrival of the world depression
and the advent of a more pacifist Labour government to office in
London, contributed to this success. Cruisers, destroyers, and
submarines were defined and limited for the three greatest naval
Powers, and certain further limitations were set in the categories
fixed at Washington. The agreements were as follows (in tons):
Typed U.
S. Britain Japan
Heavy
cruisers
with
guns over
6.1
inches 180,000 146,800 108,400
Light
cruisers
with
guns below
6.1
inches 143,500 192,200 100,450
Destroyers 150,000 150,000 105,500
Submarines 52,700 52,700 52,700
This
allowed the United States
to have 18 heavy cruisers, Britain 15, and Japan 12, while in light
cruisers the three figures would allow about 25, 35, and 18. Destroyers
were limited at 1,850 tons each with 5.l-inch guns, and submarines to
2,000 tons each with 5.l-inch guns. This settlement kept the Japanese
fleet where it was, forced Britain to reduce, and allowed the United
States to build (except in regard to submarines). Such a result could,
probably, have been possible only at a time when Japan was in financial
stringency and Britain was under a Labour government.
This
treaty left unsolved the
rivalry in the Mediterranean between Italy and France. Mussolini
demanded that Italy have naval equality with France, although his
financial straits made it necessary to limit the Italian navy. The
claim to equality on such a small basis could not be accepted by France
in view of the fact that it had two seacoasts, a worldwide empire, and
Germany's new 10,000-ton "pocket battleships" to consider. The Italian
demands were purely theoretical, as both Powers, for motives of
economy, were under treaty limits and making no effort to catch up.
France was willing to concede Italian equality in the Mediterranean
only if it could get some kind of British support against the German
Navy in the North Sea or could get a general nonaggression agreement in
the Mediterranean. These were rejected by Britain. However, Britain
succeeded in getting a French-Italian naval agreement as a supplement
to the London agreement (March 1931). By this agreement Italy accepted
a total strength of 428,000 tons, while France had a strength of
585,000 tons, the French fleet being less modern than the Italian. This
agreement broke down, at the last moment, because of the Austro-German
customs union and Germany's appropriation for a second pocket
battleship (March 1931). No evil effects emerged from the breakdown,
for both sides continued to act as if it were in force.
The
London Naval Conference of
1936 was of no significance. In 1931 the Japanese invasion of Manchuria
violated the Nine-Power Pacific Treaty of 1922. In 1933 the United
States, which had fallen considerably below the level provided in the
Washington agreement of 1922, authorized the construction of 132
vessels to bring its navy to treaty level by 1942. In 1934 Mussolini
decided to abandon orthodox financial policies, and announced a
building program to carry the Italian fleet to treaty level by 1939.
This decision was justified by a recent French decision to build two
battle cruisers to cope with Germany's three pocket battleships.
All
these actions were within
treaty limitations. In December 1934, however, Japan announced its
refusal to renew the existing treaties when they expired in 1936. The
Naval Conference called for that date met in a most unfavorable
atmosphere. On June 18, 1935, Britain had signed a bilateral agreement
with Hitler which alloy. ed Germany to build a navy up to 35 percent of
Britain's naval strength in each class and up to 100 percent in
submarines. This was a terrible blow to France, which was limited to 33
percent of the British Navy in capital ships and carriers and had to
distribute this lesser fleet on two coasts (to deal with Italy as well
as Germany) as well as around the world (to protect the French colonial
empire). This blow to France was probably the British answer to the
French alliance with the Soviet Union (May 2, 1935), the increased
German threat on the French northwest coast being intended to deter
France from honoring the alliance with the Soviet Union, if Germany
struck eastward. Thus France was once again reduced to dependence on
Britain. Germany took advantage of this situation to launch twenty-one
submarines by October 1935, and two battleships in 1936.
Under
these conditions the
Naval Conference at London in 1936 achieved nothing of importance.
Japan and Italy refused to sign. As a result, the three signers soon
were compelled to use the various escape clauses designed to deal with
any extensive building by non-signatory Powers. The maximum size of
capital ships was raised to 45,000 tons in 1938, and the whole treaty
was renounced in 1939.
The
success achieved in naval
disarmaments, limited as it was, was much greater than the success
achieved in respect to other types of armaments, because these required
that nations which felt politically insecure must be included in the
negotiations. We have already indicated the controversy between the
proponents of the "direct method" and the advocates of the "indirect
method" in disarmament. This distinction was so important that the
history of the disarmament of land and air forces can be divided into
four periods: (a) a period of direct action,
1919-1922; (b) a period of indirect action,
1922-1926; (c) a new period of direct action,
1926-1934; and (d) a period of rearmament, 1934-1939.
The
first period of direct
action was based on the belief that the victories of 1918 and the
ensuing peace treaties provided security for the victorious Powers.
Accordingly, the task of reaching a disarmament agreement was turned
over to a purely technical group, the Permanent Advisory Commission on
Disarmament of the League of Nations. This group, which consisted
exclusively of officers of the various armed services, was unable to
reach agreement on any important issues: it could not find any method
of measuring armaments or even of defining them; it could not
distinguish actual from potential armaments or defensive from
offensive. It gave answers to some of these questions, but they did not
win general assent. For example, it decided that rifles in the
possession of troops were war materials and so, also, were wood or
steel capable of being used to make such rifles, but rifles already
made and in storage were not war materials but "inoffensive objects of
peace."
As
a result of the failure of
the Permanent Advisory Commission, the Assembly of the League set up a
Temporary Mixed Commission on which only six of twenty-eight members
were officers of the armed services. This body attacked the problem of
disarmament by the indirect method, seeking to achieve security before
asking anyone to disarm. The Draft Treaty of Mutual Guarantee (1922)
and the Geneva Protocol (1924) emerged from this commission. Both of
these were, as we have said, vetoed by Britain, so that the disarmament
portions of the negotiations were never reached. The achievement of the
Locarno Pacts, however, provided, in the minds of many, the necessary
security to allow a return to the direct method. Accordingly, a
Preparatory Commission to the World Disarmament Conference was set up
in 1926 to make a draft agreement which was to be completed at a World
Disarmament Conference meeting at Geneva in 1932.
The
Preparatory Commission had
delegates from all the important countries of the world, including the
defeated Powers and the chief nonmembers of the League. It held six
sessions over three years and drew up three drafts. In general, it
encountered the same difficulties as the Permanent Advisory Committee.
This latter group, acting as a subcommittee of the Preparatory
Commission, used up 3,750,000 sheets of paper in less than six months
but still was not able to find answers to the same questions which had
baffled it earlier. The chief problems arose from political disputes,
chiefly between Britain and France. These two countries produced
separate drafts which diverged on almost every point.
The
French wanted war
potential counted but wanted trained reserves of men excluded from
limitation; the British wanted war potential excluded but wanted to
count trained reserves; the French wanted supervision by a permanent
commission to enforce fulfillment of any agreement, while the
Anglo-Americans refused all supervision. Eventually a draft was
prepared by including all divergences in parallel columns.
The
Preparatory Commission
lost more than one full session in denouncing the disarmament
suggestions of Litvinoff, the Soviet representative. His first draft,
providing for immediate and complete disarmament of every country, was
denounced by all. A substitute draft, providing that the most heavily
armed states would disarm by 50 percent, the less heavily armed by 33
percent, the lightly armed by 25 percent, and the "disarmed" by o
percent, with all tanks, airplanes, gas, and heavy artillery completely
prohibited, was also rejected without discussion, and Litvinoff was
beseeched by the chairman of the commission to show a more
"constructive spirit" in the future. After an impressive display of
such constructive spirit by other countries, a Draft Convention was
drawn up and accepted by a vote which found only Germany and the Soviet
Union in the negative (December 1930).
The
World Disarmament
Conference which considered this draft was in preparation for six years
(1926-1932) and was in session for three years (February 1932 to April
1935), yet it achieved nothing notable in the way of disarmament. It
was supported by a tremendous wave of public opinion, but the attitudes
of the various governments were becoming steadily less favorable. The
Japanese were already attacking China; the French and Germans were
deadlocked in a violent controversy, the former insisting on security
and the latter on arms equality; and the world depression was growing
steadily worse, with several governments coming to believe that only a
policy of government spending (including spending on arms) could
provide the purchasing power needed for economic revival. Once again,
the French desire for an international police force was rebuffed,
although supported by seventeen states; the British desire to outlaw
certain "aggressive" armaments (like gas, submarines, and bombing
planes) was rejected by the French, although accepted by thirty states
(including the Soviet Union and Italy).
Discussion
of these issues was
made increasingly difficult by the growing demands of the Germans. When
Hitler came to office in January 1933, he demanded immediate equality
with France, at least in "defensive" arms. This was refused, and
Germany left the conference.
Although
Britain tried, for a
time, to act as an intermediary between Germany and the Disarmament
Conference, nothing came of this, and the conference eventually
dispersed. France would make no concessions in regard to armaments
unless she obtained increased security, and this was shown to be
impossible when Britain, on February 3, 1933 (just four days after
Hitler came to office), publicly refused to make any commitments to
France beyond membership in the League and the Locarno Pacts. In view
of the verbal ambiguities or these documents and the fact that Germany
withdrew from both the League and the Disarmament Conference in October
1933, these offered little security to France. The German budget,
released in March 1934, showed an appropriation of 210 million marks
for the air force (which was forbidden entirely by Versailles) and an
increase from 345 million to 574 million marks in the appropriation for
the army. A majority of the delegates wished to shift the attention of
the Disarmament Conference from disarmament to questions of security,
but this was blocked by a group of seven states led by Britain.
Disarmament ceased to be a practical issue after 1934, and attention
should have been shifted to questions of security. Unfortunately,
public opinion, especially in the democratic countries, remained
favorable to disarmament and even to pacifism, in Britain until 1938 at
least and in the United States until 1940. This gave the aggressor
countries, like Japan, Italy, and Germany, an advantage out of all
proportion to their real strength. The rearmament efforts of Italy and
Germany were by no means great, and the successful aggressions of these
countries after 1934 were a result of the lack of will rather than of
the lack of strength of the democratic states.
The
total failure of the
disarmament efforts of 1919-1935 and the Anglo-American feeling that
these efforts handicapped them later in their conflicts with Hitler and
Japan have combined to make most people impatient with the history of
disarmament. It seems a remote and mistaken topic. That it may well be;
nevertheless, it has profound lessons today, especially on the
relationships among the military, economic, political, and
psychological aspects of our lives. It is perfectly clear today that
the French and their allies (especially Czechoslovakia) were correct in
their insistence that security must precede disarmament and that
disarmament agreements must be enforced by inspection rather than by
"good faith." That France was correct in these matters as well as in
its insistence that the forces of aggression were still alive in
Germany, although lying low, is now admitted by all and is supported by
all the evidence. Moreover, the Anglo-Americans adopted French emphasis
on the priority of security and the need for inspection in their own
disarmament discussions with the Soviet Union in the early 1960's. The
French idea that political questions (including military) are more
fundamental than economic considerations is now also accepted, even in
the United States, which opposed it most vigorously in the 1920's and
early 1930's. The fact that the secure states could have made errors
such as these in that earlier period reveals much about the nature of
human thinking, especially its proclivity to regard necessities as
unimportant when they are present (like oxygen, food, or security), but
to think of nothing else when they are lacking.
Closely
related to all this,
and another example of the blindness of experts (even in their own
areas), is the disastrous influence which economic, and especially
financial, considerations played in security, especially rearmament, in
the Long Armistice of 1919-1939. This had a double aspect. On the one
hand, balanced budgets were given priority over armaments; on the other
hand, once it was recognized that security was in acute danger,
financial considerations were ruthlessly subordinated to rearmament,
giving rise to an economic boom which showed clearly what might have
been achieved earlier if financial consideration had been subordinated
to the world's economic and social needs earlier; such action would
have provided prosperity and rising standards of living which might
have made rearming unnecessary.
Chapter
18—Reparations, 1919-1932
No
subject occupied a larger
portion of statesmen's energies than reparations during the decade
after the war. For this reason, and because of the impact which
reparations had on other issues (such as financial or economic recovery
and international amity), the history of reparations demands a certain
portion of our attention. This history can be divided into six stages,
as follows:
1.
The preliminary payments, 1919-1921
2.
The London Schedule, May 1921-September 1924
3.
The Dawes Plan, September 1924-January 1930
4.
The Young Plan, January 1930-June 1931
5.
The Hoover Moratorium, June 193 l-July 1932
6.
The Lausanne Convention, July 1932
The
preliminary payments were
supposed to amount to a total of 20,000 million marks by May 1921.
Although the Entente Powers contended that only about 8,000 million of
this had been paid, and sent Germany numerous demands and ultimatums in
regard to these payments, even going so far as to threaten to occupy
the Ruhr in March 1921 in an effort to enforce payment, the whole
matter was dropped in May when the Germans were presented with the
total reparations bill of 132,000 million marks. Under pressure of
another ultimatum, Germany accepted this bill and gave the victors
bonds of indebtedness to this amount. Of these, 82 billions were set
aside and forgotten. Germany was to pay on the other 50 billion at a
rate of 2.5 billion a year in interest and 0.5 billion a year to reduce
the total debt.
Germany
could pay these obligations only if two conditions prevailed: (a)
if it had a budgetary surplus and (b)
if it sold abroad more than it bought abroad (that is, had a favorable
balance of trade). Under the first condition there would accumulate in
the hands of the German government a quantity of German currency beyond
the amount needed for current expenses. Under the second condition,
Germany would receive from abroad an excess of foreign exchange (either
gold or foreign money) as payment for the excess of her exports over
her imports. By exchanging its budgetary surplus in marks for the
foreign-exchange surplus held by her citizens, the German government
would be able to acquire this foreign exchange and be able to give it
to its creditors as reparations. Since neither of these conditions
generally existed in the period 1921-1931, Germany could not, in fact,
pay reparations.
The
failure to obtain a
budgetary surplus was solely the responsibility of the German
government, which refused to reduce its own expenditures or the
standards of living of its own people or to tax them sufficiently
heavily to yield such a surplus. The failure to obtain a favorable
balance of trade was the responsibility equally of the Germans and of
their creditors, the Germans making little or no effort to reduce their
purchases abroad (and thus reduce their own standards of living), while
the foreign creditors refused to allow a free flow of German goods into
their own countries on the argument that this would destroy their
domestic markets for locally produced goods. Thus it can be said that
the Germans were unwilling to pay reparations, and the creditors were
unwilling to accept payment in the only way in which payments could
honestly be made, that is, by accepting German goods and services.
Under
these conditions, it is
not surprising that the London Schedule of reparations payments was
never fulfilled. This failure was regarded by Britain as proof of
Germany's inability to pay, but was regarded by France as proof of
Germany's unwillingness to pay. Both were correct, but the
Anglo-Americans, who refused to allow France to use the duress
necessary to overcome German unwillingness to pay, also refused to
accept German goods to the amount necessary to overcome German
inability to pay. As early as 1921, Britain, for example, placed a 26
percent tax on all imports from Germany. That Germany could have paid
in real goods and services if the creditors had been willing to accept
such goods and services can be seen in the fact that the real per
capita income of the German people was about one-sixth higher in the
middle 1920's than it had been in the very prosperous year 1913.
Instead
of taxing and
retrenching, the German government permitted an unbalanced budget to
continue year after year, making up the deficits by borrowing from the
Reichsbank. The result was an acute inflation. This inflation was not
forced on the Germans by the need to pay reparations (as they claimed
at the time) but by the method they took to pay reparations (or, more
accurately, to avoid payment). The inflation was not injurious to the
influential groups in German society, although it was generally ruinous
to the middle classes, and thus encouraged the extremist elements.
Those groups whose property was in real wealth, either in land or in
industrial plant, were benefitted by the inflation which increased the
value of their properties and wiped away their debts (chiefly mortgages
and industrial bonds). The German mark, which at par was worth about 20
to the pound, fell in value from 305 to the pound in August 1921 to
1,020 in November 1921. From that point it dropped to 80,000 to the
pound in January 1923, to 20 million to the pound in August 1923, and
to 20 billion to the pound in December 1923.
In
July 1922, Germany demanded
a moratorium on all cash payments of reparations for the next thirty
months. Although the British were willing to yield at least part of
this, the French under Poincaré pointed out that the Germans
had, as yet, made no real effort to pay and that the moratorium would
be acceptable to France only if it were accompanied by "productive
guarantees." This meant that the creditors should take possession of
various forests, mines, and factories of western Germany, as well as
the German customs, to obtain incomes which could be applied to
reparations. On January 9, 1923, the Reparations Commission voted 3 to
1 (with Britain opposing France, Belgium, and Italy) that Germany was
in default of her payments. Armed forces of the three nations began to
occupy the Ruhr two days later. Britain denounced this act as illegal,
although it had threatened the same thing on less valid grounds in
1921. Germany declared a general strike in the area, ceased all
reparations payments, and adopted a program of passive resistance, the
government supporting the strikers by printing more paper money.
The
area occupied was no more
than 60 miles long by 30 miles wide but contained 10 percent of
Germany's population and produced 80 percent of Germany's coal, iron,
and steel and 70 percent of her freight traffic. Its railway system,
operated by 170,000 persons, was the most complex in the world. The
occupation forces tried to run this system with only 12,500 troops and
1,380 cooperating Germans. The non-cooperating Germans tried to prevent
this, not hesitating to use murder for the purpose. Under these
conditions it is a miracle that the output of the area was brought up
to one-third its capacity by the end of 1923. German reprisals and
Allied countermeasures resulted in about 400 killed and over 2,100
wounded—most of the casualties (300 and 2,000 respectively) being
inflicted by Germans on Germans. In addition almost 150,000 Germans
were deported from the area.
The
German resistance in the
Ruhr was a great strain on Germany, both economically and financially,
and a great psychological strain on the French and Belgians. At the
same time that the German mark was being ruined, the occupying
countries were not obtaining the reparations they desired. Accordingly,
a compromise was reached by which Germany accepted the Dawes Plan for
reparations, and the Ruhr was evacuated. The only victors in the
episode u, ere the British, who had demonstrated that the French could
not use force successfully without British approval.
The
Dawes Plan, which was
largely a J. P. Morgan production, was drawn up by an international
committee of financial experts presided over by the American banker
Charles G. Dawes. It was concerned only with Germany's ability to pay,
and decided that this would reach a rate of 2.5 billion marks a year
after four years of reconstruction. During the first four years Germany
would be given a loan of $800 million and would pay a total of only
5.17 billion marks in reparations. This plan did not supersede the
German reparations obligation as established in 1921, and the
difference between the Dawes payments and the payments due on the
London Schedule were added to the total reparations debt. Thus Germany
paid reparations for five years under the Dawes Plan (1924-1929) and
owed more at the end than it had owed at the beginning.
The
Dawes Plan also
established guarantees for reparations payments, setting aside various
sources of income within Germany to provide funds and shifting the
responsibility for changing these funds from marks into foreign
exchange from the German government to an agent-general for reparations
payments who received marks within Germany. These marks were
transferred into foreign exchange only when there was a plentiful
supply of such exchange within the German foreign-exchange market. This
meant that the value of the German mark in the foreign-exchange market
was artificially protected almost as if Germany had exchange control,
since every time the value of the mark tended to fall, the
agent-general stopped selling marks. This allowed Germany to begin a
career of wild financial extravagance without suffering the
consequences which would have resulted under a system of free
international exchange. Specifically, Germany was able to borrow abroad
beyond her ability to pay, without the normal slump in the value of the
mark which would have stopped such loans under normal circumstances. It
is worthy of note that this system was set up by the international
bankers and that the subsequent lending of other people's money to
Germany was very profitable to these bankers.
Using
these American loans,
Germany's industry was largely reequipped with the most advanced
technical facilities, and almost every German municipality was provided
with a post office, a swimming pool, sports facilities, or other
nonproductive equipment. With these American loans Germany was able to
rebuild her industrial system to make it the second best in the world
by a wide margin, to keep up her prosperity and her standard of living
in spite of the defeat and reparations, and to pay reparations without
either a balanced budget or a favorable balance of trade. By these
loans Germany's creditors were able to pay their war debts to England
and to the United States without sending goods or services. Foreign
exchange went to Germany as loans, back to Italy, Belgium, France, and
Britain as reparations, and finally back to the United States as
payments on war debts. The only things wrong with the system were (a)
that it would collapse as soon as the United States ceased to lend, and
(b)
in the meantime debts were merely being shifted from one account to
another and no one was really getting any nearer to solvency. In the
period 1924-1931, Germany paid 10.5 billion marks in reparations but
borrowed abroad a total of 18.6 billion marks. Nothing was settled by
all this, but the international bankers sat in heaven, under a rain of
fees and commissions.
The
Dawes Plan was replaced by
the Young Plan at the beginning of 1930 for a variety of reasons. It
was recognized that the Dawes Plan was only a temporary expedient, that
Germany's total reparations obligation was increasing even as she paid
billions of marks, because the Dawes Plan payments were less than the
payments required by the London Schedule; that the German
foreign-exchange market had to be freed in order that Germany might
face the consequences of her orgy of borrowing, and that Germany "could
not pay" the standard Dawes payment of 2.5 billion marks a year which
was required in the fifth and following years of the Dawes Plan. In
addition, France, which had been forced to pay for the reconstruction
of her devastated areas in the period 1919-1926, could not afford to
wait for a generation or more for Germany to repay the cost of this
reconstruction through reparations payments. France hoped to obtain a
larger immediate income by "commercializing" some of Germany's
reparations obligations. Until this point all the reparations
obligations were owed to governments. By selling bonds (backed by
German's promise to pay reparations) for cash to private investors
France could reduce the debts she had incurred for reconstruction and
could prevent Britain and Germany from making further reductions in the
reparations obligations (since debts to private persons would be less
likely to be repudiated than obligations between governments).
Britain,
which had funded her
war debts to the United States at 4.6 billion dollars in 1923, was
quite prepared to reduce German reparations to the amount necessary to
meet the payments on this war debt. France, which had war debts of 4
billion dollars as well as reconstruction expenses, hoped to
commercialize the costs of the latter in order to obtain British
support in refusing to reduce reparations below the total of both
items. The problem was how to obtain German and British permission to
"commercialize" part of the reparations. In order to obtain this
permission France made a gross error in tactics: she promised to
evacuate all of the Rhineland in 1930, five years before the date fixed
in the Treaty of Versailles, in return for permission to commercialize
part of the reparations payments.
This
deal was embodied in the
Young Plan, named after the American Owen D. Young (a Morgan agent),
who served as chairman of the committee which drew up the new
agreements (February to June 1929). Twenty governments signed these
agreements in January 1930. The agreement with Germany provided for
reparations to be paid for 59 years at rates rising from I.7 billion
marks in 1931 to a peak of 2.4 billion marks in 1966 and then declining
to less than a billion marks in 1988. The earmarked sources of funds in
Germany were abolished except for 660 million marks a year which could
be "commercialized," and ail protection of Germany's foreign-exchange
position was ended by placing the responsibility for transferring
reparations from marks to foreign currencies squarely on Germany. To
assist in this task a new private bank called the Bank for
International Settlements was established in Switzerland at Basle.
Owned by the chief central banks of the world and holding accounts for
each of them, the Bank for International Settlements was to serve as "a
Central Bankers' Bank" and allow international payments to be made by
merely shifting credits from one country's account to another on the
books of the bank.
The
Young Plan, which was to
have been a final settlement of the reparations question, lasted for
less than eighteen months. The crash of the New York stock market in
October 1929 marked the end of the decade of reconstruction and opened
the decade of destruction between the two wars. This crash ended the
American loans to Germany and thus cut off the flow of foreign exchange
which made it possible for Germany to appear as if it were paying
reparations. In seven years, 1924-1931, the debt of the German federal
government went up 6.6 billion marks while the debts of German local
governments went up 11.6 billion marks. Germany's net foreign debt,
both public and private, was increased in the same period by 18.6
billion marks, exclusive of reparations. Germany could pay reparations
only so long as her debts continued to grow because only by increasing
debts could the necessary foreign exchange be obtained. Such foreign
loans almost ceased in 1930, and by 1931 Germans and others had begun a
"flight from the mark," selling this currency for other monies in which
they had greater confidence. This created a great drain on the German
gold reserve. As the gold reserve dwindled, the volume of money and
credit erected on that reserve had to be reduced by raising the
interest rate. Prices fell because of the reduced supply of money and
the reduced demand, so that it became almost impossible for the banks
to sell collateral and other properties in order to obtain funds to
meet the growing demand for money.
At
this point, in April 1931,
Germany announced a customs union with Austria. France protested that
such a union was illegal under the Treaty of Saint-Germain, by which
Austria had promised to maintain its independence from Germany. The
dispute was referred to the World Court, but in the meantime the
French, to discourage such attempts at union, recalled French funds
from both Austria and Germany. Both countries were vulnerable. On
May 8, 1931, the largest Austrian bank, the Credit-Anstalt (a
Rothschild institution), with extensive interests, almost control, in
70 percent of Austria's industry, announced that it had lost 140
million schillings (about 520 million). The true loss was over a
billion schillings, and the bank had really been insolvent for years.
The Rothschilds and the Austrian government gave the Credit-Anstalt 160
million to cover the loss, but public confidence had been destroyed. A
run began on the bank. To meet this run the Austrian banks called in
all the funds they had in German banks. The German banks began to
collapse. These latter began to call in all their funds in London. The
London banks began to fall, and gold flowed outward. On September 2lst
England was forced off the gold standard. During this crisis the
Reichsbank lost 200 million marks of its gold reserve and foreign
exchange in the first week of June and about 1,000 million in the
second week of June. The discount rate was raised step by step to 15
percent without stopping the loss of reserves but destroying the
activities of the German industrial system almost completely.
Germany
begged for relief on
her reparations payments, but her creditors were reluctant to act
unless they obtained similar relief on their war-debt payments to the
United States. The United States had an understandable reluctance to
become the end of a chain of repudiation, and insisted that there was
no connection between war debts and reparations (which was true) and
that the European countries should be able to pay war debts if they
could find money for armaments (which was not true). When Secretary of
the Treasury Mellon, who was in Europe, reported to President Hoover
that unless relief was given to Germany immediately on her public
obligations, the whole financial system of the country would collapse
with very great loss to holders of private claims against Germany, the
President suggested a moratorium on inter-governmental debts for one
year. Specifically, America offered to postpone all payments owed to it
for the year following July 1, 1931, if its debtors would extend the
same privilege to their debtors.
Acceptance
of this plan by the
many nations concerned was delayed until the middle of July by French
efforts to protect the payments on commercialized reparations and to
secure political concessions in return for accepting the moratorium. It
sought a renunciation of the Austro-German customs union, suspension of
building on the second pocket battleship, acceptance by Germany of her
eastern frontiers, and restrictions on training of "private" military
organizations in Germany. These demands were rejected by the United
States, Britain, and Germany, but during the delay the German crisis
became more acute. The Reichsbank had its worst run on July 7th; on the
following day the North German Wool Company failed with a loss of 200
million marks; this pulled down the Schröder Bank (with a loss of
24 million marks to the city of Bremen where its office was) and the
Darmstädter Bank (one of Germany's "Big Four Banks") which lost 20
million in the Wool Company. Except for a credit of 400 million marks
from the Bank for International Settlements and a "standstill
agreement" to renew all short-term debts as they came due, Germany
obtained little assistance. Several committees of international bankers
discussed the problem, but the crisis became worse, and spread to
London.
By
November 1931 all the
European Powers except France and her supporters were determined to end
reparations. At the Lausanne Conference of June 1932 German reparations
were cut to a total of only 3 billion marks, but the agreement was
never ratified because of the refusal of the United States Congress to
cut war debts equally drastically. Technically this meant that the
Young Plan was still in force, but no real effort was made to restore
it and, in 1933, Hitler repudiated all reparations. By that date,
reparations, which had poisoned international relations for so many
years, were being swallowed up in other, more terrible, problems.
Before
we turn to the
background of these other problems, we should say a few words about the
question of how much was paid in reparations or if any reparations were
ever paid at all. The question arose because of a dispute regarding the
value of the reparations paid before the Dawes Plan of 1924. From 1924
to 1931 the Germans paid about 10.5 billion marks. For the period
before 1924 the German estimate of reparations paid is 56,577 billion
marks, while the Allied estimate is 10,426 billion. Since the German
estimate covers everything that could possibly be put in, including the
value of the naval vessels they themselves scuttled in 1918, it cannot
be accepted; a fair estimate would be about 30 billion marks for the
period before 1924 or about 40 billion marks for reparations as a whole.
It
is sometimes argued that
the Germans really paid nothing on reparations, since they borrowed
abroad just as much as they ever paid on reparations and that these
loans were never paid. This is not quite true, since the total of
foreign loans w as less than 19 billion marks, while the Allies' own
estimate of total reparations paid was over 21 billion marks. However,
it is quite true that after 1924 Germany borrowed more than it paid in
reparations, and thus the real payments on these obligations were all
made before 1924. Moreover, the foreign loans which Germany borrowed
could never have been made but for the existence of the reparations
system. Since these loans greatly strengthened Germany hy rebuilding
its industrial plant, the burden of reparations as a whole on Germany's
economic system was very slight.
Part Seven—Finance, Commercial and Business
Activity: 1897-1947
Chapter
19—Reflation and Inflation, 1897-1925
We
have already seen that
valiant efforts were made in the period 1919-1929 to build up an
international political order quite different from that which had
existed in the nineteenth century. On the basis of the old order of
sovereignty and international law, men attempted, without complete
conviction of purpose, to build a new international order of collective
security....
For
these reasons, a real
understanding of the economic history of twentieth century Europe is
imperative to any understanding of the events of the period. Such an
understanding will require a study of the history of finance, commerce,
and business activity, of industrial organization, and of agriculture.
The first three of these will be considered in this chapter from the
beginning of the twentieth century to the establishment of the
pluralist economy about 1947.
The
whole of this half-century may be divided into six subdivisions, as
follows:
1.
Reflation, 1897-1914
2.
Inflation, 1914-1925
3.
Stabilization, 1922-1930
4.
Deflation, 1927-1936
5.
Reflation, 1933-1939
6.
Inflation, 1939-1947
These
periods have different
dates in different countries, and thus overlap if we take the widest
periods to include all important countries. But in spite of the
difference in dates, these periods occurred in almost every country and
in the same order. It should also be pointed out that these periods
were interrupted by haphazard secondary movements. Of these secondary
movements, the chief were the depression of 1921-1922 and the recession
of 1937-1938, both periods of deflation and declining economic activity.
The Financial
Capitalists At Their Worst
Prices
had been rising slowly
from about 1897 because of the increased output of gold from South
Africa and Alaska, thus alleviating the depressed conditions and
agricultural distress which had prevailed, to the benefit of financial
capitalists, from 1873. The outbreak of war in 1914 showed these
financial capitalists at their worst, narrow in outlook, ignorant, and
selfish, while proclaiming, as usual, their total devotion to the
social good. They generally agreed that the war could not go on for
more than six to ten months because of the "limited financial
resources" of the belligerents (by which they meant gold reserves).
This idea reveals the fundamental misunderstanding of the nature and
role of money on the part of the very persons who were reputed to be
experts on the subject. Wars, as events have proved since, are not
fought with gold or even with money, but by the proper organization of
real resources.
The
International Bankers Devise a Secret
Scheme to
Enrich Themselves
The
attitudes of bankers were
revealed most clearly in England, where every move was dictated by
efforts to protect their own position and to profit from it rather than
by considerations of economic mobilization for war or the welfare of
the British people. The outbreak of war on August 4, 1914, found the
British banking system insolvent in the sense that its funds, created
by the banking system for profit and rented out to the economic system
to permit it to operate, could not be covered by the existing volume of
gold reserves or by collateral which could be liquidated rapidly.
Accordingly, the bankers secretly devised a scheme by which their
obligations could be met by fiat money (so-called Treasury Notes), but,
as soon as that crisis was over, they then insisted that the government
must pay for the war without recourse to fiat money (which was always
damned by bankers as immoral), but by taxation and by borrowing at high
interest rates from bankers. The decision to use Treasury Notes to
fulfill the bankers' liabilities was made as early as Saturday, July
25, 1914, by Sir John Bradbury (later Lord Bradbury) and Sir Frederick
Atterbury at the latter's home. The first Treasury Notes were run off
the presses at Waterlow and Sons the following Tuesday, July 28th, at a
time when most politicians believed that Britain would stay out of the
war. The usual Bank Holiday at the beginning of August was extended to
three days during which it was announced that the Treasury Notes,
instead of gold, would be used for bank payments. The discount rate was
raised at the Bank of England from 3 percent to 10 percent to prevent
inflation, a figure taken merely because the traditional rule of the
bank stated that a lo percent bank rate would draw gold out of the
ground itself, and gold payments need be suspended only when a 10
percent rate failed.
Governments
Accept the Secret Plan of the Bankers
At
the outbreak of the war,
most of the belligerent countries suspended gold payments and, to
varying degrees, accepted their bankers' advice that the proper way to
pay for the war was by a combination of bank loans with taxation of
consumption. The period within which, according to the experts, the war
must cease because of limited financial resources eventually passed,
and the fighting continued more vigorously than ever. The governments
paid for it in various ways: by taxation, by fiat money, by borrowing
from banks (which created credit for the purpose), and by borrowing
from the people by selling war bonds to them. Each of these methods of
raising money had a different effect upon the two chief financial
consequences of the war. These were inflation and public debt. The
effects of the four ways of raising money upon these two can be seen
from the following table:
a.
Taxation gives no inflation and no debt.
b.
Fiat money gives inflation and no debt.
c.
Bank credit gives inflation and debt.
d.
Sales of bonds give no inflation but give debt.
Paying for
the War
It
would appear from this
table that the best way to pay for the war would be by taxation, and
the worst way would be by bank credit. However, taxation sufficient to
pay for a major war would have such a severe deflationary effect upon
prices that economic production would not increase enough or fast
enough. Any rapid increase in production is spurred by a small amount
of inflation which provides the impetus of unusual profits to the
economic system. Increase in public debt, on the other hand,
contributes little of value to the effort toward economic mobilization.
From
this point of view, it is
not easy to say what method of financing a war is best. Probably the
best is a combination of the four methods mixed in such a way that at
the end there is a minimum of debt and no more inflation than was
necessary to obtain complete and rapid economic mobilization. This
would probably involve a combination of fiat money and taxation with
considerable sales of bonds to individuals, the combination varying at
different stages in the mobilization effort.
At the End of
the War the Governments Are
in Debt to
the Bankers
In
the period 1914-1918, the
various belligerents used a mixture of these four methods, but it was a
mixture dictated by expediency and false theories, so that at the end
of the war all countries found themselves with both public debts and
inflation in amounts in no wise justified by the degree of economic
mobilization which had been achieved. The situation was made worse by
the fact that in all countries prices continued to rise, and in most
countries public debts continued to rise long after the Armistice of
1918.
The
causes of the wartime
inflation are to be found in both financial and economic spheres. In
the financial sphere, government spending was adding tremendous amounts
of money to the financial community, largely to produce goods which
would never be offered for sale. In the economic sphere, the situation
was different in those countries which were more completely mobilized
than in those which were only partly mobilized. In the former, real
wealth was reduced by the diversion of economic resources from making
such wealth to making goods for destruction. In the others, the total
quantity of real wealth may not have been seriously reduced (since much
of the resources utilized in making goods for destruction came from
resources previously unused, like idle mines, idle factories, idle men,
and so on) but the increase in the money supply competing for the
limited amounts of real wealth gave drastic rises in prices.
The Financial
Leaders Use Deceptive Methods
While
prices in most countries
rose 200 to 300 percent and public debts rose 1,000 percent, the
financial leaders tried to keep up the pretense that the money of each
country was as valuable as it had ever been and that as soon as the war
was ended the situation existing in 1914 would be restored. For this
reason they did not openly abandon the gold standard. Instead, they
suspended certain attributes of the gold standard and emphasized the
other attributes which they tried to maintain. In most countries,
payments in gold and export of gold were suspended, but every effort
was made to keep gold reserves up to a respectable percentage of notes,
and exchanges were controlled to keep them as near parity as possible.
These attributes were achieved in some cases by deceptive methods. In
Britain, for example, the gold reserve against notes fell from 52
percent to 18 percent in the month July-August 1914; then the situation
was concealed, partly by moving assets of local banks into the Bank of
England and using them as reserves for both, partly by issuing a new
kind of notes (called Currency Notes) which had no real reserve and
little gold backing. In the United States the percentage of reserves
required by law in commercial banks was reduced in 1914, and the
reserve requirements both for notes and deposits were cut in June 1917;
a new system of "depositary banks" was set up which required no
reserves against government deposits created in them in return for
government bonds. Such efforts were made in all countries, but
everywhere the ratio of gold reserves to notes fell drastically during
the war: in France from 60 percent to 11 percent; in Germany from 59
percent to 10 percent; in Russia from 98 percent to 2 percent; in Italy
from 60 percent to 13 percent; in Britain from 53 percent to 32 percent.
Inflation and
Public Debts Continue after the War
The
inflation and increase in
public debts continued after the war ended. The causes for this were
complicated, and varied from country to country. In general, (1) price
fixing and rationing regulations were ended too soon, before the output
of peacetime goods had risen to a level high enough to absorb the
accumulated purchasing power in the hands of consumers from their
efforts in war production; thus, the slowness of reconversion from war
production to peace production caused a short supply at a time of high
demand; (2) the Allied exchanges, which had been controlled during the
war, were unpegged in March 1919 and at once fell to levels revealing
the great price disequilibrium between countries; (3) purchasing power
held back during the war suddenly came into the market; (4) there was
an expansion of bank credit because of postwar optimism; (5) budgets
remained out of balance because of reconstruction requirements (as in
France or Belgium), reparations (as in Germany), demobilization
expenses (as in the United States, Italy, and so on); and (6)
production of peacetime goods was disrupted by revolutions (as in
Hungary, Russia, and so on) or strikes (as in the United States, Italy,
France, and so on).
Postwar
Inflation Had Evil Results
Unfortunately,
this postwar
inflation, which could have accomplished much good (by increasing
output of real wealth) was wasted (by increasing prices of existing
goods) and had evil results (by destroying capital accumulations and
savings, and overturning economic class lines). This failure was caused
by the fact that the inflation, though unwanted everywhere, was
uncontrolled because few persons in positions of power had the courage
to take the steps necessary to curtail it. In the defeated and
revolutionary countries (Russia, Poland, Hungary, Austria, and
Germany), the inflation went so far that the former monetary units
became valueless, and ceased to exist. In a second group of countries
(like France, Belgium, and Italy), the value of the monetary unit was
so reduced that it became a different thing, although the same name was
still used. In a third group of countries (Britain, the United States,
and Japan), the situation was kept under control.
Public Debt
and Economic Depression in America
As
far as Europe was concerned, the
intensity of the inflation increased as one moved geographically from
west to east. Of the three groups of countries above, the second
(moderate inflation) group was the most fortunate. In the first
(extreme inflation) group the inflation wiped out all public debts, all
savings, and all claims on wealth, since the monetary unit became
valueless. In the moderate-inflation group, the burden of the public
debt was reduced, and private debts and savings were reduced by the
same proportion. In the United States and Britain the effort to fight
inflation took the form of a deliberate movement toward deflation. This
preserved savings but increased the burden of the public debt and gave
economic depression.
Chapter
20—The Period of Stabilization, 1922-1930
As
soon as the war was
finished, governments began to turn their attention to the problem of
restoring the prewar financial system. Since the essential element in
that system was believed to be the gold standard with its stable
exchanges, this movement was called "stabilization." Because of their
eagerness to restore the prewar financial situation, the "experts"
closed their eyes to the tremendous changes which had resulted from the
war. These changes were so great in production, in commerce, and in
financial habits that any effort to restore the prewar conditions or
even stabilize on the gold standard was impossible and inadvisable.
Instead of seeking a financial system adapted to the new economic and
commercial world which had emerged from the war, the experts tried to
ignore this world, and established a financial system which looked,
superficially, as much like the prewar system as possible. This system,
however, was not the prewar system. Neither was it adapted to the new
economic conditions. When the experts began to have vague glimmerings
of this last fact, they did not begin to modify their goals, but
insisted on the same goals, and voiced incantations and exhortations
against the existing conditions which made the attainment of their
goals impossible.
These
changed economic
conditions could not be controlled or exorcised by incantations. They
were basically not results of the war at all, but normal outcomes of
the economic development of the world in the nineteenth century. All
that the war had done was to speed up the rate of this development. The
economic changes which in 1925 made it so difficult to restore the
financial system of 1914 were already discernible in 1890 and clearly
evident by 1910.
Britain's
Supremacy as the Financial Center of the
World Is
Threatened
The
chief item in these
changes was the decline of Britain. What had happened was that the
Industrial Revolution was spreading beyond Britain to Europe and the
United States and by 1910 to South America and Asia. As a result, these
areas became less dependent on Britain for manufactured goods, less
eager to sell their raw materials and food products to her, and became
her competitors both in selling to and in buying from those colonial
areas to which industrialism had not yet spread. By 1914 Britain's
supremacy as financial center, as commercial market, as creditor, and
as merchant shipper was being threatened. A less obvious threat arose
from long-run shifts in demand—shifts from the products of heavy
industry to the products of more highly specialized branches of
production (like chemicals), from cereals to fruits and dairy products,
from cotton and wool to silk and rayon, from leather to rubber, and so
on. These changes presented Britain with a fundamental
choice—either to yield her supremacy in the world or reform her
industrial and commercial system to cope with the new conditions. The
latter was difficult because Britain had allowed her industrial system
to become lopsided under the influence of free trade and international
division of labor. Over half the employed persons in Britain were
engaged in the manufacture of textiles and ferrous metals. Textiles
accounted for over one-third of her exports, and textiles, along with
iron and steel, for over one-half. At the same time, newer industrial
nations (Germany, the United States, and Japan) were growing rapidly
with industrial systems better adapted to the trend of the times; and
these were also cutting deeply into Britain's supremacy in merchant
shipping.
America
Becomes the World's Greatest Creditor
At
this critical stage in
Britain's development, the World War occurred. This had a double result
as far as this subject is concerned. It forced Britain to postpone
indefinitely any reform of her industrial system to adjust it to more
modern trends; and it speeded up the development of these trends so
that what might have occurred in twenty years was done instead in five.
In the period 1910-1920, Britain's merchant fleet fell by 6 percent in
number of vessels, while that of the United States went up 57 percent,
that of Japan up 130 percent, and that of the Netherlands up 58
percent. Her position as the world's greatest creditor was lost to the
United States, and a large quantity of good foreign credits was
replaced by a smaller amount of poorer risks. In addition, she became a
debtor to the United States to the amount of over $4 billion. The
change in the positions of the two countries can be summarized briefly.
The war changed the position of the United States in respect to the
rest of the world from that of a debtor owing about $3 billion to that
of a creditor owed $4 billion. This does not include intergovernmental
debts of about $10 billion owed to the United States as a result of the
war. At the same time, Britain's position changed from a creditor owed
about $18 billion to a creditor owed about $13.5 billion. In addition,
Britain was owed about $8 billion in war debts from her Allies and an
unknown sum in reparations from Germany, and owed to the United States
war debts of well over 54 billion. Most of these war debts and
reparations were sharply reduced after 1920, but the net result for
Britain was a drastic change in her position in respect to the United
States.
Modification
of the Basic Economic Organization of the World
The
basic economic
organization of the world was modified in other ways. As a result of
the war, the old organization of relatively free commerce among
countries specializing in different types of production was replaced by
a situation in which a larger number of countries sought economic
self-sufficiency by placing restrictions on commerce. In addition,
productive capacity in both agriculture and industry had been increased
by the artificial demand of the war period to a degree far beyond the
ability of normal domestic demand to buy the products of that capacity.
And, finally, the more backward areas of Europe and the world had been
industrialized to a great degree and were unwilling to fall back to a
position in which they would obtain industrial products from Britain,
Germany, or the United States in return for their raw materials and
food. This refusal was made more painful for both sides by the fact
that these backward areas had increased their outputs of raw materials
and food so greatly that the total could hardly have been sold even if
they had been willing to buy all their industrial products from their
prewar sources. These prewar sources in turn had increased their
industrial capacity so greatly that the product could hardly have been
sold if they had been able to recapture entirely all their prewar
markets. The result was a situation where all countries were eager to
sell and reluctant to buy, and sought to achieve these mutually
irreconcilable ends by setting up subsidies and bounties on exports,
tariffs, and restrictions on imports, with disastrous results on world
trade. The only sensible solution to this problem of excessive
productive capacity would have been a substantial rise in domestic
standards of living, but this would have required a fundamental
reapportionment of the national income so that claims to the product of
the excess capacity would go to those masses eager to consume, rather
than continue to go to the minority desiring to save. Such a reform was
rejected by the ruling groups in both "advanced" and "backward"
countries, so that this solution was reached only to a relatively small
degree in a relatively few countries (chiefly the United States and
Germany in the period 1925-1929)
International
Bankers Began to Set Gold Aside
Changes
in the basic
productive and commercial organization of the world in the period
1914-1919 were made more difficult to adjust by other less tangible
changes in financial practices and business psychology. The spectacular
postwar inflations in eastern Europe had intensified the traditional
fear of inflation among bankers. In an effort to stop rises in prices
which might become inflationary, bankers after 1919 increasingly sought
to "sterilize" gold when it flowed into their country. That is, they
sought to set it aside so that it did not become part of the monetary
system. As a result, the unbalance of trade which had initiated the
flow of gold was not counteracted by price changes. Trade and prices
remained unbalanced, and gold continued to flow. Somewhat similar was a
spreading fear of decreasing gold reserves, so that when gold began to
flow out of a country as a result of an unfavorable balance of
international payments, bankers increasingly sought to hinder the flow
by restrictions on gold exports. With such actions the unfavorable
balance of trade continued, and other countries were inspired to take
retaliatory actions. The situation was also disturbed by political
fears and by the military ambitions of certain countries, since these
frequently resulted in a desire for self-sufficiency (autarchy) such as
could be obtained only by use of tariffs, subsidies, quotas, and trade
controls. Somewhat related to this was the widespread increase in
feelings of economic, political, and social insecurity. This gave rise
to "flights of capital"—that is, to panic transfers of holdings
seeking a secure spot regardless of economic return. Moreover, the
situation was disturbed by the arrival in the foreign-exchange market
of a very large number of relatively ignorant speculators. In the
period before 1914 speculators in foreign exchange had been a small
group of men whose activities were based on long experience with the
market and had a stabilizing effect on it. After 1919 large numbers of
persons with neither knowledge nor experience began to speculate in
foreign exchange. Subject to the influence of rumors, hearsay, and mob
panic, their activities had a very disturbing effect on the markets.
Finally, within each country, the decline in competition arising from
the growth of labor unions, cartels, monopolies, and so on, made prices
less responsive to flows of gold or exchange in the international
markets, and, as a result, such flows did not set into motion those
forces which would equalize prices between countries, curtail flows of
gold, and balance flows of goods.
Most
Countries Leave the Gold Standard
As
a result of all these
factors, the system of international payments which had worked ...
before 1914 worked only haltingly after that date, and practically
ceased to work at all after 1930. The chief cause of these factors was
that neither goods nor money obeyed purely economic forces and did not
move as formerly to the areas in which each was most valuable. The
chief result was a complete mal-distribution of gold, a condition which
became acute after 1928 and which by 1933 had forced most countries off
the gold standard.
Modifications
of productive
and commercial organization and of financial practices made it almost
impossible after 1919 to restore the financial system of 1914. Yet this
is what was attempted. Instead of seeking to set up a new financial
organization adapted to the modified economic organization, bankers and
politicians insisted that the old prewar system should be restored.
These efforts were concentrated in a determination to restore the gold
standard as it had existed in 1914.
The Money
Power Seeks to Create a World System of Financial
Control in
Private Hands Able to Dominate Every Nation on Earth
In
addition to these pragmatic goals, the
powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing
less than to create a world system of financial control in private
hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the
economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a
feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert,
by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and
conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for
International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned
and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves
private corporations. Each central bank, in the hands of men
like
Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Benjamin Strong of the New York
Federal Reserve Bank, Charles Rist of the Bank of France, and Hjalmar
Schacht of the Reichsbank, sought to dominate its government by its
ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to
influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to
influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the
business world.
International
Bankers Seek and Make Agreements on
All the Major
Financial Problems of the World
In
each country the power
of the central bank rested largely on its control of credit and money
supply. In the world as a whole the power of the central bankers rested
very largely on their control of loans and of gold flows. In
the
... system, these central bankers were able to mobilize resources to
assist each other through the B.I.S., where payments between central
banks could be made by bookkeeping adjustments between the accounts
which the central banks of the world kept there. The B.I.S.
as a
private institution was owned by the seven chief central banks and was
operated by the heads of these, who together formed its governing board.
Each of these kept a substantial deposit at the B.I.S., and
periodically settled payments among themselves (and thus between the
major countries of the world) by bookkeeping in order to avoid
shipments of gold. They made agreements on all the major
financial
problems of the world, as well as on many of the economic and political
problems, especially in reference to loans, payments, and the economic
future of the chief areas of the globe.
The Bank for
International Settlements Becomes the Mechanism for Allowing the
Three
Financial Centers of the World to Act As One
The
B.I.S. is generally
regarded as the apex of the structure of financial capitalism whose
remote origins go back to the creation of the Bank of England in 1694
and the Bank of France in 1803. As a matter of fact its
establishment in 1929 was rather an indication that the centralized
world financial system of 1914 was in decline. It was set up
rather
to remedy the decline of London as the world's financial center by
providing a mechanism by which a world with three chief financial
centers in London, New York, and Paris could still operate as one. The
B.I.S. was a ... effort to cope with the problems arising from the
growth of a number of centers. It was intended to be the world cartel
of ever-growing national financial powers by assembling the nominal
heads of these national financial centers.
Montagu
Norman Was the Commander-in-Chief of the
World System
of Banking Control
The
commander in chief of
the world system of banking control was Montagu Norman, Governor of the
Bank of England, who was built up by the private bankers to a position
where he was regarded as an oracle in all matters of government and
business. In government the power of the Bank of England was
a
considerable restriction on political action as early as 1819 but an
effort to break this power by a modification of the bank's charter in
1844 failed. In 1852, Gladstone, then chancellor of the
Exchequer
and later prime minister, declared, "The hinge of the whole situation
was this: the government itself was not to be a substantive power in
matters of Finance, but was to leave the Money Power supreme and
unquestioned."
The Currency
Dictator of Europe
This
power of the Bank of England and of its governor was admitted by most
qualified observers. In
January, 1924, Reginald McKenna, who had been chancellor of the
Exchequer in 1915-1916, as chairman of the board of the Midland Bank
told its stockholders: "I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like
to be told that the banks can, and do, create money.... And they who
control the credit of the nation direct the policy of Governments and
hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people."
In
that same year, Sir Drummond Fraser, vice-president of the Institute of
Bankers, stated, "The Governor of the Bank of England must be the
autocrat who dictates the terms upon which alone the Government can
obtain borrowed money." On September 26, 1921, The Financial
Times wrote,
"Half a dozen men at the top of the Big Five Banks could upset the
whole fabric of government finance by refraining from renewing Treasury
Bills." Vincent Vickers, who had been a director of the bank
for
nine years, said, "Since 1919 the monetary policy of the Government has
been the policy of the Bank of England and the policy of the Bank of
England has been the policy of Mr. Montagu Norman." On November Il,
1927, the Wall Street Journal called Mr. Norman
"the currency
dictator of Europe." This fact was admitted by Mr. Norman himself
before the court of the bank on March 21, 1930, and before the
Macmillan Committee five days later.
Montagu
Norman's position may
be gathered from the fact that his predecessors in the governorship,
almost a hundred of them, had served two-year terms, increased rarely,
in time of crisis, to three or even four years. But Norman held the
position for twenty-four years (1920-1944), during which he became the
chief architect of the liquidation of Britain's global preeminence.
Norman Viewed
Governments and Democracy As
Threats to
the Money Power
Norman
was a strange man whose
mental outlook was one of successfully suppressed hysteria or even
paranoia. He had no use for governments and feared democracy. Both of
these seemed to him to be threats to private banking, and thus to all
that was proper and precious in human life. Strong-willed, tireless,
and ruthless, he viewed his life as a kind of cloak-and-dagger struggle
with the forces of ... [sound] money .... When he rebuilt the Bank of
England, he constructed it as a fortress prepared to defend itself
against any popular revolt, with the sacred gold reserves hidden in
deep vaults below the level of underground waters which could be
released to cover them by pressing a button on the governor's desk. For
much of his life Norman rushed about the world by fast steamship,
covering tens of thousands of miles each year, often traveling
incognito, concealed by a black slouch hat and a long black cloak,
under the assumed name of "Professor Skinner." His embarkations and
debarkations onto and off the fastest ocean liners of the day,
sometimes through the freight hatch, were about as unobserved as the
somewhat similar passages of Greta Garbo in the same years, and were
carried out in a similarly "sincere" effort at self-effacement.
Montagu
Norman's Devoted Colleague in New York City
Norman
had a devoted colleague in Benjamin Strong, the first
governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Strong owed his career to the favor of the Morgan Bank, especially of
Henry P. Davison, who made him secretary of the Bankers Trust Company
of New York (in succession to Thomas W. Lamont) in 1904, used him as
Morgan's agent in the banking rearrangements following the crash of
1907, and made him vice-president of the Bankers Trust (still in
succession to Lamont) in 1909. He became governor of the Federal
Reserve Bank of New York as the joint nominee of Morgan and of Kuhn,
Loeb, and Company in 1914. Two years later, Strong met Norman for the
first time, and they at once made an agreement to work in cooperation
for the financial practices they both revered.
These
financial practices were
explicitly stated many times in the voluminous correspondence between
these two men and in many conversations they had, both in their work
and at their leisure (they often spent their vacations together for
weeks, usually in the south of France).
Norman and
Strong Seek to Operate Central Banks Free from
Any Political
Control
In
the 1920's, they were
determined to use the financial power of Britain and of the United
States to force all the major countries of the world to go on the gold
standard and to operate it through central banks free from all
political control, with all questions of international
finance to be settled by agreements by such central banks without
interference from governments.
Norman and
Strong Were Mere Agents of the Powerful Bankers
Who Remained
Behind the Scenes and Operated in Secret
It
must not be felt that
these heads of the world's chief central banks were themselves
substantive powers in world finance. They were not. Rather, they were
the technicians and agents of the dominant investment bankers of their
own countries, who had raised them up and were perfectly capable of
throwing them down. The substantive financial powers of the world were
in the hands of these investment bankers (also called "international"
or "merchant" bankers) who remained largely behind the scenes in their
own unincorporated private banks. These formed a system of
international cooperation and national dominance which was more
private, more powerful, and more secret than that of their agents in
the central banks. This dominance of investment bankers was based on
their control over the flows of credit and investment funds in their
own countries and throughout the world. They could dominate the
financial and industrial systems of their own countries by their
influence over the flow of current funds through bank loans, the
discount rate, and the re-discounting of commercial debts; they could
dominate governments by their control over current government loans and
the play of the international exchanges. Almost all of this power was
exercised by the personal influence and prestige of men who had
demonstrated their ability in the past to bring off successful
financial coupe, to keep their word, to remain cool in a crisis, and to
share their winning opportunities with their associates. In this system
the Rothschilds had been preeminent during much of the nineteenth
century, but, at the end of that century, they were being replaced by
J. P. Morgan whose central office was in New York, although it was
always operated as if it were in London (where it had, indeed,
originated as George Peabody and Company in 1838). Old J. P.
Morgan
died in 1913, but was succeeded by his son of the same name (who had
been trained in the London branch until 1901), while the chief
decisions in the firm were increasingly made by Thomas W. Lamont after
1924. But these relationships can be described better on a national
basis later. At the present stage we must follow the efforts of the
central bankers to compel the world to return to the gold standard of
1914 in the postwar conditions following 1918.
International
Banker's Viewpoints Expressed in
Government
Reports and Conferences
The
bankers' point of view was
clearly expressed in a series of government reports and international
conferences from 1918 to 1933. Among these were the reports of the
Cunliffe Committee of Great Britain (August 1918), that of the Brussels
Conference of Experts (September 1920), that of the Genoa Conference of
the Supreme Council (January 1922), the First World Economic Conference
(at Geneva, May 1927), the report of the Macmillan Committee on Finance
and Industry (of 1931), and the various statements released by the
World Economic Conference (at London in 1933). These and many other
statements and reports called vainly for a free international gold
standard, for balanced budgets, for restoration of the exchange rates
and reserve ratios customary before 1914, for reductions in taxes and
government spending, and for a cessation of all government interference
in economic activity either domestic or international. But none of
these studies made any effort to assess the fundamental changes in
economic, commercial, and political life since 1914. And none gave any
indication of a realization that a financial system must adapt itself
to such changes. Instead, they all implied that if men would only give
up their evil ways and impose the financial system of 1914 on the
world, the changes would be compelled to reverse their direction and go
back to the conditions of 1914.
Restoration
of the Gold Standard of 1914
Accordingly,
the financial
efforts of the period after 1918 became concentrated on a very simple
(and superficial) goal—to get back to the gold standard—not
"a" gold standard but "the" gold standard, by which was meant the
identical exchange ratios and gold contents that monetary units had had
in 1914.
Restoration
of the gold
standard was not something which could be done by a mere act of
government. It was admitted even by the most ardent advocates of the
gold standard that certain financial relationships would require
adjustment before the gold standard could be restored. There were three
chief relationships involved. These were (1) the problem of inflation,
or the relationship between money and goods; (2) the problem of public
debts, or the relationship between governmental income and expenditure;
and (3) the problem of price parities, or the relationship between
price levels of different countries. That these three problems existed
was evidence of a fundamental disequilibrium between real wealth and
claims on wealth, caused by a relative decrease in the former and
increase in the latter.
Paying the
Public Debt
The
problem of public debts
arose from the fact that as money (credit) was created during the war
period, it was usually made in such a way that it was not in the
control of the state or the community but was in the control of private
financial institutions which demanded real wealth at some future date
for the creation of claims on wealth in the present. The problem of
public debt could have been met in one or more of several fashions: (a)
by increasing the amount of real wealth in the community so that its
price would fall and the value of money would rise. This would restore
the old equilibrium (and price level) between real wealth and claims on
wealth and, at the same time, would permit payment of the public debt
with no increase in the tax rates; (b) by
devaluation—that
is, reduce the gold content of the monetary unit so that the
government's holdings of gold would be worth a greatly increased number
of monetary units. These latter could be applied to the public debt; (c)
by repudiation—that is, a simple cancellation of the public debt by a
refusal to pay it; (d)
by taxation—that is, by increasing the tax rate to a level high
enough to yield enough income to pay off the public debt; (e)
by the issuance of fiat money and the payment of the debt by such money.
These
methods were not
mutually exclusive, and in some cases overlapped. It might, for
example, be argued that devaluation or use of fiat money were forms of
partial repudiation. Nor were all these methods equally practical. For
example, the first (increase real wealth) was by far the soundest
method to achieve a re-stabilization.... The fourth (taxation) would
have put a burden on the economic system so great as to be
self-defeating. In Britain, the public debt could have been paid only
by a tax of 25 percent for about three hundred years. Such heavy taxes
might have had such a depressing effect on production of real wealth
that national income would decline faster than tax rates rose, making
payment by taxation impossible. Nor were all these alternative methods
of paying the public debt of equal practicality in respect to their
effects on the two other financial problems occupying the minds of
experts and statesmen. These other two problems were inflation and
price parities. These problems were just as urgent as the public debt,
and the effects upon them of the different methods for paying the
public debt could have been completely different. Efforts to pay the
public debt by fiat money would have made the inflation problem and
perhaps the price-parity problem worse. Taxation and increasing real
wealth, on the other hand, would have reduced the inflation problem at
the same time as they reduced the public debt, since both would have
increased the value of money (that is, they were deflationary). Their
effects on the problem of price parity would differ from case to case.
Use of
Taxation to Pay Public Debt
Finally,
these methods of
paying the public debt were not of equal value in theory. Orthodox
theory rejected repudiation, devaluation, and fiat money as solutions
to the problem, and, since it showed no way of increasing the
production of real wealth, only taxation was left as a possible method
of paying public debts. But the theorists, as we have shown, could call
taxation a possible way only if they neglected the economic
consequences. These consequences in most countries were so disastrous
that taxation, if tried, soon had to be supplemented by other,
unorthodox, methods. Great Britain and the United States were the only
Great Powers which continued to use taxation as the chief method of
paying the public debt.
The Problem
of Inflation
The
second problem which had
to be faced before stabilization was possible was the problem of
inflation. This was caused by the great increase in claims on wealth
(money), and showed itself in a drastic increase in prices. There were
three possible solutions: (a) to increase the
production of real wealth; (b) to decrease the
quantity of money; or (c)
to devaluate, or make each unit of money equal to a smaller amount of
wealth (specifically gold). The first two would have forced prices back
to the lower prewar level but would have done it in entirely different
ways, one resulting in prosperity and a great rise in standards of
living, the second resulting in depression and a great fall in
standards of living. The third method (devaluation) was essentially a
recognition and acceptance of the existing situation, and would have
left prices at the higher postwar level permanently. This would have
involved a permanent reduction in the value of money, and also would
have given different parities in foreign exchanges (unless there was
international agreement that countries devaluate by the same ratio).
But it would have made possible prosperity and a rising standard of
living and would have accepted as permanent the redistribution of
wealth from creditors to debtors brought about by the wartime inflation.
International
Bankers Regarded Deflation as a Good Thing
Since
the third method
(devaluation) was rejected by orthodox theorists, and no one could see
how to get the first (increase of real wealth), only the second
(deflation) was left as a possible method for dealing with the problem
of inflation. To many people it seemed axiomatic that the cure for
inflation was deflation, especially since bankers regarded deflation as
a good thing in itself. Moreover, deflation as a method for dealing
with the problem of inflation went hand in hand with taxation as a
method for dealing with the problem of public debts. Theorists did not
stop to think what the effects of both would be on the production of
real wealth and on the prosperity of the world.
The Problem
of Price Parities
The
third financial problem
which had to be solved before stabilization became practical was the
problem of price parities. This differed because it was primarily an
international question while the other two problems were primarily
domestic. By suspending the gold standard and establishing artificial
control of foreign exchanges at the outbreak of war, the belligerent
countries made it possible for prices to rise at different rates in
different countries. This can be seen in the fact that prices in
Britain rose 200 percent in seven years (1913-1920), while in the
United States they rose only 100 percent. The resulting disequilibrium
had to be rectified before the two countries went back on the old gold
standard, or the currencies would be valued in law in a ratio quite
different from their value in goods. By going back on gold at the old
ratios, one ounce of fine gold would, by law, become equal to $20.67 in
the United States and about 84s. 11 ½ d. in Britain. For the
$20.67 in the United States you could get in 1920 about half of what
you could have bought with it in 1913; for the 84s. 11 ½ d. in
Britain you could get in 1920 only about a third of what it would buy
in 1913. The ounce of gold in the United States would be much more
valuable than in Britain, so that foreigners (and British) would prefer
to buy in the United States rather than in Britain, and gold would tend
to flow to the United States from Britain with goods flowing in the
opposite direction. In such conditions it would be said that the pound
was overvalued and the dollar undervalued. The overvaluation would
bring depression to Britain, while the United States would tend to be
prosperous. Such disequilibrium of price parities could be adjusted
either by a fall of prices in the country whose currency was overvalued
or by a rise in prices in the country whose currency was undervalued
(or by both). Such an adjustment would be largely automatic, but at the
cost of a considerable flow of gold from the country whose currency was
overvalued.
Because
the problem of price
parities would either adjust itself or would require international
agreement for its adjustment, no real attention was paid to it when
governments turned their attention to the task of stabilization.
Instead, they concentrated on the other two problems and, above all,
devoted attention to the task of building up sufficient gold reserves
to permit them to carry out the methods chosen in respect to these two
problems.
America
Returns to the Gold Standard
Most
countries were in a hurry
to stabilize their currencies when peace was signed in 1919. The
difficulties of the three problems we have mentioned made it necessary
to postpone the step for years. The process of stabilization was
stretched over more than a decade from 1919 to 1931. Only the United
States was able to return to the gold standard at once, and this was
the result of a peculiar combination of circumstances which existed
only in that country. The United States had a plentiful supply of gold.
In addition it had a technological structure quite different from that
of any other country, except perhaps Japan. American technology was
advancing so rapidly in the period 1922-1928 that even with falling
prices there was prosperity, since costs of production fell even
faster. This situation was helped by the fact that prices of raw
materials and food fell faster than prices of industrial products, so
that production of these latter was very profitable. As a result,
America achieved to a degree greater than any other country a solution
of inflation and public debt which all theorists had recognized as
possible, but which none had known how to obtain—the solution to
be found in a great increase in real wealth. This increase made it
possible simultaneously to pay off the public debt and reduce taxes; it
also made it possible to have deflation without depression. A happier
solution of the postwar problems could hardly have been found—for
a time, at least. In the long run, the situation had its drawbacks,
since the fact that costs fell faster than prices and that prices of
agricultural products and raw materials fell faster than prices of
industrial products meant that in the long run the community would not
have sufficient purchasing power to buy the products of the industrial
organization. This problem was postponed for a considerable period by
the application of easy credit and installment selling to the domestic
market and by the extension to foreign countries of huge loans which
made it possible for these countries to buy the products of American
industry without sending their own goods into the American market in
return. Thus, from a most unusual group of circumstances, the United
States obtained an unusual boom of prosperity. These circumstances
were, however, in many ways a postponement of difficulties rather than
a solution of them, as the theoretical understanding of what was going
on was still lacking.
Taxation as a
Cure for Public Debts
In
other countries the
stabilization period was not so happy. In Britain, stabilization was
reached by orthodox paths—that is, taxation as a cure for public
debts and deflation as a cure for inflation. These cures were believed
necessary in order to go back on the old gold parity. Since Britain did
not have an adequate supply of gold, the policy of deflation had to be
pushed ruthlessly in order to reduce the volume of money in circulation
to a quantity small enough to be superimposed on the small base of
available gold at the old ratios. At the same time, the policy was
intended to drive British prices down to the level of world prices. The
currency notes which had been used to supplement bank notes were
retired, and credit was curtailed by raising the discount rate to panic
level. The results were horrible. Business activity fell drastically,
and unemployment rose to well over a million and a half. The drastic
fall in prices (from 307 in 1920 to 197 in 1921) made production
unprofitable unless costs were driven down even faster. This could not
be achieved because labor unions were determined that the burden of the
deflationary policy should not be pushed onto them by forcing down
wages. The outcome was a great wave of strikes and industrial unrest.
Britain Goes
Back on the Gold Standard
The
British government could
measure the success of their deflation only by comparing their price
level with world price levels. This was done by means of the exchange
ratio between the pound and the dollar. At that time the dollar was the
only important currency on gold. It was expected that the forcing down
of prices in Britain would be reflected in an increase in the value of
the pound in terms of dollars on the foreign exchange market. Thus as
the pound rose gradually upward toward the pre-war rate of $4.86, this
rise would measure the fall in British prices downward to the American
(or the world) price level. In general terms, this was true, but it
failed to take into consideration the speculators who, knowing that the
value of the pound was rising, sold dollars to buy pounds, thus pushing
the dollar down and the pound upward faster than was justified in terms
of the changes in price levels in the two countries. Thus the pound
rose to $4.86, while the British price level had not yet fallen to the
American price level, but the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston
Churchill, judging the price level by the exchange rate, believed that
it had and went back on the gold standard at that
point. As a result, sterling was overvalued and Britain
found itself economically isolated on a price plateau above the world
market on which she was economically dependent. These higher British
prices served to increase imports, decrease exports, and encourage an
outflow of gold which made gold reserves dangerously low. To maintain
the gold reserve at all, it was necessary to keep the discount rate at
a level so high (4 ½ percent or more) that business
activity was discouraged. The only solution which the British
government could see to this situation was continued deflation. This
effort to drive down prices failed because the unions were able to
prevent the drastic cutting of costs (chiefly wages) necessary to
permit profitable production on such a deflationary market. Nor could
the alternative method of deflation—by heavy taxation—be
imposed to the necessary degree on the upper classes who were in
control of the' government. The showdown on the deflationary policy
came in the General Strike of 1926. The unions lost
the
strike—that is, they could not prevent the policy of
deflation—but they made it impossible for the government to
continue the reduction of costs to the extent necessary to restore
business profits and the export trade.
Britain Goes
into Financial Bondage to France
As
a result of this financial
policy, Britain found herself faced with deflation and depression for
the whole period 1920-1933. These effects were drastic in 1920-1922,
moderate in 1922-1929, and drastic again in -1933. The wholesale price
index (1913=100) fell from 307 in 1920 to 197 in 1921, then declined
slowly to 137 in 1928. Then it fell rapidly to 120 in 1929 and go in
1933. The number of unemployed averaged about 13/4 millions for each of
the thirteen years of 1921-1932 and reached 3 million in 1931. At the
same time, the inadequacy of the British gold reserve during most of
the period placed Britain in financial subjection to France (which had
a plentiful supply of gold because of her different financial policy).
This subjection served to balance the political subjection of France to
Britain arising from French insecurity, and ended only with Britain's
abandonment of the gold standard in 1931.
Britain
was the only important
European country which reached stabilization through deflation. East of
her, a second group of countries, including Belgium, France, and Italy,
reached stabilization through devaluation. This was a far better
method. It was adopted, however, not because of superior intelligence
but because of financial weakness. In these countries, the burden of
war-damage reconstruction made it impossible to balance a budget, and
this made deflation difficult. These countries accepted orthodox
financial ideas and tried to deflate in 1920-1921, but, after the
depression which resulted, they gave up the task. Belgium stabilized
once at 107 francs to the pound sterling, but could not hold this level
and had to devaluate further to 175 to the pound (October 1926).
France stabilized at 124.21 francs
to the pound at the end of 1926, although the
stabilization was made de jure only in June 1928.
Italy stabilized at 92.46 fire to the pound sterling in December 1927.
Achieving
Stabilization through Devaluation
.
The
group of countries which
reached stabilization through devaluation prospered in contrast with
those who reached stabilization through deflation. The prosperity was
roughly equal to the degree of devaluation. Of the three Latin
countries—Belgium, France, and Italy—Belgium devalued the
most and was most prosperous. Her stabilization was at a price level
below the world level so that the belga was undervalued by about
one-fifth. This served to encourage exports. For an industrial country
such as Belgium, this made it possible for her to profit by the
misfortunes of Britain. France was in a somewhat similar position.
Italy, on the contrary, stabilized at a figure which made the lira
considerably overvalued. This was done for purposes of
prestige—Mussolini being determined to stabilize the lira at a
value higher than that of the French franc. The effects of this
overvaluation of the lira on the Italian economy were extremely
adverse. Italy was never as prosperous after stabilization as she had
been immediately before it.
Not
only did the countries
which undervalued their money prosper; they decreased the
disequilibrium between wealth and money; they were able to use the
inflation to increase production; they escaped high taxes; they
moderated or escaped the stabilization crisis and the deflationary
depression; they improved their positions in the world market in
respect to high-cost countries like Britain; and they replenished their
gold stocks.
America
Rebuilds the Industrial Structure of Germany
through the
Dawes Plan
A
third group of countries
reached stabilization through reconstruction. These were the countries
in which the old monetary unit had been wiped out and had to be
replaced by a new monetary unit. Among these were Austria, Hungary,
Germany, and Russia. The first two of these were stabilized by a
program of international assistance worked out through the League of
Nations. The last was forced to work out a financial system by herself.
Germany had her system reorganized as a consequence of the Dawes Plan.
The Dawes Plan, as we have seen in our discussion of reparations,
provided the gold reserves necessary for a new currency and provided a
control of foreign exchange which served to protect Germany from the
accepted principles of orthodox finance. These controls were continued
until 1930, and permitted Germany to borrow from foreign sources,
especially the United States, the funds necessary to keep her economic
system functioning with an unbalanced budget and an unfavorable balance
of trade. In the period 1924-1929, by means of these funds, the
industrial structure of Germany was largely rebuilt so that, when the
depression arrived, Germany had the most efficient industrial machine
in Europe and probably the second most efficient in the world (after
the United States). The German financial system had inadequate controls
over inflation and almost none over deflation because of the Dawes Plan
restrictions on the open-market operations of the Reichsbank and the
generally slow response of the German economy to changes in the
discount rate. Fortunately, such controls were hardly necessary. The
price level was at 137 in 1924 and at the same figure
in 1929
(1913=100). In that six-year period it had reached as high as 142 (in
1925) and fallen as low as 134 (in 1926). This stability in prices was
accompanied by stability in economic conditions. While these conditions
were by no means booming, there was only one bad year before 1930. This
was 1926, the year in which prices fell to 134 from the 1925 level of
142. In this year unemployment averaged 2 million. The best year was
1925, in which unemployment averaged 636,000. This drop in prosperity
from 1925 to 1926 was caused by a lack of credit as a result of the
inadequate supplies of domestic credit and a temporary decline in the
supplies of foreign credit. It was this short slump in business which
led Germany to follow the road to technological reorganization. This
permitted Germany to increase output with decreasing employment. The
average annual increase in labor productivity in the period 1924-1932
in Germany was about 5 percent. Output per labor hour in industry rose
from 87.8 in 1925 to 115.6 in 1930 and 125 in 1932 (1928=100). This
increase in output served to intensify the impact of the depression in
Germany, so that unemployment, which averaged about three million in
the year 1930, reached over six million late in 1932. The implications
of this will be examined in detail in our study of the rise to power of
Hitler.
The Use of
the Gold Bullion Standard Instead of the
Old Gold
Standard
The
stabilization period did
not end until about 1931, although only minor Powers were still
stabilizing in the last year or so. The last Great Power to stabilize de
jure was France in June, 1928, and she had been stabilized de
facto much
earlier. In the whole period, about fifty countries stabilized their
currencies on the gold standard. But because of the quantity of gold
necessary to maintain the customary reserve ratios (that is, the
pre-1914 ratios) at the higher prices generally prevailing during the
period of stabilization, no important country was able to go back on
the gold standard as the term was understood in 1914. The chief change
was the use of the "gold exchange standard" or the "gold bullion
standard" in place of the old gold standard. Under the gold exchange
standard, foreign exchange of gold standard countries could be used as
reserves against notes or deposits in place of reserves in gold. In
this way, the world's limited supplies of gold could be used to support
a much greater volume of fictitious wealth in the world as a whole
since the same quantity of gold could act as bullion reserve for one
country and as gold exchange reserve for another. Even those countries
which stabilized on a direct gold standard did so in a quite different
way from the situation in 1914. In few countries was there free and
gratuitous convertibility between notes, coin, and bullion. In Great
Britain, for example, by the Gold Standard Act of May 1925, notes could
be exchanged for gold only in the form
of bullion and
only in amounts of at least 400 fine ounces (that is, not less than
$8,268 worth at a time). Bullion could be presented to the mint for
coinage only by the Bank of England, although the bank was bound to buy
all gold offered at 77s. 10 ½ d. per standard ounce. Notes could
be converted into coin only at the option of the bank. Thus the gold
standard of 1925 was quite different from that of 1914.
The Money
Power Creates a Facade of Cardboard and Tinsel
This
would indicate that even
in its most superficial aspects the international gold standard of 1914
was not reestablished by 1930. The legal provisions were different; the
financial necessities and practices were quite different; the profound
underlying economic and commercial conditions were entirely different,
and becoming more so. Yet financiers, businessmen, and politicians
tried to pretend to themselves and to the public that they had restored
the financial system of 1914. They had created a facade of cardboard
and tinsel which had a vague resemblance to the old system, and they
hoped that, if they pretended vigorously enough, they could change this
facade into the lost reality for which they yearned. At the same time,
while pursuing policies (such as tariffs, price controls, production
controls, and so on) which drove this underlying reality ever farther
from that which had existed in 1914, they besought other governments to
do differently. Such a situation, with pretense treated as if it were
reality and reality treated as if it were a bad dream, could lead only
to disaster. This is what happened. The period of stabilization merged
rapidly into a period of deflation and depression.
Financial
Capitalists Focus Entirely on Wealth
As
we have said, the stage of
financial capitalism did not place emphasis on the exchange of goods or
the production of goods as the earlier stages of commercial capitalism
and industrial capitalism had done. In fact, financial capitalism had
little interest in goods at all, but was concerned entirely with claims
on wealth—stocks, bonds, mortgages, insurance, deposits, proxies,
interest rates, and such.
Financial
Capitalists Discover New Ways to Make Money Out of Nothing
It
invested capital not
because it desired to increase the output of goods or services but
because it desired to float issues (frequently excess issues) of
securities on this productive basis. It built railroads in order to
sell securities, not in order to transport goods; it constructed great
steel corporations to sell securities, not in order to make steel, and
so on. But, incidentally, it greatly increased the transport of goods,
the output of steel, and the production of other goods. By the middle
of the stage of financial capitalism, however, the organization of
financial capitalism had evolved to a highly sophisticated level of
security promotion and speculation which did not require any productive
investment as a basis. Corporations were built upon corporations in the
form of holding companies, so that securities were issued in huge
quantities, bringing profitable fees and commissions to financial
capitalists without any increase in economic production whatever.
Indeed, these financial capitalists discovered that they could not only
make killings out of the issuing of such securities, they could also
make killings out of the bankruptcy of such corporations, through the
fees and commissions of reorganization. A very pleasant cycle of
flotation, bankruptcy, flotation, bankruptcy began to be practiced by
these financial capitalists. The more excessive the flotation, the
greater the profits, and the more imminent the bankruptcy. The more
frequent the bankruptcy, the greater the profits of reorganization and
the sooner the opportunity of another excessive flotation with its
accompanying profits. This excessive stage reached its highest peak
only in the United States. In Europe it was achieved only in isolated
cases.
Finance
Capitalism Opened the Way for Centralization of World
Economic
Control in the Hands of the International Banking Fraternity
The
growth of financial
capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control and
a use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the
indirect injury of all other economic groups. This concentration of
power, however, could be achieved only by using methods which planted
the seeds which grew into monopoly capitalism. Financial control could
be exercised only imperfectly through credit control and interlocking
directorates. In order to strengthen such control, some measure of
stock ownership was necessary. But stock ownership was dangerous to
banks because their funds consisted more of deposits (that is,
short-term obligations) than of capital (or long-term obligations).
This meant that banks which sought economic control through stock
ownership were putting short-term obligations into long-term holdings.
This was safe only so long as these latter could be liquidated rapidly
at a price high enough to pay short-term obligations as they presented
themselves. But these holdings of securities were bound to become
frozen because both the economic and the financial systems were
deflationary. The economic system was deflationary because power
production and modern technology gave a great increase in the supply of
real wealth. This meant that in the long run the control by banks was
doomed by the progress of technology. The financial system was also
deflationary because of the bankers' insistence on the gold standard,
with all that this implies.
The Money
Power Creates an Ingenious Plan to Create and
Control Giant
Monopolies
To
escape from this dilemma,
the financial capitalists acted upon two fronts. On the business side,
they sought to sever control from ownership of securities, believing
they could hold the former and relinquish the latter. On the industrial
side, they sought to advance monopoly and restrict production, thus
keeping prices up and their security holdings liquid.
The
efforts of financiers to
separate ownership from control were aided by the great capital demands
of modern industry. Such demands for capital made necessary the
corporation form of business organization. This inevitably brings
together the capital owned by a large number of persons to create an
enterprise controlled by a small number of persons. The financiers did
all they could to make the former number as large as possible and the
latter number as small as possible. The former was achieved by stock
splitting, issuing securities of low par value, and by high-pressure
security salesmanship. The latter was achieved by plural-voting stock,
nonvoting stock, pyramiding of holding companies, election of directors
by cooptation, and similar techniques. The result of this was that
larger and larger aggregates of wealth fell into the control of smaller
and smaller groups of men.
The Money
Power Used Monopoly Capitalism to
Increase
Wealth and Power
While
financial capitalism was
thus weaving the intricate pattern of modern corporation law and
practice on one side, it was establishing monopolies and cartels on the
other. Both helped to dig the grave of financial capitalism and pass
the reins of economic control on to the newer monopoly capitalism. On
one side, the financiers freed the controllers of business from the
owners of business, hut, on the other side, this concentration gave
rise to monopoly conditions which freed the controllers from the banks.
The
date at which any country
shifted to financial capitalism and later shifted to monopoly
capitalism depended on the supply of capital available to business.
These dates could be hastened or retarded by government action. In the
United States the onset of monopoly capitalism was retarded by the
government's antimonopoly legislation, while in Germany it was hastened
by the cartel laws. The real key to the shift rested on the control of
money flows, especially of investment funds. These controls, which were
held by investment bankers in 1900, were eclipsed by other sources of
funds and capital, such as insurance, retirement and investment funds,
and, above all, by those flows resulting from the fiscal policies of
governments. Efforts by the older private investment bankers to control
these new channels of funds had varying degrees of success, but, in
general, financial capitalism was destroyed by two events: (1) the
ability of industry to finance its own capital needs because of
the increased profits arising from the decreased competition
established by financial capitalism, and (2) the economic crisis
engendered by the deflationary policies resulting from financial
capitalism's obsession with the gold standard.
Chapter
21—The Period of Deflation, 1927- 1936
The
period of stabilization
cannot be clearly distinguished from the period of deflation. In most
countries, the period of deflation began in 1921 and, after about four
or five years, became more rapid in its development, reaching after
1929 a degree which could be called acute. In the first part of this
period (1921-1925), the dangerous economic implications of deflation
were concealed by a structure of self-deception which pretended that a
great period of economic progress would be inaugurated as soon as the
task of stabilization had been accomplished. This psychological
optimism was completely unwarranted by the economic facts, even in the
United States where these economic facts were (for the short term, at
least) more promising than anywhere else. After 1925, when the
deflation became more deep-rooted and economic conditions worsened, the
danger from these conditions was concealed by a continuation of
unwarranted optimism. The chief symptom of the unsoundness of the
underlying economic reality—the steady fall in prices—was
concealed in the later period (1925-1929) by a steady rise in security
prices (which was erroneously regarded as a good sign) and by the
excessive lending abroad of the United States (which amounted to almost
ten billion dollars in the period 1920-1931, bringing our total foreign
investment to almost 27 billion dollars by the end of 1930). This
foreign lending of the United States was the chief reason why the
maladjusted economic conditions could be kept concealed for so many
years. Before the World War, the United States had been a debtor nation
and, to pay these debts, had developed an exporting economy. The
combination of debtor and exporter is a feasible one. The war made the
United States a creditor nation and also made her a greater exporter
than ever by building up her acreage of cotton and wheat and her
capacity to produce ships, steel, textiles, and so on. The resulting
combination of creditor and exporter was not feasible. The United
States refused to accept either necessary alternative—to reduce
debts owed to her or to increase her imports. Instead, she raised
tariffs against imports and temporarily filled the gap with huge
foreign loans. But this was hopeless as a permanent solution. As a
temporary solution, it permitted the United States to be both creditor
and exporter; it permitted Germany to pay reparations with neither a
budgetary surplus nor a favorable balance of trade; it permitted dozens
of minor countries to adopt a gold standard they could not hold; it
permitted France, Britain, Italy, and others to pay war debts to the
United States without sending goods. In a word, it permitted the world
to live in a fairyland of self-delusions remote from economic realities.
Economic
Realities
These
realities were characterized by (a)
fundamental maladjustments, both economic and financial, which made it
impossible for the financial system to function as it had in 1914, and (b)
the steady deflation.
The
fundamental maladjustments
were both economic and financial. The economic maladjustments were
those which we have already indicated: the industrialization of
colonial areas; the overproduction of raw materials and food as a
result of wartime high prices, the overexpansion of heavy industry as a
result of wartime needs, the obsolescence of much of heavy industry in
Europe and in Britain which made it impossible to compete with newer
equipment or to cope with the shifts in consumer demand, and the
steadily increasing disadvantage of producers of raw materials and food
in contrast with producers of industrial goods. To these old factors
were added new ones such as the great increase in productive efficiency
in Germany and the United States, the return of Russia and Germany to
the European economy about 1924, and the return of Europe-to the world
economy in the period 1925-1927. Many countries sought to resist these
factors, both old and new, by adopting political interference with
economic life in the form of tariffs, import quotas, export subsidies,
and so on.
The
financial maladjustments
served to create an insufficiency of gold and a mal-distribution of
gold. The inadequacy of the supply of gold arose from several causes.
It has been estimated that the world's stock of gold money needed to
increase by 3.1 percent per year in the 1920's to support the world's
economic development with stable prices on the gold standard. The
production of new gold after 1920 was below this rate.
Moreover,
as a result of the
activities of the League of Nations and financial advisers like
Professor E. W. Kemmerer of Princeton University, every country was
encouraged to get on the gold standard. This led to a "gold rush" as
each country tried to obtain a supply of gold large enough to provide
adequate reserves. Because there were more countries on gold in 1928
than in 1914 and because prices in general were higher, more gold was
needed in reserves.
The
efforts to get around this
by using a gold exchange standard rather than a gold standard were
helpful in dealing with the problem of inadequate supplies of gold but
increased the difficulty of the problem of mal-distribution of gold,
since the gold exchange standard did not respond to the flow of gold as
readily and thus did not serve so well to stem such flows of gold. The
need for gold was made greater by the existence of large floating
balances of political or panic funds which might well move from one
market to another independent of economic conditions. The need was
increased by the fact that in 1920 there were three major financial
centers which had to make payments by shipments of gold in contrast to
the single financial center of 1914 where payments could be made by
bookkeeping transactions. To rectify this problem to some degree, the
Bank for International Settlements was created in 1929.... Finally, the
need for gold was increased by the enormous growth in foreign
indebtedness, much of it of a political nature such as the war debts
and reparations.
The Financial
System of 1914 Had Broken Down
On
top of this insufficiency
of gold was superimposed a drastic mal-distribution of gold. This was
conclusive proof that the financial system of 1914 had broken down, for
the old system would have operated automatically to distribute gold
evenly. This mal-distribution resulted from the fact that when gold
flowed into certain countries the automatic results of such a flow
(such as rising prices or falling interest rates) which would have
restored equilibrium in 1914 were prevented from acting in 1928. In
this period, about four-fifths of the world's gold supply was in five
countries, and over half was in two, the United States and France. The
gold had been brought to these two for quite different reasons—to
the United States because it was the world's greatest creditor and to
France because of its devaluation of the franc. Britain, on the other
hand, had floating balances of about £800 million, and handled
each year £20,000 million in transactions with a gold reserve of
only £150 million. Such a situation made it possible for France
to use gold as a political weapon against Britain.
Wholesale
Prices
As
a result of these
conditions and the deflationary economic conditions described in
Chapter 11, prices began to fall, at first slowly and then with
increasing rapidity. The turning point in most countries was in
1925-1926, with Great Britain one of the earliest (January 1925). In
the first half of 1929, this slow drift downward began to change to a
rapid drop. The following table will show the changes in wholesale
prices for five principal countries:
Wholesale
Price Indices (1913 = 100)
United
Britain France Italy Germany
1924 141 166 489 554 137
1925 148 159 550 646 142
1926 143 148 695 654 134
1927 137 142 642 527 138
1928 139 137 645 491 140
1929 137 120 627 481 137
1930 124 104 554 430 125
1931 105 102 520 376 111
1932
93
90 427 351
97
1933
95
90 398
320
93
1934 108
92 376 313
98
1935 115
93 339 344 102
1936 116
99 411 385 104
1937 124 114 581 449 106
The Facade of
Prosperity
The
economic effects of these
soft prices after 1925 were adverse, but these effects were concealed
for a considerable period because of various influences, especially the
liberal credit policies of the United States (both foreign and
domestic) and the optimism engendered by the stock-market boom. The
facade of prosperity over unsound economic conditions was practically
worldwide. Only in France and the United States was it a boom in real
wealth, but in the latter it was by no means as great as one might
think from a glance at stock prices. In Britain, the boom appeared in
the form of the flotation of new stocks of unsound and fraudulent
companies and a minor stock-market boom (about one-third as fast a rise
in security prices as in the United States). In Germany and in much of
Latin America, the boom was based upon foreign borrowing (chiefly from
the United States) the proceeds of which were largely put into
nonproductive construction. In Italy, held down by the over-evaluation
of the lira in 1927, the boom was of short duration.
The Crash of
1929
The
history of the slump begins about 1927 when France stabilized the franc
de facto at
a level at which it was devalued and undervalued. This led to a great
demand for francs. The Bank of France sold francs in return for foreign
exchange. The francs were created as credit in France, thus giving an
inflationary effect which can be seen in the behavior of French prices
in 1926-1928. The foreign exchange which France received for its francs
was largely left in that form without being converted into gold. By
1928 the Bank of France found that it held foreign exchange to the
value of 32 billion francs (about $1.2 billion). At this point the Bank
of France began to transfer its exchange holdings into gold, buying the
metal chiefly in London and New York. Because of the inadequate gold
reserves in London, a meeting of central bankers in New York decided
that the gold purchases of France and Germany should be diverted from
London to New York in the future (July 1927). To prevent the resulting
outflow of gold from having a deflationary effect which might injure
business, the New York Federal Reserve Bank dropped its discount rate
from 4 percent to 3 ½ percent. When the French gold purchases
became noticeable in 1928, the Federal Reserve Bank adopted open market
operations to counterbalance them, buying securities to a value equal
to the French purchases of gold.
As
a result there was no
reduction in money in the United States. This money, however, was going
increasingly into stock-market speculation rather than into production
of real wealth. This can be seen from the following table of indices of
average stock prices for both England and the United States in the
years indicated:
Industrial
Shares Prices
(1924 = 100)
Year United
Kingdom United
States
1924 100 100
1925 109 126
1926 115 143
1927 124 169
1928 139 220
1929 139 270
1930 112 200
1931
87 124
1932
84
66
1933 103
95
1934 125 116
The
stock-market boom in the
United States was really much more drastic than is indicated by these
index numbers, because these are yearly averages, and include sluggish
stocks as well as market leaders. The boom began as far back as 1924,
as can be seen, and reached its peak in the fall of 1929. By the spring
of 1929 it had become a frenzy and was having profound effects on
business activity, on domestic and international finance, on the
domestic affairs of foreign countries, and on the psychology and modes
of life of Americans.
Credit Was
Diverted from Production to Speculation
Among
the financial results of
the stock-market boom were the following: In the United States credit
was diverted from production to speculation, and increasing amounts of
funds were being drained from the economic system into the stock
market, where they circulated around and around, building up the prices
of securities. In Germany it became increasingly difficult to borrow
from the United States, and the foreign loans, which kept the German
financial system and the whole system of reparations and war debts
functioning, were shifted from long-term loans to precarious short-term
credits. The results of this have been examined in the chapter on
reparations. In other countries, funds tended to flow to the United
States where they could expect to roll up extraordinary earnings in
capital gains in a relatively short time. This was especially true of
funds from Britain where the stock-market boom ceased after the end of
1928. By that time the fundamentally unsound economic conditions were
beginning to break through the facade. The decline in foreign loans by
both London and New York began to be noticeable by the last half of
1928 and made it evident that the chief support of the facade was
vanishing. But the continued rise of security prices in New York
continued to draw money from the rest of the world and from the
productive and consumptive systems of the United States itself.
A Financial
Disaster of Unparalleled Magnitude
Early
in 1929, the board of
governors of the Federal Reserve System became alarmed at the
stock-market speculation, especially at its draining credit from
industrial production. To curtail this, in April 1929, the Federal
Reserve authorities called upon the member banks to reduce their loans
on stock-exchange collateral. At the same time, it engaged in
open-market operations which reduced its holdings of bankers'
acceptances from about $300 million to about $150 million. The
sterilization of gold was made more drastic. It was hoped in this way
to reduce the amount of credit available for speculation. Instead, the
available credit went more and more to speculation and decreasingly to
productive business. Call money rates in New York which had reached 7
percent at the end of 1928 were at 13 percent by June 1929. In that
month, the election of a Labour government in England so alarmed
British capital that large amounts flowed to the United States and
contributed further to the speculative frenzy. In August, the Federal
Reserve discount rate was raised to 6 percent. By this time it was
becoming evident that the prices of stocks were far above any value
based on earning power and that this earning power was beginning to
decline because of the weakening of industrial activity. At this
critical moment, on September 26, 1929, a minor financial panic in
London (the Hatry Case) caused the Bank of England to raise its bank
rate from 4 ½ percent to 6 ½ percent. This was enough.
British funds began to leave Wall Street, and the overinflated market
commenced to sag. By the middle of October, the fall had become a
panic. In the week of October 21st on the Stock Exchange and the Curb
Exchange in New York, total stocks sold averaged over 9 million a day,
and on Thursday, October 24th, almost 19 1/4 million shares changed
hands. The shrinkage in values was measured by several billion dollars
a day. Some stocks fell by 100 or even 140 points in a day. Auburn fell
210 points, General Electric 76 points, and U.S. Steel 26 points in 4
½ days. By November 6th these three stocks had fallen
respectively 55, 78, and 28 points more. It was a financial disaster of
unparalleled magnitude.
The Stock
Market Crash Reduces Real Wealth
The
stock-market crash reduced
the volume of foreign lending from the United States to Europe, and
these two events together tore away the facade which until then had
concealed the fundamental maladjustments between production and
consumption, between debts and ability to pay, between creditors and
willingness to receive goods, between the theories of 1914 and the
practices of 1928. Not only were these maladjustments revealed but they
began to be readjusted with a severity of degree and speed made all the
worse by the fact that the adjustments had been so long delayed.
Production began to fall to the level of consumption, creating idle
men, idle factories, idle money, and idle resources. Debtors were
called to account and found deficient. Creditors who had refused
repayment now sought it, but in vain. All values of real wealth shrank
drastically.
The Crisis of
1931
It
was this shrinkage of
values which carried the economic crisis into the stage of financial
and banking crisis and beyond these to the stage of political crisis.
As values declined, production fell rapidly; banks found it
increasingly difficult to meet the demands upon their reserves; these
demands increased with the decline in confidence; governments found
that their tax receipts fell so rapidly that budgets became unbalanced
in spite of every effort to prevent it.
The
financial and banking
crisis began in central Europe early in 1931, reached London by the end
of that year, spread to the United States and France in 1932, bringing
the United States to the acute stage in 1933, and France in 1934.
The Largest
Bank in Austria Collapses
The
acute stage began early in
1931 in central Europe where the deflationary crisis was producing
drastic results. Unable to balance its budget or obtain adequate
foreign loans, Germany was unable to meet her reparation obligations.
At this critical moment, as we have seen, the largest bank in Austria
collapsed because of its inability to liquidate its assets at
sufficiently high prices and with enough speed to meet the claims being
presented to it. The Austrian debacle soon spread the banking panic to
Germany. The Hoover Moratorium on reparations relieved the pressure on
Germany in the middle of 1931, but not enough to permit any real
financial recovery. Millions of short-term credits lent from London
were tied up in frozen accounts in Germany. As a result, in the summer
of 1931, the uneasiness spread to London.
The Wealthy
Were Causing the Panic
The
pound sterling was very
vulnerable. There were five principal reasons: (1) the pound was
overvalued; (2) costs of production in Britain were much more rigid
than prices; (3) gold reserves were precariously small; (4) the burden
of public debt was too great in a deflationary atmosphere; (5) there
were greater liabilities than assets in short-term international
holdings in London (about £407 million to £153
million). This last fact was revealed by the publication of the
Macmillan Report in June 1931, right at the middle of the crisis in
central Europe where most of the short-term assets were frozen. The
bank rate was raised from 2 ½ percent to 4 ½ percent to
encourage capital to stay in Britain. £130 million in credits was
obtained from France and the United States in July and August to fight
the depreciation of the pound by throwing more dollars and francs into
the market. To restore confidence among the wealthy (who were causing
the panic) an effort was made to balance the budget by cutting public
expenditures drastically. This, by reducing purchasing power, had
injurious effects on business activity and increased unrest among the
masses of the people. Mutiny broke out in the British fleet in protest
against pay cuts. Various physical and extralegal restrictions were
placed on export of gold (such as issuing gold bars of a low purity
unacceptable to the Bank of France). The outflow of gold could not be
stopped. It amounted to £200 million in two months. On September
18th New York and Paris refused further credits to the British
Treasury, and three days later the gold standard was suspended. The
bank rate still stood at 4 ½ percent. To many experts the most
significant aspect of the event was not that Britain went off gold, but
that she did so with the bank rate at 4 ½ percent. It had always
been said in Britain that a 10 percent bank rate would pull gold out of
the earth. By 1931, the authorities in Britain saw clearly the futility
of trying to stay on gold by raising the bank rate. This indicates how
conditions had changed. It was realized that the movement of gold was
subject to factors which the authorities could not control more than it
was under the influence of factors they could control. It also
shows—a hopeful sign—that the authorities after twelve
years were beginning to realize that conditions had changed. For the
first time, people began to realize that the two
problems—domestic prosperity and stable exchanges—were
quite separate problems and that the old orthodox practice of
sacrificing the former to the latter must end. From this point on, one
country after another began to seek domestic prosperity by managed
prices and stable exchanges by exchange control. That is, the link
between the two (the gold standard) was broken, and one problem was
made into two.
The British
Suspension of Gold
The
British suspension of gold
was by necessity, not by choice. It was regarded as an evil, but it was
really a blessing. As a result of this mistake, many of the benefits
which could have been derived from it were lost by trying to
counterbalance the inflationary results of the suspension by other
deflationary actions. The discount rate was raised to 6 percent;
valiant efforts to balance the budget continued; a protective tariff
was established and a program of fairly stiff taxes installed. As a
result, prices did not rise enough to give that spur to production
which would have been necessary to increase prosperity and reduce
unemployment. No system of exchange control was set up. As a result,
the depreciation of sterling in respect to gold-standard currencies
could not be prevented, and amounted to 30 percent by December 1931.
Such a depreciation was regarded by the authorities as an
evil—chiefly because of orthodox economic theories which
considered parity of exchanges as an end in itself and partly because
of the need to pay the £130 million in Franco-American
credits—a burden which increased as sterling depreciated in
respect to dollars and francs.
The Central
Core of the World's Financial System Was Disputed
As
a result of the British
abandonment of the gold standard the central core of the world's
financial system was disrupted. This core, which in 1914 was
exclusively in London, in 1931 was divided among London, New York, and
Paris. London's share depended on financial skill and old habits; New
York's share depended on her position as the world's great creditor;
Paris's share depended on a combination of a creditor position with an
undervalued currency which attracted gold. From 1927 to 1931, these
three had controlled the world's financial system with payments flowing
in to the three, credits flowing out, and stable exchanges between
them. The events of September 1931 broke up this triangle. Stable
exchanges continued for dollar-franc, leaving dollar-pound and
pound-franc to fluctuate. This did not permit an adjustment of the
maladjusted exchange rates of 1928-1931. Concretely, the undervaluation
of the franc in 1928 and the overvaluation of the pound in 1925 could
not be remedied by the events of 1931. A sterling-franc rate which
would have eliminated the undervaluation of the franc would have
resulted in a sterling-dollar rate which would have overcorrected the
overvaluation of sterling. On the other hand, the depreciation of the
pound put great pressure on both the dollar and the franc. At the same
time, Britain sought to exploit as much as possible her economic
relations with her home market, the empire, and that group of other
countries known as the "sterling bloc." The home market was set aside
by the establishment of customs duties on imports into the United
Kingdom (special customs duties November 1931, and a general tariff in
February 1932). The empire was brought into closer economic ties by a
group of eleven "Imperial Preference" treaties made at Ottawa in August
1932. The sterling bloc was reinforced and enlarged by a series of
bilateral trade agreements with various countries, beginning with
Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Argentina.
The World
Divided into Two Financial Groups
Thus
the world tended to
divide into two financial groups—the sterling bloc organized
about Britain and the gold bloc organized about the United States,
France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.
The
depreciation of sterling
in relation to gold made the currencies of the gold bloc overvalued,
and relieved Britain of that burdensome status for the first time since
1925. As a result, Britain found it easier to export and more difficult
to import, and obtained a favorable balance of trade for the first time
in almost seven years. On the other hand, the gold countries found
their depressions intensified.
Britain Frees
Herself from Bondage to France
As
a third result of the
British abandonment of the gold standard Britain freed herself from her
financial subjection to France. This subjection had resulted from the
vulnerable position of the British gold reserves in contrast to the
bulging appearance of the French reserves. After 1931 the financial
positions of the two countries were reversed. When Britain was able to
add a financial superiority after 1931 to the political superiority she
had possessed since 1924, it became possible for Britain to force
France to accept the policy of appeasement. Moreover, the financial
crisis of 1931 was to bring to power in Britain the national government
which was to carry out the policy of appeasement.
Trade
Barriers Arise
As
a fourth result, the
countries still on gold began to adopt new trade barriers, such as
tariffs and quotas, to prevent Britain from using the advantage of
depreciated currency to increase her exports to them. The countries
already off gold began to see the value in currency depreciation, and
the possibility of races in depreciation began to form in the minds of
some.
As
a fifth result of the
abandonment of gold, it became possible to rearm without the resulting
unbalancing of the budget leading to financial jeopardy as under a gold
standard. Little advantage was taken of this, because pacificism on the
Left and appeasement on the Right were regarded as substitutes for arms.
Because
of the deflationary
policy which accompanied the abandonment of gold in Great Britain,
recovery from depression did not result except to a very slight degree.
Neither prices nor employment rose until 1933, and, from that year on,
the improvement was slow. The depreciation of sterling did result in an
improvement in the foreign trade balance, exports rising very slightly
and imports falling 12 percent in 1932 in comparison with 1931. This
led to a revival of confidence in sterling and a simultaneous decline
in confidence in the gold-standard currencies. Foreign funds began to
flow to London.
Control of
Credit in Britain Left to the Bank of England
The
flow of capital into
Britain early in 1932 resulted in an appreciation of sterling in
respect to the gold currencies. This was unwelcome to the British
government since it would destroy her newly acquired trade advantage.
The pound sterling appreciated in respect to the dollar from 3.27 on
December 1, 1931, to 3.80 on March 31, 1932. To control this, the
government, in May 1932, set up the Exchange Equalization Account with
capital of £175 million. This fund was to be used to stabilize
the exchange rates by buying and selling foreign exchange against the
trend of the market. In this way, the old automatic regulation by the
market of the internal credit structure through the international flow
of funds was broken. Control of the credit structure was left to the
Bank of England, while control of the exchanges went to the Exchange
Equalization Fund. This made it possible for Britain to adopt a policy
of easy and plentiful credit within the country without being deterred
by a flight of capital from the country. Since the Exchange
Equalization Fund was not a system of exchange control but merely a
government management of the regular exchange market, it was not in a
position to handle any very considerable emigration of capital. The
easy credit policies of Britain (designed to encourage business
activity) had thus to be combined with deflationary prices (designed to
prevent any powerful flight of capital). The bank rate was dropped to 2
percent by July 1932, and an embargo was placed on new foreign capital
issues to keep this easy money at home. The chief exceptions to this
embargo arose from loans to be used in the general policy of binding
the sterling bloc to Britain, and the proceeds of these had to be used
in Britain.
On
this basis, although
sterling fell to 3.14 by the end of November 1932, a mild economic
revival was built up. Cheap credit permitted a shift of economic
activity from the old lines (like coal, steel, textiles) to new lines
(like chemicals, motors, electrical products). The tariff permitted a
rapid growth of cartels and monopolies whose process of creation
provided at least a temporary revival of economic activity. The
continued low food prices permitted the income from this increase in
activity to be diverted to necessities of a different kind, especially
dwelling construction. The budget was balanced, and early in 1934
showed a surplus of £30 million.
The
improvement in Britain was
not shared by the countries still on gold. As a result of the
competition of depreciated sterling, they found their balances of trade
pushed toward the unfavorable side and their deflation in prices
increased. Tariffs had to be raised, quotas and exchange controls set
up. The United States could hardly do the first of these (her tariff of
1930 was already the highest in history), and rejected the others in
principle.
The Crisis in
the United States, 1933
As
a result of the British
crisis, the gold countries of Europe sought to modify their financial
basis from the gold exchange standard to the gold bullion standard.
When Britain abandoned gold in September 1931, France was caught with
over £60 million in sterling exchange. This was equal to about 30
percent of her foreign-exchange holdings (7,775 million francs out of
25,194 million). The loss exceeded the total capital and surplus of the
Bank of France. To avoid any similar experience in the future, France
began to transfer her holdings of exchange into gold, much of it called
from the United States. As confidence in the pound rose, that in the
dollar fell. It became necessary to raise the New York discount rate
from 1 ½ percept to 3 ½ percent (October 1932) and to
engage in extensive open-market buying of securities to counteract the
deflationary effects of this. However, the gold exports and gold
hoarding continued, made worse by the fact that the United States was
the only gold standard country with gold coins still circulating.
The American
Banking System Began to Collapse
As
a result of the decline of
confidence and the demand for liquidity, the American banking system
began to collapse. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was set up
early in 1932 with $3 ½ billion in government money to advance
to banks and other large corporations. By the end of the year, it had
lent over $1 ½ billion. When the details of these loans were
published (in January 1933), runs on the banks were intensified. A bank
holiday was declared in Nevada in October 1932, in Iowa in January
1933, in six states during February, and in sixteen states in the first
three days of March. From February 1st to March 4th the Federal Reserve
Bank in New York lost $756 million in gold; it called in $709 million
from the other Federal Reserve Banks, which were also subject to runs.
Banks in the
U.S. Were Closed
The
banks of the whole United
States were closed by executive order on March 4 to be reopened after
March 12th if their condition was satisfactory. Export of gold was
subjected to license, convertibility of notes into gold was ended, and
private holding of gold was made illegal. These orders, completed on
April 20, 1933, took the United States off the gold standard. This was
done in order that the government could pursue a policy of price
inflation in its domestic program. It was not made necessary by the
American international financial position, as this continued very
favorable. This was quite different from the situation in Britain in
1931. London had left gold unwillingly and had followed an orthodox
financial program afterward; Washington left gold in 1933 voluntarily
in order to follow an unorthodox financial program of inflation.
The Central
Exchange Triangle Was Disrupted
As
a result of the abandonment
of the gold standard by the United States, the central-exchange
triangle between London, Paris, and New York was further disrupted. All
three exchange rates were able to fluctuate, although the Exchange
Equalization Account kept two of them relatively steady. To the
worldwide problem of economic distress was now added the problem of
exchange stabilization. A dispute ensued among Britain, France, and the
United States over which of these two problems should be given
priority. France insisted that no economic recovery was possible until
exchanges were stabilized. It surely was true that as long as the franc
remained on gold at the same valuation, France would suffer from the
depreciation of the pound and the dollar. The United States insisted
that economic recovery must have priority over stabilization, since the
latter would hamper the process of price reflation which the
administration considered essential to recovery. Britain, which had
supported the priority of recovery over stabilization as long as the
pound was the only one of the three currencies which was depreciated,
insisted on the importance of stabilization as soon as the advantages
of depreciation began to be shared by the dollar. This depreciation of
both the dollar and the pound put great strain on the franc. To keep
France from being forced off the gold standard, Britain, on April 28,
1933, lent her £30 million to be repaid out of the
sterling exchange with which France had been caught in September 1931.
Until the middle of 1933, the Exchange Equalization Account was used by
Britain to prevent any appreciation of the pound. This was countered in
the United States by the inflationary Thomas Amendment to the
Agricultural Adjustment Act (May 12, 1933). This Amendment gave the
president the power to devaluate the dollar up to 50 percent, to issue
up to $3 billion in fiat money, and to engage on an extensive program
of public spending.
The World
Economic Conference, 1933
This
dispute over the priority
of stabilization or recovery reached its peak in the World Monetary and
Economic Conference held in London from June 12 to July 27, 1933. A
Preparatory Commission of Experts drew up a series of preliminary
agreements for countries on gold or off, with exchange controls or
without, but no agreement could be obtained at the conference itself.
Britain and France tried to get the dollar to join them in a temporary de
facto stabilization
in preparation for a real agreement. The franc and pound had already
been pegged to each other at 84 francs per pound, which gave a London
gold price of 122 shillings. The United States refused to join in any
temporary stabilization because of the success of the administration's
domestic recovery program. The general price index in the United States
rose by 8.7 percent from February to June 1933, and farm products rose
by 30.1 percent. The mere hint of a stabilization agreement was
sufficient to cause a sharp break in the rise of security and commodity
prices (June 14, 1933), so Roosevelt broke off all negotiations toward
stabilization (July 3, 1933).
Four Great
Negatives
The
World Economic Conference,
as Professor William Adams Brown wrote, broke up on four great
negatives: the countries which had adopted trade restrictions refused
to abandon them without currency stabilization; the countries on the
gold standard refused to accept price increases as a road to recovery
because of fear of inflation; Great Britain wanted price increases but
refused to permit an unbalanced budget or a public works program; and
the United States, which was seeking recovery through inflation and
public works, refused to hamper the program by currency stabilization.
The Countries
of the World Divide into Three Groups
As
a result of the failure of
the Economic Conference, the countries of the world tended to divide
into three groups: a sterling bloc, a gold bloc, and a dollar bloc. The
gold and sterling blocs were formally organized, the former on July 3rd
and the later on July 8th. A struggle ensued among these three in an
effort to shift the economic burdens of past mistakes from one to
another.
The Failure
of the World Economic Conference
A
great deal has been written
since 1933 in an effort to apportion the blame for the failure of the
World Economic Conference. It is a futile task. From the point of view
of narrow self-interest in the short run, all countries were correct in
their actions. From the wider point of view of the world as a whole or
of the long-run results, all countries were worthy of blame. By 1933,
the day in which any country could follow a policy of short-run
self-interest and remain under liberal capitalism was past. For
technological and institutional reasons, the economies of the different
countries were so intertwined with one another that any policy of
self-interest on the part of one would be sure to injure others in the
short run and the country itself in the long run. Briefly, the
international and the domestic economic systems had developed [by the
Money Power] to a point where the customary methods of thought and
procedure in regard to them were [considered] obsolete [by the Money
Power].
The Whole
Banking System in America Is Insolvent
The
reason why a policy of
short-run self-interest on the part of one country was in such sharp
conflict with any similar policy pursued by another country does not
rest on the fact that the interests of one country were adverse to
those of another. That would have been a problem to be treated by
simple compromise. The conflicts between economic nationalisms were
based on the fact that, viewed superficially, the crisis took entirely
different forms in the chief countries of the world. In the United
States, the most obvious manifestation of the crisis was low prices,
which by 1933 made the whole banking system insolvent. High prices
became, thus, for the United States, the chief goal of debtors and
creditors alike. In Britain, the most obvious manifestation of the
crisis was the outflow of gold which jeopardized the gold standard. A
rectification of the international balance of payments rather than a
rise in prices thus became the chief immediate aim of British policy.
In France, the crisis appeared chiefly as an unbalanced internal
budget. The French gold supply was more than adequate, and prices, as a
result of the substantial devaluation of 1928, were considered
extremely high. But the unbalanced budget created a great problem. If
the deficit were filled by borrowing the result would be inflationary
and injurious to the creditor classes who had suffered so greatly in
the 1920's. If the deficit were filled by taxation, this would lead to
deflation (with its decline in business activity) and a flight of
capital out of the country. To the French government the only way out
of this dilemma was to be found in an increase in business activity,
which would increase the tax yield without any rise in rates. It could
see no value in the American concern with higher prices or the British
concern with trade balances as short-run objectives.
This
contrast between the
various kinds of impact which the economic and financial crisis made on
the various countries could be extended to lesser countries. In
Switzerland (where gold reserves were well over 100 percent) the chief
problem was "hot money." In Germany, the chief problem was foreign
debts, but this soon developed into a combination of all the ailments
which were afflicting other countries (low prices, unfavorable balance
of trade, unbalanced budget, panicky short-term loans, and so on). In
the Netherlands and in the countries of eastern Europe, the chief
problem was "segmentation of prices" (that is, that prices of food and
raw materials, which they sold, fell faster than prices of manufactured
goods which they bought).
Nations Begin
to Pursue Policies of Economic Nationalism
As
a result of the crisis,
regardless of the nature of its primary impact, all countries began to
pursue policies of economic nationalism. This took the form of tariff
increases, licensing of imports, import quotas, sumptuary laws
restricting imports, laws placing national origin, trade-mark, health,
or quarantine restrictions on imports, foreign-exchange controls,
competitive depreciation of currencies, export subsidies, dumping of
exports, and so on. These were first established on an extensive scale
in , and spread rapidly as a result of imitation and retaliation.
World Trade
System Breaks into Segregated Markets
As
a result of such economic
nationalism, it soon appeared that the disappearance of the old
multilateral system of world finance centering in London would be
followed by the breaking of the multilateral system of world trade
(also centering in Britain) into a number of partially segregated
markets operating on a bilateral basis. International trade declined
greatly as the following figures indicate:
Value of
Trade in Millions of Dollars
1928
1932
1935 1933
Europe's
Trade 58,082 24,426 20,762 24,065
World's
Trade 114,429
45,469
40,302 46,865
The Crisis in
the Gold Bloc, 1934—1936
After
the breakup of the World
Economic Conference, the United States continued its policy of domestic
inflation. As the dollar depreciated, the pressure on the franc
increased, while the pound, through the use of the Exchange
Equalization Account, tried to follow a middle ground in a depreciated,
but stable, relationship to the franc. In this way, by purely
artificial means, the pound was kept at about 85 francs. In the late
summer of 1933 (September 8th) the United States Treasury began to
depreciate the dollar by buying gold at constantly increasing prices
(about $30 an ounce, compared to the old stabilization rate of $20.67).
This put pressure on the franc as well as on the pound. Deflation
became increasingly severe in France, and, in October 1933, a budget
deficit of over 40 billion francs gave rise to a Cabinet crisis. By the
end of 1933, the gold price in New York reached $34, and the dollar,
which had been at 4.40 in relation to the pound in August, fell to
5.50. On February 1, 1934, the United States went back on the gold
standard at a considerable devaluation under the old price. The gold
content was cut to 59.06 percent of the 1932 amount. At the same time,
the Treasury set up a standing offer to buy gold at $35 an ounce. This
served to remove much of the uncertainty about the dollar, but
stabilized it in regard to the franc at a level which put great
pressure on the franc. At this price for gold, the metal flowed to the
United States, France losing about 3 billion francs' worth in February
1934.
France
Thus
the world depression and
the financial crisis which France had escaped for over three years were
extended to her. France had been able to escape because of her drastic
devaluation in the 1920's, her well balanced economy, and her ability
to keep down unemployment by placing restrictions on the entrance of
seasonal labor from Spain, Italy, and Poland. The crisis of the pound
in September 1931 had begun to spread the crisis to France, and the
crisis of the dollar in 1933 had made the situation worse. The American
actions of 1934, which gave the world a 59-cent dollar and $35 gold,
made the position of the gold bloc untenable. They had to suffer a
severe deflation, or abandon gold, or devaluate. Most of them (because
they feared inflation or because they had foreign debts which would
increase in weight if their currency was to depreciate) permitted
deflation with all its suffering. Italy even ordered deflation by
decree in April 1934, in order to maintain business activity by forcing
costs down as much as prices. Eventually, all members of the gold bloc
had to abandon gold to some extent because of the pressure from the
dollar.
Belgium
Belgium
was the first member
of the gold bloc to yield, setting up exchange controls on March 18,
1935, and devaluating the belga to about 72 percent of its former gold
content on March 30th. The final blow which forced the change was the
British tariff on iron and steel established on March 26, 1935. As a
result of this quick and decisive devaluation, Belgium experienced a
considerable amount of economic recovery. Almost at once, production
and prices rose, while unemployment fell.
France
Defends the Franc
The
other members of the gold
bloc did not profit by the example of Belgium, but determined to defend
the gold content of their currencies to the limit. France was the
leader in this movement, and by her policy was able to influence the
other members of the bloc to resist with the same vigor. This
determination of France to defend the franc is to be explained by the
fact that the great mass of Frenchmen were creditors in some way or
other, and having lost four-fifths of their savings in the inflation of
1914-1926 did not view with any pleasure another dose of the same
medicine. In this effort to defend the franc, France was aided greatly
by the activity of the British Exchange Equalization Account which
bought francs in enormous quantities whenever the currency became very
weak. By 1935, the resources of the Account capable of being devoted to
this purpose were largely expended, and the franc fell below the gold
export point for long periods. The Bank of France raised its discount
rate from 2 ½ percent to 6 percent (May 23-28, 1935) with
depressing economic results. Laval in July obtained emergency powers
from the Assembly, and adopted a policy of deflation by decree, cutting
ordinary public expenditures for the year from 40 billion to 11 billion
francs, cutting all public salaries by lo percent, and also reducing
all rents, the cost of public utilities, and the price of bread.
Gold Begins
to Leave France
In
this way, the strain on the
gold reserves (which fell to 16 billion francs during 1935) was
relieved at the cost of increased depression. By September, the franc
was still overvalued (as far as cost of living was concerned) by about
34 percent as compared to the pound and by about 54 percent as compared
to the dollar. The deflation necessary to bring French prices down to
parity with the prices in the depreciated-currency countries could not
be obtained. By the end of 1935, the government had abandoned the
effort, and by borrowing to meet budgetary deficits had turned France
toward inflation. Gold began to leave the country again, and this exit
became a flood after a government of the Left led by Blum came to power
in June 1936.
The
Blum "Popular Front"
government tried to follow an impossible program: "inflation on gold."
It sought inflation to relieve depression and unemployment and sought
to remain on gold because this was insisted on by both the Communist
and bourgeois supporters of the government. In an effort to restore
confidence and slow the "flight from the franc," it became necessary
for Blum formally to disavow any intention of installing a Socialist
program. The Right thus discovered that it could veto any actions of
the Left government merely by exporting capital from France. The flight
of such capital continued through the summer of 1936, while Blum
negotiated with Britain and the United States regarding devaluation of
the franc. On September 24, 1936, the bank rate was raised from 3
percent to 5 percent, and, on the following day, a Three-Power Currency
Declaration announced that the franc would be "adjusted," exchange
stability would be maintained thereafter (through the stabilization
funds), and trade restrictions would be relaxed.
The French
Devaluation of 1936
The
French devaluation (law of
October 2, 1936) provided that the gold content of the franc would be
reduced to an amount from 25.2 percent to 34.4 percent of the old
figure of 65 ½ milligrams. From the profits obtained by thus
revaluing French gold reserves, an exchange stabilization fund of 10
billion francs was set up.
France Is
Blackmailed by the Wealthy
Although
the French
devaluation of September 136 shattered the gold bloc and forced the
other members of the bloc to follow suit, it did not end the period of
deflation. The reasons for this were chiefly to be found in the
complete mismanagement of the French devaluation. This decisive event
was delayed too long—at least a year after it should have been
done—a year during which gold steadily flowed from France.
Moreover, when the devaluation came, it was insufficient and left the
franc still overvalued in relation to price levels in the other Great
Powers. Furthermore, the devaluation was shrouded with uncertainty,
since the law permitted the government to devalue to any gold content
between 43 and 49 milligrams. By stabilizing at about 46 milligrams,
the government prevented any revival of confidence because of the
danger of a further devaluation to 43 milligrams. By the time the
government realized that a further devaluation was necessary, the
situation had deteriorated so far that a devaluation to 43 milligrams
was worthless. Finally, in the devaluation law the government took
punitive measures against gold hoarders and speculators, seeking to
prevent them from reaping the profits they would obtain by converting
their gold back into francs at the new value. As a result, the exported
and hoarded gold did not return but stayed in hiding. Thus the
financial, budgetary, and economic difficulties in France continued. By
the middle of 1937, they had become so bad that the only possible
solutions were exchange control or a drastic devaluation. The former
was rejected because of the pressure from Britain and the United States
based on the Tripartite Agreement of 1936 and the support which their
stabilization funds afforded the franc; the latter was rejected by all
politicians likely to obtain power in France. As a result, the franc
passed through a series of depreciations and partial devaluations which
benefitted no one except the speculators and left France for years torn
by industrial unrest and class struggles. Unable to arm or give foreign
affairs the attention they needed, the government was subjected to
systematic blackmail by the well-to-do of the country because of the
ability of these persons to prevent social reform, public spending,
arming, or any policy of decision by selling francs. Only in May 1938
was a decisive step made. At that time the franc was drastically
depreciated to 179 in the pound, and pegged at that figure. Its gold
content (by a law of November 12, 1938) was fixed at about 27.5
milligrams nine-tenths fine. By that time France had suffered years of
economic chaos and governmental weakness. These conditions had
encouraged German aggression, and, when a decisive financial action was
made in 1938, it was, because of the rising international crisis, too
late to reap any important economic benefits.
The Gold Bloc
Was Destroyed
We
have said that the gold
bloc was destroyed by the French devaluation of September 1936. This
was accomplished almost immediately. Switzerland, the Netherlands, and
Czechoslovakia devalued their currencies by about 30 percent and Italy
by about 40 percent before the end of October. In each case, like
Belgium rather than France. the devaluation was large enough in amount
and abrupt enough in time to contribute to a noticeable reflation and
improvement in business activity. Each country of the former gold bloc
set up a stabilization fund to control exchange rates, and joined the
Tripartite currency agreement of September 1936.
The
Banker-Engendered Deflationary Crisis Became a
Chief Cause
of World War II
The
historical importance of
the banker-engendered deflationary crisis of 1927-1940 can hardly be
overestimated. It gave a blow to democracy and to the parliamentary
system which the later triumphs of these in World War II and the
postwar world were unable to repair fully. It gave an impetus to
aggression by those nations where parliamentary government collapsed,
and thus became a chief cause of World War II. It so hampered the
Powers which remained democratic by its orthodox economic theories that
these were unable to rearm for defense, with the consequence that World
War II was unduly prolonged by the early defeats of the democratic
states. It gave rise to a conflict between the theorists of orthodox
and unorthodox financial methods.... And, finally, it impelled the
whole economic development of the West along the road from financial
capitalism to monopoly capitalism and, shortly thereafter, toward the
pluralist economy.
The Banker's
Formula for Treating a Depression
The
controversy between the
bankers and the theorists of unorthodox finance arose over the proper
way to deal with an economic depression. We shall analyze this problem
later, but here we should say that the bankers' formula for treating a
depression was by clinging to the gold standard, by raising interest
rates and seeking deflation, and by insisting on a reduction of public
spending, a fiscal surplus, or at least a balanced budget. These ideas
were rejected totally, on a point-by-point basis, by the unorthodox
economists (somewhat mistakenly called "Keynesian"). The bankers'
formula sought to encourage economic recovery by "restoring confidence
in the value of money," that is, their own confidence in what was the
primary concern of bankers. This formula had worked in the past only
when it had, more or less incidentally, reduced costs (especially
wages) faster than wholesale prices so that businessmen regained
confidence, not in the value of money but in the possibility of
profits. The unorthodox theorists sought to achieve this latter more
quickly and more directly by restoring purchasing power, and thus
prices, by increasing, instead of reducing, the money supply and by
placing it in the hands of potential consumers rather in the banks or
in the hands of investors....
Ivar Kreuger
Sells Worthless and Fraudulent Securities
The
end of financial
capitalism may well be dated at the collapse of the gold standard in
Britain in September 1931, but, on the personal side, it might be dated
at the suicide of its most spectacular individual, the "Match King,"
Ivar Kreuger, in Paris in April 1932.
Ivar
Kreuger (1880-1932),
after several years' experience as an engineer in America and South
Africa, set up in Stockholm in 1911 the contracting firm of Kreuger
& Toll. By 1918 this firm was a financial company with a
capital of
12 million kronor, and chiefly interested in the Swedish Match Company,
a holding company organized by Kreuger. Within a decade, Kreuger had
control of over 150 match companies in 43 countries. The securities of
these firms were controlled through a Delaware corporation (called
International Match Company). This holding company sold millions of
dollars of securities with no voting rights, while control was
exercised through a small bloc of voting stock held by Kreuger
&
Toll. By granting loans to the governments of various countries,
Kreuger obtained match monopolies which brought in substantial sums. In
all, £330 million was lent to governments in this way, including
$75 million to France and $125 million to Germany. In return Kreuger
obtained control of 80 percent of the world's match industry, most of
Europe's paper and wood-pulp production, fourteen telephone and
telegraph companies in six countries, a considerable part of the
farm-mortgage systems of Sweden, France, and Germany, eight iron-ore
mines, and numerous other enterprises, including a considerable group
of banks and newspapers in various countries. The whole system was
financed in a sumptuous fashion by selling worthless and fraudulent
securities to investors through the most prominent investment bankers
of the world. In all, about $750 million in such securities was sold,
about one-third in the United States. The respected Lee, Higginson, and
Company of Boston sold $150 million of these securities to 600 banks
and brokers without making any investigation into their value or
honesty and received about $6 million in fees for doing so. The money
thus raised by Kreuger was used to advance loans to various countries,
to pay interest and dividends on securities issued previously, and to
finance the further exploits of Mr. Kreuger. As examples of these
exploits, we might mention that Kreuger & Toll paid dividends
of 25
percent from 1919 to 1928 and 30 percent after 1929, mostly from
capital; Swedish Match Company usually paid 15 per cent dividends. This
was done in order to persuade the investing public to buy more of
Kreuger's securities and thus keep the system going. In order to
encourage this public, prospectuses were falsified, letters were
forged, and the stock market was manipulated at heavy cost. Bonds were
issued against the same security several times over. Most brazen of
all, bonds were issued against the receipts of the match monopolies of
Italy and Spain. Although Kreuger possessed neither of these, he
carried them on his books for $80 million and had bonds forged by
himself to substantiate the claim. The long-drawn out depression of
1929-1933 made it impossible to keep the system afloat, although
Kreuger avoided no degree of corruption and deceit in his efforts to do
so. In March 1932 a note for $11 million from International Telephone
and Telegraph fell due, and Kreuger, unable to meet it, killed himself.
He left claims against his estate of $700 million, while his personal
debts were $179 million with assets of $18 million.
Large
Combinations and Cartels Formed
The
death of Kreuger is merely
a symbol of the end of European financial capitalism. For about fifty
years before this event, the centralized control made possible by the
financial system had been used to develop monopolistic tendencies in
industry. These had been furthered by the growth of large combinations,
by the formation of cartels and trade associations between units of
enterprise, and by the increase of those less tangible restrictions on
competition known as imperfect and monopolistic competition. As a
result, competition had been declining, control of the market had been
increasing, and self-financing by industrial units had been growing.
This last development made it possible for industry once more to free
itself from financial control as it had been in the owner-management
period which preceded financial capitalism. But, unlike this earlier
stage, control did not revert from financiers back to the owners of
enterprise but instead tended to shift into the hands of a new class of
bureaucratic managers whose powers of control were out of all
relationship to the extent of their ownership of the enterprises
concerned. In France, the bankers, although in retreat when war came in
1939, had been so strengthened by the unorthodox financial policies of
the 1920's that they were able to prevent any important victory for
monopoly capitalism in the 1930's, with the result that the shift from
financial to monopoly capitalism did not appear in France until the
1940's. In the United States, also, the transition was not complete
when war came in 1939, with the result that the United States, like
France, but unlike any other important country, had not shaken off the
world depression even as late as 1940.
Chapter
22—Reflation and Inflation, 1933-1947
The
period of reflation began
in some countries (like Great Britain and the United States) long
before the period of deflation had ended elsewhere (as in France). In
most countries the recovery was associated with rising wholesale
prices, with abandonment of the gold standard or at least devaluation,
and with easy credit. It resulted everywhere in increased demand,
rising production, and decreasing unemployment. By the middle of 1932,
recovery was discernible among the members of the sterling bloc; by the
middle of 1933 it was general except for the members of the gold bloc.
This recovery was halting and uncertain. Insofar as it was caused by
government actions, these actions were aimed at treatment of the
symptoms rather than the causes of the depression, and these actions,
by running contrary to orthodox economic ideas, served to slow up
recovery by reducing confidence. Insofar as the recovery was caused by
the normal working out of the business cycle, the recovery was slowed
up by the continuation of emergency measures—such as controls
over commerce and finance and by the fact that the economic
dis-equilibriums which the depression had made were frequently
intensified by the first feeble movements toward recovery. Finally, the
recovery was slowed up by the drastic increase in political insecurity
as a result of the aggressions of Japan, of Italy, and of Germany.
Except
for Germany and Russia
(both of which had isolated their economies from world fluctuations)
the recovery continued for no more than three or four years. In most
countries the latter half of 1937 and the early part of 1938
experienced a sharp "recession." In no important country had prices
reached the 1929 level at the beginning of the recession (although
within 10 percent of it), nor had the percentage of persons unemployed
fallen to the 1929 level. In many countries (but not the United States
or the gold bloc), industrial production had reached 1929 levels.
The Recession
of 1937
The
recession was marked by a
break in wholesale prices, a decline in business activity, and an
increase in unemployment. In most countries it began in the spring of
1937 and lasted for about ten months or a year. It was caused by
several factors: (1) much of the price rise before 1937 had been caused
by speculative buying and by the efforts of "panic money" to seek
refuge in commodities, rather than by demand from either consumers or
investors; (2) several international commodity cartels created in the
period of depression and early recovery broke down with a resulting
fall in prices; (3) there was a curtailment of public deficit spending
in several countries, especially the United States and France; (4) the
replacement of capital goods worn out in the period 1929-1934 had
caused much of the revival of 1933-1937 and began to taper off in 1937;
(5) the increase in political tension in the Mediterranean and the Far
East as a result of the Civil War in Spain and the Japanese attack on
North China had an adverse effect; and (6) a "gold scare" occurred.
This last was a sudden fall in the demand for gold caused by the fact
that the great increase in gold production resulting from the United
States Treasury price of $35 an ounce gave rise to rumors that the
Treasury would soon cut this price.
Ownership of
Gold Ended in the U.S.
As
a result of the recession
of 1937, the governmental policies of 1933-1935, which had given the
first recovery, were intensified and gave rise to a second recovery.
Bank rates were lowered—in some cases to 1 percent; deficit
spending was resumed or increased; all efforts to get back on a gold
standard were postponed indefinitely; in the United States, the
sterilization of gold was ended, and all thoughts of reducing the
buying price of gold were abandoned. The chief new factor after the
recession was one which was of minor but rapidly growing importance.
The deficit spending which had been used to pay for public works
projects before 1937 was increasingly devoted to rearmament after that
date. Britain, for example, spent £186 million on
arms in
the fiscal year 1936-1937 and £262 million in the year 1937-1938.
It is not possible to say to what extent this increase in armaments was
caused by the need for deficit spending and to what extent it was the
result of the rising political tensions. Similarly, it is not possible
to say which is cause and which effect as between political tensions
and rearmament. Indeed, the relationships between all three of these
factors are mutual reactions of cause and effect. At any rate, after
the recession of 1937, armaments, political tensions, and prosperity
increased together. For most countries, the political tensions led to
the use of arms in open conflict long before full prosperity had been
achieved. In most countries, industrial production exceeded the 1929
level by the end of 1937, but because of the increase in population,
efficiency, and capital this was achieved without full utilization of
resources. In the United States (with Canada as an appendage) and in
France (with Belgium as an appendage) production continued low
throughout the 1930's, reaching the 1929 level in the first pair only
in the late summer of 1939 and never reaching the 1929 level in the
second pair. As a result of the failure of most countries (excepting
Germany and the Soviet Union) to achieve full utilization of resources,
it was possible to devote increasing percentages of these resources to
armaments without suffering any decline in the standards of living. In
fact, to the surprise of many, the exact opposite resulted—as
armaments grew, the standard of living improved because of the fact
that the chief obstacle in the way of an improving standard of
living—that is, lack of consumers' purchasing power, was remedied
by the fact that armament manufacture supplied such purchasing power in
the market without turning into the market any equivalent in goods
which would use up purchasing power.
The Existence
of Imprisoned Capital
The
recovery from depression
after 1933 did not result in any marked reduction in the restrictions
and controls which the depression had brought to commercial and
financial activity. Since these controls had been established because
of the depression, it might have been expected that such controls would
have been relaxed as the depression lifted. Instead, they were
maintained and, in some cases, extended. The reasons for this were
various. In the first place, as the political crisis became more
intense the value of these controls for defense and war was realized.
In the second place, powerful bureaucratic vested interests had grown
up for enforcing these controls. In the third place, these
restrictions, which had been established chiefly for controlling
foreign trade, proved very effective in controlling domestic economic
activity. In the fourth place, under the protection of these controls
the difference in price levels between some countries had grown so
great that the ending of controls would have torn their economic
structures to pieces. In the fifth place, the demand for protection
from foreign competition remained so great that these controls could
not be removed. In the sixth place, the debtor-creditor relationships
between countries still remained valid and unbalanced and would have
required new controls as soon as the old ones were lifted to prevent
unbalanced payments and deflationary pressure. In the seventh place,
the existence of "imprisoned capital" within national economic systems
made it impossible to raise the controls, since the flight of such
capital would have been disruptive of the economic system. The chief
example of such imprisoned capital was the property of the Jews in
Germany, amounting to over lo billion marks.
For
these and other reasons
tariffs, quotas, subsidies, exchange controls, and government
manipulations of the market continued. The moment at which these
controls could have been withdrawn most easily was at the beginning of
1937, because by that time recovery was well developed and the
international dis-equilibriums were less acute because of the
disruption of the gold bloc late in 1936. The moment passed without
much being accomplished, and, by the end of 1937, the recession and the
mounting political crisis made all hopes of relaxing controls utopian.
The Hull
Reciprocal Trade Program
Such
hopes, however, were
found both before and after 1937. These included the Oslo Agreements of
1930 and 1937, the Ouchy Convention of 1932, the Hull Reciprocal Trade
Program of 1934 and after, the Van Zeeland Mission of 1937, and the
constant work of the League of Nations. Of these, only the Hull Program
accomplished anything concrete, and the importance of its
accomplishment is a subject of dispute.
The United
States Became the World's Chief Defender of Free Trade
The
Hull Reciprocal Trade
Program is of more importance from the political than from the economic
point of view. It openly aimed at freer and multilateral trade. The
act, as passed in 1934 and renewed at regular intervals since,
empowered the executive branch to negotiate with other countries trade
agreements in which the United States could reduce tariffs by any
amount up to 50 percent. In return for lowering our tariffs in this
way, we hoped to obtain trade concessions from the other party to the
agreement. Although these agreements were bilateral in form, they were
multilateral in effect, because each agreement contained an
unconditional most-favored-nation clause by which each party bound
itself to extend to the other party concessions at least as great as
those it extended to the most favored nation with which it traded. As a
result of such clauses any concessions made by either tended to be
generalized to other countries. The interest of the United States in
removing the restrictions on world trade was to be found in the fact
that she had productive capacity beyond that necessary to satisfy
articulate domestic demand in almost every field of economic activity.
As a result she had to export or find her hands full of surplus goods.
The interest of the United States in multilateral trade rather than in
bilateral trade was to be found in the fact that her surpluses existed
in all types of goods—foodstuffs, raw materials, and industrial
products—and the markets for these would have to be sought in all
kinds of foreign economies, not in any single type. The United States
had excess supplies of food like wheat, pork, and corn; of raw
materials like petroleum, cotton, and iron; of specialized industrial
products like radios, automobiles, and locomotives. It was not possible
to sell all these types to a food-producing country like Denmark, or to
a raw-material-producing country like Canada or the Malay States, or to
an industrial country like Germany or Britain. Accordingly, the United
States became the world's chief defender of freer and multilateral
trade. Her chief argument was based on the fact that such trade would
contribute to a higher standard of living for all parties. To the
United States, whose political security was so sound that it rarely
required a moment's thought, a higher standard of living was the chief
aim of existence. Accordingly, it was difficult for the United States
to comprehend the point of view of a state which, lacking political
security, placed a high standard of living in a position second to such
security.
Nazi Germany
Seeks Independence
In
sharp contrast to the
United States in its attitude toward the problem of international trade
was Nazi Germany. This and other countries were seeking "independence"
(that is, political goals in the economic sphere), and they rejected
"dependence" even if it did include a higher standard of living. They
frequently rejected the argument that autarky was necessarily injurious
to the standard of living or to international trade, because by
"autarky" they did not mean self-sufficiency in all things, but
self-sufficiency in necessities. Once this had been achieved, they
stated their willingness to expand the world's trade in nonessentials
to an extent as great as any standard of living might require.
Third World
Countries to be Deprived of Sovereignty and
Reduced to
Vassal States
The
basic key to the new
emphasis on autarky is to be found in the fact that the advocates of
such economic behavior had a new conception of the meaning of
sovereignty. To them sovereignty had not only all the legal and
political connotations it had always held, but in addition had to
include economic independence. Since such economic independence could,
according to the theory, be obtained only by the Great Powers, the
lesser states were to be deprived of sovereignty in its fullest sense
and be reduced to a kind of vassal or client condition in respect to
the Great Powers. The theory was that each Great Power, in order to
enjoy full sovereignty, must adopt a policy of autarky. Since no power,
however great, could be self-sufficient within its own national
boundaries, it must extend this sphere of autarky to include its weaker
neighbors, and this sphere would have political as well as economic
implications, since it was unthinkable that any Great Power should
permit its lesser neighbors to endanger it by suddenly cutting off its
supplies or markets.
The Rise of
Continental Blocs Made It Possible that the World
Would Be
Integrated into Large Political Units
The
theory thus led to the
conception of "continental blocs" consisting of aggregates of lesser
states about the few Great Powers. This theory was entirely in accord
with the political development of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century. This development had seen an increasing disparity in
the powers of states with a decreasing number of Great Powers. This
decline in the number of Great Powers occurred because of the advance
of technology, which had progressed to a point where only a few states
could follow. The theory of continental blocs was also in accord with
the growth of communications, transportation, weapons, and
administrative techniques. These made it almost inevitable that the
world would be integrated into increasingly large political units. The
inevitability of this development can be seen from the fact that the
wars of 1914-1945, waged for the preservation of the small states (like
Poland, Czechoslovakia, Holland, and Belgium), succeeded in reducing
the number of Great Powers from seven to two.
Integration
of States Sought by Illegitimate Methods
This
integration of states
into continental or other large blocs was, as we have seen, a quite
legitimate and attainable ambition, but it was sought by the aggressor
states (like Germany, Japan, and Italy) by quite illegitimate methods.
A better method for attaining such integration would have been based on
consent and mutual penetration. But this federalist method of
integration could have succeeded only if it were honestly offered as an
alternative to the authoritarian solution of the aggressor states. This
was not done. Instead, the "liberal" states refused to recognize the
inevitability of integration and, while resisting the authoritarian
solution, sought as well to resist the whole process of integration.
They sought to preserve the atomistic world structure of sovereign
states which was so out of keeping with technological developments both
in politics (new weapons, speedy transportation, and quicker
communications) and in economics (mass production and increasing need
for exotic materials such as tin, rubber, or uranium found in small and
scattered amounts). As a result the liberal Powers resisted the German
efforts to cope with the real world developments without putting any
realistic or progressive substitute program in its place.
The Majority
of the Countries Were Put into the
Position of
Needing Integration
The
policy of negativism on
the part of the liberal Powers was made worse by the fact that these
Powers had put Germany and others into a position (as debtors) where
they were driven in the direction of greater integration of the world
on a voluntary basis. This appeared in the fact that these Powers had
to adopt freer and increased trade in order to pay their debts. Having
put the majority of the countries of the world into this position of
needing increased integration in order to pay their debts, the liberal
countries made it impossible to obtain such integration on a federalist
basis by adopting policies of isolationist, economic nationalism for
themselves (by high tariffs, ending of long-term loans, and so on).
This dog-in-the-manger policy in economic matters was quite similar to
their policy in political matters where, after setting up an
organization to achieve peace, they declined to permit Germany to be a
part of it and, later, when Germany became a part they refused to use
the organization for peaceful goals but instead tried to use it to
enforce the Treaty of Versailles or to build up a power balance against
the Soviet Union.
The
Instruments of International Organization Were Not Sufficiently
Developed to
Prevent the Rise of Nationalism
This
failure of the liberal
states in the 1920's becomes more obvious when we examine the great
increase in restrictive economic and financial policies in the 1930's.
It is usually said that the excesses in these were caused by the great
increase in nationalism resulting from the depression. This is not
true, and the increase in such restrictions cannot be quoted as a proof
of increasing nationalism. No country entered upon these policies for
nationalistic reasons—that is, for the closer integration of its
own people, or to distinguish them more sharply from other people, or
for the aggrandizement of its own people over another. The increase in
economic nationalism was based on a much more practical cause than
that—on the fact that the nation was the only social unit capable
of action in the emergency resulting from the depression. And men were
demanding action. For this the only available agency was the national
state. If a broader agency had been available, it would have been used.
Since it was not, the state had to be used—used, not with the
purpose of injuring one's neighbors, but solely with the purpose of
benefitting oneself. The fact that neighbors were injured was a more or
less accidental result, regrettable, but inevitable so long as the
largest unit of political organization (that is, the largest unit
capable of complete action) was the nation-state. When a theater
catches fire, and persons are trampled in the resulting panic, this is
not because anyone desired this, but merely because each individual
sought to escape from the building as soon as possible. The result is
disaster because the individual is the only unit available capable of
action. And the individual is too small a unit of action to spare many
individuals from tragedy. If a larger unit of organization exists (as,
for example, if the persons in the theater are a company of infantry
with its officers), or if some cool-headed person can organize the
group into a unit of action larger than the individual, all might
escape safely. But the chances of forming an organization after the
panic has begun are almost nil. In 1929-1934, the panic started before
any unit of action larger than the nation-state existed. As a result,
all suffered, and the puny efforts to form an organization after the
panic began were vain. This is the real tragedy of the 1920's. Because
of the conservatism, timidity, and hypocrisy of those who were trying
to build an international organization in the period 1919-1929, this
organization was so inadequate by 1929 when the emergency began that
the organization which had been set up was destroyed rather than
strengthened. If the instruments of international cooperation had been
further advanced in 1929, the demand for action would have made use of
these instruments, and a new era of political progress would have
commenced. Instead, the inadequacy of these instruments forced men to
fall back on the broadest instrument which was available—the
nation-state; and there began a retrogressive movement capable of
destroying all Western Civilization.
The Rise of
Economic Nationalism
The
economic nationalism which
arose from the need to act in a crisis—and to act unilaterally
because of the lack of any organ able to act multilaterally (that is,
internationally) was intensified after the breakdown in finance and
economics of 1931-1933 by several developments. In the first place, it
was increased by the discovery, by Germany in 1932, by Italy in 1934,
by Japan in 1936, and by the United States in 1938, that deflation
could be prevented by rearming. In the second place, it was increased
by the realization that political activity was more powerful and more
fundamental than economic activity—a realization which became
clear when it was found that every step toward a unilateral economic
solution resulted in reprisals from other nations which canceled out
that step and made necessary another step, which, in its turn, called
forth new reprisals; this soon showed that except in a nation capable
of self-sufficiency such actions in the economic sphere could
accomplish little and that unilateral action, if taken at all, must be
accompanied by political steps (which would permit no reprisals). In
the third place, economic nationalism was increased, and
internationalism reduced, by the great increase in political
insecurity, since the preservation of an international economic
organization involved entrusting one's economic fate, to some degree,
to the hands of another. Rather than this, economic nationalism was
increased in the name of autarky, security, economic mobilization, and
so on. Self-sufficiency, even if it involved a lower standard of
living, was held preferable to international division of labor, on the
grounds that political security was more important than a high—
and insecure—standard of living.
International
Trade Suffers a New Injury
As
a consequence of these
three causes, international trade began to suffer a new injury. The old
nineteenth century transfer of goods between industrial and colonial
areas (producers of food and raw materials) had begun to decline by a
purely natural evolution as the result of the industrialization of
colonial areas. But now, as a result of the increase in economic
nationalism, another kind of transfer was disrupted. This was the
transfer among industrial nations resulting from an international
division of labor and an uneven distribution of raw materials. An
example of this can be seen in the iron and steel industry of western
Europe. There British and German coal, French and Belgian low-grade
iron ores, Swedish high-grade iron ores were mingled and combined to
permit production of high-grade surgical steels in Sweden, of low-grade
building steels in Belgium, of heavy machine products in Germany, and
of light steel products in France. This transfer of goods began to be
disrupted in the onslaught of economic nationalism after 1929. As a
result, history turned backward, and the older interchange of colonial
for industrial products increased in relative importance.
Economic
Nationalism Strengthens Bilateralism
Economic
nationalism also
increased the trend toward bilateralism. This received its chief and
earliest impetus from Germany, but it was soon followed by other
countries until, by 1939, the United States was the only important
supporter of multilateral trade. Most countries justified their
acceptance of bilateralism on the grounds that they were compelled to
accept it because of economic pressure from Germany. In many cases,
this was not true. Some states, like Austria or Romania, were compelled
to accept bilateralism because that was the only way they could trade
with Germany. But other, more important, states, including Britain, did
not have this excuse for their actions, although they used it as an
excuse. The real reasons for Britain's adoption of bilateralism and
protection are to be found in the structure of the British domestic
economy, especially the growing rigidity of that economy through the
great and rapid increase in monopolies and cartels.
Britain's New
Trade Policy
The
new trade policy of
Britain after 1931 was the complete antithesis of that pursued by the
United States, although the more extreme and spectacular methods of
Germany concealed this fact from many persons until 1945. The United
States sought multilateralism and expansion of world trade. Britain
sought debt collection and increase of exports through bilateralism.
Without equality of treatment, its trade agreements sought to reduce
debts first and to increase exports second, if this second was
compatible with the reduction of debts. In some cases, in order to
reduce outstanding debts, it made agreements to curtail exports from
Britain or to reduce quotas on such goods (Anglo-Italian agreements of
April 1936, of November 1936, and of March 1938, as amended March
1939). It established payment agreements and clearings with debtor
countries. Current trade was subordinated to liquidation of past debts.
This was the direct opposite of the American theory which tended to
neglect past debts in order to build up present trade in the hope that
eventually past debts could be liquidated because of the increased
volume of trade. The British preferred a smaller volume of trade with
rapid payments to a larger volume with delayed payments.
These
tactics did not work
very well. Even with clearings and restricted exports Britain had great
difficulty in bringing into existence an unfavorable balance of trade
with debtor countries. Its balances generally remained favorable, with
exports higher than imports. As a result, payments continued to lag
behind (two and a half years in respect to Turkey), and it was
necessary to rewrite the commercial agreements embodying the new
bilateralism (in the case of Italy, four agreements in three years). In
some cases (like Turkey in May 1938), special joint trading
organizations were set up to sell products of the clearing country in
free-exchange markets so that debts owed to Britain from the clearing
country could be paid. This, however, meant that the free exchange
countries had to obtain Turkish products from Britain and could sell
none of their own products in Turkey because of lack of exchange.
Because
of the failure of
Britain's bilateral agreements to achieve what she had hoped, she was
driven to replace these agreements by others, always moving in the
direction of more control. Clearing agreements which were originally
voluntary were later made compulsory; those which were earlier
one-ended became later double-ended. Britain made barter agreements
with various countries, including one direct swap of rubber for wheat
with the United States. In 1939 the Federation of British Industries
went so far as to seek an agreement with Germany dividing markets and
fixing prices for most economic activities.
As
a result of all this, the
international commodity markets in which anything could be bought or
sold (if the price was right) were disrupted. The center of these
(chiefly in Britain) began to disappear, exactly as the international
capital market (also centering in Britain) was doing. Both markets were
broken up into partial and segregated markets. In fact, one of the
chief developments of the period was the disappearance of The
Market. It
is an interesting fact that the history of modern Europe is exactly
parallel in time with the existence of the market (from the twelfth
century to the twentieth century).
The Period of
Inflation, 1938—1945
The
period of reflation, which
began in most countries in the first half of 1933, merged into the
following period of inflation without any sharp line of demarcation
between the two. The increase in prices, prosperity, employment, and
business activity after 1933 was generally caused by increases in
public spending. As the political crisis became worse with the attacks
on Ethiopia, on Spain, on China, on Austria, and on Czechoslovakia,
this public spending increasingly took the form of spending on
armaments. For several years it was possible in most countries to
increase the output of armaments without reducing the output of
consumers' goods or of capital goods merely by putting to work the
resources, men, factories, and capital which had been standing idle in
the depression. Only when there were no longer any idle resources and
increased armaments had to be obtained by diverting resources to this
purpose from the production of consumers' or capital goods did the
period of inflation begin. At that point, a competition began between
the producers of armaments and the producers of wealth for the limited
supply of resources. This competition took the form of price
competition, with each side offering higher wages for manpower, higher
prices for raw materials. The result was inflation. The money which the
community obtained for the production of wealth as well as for the
production of arms was available to buy the former only (since arms are
not usually offered for sale to the public). This intensified the
inflation greatly. In most countries, the transition from reflation to
inflation did not occur until after they had entered the war. Germany
was the chief exception and possibly also Italy and Russia, since all
of these were making fairly full utilization of their resources by
1938. In Britain, such full utilization was not obtained until 1940 or
1941, and in the United States not until 1942 or even 1943. In France
and the other countries on the Continent overrun by Germany in 1940 and
1941, such full utilization of resources was not achieved before they
were defeated.
The
period of inflation
1938-1947 was very similar to the period of inflation 1914-1920. The
destruction of property and goods was much greater; the mobilization of
resources for such destruction was also greater. As a result, the
supply of real wealth, both producers' and consumers', was curtailed
much more completely. On the other hand, because of increased knowledge
and experience, the output of money and its management was much more
skillfully handled. The two factors together gave a degree of inflation
which was somewhat less intense in the Second World War than in the
First. Price controls and rationing were better applied and more
strictly enforced. Surpluses of money were taken up by new techniques
of compulsory or voluntary savings. The financing of the war was more
skillful so that a much larger increase in production was obtained from
a similar degree of inflation.
The Use of
Lend-Lease
Much
of the improvement in
financing World War II in comparison with World War I arose from the
fact that attention was concentrated on real resources rather than on
money. This was reflected both in the way in which each country managed
its domestic economy and in the relationships between countries. The
latter can be seen in the use of Lend-Lease rather than commercial
exchange as in World War I to provide America's allies with combat
supplies. The use of commercial exchange and orthodox financing in the
First World War had left a terrible burden of intergovernmental debts
and ill-feeling in the postwar period. In World War II the United
States provided Great Britain under Lend-Lease with $27,000 million in
supplies, received $6,000 million in return, and wrote off the account
with a payment of about $800 million in the postwar settlement.
The Rise of
Centralized Planning
In
domestic economies even
more revolutionary techniques were developed under the general category
of centralized planning. This went much further in Great Britain than
in the United States or Germany, and was chiefly remarkable for the
fact that it applied to real resources and not to money flows. The
chief of these controls were over manpower and materials. Both of these
were allotted where they seemed to be needed, and were not permitted,
as in World War I, to be drawn here and there in response to rising
wages or prices. Rises in prices were controlled by sopping up excess
purchasing power by compulsory or semi-compulsory saving and by
rationing of specific necessities. Above all, price rises in such
necessities were prevented by subsidies to producers, which gave them
more payment for production without any increase in the final selling
price. As a result, in Britain the cost of living rose from 100 in 1939
to 126 in 1941, but rose no more than to 129 by the war's end in 1945.
In the United States wholesale prices of all commodities rose only 26
percent from 1940 to 1945, but were twice as high as in 1940 in 1947.
Most of this increase in the United States came after the war's end,
and may be attributed to the refusal of the Republican-controlled
Congress, led by Senator Taft, to profit from the errors of 1918-1920.
As a result, most of the mistakes of that earlier period, such as the
ending of price controls and rationing and the delays in reconversion
to peacetime production, were repeated, but only after the war itself
had been won.
A New
Economic System Emerges
Outside
the United States,
many of the wartime control mechanisms were continued into the postwar
period, and contributed substantially to the creation of a new kind of
economic system which we might call the "pluralist economy" because it
operates from the shifting alignments of a number of organized interest
blocs, such as labor, farmers, heavy industry, consumers, financial
groups, and, above all, government. This will be analyzed later. At
this point we need only say that the postwar economy was entirely
different in character from that of the 1920's following World War I.
This was most notable in the absence of a postwar depression, which was
widely expected, but which did not arrive because there was no effort
to stabilize on a gold standard.... This has been brought about by the
new concern with real economic factors instead of with financial
counters, as previously. As part of this process, there has been a
great reduction in the economic role of gold. From this has flowed two
persistent postwar problems which would have been avoided by the gold
standard. There are (1) slow worldwide inflation arising from the
competing demands for economic resources by consumers, by investors,
and by defense and government needs; and (2) the constant recurrence of
acute exchange difficulties, such as the "dollar shortage" in world
trade, arising from the inability of gold shipments or foreign demand
to influence domestic prices sufficiently to reverse these foreign
movements. But these inconveniences, associated with the absence of a
gold standard and the inadequacies of the financial arrangements in
substitute for it, were generally regarded as a small price to pay for
the full employment and rising standards of living which advanced
industrial countries were able to obtain under planning in the postwar
era.
Part Eight—International Socialism and the
Soviet Challenge
Chapter
23—The International Socialist Movement
The
international Socialist
movement was both a product of the nineteenth century and a revulsion
against it. It was rooted in some of the characteristics of the
century, such as its industrialism, its optimism, its belief in
progress, its humanitarianism, its scientific materialism, and its
democracy, but it was in revolt against its laissez faire, its
middle-class domination, its nationalism, its urban slums, and its
emphasis on the price-profit system as the dominant factor in all human
values. This does not mean that all Socialists had the same beliefs or
that these beliefs did not change with the passing years. On the
contrary, there were almost as many different kinds of Socialism as
there were Socialists, and the beliefs categorized under this term
changed from year to year and from country to country.
Industrialism,
especially in
its early years, brought with it social and economic conditions which
were admittedly horrible. Human beings were brought together around
factories to form great new cities which were sordid and unsanitary. In
many cases, these persons were reduced to conditions of animality which
shock the imagination. Crowded together in want and disease, with no
leisure and no security, completely dependent on a weekly wage which
was less than a pittance, they worked twelve to fifteen hours a day for
six days in the week among dusty and dangerous machines with no
protection against inevitable accidents, disease, or old age, and
returned at night to crowded rooms without adequate food and lacking
light, fresh air, heat, pure water, or sanitation.
These
conditions have been
described for us in the writings of novelists such as Dickens in
England, Hugo or Zola in France, in the reports of parliamentary
committees such as the Sadler Committee of 1832 or Lord Ashley's
Committee in 1842, and in numerous private studies like In
Darkest England
by General William Booth of the Salvation Army. Just at the end of the
century, private scientific studies of these conditions began to appear
in England, led by Charles Booth's Life and
Labour of the People in London or B. Seebohm Rowntree's Poverty,
a Study of l own Life.
The
Socialist movement was a
reaction against these deplorable conditions of the working masses. It
has been customary to divide this movement into two parts at the year
1848, the earlier part being called "the period of the Utopian
Socialists" while the later part has been called "the period of
scientific Socialism." The dividing line between the two parts is
marked by the publication in 1848 of The Communist Manifesto
of
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. This work, which began with the ominous
sentence, "A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of
Communism," and ended with the trumpet blast, "Workers of the world,
unite!" is generally regarded as the seed from which developed, in the
twentieth century, Russian Bolshevism and Stalinism. Such a view is
undoubtedly an oversimplification, for the development of Socialist
ideology is full of twists and turns and might well have grown along
quite different paths if the history of the movement itself had been
different.
The
history of the Socialist
movement may be divided into three periods associated with the three
Socialist Internationals. The First International lasted from 1864 to
1876 and was as much anarchistic as Socialistic. It w as finally
disrupted by the controversies of these two groups. The Second
International was the Socialist International, founded in 1889. This
became increasingly conservative and was disrupted by the Communists
during World War I. The Third, or Communist, International was
organized in 1919 by dissident elements from the Second International.
.As a result of the controversies of these three movements, the whole
anticapitalist ideology, which began as a confused revolt against the
economic and social conditions of industrialism in 1848, became sorted
out into four chief schools. These schools became increasingly
doctrinaire and increasingly bitter in their relationships.
The
basic division within the
Socialist movement after 1848 was between those who wished to abolish
or reduce the functions of the state and those who wished to increase
these functions by giving economic activities to the state. The former
division came in time to include the anarchists and the syndicalists,
while the latter division came to include the Socialists and the
Communists. In general the former division believed that man was
innately good and that all coercive power was bad, with public
authority the worst form of such coercive power. All of the world's
evil, according to the anarchists, arose because man's innate goodness
was corrupted and distorted by coercive power. The remedy, they felt,
was to destroy the state. This would lead to the disappearance of all
other forms of coercive power and to the liberation of the innate
goodness of man. The simplest way to destroy the state, they felt,
would be to assassinate the chief of the state; this would act as a
spark to ignite a wholesale uprising of oppressed humanity against all
forms of coercive power. These views led to numerous assassinations of
various political leaders, including a king of Italy and a president of
the United States, in the period 1895-1905.
Syndicalism
was a somewhat
more realistic and later version of anarchism. It was equally
determined to abolish all public authority, but did not rely on the
innate goodness of individuals for the continuance of social life.
Rather it aimed to replace public authority by voluntary associations
of individuals to supply the companionship and management of social
life which, according to these thinkers, the state had so signally
failed to provide. The chief of such voluntary associations replacing
the state would be labor unions. According to the syndicalists, the
state was to be destroyed, not by the assassination of individual heads
of states, but by a general strike of the workers organized in labor
unions. Such a strike would give the workers a powerful esprit de corps
based on a sense of their power and solidarity. By making all forms of
coercion impossible, the general strike would destroy the state and
replace it by a flexible federation of free associations of workers
(syndicates).
Anarchism's
most vigorous
proponent was the Russian exile Michael Bakunin (1814-1876). His
doctrines had considerable appeal in Russia itself, but in western
Europe they were widely accepted only in Spain, especially Barcelona,
and in parts of Italy where economic and psychological conditions were
somewhat similar to those in Russia. Syndicalism flourished in the same
areas at a later date, although its chief theorists were French, led by
Georges Sorel (1847-1922).
The
second group of radical
social theorists was fundamentally opposed to the anarcho-syndicalists,
although this fact was recognized only gradually. This second group
wished to widen the power and scope of governments by giving them a
dominant role in economic life. In the course of time, the confusions
within this second group began to sort themselves out, and the group
divided into two chief schools: the Socialists and the Communists.
These two schools were further apart in organization and in their
activities than they were in their theories, because the Socialists
became increasingly moderate and even conservative in their activities,
while remaining relatively revolutionary in their theories. However, as
their theories gradually followed their activities in the direction of
moderation, in the period of the Second International (1889-1919),
violent controversies arose between those who pretended to remain loyal
to the revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx and those who wished to revise
these ideas in a more moderate direction to adapt them to what they
considered to be changing social and economic conditions. l he strict
interpreters of Karl Marx came to be known as Communists, while the
more moderate revisionist group came to be known as Socialists. The
rivalries of the two groups ultimately disrupted the Second
International as well as the labor movement as a whole, so that
anti-labor regimes were able to come to power in much of Europe in the
period 1918-1939. This disruption and failure of the working-class
movement is one of the chief factors in European history in the
twentieth century and, accordingly, requires at least a brief survey of
its nature and background.
The
ideas of Karl Marx
(1818-1883) and of his associate Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) were
published in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 and in
their three-volume opus, Das Kapital
(1867-1894). Although they were aroused by the deplorable conditions of
the European working classes under industrialism, the chief sources of
the ideas themselves were to be found in the idealism of Hegel, the
materialism of the ancient Greek atomists (especially Democritus), and
the theories of the English classical economists (especially Ricardo).
Marx derived from Hegel what has come to be known as the "historical
dialectic." This theory maintained that all historical events were the
result of a struggle between opposing forces which ultimately merged to
create a situation which was different from either. Any existing
organization of society or of ideas (thesis) calls
forth, in time, an opposition (anti-thesis).
These two struggle with each other and give rise to the events of
history, until finally the two fuse into a new organization (synthesis).
This synthesis in turn becomes established as a new thesis to a new
opposition or antithesis, and the struggle continues, as history
continues.
A
chief element in Marxist
theory was the economic interpretation of history. According to this
view, the economic organization of any society was the basic aspect of
that society, since all other aspects, such as political, social,
intellectual, or religious, reflected the organization and powers of
the economic level.
From
Ricardo, Marx derived the
theory that the value of economic goods was based on the amount of
labor put into them. Applying this idea to industrial society where
labor obtains wages which reflect only part of the value of the product
they are making, Marx decided that labor was being exploited. Such
exploitation was possible, he believed, because the working classes did
not own the "instruments of production" (that is, factories, land, and
tools) but had allowed these, by legal chicanery, to fall into the
hands of the possessing classes. In this way, the capitalistic system
of production had divided society into two antithetical classes: the
bourgeoisie who owned the instruments of production and the proletariat
who lived from selling their labor. The proletariat, however, were
robbed of part of their product by the fact that their wages
represented only a portion of the value of their labor, the "surplus
value" of which they were deprived going to the bourgeoisie as profits.
The bourgeoisie were able to maintain this exploitative system because
the economic, social, intellectual, and religious portions of society
reflected the exploitative nature of the economic system. The money
which the bourgeoisie took from the proletariat in the economic system
made it possible for them to dominate the political system (including
the police and the army), the social system (including family life and
education), as well as the religious system and the intellectual
aspects of society (including the arts, literature, philosophy, and all
the avenues of publicity for these).
From
these three concepts of
the historical dialectic, economic determinism, and the labor theory of
value, Marx built up a complicated theory of past and future history.
He believed that "all history is the history of class struggles." Just
as in antiquity, history was concerned with the struggles of free men
and slaves or of plebians and patricians, so, in the Middle Ages, it
was concerned with the struggles of serfs and lords, and, in modern
times, with the struggles of proletariat and bourgeoisie. Each
privileged group arises from opposition to an earlier privileged group,
plays its necessary role in historical progress, and is, in time,
successfully challenged by those it has been exploiting. Thus the
bourgeoisie rose from exploited serfs to challenge successfully the
older privileged group of feudal lords and moved into a period of
bourgeois supremacy in which it contributed to history a fully
capitalized industrial society but will be challenged, in its turn, by
the rising power of the laboring masses.
To
Marx, the revolution of the
proletariat was not only inevitable but would inevitably be successful,
and would give rise to an entirely new society with a proletariat
system of government, social life, intellectual patterns, and religious
organization. The "inevitable revolution" must lead to an "inevitable
victory of the proletariat" because the privileged position of the
bourgeoisie allowed them to practice a merciless exploitation of the
proletariat, pressing these laboring masses downward to a level of bare
subsistence, because labor, having become nothing but a commodity for
sale for wages in the competitive market, would naturally fall to the
level which would just allo\v the necessary supply of labor to survive.
From such exploitation, the bourgeoisie would become richer and richer
and fewer and fewer in numbers, and acquire ownership of all property
in the society while the proletariat would become poorer and poorer and
more and more numerous and be driven closer and closer to desperation.
Eventually, the bourgeoisie would become so few and the proletariat
would become so numerous that the latter could rise up in their wrath
and take over the instruments of production and thus control of the
whole society.
According
to this theory, the
"inevitable revolution" would occur in tile most advanced industrial
country because only after a long period of industrialism would the
revolutionary situation become acute and would the society itself be
equipped with factories able to support a Socialist system. Once the
revolution has taken place, there will be established a "dictatorship
of the proletariat" during which the political, social, military,
intellectual, and religious aspects of society will be transformed in a
Socialist fashion. At the end of this period, full Socialism will he
established, the state will disappear, and a "classless society" will
come into existence. At this point history will end. This rather
surprising conclusion to the historical process would occur because
Marx had defined history as the process of class struggle and had
defined the state as the instrument of class exploitation. Since, in
the Socialist state, there will be no exploitation and thus no classes,
there will be no class struggles and no need for a state.
In
1889, after the First
International had been disrupted by the controversies between
anarchists and Socialists, a Second International had been formed by
the Socialists. This group retained its allegiance to Marxist theory
for a considerable period, but even from the beginning Socialist
actions did not follow Marxist theory. This divergence arose from the
fact that Marxist theory did not provide a realistic or workable
picture of social and economic developments. It had no real provision
for labor unions, for workers' political parties, for bourgeois
reformers, for rising standards of living, or for nationalism, yet
these became, after Marx's death, the dominant concerns of the working
class. Accordingly, the labor unions and the Social-Democratic
political parties which they dominated became reformist rather than
revolutionary groups. They were supported by upper-class groups with
humanitarian or religious motivations, with the result that the
conditions of life and of work among the laboring classes were raised
to a higher level, at first slowly and reluctantly, but, in time, with
increasing rapidity. So long as industry itself remained competitive,
the struggle between industrialists and labor remained intense, because
any success which the workers in one factory might achieve in improving
their wage levels or their working conditions would raise the costs of
their employer and injure his competitive position with respect to
other employers. But as industrialists combined together after 1890 to
reduce competition among themselves by regulating their prices and
production, and as labor unions combined together into associations
covering many factories and even whole industries, the struggle between
capital and labor became less intense because any concessions made to
labor would affect all capitalists in the same activity equally and
could be covered simply by raising the price of the product of all
factories to the final consumers.
In
fact, the picture which
Marx had drawn of more and more numerous workers reduced to lower and
lower standards of living by fewer and fewer exploitative capitalists
proved to be completely erroneous in the more advanced industrial
countries in the twentieth century. Instead, what occurred could be
pictured as a cooperative effort by unionized workers and monopolized
industry to exploit unorganized consumers by raising prices higher and
higher to provide both higher wages and higher profits. This whole
process was advanced by the actions of governments which imposed such
reforms as eight-hour days, minimum-wage laws, or compulsory accident,
old age, and retirement insurance on whole industries at once. As a
consequence, the workers did not become worse off but became much
better off with the advance of industrialism in the twentieth century.
This
tendency toward rising
standards of living also revealed another Marxist error. Marx had
missed the real essence of the Industrial Revolution. He tended to find
this in the complete separation of labor from ownership of tools and
the reduction of labor to nothing but a commodity in the market. The
real essence of industrialism was to be found in the application of
nonhuman energy, such as that from coal, oil, or waterpower, to
production. This process increased man's ability to make goods, and did
so to an amazing degree. But mass production could exist only if it
were followed by mass consumption and rising standards of living.
Moreover, it must lead, in the long run, to a decreasing demand for
hand labor and an increasing demand for highly trained technicians who
are managers rather than laborers. And, in the longer run, this process
would give rise to a productive system of such a high level of
technical complexity that it could no longer be run by the owners but
would have to be run by technically trained managers. Moreover, the use
of the corporate form of industrial organization as a means for
bringing the savings of the many into the control of a few by sales of
securities to wider and wider groups of investors (including both
managerial and laboring groups) would lead to a separation of
management from ownership and to a great increase in the number of
owners.
All
these developments were
quite contrary to the expectations of Karl Marx. Where he had expected
impoverishment of the masses and concentration of ownership, with a
great increase in the number of workers and a great decrease in the
number of owners, with a gradual elimination of the middle class, there
occurred instead (in highly industrialized countries) rising standards
of living, dispersal of ownership, a relative decrease in the numbers
of laborers, and a great increase in the middle classes. In the long
run, under the impact of graduated income taxes and inheritance taxes,
... the great problem of advanced industrial societies became ... the
exploitation of unorganized consumers (of the professional and
lower-middle-class levels) by unionized labor and monopolized managers
acting in concert. The influence of these last two groups on the state
in an advanced industrial country also served to increase their ability
to obtain what they wished from society as a whole.
As
a consequence of all these
influences, the revolutionary spirit did not continue to advance with
the advance of industrialism, as Marx had expected, but began to
decrease, with the result that the more advanced industrial countries
became less and less revolutionary. Moreover, what revolutionary spirit
did exist in advanced industrial countries was not to be found, as Marx
had expected, among the laboring population but among the lower middle
class (so-called "petty bourgeoisie"). The average bank clerk,
architect's draftsman, or schoolteacher was unorganized, found himself
oppressed by organized labor, monopolized industry, and the growing
power of the state, and found himself caught in the spiral of rising
costs resulting from the efforts of his three oppressors to push the
costs of social welfare and steady profits on to the unorganized
consumer. The petty bourgeois found that he wore a white collar, had a
better education, was expected to maintain more expensive standards of
personal appearance and living conditions, but received a lower income
than unionized labor. As a consequence of all this, the revolutionary
feeling existing in advanced industrial countries appeared among the
petty bourgeoisie rather than among the proletariat, and was
accompanied by psychopathic overtones arising from the suppressed
resentments and social insecurities of this group. But these dangerous
and even explosive feelings among the petty bourgeoisie took an
anti-revolutionary rather than a revolutionary form and appeared as
nationalistic, anti-Semitic, anti-democratic, and anti-labor-union
movements rather than as anti-bourgeois or anticapitalist movements
such as Marx had expected.
Unfortunately,
as economic and
social developments in advanced industrial countries moved in the
un-Marxian directions we have mentioned, the unionized laborers and
their Social Democratic political parties continued to accept the
Marxist ideology or at least to utter the old Marxist war cries of
"Down with the capitalists!" or "Long live the revolution" or "Workers
of the world, unite!" Since the Marxist ideology and the Marxist war
cries were more easily observed than the social realities they served
to conceal, especially when labor leaders sought all publicity for what
they said and profound secrecy for what they did, many capitalists,
some workers, and almost all outsiders missed the new developments
completely and continued to believe that a workers' revolution was just
around the corner. All this served to distort and to confuse people's
minds and people's actions in much of the twentieth century. The areas
in which such confusions became of great significance were in regard to
the class struggle and to nationalism.
We
have pointed out that the
class struggles between capitalists and the laboring masses were of
great importance in the early stages of industrialism. In these early
stages the productive process was more dependent on hand labor and less
dependent on elaborate equipment than it became later. Moreover, in
these early stages, labor was unorganized (and thus competitive), while
capitalists were un-monopolized (and thus competitive). As the process
of industrialization advanced, however, wages became a decreasing
portion of productive costs, and other costs, especially the costs of
equipment for mass production, for the technical management required by
such equipment, and for the advertising and merchandising costs
required for mass consumption, became more and more important. All of
these things made planning of increasing significance in the productive
process. Such planning made it necessary to reduce the number of
uncontrolled factors in the productive process to a minimum while
seeking to control as many of these factors as possible. An industry
which had hundreds of millions of dollars (or even billions) in
equipment and plant, as did the steel industry, automobiles, chemicals,
or electrical utilities, had to be able to plan, in advance, the rate
and the amount of usage that equipment would receive. This need led to
monopoly, which was, essentially, an effort to control both prices and
sales by removing competition from the market. Once such competition
had been removed from the market, or substantially reduced, it became
both possible and helpful for labor to be unionized.
Unionized
labor helped
planning by providing fixed wages for a fixed period into the future
and by providing a better trained as well as a more highly disciplined
labor force. Moreover, unionized labor helped planning by establishing
the same wages, conditions, hours (and thus costs) on an industry-wide
basis. In this way unionized labor and monopolized industry ceased to
be enemies, and became partners in a planning project centered on a
very expensive and complex technological plant. The class struggle in
Marxian terms largely disappeared. The one exception was that, in a
planned industry, the managerial staff could compare wage costs with
fixed capital costs and might decide, to the resentment of labor, to
replace a certain amount of labor by a certain amount of new machinery.
Labor tended to resent this and to oppose it unless consulted on the
problem. The net result was that rationalization of production
continued, and advanced industrialized countries continued to advance
in spite of the contrary influence of the monopolization of industry
which made it possible, to some extent, for obsolete factories to
survive because of decreased market competition.
The
effects of nationalism on
the Socialist movement was of even greater significance. Indeed, it was
so important that it disrupted the Second International in 1914-1919.
Marx had insisted that all the proletariat had common interests and
should form a common front and not fall victim to nationalism, which he
tended to regard as capitalistic propaganda, seeking, like religion, to
divert the workers from their legitimate aims of opposition to
capitalism. The Socialist movement generally accepted Marx's analysis
of this situation for a long time, arguing that workers of all
countries were brothers and should join together in opposition to the
capitalist class and the capitalist state. The Marxian slogans calling
on the workers of the world to form a common front continued to be
shouted even when modern nationalism had made deep inroads on the
outlook of all workers. The spread of universal education in advanced
industrial countries tended to spread the nationalist point of view
among the working classes. The international Socialist movements could
do little to reverse or hamper this development. These movements
continued to propagate the internationalist ideology of international
Socialism, but it became more and more remote from the lives of the
average worker. The Social Democratic parties in most countries
continued to embrace the international point of view and to insist that
the workers would oppose any war between capitalist states by refusing
to pay taxes to support such wars or to bear arms themselves against
their "brother workers" in foreign countries.
How
unrealistic all this talk
was became quite clear in 1914 when the workers of all countries, with
a few exceptions, supported their own governments in the First World
War. In most countries only a small minority of the Socialists
continued to resist the war, to refuse to pay taxes, or to serve in the
armed forces, or continued to agitate for social revolution rather than
for victory. This minority, chiefly among the Germans and Russians,
became the nucleus of the Third, or Communist, International which was
formed under Russian leadership in 1919. The Left-wing minority who
became the Communists refused to support the war efforts of their
various countries, not because they were pacifists as the Socialists
were but because they were anti-nationalist. They were not eager to
stop the war as the Socialists were, but wished it to continue in the
hope that it would destroy existing economic, social, and political
life and provide an opportunity for the rise of revolutionary regimes.
Moreover, they did not care who won the war, as the Socialists did, but
were willing to see their own countries defeated if such a defeat would
serve to bring a Communist regime to power. The leader of this radical
group of violent dissident Socialists was a Russian conspirator,
Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin (1870 1924). Although he
expressed his point of view frequently and loudly during the war, it
must be confessed that his support, even among extremely violent
Socialists, was microscopic. Nevertheless, the fortunes of war served
to bring this man to power in Russia in November 1917, as the leader of
a Communist regime.
Chapter
24—The Bolshevik Revolution to 1924
The
corruption, incompetence,
and oppression of the czarist regime was forgotten at the outbreak of
war in 1914 as most Russians, even those who were sent into battle with
inadequate training and inadequate weapons' rallied to the cause of
Holy Mother Russia in an outburst of patriotism. This loyalty survived
the early disasters of 1914 and 1915 and was able to rally sufficiently
to support the great Brusilov offensive against Austria in 1916. But
the tremendous losses of men and supplies in this endless warfare, the
growing recognition of the complete incompetence and corruption of the
government, and the growing rumors of the pernicious influence of the
czarina and Rasputin over the czar served to destroy any taste that the
Russian masses might have had, for the war. This weakening
of
morale was accelerated by the severe winter and semi-starvation of
1916-1917. Public discontent showed itself in March 1917, when strikes
and rioting began in Petrograd. Troops in the capital refused to
suppress these agitations, and the government soon found itself to be
helpless. When it tried to dissolve the Duma, that body refused to be
intimidated, and formed a provisional government under Prince Lvov. In
this new regime there was only one Socialist, Minister of Justice
Alexander Kerensky.
Although
the new government
forced the abdication of the czar, recognized the independence of
Finland and Poland, and established a full system of civil liberties,
it postponed any fundamental social and economic changes until the
establishment of a future constituent assembly, and it made every
effort to continue the war. In this way it failed to satisfy the
desires of large numbers of Russians for land, bread, and peace.
Powerful public feeling against efforts to continue the war forced the
resignation of several of the more moderate members of the government,
including Prince Lvov, who was replaced by Kerensky. The more radical
Socialists had been released from prison or had returned from exile (in
some cases, such as Lenin, by German assistance); their agitations for
peace and land won adherents from a much wider group than their own
supporters, and especially among the peasantry, who were very remote
from Socialist sympathies or ideas but were insisting on an end to the
war and a more equitable system of land ownership..
In
St. Petersburg and Moscow
and in a few other cities, assemblies of workers, soldiers, and
peasants, called soviets, were formed by the more radical Socialists in
opposition to the Provisional Government. The Bolshevik group, under
Lenin's leadership, put on a powerful propaganda campaign to replace
the Provisional Government by a nationwide system of soviets and to
adopt an immediate program of peace and land distribution. It cannot be
said that the Bolshevik group won many converts or increased in size
very rapidly, but their constant agitation did serve to neutralize or
alienate support for the Provisional Government, especially among the
soldiers of the two chief cities. On November 7, 1917, the Bolshevik
group seized the centers of government in St. Petersburg and was able
to hold them because of the refusal of the local military contingents
to support the Provisional Government. Within twenty-four hours this
revolutionary group issued a series of decrees which abolished the
Provisional Government, ordered the transfer of all public authority in
Russia to soviets of workers, soldiers, and peasants, set up a central
executive of the Bolshevik leaders, called the "Council of People's
Commissars," and ordered the end of the war with Germany and the
distribution of large land-holdings to the peasants.
The
Bolsheviks had no
illusions about their position in Russia at the end of 1917. They knew
that they formed an infinitesimal group in that vast country and that
they had been able to seize power because they were a decisive and
ruthless minority among a great mass of persons who had been
neutralized by propaganda. There was considerable doubt about how long
this neutralized condition would continue. Moreover, the Bolsheviks
were convinced, in obedience to Marxist theory, that no real Socialist
system could be set up in a country as industrially backward as Russia.
And finally, there was grave doubt if the Western Powers would stand
idly by and permit the Bolsheviks to take Russia out of the war or
attempt to establish a Socialist economic system. To the Bolsheviks it
seemed to be quite clear that they must simply try to survive on a
day-to-day basis, hope to keep the great mass of Russians neutralized
by the achievement of peace, bread, and land, and trust that the rapid
advent of a Socialist revolution in industrially advanced Germany would
provide Russia with an economic and political ally which could remedy
the weaknesses and backwardness of Russia itself. [At this stage
Germany was already a secret ally.]
From
1917 to 1921 Russia
passed through a period of almost incredible political and economic
chaos. With counterrevolutionary movements and foreign interventionist
forces appearing on all sides, the area under Bolshevik control was
reduced at one time to little more than the central portions of
European Russia. Within the country there was extreme economic and
social collapse. Industrial production was disorganized by the
disruption of transportation, the inadequate supply of raw materials
and credit, and the confusions arising from the war, so that there was
an almost complete lack of such products as clothing, shoes, or
agricultural tools. By 1920 industrial production in general was about
13 percent of the 1913 figure. At the same time, paper money was
printed so freely to pay for the costs of war, civil war, and the
operation of the government that prices rose rapidly and the ruble
became almost worthless. The general index of prices was only three
times the 1913 level in 1917 but rose to more than 16,000 times that
level by the end of 1920. Unable to get either industrial products or
sound money for their produce the peasants planted only for their own
needs or hoarded their surpluses. Acreage under crops was reduced by at
least one-third in 1916-1920, while yields fell even more rapidly, from
74 million tons of grain in 1916 to 30 million tons in 1919 and to less
than 20 million tons in 1920. The decrease in 1920 resulted from
drought; this became so much worse in 1921 that the crops failed
completely. Loss of life in these two years of famine reached five
million, although the American Relief Administration came into the
country and fed as many as ten million persons a day (in August 1922).
In
the course of this chaos
and tragedy the Bolshevik regime was able to survive, to crush
counterrevolutionary movements, and to eliminate foreign
interventionists. They were able to do this because their opponents
were divided, indecisive, or neutralized, while they were vigorous,
decisive, and completely ruthless. The chief sources of Bolshevik
strength were to be found in the Red Army and the secret police, the
neutrality of the peasants, and the support of the proletariat workers
in industry and transportation. The secret police (Ckeka)
was
made up of fanatical and ruthless Communists who systematically
murdered all real or potential opponents. The Red Army was recruited
from the old czarist army but was rewarded by high pay and favorable
food rations. Although the economic system collapsed almost completely,
and the peasants refused to supply, or even produce, food for the city
population, the Bolsheviks established a system of food requisitions
from; the peasants and distributed this food by a rationing system
which rewarded their supporters. The murder of the imperial family by
the Bolsheviks in July 1918 removed this possible nucleus for the
counterrevolutionary forces, while the general refusal of these forces
to accept the revolutionary distribution of agricultural lands kept the
peasants neutral in spite of the Bolshevik grain requisitions.
Moreover, the peasants were divided among themselves by the Bolshevik
success in splitting them so that the poorer peasants banded together
to divert much of the burden of grain requisitions onto their more
affluent neighbors.
The
most acute problem facing
the revolutionary regime at the end of 1917 was the war with Germany.
At first the Bolsheviks tried to end the fighting without any formal
peace, but the Germans continued to advance, and the Bolsheviks were
compelled to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918). By this
treaty Russia lost all the western borderlands, including Poland, the
Ukraine, and the Baltic areas. The German forces tried, with little
success, to obtain economic resources from the Ukraine, and soon
advanced far beyond the boundaries established at Brest-Litovsk to
occupy the Don Valley, the Crimea, and the Caucasus.
In
various parts of Russia,
notably in the south and the east, counter-revolutionary armies called
"Whites" took the field to overthrow the Bolsheviks. The Cossacks of
the Don under L. G. Kornilov, Anton Denikin, and Pëtr Wrangel
occupied the Caucasus, the Crimea, and the Ukraine after the Germans
withdrew from these areas. In Siberia a conservative government under
Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak was set up at Omsk and announced its
intention to take over all of Russia (late 1918). A group of 40,000
armed Czechoslovaks who had deserted from the Habsburg armies to fight
for Russia turned against the Bolsheviks and, while being evacuated to
the east along the Trans-Siberian Railway, seized control of that route
from the Volga to Vladivostok (summer 1918).
Various
outside Powers also
intervened in the Russian chaos. An allied expeditionary force invaded
northern Russia from Murmansk and Archangel, while a force of Japanese
and another of Americans landed at Vladivostok and pushed westward for
hundreds of miles. The British seized the oil fields of the Caspian
region (late 1918), while the French occupied parts of the Ukraine
about Odessa (March 1919)..
Against
these various forces
the Bolsheviks fought with growing success, using the new Red Army and
the Cheka, supported by the nationalized industrial and agrarian
systems. While these fought to preserve the revolutionary regime within
Russia, various sympathizers were organized outside the country. The
Third International was organized under Grigori Zinoviev to encourage
revolutionary movements in other countries. Its only notable success
was in Hungary where a Bolshevik regime under Béla Kun was able
to maintain itself for a few months (March-August 1919).
By
1920 Russia was in complete
confusion. At this point the new Polish government invaded Russia,
occupying much of the Ukraine. A Bolshevik counterattack drove the
Poles back to Warsaw where they called upon the Entente Powers for
assistance. General Weygand was sent with a military mission and
supplies. Thus supported, Poland was able to re-invade Russia and
impose the Treaty of Riga (March 1921). This treaty established a
Polish-Russian boundary 150 miles east of the tentative “Curzon
Line” which had been drawn along the ethnographic frontier by the
Western Powers in 1919. By this act Poland took within its boundaries
several millions of Ukrainians and White Russians and ensured a high
level of Soviet-Polish enmity for the next twenty years.
Much
of the burden of this
turmoil and conflict was imposed on the Russian peasantry by the
agricultural requisitions and the whole system of so-called "War
Communism." As part of this system not only were all agricultural crops
considered to be government property but all private trade and commerce
were also forbidden; the banks were nationalized, while all industrial
plants of over five workers and all craft enterprises of over ten
workers were nationalized (1920). This system of extreme Communism was
far from being a success, and peasant opposition steadily increased in
spite of the severe punishments inflicted for violations of the
regulations. As counterrevolutionary movements were suppressed and
foreign interventionists gradually withdrew, opposition to the system
of political oppression and "War Communism" increased. This culminated
in peasant uprisings, urban riots, and a mutiny of the sailors at
Kronstadt (March 1921). Within a week a turning point was passed; the
whole system of "War Communism" and of peasant requisitioning was
abandoned in favor of a "New Economic Policy" of free commercial
activity in agricultural and other commodities, with . the
reestablishment of the profit motive and of private ownership in small
industries and in small landholding. Requisitioning was replaced by a
system of moderate taxation, and the pressures of the secret police, of
censorship, and of the government generally were relaxed. As a result
of these tactics, there was a dramatic increase in economic prosperity
and in political stability. This improvement continued for two years,
until, by late 1923, political unrest and economic problems again
became acute. At the same time, the approaching death of Lenin
complicated these problems with a struggle for power among Lenin's
successors.
Because
the political
organization of the Bolshevik regime in its first few years was on a
trial-and-error basis, its chief outlines were not established until
about 1923. These outlines had two quite different aspects, the
constitutional and the political. Constitutionally the country was
organized (in 1922) into a Union of Socialist Soviet Republics (USSR).
The number of these republics has changed greatly, rising from four in
1924 and eleven in the 1936-1940 period to fifteen in the 1960's. Of
these, the largest and most important was the Russian Soviet Federal
Socialist Republic (RSFSR), which covered about three-quarters of the
area of the whole Union with about five-eighths of the total
population. The constitution of this RSFSR, drawn up in 1918, became
the pattern for the governmental systems in other republics as they
were created and joined with the RSFSR to form the USSR. In this
organization local soviets, in cities and villages, organized on an
occupational basis, elected representatives to district, county,
regional, and provincial congresses of soviets. As we shall see in a
moment, these numerous levels of indirect representation served to
weaken any popular influence at the top and to allow the various links
in the chain to he controlled by the Communist political party. The
city soviets and the provincial congresses of soviets sent
representatives to an All Russian Congress of Soviets which possessed,
in theory, full constitutional powers. Since this Congress of Soviets,
with one thousand members, met no more than once a year, it delegated
its authority to an All-Russian Central Executive Committee of three
hundred members. This Executive Committee, meeting only three times a
year, entrusted day-to-day administration to a Council of People's
Commissars, or Cabinet, of seventeen persons. When the Union of
Socialist Soviet Republics was formed in 1923 by adding other republics
to the RSFSR, the new republics obtained a somewhat similar
constitutional organization, and a similar system was created for the
whole Union. The latter possessed a Union Congress of Soviets, large
and unwieldy, meeting infrequently, and chosen by the city and
provincial soviets. This Union Congress elected an equally unwieldy
All-Union Central Executive Committee consisting of two chambers. One
of these chambers, the Council of the Union, represented population;
the other chamber, the Council of Nationalities, represented the
constituent republics and autonomous regions of the Soviet Union. The
Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR was transformed, with
slight changes, into a Union Council of Commissars for the whole Union.
This ministry had commissars for five fields (foreign affairs, defense,
foreign trade, communications, and posts and telegraphs) from which the
constituent republics were excluded, as well as numerous commissars for
activities which were shared with the republics.
This
system had certain
notable characteristics. There was no separation of powers, so that the
various organs of government could engage in legislative, executive,
administrative, and, if necessary, judicial activities. Second, there
was no constitution or constitutional law in the sense of a body of
rules above or outside the government, since constitutional laws were
made by the same process and had the same weight as other laws. Third,
there were no guaranteed rights or liberties of individuals, since the
accepted theory was that rights and obligations arise from and in the
state rather than outside or separate from the state. Last, there were
no democratic or parliamentary elements because of the monopoly of
political power by the Communist Party.
The
Communist Party was
organized in a system similar to and parallel to the state, except that
it included only a small portion of the population. At the bottom, in
every shop or neighborhood, were unions of party members called
"cells." Above these, rising level on level, were higher organizations
consisting, on each level, of a party congress and an executive
committee chosen by the congress of the same level. These were found in
districts, in counties, in provinces, in regions, and in the
constituent republics. At the top was the Central Party Congress and
the Central Executive Committee chosen by it. As years went by, the
Central Party Congress met more and more rarely and then merely
approved the activities and resolutions of the Central Executive
Committee. This committee and its parallel institution in the state
(Council of People's Commissars) were dominated, until 1922, by the
personality of Lenin. His eloquence, intellectual agility, and capacity
for ruthless decision and practical improvisation gave him the
paramount position in both party and state. In May 1922, Lenin had a
cerebral stroke and, after a series of such strokes, died in January
1924. This long-drawn illness gave rise to a struggle, for control of
the party and the state apparatus, within the party itself. This
struggle, at first, took the form of a union of the lesser leaders
against Trotsky (the second most important leader, after Lenin). But
eventually this developed into a struggle of Stalin against Trotsky
and, finally, of Stalin against the rest. By 1927 Stalin had won a
decisive victory over Trotsky and all opposition.
Stalin's
victory was due very
largely to his ability to control the administrative machinery of the
party behind the scenes and to the reluctance of his opponents,
especially Trotsky, to engage in a showdown struggle with Stalin lest
this lead to civil war, foreign intervention, and the destruction of
the revolutionary achievement. Thus, while Trotsky had the support of
the Red Army and of the mass of party members, these were both
neutralized by his refusal to use them against Stalin's control of the
party machinery.
The
party, as we have said,
remained a minority of the population, under the theory that quality
was more important than quantity. There were 23,000 members in March
1917, and 650,000 in October 1921; at this latter date a purge began
which reduced the party rolls by 24 percent. Subsequently, the rolls
were reopened, and membership rose to 3.4 million by 1940. The power to
admit or to purge, held in the hands of the Central Executive
Committee, completely centralized control of the party itself; the fact
that there was only one legal party and that elections to positions in
the state were by ballots containing only one party, and even one name
for each office, gave the party complete control of the state. This
control was neither weakened nor threatened by a new constitution, of
democratic appearance and form, which came into existence in 1936.
In
1919 the Central Executive
Committee of nineteen appointed two subcommittees of five each and a
secretariat of three. One of the subcommittees, the Politburo, was
concerned with questions of policy, while the other, the Orgburo, was
concerned with questions of party organization. Only one man, Stalin,
was a member of both of these; in April 1922, a new secretariat of
three was named (Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Valerian Kuibyshev) with
Stalin as secretary-general. From this central position he was able to
build up a party bureaucracy loyal to himself, purge those who would be
most opposed to his plans, or transfer to remote positions those party
members whose loyalty to himself was not beyond question. At the death
of Lenin in January 1924, Stalin was the most influential party member,
but still lurked in the background. At first he ruled as one of a
triumvirate of Stalin, Grigori Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev, all united in
opposition to Trotsky. The last was removed from his position as war
commissar in January 1925, and from the Politburo in October 1926. In
1927, at Stalin's behest, Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the
party. Zinoviev was later restored to membership but in 1929 Trotsky
was deported to exile in Turkey. By that time Stalin held the reins of
government firmly in his own hands.
Chapter
25—Stalinism, 1924-1939
As
Stalin gradually
strengthened his internal control of the Soviet Union after Lenin's
death in 1924, it became possible to turn, with increasing energy, to
other matters. The New Economic Policy, which Lenin had adopted in
1921, performed so successfully that the Soviet Union experienced a
phenomenal recovery from the depths to which "War Communism" had
dragged it in 1918-1921.
Unfortunately
for the economic
theorists of the Soviet Union, the NEP was not really a "policy" at
all, and it certainly was not Communism. By reestablishing a new
monetary system based on gold, in which one of the new gold rubles was
equal to 50,000 of the old, inflated paper rubles, a firm financial
basis was provided for recovery. Except for a continuance of government
regulation in international trade and in large-scale heavy industry, a
regime of freedom was permitted. Agricultural production rose,
commercial activities flourished, and the lighter industrial activities
devoted to consumers' goods began to recover. Distinctions of wealth
reappeared among the peasants, the richer ones (called "kulaks") being
regarded with suspicion by the regime and with envy by their less
fortunate neighbors. At the same time, those who made their fortunes in
commerce (called "nepmen") were sporadically persecuted by the regime
as enemies of Socialism. Nonetheless, the economic system flourished.
Acreage under cultivation rose from 148 million acres in 1921 to 222
million in 1927; grain collections, after the famine of 1922 had
passed, approximately doubled in 1923-1927; coal production doubled in
three years, while production of cotton textiles quadrupled. As a
consequence of such recovery, the Russian economic system in 1927 was,
once again, back to its 1913 level, although, since population had gone
up by ten million persons, the per capita income was lower.
In
spite of the economic
recovery of the NEP, it gave rise to important problems. Just as the
free agricultural economy produced kulaks, and the free commercial
system produced nepmen, so the mixed industrial system had undesirable
consequences. Under this mixed system industries concerned with
national defense were under direct state control; heavy industry was
controlled by monopolistic trusts, which were owned by the state, but
operated under separate budgets and were expected to be profitable;
small industry w as free. One bad result of this was that small
industry was squeezed in its efforts to obtain labor, materials, or
credit, and its products were in scarce supply at high prices. Another
result was that agricultural prices, being free and competitive, fell
lower and lower as agricultural production recovered, but industrial
prices, being monopolistic, or in short supply, remained high. The
result was a "scissors crisis," as it is called in Europe (or "parity
prices," as it is called in America). This meant that the goods farmers
sold were at low prices, while the goods they bought were at high
prices, and scarce. Thus, in 1923, agricultural prices were at 58
percent of the 1913 level, while industrial prices were at 187 percent
of their 1913 level, so that peasants could obtain only one-third as
much manufactured goods for their crops as they had been able to obtain
in 1913. By withholding credit from industry, the government was able
to force factories to liquidate their stocks of goods by lowering
prices. As a consequence, by 1924 industrial prices fell to 141 percent
of 1913, while agricultural prices rose to 77 percent of 1913. The
peasant's position was improved from one-third to one-half of his 1913
position, but at no time did he regain his 1913 parity level. This gave
rise to a great deal of agrarian discontent and to numerous peasant
disturbances during the latter part of the NEP.
Lenin
had insisted that the
weakness of the proletariat in Russia made it necessary to maintain an
alliance with the peasantry. This had been done during the period of
state capitalism (November 1917-June 1918), but the alliance had been
largely destroyed in the period of "War Communism" (June 1918-April
1921). Under the NEP this alliance was reestablished, but the "scissors
crisis" once again destroyed it. Then it was reestablished only
partially. Stalin's victory over Trotsky and his personal inclination
for terroristic methods of government led to decisions which marked the
end of these cycles of peasant discontent. The decision to build
Socialism in a single country made it necessary, it was felt, to
emphasize the predominance of heavy industry in order to obtain, as
quickly as possible, the basis for the manufacture of armaments
(chiefly iron, steel, coal, and electrical power projects). Such
projects required great masses of labor to be concentrated together and
fed. Both the labor and the food would have to be drawn from the
peasantry, but the emphasis on heavy industrial production rather than
on light industry meant that there would be few consumers' goods to
give to the peasantry in return for the food taken from them. Moreover,
the drain of manpower from the peasantry to form urban labor forces
would mean that those who continued to be peasants must greatly improve
their methods of agricultural production in order to supply, with a
smaller proportion of peasants, food for themselves, for the new urban
laborers, for the growing party bureaucracy, and for the growing Red
Army which was regarded as essential to defend "Socialism in a single
country.".
The
problem of obtaining
increasing supplies of food from fewer peasants without offering them
consumers' industrial goods in exchange could not, according to Stalin,
be worked in a peasant regime based on freedom of commerce, as under
the NEP of 1921-1927, or in one based on individual farmers, as in the
"War Communism" of 1918-1921; the former of these required that the
peasants be given goods in exchange while the latter could be made a
failure by peasant refusals to produce more food than was required by
their own needs. The NEP could not find a solution to this problem. In
spite of the closing of the scissors in 1923-1927, industrial prices
remained higher than farm prices, peasants were reluctant to supply
food to the cities since they could not get the cities' products they
wanted in return, and the amount of peasants' grain which was sold
remained about 13 percent of the grain raised in 1927 compared to 26
percent in 1913. Such a system might provide a high standard of living
for the peasants, but it could never provide the highly industrialized
basis necessary to support "Socialism in a single country."
The
new direction which
Russia's development took after 1927 and which we call "Stalinism" is a
consequence of numerous factors. Three of these factors were (1) the
bloodthirsty and paranoiac ambitions of Stalin and his associates, (2)
a return of Russia to its older traditions, but on a new level and a
new intensity, and (3) a theory of social, political, and economic
developments which is included under the phrase "Socialism in a single
country." This theory was embraced with such an insane fanaticism by
the rulers of the new Russia, and provided such powerful motivations
for Soviet foreign and domestic politics, that it must be analyzed at
some length.
The
rivalry between Stalin and
Trotsky in the mid-1920's was fought with slogans as well as with more
violent weapons. Trotsky called for "world revolution," while Stalin
wanted "Communism in a single country." According to Trotsky, Russia
was economically too weak and too backward to be able to establish a
Communist system alone. Such a system, all agreed, could not exist
except in a fully industrialized country. Russia, which was so far from
being industrialized, could obtain the necessary capital only by
borrowing it abroad or by accumulating it from its own people. In
either case, it would be taken, in the long run, from Russia's peasants
by political duress, in the one case being exported to pay for foreign
loans and, in the other case, being given, as food and raw materials,
to the industrial workers in the city. Both cases would be fraught with
dangers; foreign countries, because their own economic systems were
capitalistic, would not stand idly by and allow a rival Socialistic
system to reach successful achievement in Russia; moreover, in either
case, there would be a dangerously high level of peasant discontent,
since the necessary food and raw materials would have to be taken from
Russia's peasantry by political duress, without economic return. This
followed from the Soviet theory that the enmity of foreign capitalist
countries would require Russia's new industry to emphasize heavy
industrial products able to support the manufacture of armaments rather
than light industrial products able to provide consumers' goods which
could be given to the peasants in return for their produce.
The
Bolsheviks assumed, as an
axiom, that capitalistic countries would not allow the Soviet Union to
build up a successful Socialistic system which would make all
capitalism obsolete. This idea was strengthened by a theory, to which
Lenin made a chief contribution, that "imperialism is the last stage of
capitalism." According to this theory, a fully industrialized
capitalistic country enters upon a period of economic depression which
leads it to embrace a program of warlike aggression. The theory
insisted that the distribution of income in a capitalistic society
would become so inequitable that the masses of the people would not
obtain sufficient income to buy the goods being produced by the
industrial plants. As such unsold goods accumulated with decreasing
profits and deepening depression, there would be a shift toward the
production of armaments to provide profits and produce goods which
could be sold and there would be an increasingly aggressive foreign
policy in order to obtain markets for unsold goods in backward or
undeveloped countries. Such aggressive imperialism, it seemed to Soviet
thinkers, would inevitably make Russia a target of aggression in order
to prevent a successful Communist system there from becoming an
attractive model for the discontented proletariat in capitalistic
countries. According to Trotsky, all these truths made it quite obvious
that "Socialism in a single country" was an impossible idea, especially
if that single country was as poor and backward as Russia. To Trotsky
and his friends it seemed quite clear that the salvation of the Soviet
system must be sought in a world revolution which would bring other
countries, especially such an advanced industrial country as Germany,
to Russia's side as allies.
While
the internal struggle
between Trotsky and Stalin was wending its weary way in 1923-1927, it
became quite clear not only that world revolution was impossible and
that Germany was not going either to a Communist revolution or an
alliance with the Soviet, it also became equally clear that "oppressed
colonial" areas such as China were not going to ally with the Soviet
Union. "Communism in a single country" had to be adopted as Russia's
policy simply because there was no alternative.
Communism
in Russia alone
required, according to Bolshevik thinkers, that the country must be
industrialized with breakneck speed, whatever the waste and hardships,
and must emphasize heavy industry and armaments rather than rising
standards of living. This meant that the goods produced by the peasants
must be taken from them, by political duress, without any economic
return, and that the ultimate in authoritarian terror must be used to
prevent the peasants from reducing their level of production to their
own consumption needs, as they had done in the period of "War
Communism" in 1918-1921. This meant that the first step toward the
industrialization of Russia required that the peasantry be broken by
terror and reorganized from a capitalistic basis of private farms to a
Socialistic system of collective farms. Moreover, to prevent
imperialist capitalistic countries from taking advantage of the
inevitable unrest this program would create in Russia, it was necessary
to crush all kinds of foreign espionage, resistance to the Bolshevik
state, independent thought, or public discontent. These must be crushed
by terror so that the whole of Russia could be formed into a monolithic
structure of disciplined proletariat who would obey their leaders with
such unquestioning obedience that it would strike fear in the hearts of
every potential aggressor.
The
steps in this theory
followed one another like the steps of a geometrical proposition:
failure of the revolution in industrially advanced Germany required
that Communism be established in backward Russia; this demanded rapid
industrialization with emphasis on heavy industry; this meant that the
peasants could not obtain consumers' goods for their food and raw
materials; this meant that the peasants must be reduced by terroristic
duress to collective farms where they could neither resist nor reduce
their levels of production: this required that all discontent and
independence be crushed under a despotic police state to prevent
foreign capitalistic imperialists from exploiting the discontent or
social unrest in Russia. To the rulers in the Kremlin the final proof
of the truth of this proposition appeared when Germany, which had not
gone Communist but had remained capitalistic, attacked Russia in 1941.
A
historian, who might
question the assumptions or the stages in this theory, would also see
that the theory made it possible for Bolshevik Russia to abandon most
of the influences of Western ideology in Marxism (such as its
humanitarianism, its equality, or its anti-militarist, anti-state bias)
and allow it to fall back into the Russian tradition of a despotic
police state resting on espionage and terror, in which there was a
profound gulf in ideology and manner of living between the rulers and
the ruled. It should also be evident that a new regime, such as
Bolshevism was in Russia, would have no traditional methods of social
recruitment or circulation of elites; these would be based on intrigue
and violence and would inevitably bring to the top the most decisive,
most merciless, most unprincipled, and most violent of its members.
Such a group, forming around Stalin, began the process of establishing
"Communism in a single country" in 1927-1929, and continued it until
interrupted by the approach of war in 1941. This program of heavy
industrialization was organized in a series of "Five-Year Plans," of
which the first covered the years 1928-1932.
The
chief elements in the
First Five-Year Plan were the collectivization of agriculture and the
creation of a basic system of heavy industry. In order to increase the
supply of food and industrial labor in the cities, Stalin forced the
peasants off their own lands (worked by their own animals and their own
tools) onto large communal farms, worked cooperatively with lands,
tools, and animals owned in common, or onto huge state farms, run as
state-owned enterprises by wage-earning employees using lands, tools,
and animals owned by the government. In communal farms the crops were
owned jointly by the members and were divided, after certain amounts
had been set aside for taxes, purchases, and other payments which
directed food to the cities. In state farms the crops were owned
outright by the state, after the necessary costs had been paid. In
time, experience showed that the costs of the state farms were so high
and their operations so inefficient that they were hardly worthwhile,
although they continued to be created.
The
shift to the new system
came slowly in 1927-1929 and then was put violently into full operation
in 1930. In the space of six weeks (February-March 1930) collective
farms increased from 59,400, with 4,400,000 families, to 110,200 farms,
with 14,300,000 families. All peasants who resisted were treated with
violence; their property was confiscated, they were beaten or sent into
exile in remote areas; many were killed. This process, known as "the
liquidation of the kulaks" (since the richer peasantry resisted most
vigorously), affected five million kulak families. Rather than give up
their animals to the collective farms, many peasants killed them. As a
result, the number of cattle was reduced from 30.7 million in 1928 to
19.6 million in 1933, while, in the same five years, sheep and goats
fell from 146.7 million to 50.2 million, hogs from 26 to 12.1 million,
and horses from 33.5 to 16.6 million. Moreover, the planting season of
1930 was entirely disrupted, and the agricultural activities of later
years continued to be disturbed so that food production decreased
drastically. Since the government insisted on taking the food needed to
support the urban population, the rural areas were left with inadequate
food, and at least three million peasants starved in 1931-1933. Twelve
years later, in 1945, Stalin told Winston Churchill that twelve million
peasants died in this reorganization of agriculture.
To
compensate for these
setbacks, large areas of previously uncultivated lands, many of them
semiarid, were brought under cultivation, mostly in Siberia, as state
farms. Considerable research was done on new crop varieties to increase
yields, and to utilize the drier lands of the south and the shorter
growing season in the north. As a consequence, the area under
cultivation increased by 21 percent in 1927-1938. However, the fact
that the Soviet population rose, in the same eleven years, from 150
million to 170 million persons, meant that the cultivated acreage per
capita rose only from 1.9 to 2.0 acres. The use of semiarid lands
required a considerable extension of irrigation; thus there was an
increase of about 50 percent in the acreage irrigated in the decade
1928-1938 (from ro.6 million acres to 15.2 million acres). Some of
these irrigation projects combined irrigation with the generation of
electricity by waterpower, and provided improved water transportation
facilities, as in our Tennessee Valley Authority; this was true of the
famous project at Dnepropetrovsk on the lower Dnieper River, which had
a capacity of half ,a million kilowatts ( 1935).
The
reduction in farm animals,
which was not made up by 1941, combined with the efforts to develop
heavy industry, resulted in increased use of tractors and other
mechanized equipment in agriculture. The number of tractors rose from
26.7 thousand in 1928 to 483.5 thousand in 1938, while in the same
decade the percentage of plowing done by tractors increased from I
percent to 7, percent. Harvesting was increasingly done by combines,
the number of these increasing from almost none in 1928 to 182,000 in
1940. Such complicated machinery was not owned by the collective farms
but by independent machine-tractor stations scattered about the
country; they had to be hired from these as they were needed. The
introduction of mechanized farming of this type was not an unmixed
success, as many machines were ruined by inexperienced help and the
costs of upkeep and fuel were very high. Nevertheless, the trend toward
mechanization continued, partly from a desire to copy the United States
and partly from a rather childish enthusiasm for modern technology.
These two impulses combined, at times, to produce a "gigantomania," or
enthusiasm for large size rather than for efficiency or a satisfactory
way of life. In agriculture this gave rise to many enormous state farms
of hundreds of thousands of acres which were notoriously inefficient.
Moreover, the shift to such large-scale mechanized agriculture, in
contrast to the old czarist agriculture organized in scattered peasant
plots cultivated in a three-year, fallow-rotation system, greatly
increased such problems as spreading drought, losses to insect pests,
and decreasing soil fertility, requiring the use of artificial
fertilizers. In spite of all these problems, Soviet agriculture,
without ever becoming successful or even adequate, provided a steadily
expanding base for the growth of Soviet industry, until both were
disrupted by the invasion of Hitler's hordes in the summer of 1941.
The
industrial portion of the
First Five-Year Plan was pursued with the same ruthless drive as the
collectivization of agriculture and had similar spectacular results:
impressive physical accomplishment, large-scale waste, lack of
integration, ruthless disregard of personal comfort and standards of
living, constant purges of opposition elements, of scapegoats, and of
the inefficient, all to the accompaniment of blasts of propaganda
inflating the plan's real achievements to incredible dimensions,
attacking opposition groups (sometimes real and frequently imaginary)
within the Soviet Union, or mixing scorn with fear in verbal assaults
on foreign "capitalist imperialist" countries and their secret
"saboteurs" within Russia.
The
First Five-Year Plan of
1928-1932 was followed by a Second Plan of 1933-1937 and a Third Plan
of 1938-1942. The last of these was completely disrupted by the German
invasion of June 1941, and had, from the beginning, undergone periodic
modifications which changed its targets in the direction of an
increased emphasis on armaments because of the rising international
tensions. Because of the inadequacies of the available Soviet
statistics, it is not easy to make any definite statements about the
success of these plans. There can be no doubt that there was a great
increase in the physical output of industrial goods and that this
output was very largely in capital equipment rather than in consumers'
goods. It is also clear that much of this advance was uncoordinated and
spotty and that, while Soviet national income was rising, the standard
of living of the Russian peoples was declining from its 1928 level.
The
following estimates, made
by Alexander Baykov, will give some idea of the ... Soviet economic
system in the period 1928-1940:
1928 1940
Coal
(million
tons) 35.0 166.0
Oil
(million
tons) 11.5 31.1
Pig
iron
(million
tons) 3.3 15.0
Steel
(million
tons) 4.3 18.3
Cement
(million
tons) 1.8 5.8
Electric
power (billion
kw.) 5.0 48.3
Cotton
textiles (million
meters) 2742.0 3700.0
Woolen
textiles (million
meters) 93.2 120.0
Leather
shoes
(million
pairs) 29.6 220.0
Railroad
freight (billion
ton-kilometers) 93.4 415.0
Total
population
(millions) 150.0 173.0
Urban
population (estimated
percentage) 18.0% 33.0%
Employed
persons
(millions) 11.2 31.2
Total
wage
payments (millions of
rubles) 8.2 162.0
Grain
crops
(millions of
hectoliters) 92.2 111.2
There
can be little doubt that
this ... industrialization made it possible for the Soviet system to
withstand the German assault in 1941. At the same time the magnitude of
the achievement produced great distortions and tensions in Soviet life.
Millions of persons moved from villages to cities (some of these
entirely new) to find inadequate housing, inadequate food, and violent
psychological tensions. On the other hand, the same move opened to them
wide opportunities in ... education, for themselves and for their
children, as well as opportunities to rise in the social, economic, and
party structures. As a consequence of such opportunities, class
distinctions reappeared in the Soviet Union, the privileged leaders of
the secret police and the Red Army, as well as the leaders of the party
and certain favored writers, musicians, ballet dancers, and actors,
obtaining incomes so far above those of the ordinary Russian that they
lived in quite a different world. The ordinary Russian had inadequate
food and housing, was subject to extended rationing, having to stand in
line for scarce consumers' items or even to go without them for long
periods, and was reduced to living, with his family, in a single room,
or even, in many cases, to a corner of a single room shared with other
families. The privileged rulers and their favorites had the best of
everything, including foods and wines, the use of vacation villas in
the country or in the Crimea, the use of official cars in the city, the
right to live in old czarist palaces and mansions, and the right to
obtain tickets to the best seats at the musical or dramatic
performances. These privileges of the ruling group, however, were
obtained at a terrible price: at the cost of complete insecurity, for
even the highest party officials were under constant surveillance by
the secret police and inevitably would be purged, sooner or later, to
exile or to death.
The
growth of inequality was
increasingly rapid under the Five-Year plans and was embodied in law.
All restrictions on maximum salaries were removed; variations in
salaries grew steadily wider and were made greater by the non-monetary
privileges extended to the favored upper ranks. Special stores were
established where the privileged could obtain scarce goods at low
prices; two or even three restaurants, with entirely different menus,
were set up in industrial plants for different levels of employees;
housing discrimination became steadily wider; all wages were put on a
piecework basis even when this was quite impractical; work quotas and
work minimums were steadily raised. Much of this differentiation of
wages was justified under a fraudulent propaganda system known as
Stakhanovism.
In
September 1935, a miner
named Stakhanov mined 102 tons of coal in a day, fourteen times the
usual output. Similar exploits were arranged in other activities for
propaganda purposes and used to justify speedup, raising of production
quotas, and wage differences. At the same time, the standard of living
of the ordinary worker was steadily reduced not only by raising quotas
but also by a systematic policy of segmented inflation. Food was
purchased from the collective farms at lo\v prices and then sold to the
public at high prices. The gap between these two was steadily widened
year by year. At the same time the amount of produce taken from the
peasants was gradually increased by one technique or another. When
collective farms had to shift to tractors and combines these were taken
from the farms themselves and centralized in machine-tractor stations
controlled by the government. They had to be hired at rates which
approached one-fifth of the total output of the collective farm. One of
the chief sources of governmental income was a turnover tax (sales tax)
on consumers' goods; this varied from item to item, but was generally
about 60 percent or more. It was not imposed on producers' goods, which
were, on the contrary, subsidized to the extent of half the
government's expenditures. Price segmentation was so great that in the
period 1927-1948 consumers' prices went up thirty-fold, wages went up
eleven-fold, while prices of producers' goods and armaments went up
less than threefold. This served to reduce consumption and to falsify
the statistical picture of the national income, standards of living,
and the breakdown between consumers' goods, capital goods, and
armaments.
As
public discontent and
social tensions grew in the period of the Five-Year plans and the
collectivization of agriculture, the use of spying, purges, torture,
and murder increased out of all proportion. Every wave of discontent,
every discovery of inefficiency, every recognition of some past mistake
of the authorities resulted in new waves of police activity. When the
meat supplies of the cities almost vanished, after the collectivization
of agriculture in the early 1930's, more than a dozen of the high
officials in charge of meat supplies in Moscow were arrested and shot,
although they were in no way responsible for the shortage. By the
middle 1930's the search for "saboteurs" and for "enemies of the state"
became an all-enveloping mania which left hardly a family untouched.
Hundreds of thousands were killed, frequently on completely false
charges, while millions were arrested and exiled to Siberia or put into
huge slave-labor camps. In these camps, under conditions of
semi-starvation and incredible cruelty, millions toiled in mines, in
logging camps in the Arctic, or building new railroads, new canals, or
new cities. Estimates of the number of persons in such slave-labor
camps in the period just before Hitler's attack in 1941 vary from as
low as two million to as high as twenty million. The majority of these
prisoners had done nothing against the Soviet state or the Communist
system, but consisted of the relatives, associates, and friends of
persons who had been arrested on more serious charges. Many of these
charges were completely false, having been trumped up to provide labor
in remote areas, scapegoats for administrative breakdowns, and to
eliminate possible rivals in the control of the Soviet system, or
simply because of the constantly growing mass paranoidal suspicion
which enveloped the upper levels of the regime. In many cases,
incidental events led to large-scale reprisals for personal grudges far
beyond any scope justified by the event itself. In most cases these
"liquidations" took place in the cells of the secret police, in the
middle of the night, with no public announcements except the most
laconic. But, in a few cases, spectacular public trials were staged in
which the accused, usually famous Soviet leaders, were berated and
reviled, volubly confessed their own dastardly activities, and, after
conviction' were taken out and shot.
These
purges and trials kept
the Soviet Union in an uproar and kept the rest of the world in a state
of continuous amazement throughout the period of the Five-Year plans.
In 1929 a large group of party leaders who objected to the ruthless
exploitation of the peasantry (the so-called "Rightist opposition"),
led by the party's most expert theoretician of the Marxist ideology,
Nikolai Bukharin, was purged. In 1933 about a third of the members of
the party (at least a million names) were expelled from the party. In
1935, following upon the murder of a Stalinist supporter, Serge Kirov,
by the secret police, many of the "Old Bolsheviks," including Zinoviev
and Kamenev, were tried for treason. The following year, just as the
Spanish Civil War was beginning, the same group were tried once more as
"Trotskyists" and were shot. A few months later another large group of
"Old Bolsheviks," including Karl Radek and Grigori Pyatakov, were tried
for treason and executed. Later in that same year (1937) evidence that
the Soviet army leaders had been in communication with the German High
Command was sent from the German secret police, through Beneš,
the president of Czechoslovakia, to Stalin. These communications had
been going on since before 1920, were an open secret to careful
students of European affairs, and had been approved by both governments
as part of a common front against the Western democratic Powers;
nevertheless this information was used as an excuse to purge the Red
Army of most of its old leaders, while eight of the highest generals,
led by Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevski, were executed. Less than a year
later, in March 1938, the few remaining Old Bolsheviks were tried,
convicted, and executed. These included Bukharin, Aleksei Rykov (who
had succeeded Lenin as president of the Soviet Union), and G. Yagoda
(who had been head of the secret police).
For
every leader who was
publicly eliminated by these "Moscow Treason Trials" thousands were
eliminated in secret. By 1939 all of the older leaders of Bolshevism
had been driven from public life and most had died violent deaths,
leaving only Stalin and his younger collaborators, such as Molotov and
Voroshilov. All opposition to this group, in action, word, or thought,
was regarded as equivalent to counterrevolutionary sabotage and
aggressive capitalistic espionage.
Under
Stalinism all Russia was
dominated by three huge bureaucracies: of the government, of the party,
and of the secret police. Of these, the secret police was more powerful
than the party and the party more powerful than the government. Every
office, factory, university, collective farm, research laboratory, or
museum had all three structures. When the management of a factory
sought to produce goods, they were constantly interfered with by the
party committee (cell) or by the special department (the secret police
unit) within the factory. There were two networks of secret-police
spies, unknown to each other, one serving the special department of the
factory, while the other reported to a high level of the secret police
outside. Most of these spies were unpaid and served under threats of
blackmail or liquidation. Such "liquidations" could range from wage
reductions (which went to the secret police), through beatings or
torture, to exile, imprisonment, expulsion from the party (if a
member), to murder. The secret police had enormous funds, since it
collected wage deductions from large numbers and had millions of slave
laborers in its camps to be rented out, like draft animals on a
contract basis, for state construction projects. Whenever the secret
police needed more money it could sweep large numbers of persons,
without trial or notice, into its wage deduction system or into its
labor camps to be hired out. It would seem that the secret police,
operating in this fashion, were the real rulers of Russia. This was
true except at the very top, where Stalin could always liquidate the
head of the secret police by having him arrested by his second in
command in return for Stalin's promise to promote the arrester to the
top position. In this way the chiefs of the secret police were
successively eliminated; V. Menzhinsky was replaced by Yagoda in 1934,
Yagoda by Nikolai Yezhov in 1936, and Yezhov by Lavrenti Beria in 1938.
These rapid shifts sought to cover up the falsifications of evidence
which these men had prepared for the great purges of the period, each
man's mouth being closed by death as his part in the elimination of
Stalin's rivals was concluded. To keep the organization subordinate to
the party, none of the leaders of the secret police was a member of the
Politburo before Beria, and Beria was completely Stalin's creature
until they perished together in 1953.
It
would be a grave mistake to
believe that the Soviet system of government, with its peculiar amalgam
of censorship, mass propaganda, and ruthless terror, was an invention
of Stalin and his friends; it would be equally erroneous to believe
that this system is a creation of Bolshevism; the truth is that it is a
part of the Russian way of life and has a tradition going back through
czarism to Byzantianism and to caesarism. In Russia itself it has
typical precedents in Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Paul I, or
Alexander III. The chief changes were that the system, through the
advance of technology, of weapons, of communications, and of
transportation, became more pervasive, more constant, more violent, and
more irrational. As an example of its irrationality we might point out
that policy was subject to sudden reversals, which not only were
pursued with ruthless severity, but under which, once policy had
shifted, those who had been most active in the earlier official policy
were liquidated as saboteurs or enemies of the state for their earlier
activities as soon as the policy was changed. In the late 1920's
officials in the Ukraine had to speak Ukrainian; in a few years those
who did were persecuted for seeking to disrupt the Soviet Union. As
leaders were shifted, each demanded 100 percent loyalty, which became
an excuse for liquidation by a successor as soon as the leader changed.
The reversals in policy toward the peasants created many victims, as
did the violent reversals in foreign policy. Soviet-German relations
shifted from a basis of friendship in 1922-1927 to one of most violent
animosity in 1933-1939, changed to patent friendship and cooperation in
1939-1941, to be followed by violent animosity again in 1941. These
reversals of policy were difficult for the heavily censored Russian
people to follow; they were almost impossible for Soviet sympathizers
or members of Communist parties in foreign countries to follow; and
they were very dangerous to the leaders of the Soviet system, who might
find themselves under arrest today for having followed a different (but
official) policy a year previously.
Yet
in spite of all these
difficulties, the Soviet Union continued to grow in industrial and
military strength in the decade before 1941. In spite of low standards
of living, racking internal tensions, devastating purges, economic
dislocations, and large-scale waste and inefficiency, the industrial
basis of Soviet power continued to expand. Nazi Germans, and the
outside world in general, were more aware of the tensions, purges,
dislocations, and inefficiency than they were of the growing power,
with the result that all were amazed at the Soviet Union's ability to
withstand the German assault which began on June 22, 1941.
Part
Nine—Germany from Kaiser to Hitler: 1913-1945
Chapter
26—Introduction
The
fate of Germany is one of
the most tragic in all human history, for seldom has a people of such
talent and accomplishment brought such disasters on themselves and on
others. The explanation of how Germany came to such straits cannot be
found by examining the history of the twentieth century alone. Germany
came to the disaster of 1945 by a path whose beginnings lie in the
distant past, in the whole pattern of German history from the days of
the Germanic tribes to the present. That Germany had a tribal and not a
civilized origin and was outside the boundaries of the Roman Empire and
of the Latin language were two of the factors which led Germany
ultimately to 1945. The Germanic tribe gave security and meaning to
each individual's life to a degree where it almost absorbed the
individual in the group, as tribes usually do. It gave security because
it protected the individual in a social status of known and relatively
stable social relationships with his fellows; it gave meaning because
it was all-absorbing— totalitarian, if you will, in that it
satisfied almost all an individual's needs in a single system.
The
shattering of the Germanic
tribe in the period of the migrations, fifteen hundred years ago, and
the exposure of its members to a higher, but equally total ... social
structure—the Roman imperial system; and the subsequent, almost
immediately subsequent, shattering of that Roman system caused a double
trauma from which the Germans have not recovered even today. The
shattering of the tribe left the individual German, as a similar
experience today has left many Africans, in a chaos of unfamiliar
experiences in which there was neither security nor meaning. When all
other relationships had been destroyed, the German was left with only
one human relationship on which he turned all his energy—loyalty
to his immediate companions. But this could not carry all his life's
energy or satisfy all of life's needs—no single human
relationship ever can—and the effort to make it do so can only
turn it into a monstrosity. But the German tribesman of the sixth
century, when all else was shattered, made such an effort and tried to
build all security and all meaning on personal loyalty. Any violence,
any criminal act, any bestiality was justified for the sake of the
allegiance of personal loyalty. The result is to be seen in the
earliest work of Germanic literature—the Niebelungenlied,
a madhouse dominated by this one mood, in a situation not totally
unlike the Germany of 1945.
Into
the insanity of monomania
created by the shattering of the Germanic tribes came the sudden
recognition of a better system, which could be, they thought, equally
secure, equally meaningful, because equally total. This was symbolized
by the word Rome. It is almost impossible for us,
of the West
and of today, imbued as we are with historical perspective and
individualism, to see what Classical culture was like, and why it
appealed to the Germans. Both may be summed up in the word "total." The
Greek polis, like the Roman imperium,
was total. We in
the West have escaped the fascination of totalitarianism because we
have in our tradition other elements—the refusal of the Hebrews
to confuse God with the world, or religion with the state, and the
realization that God is transcendental, and, accordingly, all other
things must be, in some degree, incomplete and thus imperfect. We also
have, in our tradition, Christ, who stood apart from the state and told
his followers to "Render to Caesar the things which are Caesar's." And
we have in our tradition the church of the catacombs, where clearly
human values were neither united nor total, and were opposed to the
state. The Germans, as later the Russians, escaped the full influence
of these elements in the tradition of the West. The Germans and the
Russians knew Rome only in its post-Constantine phase when the
Christian emperors were seeking to preserve the totalitarian system of
Dioclesian, but in a Christian rather than a pagan totalitarianism.
This was the system the detribalized Germans glimpsed just before it
also was shattered. They saw it as a greater, larger, more powerful
entity than the tribe but with the same elements which they wanted to
preserve from their tribal past. They yearned to become part of that
imperial totalitarianism. They still yearn for it. Theodoric, the
Ostrogoth (Roman Emperor, 489-526), saw himself as a Germanic
Constantine. The Germans continued their refusal to accept this second
loss, as the Latins and the Celts were prepared to do, and for the next
thousand years the Germans made every effort to reconstruct the
Christian imperium, under Charles V (Holy Roman
Emperor,
1519-1555) as under Theodoric. The German continued to dream of that
glimpse he had had of the imperial system before it sank—one,
universal, total, holy, eternal, imperial, Roman. He refused to accept
that it was gone, hating the small group who opposed its revival and
despising the great mass who did not care, while regarding himself as
the sole defender of values and righteousness who was prepared to
sacrifice anything to restore that dream on earth. Only Charlemagne
(died 814) came close to achieving that dream, Barbarossa, Charles V,
William II, or even Hitler being but pale imitations. After
Charlemagne, the state and public authority vanished in the Dark Ages,
while society and the Church survived. When the state began to revive
at the end of the tenth century, it was obviously a separate entity
from the Church or society. The totalitarian imperium
had been
permanently broken in the West into two, and later many, allegiances.
During the split in the Dark Ages of the single entity which was
simultaneously Holy Roman, Catholic, Universal, and Imperial, the
adjectives became displaced from the nouns to leave a Universal
Catholic Church and a Holy Roman Empire. The former still survives, but
the latter was ended by Napoleon in 1806, a thousand years after
Charlemagne.
During
that thousand years,
the West developed a pluralistic system in which the individual was the
ultimate good (and the ultimate philosophic reality), faced with the
need to choose among many conflicting allegiances. Germany was dragged
along in the same process, but unwillingly, and continued to yearn for
a single allegiance which would be totally absorbing. This desire
appeared in many Germanic traits, of which one was a continued love
affair with Greece and Rome. Even today a Classical scholar does more
of his reading in German than in any other language, although he rarely
recognizes that he does so because the appeal of Classical culture to
the Germans rested on its totalitarian nature, recognized by Germans
but generally ignored by Westerners.
All
the subsequent experiences
of the German people, from the failure of Otto the Great in the tenth
century to the failure of Hitler in the twentieth century, have served
to perpetuate and perhaps to intensify the German thirst for the
coziness of a totalitarian way of life. This is the key to German
national character: in spite of all their talk of heroic behavior, what
they have really wanted has been coziness, freedom from the need to
make decisions which require an independent, self-reliant individual
constantly exposed to the chilling breeze of numerous alternatives.
Franz Grillparzer, the Austrian playwright, spoke like a true German
when he said, a century ago, "The most difficult thing in the world is
to make up one's mind." Decision, which requires the evaluation of
alternatives, drives man to individualism, self-reliance, and
rationalism, all hateful qualities to Germanism.
In
spite of these desires of
the Germans for the coziness of totalitarian oneness, they have been
forced as part, even if a relatively peripheral part, of the West to
live otherwise. Looking hack, it seemed to Wagner that Germany came
closest to its desires in the guild-dominated life of late medieval
Augsburg; this is why his only happy opera was placed in that setting.
But if Wagner is correct, the situation was achieved only briefly. The
shift of world trade from Mediterranean and Baltic to the Atlantic
destroyed the trans-Germanic commercial basis of German municipal guild
life—a fact which Thomas Mann still mourned in our own day.
Almost immediately the spiritual unity of the Germans was shattered by
the Protestant Reformation. When it became clear that no degree of
violence could restore the old religious unity, the Germans, in the
settlement of Augsburg (1555), came up with a typically German
solution: individuals would be saved from the painful need to make a
decision in religious belief by leaving the choice to the prince in
each principality. This solution and the almost contemporary reception
of the Roman Law were significant indications of the process by which
the German municipalism of the late medieval period was replaced by the
Germany of principalities (Länder) of modern times.
As
a result of the loss of
religious unity, the Germanies became divided into a Protestant
northeast, increasingly dominated by the Hohenzollerns of
Brandenburg-Prussia, and a Catholic southwest, increasingly dominated
by the Habsburgs of Austria. Significantly enough, both of these began
their dynastic rise as "marks," that is, frontier military outposts of
Christian Germanism against pagan Slavdom of the East. Even when the
Slav East became Christianized and, by copying Byzantium, obtained a
society closer to the Germanic heart's desire than the West, the
Germans could neither copy nor join the Slavs, because the Slavs, as
outlanders from the tribe, were inferiors and hardly human beings at
all. Even the Poles, who were more fully part of the West than the
Germans, were regarded by the Germans as part of the outer darkness of
Slavdom, and thus a threat to the still nonexistent Germanic tribal
empire.
Germany's
misfortunes
culminated in the disasters of the seventeenth century when Richelieu,
on behalf of France, used the internal problems of Germany in the
Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) to play off one group against another,
ensuring that the Habsburgs would never unify Germany, and dooming the
Germanies to another two hundred years of disunity. Hitler, Bismarck,
and even Kaiser William II could well be regarded as Germany's revenge
on France for Richelieu, Louis XIV, and Napoleon. In an exposed
position in central Europe, Germany found herself trapped between
France, Russia, and the Habsburg dominions and was unable to deal with
her basic problems in her own fashion and on their merits. Accordingly,
Germany obtained national unity only late and "by blood and iron," and
never obtained democracy at all. It might be added that she also failed
to achieve laissez faire or liberalism for the same reasons. In most
countries democracy was achieved by the middle classes, supported by
peasants and workers, in an attack on the monarchy supported by the
bureaucracy and landed aristocracy. In Germany this combination never
quite came off, because these various groups were reluctant to clash
with one another in the face of their threatening neighbors. Instead,
Germany's exposed frontiers made it necessary for the various groups to
subordinate their mutual antagonisms and obtain unification at the
price of a sacrifice of democracy, laissez faire, liberalism, and
nonmaterial values. Unification for Germany was achieved in the
nineteenth century, not by embracing but by repudiating the typical
nineteenth-century values. Starting as a reaction against the assault
of Napoleon in 1806, and repudiating the rationalism, cosmopolitanism,
and humanitarianism of the Enlightenment, Germany achieved unity only
by the following processes:
1.
by strengthening the monarchy and its bureaucracy;
2.
by strengthening the permanent, professional army;
3.
by preserving the landlord
class (the Junkers) as a source of personnel for both bureaucracy and
army;
4.
by strengthening the
industrial class through direct and indirect state subsidy, but never
giving it a vital voice in state policy;
5.
by appeasing the peasants
and workers through paternalistic economic and social grants rather
than by the extension of political rights which would allow these
groups to assist themselves.
The
long series of failures hy
the Germans to obtain the society they wanted served only to intensify
their desire for it. They wanted a cozy society with both security and
meaning, a totalitarian structure which would be at the same time
universal and ultimate, and which would so absorb the individual in its
structure that he would never need to make significant decisions for
himself. Held in a framework of known, satisfying, personal
relationships, such an individual would be safe because he would be
surrounded by fellows equally satisfied with their own positions, each
feeling important from his membership in the greater whole.
Although
this social structure
was never achieved in Germany, and never could he achieved, in view of
the dynamic nature of Western Civilization in which the Germans were a
part, each German over the centuries has tried to create such a
situation for himself in his immediate environment (at the minimum in
his family or beer garden) or, failing that, has created German
literature, music, drama, and art as vehicles of his protests at this
lack. This desire has been evident in the Germans' thirst for status
(which establishes his relationship with the whole) and for the
absolute (which gives unchanging meaning to the whole).
The
German thirst for status
is entirely different from the American desire for status. The American
is driven by the desire to get ahead, that is, to change his status; he
wants status and status symbols to exist as clear evidence or even
measures of the speed with which he is changing his status. The German
wants status as a nexus of obvious relationships around himself so
there will never be doubt in anyone's mind where he stands, stationary,
in the system. He wants status because he dislikes changes, because he
abhors the need to make decisions. The American thrives on change,
novelty, and decisions. Strangely enough, both react in this opposite
fashion for somewhat similar reasons based on the inadequate maturation
and integration of the individual's personality. The American seeks
change, as the German seeks external fixed relationships, as a
distraction from the lack of integration, self-sufficiency, and
internal resources of the individual himself.
The
German wants status
reflected in obvious external symbols so that his nexus of personal
relationships will be clear to everyone he meets and so that he will be
treated accordingly, and almost automatically (without need for painful
decisions). He wants titles, uniforms, nameplates, flags, buttons,
anything which will make his position clear to all. In every German
organization, be it business, school, army, church, social club, or
family, there are ranks, gradations, and titles. No German could be
satisfied with just his name on a calling card or on the nameplate of
his doorway. His calling card must also have his address, his titles,
and his educational achievements. The great anthropologist Robert H.
Lowie tells of men with two doctorate degrees whose nameplates have
"Professor Dr. Dr. So-and-So," for all the world to see their double
academic status. The emphasis on minor gradations of rank and class,
with titles, is a reflection of Germanic particularism, just as the
verbal insistence on the absolute is a reflection of German
universalism which must give meaning to the system as a whole.
In
this system the German
feels it necessary to proclaim his position by verbal loudness which
may seem boastful to outsiders, just as his behavior toward his
superiors and inferiors in his personal relationships seems to an
Englishman to be either fawning or bullying. All three of these are
acceptable to his fellow Germans, who are as eager to see these
indications of his status as he is to show them. All these reactions,
criticized by German thinkers like Kant as craving for precedence, and
satirized in German literature for the last two centuries, have been
the essential tissue of the personal relationships which make up German
life. The correct superscription on an envelope, we are told, would be
"Herrn Hofrat Professor Dr. Siegfried Harnischfeger." These pomposities
are used in speech as well as in writing, and are applied to the
individual's wife as well as to himself.
Such
emphasis on position,
precedence, titles, gradations, and fixed relationships, especially up
and down, are so typically German that the German is most at home in
hierarchical situations such as a military, ecclesiastical, or
educational organization, and is often ill at ease in business or
politics where status is less easy to establish and make obvious.
With
this kind of nature and
such neurological systems, Germans are ill at ease with equality,
democracy, individualism, freedom, and other features of modern life.
Their neurological systems were a consequence of the coziness of German
childhood, which, contrary to popular impression, was not a condition
of misery and personal cruelty (as it often is in England), but a warm,
affectionate, and externally disciplined situation of secure
relationships. After all, Santa Claus and the child-centered Christmas
is Germanic. This is the situation the adult German, face to face with
what seems an alien world, is constantly seeking to recapture. To the
German it is Gemütlichkeit; but to outsiders it may
be
suffocating. In any case it gives rise among adult Germans to two
additional traits of German character: the need for external discipline
and the quality of egocentricity.
The
Englishman is disciplined
from within so that he takes his self-discipline, embedded in his
neurological system, with him wherever he goes, even to situations
where all the external forms of discipline are lacking. As a
consequence the Englishman is the most completely socialized of
Europeans, as the Frenchman is the most completely civilized, the
Italian most completely gregarious, or the Spaniard most completely
individualistic. But the German by seeking external discipline shows
his unconscious desire to recapture the externally disciplined world of
his childhood. With such discipline he may be the best behaved of
citizens, but without it he may be a beast.
A
second notable carryover
from childhood to adult German life was egocentricity. The whole world
seems to any child to revolve around it, and most societies have
provided ways in which the adolescent is disabused of this error. The
German leaves childhood so abruptly that he rarely learns this fact of
the universe, and spends the rest of his life creating a network of
established relationships centering on himself. Since this is his aim
in life, he sees no need to make any effort to see anything from any
point of view other than his own. The consequence is a most damaging
inability to do this. Each class or group is totally unsympathetic to
any point of view except the egocentric one of the viewer himself. His
union, his company, his composer, his poet, his party, his neighborhood
are the best, almost the only acceptable, examples of the class, and
all others must be denigrated. As part of this process a German usually
chooses for himself his favorite flower, musical composition, beer,
club, painting, or opera, and sees little value or merit in any other.
Yet at the same time he insists that his myopic or narrow-angled vision
of the universe must be universalized, because no people are more
insistent on the role of the absolute or the universal as the framework
of their own egocentricity. One deplorable consequence of this has been
the social animosities rampant in a Germany which has loudly proclaimed
its rigid solidarity.
With
an individual personality
structure such as this, the German was painfully uncomfortable in the
totally different, and to him totally unfriendly, world of
nineteenth-century individualism, liberalism, competitive atomism,
democratic equality, and self-reliant dynamicism. And the German was
doubly uncomfortable and embittered by 1860 to see the power, wealth,
and national unity which these nineteenth-century traits had brought to
Britain and France. The late arrival of these achievements, especially
national unity and industrialism, in Germany left the average German
with a feeling of inferiority in respect to England. Few Germans were
willing to compete as individuals with British businessmen.
Accordingly, the newly unified German government was expected to help
German industrialists with tariffs, credit, price and production
controls, cheaper labor costs, and such. As a consequence Germany never
had a clearly competitive, liberal economy like the western Powers.
The
failure to achieve
democracy was reflected in public law. The German Parliament was more
of an advisory than a legislative body; the judiciary was not under
popular control; and the executive (the chancellor and the Cabinet)
were responsible to the emperor rather than to Parliament. Moreover,
the constitution, because of a peculiar suffrage system, was weighted
to give undue importance to Prussia (which was the stronghold of the
army, the landlords, the bureaucracy, and the industrialists). Within
Prussia the elections were weighted to give undue influence to these
same groups. Above all, the army was subject to no democratic or even
governmental control, but was dominated by the Prussian Officers' Corps
whose members were recruited by regimental election. This Officers'
Corps thus came to resemble a fraternity rather than an administrative
or professional organization.
By
1890, when he retired from
office, Bismarck had built up an unstable balance of forces within
Germany similar to the unstable balance of powers which he had
established in Europe as a whole. His cynical and materialistic view of
human motivations had driven all idealistic and humanitarian forces
from the German political scene and had remodeled the political parties
almost completely into economic and social pressure groups which he
played off, one against another. The chief of these forces were the
landlords (Conservative Party), the industrialists (National Liberal
Party), the Catholics (Center Party), and the workers (Social
Democratic Party). In addition, the army and the bureaucracy were
expected to be politically neutral, but they did not hesitate to exert
pressures on the government without the intermediary of any political
party. Thus there existed a precarious and dangerous balance of forces
which only a genius could manipulate. Bismarck was followed by no
genius. The Kaiser, William II (1888-1918), was an incapable neurotic,
and the system of recruitment to government service was such as to
exclude any but mediocrities. As a result, the precarious structure
left by Bismarck was not managed but was merely hidden from public view
by a facade of nationalistic, anti-foreign, anti-Semitic,
imperialistic, and chauvinistic propaganda of which the emperor was the
center.
The
dichotomy in Germany
between appearance and reality, between propaganda and structure,
between economic prosperity and political and social weakness was put
to the test in World War I, and failed completely. The events of
1914-1919 revealed that Germany was not a democracy in which all men
were legally equal. Instead, the ruling groups formed some strange
animal fording it over a host of lesser animals. In this strange
creature the monarchy represented the body, which was supported by four
legs: the army, the landlords, the bureaucracy, and the industrialists.
This
glimpse of reality was
not welcome to any important group in Germany, with the result that it
was covered over, almost at once, by another misleading facade: the
"revolution" of 1918 was not really a revolution at all, because it did
not radically change this situation; it removed the monarchy, but it
left the quartet of legs.
This
Quartet was not the
creation of a moment, rather it was the result of a long process of
development whose last stages were reached only in the twentieth
century. In these last stages the industrialists were adopted into the
ruling clique by conscious acts of agreement. These acts culminated in
the years 1898-1905 in a deal by which the Junkers accepted the
industrialists' navy-building program (which they detested) in return
for the industrialists' acceptance of the Junkers' high tariff on
grains. The Junkers were anti-navy because they, with their few numbers
and close alliance with the army, were opposed to any venture into the
fields of colonialism or overseas imperialism, and were determined not
to jeopardize Germany's continental position by alienating England. In
fact, the policy of the Junkers was not only a continental one; on the
Continent it was klein-deutsch. This expression
meant that they
were not eager to include the Germans of Austria within Germany because
such an increment of Germans would dilute the power of the small group
of Junkers inside Germany. Instead, the Junkers would have preferred to
annex the non-German areas to the east in order to obtain additional
land and a supply of cheap Slav agricultural labor. The Junkers wanted
agricultural tariffs to raise the prices of their crops, especially rye
and, later, sugar beets. The industrialists objected to tariffs on food
because high food prices made necessary high wages, which they opposed.
On the other hand, the industrialists wanted high industrial prices and
a market for the products of heavy industry. The former they obtained
by the creation of cartels after 1888; the latter they obtained by the
naval-building program and armaments expansion after 1898. The Junkers
agreed to these only in return for a tariff on food which eventually,
through "import certificates," became a subsidy for growing rye. This
alliance, of which Bülow was the creator, was agreed on in May
1900, and consummated in December 1902. The tariff of 1902, which gave
Germany one of the most protected agricultures in the world, was the
price paid by industry for the Navy bill of 1900, and, symbolically
enough, could be passed through the Reichstag only after the rules of
procedure were violated to gag the opposition.
The
Quartet was not
Conservative but, potentially at least, revolutionary reactionaries.
This is true at least of the landlords and industrialists, somewhat
less true of the bureaucracy, and least true of the army. The landlords
were revolutionary because they were driven to desperation by the
persistent agricultural crisis which made it difficult for a high-cost
area like eastern Germany to compete with a low-cost area like the
Ukraine or high-productivity areas like Canada, Argentina, or the
United States. Even in isolated Germany they had difficulty in keeping
down the wages of German agricultural labor or in obtaining
agricultural credit. The former problem rose from the need to compete
with the industrial wages of West Germany. The credit problem rose
because of the endemic lack of capital in Germany, the need to compete
with industry for the available supply of capital, and the
impossibility of raising capital by mortgages where estates were
entailed. As a result of these influences, the landlords, overburdened
with debts, in great jeopardy from any price decline, and importers of
unorganized Slav laborers, dreamed of conquests of lands and labor in
eastern Europe. The industrialists were in a similar plight, caught
between the high wages of unionized German labor and the limited market
for industrial products. To increase the supply of both labor and
markets, they hoped for an active foreign policy which would bring into
one unit a Pan-German bloc, if not a Mittel-europa. The bureaucracy,
for ideological, especially nationalist, reasons, shared these dreams
of conquest. Only the army hung back under the influence of the
Junkers, who saw how easily they, as a limited political and social
power, could be overwhelmed in a Mittel-europa or even a Pan-Germania.
Accordingly, the Prussian Officers' Corps had little interest in these
Germanic dreams, and looked with favor on the conquest of Slav areas
only if this could be accomplished without undue expansion of the army
itself.
Chapter
27—The Weimar Republic, 1918-1933
The
essence of German history
from 1918 to 1933 can be found in the statement There was no revolution
in 1918. For there to have been a revolution it would have been
necessary to liquidate the Quartet or, at least, subject them to
democratic control. The Quartet represented the real power in Germany
society because they represented the forces of public order (army and
bureaucracy) and of economic production (landlords and industrialists).
Even without a liquidation of this Quartet, it might have been possible
for democracy to function in the interstices between them if they had
quarreled among themselves. They did not quarrel, because they had an esprit
de corps
bred by years of service to a common system (the monarchy) and because,
in many cases, the same individuals were to be found in two or even
more of the four groups. Franz von Papen, for example, was a
Westphalian noble, a colonel in the army, an ambassador, and a man with
extensive industrial holdings, derived from his wife, in the Saarland..
Although
there was no
revolution—that is, no real shift in the control of power in
Germany in 1919—there was a legal change. In law, a democratic
system was set up. As a result, by the late 1920's there had appeared
an obvious discrepancy between law and fact—the regime, according
to the law, being controlled by the people, while in fact it was
controlled by the Quartet. The reasons for this situation are important.
The
Quartet, with the
monarchy, made the war of 1914-1918, and were incapable of winning it.
As a result, they were completely discredited and deserted by the
soldiers and workers. Thus, the masses of the people completely
renounced the old system in November 1918. The Quartet, however, was
not liquidated, for several reasons:
1.
They were able to place the
blame for the disaster on the monarchy. and jettisoned this to save
themselves;
2.
most Germans accepted this as an adequate revolution;
3.
the Germans hesitated to
make a real revolution for fear it would lead to an invasion of Germany
by the French, the Poles, or others;
4.
many Germans were satisfied
with the creation of a government which was democratic in form and made
little effort to examine the underlying reality;
5.
the only political party
capable of directing a real revolution was the Social Democrats, who
had opposed the Quartet system and the war itself, at least in theory;
but this party was incapable of doing anything in the crisis of 1918
because it was hopelessly divided into doctrinaire cliques, was
horrified at the danger of Soviet Bolshevism, and was satisfied that
order, trade-unionism, and a "democratic" regime were more important
than Socialism, humanitarian welfare, or consistency between theory and
action.
Before
1914 there were two
parties which stood outside the Quartet system: the Social Democrats
and the Center (Catholic) Party. The former was doctrinaire in its
attitude, being anticapitalist, pledged to the international
brotherhood of labor, pacifist, democratic, and Marxist in an
evolutionary, but not revolutionary, sense. The Center Party, like the
Catholics who made it up' came from all levels of society and all the
Catholics who made it up, came from all levels of society and all
shades of ideology, but in practice were frequently opposed to the
Quartet on specific issues.
These
two opposition parties
underwent considerable change during the war. The Social Democrats
always opposed the war in theory, but supported it on patriotic grounds
by voting for credits to finance the war. Its minute Left wing refused
to support the war even in this fashion as early as 1914. This
extremist group, under Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, became known
as the Spartacist Union and (after 1919) as the Communists. These
extremists wanted an immediate and complete Socialist revolution with a
soviet form of government. More moderate than the Spartacists was
another group calling itself Independent Socialists. These voted war
credits until 1917 when they refused to continue to do so and broke
from the Social Democratic Party. The rest of the Social Democrats
supported the war and the old monarchial system until November 1918 in
fact, but in theory embraced an extreme type of evolutionary Socialism.
The
Center Party was
aggressive and nationalist until 1917 when it became pacifist. Under
Matthias Erzberger it allied with the Social Democrats to push through
the Reichstag Peace Resolution of July 1917. The position of these
various groups on the issue of aggressive nationalism was sharply
revealed in the voting to ratify the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk imposed by
the militarists, Junkers, and industrialists on a prostrate Russia. The
Center Party voted to ratify; the Social Democrats abstained from
voting; the Independents voted No.
The
"revolution" of November
1918 would have been a real revolution except for the opposition of the
Social Democrats and the Center Party, for the Quartet in the crucial
days of November and December 1918 were discouraged, discredited, and
helpless. Outside the Quartet itself there w as, at that time and even
later, only two small groups which could possibly have been used by the
Quartet as rallying points about which could have been formed some mass
support for the Quartet. These two small groups were the
"indiscriminate nationalists" and the "mercenaries." The indiscriminate
nationalists were those men, like Hitler, who were not able to
distinguish between the German nation and the old monarchial system.
These persons, because of their loyalty to the nation, were eager to
rally to the support of the Quartet, which they regarded as identical
with the nation. The mercenaries were a larger group who had no
particular loyalty to anyone or to any idea but were willing to serve
any group which could pay for such service. The only groups able to pay
were two of the Quartet—the Officers' Corps and the
industrialists—who organized many mercenaries into reactionary
armed bands or "Free Corps" in 1918-1923.
Instead
of working for a
revolution in 1918-1919, the two parties which dominated the
situation—the Social Democrats and the Centrists— did all
they could to prevent a revolution. They not only left the Quartet in
their positions of responsibility and power—the landlords on
their estates, the officers in their commands, the industrialists in
control of their factories, and the bureaucracy in control of the
police, the courts, and the administration—but they increased the
influence of these groups because the actions of the Quartet were not
restrained under the republic by that sense of honor or loyalty to the
system which had restrained the use of their power under the monarchy.
As
early as November 10,1918,
Friedrich Ebert, chief figure of the Social Democratic Party, made an
agreement with the Officers' Corps in which he promised not to use the
power of the new government to democratize the army if the officers
would support the new government against the threat of the Independents
and the Spartacists to establish a soviet system. As a consequence of
this agreement Ebert kept a private telephone line from his office in
the Chancellery to General Wilhelm Groener's office at the army's
headquarters and consulted with the army on many critical political
issues. As another consequence, Ebert and his Minister of War Gustav
Noske, also a Social Democrat, used the army under its old monarchist
officers to destroy the workers and radicals who sought to challenge
the existing situation. This was done in Berlin in December 1918, in
January 1919, and again in March 1919, and in other cities at other
times. In these assaults the army had the pleasure of killing several
thousand of the detested radicals..
A
somewhat similar
anti-revolutionary agreement was made between heavy industry and the
Socialist trade unions on November 11, 1918. On that day Hugo Stinnes,
Albert Vögler, and Alfred Hugenberg, representing industry, and
Carl Legien, Otto Hue, and Hermann Müller representing the unions,
signed an agreement to support each other in order to keep the
factories functioning. Although this agreement was justified on
opportunist grounds, it clearly showed that the so-called Socialists
were not interested in economic or social reform but were merely
interested in the narrow trade-union objectives of wages, hours, and
working conditions. It was this narrow range of interests which
ultimately destroyed the average German's faith in the Socialists or
their unions.
The
history of the period from
1918 to 1933 cannot be understood without some knowledge of the chief
political parties. There were almost forty parties, but only seven or
eight were important. These were, from extreme Left to extreme Right,
as follows:
1.
Spartacist Union (or Communist—KPD)
2.
Independent Socialist (USPD)
3.
Social Democrats (SPD)
4.
Democratic
5.
Center (including Bavarian People's Party)
6.
People's Party
7.
Nationalists
8.
"Racists" (including Nazis)
Of
these parties only the
Democrats had any sincere and consistent belief in the democratic
Republic. On the other hand the Communists, Independents, and many of
the Social Democrats on the Left, as well as the "Racists,"
Nationalists, and many of the People's Party on the Right, were adverse
to the Republic, or at best ambivalent. The Catholic Center Party,
being formed on a religious rather than on a social basis, had members
from all areas of the political and social spectrum.
The
political history of
Germany from the armistice of 1918 to the arrival of Hitler to the
chancellorship in January 1933 can be divided into three periods, thus:
Period
of Turmoil 1918-1924
Period
of Fulfillment 1924-1930
Period
of Disintegration 1930-1933
During
this span of over
fourteen years, there were eight elections, in none of which did a
single party obtain a majority of the seats in the Reichstag.
Accordingly, every German Cabinet of the period was a coalition. The
following table gives the results of these eight elections:
Jan. June May Dec. May July Sept. Nov.March
Party 1919 1920 1924 1924 1928 1930 1932 19321933
Communist 0 4 62 45 54 77 89 10081
Independent
Socialist
22 84
Social
Democrats 163 102 100 131 153 143 133 121120
Democrats 75 39 28 32 25 20 4 2 5
Center 91 64 65 69 62 68 75 70 74
Bavarian
People’s 21 16 19 16 19 22 20 18
Economic
Party 4 4 10 17 25 2 2 0 0
German
People’s
Party 19 65 45 51 45 30 7 11 2
Nationalists 44 71 95 103 73 41 37 52 52
Nazis 0 0 32 14 12 107 230 196288
On
the basis of these
elections Germany had twenty major Cabinet changes from 1919 to 1933.
Generally these Cabinets were constructed about the Center and
Democratic parties with the addition of representatives from either the
Social Democrats or the People’s Party. On only two occasions
(Gustav Stresemann in 1923 and Hermann Müller in 1928-1930) was it
possible to obtain a Cabinet broad enough to include all four of these
parties. Moreover, the second of these broad-front Cabinets was the
only Cabinet after 1923 to include the Socialists and the only Cabinet
after 1925 which did not include the Nationalists. This indicates
clearly the drift to the Right in the German government after the
resignation of Joseph Wirth in November 1922. This drift, as we shall
see, was delayed by only two influences: the need for foreign loans and
political concessions from the Western Powers and the recognition that
both of these could be obtained better by a government which seemed to
be republican and democratic in inclination than by a government which
was obviously hand in glove with the Quartet.
At
the end of the war in 1918
the Socialists were in control, not because the Germans were
Socialistic (for the party was not really Socialist) but because this
was the only party which had been traditionally in opposition to the
imperial system. A committee of six men was set up: three from the
Social Democrats (Ebert, Philip Scheidemann, and Otto Landsberg) and
three from the Independent Socialists (Hugo Haase, Wilhelm Dittman, and
Emil Barth). This group ruled as a sort of combined emperor and
chancellor and had the regular secretaries of state as their
subordinates. These men did nothing to consolidate the republic or
democracy and were opposed to any effort to take any steps toward
Socialism. They even refused to nationalize the coal industry,
something which was generally expected. Instead they wasted the
opportunity by busying themselves with typical trade-union problems
such as the eight-hour day (November 12, 1918) and collective
bargaining methods (December 23, 1918).
The
critical problem was the
form of government, with the choice resting between workers' and
peasants' councils (soviets), already widely established, and a
national assembly to set up an ordinary parliamentary system. The
Socialist group preferred the latter, and were willing to use the
regular army to enforce this choice. On this basis a
counterrevolutionary agreement was made between Ebert and the General
Staff. As a consequence of this agreement, the army attacked a
Spartacist parade in Berlin on December 6, 1918, and liquidated the
rebellious People's Naval Division on December 24, 1918. In protest at
this violence the three Independent members of the government resigned.
Their example was followed by other Independents throughout Germany,
with the exception of Kurt Eisner in Munich. The next day the
Spartacists formed the German Communist Party with a non-revolutionary
program. Their declaration read, in part: "The Spartacist Union will
never assume governmental power except in response to the plain and
unmistakable wish of the great majority of the proletarian masses in
Germany; and only as a result of a definite agreement of these masses
with the aims and methods of the Spartacist Union."
This
pious expression,
however, was the program of the leaders; the masses of the new party,
and possibly the members of the Independent Socialist group as well,
were enraged at the conservatism of the Social Democrats and began to
get out of hand. The issue was joined on the question of councils
versus National Assembly. The government, under Noske's direction, used
regular troops in a bloody suppression of the Left (January 5-15),
ending up with the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the
Communist leaders. The result was exactly as the Quartet wanted: the
Communists and many non-Communist workers were permanently alienated
from the Socialists and from the parliamentary republic. The Communist
Party, deprived of leaders of its own, became a tool of Russian
Communism. As a result of this repression, the army was able to disarm
the workers at the very moment when it was beginning to arm reactionary
private bands (Free Corps) of the Right. Both of these developments
were encouraged by Ebert and Noske.
Only
in Bavaria was the
alienation of Communist and Socialist and the disarmament of the former
not carried out; Kurt Eisner, the Independent Socialist
minister-president in Munich, prevented it. Accordingly, Eisner was
murdered by Count Anton von Arco-Valley on February Zl, 1919. When the
workers of Munich revolted, they were crushed by a combination of
regular army and Free Corps amid scenes of horrible violence from both
sides. Eisner was replaced as premier by a Social Democrat, Adolph
Hoffman. Hoffman, on the night of March 13, 1920, was thrown out by a
military coup which replaced him by a government of the Right under
Gustav von Kahr.
In
the meantime, the National
Assembly elected on June 19, 1919, drew up a parliamentary constitution
under the guidance of Professor Hugo Preuss. This constitution provided
for a president elected for seven years to be head of the state, a
bicameral legislature, and a Cabinet responsible to the lower house of
the legislature. The upper house, or Reichsrat, consisted of
representatives of eighteen German states and had, in legislative
matters, a suspensive veto which could be overcome by a two-thirds vote
of the lower chamber. This lower chamber, or Reichstag, had 608
members, elected by a system of proportional representation on a party
basis. The head of the government, to whom the president gave a mandate
to form a Cabinet, was called the chancellor. The chief weaknesses of
the constitution were the provisions for proportional representation
and other provisions, by articles 25 and 48, which allowed the
president to suspend constitutional guarantees and rule by decree, in
periods of "national emergency." As early as 1925 the parties of the
Right were planning to destroy the republic by the use of these powers.
A
direct challenge to the
republic from the Right came in March 1920, when Captain
Ehrhardt’s Brigade of the Free Corps marched into Berlin, forced
the government to flee to Dresden, and set up a government under
Wolfgang Kapp, an ultra-nationalist. Kapp was supported by the army
commander in the Berlin area, Baron Walther von Lüttwitz, who
became Reichswehr minister in Kapp's government.
Since General
Hans von Seeckt, chief of staff, refused to support the legal
government, it was helpless, and was saved only by a general strike of
the workers in Berlin and a great proletarian rising in the industrial
regions of western Germany. The Kapp government was unable to function,
and collapsed, while the army proceeded to violate the territorial
disarmament clauses of the Treaty of Versailles by invading the Ruhr in
order to crush the workers' uprising in that area. Seeckt was rewarded
for his non-cooperation by being appointed commander in chief in May
1920.
As
a consequence of these
disturbances, the general election of July 1920 went against the
"Weimar Coalition." A new government came in which was completely
middle-class in its alignment, the Socialists of the Weimar Coalition
being replaced by the party of big business, the German People's Party.
Noske was replaced as Reichswehr minister by Otto Gessler, a willing
tool of the Officers' Corps. Gessler, who held this critical position
from March 1920 to January 1928, made no effort to subject the army to
democratic, or even civilian, control, but cooperated in every way with
Seeckt's secret efforts to evade the disarmament provisions of the
peace treaties. German armaments factories were moved to Turkey,
Russia, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. German officers were
drilled in prohibited weapons in Russia and China. Inside Germany,
secret armaments were prepared on a considerable scale, and troops in
excess of the treaty limits were organized in a "Black Reichswehr"
which was supported by secret funds of the regular Reichswehr. The
Reichstag had no control over either organization. When the Western
Powers in 1920 demanded that the Free Corps be disbanded, these groups
went underground and formed a parallel organization to the Black
Reichswehr, being supplied with protection, funds, information, and
arms from the Reichswehr and Conservatives. In return the Free Corps
engaged in large-scale conspiracy and murder on behalf of the
Conservatives. According to The Times of London,
the Free Corps murdered four hundred victims of the Left and Center in
one year.
The
middle-class Cabinet of
Konstantin Fehrenbach resigned on May 4, 1921 and allowed the Weimar
Coalition of Socialists, Democrats, and Center to take office to
receive the reparations ultimatum of the Allied governments on May 5th.
Thus, the democratic regime was further discredited in the eyes of
Germans as an instrument of weakness, hardship, and shame. As soon as
the job was done, the Socialists were replaced by the People's Party,
and the Wirth Cabinet was succeeded by a purely middle-class government
under Wilhelm Cuno, general manager of the Hamburg-American Steamship
Line. It was this government which "managed" the hyperinflation of 1923
and the passive resistance against the French forces in the Ruhr. The
inflation, which was a great benefit to the Quartet, destroyed the
economic position of the middle classes and o\ver middle classes and
permanently alienated them from the republic.
The
Cuno government was ended
by a deal between Stresemann and the Socialists. The former, on behalf
of the People's Party, which had hitherto been resolutely
anti-republican, accepted the republic; the Socialists agreed to
support a Stresemann Cabinet; and a broad coalition was formed for a
policy of fulfillment of the Treaty of Versailles. This ended the
Period of Turmoil (August 1923).
The
Period of Fulfillment
(1923-1930) is associated with the name of Gustav Stresemann, who was
in every Cabinet until his death in October 1929. A reactionary
Pan-German and economic imperialist in the period before 1919,
Stresemann was always a supporter of the Quartet, and the chief creator
of the German People's Party, the party of heavy industry. In 1923,
while still keeping his previous convictions, he decided that it would
be good policy to reverse them publicly and adopt a program of support
for the republic and fulfillment of treaty obligations. He did this
because he realized that Germany was too weak to do anything else and
that she could get stronger only by obtaining release from the more
stringent treaty restrictions, by foreign loans from sympathetic
British and American financiers, and by secret consolidation of the
Quartet. All these things could be achieved more easily by a policy of
fulfillment than by a policy of resistance like Cuno's.
The
Bavarian government of the
Right, which had been installed under Gustav von Kahr in 1921, refused
to accept Stresemann's decision to readmit the Socialists to the Reich
government in Berlin. Instead, Kahr assumed dictatorial powers with the
title of state commissioner of Bavaria. In reply the Stresemann Cabinet
invested the executive power of the Reich in the Reichswehr minister,
an act which had the effect of making von Seeckt the ruler of Germany.
In terror of a rightist coup d’état
(putsch),
the Communist International decided to allow the German Communist Party
to cooperate with the Socialists in an anti-Right front within the
parliamentary regime. This was done at once in the states of Saxony and
Thuringia. At this the Reichswehr commander in Bavaria, General Otto
von Lossow, shifted his allegiance from Seeckt to Kahr.
Stresemann-Seeckt in Berlin faced Kahr-Lossow in Munich with the "Red"
governments of Saxony and Thuringia in between. The Reichswehr chiefly
obeyed Berlin, while the Black Reichswehr and underground Free Corps
(especially Ehrhardt's and Rossbach's) obeyed Munich. Kahr-Lossow, with
the support of Hitler and Ludendorff, planned to invade Saxony and
Thuringia, overthrow the Red governments on the pretext of suppressing
Bolshevism, and then continue northward to overthrow the central
government in Berlin. The Reich government headed this plot off by an
illegal act: The Reichswohr forces of Seeckt overthrew the
constitutional Red governments of Saxony and Thuringia to anticipate
Bavaria. As a result, Lossow and Kahr gave up the plans for revolt,
while Hitler and Ludendorff refused to do so. By the "Beer-Hall" Putsch
of November 8, 1923, Hitler and Ludendorff tried to abduct Kahr and
Lossow and force them to continue the revolt. They were overcome in a
blast of gunfire. Kahr, Lossow, and Ludendorff were never punished;
Hermann Goring fled the country; Hitler and Rudolf Hess were given
living quarters in a fortress for a year, profiting by the occasion to
write the famous volume Mein Kampf.
In
order to deal with the
economic crisis and the inflation, Stresemann's government was granted
dictatorial powers overriding all constitutional guarantees, except
that the Socialists won a promise not to touch the eight-hour day or
the social-insurance system. In this way the inflation was curbed, and
a new monetary system was established; incidentally, the eight-hour day
was abolished by decree (1923). A reparations agreement (the Dawes
Plan) was made with the Allied governments, and the Ruhr was
successfully evacuated. In the course of these events the Social
Democrats abandoned the Stresemann government in protest at its illegal
suppression of the Red government of Saxony, but the Stresemann program
continued with the support of the parties of the Center and Right,
including, for the first time, the support of the anti-Republican
Nationalists. Indeed, the Nationalists with three or four seats in the
Cabinet in 1926-1928 were the dominant force in the government,
although they continued to protest in public against the policy of
fulfillment, and Stresemann continued to pretend that his
administration of that policy exposed him to imminent danger of
assassination at the hands of the Right extremists.
The
German Cabinets from 1923
to 1930, under Wilhelm Marx, Hans Luther, Marx again, and finally
Hermann Müller, were chiefly concerned with questions of foreign
policy, with reparations, evacuation of the occupied areas, disarmament
agitation, Locarno, and the League of Nations. On the domestic front,
just as significant events were going on but with much less fanfare.
Much of the industrial system, as well as many public buildings, was
reconstructed by foreign loans. The Quartet were secretly strengthened
and consolidated by reorganization of the tax structure, by utilization
of governmental subsidies, and by the training and rearrangement of
personnel. Alfred Hugenberg, the most violent and irreconcilable member
of the Nationalist Party, built up a propaganda system through his
ownership of scores of newspapers and a controlling interest in Ufa,
the great motion-picture corporation. By such avenues as this, a
pervasive propaganda campaign, based on existing German prejudices and
intolerances, was put on to prepare the way for a counterrevolution by
the Quartet. This campaign sought to show that all Germany's problems
and misfortunes were caused by the democratic and laboring groups, by
the internationalists, and by the Jews.
The
Center and Left shared
this nationalist poison sufficiently to abstain from any effort to give
the German people the true story of Germany's responsibility for the
war and for her own hardships. Thus the Right was able to spread its
own story of the war, that Germany had been overcome by "a stab in the
back" from "the three Internationals": the "Gold" International of the
Jews, the "Red" International of the Socialists, and the "Black"
International of the Catholics, an unholy triple alliance which was
symbolized in the gold, red, and black flag of the Weimar Republic. In
this fashion every effort was made, and with considerable success, to
divert popular animosity at the defeat of 1918 and the Versailles
settlement from those who were really responsible to the democratic and
republican groups. At the same time, German animosity against economic
exploitation was directed away from the landlords and industrialists by
racist doctrines which blamed all such problems on bad Jewish
international bankers and department store owners.
The
general nationalism of the
German people, and their willingness to accept the propaganda of the
Right, succeeded in making Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg president
of the republic in 1925. On the first ballot none of seven candidates
received a majority of the total vote, so the issue went to the polls
again. On the second ballot Hindenburg received 14,655,766 votes, Marx
(of the Center Party) received 13,751,615, while the Communist Ernst
Thälmann received 1,931,151.
The
victory of Hindenburg was
a fatal blow to the republic. A mediocre military leader, and already
on the verge of senility, the new president was a convinced
anti-democrat and anti-republican. To bind his allegiance to the
Quartet more closely, the landlords and industrialists took advantage
of his eightieth birthday in 1927 to give him a Junker estate, Neudeck,
in East Prussia. To avoid the inheritance tax, the deed to this estate
was made out to the president's son, Colonel Oskar von Hindenburg. In
time this estate came to be known as the "smallest concentration camp"
in Germany, as the president spent his last years there cut off from
the outside world by his senilities and a coterie of intriguers. These
intriguers, who were able to influence the aged presidential mind in
any direction they wished, consisted of Colonel Oskar, General Kurt von
Schleicher, Dr. Otto Meissner, w ho remained head of the presidential
office under Ebert, Hindenburg, and Hitler; and Elard von
Oldenburg-Januschau who owned the estate next to Neudeck. This coterie
was able to make and unseat Cabinets from 1930 to 1934, and controlled
the use of the presidential power to rule by decree in that critical
period.
No
sooner did Hindenburg
become a landlord in October 1927 than he began to mobilize government
assistance for the landlords. This assistance, known as Osthilfe
(Eastern Help), was organized by a joint session of the Reich and
Prussian governments presided over by Hindenburg on December 21, 1927.
The stated purpose of this assistance was to increase the economic
prosperity of the regions east of the Elbe River in order to stop the
migration of Germans from that area to western Germany and their
replacement by Polish farm laborers. This assistance soon became a sink
of corruption, the money being diverted in one way or another, legally
or illegally, to subsidize the bankrupt great estates and the
extravagances of the Junker landlords. It was the threat of public
revelation of this scandal which was the immediate cause of the death
of the Weimar Republic by Hindenburg's hand in 1932.
The
combination of all of
these events (the real power of the Quartet, the shortsighted and
unprincipled opportunism of the Social Democrats and the Center Party,
the coterie around Hindenburg, and the Osthilfe
scandal) made
possible the disintegration of the Weimar Republic in the years
1930-1933. The decision of the Quartet to attempt to establish a
government satisfactory to themselves was made in 1929. The chief
causes of the decision were (1) the realization that industrial plants
had been largely rebuilt by foreign loans; (2) the knowledge that these
foreign loans were now drying up and that, without them, neither
reparations nor internal debts could be met except at a price which the
Quartet was unwilling to pay; (3) the knowledge that the policy of
fulfillment had accomplished about as much as could be expected from
it, the Allied Control Missions having ended, rearmament having
progressed as far as was possible under the Versailles Treaty, the
western frontier having been made secure, and the eastern frontier
having been opened to German penetration.
The
decision of the Quartet
did not result from the economic crisis of 1929, but was made earlier
in the year. This can be seen in the alliance of Hugenberg and Hitler
to force a referendum on the Young Plan. The Quartet had accepted the
much more severe Dawes Plan in 1924 because they were not then ready to
destroy the Weimar regime. The challenge to the Young Plan not only
indicated that they were ready; it also became an indication of their
strength. This test was a disappointment, since they obtained only five
million votes adverse to the plan from an electorate of 40 million. As
a result, for the first time, the Nazis began a drive to build up a
mass following. The moment for which they had been kept alive by the
financial contributions of the Quartet had arrived. The effort would
never have succeeded, however, were it not for the economic crisis. The
intensity of this crisis can be measured by the number of Reichstag
seats held by the Nazis:
April Dec. July Dec. March
1924 1924 1928 1930 1932 1932 1933
7 14 12 107 230 196 288
The
Nazis were financed by the
Black Reichswehr from 1919 to 1923; then this support ceased because of
army disgust at the fiasco of the Munich Putsch.
This lack of
enthusiasm for the Nazis by the army continued for years. It was
inspired by social snobbery and fears of the Nazi Storm Troops (SA) as
a possible rival to itself. This diffidence on the part of the army was
compensated by the support of the industrialists, who financed the
Nazis from Hitler's exit from prison in 1924 to the end of 1932.
The
destruction of the Weimar Republic has five stages:
Brüning:
March
27,
1930 May 30, 1932
von
Papen:
May
31, 1932-November 17, 1932
Schleicher:
December
2,
1932-January 28, 1933
Hitler:
January
30, 1933-March 5, 1933
Gleichschaltung:
March
6, 1933-August 2, 1934
When
the economic crisis began
in 1929, Germany had a democratic government of the Center and Social
Democratic parties. The crisis resulted in a decrease in tax receipts
and a parallel increase in demands for government welfare services.
This brought to a head the latent dispute over orthodox and unorthodox
financing of a depression. Big business and big finance were determined
to place the burden of the depression on the working classes by forcing
the government to adopt a policy of deflation—that is, by wage
reductions and curtailment of government expenditures. The Social
Democrats wavered in their attitude, but in general were opposed to
this policy. Schacht, as president of the Reichsbank, was able to force
the Socialist Rudolf Hilferding out of the position of minister of
finance by refusing bank credit to the government until this was done.
In March 1930, the Center broke the coalition on the issue of reduction
of unemployment benefits, the Socialists were thrown out of the
government, and Heinrich Brüning, leader of the Center Party, came
in as chancellor. Because he did not have a majority in the Reichstag,
he had to put the deflationary policy into effect by the use of
presidential decree under Article 48. This marked the end of the Weimar
Republic, for it had never been intended that this "emergency clause"
should be used in the ordinary process of government, although it had
been used by Ebert in 1923 to abolish the eight-hour day. When the
Reichstag condemned Brüning's method by a vote of 236 to 221 on
July 18, 1930, the chancellor dissolved it and called for new
elections. The results of these were contrary to his hopes, since he
lost seats both to the Right and to the Left. On his Right were 148
seats (107 Nazis and 41 Nationalists); on his Left were 220 seats (77
Communists and 143 Socialists). The Socialists permitted Brüning
to remain in office by refusing to vote on a motion of no confidence.
Left in office, Brüning continued the deflationary policy by
decrees which Hindenburg signed. Thus, in effect, Hindenburg was the
ruler of Germany, since he could dismiss or name any chancellor, or
could permit one to govern by his own power of decree.
Brüning's
policy of
deflation was a disaster. The suffering of the people was terrible,
with almost eight million unemployed out of twenty-five million
employable. To compensate for this unpopular domestic policy,
Brüning adopted a more aggressive foreign policy, on such
questions as reparations, union with Austria, or the World Disarmament
Conference.
In
the crisis of 1929-1933,
the bourgeois parties tended to dissolve to the profit of the extreme
Left and the extreme Right. In this the Nazi Party profited more than
the Communists for several reasons: (1) it had the financial support of
the industrialists and landlords; (2) it was not internationalist, but
nationalist, as any German party had to be; (3) it had never
compromised itself by accepting the republic even temporarily, an
advantage when most Germans tended to blame the republic for their
troubles; (4) it was prepared to use violence, while the parties of the
Left, even the Communists, were legalistic and relatively peaceful,
because the police and judges were of the Right. The reasons why the
Nazis, rather than the Nationalists, profited by the turn from
moderation could be explained by the fact that (1) the Nationalists had
compromised themselves and vacillated on every issue from 1924 to 1929,
and (2) the Nazis had an advantage in that they were not clearly a
party of the Right but were ambiguous; in fact, a large group of
Germans considered the Nazis a revolutionary Left party differing from
the Communists only in being patriotic.
In
this polarization of the
political spectrum it was the middle classes which became unanchored,
driven by desperation and panic. The Social Democrats were sufficiently
fortified by trade unionism, and the Center Party members were
sufficiently fortified by religion to resist the drift to extremism.
Unfortunately, both these relatively stable groups lacked intelligent
leadership and were too wedded to old ideas and narrow interests to
find any appeal broad enough for a wide range of German voters.
The
whole of 1932 was filled
with a series of intrigues and distrustful, shifting alliances among
the various groups which sought to get into a position to use the
presidential power of decree. On October 11, 1931, a great reactionary
alliance was made of the Nazis, the Nationalists, the Stahlhelm (a
militaristic veterans' organization), and the Junker Landbund.
This
so-called "Harzburg Front" pretended to be a unified opposition to
Communism, but really represented part of the intrigue of these various
groups to come to power. Of the real rulers of Germany, only the
Westphalian industrialists and the army were absent. The industrialists
were taken into camp by Hitler during a three-hour speech which he made
at the Industrial Club of Dusseldorf at the invitation of Fritz Thyssen
(January 27, 1932). The army could not be brought into line, since it
was controlled by the presidential coterie, especially Schleicher and
Hindenburg himself. Schleicher had political ambitions of his own, and
the army traditionally would not commit itself in any open or formal
fashion.
In
the middle of this crisis
came the presidential election of March-April 1932. It offered a
fantastic sight of a nominally democratic republic forced to choose its
president from among four anti-democratic, anti-republican figures of
which one (Hitler) had become a German citizen only a month previously
by a legal trick. Since Hindenburg appeared as the least impossible of
the four, he was reelected on the second ballot:
First
Ballot Second Ballot
Hindenburg 18,661,736 19,359,533
Hitler 11,338,571 13,418,051
Thälmann,
Communist 4,982,079 3,706,655
Düsterberg,
Stahlhelm 2,557,876
Hindenburg
continued to
support Brüning until the end of May 1932, when he dismissed him
and put in Von Papen. This was done at the instigation of Von
Schleicher who was hoping to build up some kind of broad-front
coalition of nationalists and workers as a facade for the Reichswehr.
In this plan Schleicher was able to get Hindenburg to abandon
Brüning by persuading him that the chancellor was planning to
break up some of the bankrupt large estates east of the Elbe and might
even investigate the Osthilfe scandals. Schleicher put in Papen as
chancellor in the belief that Papen had so little support in the
country that he would be completely dependent on Schleicher's ability
to control Hindenburg. Instead, the president became so fond of Papen
that the new chancellor was able to use Hindenburg's power directly,
and even began to undermine the influence of Schleicher in the
president's entourage.
Papen's
"Cabinet of the
barons" was openly a government of the Quartet and had almost no
support in the Reichstag and little support in the country. Papen and
Schleicher realized that it could not last long. Each began to form a
plot to consolidate himself and stop the polarization of political
opinion in Germany. Papen's plot was to cut off the financial
contributions from industry to Hitler and break down the Nazi Party's
independence by a series of expensive elections. The chancellor felt
sure that Hitler would he willing to come into a Cabinet of which Papen
was head in order to recover the financial contributions from industry
and prevent the disruption of his party. Schleicher, on the other hand,
hoped to unite the Left wing of the Nazi Party under Otto Strasser with
the Christian and Socialist labor unions to support the Reichwehr in a
program of nationalism and unorthodox finance. Both plots dependent on
retaining the favor of Hindenburg in order to retain control of the
army and of the presidential power to issue decrees. In this, Papen was
more successful than Schleicher, for the aged president had no liking
for any unorthodox economic schemes.
Papen's
plot developed more
rapidly than Schleicher's and appeared more hopeful because of his
greater ability to control the president. Having persuaded his close
friends, the industrialists, to stop their contributions to the Nazis,
Papen called a new election for November 1932. In the balloting the
Nazis were reduced from 230 to 196 seats, while the Communists were
increased from 89 to 100. The tide had turned. This had three results:
(1) Hitler decided to join a coalition government, which he had
previously refused; (2) the Quartet decided to overthrow the republic
in order to stop the swing to the Communists; and (3) the Quartet,
especially the industrialists, decided that Hitler had learned a lesson
and could safely be put into office as the figurehead of a Right
government because he was growing weaker. The whole deal was arranged
by Papen, himself a colonel and an industrialist as w ell as a
Westphalian aristocrat, and was sealed in an agreement made at the home
of the Cologne banker Baron Kurt von Schroder, on January 4, 933.
This
agreement came into
effect because of Papen's ability to manage Hindenburg. On January 28,
1933, the president forced the resignation of Schleicher by refusing to
grant him decree powers. Two days later Hitler came to office as
chancellor in a Cabinet which contained only two other Nazis. These
were Minister of Air Goring and Frick in the vital Ministry of the
Interior. Of the other eight posts, two, the ministries of economics
and agriculture, went to Hugenburg; the Ministry of Labor went to Franz
Seldte of the Stahlhelm, the Foreign Ministry and the Reichswehr
Ministry went to nonparty experts, and most of the remaining posts went
to friends of Papen. It would not seem possible for Hitler, thus
surrounded, ever to obtain control of Germany, yet within a year and a
half he was dictator of the country.
Chapter 28—The
Nazi Regime
Coming to
Power, 1933—1934
When
Adolf Hitler became
chancellor of the German Reich on January 30, 1933, he was not yet
forty-four years old. From his birth in Austria in 1889 to the outbreak
of war in 1914, his life had been a succession of failures, the seven
years 1907-1914 being passed as a social derelict in Vienna and Munich.
There he had become a fanatical Pan-German anti-Semite, attributing his
own failures to the "intrigues of international Jewry."
The
outbreak of war in August
1914 gave Hitler the first real motivation of his life. He became a
super-patriot, joined the Sixteenth Volunteer Bavarian Infantry, and
served at the front for four years. In his way he was an excellent
soldier. Attached to the regimental staff as messenger for the First
Company, he was completely happy, always volunteering for the most
dangerous tasks. Although his relations with his superiors were
excellent and he was decorated with the Iron Cross, second class, in
1914 and with the Iron Cross, first class, in 1918, he was never
promoted beyond Private, First Class, because he was incapable of
having any real relationships with his fellow soldiers or of taking
command of any group of them. He remained on active service at the
front for four years. During that period his regiment of 3,500 suffered
3,260 killed in action, and Hitler himself was wounded twice. These
were the only two occasions on which he left the front. In October 1918
he was blinded by mustard gas and sent to a hospital at Pasewalk, near
Berlin. When he emerged a month later he found the war finished,
Germany beaten, and the monarchy overthrown. He refused to become
reconciled to this situation. Unable to accept either defeat or the
republic, remembering the war as the second great love of his life (the
first being his mother), he stayed with the army and eventually became
a political spy for the Reichswehr, stationed near Munich. In the
course of spying on the numerous political groups in Munich, Hitler
became fascinated by the rantings of Gottfried Feder against the
"interest slavery of the Jews." At some meetings Hitler himself became
a participant, attacking the "Jewish plot to dominate the world" or
ranting about the need for Pan-German unity. As a result he was asked
to join the German Workers' Party, and did so, becoming one of about
sixty regular members and the seventh member of its executive committee.
The
German Workers' Party had
been founded by a Munich locksmith, Anton Drexler, on January 5, 1919,
as a nationalist, Pan-German, workers' group. In a few months Captain
Ernst Rohm of Franz von Epp's corps of the Black Reichswohr joined the
movement and became the conduit by which secret Reichswehr funds,
coming through Epp, were conveyed to the party. He also began to
organize a strong-arm militia within the group (the Storm Troops, or
SA). When Hitler joined in September 1919, he was put in charge of
party publicity. Since this was the chief expense, and since Hitler
also became the party's leading orator, public opinion soon came to
regard the whole movement as Hitler's, and Rohm paid the Reichswehr's
funds to Hitler directly.
During
1920 the party grew
from 54 to 3,000 members; it changed its name to National Socialist
German Workers' Party, purchased the Völkischer Beobachter
with 60,000 marks of General von Epp's money, and drew up its
"Twenty-five-Point Program."
The
party program of 1920 was
printed in the party literature for twenty-five years, but its
provisions became more remote from attainment as years passed. Even in
1920, many of its clauses were put in to win support from the lower
classes rather than because they were sincerely desired by the party
leaders. These included (1) Pan-Germanism; (2) German international
equality, including the abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles; (3)
living space for Germans, including colonial areas; (4) German
citizenship to be based on blood only, with no naturalization, no
immigration for non-Germans, and all Jews or "other aliens" eliminated;
(5) all unearned incomes to be abolished, the state to control all
monopolies, to impose an excess-profits tax on corporations, to
"communalize" the large department stores, to encourage small business
in the allotment of government contracts, to take agricultural land for
public purposes without compensation, and to provide old-age
pensions;(6) to punish all war profiteers and usurers with death; and
(7) to see that the press, education, culture, and religion conform to
"the morals and religious sense of the German race."
As
the party grew, adding
members and spreading out to link up with similar movements in other
parts of Germany, Hitler strengthened his control of the group. He
could do this because he had control of the party newspaper and of the
chief source of money and was its chief public figure. In July 1921, he
had the party constitution changed to give the president absolute
power. He was elected president; Drexler was made honorary president;
while Max Amann, Hitler's sergeant in the war, was made business
manager. As a consequence of this event, the SA was reorganized under
Röhm, the word "Socialism" in the party name was interpreted to
mean nationalism (or a society without class conflicts), and equality
in party and state was replaced hy the "leadership principle" and the
doctrine of the elite. Tn the next two years the party passed through a
series of crises of which the chief was the attempted Putsch
of
November 9, 1923. During this period all kinds of violence and
illegality, even murder, were condoned by the Bavarian and Munich
authorities. As a result of the failures of this period, especially the
abortive Putsch, Hitler became convinced that he
must come to
power by legal methods rather than by force; he broke with Ludendorff
and ceased to be supported by the Reichswehr; he began to receive his
chief financial support from the industrialists; he made a tacit
alliance with the Bavarian People's Party by which Prime Minister
Heinrich Held of Bavaria raised the ban on the Nazi Party in return for
Hitler's repudiation of Ludendorff's anti-Christian teachings; and
Hitler formed a new armed militia (the SS) to protect himself against
Rohm's control of the old armed militia (the SA).
In
the period 1924-1930 the
party continued, without any real growth, as a "lunatic fringe,"
subsidized by the industrialists. Among the chief contributors to the
party in this period were Carl Bechstein (Berlin piano manufacturer),
August Borsig (Berlin locomotive manufacturer), Emil Kirdorf (general
manager of the Rhenish-Westphalian Coal Syndicate), Fritz Thyssen
(owner of the United Steel Works and president of the German Industrial
Council) and Albert Vögler (general manager of the Gelsenkirchen
Iron and Steel Company and formerly general manager of United Steel
Works). During this period neither Hitler nor his supporters were
seeking to create a mass movement. That did not come until 1930. But
during this earlier period the party itself was steadily centralized,
and the Leftish elements (like the Strasser brothers) were weakened or
eliminated. In April 1927, Hitler spoke to 400 industrialists in Essen;
in April 1928, he addressed a similar group of landlords from east of
the Elbe; in January 1932 came one of his greatest triumphs when he
spoke for 3 hours to the Industrial Club of Düsseldorf and won
support and financial contributions from that powerful group. By that
date he was seeking to build his movement into a mass political party
capable of sweeping him into office. This project failed. As we have
indicated, by the end of 1932 much of the financial support from
industry had been cut off by Papen, and party membership was falling
away, chiefly to the Communists. To stop this decline, Hitler agreed to
become chancellor in a Cabinet in which there would be only three Nazis
among eleven members. Papen hoped in this way to control the Nazis and
to obtain from them the popular support which Papen had so sorely
lacked in his own chancellorship in 1932. But Papen was far too clever
for his own good. He, Hugenberg, Hindenburg, and the rest of the
intriguers had underestimated Hitler. The latter, in return for
Hugenberg's acceptance of new elections on March 5, 1933, promised that
there would be no Cabinet changes whatever the outcome of the voting.
In spite of the fact that the Nazis obtained only 44 per cent of the
ballots in the new election, Hitler became dictator of Germany within
eighteen months.
One
of the chief reasons for
this success rests on the position of Prussia within Germany. Prussia
was the greatest of the fourteen states of Germany. Covering almost
two-thirds of the country, it included both the great rural areas of
the east and the great industrial areas of the west. Thus it included
the most conservative as well as the most progressive portions of
Germany. While its influence was almost as great under the republic as
it had been under the empire, this influence was of quite a different
character, having changed from the chief bulwark of conservatism in the
earlier period to the chief area of progressivism in the later period.
This change w as made possible by the large numbers of enlightened
groups in the Rhenish areas of Prussia, but chiefly by the fact that
the so-called Weimar Coalition of Social Democrats, Center Party, and
Liberal Democrats remained unbroken in Prussia from 1918 to 1932. As a
consequence of this alliance, a Social Democrat, Otto Braun. held the
position of prime minister of Prussia for almost the whole period 1920
1932, and Prussia was the chief obstacle in the path of the Nazis and
of reaction in the critical days after 1930. As part of this movement
the Prussian Cabinet in 1930 refused to allow either Communists or
Nazis to hold municipal offices in Prussia, prohibited Prussian civil
servants from holding membership in either of these two parties, and
forbade the use of the Nazi uniform.
This
obstacle to extremism was
removed on July 20, 1932, when Hindenburg, by presidential decree based
on Article 48, appointed Papen commissioner for Prussia. Papen at once
dismissed the eight members of the Prussian parliamentary Cabinet and
granted their governmental functions to men named by himself. The
dismissed ministers were removed from their offices by the power of the
army, but at once challenged the legality of this action before the
German Supreme Court at Leipzig. By its verdict of October 25, 1932,
the court decided for the removed officials. In spite of this decision,
Hitler, after only a week in the chancellorship, was able to obtain
from Hindenburg a new decree which removed the Prussian ministers from
office once more and conferred their powers on the federal
vice-chancellor, Papen. Control of the police administration was
conferred on Hermann Goring. The Nazis already held, through Wilhelm
Frick, control of the Reich Ministry of Interior and thus of the
national police powers. Thus Hitler, by February 7th, had control of
the police powers both of the Reich and of Prussia.
Using
this advantage, the
Nazis began a twofold assault on the opposition. Goring and Frick
worked under a cloak of legality from above, while Captain Rohm in
command of the Nazi Party storm troops worked without pretense of
legality from below. All uncooperative police officials were retired,
removed, or given vacations and were replaced by Nazi substitutes,
usually Storm Troop leaders. On February 4, 1933, Hindenburg signed an
emergency decree which gave the government the right to prohibit or
control any meetings, uniforms, or newspapers. In this way most
opposition meetings and newspapers were prevented from reaching the
public.
This
attack on the opposition
from above was accompanied by a violent assault from below, carried out
by the SA. In desperate attacks in which eighteen Nazis and fifty-one
opposition were killed, all Communist, most Socialist, and many Center
Party meetings were disrupted. In spite of all this, it was evident a
week before the election that the German people were not convinced.
Accordingly, under circumstances which are still mysterious, a plot was
worked out to burn the Reichstag building and blame the Communists.
Most of the plotters were homosexuals and were able to persuade a
degenerate moron from Holland named Van der Lubbe to go with them.
After the building was set on fire, Van der Lubbe was left wandering
about in it and was arrested by the police. The government at once
arrested four Communists, including the party leader in the Reichstag
(Ernst Torgler).
The
day following the fire
(February 28, 1933) Hindenburg signed a decree suspending all civil
liberties and giving the government power to invade any personal
privacy, including the right to search private homes or confiscate
property. At once all Communist members of the Reichstag, as well as
thousands of others, were arrested, and all Communist and
Social-Democrat papers were suspended for two weeks.
The
true story of the
Reichstag fire was kept secret only with difficulty. Several persons
who knew the truth, including a Nationalist Reichstag member, Dr.
Oberfohren, were murdered in March and April to prevent their
circulating the true story. Most of the Nazis who were in on the plot
were murdered by Goring during the "blood purge" of June 30, 1934. The
four Communists who were directly charged with the crime were acquitted
by the regular German courts, although Van der Lubbe was convicted.
In
spite of these drastic
measures, the election of March 5, 1933, was a failure from the Nazi
point of view. Hitler's party received only 288 of 647 seats, or 43.9
percent of the total vote. The Nationalists obtained only 8 percent.
The Communists obtained 81 seats, a decrease of 19, but the Socialists
obtained 125, an increase of 4. The Center Party fell from 89 to 74,
and the People's Party from 11 to 2. The Nationalists stayed at 5:
seats. In the simultaneous election to the Prussian Diet, the Nazis
obtained 211 and the Nationalists 43 out of 474 seats.
The
period from the election
of March 5, 1933, to the death of Hindenburg on August :, 1934, is
generally called the Period of Coordination (Gleichschaltung).
The process was carried on, like the electoral campaign just finished,
by illegal actions from below and legalistic actions from above. From
below, on March 7th throughout Germany, the SA swept away much of the
opposition by violence, driving it into hiding. They marched to most
offices of trade unions, periodicals, and local governments, smashing
them up, expelling their occupants, and raising the swastika flag.
Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick condoned these actions by naming
Nazis as police presidents in various German states (Baden, Saxony,
Württemburg, Bavaria), including General von Epp in Bavaria. These
men then proceeded to use their police powers to seize control of the
apparatus of state government.
The
new Reichstag met on March
23rd at the Kroll Opera House. In order to secure a majority, the Nazis
excluded from the session all of the Communist and 30 Socialist
members, about 109 in all. The rest were asked to pass an "enabling
act" which would give the government for four years the right to
legislate by decree, without the need for the presidential signature,
as in Article 48, and without constitutional restrictions except in
respect to the powers of the Reichstag, the Reichsrat, and the
presidency.
Since
this law required a
two-third majority, it could have been beaten if only a small group of
the Center Party had voted against it. To be sure, Hitler made it very
clear that he was prepared to use violence against all who refused to
cooperate with him, but his power to do so on a clear-cut
constitutional issue in March 1933 was much less than it became later,
since violence from him on such a question might well have arrayed the
president and the Reichswehr against him.
In
spite of Hitler's
intimidating speech, Otto Wels of the Social Democrats rose to explain
why his party refused to support the bill. He was followed by Monsignor
Kaas of the Center Party who explained that his Catholic Group would
support it. The vote in favor of the bill was more than sufficient,
being 441-94, with the Social Democrats forming the solid minority.
Thus, this weak, timid, doctrinaire, and ignorant group redeemed
themselves by their courage after the eleventh hour had passed.
Under
this "Enabling Act" the
government issued a series of revolutionary decrees in the next few
months. The diets of all the German states, except Prussia (which had
had its own election on March 5th) were reconstituted in the
proportions of votes in the national election of March 5th, except that
the Communists were thrown out. Each party was given its quota of
members and allowed to name the individual members on a purely party
basis. A similar procedure was applied to local governments. Thus the
Nazis received a majority in each body.
A
decree of April 7th gave the
Reich government the right to name a governor of each German state.
This was a new official empowered to enforce the policies of the Reich
government even to the point of dismissing the state governments,
including the prime ministers, diets, and the hitherto irremovable
judges. This right was used in each state to make a Nazi governor and a
Nazi prime minister. In Bavaria, for example, the two were Epp and
Rohm, while in Prussia the two were Hitler and Goring. In many states
the governor was the district leader of the Nazi Party, and where he
was not, he was subject to that leader's orders. By a later law of
January 30, 1934, the diets of the states were abolished; the sovereign
powers of the states were transferred to the Reich; and the governors
were made subordinates of the Reich Ministry of the Interior.
All
the political parties
except the Nazis were abolished in May, June, and July 1933. The
Communists had been outlawed on February 28th. The Social Democrats
were enjoined from all activities on June 22nd, and were expelled from
various governing bodies on July 7th. The German State Party
(Democratic Party) and the German People's Party were dissolved on June
28th and July 4th. The Bavarian People's Party was smashed by the Storm
Troopers on June 22nd, and disbanded itself on July 4th. The Center
Party did the same on the following day. A series of pitched battles
between the SA and the Stahlhelm in April-June 1933 ended with the
absorption of the latter into the Nazi Party. The Nationalists were
smashed by violence on June 21st; Hugenberg was unable to penetrate the
SA guard around Hindenburg to protest; and on June 28th his party was
dissolved. Finally, on July 14, 1933, the Nazi Party was declared to be
the only recognized party in Germany.
The
middle classes were
coordinated and disappointed. Wholesale and retail trade associations
were consolidated into a Reich Corporation of German Trade under the
Nazi Dr. von Renteln. On July 22nd the same man became president of the
German Industrial and Trade Committee, which was a union of all the
chambers of commerce. In Germany these last had been semipublic legal
corporations.
The
breakup of the great
department stores, which had been one of the Nazi promises to the petty
bourgeoisie since Gottfried Feder's Twenty-five-Point program of 1920,
was abandoned, according to Hess's announcement of July 7th. Moreover,
liquidation of the cooperative societies, which had also been a promise
of long duration, was abandoned by an announcement of July 19th.
This last reversal resulted from the fact that most of the cooperatives
had come under Nazi control by being taken over by the Labor Front on
May 16 1933.
Labor
was coordinated without
resistance, except from the Communists. The government declared May 1st
a national holiday, and celebrated it with a speech by Hitler on the
dignity of labor before a million persons at Tempelhof. The next day
the SA seized all union buildings and offices, arrested all union
leaders, and sent most of these to concentration camps. The unions
themselves were incorporated into a Nazi German Labor Front under
Robert Ley. The new leader, in an article in the Völkischer
Beobachter,
promised employers that henceforth they could be masters in their own
houses as long as they served the nation (that is, the Nazi Party).
Work was supplied for labor by reducing the work week to forty hours
(with a corresponding wage cut), hy prohibiting aliens to work, by
enforced "labor service" for the government, by grants of loans to
married persons, by tax cuts for persons who spent money on repairs, by
construction of military automobile roads, and so forth.
Agriculture
was coordinated
only after Hugenberg left the government on June 29th and was replaced
hy Richard Darré as Reich minister of food and Prussian minister
of agriculture. The various land and peasant associations were merged
into a single association of which Darré was president, while
the various landlords' associations were united into the German Board
of Agriculture of which Darré was president also.
Religion
was coordinated in
various ways. The Evangelical Church was reorganized. When a non-Nazi,
Friedrich von Bodelschwing, was elected Reich bishop in May 1933, he
was forcibly removed from office, and the National Synod was forced to
elect a Nazi, Ludwig Müller, in his place (September 27th). At the
elections for Church assemblies in July 1933, government pressure was
so great that a majority of Nazis was chosen in each. In 1935 a
Ministry of Church Affairs under Hans Kerrl was set up with power to
issue Church ordinances having the force of law and with complete
control over Church property and funds. Prominent Protestant leaders,
like Martin Niemöller, who objected to these steps, were arrested
and sent to concentration camps.
The
Catholic Church made every
effort to cooperate with the Nazis, but soon found it was impossible.
It withdrew its condemnation of Nazism on March 28, 1933, and signed a
Concordat with von Papen on July 20th. By this agreement the state
recognized freedom of religious belief and of worship, exemption of the
clergy from certain civic duties, and the right of the Church to manage
its own affairs and to establish denominational schools. Governors of
the German states were given a right to object to nominations to the
highest clerical posts; bishops were to take an oath of loyalty, and
education was to continue to function as it had been doing.
This
agreement with the Church
began to break down almost at once. Within ten days of the signing of
the Concordat, the Nazis began to attack the Catholic Youth League and
the Catholic press. Church schools were restricted, and members of the
clergy were arrested and tried on charges of evading the monetary
foreign-exchange regulations and of immorality. The Church condemned
the efforts of Nazis like Rosenberg to replace Christianity by a
revived German paganism and such laws as that permitting sterilization
of socially objectionable persons. Rosenberg's book, The Myth
of the Twentieth Century,
was put on the Index; Catholic scholars exposed its errors in a series
of studies in 1934; and finally, on March 14, 1937, Pope Pius XI
condemned many of the tenets of Nazism in the encyclical Mit
brennender Sorge.
Attempts
to coordinate the
civil service began with the law of April 7, 1933 and continued to the
end of the regime without ever being completely successful because of
the lack of capable personnel who were loyal Nazis. "Non-Aryans" (Jews)
or persons married to "non-Aryans," politically unreliable persons, and
"Marxists" were discharged, and loyalty to Nazism was required for
appointment and promotion in the civil service.
Of
the chief elements in
German society, only the presidency, the army, the Catholic Church, and
industry were not coordinated by 1934. In addition, the bureaucracy was
only partially controlled. The first of these, the presidency, was
taken over completely in 1934 as the result of a deal with the army.
By
the spring of 1934 the
problem of the SA had become acute, since this organization was
directly challenging two members of the Quartet, the army and industry.
Industry was being challenged by the demand of the SA for the "second
revolution"—that is, for the economic reforms which would justify
the use of the word "Socialism" in the name "National Socialism." The
army was being challenged by the demand of Captain Rohm that his SA. be
incorporated into the Reichswehr with each officer holding the same
rank in the latter as he already held in the former. Since the
Reichswehr had only 300,000 men while the SA had three million, this
would have swamped the Officers' Corps. Hitler had denounced this
project on July 1, 1933, and Frick repeated this ten days later.
Nevertheless, Röhm repeated his demand on April 18, 1934, and was
echoed by Edmund Heines and Karl Ernst. In full Cabinet meeting
Minister of War General von Blomberg refused.
A
tense situation developed.
If Hindenburg died, the Reichswehr might have liquidated the Nazis and
restored the monarchy. On June 21st Hindenburg ordered Blomberg to use
the army, if necessary, to restore order in the country. This was
regarded as a threat to the SA. Accordingly, Hitler made a deal to
destroy the SA in return for a free hand to deal with the presidency
w-hen it became vacant. This was done. A meeting of SA leaders was
called by Hitler for June 30, 1934, at Bad Wiessee in Bavaria. The SS,
under Hitler's personal command, arrested the SA leaders in the middle
of the night and shot most of them at once. In Berlin, Göring did
the same to the SA leaders there. Both Hitler and Göring also
killed most of their personal enemies; the Reichstag incendiaries,
Gregor Strasser, General and Mrs. von Schleicher, all of von Papen's
close associates, Gustav von Kahr, all those who had known Hitler in
the early days of his failure, and many others. Papen escaped only by a
narrow margin. In all, several thousands were eliminated in this "blood
purge."
Two
excuses were given for
this violent action: that the murdered men were homosexuals (something
which had been known for years) and that they were members of a
conspiracy to murder Hitler. That they were in a conspiracy was quite
true, but it was by no means mature in June 1934, and it was aimed at
the army and heavy industry, and not at Hitler. In fact, Hitler had
been wavering until the last moment whether he would throw in his lot
with the "second revolution" or with the Quartet. His decision to join
the latter and exterminate the former was an event of great
significance. It irrevocably made the Nazi movement a counterrevolution
of the Right, using the party organization as an instrument for
protecting the economic status quo.
The
supporters of the "second
revolution" were driven underground, forming a "Black Front" under the
leadership of Otto Strasser. This movement was so ineffectual that the
only choice facing the average German was the choice between the
reactionary mode of life built about the surviving members of the
Quartet (army and industry) and the completely irrational nihilism of
the inner clique of the Nazi Party.
Only
as the regime approached
its end did a third possible way appear: a revived progressive and
cooperative Christian humanism which sprang from the reaction
engendered within the Quartet by the realization that Nazi nihilism was
merely the logical outcome of the Quartet's customary methods of
pursuing its customary goals. Many of the persons associated with this
new third way were destroyed by the Nazis in the systematic
destructiveness which followed the attempt to assassinate Hitler on
June 20, 1944.
In
return for Hitler's
decisive step—the destruction of the SA on June 30,
1934—the army permitted Hitler to become president following
Hindenburg's death in August. By combining the offices of president and
chancellor, Hitler obtained the president's legal right to rule by
decree, and obtained as well the supreme command of the army, a
position which he solidified by requiring a personal oath of
unconditional obedience from each soldier (Law of August 20, 1934).
From this time on, in the minds of the Reichswehr and the bureaucracy,
it was both legally and morally impossible to resist Hitler's orders.
The Rulers
and the Ruled, 1934—1945
Thus,
by August 1934, the Nazi
movement had reached its goal—the establishment of an
authoritarian state in Germany. The word used here is "authoritarian,"
for, unlike the Fascist regime in Italy, the Nazi regime was not
totalitarian. It was not totalitarian because two members of the
Quartet were not coordinated, a third member was coordinated only
incompletely and, unlike Italy or Soviet Russia, the economic system
was not ruled by the state but was subject to "self-rule." All this is
not in accord with popular opinion about the nature of the Nazi system
either at the time it was flourishing or since. Newspaper men and
journalistic writers applied the term "totalitarian" to the Nazi
system, and the name has stuck without any real analysis of the facts
as they existed. In fact, the Nazi system was not totalitarian either
in theory or in practice.
The
Nazi movement, in its
simplest analysis, was an aggregation of gangsters, neurotics,
mercenaries, psychopaths, and merely discontented, with a small
intermixture of idealists. This movement was built up by the Quartet as
a counterrevolutionary force against, first, the Weimar Republic,
internationalism, and democracy, and against, second, the dangers of
social revolution, especially Communism, engendered by the world
economic depression. This movement, once it came to power at the behest
of the Quartet, took on life and goals of its own quite different from,
and, indeed, largely inimical to, the life and goals of the Quartet. No
showdown or open conflict ever arose between the movement and the
Quartet. Instead, a modus vivendi was worked out by
which the
two chief members of the Quartet, industry and the army, obtained their
desires, while the Nazis obtained the power and privileges for which
they yearned.
The
seeds of conflict
continued to exist and even to grow between the movement and its
creators, especially because of the fact that the movement worked
continually to create a substitute industrial system and a substitute
army parallel to the old industrial system and the old Reichswehr. Here
again the threatening conflict never broke out because the Second World
War had the double result that it demonstrated the need for solidarity
in the face of the enemy, and it brought great booty and profits to
both sides—to the industrialists and Reichswehr on one hand and
to the party on the other hand.
Except
for the rise of the
party, and the profits, power, and prestige which accrued to the
leaders (but not to the ordinary members) of the party, the structure
of German society was not drastically changed after 1933. It was still
sharply divided into two parts—the rulers and the ruled. The
three chief changes were: (1) the methods and techniques by which the
rulers controlled the ruled were modified and intensified, so that law
and legal procedures practically vanished, and power (exercised through
force, economic pressures, and propaganda) became much more naked and
direct in its application; (2) the Quartet which had held real power
from 1919 to 1933 were rearranged and increased to a Quintet, such as
existed before 1914; and (3) the line between rulers and ruled was made
sharper, with fewer persons in an ambiguous position than earlier in
German history; this was made more acceptable to the ruled by creating
a new third group of non-citizens (Jews and foreigners) which could be
exploited and oppressed even by the second group of the ruled.
The
following table shows the
approximate relationships of the ruling groups in the three periods of
German history in the twentieth century:
The
Empire The
Weimar
Republic The
Third Reich
Emperor Nazi
Party (leaders only)
Army Army Industry
Landlords Bureaucracy Army
Bureaucracy Industry Bureaucracy
Industry Landlords Landlords
The
ruled groups below these
rulers have remained roughly the same. In the Third Reich they
included: (1) peasants; (2) laborers; (3) the petty bourgeoisie of
clerks, retailers, artisans, small industry, and so on; (4)
professional groups, such as doctors, druggists, teachers, engineers,
dentists, and so on. Below these was the submerged group of
"non-Aryans" and the inhabitants of occupied areas.
A
revealing light is cast on
Nazi society by examining the positions of the ruling groups. We shall
examine each of these in reverse order.
The
influence of the landlord
group in the earlier period rested on tradition rather than on power.
It was supported by a number of factors: (1) the close personal
connections of the landlords with the emperor, the army, and the
bureaucracy; (2) the peculiar voting rules in Germany which gave the
landlords undue influence in Prussia and gave the state of Prussia
undue influence in Germany; (3) the economic and social power of the
landlords, especially east of the Elbe, a power based on their ability
to bring pressure to bear on tenants and agricultural laborers in that
area.
All
these sources of power
were weakening, even under the empire. The republic and the Third Reich
merely extended a process already well advanced. The economic power of
the landlords was threatened by the agricultural crisis after 1880 and
was clearly evident in their demand for tariff protection after 1895.
The bankruptcy of the Junker estates was bound to undermine their
political influence even if the state was willing to support them with
subsidies and Osthilfe indefinitely. The departure
of the
emperor and the change in the position of the army and bureaucracy
under the republic weakened these avenues of indirect influence by the
landlords. The change in the voting regulations after 1918 and the
ending of voting after 1933, combined with the increasing absorption of
Prussia and the other Länder into a unified German
state,
reduced the political power of the landlord group. Finally, their
social influence was weakened by the migration of German farm laborers
from eastern to central and western Germany and their replacement by
Slav farm labor.
This
decrease in the power of
the landlord group continued under the Third Reich and was intensified
by the fact that this group was the one segment of the Quartet which vv
as successfully coordinated. The landlords lost most of their economic
power because the control of their economic life was not left in the
hands of the landlords as was done with industry. In both cases
economic life was controlled, chiefly by cartels and associations, but
in industry these were controlled by industrialists, while in
agriculture they were controlled by the state in close cooperation with
the party.
Prices,
production, conditions
of sale, and, in fact, every detail about agriculture was in control of
a government corporation called the Reichsnährstand
which
consisted of a complex of groups, associations, and boards. The leader
of this complex was the minister of food and agriculture, named by
Hitler. This leader appointed the subordinate leaders of all the member
organizations of the Reichsnährstand, and these, in
turn,
named their subordinates. This process was continued down to the lowest
individual, each leader naming his direct subordinates according to the
“leadership principle." Every person engaged in any activity
concerned with agriculture, food, or raw-material production, including
lumber, fishing, dairying, and grazing belonged to one or several
associations in the Reichsnährstand. The
associations were
organized both on a territorial and on a functional basis. On a
functional basis they were organized in both vertical and horizontal
associations. On a territorial basis were twenty regional
"peasant-ships" (Landesbauernschaften) subdivided
into 515 local "peasant-ships" (Kreisbauernschaften).
On a horizontal basis were associations of persons in the same
activity, such as grinding flour, churning butter, growing grain, and
so on. On a vertical basis were associations of all persons concerned
with the production and processing of any single commodity, such as
grain or milk. These organizations, all formed on the "leadership
principle," were chiefly concerned with prices and production quotas.
These were controlled by the state, but prices were set at a level
sufficient to give a profit to most participants, and quotas were based
on assessments estimated by the farmers themselves.
While
the landlords lost power
in this way, they received economic advantages. As befitted a
counterrevolutionary movement, the Nazis increased the wealth and
privileges of the landlords. The report on the Osthilfe
scandal, which had been made for Schleicher in 1932, was permanently
suppressed. The autarky program gave them a stable market for their
products, shielding them from the vicissitudes which they had suffered
under liberalism with its unstable markets and fluctuating prices. The
prices fixed under Nazism were not high but were adequate, especially
in combination with other advantages. By 1937, prices paid to farmers
were 23 percent more than in 1933 although still 28 percent below those
of 1925. Larger farms which used hired labor were aided by the
prevention of unions, strikes, and rising wages. Labor forces were
increased by using the labor services of boys and girls in the Nazi
Youth Movement and Labor Service. Payments for interest and taxes were
both reduced, the former from 950 million marks in 1929-1930 to 630
million marks in 1935-1936, and the latter from 740 million to 460
million marks in the same six years. Farmers were exempt completely
from unemployment-insurance contributions which amounted to 19 million
marks in 1932-1933. The constant threat of breaking up the bankrupt
great estates was removed whether it arose from the state or from
private creditors. All farms of over family size were made secure in
possession of their owner's family, with no possibility of alienation,
by increasing the use of entail on great estates and by the Hereditary
Farms Act for lesser units.
These
benefits were greater
for larger units than for smaller ones, and greatest for the large
estates. While small farms (5 to 50 hectares), according to Max Sering,
made a net return of 9 marks a hectare in 1925, large ones (over 100
hectares) lost 18 marks a hectare. In 1934 the corresponding figures
were 28 and 53, a gain of 19 marks per hectare for small units and of
71 marks per hectare for large units. As a result of this growth in
profitability of large units, the concentration of ownership of land in
Germany was increased, thus reversing a trend. Both the number and the
average size of large units increased.
Thus
the landlords won great
privileges and rewards in the Third Reich, but at the cost of a drastic
reduction in their power. They were coordinated, like the rest of
society outside the ruling groups, with the result that they became the
least important of these groups.
The
bureaucracy was not
completely coordinated, but it found its power greatly reduced. The
civil service was not, as we have indicated, purged of non-Nazis,
although Jews and obvious anti-Nazis were generally retired. Only in
the Ministry of Economics, perhaps because of the complete
reorganization of the ministry, was there any extensive change at
first. But this change did not bring in party members; it brought in
men from private business. Outside the Ministry of Economics the chief
changes were the ministers themselves and their secretaries of state.
The newly created ministries, of course, had new men, but, except on
the lowest levels, these were not chosen because they were party
members. The old division of the bureaucracy into two classes (academic
and non-academic), with the upper open only to those who passed an
academic examination, continued. Only in the lowest, non-skilled ranks
did party members overwhelm the service.
By
1939, of l.5 million civil
servants 28.2 percent were party members, 7.2 percent belonged to the
SA, and 1.1 percent belonged to the SS. The act of 1933, which expelled
non-Ayrans and political unreliables, affected only 1.1 percent (or 25
out of 2,339) of the top civil servants. But new recruits were
overwhelmingly party members so that, in time, the bureaucracy would
have become almost completely Nazi. The Civil Service Act of 1937 did
not require party membership, but the candidate had to be loyal to the
Nazi idea. In practice, 99 percent of those appointed to the grade of
assessor (the lowest academic rank) were party members from 1933 to
1936. However, a law of December 28, 1939 stated, what had always been
understood, that in his civil service work a party member was not
subject to party orders but only to the orders of the civil service
superior. Here again the lower ranks were more subject to party control
by means of the office "party cell" which permitted party members to
accomplish their ends by terror. This opens up an important, if
nonofficial, aspect of this subject.
A
chief change was that where
formerly the bureaucracy governed by rational, known rules, under the
Nazis it increasingly governed by irrational and even unknown rules.
Neither earlier nor later were these rules made by the bureaucracy
itself, and to some extent the later rules, because of the
bureaucracy's well-known anti-democratic proclivities, may have been
more acceptable to the bureaucracy. More important was the influence of
party terrorism, through the SA, the SS, and the secret police
(Gestapo). Even more important was the growth, outside of the
bureaucracy, of a party organization which countermanded and evaded the
decisions and actions of the regular bureaucracy. The regular police
were circumvented by the party police; the regular avenues of justice
were bypassed by the party courts; the regular prisons were eclipsed by
the party's concentration camps. As a result, Torgler, acquitted by the
regular courts of the charge that he conspired to burn the Reichstag,
was immediately thrown into a concentration camp by the secret police;
and Niemöller, having served a brief term for violation of the
religious regulations, was taken from a regular prison to a
concentration camp.
The
Reichswehr Officers' Corps
was not coordinated, hut found itself more subject to the Nazis than it
ever was to the Weimar Republic. The republic could never have murdered
generals as Hitler did in 1934. This weakening of the power of the
army, however, was not in relationship to the party as much as it was
in relationship to the state. Previously, the army very largely
controlled the State; under the Third Reich the state controlled the
army; but the party did not control the army and, for failure to do so,
built up its own army (SS). There was a statutory provision which made
it illegal for members of the armed services to be simultaneously
members of the party. This incompatibility was revoked in the autumn of
1944. However, the army was quite completely subjected to Hitler as
chief of the state although not as Fuhrer of the Nazi Party. The army
had always been subordinated to the chief of the state. When Hitler
obtained this position (with army consent) at the death of Hindenburg
on August 2, 1934, he strengthened his position by requiring army
officers to take their oath of loyalty to himself personally, and not
merely to the German Fatherland as had been done previously. All this
was possible because the army, although not coordinated, generally
approved of what the Nazis were doing and, where they occasionally
disagreed, did so only for tactical reasons. The relations between the
two were well stated by Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, Reich
minister of war and commander in chief of the armed forces until
February, 1939:.
"Before
1938-1939, the German
generals were not opposed to Hitler. There was no reason to oppose
Hitler since he produced the results which they desired. After this
time some generals began to condemn his methods and lost confidence in
the power of his judgment. However, they failed as a group to take any
definite stand against him, although a few of them tried to do so and,
as a result, had to pay for this with their lives or their positions."
To this statement it is necessary only to add that the German Officers'
Corps maintained its autonomous condition and its control of the army
by the destruction of its chief rival, the SA, on June 30, 1934. For
this it paid on August 2, 1934. After that, it was too late for it to
oppose the movement, even if it had wished to do so.
The
position of the
industrialists in Nazi society w as complex and very important. In
general, business had an extraordinary position. In the first place, it
was the only one of the Quartet which drastically improved its position
in the Third Reich. In the second place, it was the only one of the
Quartet which was not coordinated significantly and in which the
"leadership principle" was not applied. Instead, industry was left free
of government and party control except in the widest terms and except
for the exigencies of war, and was subjected instead to a pattern of
self-regulation built up, not on the "leadership principle," but on a
system where power was proportional to the size of the enterprise.
In
these strange exceptions we
can find one of the central principles of the Nazi system. It is a
principle which is often missed. We have been told that Germany had a
corporate state or a totalitarian state. Neither was true. There was no
real corporate organization (even fraudulent, as in Italy and Austria),
and such an organization, much discussed before and after 1933, was
quickly dropped by 1935. The term "totalitarian" cannot be applied to
the German system of self-regulation, although it could be applied to
the Soviet system.
The
Nazi system was
dictatorial capitalism—that is, a society organized so that
everything was subject to the benefit of capitalism; everything, that
is, compatible with two limiting factors: (a) that
the Nazi Party, which was not capitalist, was in control of the state,
and (b)
that war, which is not capitalist, could force curtailment of
capitalist benefits (in the short run at least). In this judgment we
must define our terms accurately. We define capitalism as "a system of
economics in which production is based on profit for those who control
the capital." In this definition one point must be noted: the
expression "for those who control the capital" does not necessarily
mean the owners. In modern economic conditions large-scale enterprise
with widely dispersed stock-ownership has made management more
important.... Accordingly, profits are not the same as dividends, and,
in fact, dividends become objectionable to management, since they take
profits out of its control.
The
traditional capitalist
system was a profit system. In its pursuit of profits it was not
primarily concerned with production, consumption, prosperity, high
employment, national welfare, or anything else. As a result, its
concentration on profits eventually served to injure profits.
This
development got the whole
society into such a mess that enemies of the profit system began to
rise up on all sides. Fascism was the counterattack of the profit
system against these enemies. This counterattack was conducted in such
a violent fashion that the whole appearance of society was changed,
although, in the short run, the real structure was not greatly
modified. In the long run Fascism threatened even the profit system,
because the defenders of that system, businessmen rather than
politicians, turned over the control of the state to a party of
gangsters and lunatics who in the long run might turn to attack
businessmen themselves.
In
the short run the Nazi
movement achieved the aim of its creators. In order to secure profits
it sought to avert six possible dangers to the profit system. These
dangers were (1) from the state itself, (2) from organized labor; (3)
from competition; (4) from depression; (5) from business losses; and
(6) from alternative forms of economic production organized on
nonprofit bases. These six all merged into one great danger, the danger
from any social system in which production was organized on any basis
other than profit. The fear of the owners and managers of the profit
system for any system organized on any other basis became almost
psychopathic.
The
danger to the profit
system from the state has always existed because the state is not
essentially organized on a profit basis. In Germany this danger from
the state was averted by the industrialists taking over the state, not
directly, but through an agent, the Nazi Party. Hitler indicated his
willingness to act as such an agent in various ways: by reassurances,
such as his Dusseldorf speech of 1932; by accepting, as a party leader
and his chief economic adviser, a representative of heavy industry
(Walter Funk) on the very day (December 31, 1931) on which that
representative joined the party at the behest of the industrialists; by
the purge of those who wanted the "second revolution" or a corporative
or totalitarian state (June 30, 1934).
That
the industrialists' faith
in Hitler on this account was not misplaced was soon demonstrated. As
Gustav Krupp, the armaments manufacturer, writing to Hitler as the
official representative of the Reich Association of German Industry,
put it on April :5, 1933, "The turn of political events is in line with
the wishes which I myself and the Board of Directors have cherished for
a long time." This was true. The "second revolution" was publicly
rejected by Hitler as early as July 1933, and many of its supporters
sent to concentration camps, a development which reached its climax in
the "blood purge" a year later. The radical Otto Wagener was replaced
as chief economic adviser to the Nazi Party by a manufacturer, Wilhelm
Keppler. The efforts to coordinate industry were summarily stopped.
Many of the economic activities which had come under state control were
"re-privatized." The United Steel Works, which the government had
purchased from Ferdinand Flick in 1932, as well as three of the largest
banks in Germany, which had been taken over during the crisis of 1931,
were restored to private ownership at a loss to the government.
Reinmetal-Borsig, one of the greatest corporations in heavy industry,
was sold to the Hermann Göring Works. Many other important firms
were sold to private investors. At the same time the property in
industrial firms still held by the state was shifted from public
control to joint public-private control by being subjected to a mixed
board of directors. Finally, municipal enterprise was curtailed; its
profits were taxed for the first time in 1935, and the law permitting
municipal electric-power plants was revoked in the same year.
The
danger from labor was not
nearly so great as might seem at first glance. It was not labor itself
which was dangerous, because labor itself did not come directly and
immediately in conflict with the profit system; rather it was with
labor getting the wrong ideas, especially Marxist ideas which did seek
to put the laborer directly in conflict with the profit system and with
private ownership. As a result, the Nazi system sought to control the
ideas and the organization of labor, and was quite as eager to control
his free time and leisure activities as it was to control his working
arrangements. For this reason it was not sufficient merely to smash the
existing labor organizations. This would have left labor free and
uncontrolled and able to pick up any kind of ideas. Nazism, therefore,
did not try to destroy these organizations but to take them over. All
the old unions were dissolved into the German Labor Front. This gave an
amorphous body of 25 million in which the individual was lost. This
Labor Front was a party organization, and its finances were under
control of the party treasurer, Franz X. Schwarz.
The
Labor Front soon lost all
of its economic activities, chiefly to the Ministry of Economics. An
elaborate facade of fraudulent organizations which either never existed
or never functioned was built up about the Labor Front. They included
national and regional chambers of labor and a Federal Labor and
Economic Council. In fact, the Labor Front had no economic or political
functions and had nothing to do with wages or labor conditions. Its
chief functions were (1) to propagandize; (2) to absorb the workers'
leisure time, especially by the "Strength Through Joy" organization, (
3 ) te tax workers for the party's profit; (4) to provide jobs for
reliable party members within the Labor Front itself; (5) to disrupt
working-class solidarity.
This
facade was painted with
an elaborate ideology based on the idea that the factory or enterprise
was a community in which leader and followers cooperated. The Charter
of Labor of January 20, 1934, which established this, said, `'The
leader of the plant decides against the followers in all matters
pertaining to the plant in so far as they are regulated by statute." A
pretense was made that these regulations merely applied the "leadership
principle" to enterprise. It did no such thing. Under the "leadership
principle" the leader was appointed from above. In business life the
existing owner or manager became, ipso facto, leader. Under this system
there were no collective agreements, no way in which any group defended
the worker in the face of the great power of the employer. One of the
chief instruments of duress w as the "workbook" carried by the worker,
which had to be signed by the employer on entering or leaving any job.
If the employer refused to sign, the worker could get no other job.
Wage
scales and conditions of
labor, previously established by collective agreements, were made by a
state employee, the labor trustee, created May 19, 1933. Under this
control there was a steady downward reduction of working conditions,
the chief change being from a period wage to a piecework payment. All
overtime, holiday, night, and Sunday rates were abolished. The labor
trustee was ordered to set maximum wage rates in June 1938, and a rigid
ceiling was set in October 1939.
In
return for this
exploitation of labor, enforced by the terroristic activity of the
"party cell' in each plant, the worker received certain compensations
of which the chief was the fact that he was no longer threatened with
the danger of mass unemployment. Employment figures for Germany were
17.8 million persons in 1929, only 12.7 million in 1932, and 20 million
by 1939. This increased economic activity went to non-consumers' goods
rather than consumers' goods, as can be seen from the following indices
of production:
1928 1929 1932 1938
Production 100 100.9 58.7 124.7
a.
Capital
goods 100 103.2 45.7 135.9
b.
Consumers’
goods 100 98.5 78.1 107.8
Business
hates competition. Such competition might appear in various forms: (a)
prices; (b) for raw materials; (c) for markets; (d)
potential competition (creation of new enterprises in the same
activity); (c)
for labor. All these make planning difficult, and jeopardize profits.
Businessmen prefer to get together with competitors so that they can
cooperate to exploit consumers to the benefit of profits instead of
competing with each other to the injury of profits. In Germany this was
done by three kinds of arrangements: (1) cartels (Kartelle),
(2) trade associations (Fackverbände), and (3)
employers' associations (Spitzen-verbände).
The cartels regulated prices, production, and markets. The trade
associations were political groups organized as chambers of commerce or
agriculture. The employers' associations sought to control labor..
All
these existed long before
Hitler came to power, an event that had relatively little influence on
the cartels, but considerable influence on the other two. The economic
power of cartels, left in the hands of businessmen, was greatly
extended; the employers' associations were coordinated, subjected to
party control through the establishment of the "leadership principle,"
and merged into the Labor Front, but had little to do, as all relations
with labor (wages, hours, working conditions) were controlled by the
state (through the Ministry of Economics and the labor trustee) and
enforced by the party. The trade associations were also coordinated and
subject to the "leadership principle," being organized into an
elaborate hierarchy of chambers of economics, commerce, and industry,
whose leaders were ultimately named by the Ministry of Economics.
All
this was to the taste of
businessmen. While they, in theory, lost control of the three types of
organizations, in fact they got what they wanted in all three. We have
shown that the employers' associations were coordinated. Yet employers
got the labor, wage, and working conditions they wanted, and abolished
labor unions and collective bargaining, which had been their chief
ambition in this field. In the second field (trade associations)
activities were largely reduced to social and propaganda actions, but
the leaders, even under the "leadership principle," continued to be
prominent businessmen. Of 173 leaders throughout Germany, 9 were civil
servants, only 21 were party members, 108 were businessmen, and the
status of the rest is unknown. Of 17 leaders in provincial economic
chambers, all were businessmen, of whom 14 were party members. In the
third field, the activities of cartels were so extended that almost all
forms of market competition were ended, and these activities were
controlled by the biggest enterprises. The Nazis permitted the cartels
to destroy all competition by forcing all business into cartels and
giving these into the control of the biggest businessmen. At the same
time it did all it could to benefit big business, to force mergers, and
to destroy smaller businesses. A few examples of this process will
suffice.
A
law of July 15, 1933, gave
the minister of economics the right to make certain cartels compulsory,
to regulate capacity of enterprises, and prohibit the creation of new
enterprises. Hundreds of decrees were issued under this law. On the
same day, the cartel statute of 1923 which prevented cartels from using
boycotts against nonmembers was amended to permit this practice. As a
result, cartels were able to prohibit new retail outlets, and
frequently refused to supply wholesalers or retailers unless they did
more than a minimum volume of business or had more than a minimum
amount of capital. These actions were taken, for example, by the radio
and the cigarette cartels.
Cartels
were controlled by big
business, since voting power within the cartel was based on output or
number of employees. Concentration of enterprise was increased by
various expedients, such as granting public contracts only to large
enterprises or by "Aryanization" (which forced Jews to sell out to
established firms). As a result, on May 7, 1938, the Ministry of
Economics reported that 90,448 out of 600,000 one-man firms had been
closed in two years. The Corporation Law of 1937 facilitated mergers,
refused to permit new corporations of below 500,000 marks capital,
ordered all new shares to be issued at a par value of at least 1,000
marks, and ordered the dissolution of all corporations of less than
100,000 marks capital. By this last provision 20 percent of all
corporations with 0.3 percent of all corporate capital were condemned.
At the same time share-owners lost most of their rights against the
board of directors, and on the board the power of the chairman was
greatly extended. As an example of a change, the board could refuse
information to stockholders on flimsy excuses.
The
control of raw materials,
which was lacking under the Weimar Republic, was entrusted to the
functional trade associations. After August 18, 1939, priority numbers,
based on the decisions of the trade associations, were issued by the Reichstellen
(subordinate offices of the Ministry of Economics). In some critical
cases subordinate offices of the Reichstellen were
set up as public offices to allot raw materials, but in each case these
were only existing business organizations with a new name. In some
cases, such as coal and paper, they were nothing but the existing
cartels.
In
this way competition of the
old kind was largely eliminated, and that, not by the state but by
industrial self-regulation, and not at the expense of profits, but to
the benefit of profits, especially of those enterprises which had
supported the Nazis—large units in heavy industry.
The
threat to industry from
depression was eliminated. This can be seen from the following figures:
1929 1932 1938
National income,
1925-1934
prices
billions -
RM 70.0 52.0 84.0
Per
capita incomes, 1925-1934 prices -
RM 1,089.0 998.0 1,226.0
Percentage of
national incomes:
to
industry 21.0% 17.4% 26.6%
to
workers 68.8% 77.6% 63.1%
to
others 10.2% 5.0% 10.3%
Number
of corporate
bankruptcies 116 134 7
Profit ratios of
corporations
(heavy
industry) 4.06% -6.94% 6.44%
In
the period after 1933 the
threat to industry from forms of production based on a nonprofit
organization of business largely vanished. Such threats could come from
government ownership, from cooperatives, or from syndicalism. The last
was destroyed by the destruction of the labor unions. The cooperatives
were coordinated by being subjected "irrevocably and unconditionally to
the command and administrative authority of the leader of the German
Labor Front, Dr. Robert Ley," on May 13, 1933. The threat from public
ownership was eliminated under Hitler, as we have indicated.
It
would seem, from these
facts, that industry was riding the crest of the wave under Nazism.
This is quite true. But industry had to share this crest with the party
and the army.... Party participation in business activities was not the
threat to industry which it might appear to be at first glance. These
participations were the efforts of the party to secure an independent
economic foundation, and were largely built up of unprofitable
activities, or non-Aryan, non-German, or labor-union activities, and
were not constructed at the expense of "legitimate" German industry.
The Hermann Göring Works arose from government efforts to utilize
low-grade iron ore in Brunswick. To this was added various other
enterprises: those already in government control (which were thus
shifted from a socialized to a profit-seeking basis), those taken from
newly annexed areas, and those confiscated from Thyssen when he became
a traitor. The Gustloff Works, in complete party control, were made up
of non-Aryan properties. The Labor Front, with sixty-five corporations
in 1938, was an improvement over the previous situation, since all,
except the People's Auto enterprise (Volkswagen), were taken from labor
unions. Other party activities were in publishing, a field of little
concern to big industry, and largely non-Aryan previously.
...
Industry wanted to prepare
for war, since it was profitable.... [I]ndustry was not ruling Germany
directly, but was ruling through an agent. It was not government of,
by, and for industry, but government of and by the party and for
industry. The interests and desires of these two were not identical.
The party was largely paranoid, racist, violently nationalistic, and
really believed its own propaganda about Germany's imperial mission
through "blood and soil." Industry wanted re-armaments and an
aggressive foreign policy to support these, not in order to carry out a
paranoid policy but because this was the only kind of program they
could see which would combine full employment of labor and equipment
with profits. In the period 1936-1939 the policies of "rearmament for
war" and "rearmament for profits" ran parallel courses. From 1939 on
they ran parallel only because the two groups shared the booty of
conquered areas and were divergent because of the danger of defeat.
This danger was regarded as a necessary risk in pursuit of world
conquest by the party; it was regarded as an unnecessary risk in
pursuit of profits by industry.
This
brings us to the new
ruling group, the party. The party was a ruling group only if we
restrict the meaning of the term "party" to the relatively small group
(a few thousand) of party leaders. The four million party members were
not part of the ruling group, but merely a mass assembled to get the
leaders in control of the state, but annoying and even dangerous once
this was done. Accordingly, the period after 1933 saw a double action,
a steady growth of power and influence for the Reichsleiter
in
respect to the ruled groups, the Quartet, and the ordinary members of
the party itself, and, combined with this, a steady decrease in the
influence of the party as a whole in respect to the state. In
other words, the leaders controlled the state and the state controlled
the party.
At
the head of the party was the Führer; then came about twoscore Reichsleiter;
below these was the party hierarchy,
organized by dividing Germany into 4 districts (Gaue)
each under a Gauleiter; each district was
subdivided into circles (Kreise) of which there were
808, each under a Kreisleiter; each Kreis
was divided into chapters (Orts-gruppen),
each under an Ortsgruppenleiter; these chapters
were divided into cells (Zellen) and subdivided into
blocks under Zellenleiter and Blockleiter.
The Blockleiter had to
supervise and spy on 40 to 60 families; the Zellenleiter had
to supervise 4 to 8 blocks (200 to 400 families); and tie Ortsgruppenleiter
had to supervise a town or district of up
to 1,500 families through his 4 to 6 Zellenleiter.
This
party organization became
in time a standing threat to the position of the industrialists. The
threat became more direct after the outbreak of war in 1939, although,
as we have indicated, the issue was suspended for the sake of sharing
the booty and for the sake of solidarity in the face of the enemy. The
three ruling groups, party, army, and industrialists, remained in
precarious balance although secretly struggling for supremacy in the
whole period 1934-1945. [Actually the industrialists were secretly in
control of Hitler, the party and army.] In general, there was a slow
extension of party superiority, although the party was never able to
free itself from dependence on the army and business because of their
technical competence.
The
army was brought partly
under party control in 1934 when Hitler became president and obtained
the oath of allegiance; this control was extended in 1938 when Hitler
became commander in chief. This resulted in the creation of centers of
intrigue within the Officers' Corps, but this intrigue, although it
penetrated to the highest military level, never succeeded in doing more
than wound Hitler once out of a dozen efforts to assassinate him. The
power of the army was steadily subjected to Hitler. The old
officers were removed from control of the fighting troops after their
failure in Russia in December 1941, and by 1945 the Officers' Corps had
been so disrupted from within that the army was being guided to defeat
after defeat by nothing more tangible than Hitler's "intuition"
in spite of the fact that most army officers objected to subjecting
themselves and Germany to the jeopardies of such an unpredictable and
unproductive authority.
Business
was in a somewhat
similar but less extreme position. At first, unity of outlook seemed
assured, largely because Hitler's mind was able to adopt the colors of
an industrialist's mind whenever he made a speech to businessmen. By
1937 businessmen were convinced that armaments were productive, and by
1939 ... had even decided that war would he profitable. But
once
the war began, the urgent need for victory subjected industry [smaller
industries, not large industries] to controls which were hardly
compatible with the vision of industrial self-government which Hitler
had adopted from business. The Four-Year Plan, created as early as
1936, became the entering wedge of outside control. After war began the
new Ministry of Munitions under the control of Fritz Todt and Albert
Speer (who were Nazis but not businessmen) began to dominate economic
life.
Outside
its rather specialized
area, the organization of the Four-Year Plan, almost completely Nazi,
was transformed into a General Economic Council in 1939, and the whole
range of economic life was, in 1943, subjected to four Nazis
forming the Inner Defense Council. Industry accepted this situation
because profits were still protected, promises of material advantages
remained bright for years, and the hope did not die that these controls
were no more than temporary wartime measures.
Thus
the precarious balance
of power between party, army, and industry, followed in a secondary
role by bureaucracy and landlords, drove themselves and the German
people to a catastrophe so gigantic that it threatened for a while to
destroy completely all the established institutions and relationships
of German society.
Part Ten—Britain: the Background to
Appeasement: 1900-1939
Chapter
29—The Social and Constitutional Background
In
the course of the twentieth
century Britain experienced a revolution as profound, and considerably
more constructive, than those in Russia or Germany. The magnitude of
this revolution cannot be judged by the average American because
Britain has been, to most Americans, one of the less familiar countries
of Europe. This condition is not based on ignorance so much as on
misconceptions. Such misconceptions seem to arise from the belief that
the English, speaking a similar language, must have similar ideas.
These misconceptions are as prevalent among the better-educated classes
of Americans as in less well-informed circles, and, as a result, errors
and ignorance about Britain are widespread, even in the better books on
the subject. In this section, we shall emphasize the ways in which
Britain is different from the United States, especially in its
constitution and its social structure.
From
this political point of
view, the greatest difference between Britain and the United States
rests in the fact that the former has no constitution. This is not
generally recognized. Instead, the statement is usually made that
Britain has an unwritten constitution based on customs and conventions.
Such a statement seriously misrepresents the facts. The term
`'constitution" refers to a body of ruses concerned with the structure
and functioning of a government, and it clearly implies that this body
of rules is superior in its force and is formed by a different process
than ordinary statute law. In Britain this is not so. The so-called
"constitutional law" of England consists either of statutes which
differ in no way (either in method of creation or force) from ordinary
statutes or it consists of customs and conventions which are inferior
in force to statutes and which must yield to any statute.
The
major practices of the
"constitution" of Britain are based on convention rather than on law.
The distinction between the two reveals at once the inferiority of the
former to the latter. "Laws" (based on statutes and judicial decisions)
are enforceable in courts, while "conventions" (based on past practices
regarded as proper) are not enforceable in any legal way. The
precedents of the British system of government are generally in the
nature of conventions which cover the most important parts of the
system: the Cabinet and the political parties, the monarchy, the two
Houses of Parliament, the relationships between these, and the internal
discipline and conduct of all five of these agencies.
The
conventions of the system
have been highly praised, and described as binding on men's actions.
They are largely praiseworthy, but their binding character is much
overrated. Certainly they are not sufficiently binding to deserve the
name of constitution. This is not to say that a constitution cannot be
unwritten. It is perfectly possible to have an unwritten constitution,
but no constitution exists unless its unwritten practices are fairly
clearly envisaged and are more binding than ordinary law. In Britain
neither of these is true. There is no agreement even on fairly
clear-cut issues. For example, every textbook asserts that the monarchy
no longer has the power to veto legislation because that power has not
been used since the reign of Queen Anne. Yet three of the four great
authorities on constitutional law in the twentieth century (Sir William
Anson, A. V. Dicey, and Arthur Berriedale Keith) were inclined to
believe that the royal veto still existed.
The
customs of the
constitution are admittedly less binding than law; they are not
enforceable in the courts; they are not clearly stated anywhere and,
accordingly, their nature, binding or not, is left largely to the
interpretation of the actor himself. Since so many of the relationships
which are covered by conventions are based on precedents which are
secret (such as relationships between monarchy and Cabinet, between
Cabinet and political parties, between Cabinet and civil service, and
all the relationships within the Cabinet) and since, in many cases, the
secrecy of these precedents is protected by law under the Official
Secrets Act, the binding nature of the conventions has become steadily
weaker. Moreover, many of the so-called conventions which have been
pointed out by writers on the subject were never true, but were
inventions of the writers themselves. Among these was the convention
that the monarch was impartial—a convention which accorded not at
all with the conduct of Queen Victoria in whose reign the rule was
explicitly stated by Walter Bagehot.
Another
convention which
appeared in textbooks for years was to the effect that Cabinets are
overthrown by adverse votes in Parliament. In fact, there have been in
the last two generations scores of cases where the Cabinet's desires
met with an adverse vote, yet no Cabinet has resigned as a result of
such a vote in over sixty years. As early as 1853 the Coalition
government was defeated in Commons three times in one week, while as
late as 1924 the Labour government was defeated ten times in seven
months. It is seriously stated in many books that the Cabinet is
responsible to the House of Commons, and controlled by it. This control
is supposed to be exercised by the voting of the members of the
Parliament with the understanding that the government will resign on an
adverse vote and can be compelled to do so by the House of Commons'
control over supply. This whole interpretation of the British system of
government had little relationship to reality in the nineteenth century
and has almost none in the twentieth century. In truth, the Cabinet is
not controlled by the Commons, but the reverse.
As
W. I. Jennings says in more than one place in his book Cabinet
Government,
"It is the Government that controls the House of Commons." This control
is exercised through the Cabinet's control of the political party
machinery. This power over the party machinery is exercised through
control of party funds and above all by control of nominations to
constituencies. The fact that there are no primary elections in Britain
and that party candidates are named by the inner clique of the party is
of tremendous importance and is the key to the control which the inner
clique exercises over the House of Commons, yet it is rarely mentioned
in books on the English political system.
In
the United States the
political parties are very decentralized, with all power flowing from
the local districts inward to the central committee. Any man who wins
the party nomination in a local primary and in the election can become
a party leader, In Britain the situation is entirely different. The
party control is almost completely centralized in the hands of a
largely self-perpetuating inner clique, and this clique, because of the
lack of primary elections, has power of approval over all candidates
and can control party discipline by its ability to give the better
constituencies to the more docile party members. The statement that the
Commons controls the Cabinet, through its control over supply, is not
valid, because the Cabinet, if it has a majority in Parliament, can
force that majority, by using the party discipline, to pass a supply
bill exactly as it forces it to pass other bills. This statement that
control of supply provides control of the government was never used to
justify the House of Lords' control over the Cabinet, although the
Lords could refuse supply as well as the Commons could until 1911.
Another
convention, generally
stated in most emphatic terms, is concerned with the impartiality of
the Speaker of the House of Commons. The validity of this convention
can be judged by reading Hansard for 1939 and observing the way in
which the Speaker protected the members of the government from adverse
questioning. Such questioning of members of the government by the
opposition in Parliament has frequently been pointed out as one of the
guarantees of free government in Britain. In practice, it has become a
guarantee of little value. The government can refuse to answer any
question on the grounds of "public interest." To this decision there is
no appeal. In addition, when questions are not refused, they are
frequently answered in an evasive fashion which provides no
enlightenment whatever. This was the regular procedure in answering
questions on foreign policy in the period 1935-1940. In that period,
questions were even answered by outright falsehoods without any
possible redress available to the questioners.
Violation
and distortion of
the "conventions of the constitution" have steadily increased in the
twentieth century. In 1921 a convention of over five hundred years'
duration and another of over one hundred years' duration were set aside
without a murmur. The former provided that the Convocations of the
Church of England be simultaneous with the sessions of Parliament. The
latter provided that the Royal Address be approved in council. Even
more serious were the distortions of conventions. In 1931 the
convention that the leader of the opposition be asked to form a
government when the Cabinet resigns was seriously modified. In 1935 the
rule regarding Cabinet solidarity was made meaningless. In 1937 the
Conservative government even violated a constitutional convention with
impunity by having George VI take the coronation oath in a form
different from that provided by law.
This
process of the weakening
and dissolution of the so-called "constitution" went so far in the
twentieth century that, by 1932, Sir Austen Chamberlain and Stanley
(Lord) Baldwin were agreed that " 'unconstitutional' is a term applied
in politics to the other fellow who does something that you do not
like." This statement is too sweeping by far. A more accurate
estimation of the situation would, perhaps, be worded thus:
"'Unconstitutional' is any action likely to lead to public disorder in
the immediate future or likely to affect adversely the government's
chances at the polls in any future election."
The
kind of act which could
lead to such a result would be, in the first place, any open act of
repression. More important, it would be, in the second place, any open
act of "unfairness." This idea of "unfairness," or, on its positive
side, "fair play," is a concept which is very largely Anglo-Saxon and
which is largely based on the class structure of England as it existed
up to the early twentieth century. This class structure was clearly
envisioned in the minds of Englishmen and was so completely accepted
that it was assumed without need to be explicitly stated. In this
structure, Britain was regarded as divided into two groups the
"classes" and the "masses." The "classes" were the ones who had
leisure. This meant that they had property and income. On this basis,
they did not need to work for a living; they obtained an education in a
separate and expensive system; they married within their own class;
they had a distinctive accent; and, above all, they had a distinctive
attitude. This attitude was based on the training provided in the
special educational system of the "classes." It might be summed up in
the statement that "methods are more important than goals" except that
this group regarded the methods and manners in which they acted as
goals or closely related to goals.
This
educational system was
based on three great negatives, not easily understood by Americans.
These were (a) education must not be vocational—that
is, aimed at assisting one to make living; (b)
education is not aimed directly at creating or training the
intelligence; and (c)
education is not aimed at finding the "Truth." On its positive side,
the system of education of the "classes" displayed its real nature on
the school level rather than on the university level. It aimed at
developing a moral outlook, a respect for traditions, qualities of
leadership and cooperation, and above all, perhaps, that ability for
cooperation in competition summed up in the English idea of "sport" and
"playing the game." Because of the restricted numbers of the upper
class in Britain, these attitudes applied chiefly to one another, and
did not necessarily apply to foreigners or even to the masses. They
applied to people who "belonged," and not to all human beings.
The
functioning of the British
parliamentary system depended to a very great extent on the possession
by the members of Parliament of this attitude. Until the end of the
nineteenth century, most members of Parliament, coming from the same
class background, had this attitude. Since then, it has been lost to a
considerable extent, in the Conservative Party by the grow-in"
influence of businessmen and the declining influence of the older
aristocracy, and in the Labour Party by the fact that the majority of
its members were never subjected to the formative influences,
especially educational, which created this attitude. The loss of this
attitude, however, has not been so rapid as one might expect because,
in the first place, plutocracy in England has always been closer to
aristocracy than in other countries, there being no sharp divisions
between the two, with the result that the aristocracy of today is
merely the plutocracy of yesterday, admission from the latter group to
the former being generally accomplished in one generation through the
financial ability of the first generation of wealth to send its
children to the select schools of the aristocrats. This process is so
general that the number of real aristocrats in Britain is very small,
although the number of nominal aristocrats is quite large. This can be
observed in the fact that in 1938 more than half of the peerage had
been created since 1906, the overwhelming majority for no other reason
than recognition of their ability to acquire a fortune. These new peers
have aped the older aristocrats, and this has had the effect of keeping
the attitudes which allow the constitution to function alive, although
it must be confessed that the new businessmen leaders of the
Conservative Party (like Baldwin or Chamberlain) displayed a more
complete grasp of the forms than of the substance of the old
aristocratic attitude.
Within
the Labour Party, the
majority of whose members have had no opportunity to acquire the
attitude necessary to allow the proper functioning of the
constitutional system, the problem has been alleviated to a
considerable extent by the fact that the members of that party who are
of working-class origin have given very wide influence to the small
group of party members who were of upper-class origin. The
working-class members of the Labour Party have proved very susceptible
to what is called the "aristocratic embrace." That is, they have shown
a deference to the points of view and above all to the manners and
position of the upper classes, and have done so to a degree which would
be impossible to find in any country where class lines were not so
rigidly drawn as in England. The working-class members of the Labour
Party, when they entered Parliament, did not reject the old upper-class
methods of action, but on the contrary sought to win upperclass
approval and to retain lower-class support by demonstrating that they
could run the government as well as the upper class had always done.
Thus the business-class leaders of the Conservative Party and the
working-class leaders of the Labour Party both consciously sought to
imitate the older aristocratic attitude which had given rise to the
conventions of parliamentary government. Both failed in essence rather
than in appearance, and both failed from lack of real feeling for the
aristocratic pattern of thought rather than from any desire to change
the conventions.
The
chief element in the old
attitude which both groups failed to grasp was the one which we have
attempted to describe as emphasis on methods rather than on goals. In
government, as in tennis or cricket, the old attitude desired to win
but desired to win within the rules, and this last feeling was so
strong as to lead a casual observer to believe that they lacked a
desire to win. In parliamentary life this appeared as a diffidence to
the possession of high office or to the achievement of any specific
item of legislation. If these could not be obtained within the existing
rules, they were gracefully abandoned.
This
attitude was based to a
very considerable degree on the fact that the members of both
government and opposition were, in the time of Queen Victoria, from the
same small class, subjected to the same formative influences, and with
the same or similar economic interests. Forty out of 69 Cabinet
ministers were sons of peers in 1885-1905, while 25 out of 51 were sons
of peers in 1906-1916. To resign from office or to withdraw any item of
projected legislation did not, at that time, represent any surrender to
an adverse group. This was not an attitude which either the new
business leaders of the Conservative Party or the working-class leaders
of the Labour Party could accept. Their goals were for them of such
immediate concrete value to their own interests that they could not
regard with equanimity loss of office or defeat of their legislative
program. It was this new attitude which made possible at one and the
same time the great increase in party discipline and the willingness to
cut corners where possible in interpreting the constitutional
conventions.
The
custom of the constitution
thus rests only on public opinion as a sanction, and any British
government can do what it wishes so long as it does not enrage public
opinion. This sanction is not nearly so effective as might appear at
first glance, because of the difficulty which public opinion in England
has in obtaining information and also because public opinion in England
can express itself only through the ballot, and the people cannot get
an election unless the government wishes to give one. All the
government needs to do is to prevent an election until public opinion
subsides. This can be done by the Conservative much more easily than by
the Labour Party because the Conservatives have had a wider control
over the avenues of publicity through which public opinion is aroused
and because the actions of a Conservative government can be kept secret
more easily, since the Conservatives have always controlled the chief
other parts of the government which might challenge a government's
actions. The first point will be discussed later. The second point can
be amplified here.
The
Commons and Cabinet are
generally controlled by the same party, with the latter controlling the
former through the party machinery. This group can do what it wishes
with a minimum of publicity or public protest only if the other three
parts of the government cooperate. These three parts are the monarchy,
the House of Lords, and the civil service. Since all three of these
have been traditionally Conservative, a Conservative government could
generally count on their cooperation. This meant that a Conservative
government, on coming to power, had control of all five parts of the
government, while a Labour government had control of only two. This
does not necessarily mean that the Conservatives would use their
control of the monarchy, the Lords, or the civil service to obstruct a
Labour-controlled Commons, since the Conservatives have generally been
convinced of the long-run value to be derived from a reluctance to
antagonize public opinion. In 1931 they abandoned the gold standard,
without any real effort to defend it, as a result of the mutiny in the
British fleet; in 1935 they used their control of the British
Broadcasting Corporation relatively fairly as a result of public
protests at the very unfair way they had used it in 1931.
Nonetheless,
the Conservative
control of these other parts of the government at a time when they do
not control the government have been very helpful to them. In 1914, for
example, the army refused to enforce the Irish Home Rule bill which had
been passed after two general elections and had been approved three
times by the Commons. The army, almost completely Conservative, not
only refused to enforce this bill but made it clear that in any
showdown on the issue its sympathies would be with the opponents of the
bill. This refusal to obey the Liberal government of the day was
justified on the grounds that the army's oath of loyalty was to the
king and not to the government. This might well be a precedent for a
rule that a Conservative minority could refuse to obey the law and
could not be forced by the army, a privilege not shared by a Liberal or
Labour minority.
Again,
in 1931, George V, on
the resignation of MacDonald, did not call upon the leader of the
opposition to form a government, but encouraged an intrigue which tried
to split the Labour Party and did succeed in breaking off 15 out of 289
Labour M.P.'s. MacDonald, who then represented no party, became prime
minister on a majority borrowed by the king from another party. That
the king would have cooperated in such an intrigue in favor of the
Labour Party is very dubious. The only satisfaction which Labour had
was in defeating the sessionists in the election of 1935, but this did
little to overcome the injury inflicted m 1931.
Or
again, in 1929 1931, under
the second Labour government, the Conservative House of Lords prevented
the enactment of all important legislation, including a Trades Disputes
Act, the long-needed democratization of education, and electoral
reform. For any Act to pass over the opposition of the Lords, it must,
since 1911, be voted in the Commons three times in identical form in
not less than two years. This meant that the Conservatives have a
suspensive veto over the legislation of opposition governments. The
importance of this power can be seen in the fact that very few bills
ever became law without the Lords' consent.
Unlike
the government of the
United States, that of England involves no elements of federalism or
separation of powers. The central government can govern in respect to
any subject no matter how local or detailed, although in practice it
leaves considerable autonomy to counties, boroughs, and other local
units. This autonomy is more evident in regard to administration or
execution of laws than it is in regard to legislation, the central
government usually blocking out its wishes in general legislation,
leaving the local authorities to fill in the gaps with administrative
regulations and to execute the whole under supervision of the central
authorities. However, the needs of local government, as well as the
broadening scope of general governmental regulation, have made a
congestion of legislation in Parliament so great that no member can be
expected to know much about most bills. Fortunately, this is not
expected. Voting in Parliament is on strict party lines, and members
are expected to vote as their party whips tell them to, and are not
expected to understand the contents of the bills for which they are
voting.
There
is also no separation
of powers. The Cabinet is the government and "is expected to govern not
only within the law, but, if necessary, without law or even against the
law." There is no limit on retroactive legislation, and no
Cabinet
or Parliament can bind its successors. The Cabinet can enter into war
without Parliament's permission or approval. It can expend money
without Parliament's approval or knowledge, as was done in 1847 for
relief in Ireland or in 1783-1883 in regard to secret-service money. It
can authorize violations of the law, as was done in regard to payments
of the Bank of England in 1847, in 1857, or in 1931. It can make
treaties or other binding international agreements without the consent
or knowledge of Parliament, as was done in 1900, 1902, and 1912.
The
idea, widely held in
the United States, that the Commons is a legislative body and the
Cabinet is an executive body is not true. As far as
legislation is
concerned, Britain has a multi-cameral system in which the Cabinet is
the second chamber, the Commons the third, and the Lords the fourth. Of
these three the Conservatives always have control of the Lords, and the
same party generally has control of the other two. Legislation
originates in the meetings of the inner clique of the party, acting as
a first chamber. If accepted by the Cabinet it passes the Commons
almost automatically. The Commons, rather than a legislative
body,
is the public forum in which the party announces the decisions it has
made in secret party and Cabinet meetings and allows the opposition to
criticize in order to test public reactions. Thus
all bills come
from the Cabinet, and rejection in Commons is almost unthinkable,
unless the Cabinet grants to party members in Commons freedom of
action. Even then this freedom usually extends only to the right to
abstain from voting, and does not allow the member to vote against a
bill. Although machinery for private members' bills exists
similar
to that in the United States, such bills rarely become law. The only
significant one in recent years was an unusual hill of an unusual
member from an unusual constituency. It was the divorce law of A. P.
Herbert, famous humorist, and Member from Oxford.
This
situation is sometimes
called "Cabinet dictatorship." It could more accurately be called
"party dictatorship." Both the Cabinet and the Commons are controlled
by the party, or more accurately by the inner clique of the party.
This inner clique may hold seats in the Cabinet, hut the two are not
the same thing, since members of one may not be members of the other,
and the gradations of power are hy no means the same in one as in the
other. The inner clique of the Conservative Party sometimes meets in
the Carlton Club, while the inner clique of the Labour Party meets in a
trade-union conclave, frequently in Transport House.
The
implication here that the
Cabinet controls the Commons, that Commons will never overthrow the
Cabinet, and that it will not reject legislation acceptable to the
Cabinet is based on the assumption that the party has a majority in
Commons. A minority government, usually a coalition government, has no
such control over Commons because its powers of party discipline are
very weak over any party but its own. With other parties than its own,
a government has few powers beyond the threat of dissolution, which,
while it does threaten members of all parties with the expenses of an
election and the possibility of losing their seats, is a double-edged
weapon that may cut both ways. Over its own members the Cabinet has the
additional powers arising from control of nominations to
constituencies, party funds, and appointment to government offices.
It
is not generally recognized
that there have been many restrictions on democracy in Britain, most of
them in nonpolitical spheres of life, but nonetheless effectively
curtailing the exercises of democracy in the political sphere. These
restrictions were considerably worse than in the United States, because
in the latter country they have been made on a variety of grounds
(racial, religious, national, and so on), and because they are
recognized as being unjust and are the occasion for feelings of guilt
from those whom they benefit and loud protests from others. In Britain
the restrictions were almost all based on one criterion, possession of
wealth, and have been the occasion for relatively mild objections,
because in Britain the idea that wealth entitled its possessor to
special privileges and special duties was generally accepted, even by
the non-possessing masses. It was this lack of objections from both
classes and masses which concealed the fact that Britain, until 1945,
was the world's greatest plutocracy.
Plutocracy
restricted
democracy in Britain to a notable but decreasing degree in the period
before 1 945. This was more evident in social or economic life than in
political life, and in politics it was more evident in local than in
national affairs. In political life local government had a restricted
suffrage (householders and their wives; in some localities only half as
many as in national suffrage). This restricted suffrage elected members
of local boards or councils whose activities were unpaid, thus
restricting these posts to those who had leisure (that is, wealth). In
local government the old English tradition that the best government is
government by amateurs (which is equivalent to saying that the best
government is government by the well-to-do) still survived. These
amateurs were aided by paid secretaries and assistants who had the
necessary technical knowledge to handle the problems that arose. These
technicians were also of the middle or upper classes because of the
expense of the educational system which screened out the poor on the
lower levels of schooling. The paid expert who advised the unpaid
members of the borough councils was the town clerk. The paid expert who
advised the unpaid justice of the peace in the administration of local
justice was the clerk of Quarter Sessions.
In
national politics the
suffrage was wide and practically unrestricted, but the upper classes
possessed a right to vote twice because they were allowed to vote at
their place of business or their university as well as at their
residence. Members of Parliament were, for years, restricted to the
well-to-do by the expenses of office and by the fact that Members of
Parliament were unpaid. Payment for Members was adopted first in 1911
and fixed at £400 a year. This was raised in 1936 to £500
with an additional £100 for expenses. But the Member's expenses
in Commons were so great that a Conservative Member would need at least
£ 1,000 a year additional income and a Labour Member would need
about £350 a year additional. Moreover, each candidate for
Parliament must post a deposit of £150, which is forfeited if he
does not receive over one-eighth of the total vote. This deposit
amounted to more than the total annual income of about three-quarters
of all English families in 1938, and provided another barrier to the
great majority if they aspired to run for Parliament. As a result of
these monetary barriers, the overwhelming mass of Englishmen could not
participate actively in politics unless they could find an outside
source of funds. By finding this source in labor
unions in the
period after 1890, they created a new political party organized on a
class basis, and forced the merger of the two existing parties into a
single group also organized on a class basis.
From
this point of view the
history of English political parties could be divided into three
periods at the years of 1915 and 1924. Before 1915 the two major
parties were the Liberals and the Unionists (Conservatives); after 1924
the two major parties were the Conservatives and Labour; the decade
1915-1924 represented a period in which the Liberal Party was disrupted
and weakened.
Until
1915 the two parties
represented the same social class—the small group known as
"society." In fact both parties—Conservatives and
Liberals—were controlled from at least 1866 by the same small
clique of "society." This clique consisted of no more than half-a-dozen
chief families, their relatives and allies, reinforced by an occasional
recruit from outside. These recruits were generally obtained from the
select educational system of "society," being found in Balliol or New
College at Oxford or at Trinity College, Cambridge, where they first
attracted attention, either by scholarship or in the debates of the
Oxford or Cambridge Union. Having attracted attention in this fashion,
the new recruits were given opportunities to prove their value to the
inner clique of each party, and generally ended by marrying into one of
the families which dominated these cliques.
At
the beginning of the
twentieth century the inner clique of the Conservative Party was made
up almost completely of the Cecil family and their relatives. This was
a result of the tremendous influence of Lord Salisbury. The only
important autonomous powers in the Conservative Party in 1900 were
those leaders of the Liberal Party who had come over to the
Conservatives as a result of their opposition to Gladstone's project
for Home Rule in Ireland. Of these, the most important example was the
Cavendish family (dukes of Devonshire and marquesses of Hartington). As
a result of this split in the Liberal Party, that party was subjected
to a less centralized control, and welcomed into its inner clique many
newer industrialists who had the money to support it.
Since
1915 the Liberal Party
has almost disappeared, its place being taken by the Labour Party,
whose discipline and centralized control bears comparison with that of
the Conservative Party. The chief differences between the two existing
parties are to be found in methods of recruitment, the inner clique of
the Conservative Party being built on the basis of family, social, and
educational connections, while that of the Labour Party is derived from
the hard school of trade-union politics with a seasoning of upper-class
renegades. In either case the ordinary voter in Britain, in 1960 as in
1900, was offered a choice between parties whose programs and
candidates were largely the creations of two small self-perpetuating
groups over which he (the ordinary voter) had no real control. The
chief change from 1900 to 1960 was to be found in the fact that in 1900
the two parties represented a small and exclusive social class remote
from the voters' experience, while in 1960 the two parties represented
two antithetical social classes which were both remote from the average
voter.
Thus,
the lack of primary
elections and the insufficient payment for Members of Parliament have
combined to give Britain two political parties, organized on a class
basis, neither of which represents the middle classes. This is quite
different from the United States, where both the major parties are
middle-class parties, and where geographic, religious, and traditional
influences are more important than class influences in determining
party membership. In America the prevalent middle-class ideology of the
people could easily dominate the parties because both parties are
decentralized and undisciplined. In Britain, where both parties are
centralized and disciplined and controlled by opposing social extremes,
the middle-class voter finds no party which he can regard as
representative of himself or responsive to his views. As a result, by
the 1930's the mass of the middle classes was split: some provided
continued support for the Liberal Party, although this was recognized
as relatively hopeless; some voted Conservative as the only way to
avoid Socialism, although they objected to the proto-Fascism of many
Conservatives; others turned to the Labour Party in the hope of
broadening it into a real progressive party.
A
study of the two parties is
revealing. The Conservative Party represented a small clique of the
very wealthy, the one-half percent who had incomes of over £2,000
a year. These knew each other well, were related by marriage, went to
the same expensive schools, belonged to the same exclusive clubs,
controlled the civil service, the empire, the professions, the army,
and big business. Although only one-third of one percent of Englishmen
went to Eton or Harrow, 43 percent of Conservative members of
Parliament in 1909 had gone to these schools, and in 1938 the figure
was still about 32 percent. In this last year ( 1938) there were 415
Conservative M.P.'s. Of these, 236 had titles and 145 had relatives in
the House of Lords. In the Cabinet which made the Munich Agreement were
one marquess, three earls, two viscounts, one baron, and one baronet.
Of the 415 Conservative M.P.'s at that time, only one had had poor
parents, and only four others came from the lower classes. As Duff
Cooper (Viscount Norwich) said in March, 1939, "It is as difficult for
a poor man, if he be a Conservative, to get into the House of Commons
as it is for a camel to get through the eye of a needle." This was
caused by the great expenses entailed in holding the position of
Conservative M.P. Candidates of that party u ere expected to make
substantial contributions to the party. The cost of an electoral
campaign was £400 to £1,200. Those candidates who paid the
whole expense and in addition contributed £ 500 to £1,000 a
year to the party fund were given the safest seats. Those who paid
about half of these sums were given the right to “stand” in
less desirable constituencies.
Once
elected, a Conservative
M. P. was expected to be a member of one of the exclusive London clubs
where many important party decisions were formed. Of these clubs the
Carlton, which had over half of the Conservative M. P.’s as
members in 1938, cost a £40 entrance fee and 17 guineas annual
dues. The City of London Club, with a considerable group of
Conservatives on its rolls, had an entrance fee of 100 guineas and
annual dues of 15 guineas. Of 33 Conservative M. .’s who died
leaving recorded wills in the period before 1938 all left at least
£1,000, while the gross estate of the group was £7,199,151.
This gave an average estate of £218,156. Of these 33, 14 left
over £10,000 each; 14 more left from £20,000 to
£100,000; and only 5 left between £10,000 and £20,000.
Of
the 415 M. P.’s on
the Conservative side in 1938, 44 percent (or 181) were corporation
directors, and these held 775 directorships. As a result, almost every
important corporation had a director who was a Conservative M. P. These
M. P.’s did not hesitate to reward themselves, their companies, and
their associates with political favors.
In eight years (1931-1939) thirteen directors of the "Big Five banks"
and two directors of the Bank of England were raised to the peerage by
the Conservative government. Of ninety peers created in seven years
(1931-1938), thirty-five were directors of insurance companies. In 1935
Walter Runciman, as president of the Board of Trade, introduced a bill
to grant a subsidy of £2 million to tramp merchant vessels. He
administered this fund, and in two years gave £92,567 to his
father's company (Moor Line, Ltd.) in which he held 21,000 shares of
stock himself. When his father died in 1937 he left a fortune of
£2,388,453. There is relatively little objection to activities of
this kind in England. Once having accepted the fact that politicians
are the direct representatives of economic interests, there would be
little point in objecting when politicians act in accordance with their
economic interests. In 1926 Prime Minister Baldwin had a direct
personal interest in the outcome of the coal strike and of the General
Strike, since he held 194,526 ordinary shares and 37,591 preferred
shares of Baldwin's, Ltd., which owned great collieries.
The
situation of 1938 was not
much different from the situation of forty years earlier in 1898 except
that, at the earlier date, the Conservative Party was subject to an
even more centralized control, and the influence of industrial wealth
was subordinated to the influence of landed wealth. In 1898 the
Conservative Party was little more than a tool of the Cecil family. The
prime minister and leader of the party was Robert Arthur Talbot
Gascoyne-Cecil (Lord Salisbury), who had been prime minister three
times for a total of fourteen years when he retired in 1902. On
retirement he handed over the leadership of the party as well as the
prime minister's chair to his nephew, protégé, and
hand-picked successor, Arthur James Balfour. In the ten years of the
Salisbury-Balfour government between 1895 and 1905, the Cabinet was
packed with relatives and close associates of the Cecil family.
Salisbury himself was prime minister and foreign secretary (1895-1902);
his nephew, Arthur Balfour, was first lord of the Treasury and leader
in Commons (1895-1902) before becoming prime minister (1902-1905);
another nephew, Gerald Balfour (brother of Arthur), was chief secretary
of Ireland (1895-1900) and president of the Board of Trade (1900-1905);
Lord Salisbury's son and heir, Viscount Cranborne, was undersecretary
for foreign affairs (1900-1903) and lord privy seal (1903-1905);
Salisbury's son-in-law, Lord Selborne, was undersecretary for the
colonies (18951900) and first lord of the Admiralty (1900 1905); Walter
Long, a protégé of Salisbury, was president of the Board
of Agriculture (18951900), president of the Local Government Board
(1900-1905), and chief secretary for Ireland (1905-1906); George
Curzon, another protégé of Salisbury, was undersecretary
for foreign affairs (1895-1898) and viceroy of India (1899-1905);
Alfred Lyttelton, Arthur Balfour's most intimate friend and the man who
would have been his brother-in-law except for his sister's premature
death in 1875 (an event which kept Balfour a bachelor for the rest of
his life), was secretary of state for the colonies; Neville Lyttelton,
brother of Alfred Lyttelton, was commander in chief in South Africa and
chief of the General Staff (1902-1908). In addition, a dozen close
relatives of Salisbury, including three sons and various nephews,
sons-in-law, and grandchildren, and a score or more of
protégés and agents were in Parliament or in various
administrative positions, either then or later.
The
Liberal Party was not so
closely controlled as was the Conservative Party, but its chief leaders
were on intimate relations of friendship and cooperation with the Cecil
crowd. This was especially true of Lord Rosebery, who was prime
minister in 1894-1895, and H. H. Asquith, who was prime minister in
1905-1915. Asquith married Margot Tennant, sister-in-law of Alfred
Lyttelton, in 1894, and had Balfour as his chief witness at the
ceremony. Lyttelton was the nephew of Gladstone as Balfour was the
nephew of Salisbury. In later years Balfour was the closest friend of
the Asquiths even when they were leaders of two opposing parties.
Balfour frequently joked of the fact that he had dinner, with
champagne, at Asquith's house before going to the House of Commons to
attack his host's policies. On Thursday evenings when Asquith dined at
his club, Balfour had dinner with Mrs. Asquith, and the prime minister
would stop by to pick her up on his way home. It was on an evening of
this kind that Balfour and Mrs. Asquith agreed to persuade Asquith to
write his memoirs. Asquith had been almost as friendly with another
powerful leader of the Conservative Party, Lord Milner. These two ate
their meals together for four years at the scholarship table in Balliol
in the 1870's, and had supper together on Sunday evenings in the
1880's. Mrs. Asquith had a romantic interlude with Milner in Egypt in
1892 when she was still Margot Tennant, and later claimed that she got
him his appointment as chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue by
writing to Balfour from Egypt to ask for this favor. In 1908, according
to W. T. Stead, Mrs. Asquith had three portraits over her bed: those of
Rosebery, Balfour, and Milner.
After
the disruption of the
Liberal Party and the beginnings of the rise of the Labour Party, many
members of the Liberal Party went over to the Conservatives.
Relationships between the two parties became somewhat less close, and
the control of the Liberal Party became considerably less centralized..
The
Labour Party arose because
of the discovery by the masses of the people that their vote did not
avail them much so long as the only choice of candidates was, as
Bagehot put it, “Which of two rich people will you choose?”
The issue came to a head because of a judicial decision. In the Taff
Vale case (1901) the courts decided that labor unions were responsible
for damages resulting from their economic actions. To overcome this
decision, which would have crippled the unions by making them
financially responsible for the damages arising from strikes the
working classes turned to political action by setting up their own
candidates in their own party. The funds needed were provided by the
labor unions, with the result that the Labour Party became for all
practical purposes, the Trade-Union Party.
The
Labour Party is, in
theory, somewhat more democratic than the Conservatives, since its
annual party conference is the final authority on policies and
candidates. But, since unions provide the bulk of the members and the
party funds, the unions dominate the party. In 1936, when the party
membership was 2,444,357, almost 2 million of these were indirect
members through the 7 3 trade unions which belonged to the party.
Between party conferences, administration of the party’s work was
in the hands of the National Executive Committee, 17 of whose 25
members could be elected by the unions.
Because
of its working-class
basis, the Labour Party was generally short of funds. In the 1930's it
spent on the average £300,000 a year, compared to £600,000
a year for the Conservatives and £400,000 a year for the
Liberals. In the election of 1931 the Labour Party spent £81,629
in campaigning, compared to the £472,476 spent by non-Labour
candidates. In the election of 1935 the two figures were £196,819
and £526,274.
This
shortage of money on the
part of the Labour Party was made worse by the fact that the Labour
Party, especially when out of office, had difficulty in getting its
side of the story to the British people. In 1936 the Labour Party had
support from one morning paper with a circulation of two million
copies, while the Conservatives had the support of six morning papers
with a circulation of over six million copies. Of three evening papers,
two supported the Conservatives and one supported the Liberals. Of ten
Sunday papers with an aggregate circulation of 13,130,000 copies, seven
with a circulation of 6,330,000 supported the Conservatives, one with a
circulation of 400,000 supported Labour, and the two largest, with a
circulation of 6,300,000, were independent.
The
radio, which is the second
most important instrument of publicity, is a government monopoly,
created by the Conservatives in 1926. In theory it is controlled by an
impartial board, but this board was created by Conservatives, is
generally manned by Conservative sympathizers, and permits the
government to make certain administrative decisions. Sometimes it is
run fairly; sometimes it is run very unfairly. In the election of 1931
the government allowed fifteen periods on the B.B.C. for political
campaigning; it took eleven periods for the Conservatives, gave three
to Labour, and one to the Liberals. In 1935, somewhat more fairly, it
permitted twelve periods, taking five for the Conservatives, and giving
four to Labour and three to the Liberals.
Since
the two chief parties in
England do not represent the ordinary Englishman, but instead represent
the entrenched economic interests directly, there is relatively little
“lobbying,” or attempting to influence legislators by
political or economic pressure. This is quite different from the United
States where lobbyists sometimes seem to be the only objects on a
congressman’s horizon. In England, where the economic interests
are directly represented in Parliament, lobbying comes chiefly from
groups influenced by non-economic issues like divorce, women's
suffrage, antivivisection, and so on.
On
the whole, if we were to
look at politics Britain would appear at least as democratic as
America. It is only when we look outside the sphere of politics to the
social or economic spheres that we see that the old division into two
classes was maintained relatively rigidly until 1939. The
privileged classes were generally able to maintain their grasp on the
professions, the educational system, the army, the civil service, and
so on, even when they were losing their grasp on the political system.
This was possible because training in the expensive educational system
of the upper classes continued to be the chief requirement for entrance
into these nonpolitical activities. The educational system, as we have
said, was divided roughly into two parts: (a) one
part for the
ruling classes consisted of preparatory schools, the so-called "public
schools" and the old universities; and (b) the other
for the
masses of the people consisted of public elementary schools, the
secondary schools, and the newer universities. This division is not
absolutely rigid, especially on the university level, but it is quite
rigid on the lower level.
As
Sir Cyril Norwood,
headmaster of Harrow School, said, "The boy of ability from a poor home
may get to Oxford—it is possible, though not easy—but he
has no chance to enter Eton." A private school (called "public school")
cost about £300 a year in 1938, a sum which exceeded the annual
income of more than 80 percent of English families. The masses of the
people obtained free primary schools only after 1870, and secondary
schools in 1902 and 1918. These latter, however, were not free,
although there were many part-payment places, and less than 10 percent
of children entered a secondary school in 1938. On the highest level of
education, the twelve universities of England and Wales had only 40,000
students in 1938. In the United States, at the same period, the number
of students on the university level was 1,350,000, a difference which
was only partially compensated by the fact that the population of the
United States was four times as numerous as that of Britain.
The
educational system of
Britain has been the chief bottleneck by which the masses of the people
are excluded from positions of power and responsibility. It acts as a
restriction because the type of education which leads to such positions
is far too expensive for any but an insignificant fraction of
Englishmen to be able to afford it. Thus, while
Britain had
political democracy at a fairly early period it was the last civilized
country to obtain a modern system of education. In fact, it is still in
process of obtaining such a system. This is in sharp contrast
with
the situation in France where the amount of education obtainable by a
student is limited only by his ability and willingness to work; and
positions of importance in the civil service, the professions, and even
business are available to those who do best in the educational system.
In Britain ability to a considerable degree commands positions for
those who pass through the educational system, but the right to do this
is based very largely on ability to pay.
The
civil service in Britain
in 1939 was uniform in all the regular departments of the government,
and was divided into three levels. From the bottom up, these were known
as "clerical," "executive," and "administrative." Promotion from one
level to another was not impossible but was so rare that the vast
majority remained in the level they first entered. The most important
level—the administrative—was reserved to the well-to-do
classes by its method of recruitment. It was open in theory to
everyone through a competitive examination. This examination, however,
could be taken only by those who were twenty-two or twenty-four years
old; it gave 300 out of 1,300 points for the oral part; and the written
part was based on liberal subjects as taught in the "public schools"
and universities. All this served to restrict admission to the
administrative level of the civil service to young men whose families
could afford to bring them up in the proper fashion. In 1930, of 56
civil servants in posts commanding salaries of over £2,000 each,
only 9 did not have the upperclass background of Oxford, Cambridge, or
a "public school." This policy of restricting was most
evident in
the Foreign Office, where from 1851 to 1919 every person on the
administrative level was from Oxford or Cambridge, one-third were from
Eton, and one-third had titles. The use of educational restrictions as
a method for reserving the upper ranks of the civil service to the
well-to-do was clearly deliberate and was, on the whole, successful in
achieving the purpose intended. As a result, as H. R. G. Greaves wrote,
"The persons to be found in the principal positions of the civil
service in 1850, 1900, or 1930 did not differ markedly in type.”
A
similar situation was to be
found elsewhere. In the army in peacetime the officers were almost
entirely from the upper class. They obtained commissions by an
examination, largely oral, based on study at the universities or at the
two military schools (Sandhurst and Woolwich) which cost £300 a
year to attend. The pay was small, with heavy deductions for living
expenses, so that an officer needed a private income. The navy was
somewhat more democratic, although the proportion of officers risen
from the ranks decreased from 10.9 percent in 1931 to 3.3 percent in
1936. The naval school (Dartmouth) was very expensive, costing
£788 a year.
The
clergy of the
Established Church represented the same social class, since, until well
into the twentieth century, the upper ranks of the clergy were named by
the government, and the lower acquired their appointments by purchase.
As a consequence, in the 1920's, 71 of 80 bishops were from expensive
"public" schools.
The
various members of the
legal profession were also very likely to be of the upper class,
because legal training was long and expensive. This training generally
began at one of the older universities. For admission to the bar a man
had to be a member of one of the four Inns of Court (Inner Temple,
Middle Temple, Lincoln's Inn, Gray's Inn). These are private clubs to
which admission was by nomination of members and payment of large
admission fees varying from £58 to £208. A member was
expected to eat dinners in his inn twenty-four nights a year for three
years before being called to the bar. Then he was expected to begin
practice by acting as "devil" (clerk) to a barrister for a couple of
years. During these years the "devil," even in 1950, paid 100 guineas
to the barrister, £130 a year for his share of the rent, 50
guineas a year to the clerk, 30 guineas for his wig and gown, and
numerous other "incidental" expenses. Accordingly, it is not surprising
to find that sons of wage earners formed less than 1 percent of the
admissions to Lincoln's Inn in 1886-1923 and were only 1.8 percent in
the period 1923-1927. In effect, then, a member of the bar might well
pass five years after receiving the bachelor's degree before he could
reach a position where he could begin to earn a living.
As
a result, members of the bar have been, until very recently, almost
entirely from the well-to-do classes. Since
judges are appointed exclusively from barristers with from seven to
fifteen years of experience, the judicial system has also been
monopolized by the upper classes. In 1926, 139 out of 181
judges
were graduates of expensive "public" schools. The same conditions also
exist on the lower levels of justice where the justice of the peace, an
unpaid official for whom no legal training was required, was the chief
figure. These justices of the peace have always been offshoots of the
"county families" of well-to-do persons.
With
a system of legal
administration and justice such as this, the process of obtaining
justice has been complex, slow and, above all, expensive. As a result,
only the fairly well-to-do can defend their rights in a civil suit and,
if the less well-to-do go to court at all, they find themselves in an
atmosphere completely dominated by members of the upper classes.
Accordingly, the ordinary Englishman (over 90 percent of the total)
avoid all litigation even when he has right on his side.
As
a result of the conditions
just described, the political history of Britain in the twentieth
century has been a long struggle for equality. This struggle has
appeared in various forms: as an effort to extend educational
opportunities, as an effort to extend health and economic security to
the lo\ver classes, as an effort to open the upper ranks of the civil
services and the defense forces, as well as the House of Commons
itself, to those classes which lacked the advantages in leisure and
training provided by wealth..
In
this struggle for equality
the goal has been sought by leveling the upper classes down as well as
by leveling the lo\ver classes up. The privileges of the former have
been curtailed, especially by taxation and more impersonal methods of
recruitment to office, at the same time that the opportunities of the
latter have been extended by widening educational advantages and by the
practice of granting a living payment for services rendered. In this
struggle, revolutionary changes have been made by the Liberal and
Conservative parties as well as by the Labour Party, each hoping to be
rewarded by the gratitude of the masses of the people at the polls.
Until
1915 the movement toward
equality was generally supported by the Liberals and resisted by the
Conservatives, although this alignment was not invariable. Since 1923
the movement toward equality has generally been supported by Labour and
resisted by the Conservatives. Here, again, the alignment has not been
invariable. Both before and after World War I there have been very
progressive Conservatives and very reactionary Liberals or Labourites.
Moreover, since 1924 the two major parties have, as already mentioned,
come to represent two opposing vested economic interests—the
interests of entrenched wealth and of entrenched unionism. This has
resulted in making the positions of the two parties considerably more
antithetical than they were in the period before 1915 when both major
parties represented the same segment of society. Moreover, since 1923,
as the alienation of the two parties on the political scene has become
steadily wider, there has arisen a tendency for each to take on the
form of an exploiting group in regard to the great middle class of
consumers and unorganized workers.
In
the two decades,
1925-1945, it seemed that the efforts of men like Lord Melchett and
others would create a situation where monopolized industry and
unionized labor would cooperate on a program of restricted output, high
wages, high prices, and social protection of both profits and
employment to the jeopardy of all economic progress and to the injury
of the middle and professional classes who were not members of the
phalanxed ranks of cartelized industry and unionized labor. Although
this program did succeed to the point where much of Britain's
industrial plant was obsolescent, inefficient, and inadequate, this
trend was partly ended by the influence of the war but chiefly by the
victory of the Labour Party in the election of 1945.
As
a result of this victory,
the Labour Party began an assault on certain segments of heavy industry
in order to nationalize them, and initiated a program of socialized
public services (like public medicine, subsidized low food prices, and
so on) which broke the tacit understanding with monopolized industry
and began to distribute the benefits of the socialized economy outside
the ranks of trade-union members to other members of the lower and
lower middle classes. The result was to create a new society of
privilege which from some points of view looked like an inversion of
the society of privilege of 1900. The new privileged were the
trade-union elite of the working classes and the older privileged of
the upper classes, while the exploited were the middle class of
white-collar and professional workers who did not have the unionized
strength of the one or the invested wealth of the other.
Chapter
30—Political History to 1939
The
domestic political history
of Britain in the twentieth century could well be divided into three
parts by the two great wars with their experience of coalition or
"national" government.
In
the first period ten years
of Conservative government (in which Salisbury was succeeded by
Balfour) were followed by ten years of Liberal government (in which
Campbell-Bannerman was succeeded by Asquith). The dates of these four
governments are as follows:
A.
Conservative
1.
Lord Salisbury, 1895-1902
2.
Arthur J. Balfour, 1902-1905
B.
Liberal
1.
Henry Campbell-Bannerman, 1905-1908
2.
Herbert Henry Asquith, 1908-1915
The
government of Balfour was
really nothing but a continuation of the Salisbury government, but it
was a pale imitation. Balfour was far from being the strong personality
his uncle was, and he had to face the consequences of the Salisbury
government's mistakes. In addition he had to face the beginnings of all
those problems of the twentieth century which had not been dreamed of
during the great days of Victoria: problems of imperialist aggressions,
of labor agitation, of class animosities, of economic discontents.
The
sorry record of the
British war administration during the Boer War led to the establishment
of a Parliamentary Committee of Investigation under Lord Esher. The
report of this group resulted in a whole series of reforms which left
Britain far better equipped to stand the shocks of 1914-1918 than she
would otherwise have been. Not the least of the consequences of the
Committee of Investigation was the creation, in 1904, of the Committee
on Imperial Defence. On this latter committee Esher was, for a
quarter-century, the chief figure, and as a result of his influence,
there emerged from the obscurity of its secretarial staff two able
public servants: (Sir) Ernest Swinton, later inventor of the tank, and
Maurice (Lord) Hankey, later secretary at the Peace Conference of 1919
and for twenty years secretary to the Cabinet.
The
Balfour government was
weakened by several other actions. The decision to import Chinese
coolies to work the mines of the Transvaal in 1903 led to widespread
charges of reviving slavery. The Education Act of 1902, which sought to
extend the availability of secondary education by shifting its control
from school boards to local government units and by providing local
taxes (rates) to support private, church-controlled schools, was
denounced by Nonconformists as a scheme to force them to contribute to
support Anglican education. The efforts of Joseph Chamberlain,
Balfour's secretary of state for the colonies, to abandon the
traditional policy of "free trade" for a program of tariff reform based
on imperial preference succeeded only in splitting the Cabinet,
Chamberlain resigning in 1903 in order to agitate for his chosen goal,
while the Duke of Devonshire and three other ministers resigned in
protest at Balfour's failure to reject Chamberlain's proposals
completely.
Added
to these difficulties,
Balfour faced a great ground-swell of labor discontent from the fact
that the wage-earning segment of the population experienced a decline
in standards of living in the period 1898-1906 because of the inability
of wages to keep up with the rise in prices. This inability arose very
largely from the decision of the House of Lords, acting as a Supreme
Court, in the Taff Vale case of 1902, that labor unions could be sued
for damages arising from the actions of their members in strikes.
Deprived in this fashion of their chief economic weapon, the workers
fell back on their chief political weapon, the ballot, with the result
that the Labour membership of the House of Commons increased from three
to forty-three seats in the election of 6.
This
election of 1906 was a
Liberal triumph, that party obtaining a plurality of 220 over the
Conservatives and a majority of 84 over all other parties. But the
triumph was relatively short-lived for the upper-class leaders of that
party, like Asquith, Haldane, and Edward Grey. These leaders, who were
closer to the Conservative leaders both socially and ideologically than
they were to their own followers, for partisan reasons had to give free
rein to the more radical members of their own party, like Lloyd George,
and after 1910 were unable to govern at all without the support of the
Labour Party members and the Irish Nationalists.
The
new government started off
at full tilt. The Trade Disputes Act of 1906 overturned the Taff Vale
decision and restored the strike as a weapon to the armory of the
workers. In the same year a Workingmen's Compensation Act was put on
the books, and in 1909 came an Old Age Pension system. In the meantime
the House of Lords, the stronghold of Conservatism, tried to halt the
Liberal tide by its veto of an Education bill, of a Licensing bill
which would have reduced the number of "public houses," of a bill
restricting plural voting, and, as the coup de grace, of Lloyd George's
budget of 1909. This budget was aimed directly at Conservative
supporters by its taxation of unearned incomes, especially from landed
property. Its rejection by the Lords was denounced by Asquith as a
breach of the constitution, which, according to his belief, gave
control over money bills to the Lower House.
From
this dispute emerged a
constitutional crisis which shook English society to its foundations.
Even after two general elections, in January and in December 1910, had
returned the Liberals to power, although with a reduced majority, the
Lords refused to yield until Asquith threatened to create enough new
peers to carry his Parliament bill. This bill, which became law in
August 1911, provided that the Lords could not veto a money bill and
could not prevent any other bill from becoming law if it was passed in
three sessions of the Commons over a period of at least two years.
The
election of 1910 had so
reduced Acquith’s plurality that he became dependent on Irish and
Labourite support, and, for the next four years, was of necessity
compelled to grant both concessions for which he personally had little
taste. In 1909 the Lords, again as a Supreme Court, declared the use of
union funds in political campaigns to be illegal, thus destroying the
political weapon to which Labour had been driven by the Taff Vale
decision of 1902. Asquith was not eager to overthrow this so-called
"Osborne Judgement," at least for a while, for as long as union
political activities were illegal the Labourite members of the Commons
had to support Asquith in order to avoid a general election they could
no longer finance. In order to permit the existing Labour members to
live without union funds, the Asquith government in 1911 established
payment for members of Parliament for the first time. Labour was also
rewarded for its support of the Asquith government by the creation of
Health and Unemployment Insurance in 1911, by a Minimum Wage Law in
1912, and by a Trades-Union Act in 1913. This last item made it legal
for labor organizations to finance political activities after approval
by a majority of their members and from a special fund to be raised
from those union members who did not ask to be exempt.
Assaulted
by the supporters of
women suffrage, dependent on the votes of Labour and the Irish
Nationalists, and under steady pressure from Nonconformist Liberals,
the Asquith government had an unpleasant period from 1912- to 1915. The
unpleasantness culminated in violent controversies over Irish Home Rule
and Welsh Disestablishment. Both bills were finally jammed through
without the acceptance of the Lords in September 1914, in both cases
with provisions which suspended their application until the end of the
war with Germany. Thus the weakness and divisions of the Asquith
government and the alarming divisions in Britain itself were swallowed
up in the greater problems of waging a modern war of unlimited
resources.
The
problem of waging this war
was given eventually to coalition governments, at first (1915-1916)
under Asquith and later (1916-1922) under the more vigorous direction
of David Lloyd George. The latter coalition was returned to power in
the "Khaki Election" of December 1918, on a program promising
punishment of German "war criminals," full payment by the defeated
powers of the costs of the war, and "homes fit for heroes." Although
the Coalition government w as made up of Conservatives, Liberals, and
Labour, with an ex-Liberal as prime minister, the Conservatives had a
majority of seats in Parliament and were in closest contact with Lloyd
George so that the coalition government was, except in name, a
Conservative government.
The
political history of
Britain in the years between 1918 and 1945 is a depressing one, chiefly
because of Conservative errors in domestic economic policy and in
foreign policy. In this period there were seven general elections
(1918, 1922, 1923, 1924, 1929, 1931, 1935). In only one (1931) did a
party receive a majority of the popular vote, but in four the
Conservatives obtained a majority of seats in the House of Commons. On
the basis of these elections Britain had ten governments in the period
1918-1945. Of these, three were Conservative-dominated coalitions
(1918, 1931, 1940), two were Labour supported by Liberal votes (1924,
1929), and five were Conservatives (1922, 1923, 1924, 1935, 1937), thus:
Lloyd
George December
1918 - October 1922
Bonar
Law October
1922 - May 1923
Stanley
Baldwin May
1923 - January 1924
Ramsey
MacDonald January
1924 - November 1924
Second
Baldwin November
1924 - June 1929
Second
MacDonald June
1929 - August 1931
National
Government
(McDonald) August 1931
- June 1935
Third
Baldwin June
195 - May 1937
Neville
Chamberlain May
1937 - May 1940
Second
National Government
(Churchill) May
1940-July 1945
The
Lloyd George coalition was
almost a personal government, as Lloyd George had his own supporters
and his own political funds and feuds. Although technically a Liberal,
Lloyd George had split his own party, so that Asquith was in opposition
along with the Labour party and about an equal number of Conservatives.
Since the 80 Irish Nationalists and Irish Republicans did not take
their seats, the 334 Conservatives in the coalition had a majority of
the Commons, but allowed Lloyd George to take the responsibility for
handling the postwar problems. They waited four years before throwing
him out. During this time domestic affairs were in a turmoil, and
foreign affairs were not much better. In the former, the effort to
deflate prices in order to go back on the gold standard at the prewar
parity was fatal to prosperity and domestic order. Unemployment and
strikes increased, especially in the coal mines.
The
Conservatives prevented
any realistic attack on these problems, and passed the Emergency Powers
Act of 1920, which, for the first time in English history, gave a
peacetime government the right to proclaim a state of siege (as was
done in 1920, 1921, and 1926). Unemployment was dealt with by
establishment of a "dole," that is, a payment of 20 shillings a week to
those unable to find work. The wave of strikes was dealt with by minor
concessions, by vague promises, by dilatory investigations, and by
playing one group off against another. The revolt in Ireland was met by
a program of strict repression at the hands of a new militarized police
known as "Black and Tans." The protectorate over Egypt was ended in
1922, and a reexamination of imperial relations was made necessary by
the refusal of the Dominions to support the United Kingdom in the Near
East crisis arising from Lloyd George's opposition to Kemal
Atatürk.
On
October 23, 1923, the
Conservatives overthrew Lloyd George and set up their own government
under Bonar Law. In the following General Election they obtained 344 of
615 seats, and were able to continue in office. This Conservative
government lasted only fifteen months under Bonar Law and Stanley
Baldwin. In domestic affairs its chief activities were piecemeal action
on unemployment and talk about a protective tariff. On this last issue
Baldwin called a General Election in December 1923 and lost his
majority, although continuing to have the largest block in Commons, 258
seats to Labour's 191 and the Liberals' 159. Asquith, who held the
balance of power, could have thrown his support either way, and decided
to throw it to Labour, hoping to give Labour a "fair chance." Thus the
first Labour government in history came to office, if not to power.
With
an unfriendly House of
Lords, an almost completely inexperienced Cabinet, a minority
government, a large majority of its members in Commons trade unionists
with no parliamentary experience, and a Liberal veto over any effort to
carry out a Socialist or even a Labourite program, little could be
expected from MacDonald's first government. Little was accomplished,
nothing of permanent importance at least, and within three months the
prime minister was looking about for an excuse to resign. His
government continued the practice of piecemeal solutions for
unemployment, began public subsidies for housing, lowered the taxes on
necessities (sugar, tea, coffee, cocoa), abolished the corporation tax
and the wartime duties of 33 1/3 percent on motorcars, watches, clocks,
musical instruments, hats, and plate glass, as well as the 1921 duties
on "key industries" (optical glass, chemicals, electrical apparatus) .
The
chief political issue of
the day, however, was Communism. This rose to a fever heat when
MacDonald recognized Soviet Russia and tried to make a commercial
treaty with the same country. MacDonald cooperated with the Liberals
with ill-grace and resigned when Parliament decided to investigate the
quashing of the prosecution, under the Incitement to Mutiny Act, of the
editor of a Communist weekly paper. In the resulting general election
the Conservatives played the "red scare" for all it was worth. They
were aided greatly when the permanent officials of the Foreign Office
issued, four days before the election, the so-called "Zinoviev Letter."
This forged document called upon British subjects to support a violent
revolution in behalf of the Third International. It undoubtedly played
some role in gaining the Conservatives their largest majority in many
years, 412 out of 615 seats.
Thus
began a Conservative
government which was in office under Baldwin for five years. Winston
Churchill as chancellor of the Exchequer carried out the stabilization
policy which put England on the gold standard with the pound sterling
at the prewar rate of parity. As we have indicated in Chapter
7,
this policy of deflation drove Britain into an economic depression and
a period of labor conflict, and the policy was so bungled in its
execution that Britain was doomed to semi-depression for almost a
decade, was in financial subjection to France until September 1931, and
was driven closer to domestic rebellion than she had been at any time
since the Chartist movement of 1848. The recognition of Russia and the
trade agreement with Russia were abrogated; the import duties were
restored; and the income tax was lowered (although the inheritance tax
was raised). As deficits grew, they were made up by a series of raids
on available special funds. The chief domestic event of the
period was the General Strike of May 3-12, 1926.
The,
General Strike developed
from a strike in the coal mines and from the determination of both
sides to bring the class struggle to a showdown. The British mines were
in bad condition because of the nature of the coal deposits and because
of mismanagement which left them with inadequate and obsolete
technological equipment. Most of them were high-cost producers compared
to the mines of northern France and western Germany. The deflation
resulting from the effort to stabilize the pound hit the mines with
special impact, since prices could be cut only if costs were cut first,
an action which meant, for the mines above all, cutting of wages. The
loss of the export trade resulting from Germany's efforts to pay
reparations in coal, and especially the return of the Ruhr mines to
full production after the French evacuation of that area in 1924 made
the mines the natural focal point for labor troubles in England.
The
mines had been under
government control during the war. After that conflict ended, many
Liberals, Labourites, and the miners themselves wanted nationalization.
This attitude was reflected in the report of a royal commission under
Lord Sankey which recommended nationalization and higher wages. The
government gave the latter but refused the former (1919). In 1921, when
government control ended, the owners demanded longer hours and reduced
wages. The miners refused, went out on strike for three months
(March-June 1921), and won a promise of a government subsidy to raise
wages in the worse-paid districts. In 1925, as a result of
stabilization, the owners announced new wage cuts. Because the miners
objected, the government appointed a new royal commission under Sir
Herbert Samuel. This group condemned the subsidy and recommended
closing down high-cost mines, selling output collectively, and cutting
wages while leaving hours of work the same. Since owners, government,
and labor were all willing to force a showdown, the affair drifted into
a crisis when the government invoked the Emergency Powers Act of 1920
and the Trades Union Congress answered with an order for a General
Strike.
In
the General Strike all
union labor went out. Upper- and middle-class volunteers sought to keep
utilities and other essential economic activities functioning. The
government issued its own news bulletin (The British Gazette
under Churchill), used the British Broadcasting Corporation to attack
the unions, and had their side supported by the only available
newspaper, the anti-union Daily Mail, which was
printed in Paris and flown over.
The
Trades Union Congress had
no real heart in the strike, and soon ended it, leaving the striking
miners to shift for themselves. The miners stayed out for six months,
and then began to drift back to work to escape starvation. They were
thoroughly beaten, with the result that many left England. The
population of the worst-hit area, South Wales, fell by 250,000 in three
years.
Among
the results of the
failure of the General Strike, two events must be mentioned. The Trades
Dispute Act of 1927 forbade sympathy strikes, restricted picketing,
prohibited state employees from affiliating with other workers,
restored the Taff Vale decision, and changed the basis for collection
of labor-union political funds from those who did not refuse to
contribute to those who specifically agreed to contribute. The Trades
Union Congress, disillusioned with economic weapons of class conflict,
discarded the strike from its arsenal, and concentrated its attention
on political weapons. In the economic field it became increasingly
conservative and began to negotiate with the leaders of industry, like
Lord Melchett of Imperial Chemical Industries, on methods by which
capital and labor might cooperate to mulct consumers. A National
Industrial Council, consisting of the Trades Union Congress, the
Federation of British Industries, and the National Conference of
Employers, was set up as the instrument of this cooperation.
The
last three years of the
Conservative government were marked by the creation of a national
system of electric-power distribution and of a government-owned
monopoly over radio (1926), the extension of the electoral franchise to
women between twenty-one and thirty years of age (1928), the Road
Transport Act, and the Local Government Act ( 1929). In these later
years the government became increasingly unpopular because of a number
of arbitrary acts by the police. As a result, the general election of
1929 was almost a repetition of that of 1923: the Conservatives fell to
260 seats; Labour, with 288 seats, was the largest party but lacked a
majority; and the Liberals, with 59 seats, held the balance of power.
As in 1923, the Liberals threw their support to Labour, bringing to
office the second MacDonald government.
The
MacDonald government of
1929-1931 was even less radical than that of 1924. The Labour members
were unfriendly to their Liberal supporters and were divided among
themselves so that there was petty bickering even within the Cabinet.
The Liberal members were more progressive than Labour, and became
impatient with Labour's conservative policies. Snowden, as chancellor
of the Exchequer, kept the import duties and raised other taxes,
including the income tax. Since this was not sufficient to balance the
budget, he borrowed from various separate funds and moved forward the
date on which income-tax was due.
The
Lord Privy Seal, J. H.
Thomas, a railroad union leader, was made head of a group seeking a
solution to the problem of unemployment. After a few months the task
was given up, and he was made secretary of state for the Dominions.
This failure appeared worse because both the Liberals and Sir Oswald
Mosley (then of the Labour Party) had worked out detailed plans based
on public-works projects. Unemployment benefits were increased, with
the result that the Insurance Fund had to he replenished by loans. The
Coal Mines Act (1930) set up a joint-selling agency, established a
subsidy for coal exports and a national wage board for the mines, but
left hours of work at seven and a half a day instead of the older seven.
The
House of Lords refused to
accept an Electoral Reform bill, an Agricultural Land Utilization bill,
and Sir Charles Trevelyan's Education bill. The last of these provided
free secondary education and raised the school-leaving age to fifteen
years; but the Labour government was not insistent on these bills, and
Trevelyan resigned in protest at its dilatory attitude. An Agricultural
Marketing bill, which benefitted the landed group in the House of Lords
and raised food prices to the consumer, was passed. Throughout these
efforts at legislation it was clear that the Labour Party had
difficulty controlling its own members, and the Labour protest vote on
most divisions in Commons was quite large.
The
problem of the growing
budgetary deficit was complicated in 1931 by the export of gold. The
National Confederation of Employers and the Federation of British
Industries agreed in prescribing wage cuts of one-third. On February
11th a committee under Sir George May, set up on a Liberal motion,
brought in its report. It recommended cuts in government expenditures
of £96 million, two-thirds to come from unemployment benefits and
one-third from employees' wages. This was rejected by the Trades Union
Congress and by a majority of the Cabinet.
In
June the Macmillan
Committee, after two years' study, reported that the whole financial
structure of England was unsound and should be remedied by a managed
currency, controlled by the Bank of England. Instead of making efforts
in any consistent direction, MacDonald, unknown to any of his Cabinet
except Snowden and Thomas, resigned but secretly agreed to continue as
prime minister supported by the Conservatives and whichever Labour and
Liberal members he could get. Throughout the crisis MacDonald consulted
with the leaders of the other two parties but not with his own, and he
announced the formation of the National government at the same Cabinet
meeting at which he told the ministers that they had resigned.
The
National government had a
Cabinet of ten members, of which four were Labour, four Conservative,
and two liberal. The non-Cabinet ministers were Conservative or
Liberal. This Cabinet had the support of 243 Conservatives, 52
Liberals, and 12 Labour, and had in opposition 242 Labour and 9
Independents. Only thirteen Labour M.P.'s followed MacDonald, and they
were soon expelled from the party.
This
crisis was of great significance because it revealed the incapacity of
the Labour Party and the power of the bankers.
The Labour Party throughout was wracked by petty personal bickering.
Its chief members had no understanding of economics. Snowden, the
"economic expert" of the Cabinet, had financial views about the same as
those of Montagu Norman of the Bank of England. There was no agreed
party program except the remote and unrealistic one of "nationalization
of industry," and this program was bound to be regarded with mixed
enthusiasm by a party whose very structure was based on trade unionism.
As
for the bankers they
were in control throughout the crisis. While publicly they insisted on
a balanced budget, privately they refused to accept balancing by
taxation and insisted on balancing by cuts in relief payments.
Working
in close cooperation with American bankers and Conservative leaders,
they were in a position to overthrow any government which was not
willing to crush them completely. While they refused
cooperation to
the Labour government on August 23rd, they were able to obtain a loan
of £80 million from the United States and France for the National
government when it was only four days old. Although they would not
allow the Labour government to tamper with the gold standard in August,
they permitted the National government to abandon it in September with
bank rates at 4 ½ percent.
The
National government at
once attacked the financial crisis with a typical barbers' weapon:
deflation. It offered a budget including higher taxes and drastic cuts
in unemployment benefits and public salaries. Riots, protests, and
mutiny in the navy were the results. These forced Britain off gold on
September 21st. A general election was called for October 27th. It was
bitterly fought, with MacDonald and Snowden attacking Labour while
Conservatives and Liberals fought on the issue of a tariff. Snowden
called the Labour Party "Bolshevism run mad." I le was later rewarded
with a peerage. The government used all the powerful methods of
publicity it controlled, including the B.B.C., in a fashion
considerably less than fair, while Labour had few avenues of publicity,
and was financially weak from the depression and the Trades Disputes
Act of 1927. The result was an overwhelming government victory with 458
members supporting it and only 56 in opposition.
The
National government
lasted four years. Its chief domestic accomplishment was the ending of
free trade and the construction of a cartelized economy behind the new
trade barriers. The construction of cartels, the revival of
the
export trade, and the continuance of low food prices gave a mild
economic boom, especially in housing. The ending of free trade split
the Liberal Party into a government group (under Sir John Simon) and an
opposition group (under Sir Herbert Samuel and Sir Archibald Sinclair).
This gave three Liberal splinters, for Lloyd George had never supported
the government.
The
domestic program of the
National government was such as to encourage a cartelized economic
system, and to curtail the personal freedom of individuals. On this,
there was no real protest, for the Labour opposition had a program
which, in fact if not in theory, tended in the same direction.
A
national system of
unemployment insurance was set up in 1933. It required the insurance
fund to be kept solvent by varying contributions with needs. With it
was a relief program, including a means test, which applied to those
not eligible for unemployment insurance. It placed most of the burden
on local governments but put all the control in a centralized
Unemployment Assistance Board. Unemployed youth were sent to training
centers. All educational reform was curtailed, and the project to raise
the school-leaving age from fifteen to sixteen was abandoned.
The
London Passenger Transport
Act of 1933, like the Act creating the B.B.C. seven years earlier,
showed that the Conservatives had no real objection to nationalization
of public utilities. All the transportation system of the London area,
except the railroads, was consolidated under the control of a public
corporation. Private owners were bought out by generous exchange of
securities, and a governing board was set us of trustees representing
various interests.
The
Agricultural Marketing Act
of 1931, as modified in 1933, provided centralized control of the
distribution of certain crops with minimum prices and government
subsidies.
The
police of London, with
jurisdiction over one-sixth the population of England, were reorganized
in 1933 to destroy their obvious sympathy with the working classes.
This was done by restricting all ranks above inspector to persons with
an upper-class education, by training them in a newly created police
college, and by forbidding them to join the Police Federation (a kind
of union). The results of this were immediately apparent in the
contrast between the leniency of the police attitude toward Sir Oswald
Mosley's British Union of Fascists (which beat up British subjects with
relative impunity) and the violence of police action toward even
peaceful anti-Fascist activities. This tolerant attitude toward Fascism
was reflected in both the radio and the cinema.
A
severe Incitement to
Disaffection Act in 1934 threatened to destroy many of the personal
guarantees built up over the centuries by making police search of homes
less restricted and by making the simple possession of material likely
to disaffect the armed forces a crime. It was passed after
severe
criticism and a Lords' debate which continued until 4:00 A. M. For the
first time in three generations, personal freedom and civil rights were
restricted in time of peace. This was done by new laws, by the use of
old laws like the Official Secrets Acts, and by such ominous
innovations as "voluntary" censorship of the press and by judicial
extension of the scope of the libel laws. This development reached its
most dangerous stage with the Prevention of Violence Act of 1939, which
empowers a secretary of state to arrest without warrant and to deport
without trial any person, even a British subject, who has not been
ordinarily resident in England, if he believes such a person is
concerned in the preparation or instigation of acts of violence or is
harboring persons so concerned. Fortunately, these new
strictions
were administered with a certain residue of the old English
good-humored tolerances, and were, for political reasons, rarely
applied to any persons with strong trade-union support.
The
reactionary tendencies of
the National government were most evident in its fiscal policies. For
these, Neville Chamberlain was chiefly responsible. For the first time
in almost a century, there was an increase in the proportion of the
total tax paid by the working classes. For the first time since the
repeal of the corn laws in 1846, there was a tax on food. For the first
time in two generations, there was a reversal in the trend toward more
education for the people. The budget was kept balanced, but at a
considerable price in human suffering and in wastage of Britain's
irreplaceable human resources. By 1939 in the so-called "depressed
areas" of Scotland, of South Wales, and of the northeast coast,
hundreds of thousands had been unemployed for years, and, as the
Pilgrim Fund pointed out, had had their moral fiber completely
destroyed by years of living on an inadequate dole. The
capitalists
of these areas were supported either by government subsidy (as the
Runciman family lined their pockets from shipping subsidies) or were
bought out by cartels and trade associations from funds assessed on the
more active members of the industry (as was done in coal mining, steel,
cement, shipbuilding, and so on).
The
Derating Act of 1929 of
Neville Chamberlain exempted industry from payment of three-quarters of
its taxes under certain conditions. In the period 1930-1937 this saved
industry £170 million, while many unemployed were allowed to
starve. This law was worth about £200,000 a year to Imperial
Chemical Industries. On the other hand Chamberlain, as chancellor of
the Exchequer, insisted on those appropriations for the air force which
ultimately made it possible for the RAF to overcome Göring's
attack in the Battle of Britain in 1940.
The
General Election of 1935,
which gave the Conservatives ten more years in office, was the most
shameful of modern times. It was perfectly clear that the English
people were wholeheartedly for collective security. In the period
November 1934 to June 1935, the League of Nations Union cooperated with
other organizations to hold a "Peace Ballot." Five questions were
asked, of which the most important were the first (Should Britain
remain in the League?) and the fifth (Should Britain use economic or
military sanctions against aggressors?). On the first question the
answers gave 11,090,387 affirmative and 355,883 negative votes. On the
use of economic sanctions, the vote was 10,027,608 affirmative and
635,074 negative. On the use of military sanctions, the vote was
6,784,368 affirmative and 2,31,981 negative.
To
add to this, a by-election
at East Fulham in the spring of 1935 saw a Labour supporter of
collective security defeat a Conservative. The Conservatives resolved
to fight a General Election in support of collective security. Baldwin
replaced MacDonald as prime minister, and Samuel Hoare replaced the
Liberal, Sir John Simon, at the Foreign Office, to make people believe
that the past program of appeasement would be reversed. In
September, Hoare made a vigorous speech at Geneva in which he pledged
Britain's support of collective security to stop the Italian aggression
against Ethiopia. The public did not know that he had stopped off in
Paris en route to Geneva to arrange a secret deal by which Italy would
be given two-thirds of Ethiopia.
The
Royal Jubilee was used
during the spring of 1935 to build up popular enthusiasm for the
Conservative cause. Late in October, a week before the local elections
on which Labour had already spent most of its available funds, the
Conservatives announced a General Election for November 14th, and asked
a popular mandate to support collective security and rearmament. The
Labour Party was left without either an issue or funds to support it,
and in addition was split on the issue of pacifism, the party leaders
in both Lords and Commons refusing to go along with the rest of the
party on the issue of rearmament as a support for collective security.
In
the election the government
lost 83 seats, but the Conservatives still had a majority, with 387
seats to Labour's 154. The Liberal Party was reduced from 34 to 21.
This new government was in office for ten years, and had its attention
devoted, almost exclusively to foreign affairs. In these, until 1940 as
we shall see, it show-cd the same incapacity and the same bias it had
been revealing in its domestic program.
Part
Eleven—Changing Economic Patterns
Chapter
31—Introduction
An
economic system does not
have to be expansive—that is, constantly increasing its
production of wealth—and it might well be possible for people to
be completely happy in a non-expansive economic system if they were
accustomed to it. In the twentieth century, however, the people of our
culture have been living under expansive conditions for generations.
Their minds are psychologically adjusted to expansion, and they feel
deeply frustrated unless they are better off each year than they were
the preceding year. The economic system itself has become organized for
expansion, and if it does not expand it tends to collapse.
The
basic reason for this
maladjustment is that investment has become an essential part of the
system, and if investment falls off, consumers have insufficient
incomes to buy the consumers' goods which are being produced in another
part of the system because part of the flow of purchasing power created
by the production of goods was diverted from purchasing the goods it
had produced into savings, and all the goods produced could not be sold
until those savings came back into the market by being invested. In the
system as a whole, everyone sought to improve his own position in the
short run, but this jeopardized the functioning of the system in the
long run. The contrast here is not merely between the individual and
the system, but also between the long run and the short run.
The Harmony
of Interests
The
nineteenth century had
accepted as one of its basic faiths the theory of "the harmony of
interests." This held that what was good for the individual was good
for society as a w hole and that the general advancement of society
could be achieved best if individuals were left free to seek their own
individual advantages. This harmony was assumed to exist between one
individual and another, between the individual and the group, and
between the short run and the long run. Tn the nineteenth century, such
a theory was perfectly tenable, but in the twentieth century it could
be accepted only with considerable modification. As a result of persons
seeking their individual advantages, the economic organization of
society was so modified that the actions of one such person were very
likely to injure his fellows, the society as a whole, and his own
long-range advantage. This situation led to such a conflict between
theory and practice, between aims and accomplishments, between
individuals and groups that a return to fundamentals in economics
became necessary. Unfortunately, such a return was made difficult
because of the conflict between interests and principles and because of
the difficulty of finding principles in the extraordinary complexity of
twentieth-century economic life.
The Factors
of Economic Progress
The
factors necessary to
achieve economic progress are supplementary to the factors necessary
for production. Production requires the organization of knowledge,
time, energy, materials, land, labor, and so on. Economic progress
requires three additional factors. These are: innovation, savings, and
investment. Unless a society is organized to provide these three, it
will not expand economically. "Innovation" means devising new and
better ways of performing the tasks of production; "saving" means
refraining from consumption of resources so that they can be mobilized
for different purposes; and "investment" means the mobilization of
resources into the new, better ways of production.
The
absence of the third
factor (investment) is the most frequent cause of a failure of economic
progress. It may be absent even when both of the other factors are
working well. In such a case, the savings accumulated are not applied
to inventions but are spent on consumption, on ostentatious social
prestige, on war, on religion, on other nonproductive purposes, or even
left unspent.
Powerful
Groups Seek to Maintain Status Quo
Economic
progress has always
involved shifts in productive resources from old methods to new ones.
Such shifts, however beneficial to certain groups and however welcome
to people as a whole, were bound to be resisted and resented by other
groups who had vested interests in the old ways of doing things and in
the old ways of utilizing resources. In a progressive period, these
vested interests are unable to defend their vested interests to the
point of preventing progress; but, obviously, if the groups in a
society who control the savings which are necessary for progress are
the same vested interests who benefit by the existing way of doing
things, they are in a position to defend these vested interests and
prevent progress merely by preventing the use of surpluses to finance
new inventions. Such a situation is bound to give rise to an economic
crisis. From one narrow point of view, the twentieth century's economic
crisis was a situation of this type. To understand how such a situation
could arise, we must examine the development in the chief capitalist
countries and discover the causes of the crisis.
Chapter 32—Great
Britain
In
Britain, throughout the
nineteenth century, the supply of capital was so plentiful from private
savings that industry was able to finance itself with little recourse
to the banking system. The corporate form was adopted relatively
slowly, and because of the benefits to be derived from limited
liability rather than because it made it possible to appeal to a
widespread public for equity capital. Savings were so plentiful that
the surplus had to be exported, and interest rates fell steadily.
Promoters and investment bankers were not much interested in domestic
industrial securities (except railroads), and for most of the century
concentrated their attention on government bonds (both foreign and
domestic) and on foreign economic enterprises. Financial capitalism
first appeared in foreign securities, and found a fruitful field of
operations. The corporation law (as codified in 1862) was very lenient.
There were few restrictions on formations of companies, and none on
false prospectuses or false financial reports. Holding companies were
not legally recognized until 1928, and no consolidated balance sheet
was required then. As late as 1933, of 111 British investment trusts
only 52 published a record of their holdings.
Secrecy Is
One of the Elements of the English
Business and
Financial Life
This
element of secrecy is one
of the outstanding features of English business and financial life. The
weakest "right" an Englishman has is the "right to know," which is
about as narrow as it is in American nuclear operations. Most duties,
powers, and actions in business are controlled by customary procedures
and conventions, not by explicit rules and regulations, and are often
carried out by casual remarks between old friends. No record
perpetuates such remarks, and they are generally regarded as private
affairs which are no concern of others, even when they involve millions
of pounds of the public's money. Although this situation is changing
slowly, the inner circle of English financial life remains a matter of
"whom one knows," rather than "what one knows." Jobs are still obtained
by family, marriage, or school connections; character is considered far
more important than knowledge or skill; and important positions, on
this basis, are given to men who have no training, experience, or
knowledge to qualify them.
The Core of
English Financial Society Consists of 17 Private
International
Banking Firms
As
part of this system and at
the core of English financial life have been seventeen private firms of
"merchant bankers" who find money for established and wealthy
enterprises on either a long-term (investment) or a short-term
("acceptances") basis. These merchant bankers, with a total of less
than a hundred active partners, include the firms of Baring Brothers,
N. M. Rothschild, J. Henry Schroder, Morgan Grenfell, Hambros, and
Lazard Brothers. These merchant bankers in the period of financial
capitalism had a dominant position with the Bank of England and,
strangely enough, still have retained some of this, despite the
nationalization of the Bank by the Labour government in 1946. As late
as 1961 a Baring (Lord Cromer) was named governor of the bank, and his
board of directors, called the "Court" of the bank, included
representatives of Lazard, of Hambros, and of Morgan Grenfell, as well
as of an industrial firm (English Electric) controlled by these.
The Heyday of
English Financial Capitalism
The
heyday of English
financial capitalism is associated with the governorship of Montagu
Norman from 1920 to 1944, but it began about a century after the advent
of industrial capitalism, with the promotion of Guinness, Ltd., by
Barings in 1886, and continued with the creation of Allsopps, Ltd., by
the Westminster Bank in 1887. In the latter year, only 10,000 companies
were in existence although the creation of companies had been about
1,000 a year in the 1870's and about 1,000 a year in the 1880's. Of the
companies registered, about a third fell bankrupt in their first year.
This is a very large fraction when we consider that about one-half the
companies created were private companies which did not offer securities
to the public and presumably already were engaged in a flourishing
business.... In two years (1894-1896) E. T. Hooley promoted twenty-six
corporations with various noble lords as the directors of each. The
total capital of this group was £18.6 million, of which Hooley
took £5 million for himself.
Money Power
Exercises Its Influence through Interlocking
Directorates
and Direct Financial Controls
From
this date onward,
financial capitalism grew rapidly in Britain, without ever achieving
the heights it did in the United States or Germany. Domestic concerns
remained small, owner-managed, and relatively unprogressive (especially
in the older lines like textiles, iron, coal, shipbuilding). One chief
field of exploitation for British financial capitalism continued to be
in foreign countries until the crash of 1931. Only after 1920 did it
spread tentatively into newer fields like machinery, electrical goods,
and chemicals, and in these it was superseded almost at once by
monopoly capitalism.... In addition, its rule was relatively honest (in
contrast to the United States but similar to Germany). It made little
use of holding companies, exercising its influence by interlocking
directorates and direct financial controls. It died relatively easily,
yielding control of the economic system to the new organizations of
monopoly capitalism constructed by men like William H. Lever, Viscount
Leverhulme (1851-1925) or Alfred M. Mond, Lord Melchett (1868-1930).
The former created a great international monopoly in vegetable oils
centering upon Unilever, while the latter created the British chemical
monopoly known as Imperial Chemical Industries.
Banking
Control of Government throughout the World
Financial
capitalism in
Britain, as elsewhere, was marked not only by a growing financial
control of industry but also by an increasing concentration of this
control and by an increasing banking control of government. As we have
seen, this influence of the Bank of England over the government was an
almost unmitigated disaster for Britain. The power of the bank in
business circles was never as complete as it was in government, because
British businesses remained self-financing to a greater extent than
those of other countries. This self-financing power of business in
Britain depended on the advantage which it held because of the early
arrival of industrialism in England. As other countries became
industrialized, reducing Britain's advantage and her extraordinary
profits, British business was forced to seek outside financial aid or
reduce its creation of capital plant. Both methods were used, with the
result that financial capitalism grew at the same time as considerable
sections of Britain's capital plant became obsolete.
The Money
Trust Became Increasingly Concentrated and
Powerful in
the Twentieth Century
The
control of the Bank of
England over business was exercised indirectly through the joint-stock
banks. These banks became increasingly concentrated and increasingly
powerful in the twentieth century. The number of such banks decreased
through amalgamation from 109 in 1866 to 35 in 1919 and to 33 in 1933.
This growth of a "money trust" in Britain led to an investigation by a
Treasury Committee on Bank Amalgamations. In its report (Colwyn Report,
1919) this committee admitted the danger and called for government
action. A bill was drawn up to prevent further concentration but was
withdrawn when the bankers made a "gentlemen's agreement" to ask
Treasury permission for future amalgamations. The net result was to
protect the influence of the Bank of England, since this might have
been reduced by complete monopolization of joint-stock banking, and the
bank was always in a position to influence the Treasury's attitude on
all questions. Of the 33 joint-stock banks existing in 1933, 9 were in
Ireland and 8 in Scotland, leaving only 16 for England and Wales. The
33 together had over £2,500 million in deposits in April 1933, of
which £1,773 million were in the so-called "Big Five" (Midland,
Lloyds, Barclays, Westminster, and National Provincial). The Big Five
controlled at least 7 of the other 28 (in one case by ownership of 98
percent of the stock). Although competition among the Big Five was
usually keen, all were subject to the powerful influence of the Bank of
England, as exercised through the discount rate, interlocking
directorships, and above all through the intangible influences of
tradition, ambition, and prestige.
Finance
Capitalism Paves the Way for Monopoly
Capitalism to
Flourish
In
Britain, as elsewhere, the
influence of financial capitalism served to create the conditions of
monopoly capitalism not only by creating monopoly conditions (which
permitted industry to free itself from financial dependency on banks)
but also by insisting on those deflationary, orthodox financial
policies which eventually alienated industrialists from financiers.
Although monopoly capitalism began to grow in Britain as far back as
the British Salt Union of 1888 (which controlled 91 percent of the
British supply), the victory of monopoly capitalism over financial
capitalism did not arrive until 1931. By that year the structure of
monopoly capitalism was well organized. The Board of Trade reported in
1918 that Britain had 500 restrictive trade associations. In that same
year the Federation of British Industries (FBI) had as members 129
trade associations and 704 firms. It announced that its goals would be
the regulation of prices, the curtailment of competition, and the
fostering of cooperation in technical matters, in politics, and in
publicity. By 1935 it had extended this scope to include (a)
elimination of excess productive capacity, (b)
restrictions on entry of new firms into a field, and (c)
increasing duress on both members and outsiders to obey minimum-price
regulations and production quotas. This last ability was steadily
strengthened in the period 1931-1940. Probably the greatest achievement
in this direction was a decision of the House of Lords, acting as a
Supreme Court, which permitted the use of duress against outsiders in
order to enforce restrictive economic agreements (the case of Thorne v.
Motor Trade Association decided June 4, 1937).
Giant
Monopolies Control the Banking System
The
year 1931 represented for
Britain the turning point from financial to monopoly capitalism. In
that year financial capitalism, which had held the British economy in
semi-depression for a decade, achieved its last great victory when the
financiers led by Montagu Norman and J. P. Morgan forced the
resignation of the British Labour government. But the handwriting was
already on the wall. Monopoly had already grown to such a degree that
it aspired to make the banking system its ... [ally] instead of its
master. The deflationary financial policy of the bankers had alienated
politicians and industrialists and driven monopolist trade unions to
form a united front against the bankers.
The Revolt of
the British Fleet
This
was clearly evident in
the Conference on Industrial Reorganization and Relationships of April
1928. This meeting contained representatives of the Trade Union
Congress and the Employers' Federation and issued a Memorandum
to
the chancellor of the Exchequer signed by Sir Alfred Mond of Imperial
Chemicals and Ben Turner of the trade unions. Similar declarations were
issued by other monopolist groups, but the split of monopolist
capitalists and of financial capitalists could not become overt until
the latter were able to get rid of the Labour government. Once that was
achieved, labor and industry were united in opposition to the
continuance of the bankers' economic policy with its low prices and
high unemployment. The decisive event which caused the end of financial
capitalism in Britain was the revolt of the British fleet at
Invergordon on September 15, 1931, and not the abandonment of gold six
days later. [Actually the powers of financial capitalism and monopoly
capitalism have been cooperating to build and sustain the international
financial system and the international economic system.]The mutiny made
it clear that the policy of deflation must be ended. As a result, no
real effort was made to defend the gold standard.
The Adoption
of Protective Tariffs
With
the abandonment of gold
and the adoption of a protective tariff, monopolist capital and labor
joined in an effort to raise both wages and profits by a program of
higher prices and restrictions on production. The old monopolies and
cartels increased in strength and new ones were formed, usually with
the blessing of the government. These groups enforced restrictive
practices on their members and on outsiders even to the extent of
buying up and destroying productive capacity in their own lines. In
some cases, as in agricultural products and in coal, these efforts were
based on statute law, but in most cases they were purely private
ventures. In no case did the government make any real effort to protect
consumers against exploitation. In 1942 a capable observer, Hermann
Levy, wrote, "Today Britain is the only highly industrialized country
in the world where no attempt has yet been made to restrict the
domination of quasi-monopolist associations in industry and trade." It
is true that the government did not accept the suggestions of Lord
Melchett and of the Federation of British Industries that cartels and
trade associations be made compulsory, but it gave such free rein to
these groups in the use of their economic power that the compulsory
aspect became largely unnecessary. By economic and social pressure
individuals who refused to adopt the restrictive practices favored by
the industry as a whole were forced to yield or were ruined. This, for
example, was done to a steel manufacturer who insisted on constructing
a continuous-strip steel mill in 1940.
Restrictive
Practices
Among
the producing groups,
social pressures were added to economic duress to enforce restrictive
practices. A tradition of inefficiency, high prices, and low output
became so entrenched that anyone who questioned it was regarded as
socially unacceptable and almost a traitor to Britain. As The
Economist, the
only important voice in the country which resisted this trend, said (on
January 8, 1944) " . . . too few British business men are trying to
compete. In these days, to say that a firm has so increased its
efficiency that it can sell at low prices is not to give praise for
initiative and enterprise, but to criticize it for breaking the rules
of 'fair' trading and indulging in the ultimate sin of 'cut-throat'
competition."
No
detailed analysis of the
methods or organization of these restrictive groups can be made here,
but a few examples may be indicated. The Coal Mines Act of 1930 set up
an organization which allotted production quotas to each colliery and
fixed minimum prices. The National Shipbuilders Security, Ltd., was set
up in 1930 and began to buy up and destroy shipyards, using funds from
a million-pound bond issue whose service charges were met from a 1
percent levy on construction contracts. By 1934 one-quarter of
Britain's shipbuilding capacity had been eliminated. The Millers'
Mutual Association (1920) entirely suppressed competition among its
members, and set up the Purchase Finance Company to buy up and destroy
flour mills, using funds secured by a secret levy on the industry. By
1933 over one-sixth of the flour mills in England had been eliminated.
In textiles the Lancashire Cotton Corporation acquired ro million
cotton spindles in three years (1934-1937) and scrapped about half of
these, while the Spindles Board scrapped about 2 million spindles in
one year (1936-1937). In spite of the growing international crisis,
these restrictive actions continued unabated until May 1940, but the
drive toward total mobilization by the Churchill government brought a
fuller utilization of resources in Britain than in any other country.
The
Conservative Party in Britain Represent the Bankers
This
wartime experience with
full employment made it impossible to return to the semi-stagnation and
partial use of resources which had prevailed under financial capitalism
in the 1930'5. However, the economic future of Britain in the postwar
period was much hampered by the fact that the two opposing political
parties represented entrenched economic interests and were not a rather
amorphous groupings of diverse interests as in the United States. The
Labour Party, which held office from 1945 to 1951 under Clement Attlee,
represents the interests of labor unions and, in a more remote fashion,
of consumers The Conservative Party, which held office under Churchill,
Eden, Macmillan, and Douglas-Home after 1951 represents the propertied
classes, and still continues to show strong banking influence. This has
created a kind of balance in which a welfare state has been
established, but at the cost of slow inflation and slack use of
resources.
Consumption
and enjoyment of
leisure rather than production have been the marks of the British
economy even under the Conservative Party, which has shown more concern
for the value of the pound in the foreign exchanges than it has for
productive investment. The middle classes and, above all, the
professional and educated groups are not directly represented by either
party. By their shift from one of these alien parties to the other,
they can determine the outcome of elections, but they are not really at
home in either and may, ultimately, turn back to the Liberal Party,
although they are reluctant to embark upon the period of coalition, and
the relatively irresponsible governments this might entail.
Class
Structure in Britain
The
class structure in
Britain, which has survived the war in spite of steady attrition, is
still being eroded, not by any drastic increase in working-class people
rising into the upper class; but by the development of the third class
which belongs to neither of the old classes. This new group included
the people with "know-how," managers, scientists, professional men,
imaginative parvenu entrepreneurs in lines which the older possessing
class had ignored. These newly established rich now try to ignore the
older upper class, and frequently show surprising resentments toward
it. As this new, amorphous, vigorous group ... blurs the outlines of
the two older classes. Much of this blurring has been the result of
adoption of upper-class characteristics by non-upperclass persons.
Increasing numbers of young people are adopting the British
Broadcasting Corporation accent, which makes it increasingly difficult
to establish the class, educational, and geographic origin of a
speaker. Closely related to this is the improved appearance and health
of the ordinary Englishman as a consequence of rising standards of
living in general and the advent of the National Health service in
particular. The loss of these two identifying characteristics leaves
clothing as the chief class distinctive mark, but this applies only to
men. Many women, as the result of the wide spreading of style magazines
and the influence of the cinema, wear similar dresses, use the same
cosmetics, and adopt the same hair arrangements. Today, even relatively
poor shop-girls are often well dressed and invariably are attractively
clean and carefully coiffured.
Large Blocks
of Interest Groups
As
in most other countries in
the postwar world, Britain's economy is increasingly made up of large
blocs of interest groups whose shifting alignments determine economic
policy within the three-cornered area of consumers' living standards,
investment needs, and governmental expenditures (chiefly defense). All
these diverse interest groups are increasingly monopolistic in
organization, and increasingly convinced of the need for planning for
their own interests, but the major factor in the picture is no longer
the banking fraternity, as it was before the war, but the government
through the Treasury. [The bankers are now sharing power with the new
groups of wealth and the transnational corporations.]
The Increase
in Power of the Giant Monopolies
This
decrease in the power of
the bankers, [power is now being shared with new financial groups] with
a corresponding increase in that of other groups, including the
government, is not the result of any new laws, such as the
nationalization of the Bank of England, but of shifts in the flows of
investment funds, which increasingly bypass the banks. Many of the
largest industrial enterprises, such as British Imperial Chemicals or
Shell Oil, are largely self-financing as a result of monopolistic
conditions based on cartels, patent controls, or control of scarce
resources. At the same time, the great mass of investment funds come
from non-banking sources. About half of such funds now comes from
government and public authorities, such as the National Coal Board,
which produces £17 million a year in new money
seeking
investment. Insurance companies (concerned with non-life policies) are
fairly closely linked with the older banking structure, as they are in
most countries, but the banks ignored insurance on lives, which in
England developed as a lower-class concern, paid by weekly or monthly
premiums through door-to-door collections. These insurance companies in
Britain provide £1.5 million a day in money seeking investment
(1961), and the largest company' the Prudential, pours out £2
million a week. Much of this goes into industrial shares. In 1953, when
the Conservative Party denationalized the steel industry, which Labour
had nationalized in 1948, much of its shares were bought up by funds
from insurance companies. These enormous funds create a great danger
that the handful of unknown men who handle the investment of such funds
could become a centralized power in British economic life. So far they
have made no effort to do so, since they supply funds without
interfering in the existing management of the corporations in which
they invest. They are satisfied with an adequate return on their money,
but the possibility of such control exists.
Lower Class
Distaste for Banks
Another
source of funds from
lower-class sources is the Postal Savings system. This has expanded
because the lower classes in England regard banks as alien, upper-class
institutions, and prefer to put their savings somewhere else. As a
result, Postal Savings at over £6,000 millions are about the same
size as the deposits of all the eleven joint-stock banks.
Somewhat
similar in character
are the investments of pension funds, which reached a total of about £2,000 million at
the end of 1960 and are increasing at about £150 million a year.
Pressure Upon
Britain by International Institutions
Two
other lower-class
non-banking innovations which have been having revolutionary influences
on British life are the building societies (called "building and loan"
in the United States) and "hire-purchase" associations
(installment-buying organizations) which help the lower classes to
acquire homes and to equip them. Together, these have wiped away much
of the traditional dinginess of English lower-class life, brightening
it up with amenities which have contributed to increase the solidarity
of family life. Slum clearance and rebuilding by local government
bodies (the so-called Council houses) have added to this. One
consequence of the flowing of investment funds outside the control of
the banks has been that the traditional controls on consumption and
investment by the use of changes of bank rates have become decreasingly
effective. This has had the double effect of damping down the movements
of the business cycle and shifting such controls to the government,
which can regulate consumption by such devices as changes in the terms
of installment buying (larger down payments and carrying charges). At
the same time, Britain's formerly independent role in all these matters
has come increasingly under the influence of outside, uncontrollable
influences, such as business conditions in the United States, the
competition of the European Common Market, and the pressures of various
international agencies, such as the International Monetary Fund. The
final result is a complex and increasingly feudalized social-welfare
economy in which managers ... [and] owners share power in a complicated
dynamic system whose chief features are still largely unknown even to
serious students.
Chapter 33—Germany
While
Britain passed through
the stages of capitalism in this fashion, Germany was passing through
the same stages in a different way.
In
Germany, capital was scarce
when industrialism arrived. Because savings from commerce, overseas
trade, or small artisan shops were much less than in Britain, the stage
of owner-management was relatively short. Industry found itself
dependent upon banks almost at once. These banks were quite different
from those in England, since they were "mixed" and not divided into
separate establishments for different banking functions. The chief
German credit banks, founded in the period 1848-1881, were at the same
time savings banks, commercial banks, promotion and investment banks,
stockbrokers, safety deposits, and so on. Their relationship to
industry was close and intimate from the creation of the
Darmstädter Bank in 1853. These banks floated securities for
industry by granting credit to the firm, taking securities in return.
These securities were then slowly sold to the investing public as the
opportunity offered, the bank retaining enough stock to give it control
and appointing its men as directors of the enterprise to give that
control final form.
The
Importance of Interlocking Directorates
The
importance of the holding
of securities by banks can be seen from the fact that in 1908 the
Dresdner Bank was holding 2 billion marks' worth. The importance of
interlocking directorates can be seen from the fact that the same bank
had its directors on the boards of over two hundred industrial concerns
in 1913. In 1929, at the time of the amalgamation of the Deutsche Bank
and the Disconto Gesellschaft, the two together had directorships in
660 industrial firms and held the chairmanship of the board in 192 of
these. Before 1914, examples of individuals with thirty or even forty
directorships were not uncommon.
Banking
Control of Industry
This
banking control of
industry was made even closer by the use which the banks made of their
positions as brokers and depositories for securities. The German credit
banks acted as stockbrokers, and most investors left their securities
on deposit with the banks so that they could be available for quick
sale if needed. The banks voted all this stock for directorships and
other control measures, unless the owners of the stock expressly
forbade it (which was very rare). In 1929 a law was passed preventing
the banks from voting stocks deposited with them unless this had been
expressly permitted by the owners. The change was of little
significance, since by 1929 financial capitalism was on the wane in
Germany. Moreover, permission to vote deposited stock was rarely
refused. The banks also voted as a right all stock left as collateral
for loans and all stock bought on margin. Unlike the situation in
America, stocks bought on margin were considered to be the property of
the bank (acting as stockbrokers) until the whole price has been paid.
The importance of the stock-brokerage business to German banks may be
seen in the fact that in the twenty-four years 1885-1908 one-quarter of
the gross profits of the large credit banks came from commissions. This
is all the more remarkable when we consider that the brokerage
commissions charged by German banks were very small (sometimes as low
as one-half per thousand).
A Highly
Centralized Financial Capitalism Built in Germany
By
methods such as these, a
highly centralized financial capitalism was built up in Germany. The
period begins with the founding of the Darmstädter Bank in 1853.
This was the first bank to establish a permanent, systematic control of
the corporations it floated. It also was the first to use promotion
syndicates (in 1859). Other banks followed this example, and the
outburst of promotion reached a peak of activity and corruption in the
four years 1870-1874. In these four years, 857 stock companies with
3,306,810,000 marks of assets were floated, compared to 295 companies
with 2,405,000,000 in assets in the preceding nineteen years
(1851-1870). Of these 857 companies founded in 1870-1874, 123 were in
the process of liquidation and 37 were bankrupt as early as September
1874.
German
Bankers Consolidate Control of Industrial Corporations
These
excesses of financial
capitalist promotion led to a governmental investigation which resulted
in a strict law regulating promotion in 1883. This law made it
impossible for German bankers to make fortunes out of promotion and
made it necessary for them to seek the same ends by consolidating their
control of industrial corporations on a long-term basis. This was quite
different from the United States, where the absence of any legal
regulation of promotion previous to the SEC Act of 1933 made it more
likely that investment bankers would seek to make short-term "killings"
from promotions rather than long-term gains from the control of
industrial companies. Another result is to be seen in the relatively
sounder financing of German corporations through equity capital rather
than through the more burdensome (but promoter-favored) method of fixed
interest bonds.
Germany Was
Controlled by a Highly Centralized Oligarchy
The
financial capitalism of
Germany was at its peak in the years just before 1914. It was
controlled by a highly centralized oligarchy. At the center was the
Reichsbank whose control over the other banks was relatively weak at
all times. This was welcomed by the financial oligarchy, for the
Reichsbank, although privately owned, was controlled by the government
to a considerable degree. The weakness of the Reichsbank's influence
over the banking system arose from the weakness of its influence over
the two usual instruments of central-banking control—the
re-discount rate and open-market operations. The weakness of the former
was based on the fact that the other banks rarely came to the
Reichsbank for re-discounts, and usually had a discount rate below that
of the Reichsbank. A law of 1899 tried to overcome this weakness by
forcing the other banks to adjust their discount rates to that of the
Reichsbank, but it was never a very effective instrument of control.
Open-market control was also weak because of an official German
reluctance "to speculate" in government securities and because the
other banks were more responsive to the condition of their portfolios
of commercial paper and securities than they were to the size of their
gold reserves. In this they were like French rather than British banks.
Only in 1909 did the Reichsbank begin a deliberate policy of control
through open-market operations, and it was never effective. It was
ended completely from 1914 to 1929 by the war, the inflation, and the
restrictions of the Dawes Plan.
Control of
German Financial Capitalism Rested in Private Hands
Because
of these weaknesses of
the Reichsbank, the control of German financial capitalism rested in
the credit banks. This is equivalent to saying that it was largely
beyond the control of the government, and rested in private hands.
Of
the hundreds of German
credit banks, the overwhelming preponderance of power was in the hands
of the eight so-called "Great Banks." These were the masters of the
German economy from 1865 to 1915. Their overwhelming position can be
seen from the fact that of 421 German credit banks in 1907 with
13,204,220,000 marks capital, the eight Great Banks held 44 percent of
the total capital of the group. Moreover, the position of the Great
Banks was better than this because the Great Banks controlled numerous
other banks. In consequence, Robert Franz, editor of Der
Deutsche Oekonomist, estimated in 1907 that the eight Great
Banks controlled 74 percent of the capital assets of all 421 banks.
The Power and
Control of the Stinnes Combine
...
The turning point from
financial to monopoly capitalism was in the year or so following the
end of the inflation (1924). In that year the inflation was ended,
cartels were given a special legal status with their own Cartel Court
to settle disputes, and the greatest creation of financial control ever
constructed by German financial capitalism collapsed. The inflation
ended in November 1923. The Cartel Decree was November ', 1923. The
great control structure was the Stinnes combine, which began to fall
apart at the death of Hugo Stinnes in April 19.4. At that time Stinnes
had complete control of 107 large enterprises (mostly heavy industry
and shipping) and had important interests in about 4,500 other
companies. The attempt (and failure) of Stinnes to turn this structure
of financial controls into an integrated monopoly marks the end of
financial capitalism in Germany.
To
be sure, the great need for
capital on the part of German industry in the period after 1924 (since
so much of German savings was wiped out by the inflation) gave a false
afterglow to the setting sun of German financial capitalism. In five
years, billions of marks were supplied to German industry through
financial channels from loans made outside Germany. But the depression
of 1929 to 1934 revealed the falsity of this appearance. As a result of
the depression, all the Great Banks but one had to be rescued by the
German government, which took over their capital stock in return. In
1937 these banks that had come under government ownership were
"re-privatized," but by that time industry had largely escaped from
financial control.
German
Oligarchy Uses Direct Financial Pressure and Interlocking
Directorates
to Integrate Enterprises and Reduce Competition
The
beginnings of monopoly
capitalism in Germany goes back at least a generation before the First
World War. As early as 1870, the financial capitalists, using direct
financial pressure as well as their system of interlocking directors,
were working to integrate enterprises and reduce competition. In the
older lines of activity, such as coal, iron, and steel, they tended to
use cartels. In the newer lines, like electrical supplies and
chemicals, they tended to use great monopolistic firms for this
purpose. There are no official figures on cartels before 1905 but it is
believed that there were 250 cartels in 1896, of which 80 were in iron
and steel. The official investigation of cartels made by the Reichstag
in 1905 revealed 385, of which 92 were in coal and metals. Shortly
after this, the government began to help these cartels, the most famous
example of this being a law of 1910 which forced potash manufacturers
to become members of the potash cartel.
The Financial
Oligarchy Takes Over Complete Control of the
German
Economic System
In
1923 there were 1,500
cartels, according to the Federation of German Industrialists. They
were, as we have seen, given a special legal status and a special court
the following year. By the time of the financial collapse of 1931 there
were 2,500 cartels, and monopoly capitalism had grown to such an extent
that it was prepared to take over complete control of the German
economic system. As the banks fell under government control, private
control of the economic system was assured by releasing it from its
subservience to the banks. This was achieved by legislation such as
that curtailing interlocking directorates and the new corporation law
of 1937, but above all by the economic fact that the growth of large
enterprises and of cartels had put industry in a position where it was
able to finance itself without seeking help from the banks.
The German
Oligarchy Was Organized in a Highly Complex
and Intricate
Hierarchy
This
new privately managed
monopoly capitalism was organized in an intricate hierarchy whose
details could be unraveled only by a lifetime of study. The size of
enterprises had grown so big that in most fields a relatively small
number were able to dominate the field. In addition, there was a very
considerable amount of interlocking directorates and ownership by one
corporation of the capital stock of another. Finally, cartels working
between corporations fixed prices, markets, and output quotas for all
important industrial products. An example of this—not by any
means the worst—could be found in the German coal industry in
1937. There were 260 mining companies. Of the total output, 21
companies had 90 percent, 5 had 50 percent, and 1 had 14 percent. These
mines were organized into five cartels of which I controlled 81 percent
of the output, and 2 controlled 94 percent. And finally, most coal
mines (69 percent of total output) were owned subsidiaries of other
corporations which used coal, producers either of metals (54 percent of
total coal output) or of chemicals (10 percent of total output).
Similar
concentration existed
in most other lines of economic activity. In ferrous metals in 1929, 3
firms out of 26 accounted for 68.8 percent of all German pig-iron
production; 4 out of 49 produced 68.3 percent of all crude steel; 3 out
of 59 produced 55.8 percent of all rolling mill products. In 1943, one
firm (United Steel Works) produced 40 percent of all German steel
production, while 12 firms produced over 90 percent. Competition could
never exist with concentration as complete as this, but in addition the
steel industry was organized into a series of steel cartels (one for
each product). These cartels, which began about 1890, by 1930 had
control of 100 percent of the German output of ferrous metal products.
Member firm had achieved this figure by buying up the nonmembers in the
years before 1930. These cartels managed prices, production, and
markets within Germany, enforcing their decisions by means of fines or
boycotts. They were also members of the International Steel Cartel,
modeled on Germany's steel cartel and dominated by it. The
International Cartel controlled two-fifths of the world's steel
production and five-sixths of the total foreign trade in steel. The
ownership of iron and steel enterprises in Germany is obscure but
obviously highly concentrated. In 1932, Friedrich Flick had majority
ownership of Gelsen-Kirchner Bergwerke, which had majority control of
the United Steel Works. He sold his control to the German government
for 167 percent of its value by threatening to sell it to a French
firm. After Hitler came into power, this ownership by the government
was "re-privatized" so that government ownership was reduced to 25
percent. Four other groups had 41 percent among them, and these were
closely interwoven. Flick remained as director of United Steel Works
and was chairman of the boards of four other great steel combines. In
addition, he was director or chairman of the boards in six iron and
coal mines, as well as of numerous other important enterprises. It is
very likely that the steel industry of Germany in 1937 was controlled
by no more than five men of whom Flick was the most important.
The
Tremendous Power of the I. G. Farben Monopoly
These
examples of the growth
of monopoly capitalism in Germany are merely picked at random and are
by no means exceptional. Another famous example can be found in the
growth of I. G. Farbenindustrie, the German chemical organization. This
was formed in 1904 of three chief firms, and grew steadily until after
its last reorganization in 1926 it controlled about two-thirds of
Germany's output of chemicals. It spread into every branch of industry,
concentrating chiefly on dyes (in which it had 100 percent monopoly),
drugs, plastics, explosives, and light metals. It had been said that
Germany could not have fought either of the world wars without I. G.
Farben. In the first war, by the Haber process for extracting nitrogen
from the air, it provided supplies of explosives and fertilizers when
the natural sources in Chile were cut off. In the second war, it
provided numerous absolute necessities, of which artificial rubber and
synthetic motor fuels were the most important. This company by the
Second World War was the largest enterprise in Germany. It had over
2,332.8 million reichsmarks in assets and 1,165 million in
capitalization in 1942. It had about 100 important subsidiaries in
Germany, and employed 350,000 persons in those in which it was directly
concerned. It had interests in about 700 corporations outside Germany
and had entered into over 500 restrictive agreements with foreign
concerns.
The European
Dye Cartel
Among
these agreements the
most significant was the European Dyestuff Cartel. This grew out of a
Swiss cartel formed in 1918. When I. G. Farben was reorganized in 1925
and a similar French organization (Kuhlmann group) was set up in 1927,
these two formed a French-German cartel. All three countries set up the
European Cartel in 1929. Imperial Chemicals, which had won a near
monopoly in British territory in 1926, joined the European Cartel in
1931. This British group already had a comprehensive agreement with du
Pont in the United States (made in 1929 and revised in 1939). An effort
by I. G. Farben to create a joint monopoly with du Pont within the
United States broke down after years of negotiation in a dispute over
whether division of control should be 50-50 or 51-49. Nevertheless, I.
G. Farben made many individual cartel agreements with du Pont and other
American corporations, some formal, others "gentlemen's agreements." In
its own field of dyestuffs, it set up a series of subsidiaries in the
United States which were able to control 40 percent of the American
output. To ensure I. G. Farben control of these subsidiaries, a
majority of Germans was placed on each board of directors, and Dietrich
Schmitz was sent to the United States to become a naturalized American
citizen and become the managing head of the chief I. G. Farben
subsidiary here. Dietrich Schmitz was a brother of Hermann Schmitz,
chairman of the board of I. G. Farben, director of the United Steel
Works. of Metallgesellschaft (the German light-metals trust), of the
Bank for International Settlements, and of a score of other important
firms. This policy of penetration into the United States was also used
in other countries.
The Entire
German Industrial System Controlled by the Elite through
Personal
Friendships and Secret Agreements
While
I. G. Farben was the
greatest example of concentrated control in German monopoly capitalism,
it was by no means untypical. The process of concentration by 1939 had
been carried to a degree which can hardly be overemphasized. The
Kilgore Committee of the United States Senate in 1945 decided, after a
study of captured German records, that I. G. Farben and United Steel
Works together could dominate the whole German industrial system. Since
so much of this domination was based on personal friendships and
relationships, on secret agreements and contracts, on economic
pressures and duress as well as on property and other obvious control
rights, it is not something which can be demonstrated by statistics.
But even the statistics give evidence of a concentration of economic
power. In Germany in 1936 there were about 40,000 limited-liability
companies, with total nominal capitalization of about 20,000 million
reichsmarks. I. G. Farben and United Steel Works had 1,344 million
reichsmarks of this capital. A mere 18 companies out of the 40,000 had
one-sixth of the total working capital of all companies.
Powerful
Monopolies Hidden in Various Countries of the World
While
monopolistic
organization of economic life reached its peak in Germany, the
differences in this respect between Germany and other countries have
been overemphasized. It was a difference of degree only, and, even in
degree, Britain, Japan, and a number of smaller countries were not so
far behind the German development as one might believe at first glance.
The error arose from two causes. On the one hand, German cartels and
monopolies were well publicized, while similar organizations in other
countries remained in hiding. As the British Committee on Trusts
reported in 1929, "What is notable among British consolidations and
associations is not their rarity or weakness so much as their
unobtrusiveness." It is possible that the British vegetable-oil
monopoly around Unilever was as powerful as the German chemical
monopoly around I. G. Farben, but, while much has been heard about the
latter, very little is heard about the former. After an effort to study
the former, Fortune magazine wrote, "No other
industry, perhaps, is quite so exasperatingly secretive as the soap and
shortening industries."
I. G. Farben
Used Espionage and Economic Sabotage to Enhance
Power of the
Money Trust in Germany
On
the other hand, Germany
monopolistic organizations have built up disfavor because of their
readiness to be used for nationalistic purposes. German cartel managers
were ... first ... businessmen seeking profits and [patriotic Germans]
... second. In most other countries (especially the United States),
monopoly capitalists are businessmen first and patriots later. As a
result, the goals of German cartels were as frequently political as
economic. I. G. Farben and others were constantly working to help
Germany in its struggle for power, by espionage, by gaining economic
advantages for Germany, and by seeking to cripple the ability of other
countries to mobilize their resources or to wage war.
The Money
Power Used Nazism to Check Bolshevism
This
difference in attitude
between German and other capitalists became increasingly evident in the
1930's. In that decade the German found his economic and his patriotic
motives impelling him in the same direction (to build up the power and
wealth of Germany against Russia and the West). The capitalists of
France, Britain, and the United States, on the other hand, frequently
experienced conflicting motives. Bolshevism presented itself as an
economic threat ... at the same time that Nazism presented itself as a
political threat to their countries. Many persons were willing to
neglect or even increase the latter threat in order to use it against
the former danger.
Powerful
Figures Maintain Favorable Attitude Toward Nazism
This
difference in attitude
between German and other capitalists arose from many causes. Among
these were (a) the contrast between the German
tradition of a national economy and the Western tradition of
laissez-faire, (b)
the fact that world depression caused the threat of social revolution
to appear before Nazism rose as a political danger to the West, (c)
the fact that cosmopolitan financial capitalism was replaced more
rapidly by nationalist monopoly capitalism in Germany than in the West,
and (d) the fact that many wealthy and influential persons like Montagu
Norman, Ivar Kreuger, Basil Zaharoff, and Henri Deterding directed
public attention to the danger of Bolshevism while maintaining a
neutral, or favorable, attitude toward Nazism.
German
Economic Revival After World War II
The
impact of the war on
Germany was quite different from its effects on most other countries.
In France, Britain, and the United States, the war played a significant
role in demonstrating conclusively that economic stagnation and
underemployment of resources were not necessary and could be avoided if
the financial system were subordinated to the economic system. In
Germany this was not necessary, since the Nazis had already made this
discovery in the 1930's. On the other hand, the destruction of the war
left Germany with a large task to do, the rebuilding of the German
industrial plant. But, since Germany could not get to that task until
it had its own government, the masses of Germans suffered great
hardships in the five years 1945-1950, so that, by the time the proper
political conditions arrived to allow the task of rebuilding, these
masses of German labor were eager for almost any job and were more
concerned with making a living wage than they were with seeking to
raise their standards of living. This readiness to accept low wages,
which is one of the essential features of the German economic revival,
was increased by the influx of surging millions of poverty-stricken
refugees from the Soviet-occupied East. Thus a surplus of labor, low
wages, experience in unorthodox financial operations, and an immense
task to be done all contributed to the German revival.
The
Development of the European Economic Community
The
signal for this to begin
was given by the West German currency reform of 1950, which encouraged
investment and offered entrepreneurs the possibility of large profits
from the state's tax policies. The whole developed into a great boom
when the establishment of the European Common Market of seven western
European states offered Germany a mass market for mass production just
as the rebuilding of German industry was well organized. The
combination of low wages, a docile labor force, new equipment, and a
system of low taxes on producers, plus the absence of any need for
several years to assume the expense of defense expenditures, all
contributed to make German production costs low on the world's markets
and allowed Germany to build up a flourishing and profitable export
trade. The German example was copied in Japan and in Italy, and, on a
different basis, in France, with the result that the Common Market area
enjoyed a burst of economic expansion and prosperity which began to
transform western European life and to raise most of its countries to a
new level of mobility and affluence such as they had never known
before. One result of this was the development of what had been
backward areas within these countries, most notably in southern Italy,
where the boom caught on by 1960. The only area within the Common
Market where this did not occur was in Belgium, which was hampered by
obsolescent equipment and domestic social animosities, while in France
the boom was delayed for several years by the acute political problems
associated with the death of the Fourth Republic (1958).
Chapter 34—France
Financial
capitalism lasted
longer in France than in any other major country. The roots of
financial capitalism there, like Holland but unlike Germany, go back to
the period of commercial capitalism which preceded the Industrial
Revolution. These roots grew rapidly in the last half of the eighteenth
century and were well established with the founding of the Bank of
France in 1800. At that date, financial power was in the hands of about
ten or fifteen private banking houses whose founders, in most cases,
had come from Switzerland in the second half of the eighteenth century.
These bankers, all Protestant, were deeply involved in the agitations
leading up to the French Revolution. When the revolutionary violence
got out of hand, they were the chief forces behind the rise of
Napoleon, whom they regarded as the restorer of order. As a reward for
this support, Napoleon in 1800 gave these bankers a monopoly over
French financial life by ... [allowing] them [to] control of the new
Bank of France.
Financial
Power Resides in Private Banking Houses Who
Control the
Bank of France
By
1811 most of these bankers
had gone over to the opposition to Napoleon because they objected to
his continuation of a warlike policy. France at that time was still in
the stage of commercial capitalism, and constant war was injurious to
commercial activity. As a result, this group shifted its allegiance
from Bonaparte to Bourbon, and survived the change in regime in 1815.
This established a pattern of political agility which was repeated with
varying success in subsequent changes of regime. As a result, the
Protestant bankers, who had controlled financial life under the First
Empire, were still the main figures on the board of regents of the Bank
of France until the reform of 1936. Among these figures the chief bore
the names Mirabaud, Mallet, Neuflize, and Hottinguer.
Rivalry
Between Older Protestant and Jewish Bankers
In
the course of the
nineteenth century, a second group was added to French banking circles.
This second group, largely Jewish, was also of non-French origin, the
majority Germanic (like Rothschild, Heine, Fould, Stern, and Worms) and
the minority of Iberian origin (like Pereire and Mires). A rivalry soon
grew up between the older Protestant bankers and the newer Jewish
bankers. This rivalry was largely political rather than religious in
its basis, and the lines were confused by the fact that some of the
Jewish group gave up their religion and moved over to the Protestant
group (such as Pereire and Heine).
Mirabaud and
Rothschild Dominate the Entire
German
Financial System
The
rivalry between these two
groups steadily increased because of their differing political
attitudes toward the July Monarchy (1830-1848), the Second Empire
(1852-1870), and the Third Republic 1871-1940). In this rivalry the
Protestant group was more conservative than the Jewish group, the
former being lukewarm toward the July Monarchy, enthusiastic toward the
Second Empire, and opposed to the Third Republic. The Jewish group, on
the other hand, warmly supported the July Monarchy and the Third
Republic but opposed the Second Empire. In this rivalry the leadership
of each group was centered in the richest and more moderate banking
family. The leadership of the Protestant group was exercised by
Mirabaud, which was on the left wing of the group. The leadership of
the Jewish group was held by Rothschild, which was on the right wing of
that group. These two wings were so close that Mirabaud and Rothschild
(who together dominated the whole financial system, being richer and
more powerful than all other private banks combined) frequently
cooperated together even when their groups as a whole were in
competition.
Catholic
Bankers
This
simple picture was
complicated, after 1838, by the slow rise of a third group of bankers
who were Catholics. This group (including such names as Demachy,
Seillière, Davillier, de Germiny, Pillet-Will, Gouïn, and
de Lubersac) rose slowly and late. It soon split into two halves. One
half formed an alliance with the Rothschild group and accepted the
Third Republic. The
other half formed an alliance with the rising power of heavy industry
(largely Catholic) and rose with it, forming under the Second Empire
and early Third Republic a powerful industrial-banking group whose
chief overt manifestation was the Comité des Forges (the French
steel "trust").
Rothschild's
French Investment Bank
Thus
there were, in the period 1871-1900, three great
groups in France: (a) the alliance of Jews and
Catholics dominated by Rothschild; (b) the alliance
of Catholic industrialists and Catholic bankers dominated by Schneider,
the steel manufacturer; and (c)
the group of Protestant bankers dominated by Mirabaud. The first of
these accepted the Third Republic, the other two rejected the Third
Republic. The first waxed wealthy in the period 1871-1900, chiefly
through its control of the greatest French investment bank, the Banque
de Paris et des Pays Bas (Paribas). This Paribas bloc by 1906 had a
dominant position in French economic and political life.
Banking
Groups Paralyze the French Political and Economic System
In
opposition to Paribas the
Protestant bankers established an investment bank of their own, the
Union Parisienne, in 1904. In the course of the
period 1904-1919 the
Union Parisienne group and the Comité des Forges group formed an
alliance based on their common opposition to the Third Republic and the
Paribas bloc. This new combination we might call the
Union-Comité bloc. The rivalry of these two great powers, the
Paribas bloc and the Union-Comité bloc, fills the pages of
French history in the period 1884-1940. It
paralyzed the French political system, reaching the crisis stage in the
Dreyfus case and again in 1934-1938. It
also partially paralyzed the French economic system, delaying the
development from financial capitalism to monopoly capitalism, and
preventing economic recovery from the depression in the period
1935-1940. It contributed much to the French defeat
in 1940. At present, we are concerned only with the
economic aspects of this struggle.
In
France the stage of
commercial capitalism continued much longer than in Britain, and did
not begin to be followed by industrial capitalism until after 1830. The
stage of financial capitalism in turn did not really begin until about
1880, and the stage of monopoly capitalism became
evident only about 1925.
The Greatest
Bankers Had Intimate Connections with Governments
During
all this period
the private bankers continued to exist and grow in power. Founded in
commercial capitalism, they were at first chiefly interested in
governmental obligations both domestic and foreign. As a
result,
the greatest private bankers, like the Rothschilds or Mallets, had
intimate connections with governments and relatively weak connections
with the economic life of the country. It was the advent of
the railroad in the period 1830-1870 which
changed this situation. The railroads required capital far beyond the
ability of any private banker to supply from his own resources. The
difficulty was met by establishing investment banks, deposit banks,
saving banks, and insurance companies which gathered the small savings
of a multitude of persons and made these available for the private
banker to direct wherever he thought fitting. Thus, the private banker
became a manager of other persona' funds rather than a lender of his
own. In the second place, the private banker now became much more
influential and must less noticeable. He now controlled billions where
formerly he had controlled millions, and he did it unobtrusively, no
longer in the open in his own name, but acting from the background,
concealed from public view by the plethora of financial and credit
institutions which had been set up to tap private savings. The public
did not notice that the names of private bankers and their agents still
graced the list of directors of the new financial enterprises. In the
third place, the advent of the railroad brought into existence new
economic powers, especially in iron-making and coal mining. These new
powers, the first powerful economic influences in the state free from
private banking control, arose in France from an activity very
susceptible to governmental favor and disfavor: the armaments industry.
Private
Proprietorships and Partnerships
Industrial
capitalism began in
France, as elsewhere, in the fields of textiles and iron-making. The
beginning may be discerned before 1830, but the growth was slow at all
times. There was no lack of capital, since most Frenchmen were careful
savers, but they preferred fixed-interest obligations (usually
government bonds) to equity capital, and would rather invest in family
enterprises than in securities of other origin. The use of the
corporation form of business organization grew very slowly (although it
was permitted by French law in 1807, earlier than elsewhere). Private
proprietorships and partnerships remained popular, even in the
twentieth century. Most of these were financed from profits and family
savings (as in England). When these were successful and increased in
size, the owners frequently cut off the growth of the existing
enterprise and started one or more new enterprises alongside the old
one. These sometimes engaged in the identical economic activity but
more frequently engaged in a closely related activity. Strong family
feeling hampered the growth of large units or publicly owned
corporations because of reluctance to give outsiders an influence in
family businesses. The preference for fixed-interest obligations over
equity securities as investments made it difficult for corporations to
grow in size easily and soundly. Finally, the strong feeling against
public authority, especially the tax collector, increased the
reluctance to embark in public rather than private forms of business
organization.
The Schneider
Monopoly Over Arms
Nonetheless,
industry grew,
receiving its greatest boost from the advent of the railroad, with its
increased demand for steel and coal, and from the government of
Napoleon III (1852-1870), which added a new demand for armaments to the
industrial market. Napoleon showed special favor to one firm of iron
and armaments makers, the firm of Schneider at Le Creusot. Eugene
Schneider obtained a monopoly in supplying arms to the French
government, sold materials to government-encouraged railway
construction, become president of the Chamber of Deputies, and minister
of agriculture and commerce. It is hardly surprising that the
industrialists looked back on the period of the Second Empire as a kind
of golden age.
Clash Between
Two Economic Blocs
The
loss of political
influence by the heavy industrialists after 1871 reduced their profits,
and drove them to ally with the Catholic bankers. Thus, the struggle
between financial capitalism and monopoly capitalism which appeared in
most countries was replaced in France by a clash between two economic
blocs, both of which were interested in both industry and banking and
neither of which was prepared to accept the unorthodox banking
procedures which become one of the chief goals of monopoly capitalism.
As a result, monopoly capitalism appeared late in France and, when it
did, arose between the two great blocs, with ramifications in both, but
largely autonomous from the central control of either. This new
autonomous and rather amorphous group which reflected the rise of
monopoly capitalism may be called the Lille-Lyons Axis. It rose slowly
after 1924, and took over the control of France after the defeat of
1940.
The Rise of
Financial Capitalism in France
The
rise of financial
capitalism in France, as elsewhere, was made possible by the demand for
capital for railroad building. The establishment of the Crédit
Mobilier in 1852 (with 60 million francs in assets) may be taken as the
opening date for French financial capitalism. This bank was the model
for the credit banks established in Germany later, and, like them,
conducted a mixed business of savings accounts, commercial credit, and
investment banking. The Credit Mobilier failed in 1867, but others were
founded afterward, some mixed, others more specialized on the British
or American pattern.
Over 300
Billion Francs Taken from the French People
by Worthless
Securities
Once
begun, financial
capitalism in France displayed the same excesses as elsewhere. In
France these were worse than those in Britain or Germany (after the
reforms of 1884), although they were not to be compared with the
excesses of frenzy and fraud displayed in the United States. In France,
as in Britain, the chief exploits of financial capitalism in the
nineteenth century were to be found in the foreign field, and in
government rather than in business securities. The worst periods of
delirium were in the early 1850's, again in the early 1880's, and again
in much of the twentieth century. In one year of the first period (July
1, 1854 to July 1, 1855) no less than 457 new companies with combined
capital of 1 billion francs were founded in France. The losses to
security buyers were so great that on March 9, 1856, the government had
to prohibit temporarily any further issue of securities in Paris. Again
in the period 1876 to 1882 over I billion francs of new stocks were
issued, leading to a crash in 1882. And finally, in the whole period
1900-1936, financial capitalism was clearly in control in France. In
1929 a Paris newspaper estimated that in a period of thirty years (from
the Humbert embezzlement of 1899) more than 300 billion francs
(equivalent to the total public and private debt of France in 1929) had
been taken from the French people by worthless securities.
The
center of the French
economic system in the twentieth century was not to be found, as some
have believed, in the Bank of France, but, instead, resided in a group
of almost unknown institutions—the private banks. There were over
a hundred of these private banks, but only about a score were of
significance, and even in this restricted group two (Rothschild and
Mirabaud) were more powerful than all the others combined.
These
private banks were known as the Haute Banque, and acted as the High
Command of the French economic system. Their stock was closely held in
the hands of about forty families, and they issued no reports on their
financial activities. They were, with a few exceptions, the same
private banks which had set up the Bank of France. They were
divided into a group of seven Jewish banks (Rothschild, Stern, Cahen
d'Anvers, Propper, Lazard, Spitzer, and Worms), a group of seven
Protestant banks (Mallet, Mirabaud, Heine, Neuflize, Hottinguer, Odier,
and Vernes), and a group of five Catholic banks (Davillier, Lubersac,
Lehideux, Goudchaux, and Demachy). By the twentieth century
the
basic fissure to which we have referred had appeared between the Jews
and the Protestants, and the Catholic group had split to ally itself
either with the Jews or with the forces of monopolistic heavy industry.
None the less, the various groups continued to cooperate in the
management of the Bank of France.
The Bank of
France Was Controlled by Forty Families
The
Bank of France was not the
center of French financial capitalism except nominally, and possessed
no autonomous power of its own. It was controlled until 1936, as it had
been in 1813, by the handful of private banks which created it, except
that in the twentieth century some of these were closely allied with an
equally small but more amorphous group of industrialists. In spite of
the fissure, the two blocs cooperated with each other in their
management of this important instrument of their power.
The
Bank of France was
controlled by the forty families (not two hundred, as frequently
stated) because of the provision in the bank's charter that only the
200 largest stockholders were entitled to vote for the members of the
board of regents (the governing board of the bank). There were 182,500
shares of stock outstanding, each with face value of 1,000 francs but
usually worth five or ten times that. In the twentieth century there
were 30,000 to 40,000 stockholders. Of the 200 who could vote for the
twelve elected regents, 78 were corporations or foundations and 122
were individuals. Both classes were dominated by the private banks, and
had been for so long that the regents' seats had become practically
hereditary. The chief changes in the names of regents were caused by
the growth of heavy industry and the transfer of seats through female
lines. Three seats were held by the same families for well over a
century. In the twentieth century the names of Rothschild, Mallet,
Mirabaud, Neuflize, Davillier, Vernes, Hottinguer, and their relatives
were consistently on the board of regents.
Forty
Families Control Nineteen Chief Banks
The
Bank of France acted as a
kind of general staff for the forty families which controlled the
nineteen chief private banks. Little effort was made to influence
affairs by the re-discount rate, and open-market operations were not
used until 1938. The state was influenced by the Treasury's need for
funds from the Bank of France. Other banks were influenced by methods
more exclusively French: by marriage alliances, by indirect bribery
(that is, by control of well-paying sinecures in banking and industry),
and by the complete dependence of French banks on the Bank of France in
any crisis. This last arose from the fact that French banks did not
emphasize gold reserves but instead regarded commercial paper as their
chief reserve. In any crisis where this paper could not be liquidated
fast enough, the banks resorted to the unlimited note-issuing power of
the Bank of France.
Investment
Bank Supplied Long-Term Capital to Industry
In
the third line of control
of the French economy were the investment banks called "barques
d'affaires." These were dominated by two banks: the Banque de Paris et
des Pays Bas set up by the Rothschild group in 1872 and the Banque de
l'Union Parisienne founded by the rival bloc in 1904. These investment
banks supplied long-term capital to industry, and took stock and
directorships in return. Much of the stock was resold to the public,
but the directorships were held indefinitely for control purposes. In
1931, Paribas held the securities of 357 corporations, and its own
directors and top managers held 180 directorships in 120 of the more
important of these. The control was frequently made easier by the use
of nonvoting stock, multiple-voting stock, cooptative directorships,
and other refinements of financial capitalism. For example, the General
Wireless Company set up by Paribas distributed 200,000 shores of stock
worth 500 francs a share. Of these, 181,818 shares, sold to the public,
had one-tenth vote each while 18,182 shares, held by the insider group,
had one vote each. A similar situation was to be found in Havas stock,
also issued by Paribas.
Interlocking
Directorships
The
investment bank of the
non-Jewish private banks and their industrial allies was the Union
Parisienne. Among its sixteen directors were to be found such names as
Mirabaud, Hottinguer, Neuflize, Vernes, Wendel, Lubersac, and Schneider
in the period before 1934. The two largest stock-holders in 1935-1937
were Lubersac and Mallet. The directors of this bank held 124 other
directorships on 90 important corporations in 1933. At the same time it
held stock in 338 corporations. The value of the stock held by the
Union Parisienne in 1932 was 482.1 million francs and of that held by
Paribas was 548.8 million francs, giving a total for both of 1,030.9
million francs.
Decline of
Jewish Group of Private Bankers
In
the fourth line of control
were five chief commercial banks with 4,416 branches in 1932. At the
beginning of the century these had all been within the "Paribas
Consortium," but after the founding of the Union Parisienne in 1904
they slowly drifted over to the new bloc, the Comptoir National
d'Escompte going over almost at once, with the others following more
slowly. As a result, the control of the two great blocs over the great
deposit banks was rather mixed during the twentieth century, with the
old Jewish group of private bankers losing ground rather steadily. The
decline of this group was closely related to the decline of
international financial capitalism, and received its worse blow in the
losses in foreign bonds resulting from the First World War Regional
deposit banks were controlled in varying degrees by one or the other of
the two blocs, the Paribas control being stronger in the north, west,
and south, while the Union-Comité bloc was stronger in the
northeast, east, and southeast. Control of savings banks and insurance
companies was also shared, especially where they had been founded
before the two blocs achieved their modern form. For example, the
largest insurance company in France, with capital and reserves of 2,463
million francs in 1931, had as directors such names as Mallet,
Rothschild, Neuflize, Hottinguer, and so on.
Banking
Families Divide Up Their Spheres of Interest in Various
Industries
and Public Utilities
This
cooperation between the
two blocs in regard to the lower levels of the banking system (and the
Bank of France itself) did not usually extend to industrial or
commercial activity. There, competition outside the market was severe,
and became a struggle to the death in 1932-1940. In some activities,
spheres of interest were drawn between the two groups, and thus
competition was reduced. Inside France, there was the basic division
between east and west, the Jewish group emphasizing shipbuilding,
transatlantic communications and transportation, and public utilities
in the west, while the Protestant-Catholic group emphasized iron,
steel, and armaments in the east. Outside France, the former group
dominated the colonies, North Africa, and the eastern Mediterranean,
while the latter group emphasized central and eastern Europe (chiefly
through the Union européene industrielle et financière,
created in 1920 to be the economic counterpart of the Little Entente).
Worldwide
Ramifications of Rivalry Between Banking Groups
In
some fields the rivalry of
the two groups had worldwide ramifications. In petroleum products, for
example, the Jewish bankers, through the Banque de Paris et des Pays
Bas, controlled the Compagnie française des pétroles,
which was allied to Standard Oil and Rockefeller, while the
Catholic-Protestant bankers, through the Union Parisienne, controlled
Petrofina, which was allied to Royal Dutch Shell and Deterding. Jules
Exbrayat, partner of Demachy et Cie. (in which François de
Wendel was majority owner) was a director of Union Parisienne and of
Petrofina, and Alexandre Bungener, partner of Lubersac et Cie., was
also a director of Union Parisienne and of Petrofina. Charles Sergeant,
once undersecretary of the Ministry of Finance and sub-governor of the
Bank of France, was for years chairman of the Union Parisienne, and
played a role in one bloc similar to that played by Horace Finaly in
the other bloc. He was a director of Petrofina and of the Union
européene industrielle et financière. When he retired for
reasons of health in 1938 he was replaced in several positions
(including Petrofina and Union Parisienne) by Jean Tannery, honorary
governor of the Bank of France. At the same time, Joseph Courcelle,
former inspector of finances, was a director of seventeen companies
including Petrofina and Union Parisienne. On the other side, Horace
Finaly was general manager of Paribas and director of Standard
Franco-Américaine, while his son, Boris, was a director of Cie.
française des pétroles. Former ambassador Jules Cambon
and Emile Oudot, both directors of Parisbas, were respectively
directors of Standard Franco-Américaine and Standard
française des pétroles (before these merged in 1938).
French
Economy Organized into Trade Association,
Industrial
Monopolies and Cartels
Outside
the banking system
which we have sketched, the French economy was organized in a series of
trade associations, industrial monopolies, and cartels. These were
usually controlled by the Catholic-Protestant bloc of private bankers,
since the Jewish group continued to use the older methods of financial
capitalism while their rivals moved forward to the more obvious methods
of monopoly capitalism. In such cases, individual companies controlled
by the Jewish group frequently jointed the cartels and associations set
up by the rival bloc.
The Center of
the Monopolistic Industrial Controls
At
the center of the system of
monopolistic industrial controls was the Confédération
générale du patronat français, which after 1936
(Matignon agreements) did the collective bargaining for most French
industry. The Confédération was divided into sections for
different branches of industry. Around the Confédération
was a series of general trade associations and cartels such as the
Comité des Forges, Comité centrale des Houillères,
Union des industries métallurgiques et minières,
Société de l'industrie minérale, and so on. Below
these were a large number of regional associations and local cartels.
These were integrated into a single whole by financial controls, family
alliances, and interlocking positions.
Monopolies in
the Metal Industry
In
this system the
Comité des Forges, trade association of the metallurgical
industry, held a key position. In France the iron industry was
originally widely scattered in small enterprises. Of these, the
factories at Le Creusot, acquired by the Schneider family in 1838, were
so favored by Napoleon III that they began to emerge as the chief metal
company in France. As a result of the loss of governmental privileges
by the shift from Second Empire to Third Republic and the blow to
Schneider's prestige from the victory of Krupp steel cannon over Le
Creusot's bronze cannon in 1870, the whole metal industry of France
began to turn toward monopoly and to seek capital from private bankers.
The turn toward monopoly appeared almost at once, especially in the
typical French form of the comptoir (a joint
selling agency).
In
1884, as we have said, the
Comité des Forges was formed as an association of all the
metallurgical industries of France, using a single comptoir to
prevent price competition. By the twentieth century, the Comité
des Forges consisted of representatives of over 200 companies with
nominal capital of about 8 billion francs, but whose securities were
worth almost 100 billion francs in 1939. Of the 200 corporations the
chief perhaps were Établissements Schneider; Les Forges et
Aciéries de la Marine et Homécourt; La
Société des Petits-Fils de François de Wendel; Les
Aciéries de Longwy, and so on. By the year 1939, 75 percent of
French steel production was from six companies. The monopolistic
influences, however, were much stronger than these figures would
indicate. Of the 200 firms in the Comité des Forges, only 70
were of importance in iron and steel. These 70 had an aggregate
capitalization of about 4 billion francs. Of these firms, 51 with
2,727,054,000 francs of capital in 1939 were in the Union-Comité
bloc and were controlled by a Schneider-Mirabaud alliance. Eleven
corporations with 506 million francs of capital were in the Paribas
bloc. Eight firms with 749 million francs of capital were in neither
bloc or doubtful.
Monopolies in
the Coal Industry
A
somewhat similar development
is to be found in the French coal industry. This, perhaps, is not
surprising, as the coal industry was largely dominated by the same
groups as the steel industry. By 1938, 77 percent of French coal
production came from 14 companies. Three of these companies were owned
by Wendel, who thus controlled 15.3 percent of French coal output
directly, and considerably more indirectly. Parallel to the
Comité des Forges in steel, and controlled by the same group,
was the Comité-centrale des Houillères in coal. This was
supported by taxes on collieries based on output. Voting power within
the organization was based on this financial contribution, so that 13
companies controlled over three-fourths of the votes and Wendel over
one-sixth. The French coal industry was controlled nearly as completely
by the Union-Comité bloc as was the steel industry. Coal in
France was found chiefly in two areas —the northwest around Lille
and the southeast about Lyons. The latter was controlled almost
completely by the Union-Comité bloc, but the Paribas influence
was very great in the far richer northern area. It was these Paribas
coal mines of the north which gradually drifted away and became one of
the chief elements in the monopolistic Lille-Lyons Axis.
The Paribas
Bloc Had Taken Control of the Strategic Fields
of
Communications and Publicity
The
preponderant influence of
the Union-Comité bloc in such important fields as iron, steel,
and coal was balanced to some extent by the skillful fashion in which
the Paribas bloc had taken control of the strategic points in the
fields of communications and publicity.
There
were only 1,506
corporations registered on the stock exchange in Paris in 1936. Of this
number only about 600 were important. If we add to these about 150 or
200 important corporations not registered in Paris, we have a total of
about 800 firms. Of these 800, the Paribas bloc controlled, in 1936,
almost 400 and the Union-Comité bloc about 300. The
rest
were controlled by neither bloc. The superior number of firms
controlled by Paribas was counterbalanced by the much heavier
capitalization of the Union-Comité firms. This in turn was
counterbalanced by the fact that the Parisbas firms were in strategic
positions.
The Paribas
system Was Headed by Baron Edouard de Rothschild
The
whole Paribas system in
the twentieth century was headed by the Baron Edouard de Rothschild,
but the active head was René Mayer, manager of the Rothschild
bank and nephew by marriage of James Rothschild. The
chief
center of operations for the system was in the Banque de Paris et des
Pays Bas, which was managed, until 1937, by Horace Finaly of a
Hungarian-Jewish family brought to France by Rothschild in 1880. From
this bank was ruled much of the section of the French economy
controlled by this bloc. Included in this section were many
foreign
and colonial enterprises, utilities, ocean shipping, airlines,
shipbuilding and, above all, communications. In this latter group were
Cie. générale transatlantique, Cie.
générale de télégraphie sans fils,
Radio-France, Cie. française de câbles
télégraphiques, Cie. internationale des wagon-lits,
Havas, and Hachette.
Havas–a Great
Monopolistic News Agency
Havas
was a great monopolistic
news agency, as well as the most important advertising agency in
France. It could, and did, suppress or spread both news and
advertising. It usually supplied news reports gratis to those papers
which would print the advertising copy it also provided. It received
secret subsidies from the government for almost a century (a fact first
revealed by Balzac), and by the late 1930's these subsidies from the
secret funds of the Popular Front had reached a fantastic size.
Hachette had a monopoly on the distribution of periodicals and a
sizable portion of the distribution of books. This monopoly could be
used to kill papers which were regarded as objectionable. This was done
in the 1930's to Francois Coty's reactionary L'Ami du peuple.
Rothschilds
Desire to Form an Alliance with Russia
After
1934, the
Union-Comité bloc was badly injured by the world depression,
which fell on heavy industry more severely than on other segments of
the economy. After 1937, the Paribas bloc was badly split by the rise
of anti-Semitism, the controversy over orthodox and unorthodox
financial methods for dealing with depression, and, above all, by the
growing foreign crisis. The Rothschild desire to form an alliance with
Russia and adopt a policy of resistance to Hitler while supporting
Loyalist Spain, continuing orthodox financial policies, and building up
the labor unions against the Comité des Forges, collapsed from
its own internal contradictions, their own lack of faith in it, and the
pressure of Great Britain.
As
the two older blocs thus
weakened, a new bloc rose rapidly to power between them. This was the
Lille-Lyons Axis. It was constructed about two regional
groups—one in the north about Lille and the other in the
southeast and east about Lyons and in Alsace. The former had a branch
running to Brussels in Belgium, while the latter had a branch running
to Basle in Switzerland. The Lille end was originally under Rothschild
influence, while the Lyons end was originally under Mirabaud influence.
The two ends were integrated into a single unit by the activities of
several private banks and two deposit banks in Paris. The private banks
included Odier, Sautter et Cie., S. Propper et Cie., and Worms et Cie.
The credit banks included the Crédit Commercial de France and
the Banque française pour le commerce et l'industrie.
Monopolies
Over Electrical Utilities, Chemicals, Textiles and Light Metals
This
Lille-Lyons Axis was
built up about four economic activities: electrical utilities,
chemicals, artificial textiles, and light metals. These four were
monopolistic and interrelated, chiefly for technological reasons. They
were monopolistic either by nature (public utilities) or because they
were based on narrowly controlled natural resources (utilities and
chemicals), or because they required large-scale operation utilizing
by-products and affiliated activities for profitable operation
(utilities, chemicals, artificial textiles, and light metals), or
because they required use of closely held patents (chemicals,
artificial textiles, and light metals).
The
Lille-Lyons Axis
These
activities were
interrelated for various reasons. The public utilities of the north
were based on coal, while those of the southeast were based on
waterpower. The manufacture of light metals concentrated in the
southeast because of the available water power. These metals, chiefly
aluminum, were made by electrolysis, which provided chemical
by-products. Thus the two light-metals firms in France moved into the
field of chemicals. The textile industry was already centered in the
north (about Lille) and in the southeast (about Lyons). When this
textile industry turned to artificial fibers, it had to ally with
chemical firms. This was easy because the chemical firms of the
southeast were already in close contact with the textile firms of Lyons
(chiefly the Gillet family), while the chemical firms of the north were
already in close contact with the textile firms of the area (chiefly
the Motte family and its relatives). These textile firms of the north
already controlled, in cooperation with Paribas, the richest coal mines
of the area. These coal mines began to generate electric power at the
mine, utilizing all by-products for chemicals and artificial textiles.
Since the textile families of the north (like Motte) were already
related to the textile families of the southeast (like Gillet) by
marriage and by trade associations, it was easy for the Lille-Lyons
Axis to grow up along these lines.
The
Lille-Lyons Axis Take Over the Whole Economy of France
As
a result of the stalemate
between the two great blocs, between financial capitalists and monopoly
capitalists, between supporters of the Russian alliance and supporters
of appeasement, between orthodox and unorthodox financial measures,
between Jews and anti-Semites, France was completely paralyzed and went
down to defeat in 1940. This was quite acceptable to the Lille-Lyons
Axis. It accepted the defeat with satisfaction, and, with German help,
began to take over the whole economy of France. The Paribas bloc was
destroyed by the anti-Semite laws, and many of its chief strong points
taken over. The Union-Comité bloc was badly crippled by a series
of severe blows, including the forced sale of all Schneider's foreign
holdings, and of most of Wendel's domestic holdings to the Germans
(chiefly to the Hermann Göring Werke), the seizure of the other
Lorraine iron properties, and the abolition of the Comité des
Forges itself.
Giant
Monopolies Control the Economy of France
At
the same time, the
Lille-Lyons Axis strengthened itself. The French chemical industry,
already largely monopolized by Etablissements Kuhlmann, was forced into
a single corporation (Société Francolor) controlled by
the Lille-Lyons Axis and I. G. Farben. The light-metals industry,
already largely monopolized by Alais, Froges, et Camargue, was
centralized almost completely in this firm. The artificial textile
industry, already largely monopolized by the Gillet clique, was
centralized under a single corporation, France-Rayonne, under joint
Gillet-German control. The automobile industry was subjected to a
single control—the Comité d'organization
d'automobiles—and set up a joint manufacturing
company—Société générale
française de construction d'automobiles. The whole system was
controlled by a small group in Lyons centering about the Gillet family
and represented on the political scene chiefly by Pierre Laval.
The Struggles
Between the Three Great Economic Power Blocs
The
struggles between these
three great economic power blocs in France are rather difficult for
Americans to understand because they were not reflected in price
competition in the market where Americans would normally expect
economic competition to appear. In the field of price policies, the
three blocs generally cooperated. They also cooperated in their
attitudes toward labor, although to a lesser degree. Their rivalries
appeared in the fields of economic and political power as struggles to
control sources of raw materials, supplies of credit and capital, and
the instruments of government. Price competition, which to an American
always has seemed to be the first, and even the only, method of
economic rivalry, has, in Europe, generally been regarded as the last
possible method of economic rivalry, a method so mutually destructive
as to be tacitly avoided by both sides. In fact, in France, as in most
European countries, competing economic groups saw nothing inconsistent
in joining together to use the power of the state to enforce joint
policies of such groups toward prices and labor.
The
French defeat in 1940
shattered the stalemate between the economic power blocs which had
paralyzed France in the 1930's and done so much to make the defeat
possible. The two older blocs were disrupted under the German
occupation and the Vichy regime, the Paribas bloc by the anti-Semitic
laws and the Union-Comité bloc because its holdings were
desirable to the Germans and their French collaborators. The
Lille-Lyons Axis, led by the associates of the Banque Worms and the
Banque de l'Indochine, sought to take over most of the French economy
as the willing collaborators of the Germans and their old associate,
Pierre Laval, and were fairly successful in doing so, but the economic
confusions of the occupation and the burden of the German occupation
costs made it impossible to win any significant benefits from their
position. Moreover, as collaborators with the Nazis the Lille-Lyons
Axis could not expect to survive a German defeat, and did not do so.
René Mayer
...
[S]ome of the personnel of
Paribas have [played a significant role in France since 1945] ...
notably René Mayer, active head of the Rothschild family
interests who was minister of finance in the early postwar government.
Later, in 1962, De Gaulle made the director of the Rothschild bank,
George Pompidou, prime minister. The rather prominent role played by
bankers such as these did not prevent France from following the pattern
of new economic procedures which we have observed in other countries.
The process was delayed by the political paralysis arising from the
French parliamentary system, especially the instability of Cabinets
arising from the multiplicity of parties. The military crisis in
Indochina, followed by the protracted and frustrating civil war in
Algeria, prevented France from establishing any satisfactory economic
system until 1958.
The European
Economic Community
The
only achievement of the
earlier period was, however, a very great one—the French role in
establishing the European Common Market, which was decisive. This was
established by the Treaty of Rome of 1957, with six members (France,
West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, and Luxembourg). It
planned to remove the internal customs barriers among its members by
stages over at least a dozen years, while adopting a common external
tariff against outsiders. In this way a mass market would be provided
which would allow mass production with lower costs. France was unable
to contribute much to this new market until its political instability
was ended by the establishment of the Fifth Republic, on a more
authoritarian pattern, in 1958 (constitution of October 4th). In
December of that year, the franc was devalued and a program of fiscal
austerity was inaugurated. At once economic activity began to rise. The
rate of growth of industrial production reached 6.3 percent in 1961 and
almost 8.5 percent in 1962. The gold reserves doubled within two years
of the devaluation.
The
resulting prosperity,
called an "economic miracle" in the 1962 Report of the twenty-nation
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (the successor
organization to the Marshall Plan), was unevenly spread in that farmers
and government employees obtained less than a fair share of it, and it
was accompanied by an undesirable inflation of the cost of living (with
1953 as 100) to 103 in 1956, up to 138 in 1961, and to 144 in 1962.
However, it brought France and the other Common Market countries to an
unprecedented level of prosperity which was in striking contrast to the
drab conditions in the unfortunate countries within the Iron Curtain.
The British, who had formed a European Free Trade Association of the
"Outer Seven" (Austria, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland)
to seek free trade among members but no common external tariff against
others, sought to lift its rather lethargic economy by joining the
Common Market in 1962, but was rebuffed by De Gaulle, who required as a
price that Britain renounce its efforts, going back over decades, to
establish a special relationship with the United States.
Chapter
35—The United States of America
...
From the beginning, the United States had a shortage of labor in the
face of an unprecedented richness of resources. As a result, it sought
labor-saving devices and high output per man-day of work, even in
agriculture. This means that the amount of capital equipment per man
was unusually high throughout American history, even in the earliest
period, and this undoubtedly presented a problem in an undeveloped
country where private savings were, for many generations, scarce. The
accumulation of such savings for investment in labor-saving mechanisms
brought an opportunity to financial capitalism at an early date.
Accordingly, the United States had financial capitalism over a longer
period and in a more extreme form than any other country. Moreover, the
size of the country made the problem of transportation so acute that
the capital necessary for the early canals, railroads, and iron
industry was large and had to be found from sources other than local
private persons. Much of it came from government subsidies or from
foreign investors. It was observable as early as 1850 and had overseas
connections which were still in existence in the 1930's.
The
Techniques of Finance Capitalism Reach Levels of Corruption into
America
Higher Than Any Country in the World
By
the 1880's the techniques of financial capitalism were well developed
in New York and northern New Jersey, and reached levels of corruption
which were never approached in any European country. This corruption
sought to cheat the ordinary investor by flotations and manipulations
of securities for the benefit of "insiders." Success in this was its
own justification, and the practitioners of these dishonesties were as
socially acceptable as their wealth entitled them to be, without any
animadversions on how that wealth had been obtained. Corrupt
techniques, associated with the names of Daniel Drew or Jay Gould in
the wildest days of railroad financial juggling, were also practiced by
Morgan and others who became respectable from longer sustained success
which allowed them to build up established firms.
Close
Alliance of Wall Street with Two Major Parties
Any
reform of Wall Street practices came from pressure from the
hinterlands, especially from the farming West, and was long delayed by
the close alliance of Wall Street with the two major political parties,
which grew up in 1880-1900. In this alliance, by 1900, the influence of
Morgan in the Republican Party was dominant, his chief rivalry coming
from the influence of a monopoly capitalist, Rockefeller of Ohio. By
1900 Wall Street had largely abandoned the Democratic Party, a shift
indicated by the passage of the Whitney family from the Democrats to
the Republican inner circles, shortly after they established a family
alliance with Morgan. In the same period, the Rockefeller family
reversed the ordinary direction of development by shifting from the
monopoly fields of petroleum to New York banking
circles by way
of the Chase National Bank. Soon family as well as financial alliances
grew up among the Morgans, Whitneys, and Rockefellers, chiefly through
Payne and Aldrich family connections.
Finance
Capitalism in New York Resembles a Feudal Structure
For
almost fifty years, from 1880 to 1930, financial capitalism
approximated a feudal structure in which two great powers, centered in
New York, dominated a number of lesser powers, both in New York and in
provincial cities. No description of this structure as it existed in
the 1920's can be given in a brief compass, since it infiltrated all
aspects of American life and especially all branches of economic life.
At
the center were a group of less than a dozen investment banks, which
were, at the height of their powers, still unincorporated private
partnerships. These included J. P. Morgan; the Rockefeller family;
Kuhn, Loeb and Company; Dillon, Read and Company; Brown Brothers and
Harriman; and others. Each of these was linked in organizational or
personal relationships with various banks, insurance companies,
railroads, utilities, and industrial firms. The result was to form a
number of webs of economic power of which the more important centered
in New York, while other provincial groups allied with these were to be
found in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, and Boston.
J. P. Morgan
Dominates Corporate America
J.
P. Morgan worked in close relationship to a group of banks and
insurance companies, including the First National Bank of New York, the
Guaranty Trust Company, the Bankers Trust, the New York Trust Company,
and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. The whole nexus dominated
a network of business firms which included at least one-sixth of the
two hundred largest nonfinancial corporations in American business.
Among these were twelve utility companies, five or more railroad
systems, thirteen industrial firms, and at least five of the fifty
largest banks in the country. The combined assets of these firms were
more than $30 billion. They included American Telephone and Telegraph
Company, International Telephone and Telegraph, Consolidated Gas of New
York, the groups of electrical utilities known as Electric Bond and
Share and as the United Corporation Group (which included Commonwealth
and Southern, Public Service of New Jersey, and Columbia Gas and
Electric), the New York Central railway system, the Van Sweringen
railway system (Allegheny) of nine lines (including Chesapeake and
Ohio; Erie; Missouri Pacific; the Nickel Plate; and Pere Marquette);
the Santa Fe; the Northern system of five great lines (Great Northern;
Northern Pacific; Burlington; and others); the Southern Railway;
General Electric Company; United States Steel; Phelps Dodge; Montgomery
Ward; National Biscuit; Kennecott Copper; American Radiator and
Standard Sanitary; Continental Oil; Reading Coal and Iron; Baldwin
Locomotive; and others.
The
Rockefeller Group Was a Monopoly Capitalist Organization
The
Rockefeller group, which was really a monopoly capitalist organization
investing only its own profits, functioned as a financial capitalist
unit in close cooperation with Morgan. Allied with the country's
largest bank, the Chase National, it was involved as an industrial
power in the various Standard Oil firms and the Atlantic Refining
Company, but it controlled over half the assets of the oil industry,
plus the $2 1/3 billion assets in Chase National Bank.
Kuhn Loeb
Dominates Railroads
Kuhn,
Loeb was chiefly interested in railroads, where it dominated the
Pennsylvania, the Union Pacific, the Southern Pacific, the Milwaukee,
the Chicago Northwestern, the Katy (Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad
Company), and the Delaware and Hudson. It also dominated the Bank of
Manhattan and the Western Union Telegraph Company for a total of almost
$11 billion in assets.
Mellon Group
Assets Reach 3.3 Billion
The
Mellon group centered in Pittsburgh dominated Gulf Oil, Koppers, Alcoa,
Westinghouse Electric, Union Trust Company, the Mellon National Bank,
Jones and Laughlin Steel, American Rolling Mill, Crucible Steel, and
other firms for total assets of about $3.3 billion.
Four Economic
Blocs Dominate Corporate America
It
has been calculated that the 200 largest nonfinancial corporations in
the United States, plus the fifty largest banks, in the mid-1930's,
owned 34 percent of the assets of all industrial corporations, 48
percent of the assets of all commercial banks, 75 percent of the assets
of all public utilities, and 95 percent of the assets of all railroads.
The total assets of all four classes were almost $100 billion, divided
almost equally among the four classes. The four economic power blocs
which we have mentioned (Morgan; Rockefeller; Kuhn, Loeb and Company;
and Mellon) plus du Pont, and three local groups allied with these in
Boston, Cleveland, and Chicago, together dominated the following
percentages of the 250 corporations considered here: of industrial
firms 58 percent of their total assets, of railroads 82 percent, and
utilities 58 percent. The aggregate value of the assets controlled by
the eight power groups was about $61,205 million of the total assets of
$198,351 million in these 250 largest corporations at the end of 1935.
The Economic
Power of the Money Trust in America
Is Almost
Beyond Imagination
The
economic power represented by these figures is almost beyond
imagination to grasp, and was increased by the active role which these
financial titans took in politics. Morgan and Rockefeller together
frequently dominated the national Republican Party, while Morgan
occasionally had extensive influence in the national Democratic Party
(three of the Morgan partners were usually Democrats). These two were
also powerful on the state level, especially Morgan in New York and
Rockefeller in Ohio. Mellon was a power in Pennsylvania and du Pont was
obviously a political power in Delaware.
The Morgan
Hierarchy
In
the 1920's this system of economic and political power formed a
hierarchy headed by the Morgan interests and played a principal role
both in political and business life. Morgan, operating on the
international level in cooperation with his allies abroad, especially
in England, influenced the events of history to a degree which cannot
be specified in detail but which certainly was tremendous....
Finance and
Monopoly Capitalism Dominate America
In
the United States, however, the ... [system] of financial capitalism
was much more protracted than in most foreign countries, and was not
followed by a clearly established system of monopoly capitalism. This
blurring of the stages was caused by a number of events of which three
should be mentioned: (1) the continued personal influence of many
financiers and bankers ... ; (2) the decentralized condition of the
United States itself, especially the federal political system; and (3)
the long-sustained political and legal tradition of antimonopoly going
back at least to the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. As a consequence,
the United States did not reach a clearly monopolistic economy, and was
unable to adopt a fully unorthodox financial policy capable of
providing full use of resources. Unemployment, which had reached 13
million persons in 1933, was still at 10 million in 1940. On the other
hand, the United States did take long steps in the direction of
balancing interest blocs by greatly strengthening labor and farm groups
and by sharply curtailing the influence and privileges of finance and
heavy industry.
The Interlock
Between Bankers and Industrialists
Of
the diverse groups in the American economy, the financiers were most
closely related to heavy industry because of the latter's great need
for capital for its heavy equipment. The deflationary policies of the
bankers were acceptable to heavy industry chiefly because the mass
labor of heavy industry in the United States, notably in steel and
automobile manufacturing, was not unionized, and the slowly declining
prices of the products of heavy industry could continue to be produced
profitably if costs could be reduced by large-scale elimination of
labor by installing more heavy equipment. Much of this new equipment,
which led to assembly-line techniques such as the continuous-strip
steel mill, were financed by the bankers. With unorganized labor, the
employers of mass labor could rearrange, curtail, or terminate labor
without notice on a daily basis and could thus reduce labor costs to
meet falls in prices from bankers' deflation. The fact that reductions
in wages or large layoffs in mass-employment industries also reduced
the volume of purchasing power in the economy as a whole, to the injury
of other groups selling consumers' goods, was ignored by the makers of
heavy producers' goods. In this way, farmers, light industry, real
estate, commercial groups, and other segments of the society were
injured by the deflationary policies of the bankers and by the
employment policies of heavy industry, closely allied to the bankers.
When these policies became unbearable in the depression of 1929-1933,
these other interest blocs, who had been traditionally Republican (or
at least, like the western farmers, had refused to vote Democratic and
had engaged in largely futile third-party movements), deserted the
Republican Party, which remained subservient to high finance and heavy
industry.
The
Democratic Party
This
shift of the farm bloc, light industry, commercial interests (notably
department stores), real estate, professional people, and mass,
unskilled, labor to the Democratic Party in 1932 resulted in the
election of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. The new
administration sought to ... reward and help the groups which had
elected it. The farmers were helped by subsidies; labor was helped by
government spending to make jobs and provide purchasing power and by
encouragement of unionization; while real estate, professional people,
and commercial groups were helped by the increasing demand from the
increased purchasing power of farmers and labor.
The New Deal
The
New Deal's actions against finance and heavy industry were chiefly
aimed at preventing these two from ever repeating their actions of the
1920-1933 period. The SEC Act sought to supervise securities issues and
stock-exchange practices to protect investors. Railroad legislation
sought to reduce the financial exploitation and even the deliberate
bankruptcy of railroads by financial interests (as William Rockefeller
had done to the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul or as Morgan had done
to the New York, New Haven and Hartford). The Banking Act of 1933
separated investment banking from deposit banking. The wholesale
manipulation of labor by heavy industry was curtailed by the National
Labor Relations Act of 1933, which sought to protect labor's rights of
collective bargaining. At the same time, with the blessings of the new
administration, a drive was made by labor groups allied with it to
unionize the masses of unskilled labor employed by heavy industry to
prevent the latter from adopting any policy of mass layoffs or sharp
and sudden wage reductions in any future period of decreasing demand.
To this end a Committee for Industrial Organization was set up under
the leadership of the one head of a mass labor union in the country,
John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers, and a drive was put on to
organize the workers of the steel, automobile, electrical, and other
industries which had no unions.
The New Deal
Greatly Benefitted the Bankers
All
this served to create more highly organized and more self-conscious
interest blocs in American life, especially among farmers and labor,
but it did not represent any victory for unorthodox financing, the real
key to either monopoly capitalism or to a managed pluralist economy.
The reason for this was that the New Deal, because of President
Roosevelt, was fundamentally orthodox in its ideas on the nature of
money. Roosevelt was quite willing to unbalance the budget and to spend
in a depression in an unorthodox fashion because he had grasped the
idea that lack of purchasing power was the cause of the lack of demand
which made unsold goods and unemployment, ... and had quite orthodox
ideas on the nature of money. As a result, his administration treated
the symptoms rather than the causes of the depression and, while
spending unorthodoxly to treat these symptoms, did so with money
borrowed from the banks in the accepted fashion. The New Deal allowed
the bankers to create the money, borrowed it from the banks, and spent
it. This meant that the New Deal ran up the national debt to the credit
of the banks, and spent money in such a limited fashion that no drastic
re-employment of idle resources was possible.
A Failure to
Grasp the Nature of Money
One
of the most significant facts about the New Deal was Its orthodoxy on
money. For the whole twelve years he was in the White House, Roosevelt
had statutory power to issue fiat money in the form of greenbacks
printed by the government without recourse to the banks. This authority
was never used. As a result of such orthodoxy, the depression's
symptoms of idle resources were overcome only when the emergency of the
war in 1942 made it possible to justify a limitless increase in the
national debt by limitless borrowing from private persons and the
banks. But the whole episode showed a failure to grasp the nature of
money and the function of the monetary system, of which considerable
traces remained in the postwar period.
Roosevelt's
Theory of Pump Priming
One
reason for the New Deal's readiness to continue with an orthodox theory
of the nature of money, along with an unorthodox practice in its use,
arose from the failure of the Roosevelt administration to recognize the
nature of the economic crisis itself. This failure can be seen in
Roosevelt's theory of "pump priming." He ... believed, as did his
secretary of the Treasury, that there was nothing structurally wrong
with the economy, that it was simply temporarily stalled, and would
keep going of its own powers if it could be restarted. In order to
restart it, all that was needed, in New Deal theory, was a relatively
moderate amount of government spending on a temporary basis. This would
create purchasing power (demand) for consumers' goods, which, in turn,
would increase the confidence of investors who would begin to release
large unused savings into investment. This would, again, create
additional purchasing power and demand, and the economic system would
take off of its own power. The curtailment of the powers of finance and
heavy industry would then prevent any repetition of the collapse of
1929.
The Public
Debt Rises Under Roosevelt's Erroneous Theories
The
inadequacy of this theory of the depression was shown in 1937 when the
New Deal, after four years of pump priming and a victorious election in
1936, stopped its spending. Instead of taking off, the economy
collapsed in the steepest recession in history. The New Deal had to
resume its treatment of symptoms but now ... the spending program could
[never] ... be ended, ... since the administration ... lacked the ...
[determination] to reform the system or ... to escape from borrowing
bank credit with its mounting public debt, and the administration ...
[decided not to] to adopt ... [a] really large-scale spending necessary
to give full employment of resources. The administration was saved from
this impasse by the need for the rearmament program followed by the
war. Since 1947 the Cold War and the space program have allowed the
same situation to continue, so that even today prosperity is not the
result of a properly organized economic system but of government
spending, and any drastic reduction in such spending would give rise to
an acute depression.
Chapter
36—The Economic Factors
From
an analytical point of view there are a number of important elements in
the economic situation of the twentieth century. These elements did not
all come into existence at the same time, nor did any single one come
into existence everywhere simultaneously. The order in which these
elements came into existence is roughly that in which we list them here:
1.
rising standards of living
2.
industrialism
3.
growth of size of enterprises
4.
dispersal of ownership of enterprises
5.
separation of control from ownership
6.
concentration of control
7.
decline of competition
8.
increasing disparity in the distribution of incomes
9.
declining rate of expansion leading to crisis
Rising
Standards of Living
1.
A rise in the general or average standard of living in modern times is
obvious and, with intermittent breaks, goes back for a thousand years.
Such progress is welcome, but it obviously brings with it certain
accompanying factors which must be understood and accepted. A rising
standard of living, except in its earliest stages, does not involve any
increase in consumption of necessities but instead involves an increase
in the consumption of luxuries even to the point of replacing basic
necessities by luxuries. As average incomes rise, people do not, after
a certain level, eat more and more black bread, potatoes, and cabbage,
or wear more and more clothing. Instead, they replace black bread with
wheaten bread and add meat to their diet and replace coarse clothing by
finer apparel; they shift their emphasis from energy foods to
protective foods.
This
process can be continued indefinitely. A number of students have
divided goods from this point of view into three levels: (a)
necessities, (b) industrial products, and (c)
luxuries and services. The first would include food and clothing; the
second would include railroads, automobiles, and radios; the third
would include movies, books, amusements, yachts, leisure, music,
philosophy, and so on. Naturally, the dividing lines between the three
groups are very vague, and the position of any particular item will
vary from society to society and even from person to person.
As
standards of living rise, decreasing proportions of attention and
resources are devoted to primary or secondary types of products, and
increasing proportions to secondary and tertiary types of products.
This has very important economic consequences. It means that luxuries
tend to become relatively more important than necessities. It also
means that attention is constantly being shifted from products for
which the demand is relatively inelastic to products for which the
demand is relatively elastic (that is, expansible). There are
exceptions to this. For example, housing, which is obviously a
necessity, is a product for which demand is fairly elastic and might
continue to be so until most persons lived in palaces, but, on the
whole, the demand for necessities is less elastic than the demand for
luxuries.
A
rising standard of living also means an increase in savings (or
accumulation of surplus) out of all proportion to the rise in incomes.
It is a fairly general rule both for societies and for individuals that
savings go up faster than incomes as the latter rise, if for no other
reason than the fact that a person with an adequate supply of
necessities will take time to make up his mind on which luxuries he
will expend any increase in income.
Finally,
a shift from primary to secondary production usually entails a very
great increase in capital investment, while a shift from secondary to
tertiary production may not result in any increase in capital
investment proportionately as great. Leisure, amusements, music,
philosophy, education, and personal services are not likely to require
capital investments comparable to those required by the construction of
railroads, steel factories, automotive plants, and electrical stations.
As
a result of these factors, it may well arise that a society whose
rising standards of living have brought it to the point where it is
passing from emphasis on secondary to emphasis on tertiary production
will be faced with the necessity of adjusting itself to a situation
which includes more emphasis on luxuries than on necessities, more
attention to products of elastic demand than inelastic, and increased
savings with decreasing demands for investment.
Industrialism
2.
Industrialization is an obvious element in modern economic development.
As used here, it has a very specific meaning, namely, the application
of inanimate power to production. For long ages, production was made by
using power from animate sources such as human bodies, slaves, or draft
animals, with relatively little accomplished by power from such
inanimate sources as wind or falling water. The so-called Industrial
Revolution began when the energy from coal, released through a
nonliving machine—the steam engine—became an important
element in the productive process. It continued through improvements in
the use of wind power and waterpower to the use of oil in
internal-combustion engines and finally to power from atomic sources.
The
essential aspect of industrialism has been the great rise in the use of
energy per capita of population. No adequate figures are available for
most European countries, but in the United States the energy used per
capita was:
Year Energy
Per
Capita Index
1830 6
million
BTU 1
1890 80
million
BTU 13
1930 245
million
BTU 40
As
a result of this increase in the use of energy per capita, industrial
output per man-hour rose significantly (in the United States 96 percent
from 1899 to 1929). It was this increase in output per man-hour which
permitted the rise in standards of living and the increases in
investment associated with the process of industrialization.
The
Industrial Revolution did not reach all parts of Europe, or even all
parts of any single country, at the same moment. In general, it began
in England late in the eighteenth century (about 1776) and spread
slowly eastward and southward across Europe, reaching France after
1830, Germany after 1850, Italy and Russia after 1890. This eastward
movement of industrialism had many significant results, among them the
belief on the part of the newer countries that they were at a
disadvantage in comparison with England because of the latter's head
start. This was untrue, for, from a strictly temporal point of view,
these newer countries had an advantage over England, since their newer
industrial installations were less obsolescent and less hampered by
vested interests. Whatever advantage England had arose from better
natural resources, more plentiful supply of capital, and skilled labor.
Growth of
Size of Enterprises
3.
The growth of size of enterprise was a natural result of the process of
industrialism. This process required very considerable outlays for
fixed capital, especially in the activities most closely associated
with the early stages of industrialism, such as railroads, iron
foundries, and textile mills. Such great outlays required a new legal
structure for enterprise. This was found in the corporation or
limited-liability joint-stock company. In this company large capital
installations could be constructed and run, with ownership divided into
small fractions among a large number of persons.
This
increase in size of units
was apparent in all countries, but chiefly in the United States,
Britain, and Germany. The statistics on this are incomplete and tricky
to use, but, in general, they indicate that, while the number of
corporations has been increasing, and the average size of all
corporations has been falling, the absolute size of the largest
corporations has been increasing rapidly in the twentieth century, and
the share of total assets or of total output held h! the largest
corporations has been rising. As a result, the output of certain
products, notably chemicals, metals, artificial fibers, electrical
equipment, and so on, has been dominated in most countries by a few
great firms.
In
the United States, where this process has been studied most carefully,
it was found that from 1909 to 1930 the number of billion-dollar
corporations rose from 1 to 15, and the share of all corporation assets
held by the 200 largest rose from 32 percent to over 49 percent. By
1939 this figure reached 57 percent. This meant that the largest 200
corporations were growing faster than other corporations (5.4 percent a
year compared to 2.0 percent a year) and faster than total national
wealth. As a result, by 1930 these 200 largest corporations had 49.2
percent of all corporate assets (or $81 billion out of $165 billion);
they had 38 percent of all business wealth (or $81 billion out of $212
billion); they held 22 percent of all wealth in the country (or $81
billion out of $367 billion). In fact in 1930, a single corporation
(American Telephone and Telegraph) had greater assets than the total
wealth in 21 states. No such figures are available for
European
countries, but there can be no doubt that similar growth was taking
place in most of them during this period.
Dispersal of
Ownership of Enterprises
4.
Dispersal of ownership of enterprise was a natural result of the growth
of size of enterprise, and was made possible by the corporate method of
organization. As corporations increased in size, it became less and
less possible for any individual or small group to own any important
fractions of their stocks. [An individual or family can maintain
control of a corporation by holding as little as 5-10 percent of the
stock.] In most countries the number of security holders increased
faster than the number of outstanding securities. In the United States
the former increased in numbers seven times as fast as the latter from
1900 to 1928. This was a greater spread than in other countries, but
elsewhere there was also a considerable spreading out of corporate
ownership. This was exactly contrary to the prediction of Karl Marx
that the owners of industry would get fewer and fewer as well as richer
and richer.
Separation of
Control from Ownership
5.
The separation of ownership from control has already been mentioned. It
was an inevitable counterpart of the advent of the corporate form of
business organization; indeed, the corporate form was devised for this
very purpose—that is, to mobilize the capital owned by many
persons into a single enterprise controlled by a few. As we have seen,
this inevitable counterpart was carried to a quite unexpected degree by
the devices invented by financial capitalism.
Concentration
of Control
6.
The concentration of control was also inevitable in the long run, but
here also was carried by special devices to an extraordinary degree. As
a result, in highly industrialized countries, the economic systems were
dominated by a handful of industrial complexes. The French economy was
dominated by three powers (Rothschild, Mirabaud, and Schneider); the
German economy was dominated by two (I. G. Farben and Vereinigte Stahl
Werke); the United States was dominated by two (Morgan and
Rockefeller). Other countries, like Italy or Britain, were dominated by
somewhat larger numbers....
In
the United States, Morgan ... [guided] the economic swing from
financial to monopoly capitalism, and yielded quite gracefully to the
rising power of du Pont. In Britain, likewise, the masters of financial
capitalism yielded to the masters of chemical products and vegetable
oils, once the inevitable writing on the wall had been traced out in a
convincing fashion. But all these shifts of power within the individual
economic systems indicate merely that individuals or groups are unable
to maintain their positions in the complex flux of modern life, and do
not indicate any decentralization of control. On the contrary, even as
group succeeds group, the concentration of control becomes greater.
Decline of
Competition
7.
A decline in competition is a natural consequence of the concentration
of control. This decline in competition refers, of course, only to
price competition in the market, since this was the mechanism which
made the economic system function in the nineteenth century. This
decline is evident to all students of modern economics, and is one of
the most widely discussed aspects of the modern economic system. It is
caused not only by the activities of businessmen but also by the
actions of labor unions, of governments, of private social welfare
organizations, and even of the herd-like behavior of consumers
themselves.
Increasing
Disparity in the Distribution of Incomes
8.
The increasing disparity in the distribution of income is the most
controversial and least well-established characteristic of the system.
The available statistical evidence is so inadequate in all European
countries that the characteristic itself cannot be proved conclusively.
An extensive study of the subject, using the available materials for
both Europe and the United States, with a careful analysis of the much
better American materials, will permit the following tentative
conclusions. Leaving aside all government action, it would appear that
the disparity in the distribution of the national income has been
getting wider.
In
the United States, for example, according to the National Industrial
Conference Board, the richest one-fifth of the population received 46.2
percent of the national income in 1910, 51.3 percent in 1929, and 48.5
percent in 1937. In the same three years, the share of the poorest
one-fifth of the population fell from 8.3 percent to 5.4 percent to 3.6
percent. Thus the ratios between the portion obtained by the richest
one-fifth and that obtained by the poorest one-fifth increased in these
three years from 5.6 to 9.3 to 13.5. If, instead of one-fifths, we
examine the ratios between the percentage obtained by the richest
one-tenth and that obtained by the poorest one-tenth, we find that in
1910 the ratio was 10; in 1929 it was 21.7; and in 1937 it was 34.4.
This means that the rich in the United States were getting richer
relatively and probably absolutely while the poor were getting poorer
both relatively and absolutely. This last is caused by the fact that
the increase in the real national income in the period 1910-1937 was
not great enough to compensate for the decrease in percentage going to
the poor or for the increase in number of persons in that class.
As
a result of such an
increase in disparity in the distribution of national income, there
will be a tendency for savings to rise and for consumers' purchasing
power to decline relative to each other. This is because the savings of
a community are largely made by the richer persons in it, and savings
increase out of all proportion as incomes rise. On the other hand, the
incomes of the poor class are devoted primarily to expenditures for
consumption. Thus, if it is correct that there is an increasing
disparity in the distribution of the national income of a country,
there will be a tendency for savings to rise and consumer purchasing
power to decline relative to each other. If this is so, there will be
an increasing reluctance on the part of the controllers of savings to
invest their savings in new capital equipment, since the existing
decline of purchasing power will make it increasingly difficult to sell
the products of the existing capital equipment and highly unlikely that
the products of any new capital equipment could be sold more easily.
This
situation, as we have described it, assumes that the government has not
intervened in such a way as to change the distribution of the national
income as determined by economic factors. If, however, the government
does intervene to disturb this distribution, its actions will either
increase the disparity in its distribution or will decrease it. If
these actions increase it, the problem of the discrepancy to which we
have referred between savings, on one hand, and the level of purchasing
power and investment, on the other, will be made worse. If, on the
other hand, the government adopts a program which seeks to reduce the
disparity in the distribution of the national income, by, for example,
adopting a program of taxation which reduces the savings of the rich
while increasing the purchasing power of the poor, the same problem of
insufficient investment will arise. Such a tax program as we have
described would have to be based on a graduated income tax, and,
because of the concentration of saving in the upper-income brackets,
would have to be carried to such a sharp degree of graduation that the
taxes of the very rich would be rapidly approaching the level of
confiscation. This would, as the conservatives say, "kill incentive."
Of this there can be no doubt, for any person with an income already
large enough to satisfy his consumers' wants will be very unlikely to
possess any incentive to invest if each dollar of profit made from such
investment is to have all but a few cents of its value taken by the
government in the form of taxation.
In
this way, the problem of increasing disparity in the distribution of
national income leads to a single result (decline of investment
relative to savings), whether the situation is left subject to purely
economic factors or the government takes steps to decrease the
disparity. The only difference is that, in the one ease, the decline in
investment may be attributed to a leek of consumer purchasing power,
while, in the other case, it may be attributed to a "killing of
incentive" by government action. Thus, we see that the controversy
which has raged in both Europe and America since 1932 between
progressives and conservatives in regard to the causes of the lack of
investment is an artificial one. The progressives, who insisted that
the lack of investment was caused by lack of consumer purchasing power,
w ere correct. But the conservatives, who insisted that the lack of
investment was caused by a lack of confidence, were also correct. Each
was looking at the opposite side of what is a single continuous cycle.
This
cycle runs roughly as follows: (a) purchasing power
creates demand for goods; (b) demand for goods
creates confidence in the minds of investors; (c)
confidence creates new investment; and (d)
new investment creates purchasing power, which then creates demand, and
so on. To cut this cycle at any point and to insist that the cycle
begins at that point is to falsify the situation. In the 1930's the
progressives concentrated attention on stage (a),
while the conservatives concentrated attention on stage (c).
The progressives, who sought to increase purchasing po\ver by some
redistribution of the national income, undoubtedly did increase
purchasing power under stage (a), but they lost
purchasing power under stage (c)
by reducing confidence of potential investors. This decrease of
confidence was especially noticeable in countries (like France and the
United States) which were still deeply involved in the stage of
financial capitalism.
It
would appear that the
economic factors alone affected the distribution of incomes in the
direction of increasing disparity. In no major country, however, were
the economic factors alone allowed to determine the issue. In all
countries government action noticeably influenced the distribution....
In
Italy the economic factors had relatively free rein until after the
creation of the corporative state in 1934. The effect of government
action was to increase the normal economic tendency toward an
increasing disparity in distribution of the national income. This
tendency had been allowed to work from an early period until the end of
the war in 1918. A drastic effort by Leftish influences in the period
1918-1922 resulted in government action which reversed this tendency.
As a result, a counterrevolution brought Mussolini to power in October
1922. The new government suppressed those government actions which had
hampered the normal economic tendency, and as a result the trend toward
greater disparity in distribution of the national income was resumed.
This trend became more drastic after the creation of the dictatorship
in 1925, after the stabilization of the lira in 1927, and after the
creation of the corporative state in 1934.
In
Germany the changes in distribution of the national income were similar
to those in Italy. although complicated by the efforts to create a
social-service state (an effort going back to Bismarck) and by the
hyperinflation. In general, the trend toward increasing
disparity
in distribution of the national income continued, less rapidly than in
Italy, until after 1918. The inflation, by wiping out unemployment for
the lower class and by wiping out the savings of the middle class,
created a complex situation in which the wealth of the richest class
was increased while the poverty of the poorest class was reduced, and
the general trend toward increased disparity in income was probably
reduced. This reduction became great under the social-service state of
1924-1930, but was drastically reversed because of the great increase
in poverty in the lower classes after 1929. After 1934 the adoption of
an unorthodox financial policy and a policy of benefits to monopoly
capitalism reinforced the normal trend toward increasing disparity in
distribution of income. This was in accord with the desires
of the
Hitler government, but the full impact of this policy was not apparent
on the distribution of incomes until the period of full employment
after 1937.
Until
1938 Hitler's policy, although aimed at favoring the high-income
classes, raised the standards of living of the lower-income levels even
more drastically by shifting them from unemployment with incomes close
to nothing into wage-earning positions in industry) so that the
disparity in distribution of income was probably even reduced for a
short-run period in 1934-1937. This was not unacceptable to the
high-income classes, because it stopped the threat of revolution by the
discontented masses and because it was obviously of long-run benefit to
them. This long-run benefit began to appear when capacity employment of
capital and labor was achieved in 1937. The continuance of the policy
of rearmament after 1936 increased the incomes of the high-income
groups while decreasing the incomes of the lower-income groups and thus
served, from 1937 onward, to reinforce the normal economic tendency
toward an increasing disparity int eh distribution of incomes. This, of
course, is one of the essential features of a Fascist government, and
is obvious not only in Germany since 1937, in Italy since 1927, but
also in Spain since 1938.
In
France and Britain, the trend toward increasing disparity in the
distribution of incomes was reversed in recent decades, although in
Britain before 1945 and in France before 1936 there was no conscious
effort to achieve this result.
In
France disparity increased until 1913, then decreased chiefly because
of the increasing power of labor unions and actions of the government.
The inflation and resulting devaluation badly injured the incomes of
the possessing class, so that the disparity became less disperse; but
the whole level of living standards was declining, savings were
declining, and investment was decreasing more rapidly than either. This
process became worse after the depression hit France about 1931 and
even worse after the Popular Front adopted its welfare program in 1936.
This decline of the general economic level continued quite steadily
except for a brief revival after 1938, but the disparity in the
distribution of incomes very likely became greater in 1940-1942.
In
Britain the disparity became greater, but at a slower rate (because of
labor unions), until the First World War, and then almost stabilized,
increasing only slightly, because of the severe efforts made in Britain
to pay for much of the war's cost by taxation. The decrease in
upper-level incomes by taxation, however, was more than overcome by the
decrease in lower-level incomes from unemployment. This static
condition of the disparity in distribution of the national income
doubtless continued until after 1931. Since this last date the
situation is confused. The revival of prosperity and the rapid
development of new lines of activity combined with the peculiarities of
the incidence of British taxation have likely reduced the disparity,
but, until 1943, not by anything approaching the degree which one might
expect from a first glance at the problem. Since 1943 and especially
since 1946 the tax schedule and the government's social welfare program
have drastically reduced the disparity in distribution of income and
have also cut investment and even savings by private sources to a
considerable degree.
It
would seem that in the twentieth century the disparity in the
distribution of national income, which had been increasing for
generations, slowed down and reversed as a result of government
activities. This turning point appeared in different countries at
different dates, probably earliest in Denmark and France, later in
Germany and Italy, latest in Britain and Spain. In France and Britain
the tendency was reversed by the action of the government, but in a
hesitant fashion which was not able, in any decisive way, to overcome
the sag in private enterprise by any upswing in government enterprise.
In Germany, Italy, and Spain the governments fell into the hands of the
possessing classes, and the desires of the peoples of these countries
for a more equitable distribution of incomes were frustrated. In all
three types of conditions, there was a decline in real economic
progress until after 1950.
Declining
Rate of Expansion Leading to Crisis
9.
A declining rate of economic expansion is the last important
characteristic of the economic system of Europe in the present century
up to 1950. This decline resulted almost inevitably from the other
characteristics which we have already discussed. It varied from country
to country, the countries of eastern Europe suffering less than those
of western Europe on the whole, but chiefly because their previous rate
of progress had been so much lower.
The
causes of this decline are
basically to be found in a relative increase in the power of the vested
interests within the community to defend the status quo against the
efforts of the progressive and enterprising members of the community to
change it. This was revealed in the market (the central mechanism of
the economic system) as a result of a relative increase in savings in
respect to investment. Savings have continued or have increased for
several reasons. In the first place, a tradition which placed a high
social esteem on savings existed in western Europe from the Protestant
Reformation until the 1930'S. In the second place, there had grown up
established institutionalized savings organizations like insurance
companies. In the third place, the rising standards of living increased
savings even more rapidly. In the fourth place, the increasing
disparity in the distribution of incomes increased savings. In the
fifth place, the increase in size of enterprises and the separation of
ownership from control acted to increase the amount of corporate
savings (undistributed profits).
On
the other hand, the inclination to invest did not rise so rapidly as
savings, or even decreased. Here, again, the reasons are numerous. In
the first place, the shift in advanced industrial countries from
secondary to tertiary production reduces the demand for heavy capital
investment. In the second place, declining rates of population
increase, and geographic expansion may adversely affect the demand for
investment. In the third place, the increasing disparity in the
distribution of incomes, whether it is counteracted by government
action or not, has a tendency to reduce the demand for investment
capital. In the fourth place, the decrease in competition has served to
reduce the amount of investment by making it possible for the
controllers of existing capital to maintain its value by curtailing the
investment of new capital which would make the existing capital less
valuable. This last point may require additional explanation.
In
the past, investment was not only capital-creating but also
capital-destroying—that is, it made some existing capital
worthless by making it obsolete. The creation by investment, for
example, of shipyards for making iron-hull steam vessels not only
created this new capital but at the same time destroyed the value of
the existing yards equipped to make wooden-hull sailing ships. In the
past, new investment was made in only one of two cases: (a)
if
an old investor believed that the new capital would yield sufficient
profit to pay for itself and for the old investment now made obsolete,
or (b) if the new investor was completely free of
the old one,
so that the latter could do nothing to prevent the destruction of his
existing capital holdings by the new investor. Both of these two
alternatives, in the twentieth century tended to become less likely
(until 1950), the former by the decline in consumer purchasing power
and the latter by the decrease in competition.
The
way in which the relative decline of investment in respect to savings
results in economic crisis is not difficult to see. In the modern
economic community, the sum total of goods and services appearing in
the market is at one and the same time the income of the community and
the aggregate cost of producing the goods and services in question. The
sums expended by the entrepreneur on wages, rents, salaries, raw
materials, interest, lawyers' fees, and so on, represent costs to him
and income to those who receive them. His own profits also enter the
picture, since they are his income and the cost of persuading him to
produce the wealth in question. The goods are offered for sale at a
price which is equal to the sum of all costs (including profits). In
the community as a whole, aggregate costs, aggregate incomes, and
aggregate prices are the same, since they are merely opposite sides of
the identical expenditures.
The
purchasing power available in the community is equal to income minus
savings. If there are any savings, the available purchasing power will
be less than the aggregate prices being asked for the products for sale
and by the amount of the savings. Thus, all the goods and services
produced cannot be sold as long as savings are held back. In order for
all the goods to be sold, it is necessary for the savings to reappear
in the market as purchasing power. The usual way in which this is done
is by investment. When savings are invested, they are expended into the
community and appear as purchasing power. Since the capital good made
by the process of investment is not offered for sale to the community,
the expenditures made by its creation appear completely as purchasing
power. Thus, the disequilibrium between purchasing power and prices in
which was created by the act of saving is restored completely by the
act of investment, and all the goods can be sold at the prices asked.
But whenever investment is less than savings, the available supply of
purchasing power is inadequate by the same amount to buy the goods
being offered. This margin by which purchasing power is inadequate
because of an excess of savings over investment may be called the
"deflationary gap." This '"deflationary gap" is the key to
the
twentieth century economic crisis and one of the three central cores of
the whole tragedy of the century.
Chapter
37—The Results of Economic Depression
The
deflationary gap arising from a failure of investment to reach the
level of savings can he closed either by lowering the supply of goods
to the level of the available purchasing power or by raising the supply
of purchasing power to a level able to absorb the existing supply of
goods, or by a combination of both. The first solution will give a
stabilized economy on a low level of economic activity; the second will
give a stabilized economy on a high level of economic activity. Left to
itself, the economic system under modern conditions would adopt the
former procedure. This would work roughly as follows: The existence of
the deflationary gap (that is, available purchasing power less than
aggregate prices of available goods and services) will result in
falling prices, declining economic activity, and rising unemployment.
All this will result in a fall in national income, and this in turn
will result in an even more rapid decline in the volume of savings.
This decline continues until the volume of savings reaches the level of
investment, at which point the fall is arrested and the economy becomes
stabilized at a low level.
As
a matter of fact, this process did not work itself out in any
industrial country during the great depression of 1929-1934, because
the disparity in the distribution of the national income was so great
that a considerable portion of the population would have been driven to
zero incomes and absolute want before the savings of the richer segment
of the population fell to the level of investment. Moreover, as the
depression deepened, the level of investment declined even more rapidly
than the level of savings. There can be little doubt that under such
conditions the masses of the population would have been driven to
revolution before the "automatic economic factors" were able to
stabilize the economy, and the stabilization, if reached, would have
been on a level so low that a considerable portion of the population
would have been in absolute want. Because of this, in every industrial
country, governments took steps to arrest the course of the depression
before their citizens were driven to desperation.
The
methods used to deal with the depression and close the deflationary gap
were of many different kinds, but all are reducible to two fundamental
types: (a) those which destroy goods and (b)
those which produce goods which do not enter the market.
The
destruction of goods will close the deflationary gap by reducing the
supply of unsold goods through lowering the supply of goods to the
level of the supply of purchasing power. It is not generally realized
that this method is one of the chief ways in which the gap is closed in
a normal business cycle. In such a cycle, goods are destroyed hy the
simple expedient of not producing the goods which the system is capable
of producing. The failure to use the economic system at the 1929 level
of output during the years 1930-1934 represented a loss of goods worth
$100,000,000,000 in the United States, Britain, and Germany alone. This
loss was equivalent to the destruction of such goods. Destruction of
goods by failure to gather the harvest is a common phenomenon under
modern conditions, especially in respect to fruits, berries, and
vegetables. When a farmer leaves his crop of oranges, peaches, or
strawberries unharvested because the selling price is too low to cover
the expense of harvesting, he is destroying the goods. Outright
destruction of goods already produced is not common, and occurred for
the first time as a method of combating depression in the years
1930-1934. During this period, stores of coffee, sugar, and bananas
were destroyed, corn was plowed under, and young livestock was
slaughtered to reduce the supply on the market. This destruction of
goods in warfare is another example of this method of overcoming
deflationary conditions int he economic system.
The
second method of filling the deflationary gap, namely, by producing
goods which do not enter the market, accomplishes its purpose by
providing purchasing power in the market, since the costs of production
of such goods do enter the market as purchasing power, while the goods
themselves do not drain funds from the system if they are not offered
for sale. New investment was the usual way in which this was
accomplished in the normal business cycle, but it is not the normal way
of filling the gap under modern conditions of depression. We have
already seen the growing reluctance to invest and the unlikely chance
that the purchasing power necessary for prosperity will be provided by
a constant stream of private investment. If this is so, the funds for
producing goods which do not enter the market must be sought in a
program of public spending.
Any
program of public spending at once runs into the problems of inflation
and public debt. These are the same two problems which were mentioned
in an earlier chapter in connection with the efforts of governments to
pay for the First World War. The methods of paying for a depression are
exactly the same as the methods of paying for a war, except that the
combination of methods used may be somewhat different because the goals
are somewhat different. In financing a war, we should seek to achieve a
method which will provide a maximum of output with a minimum of
inflation and public debt. In dealing with a depression, since a chief
aim is to close the deflationary gap, the goal will be to provide a
maximum of output with a necessary degree of inflation and a minimum of
public debt. Thus, the use of fiat money is more justifiable in
financing a depression than in financing a war. [Fiat money without
gold and silver backing should not be used to finance either.]
Moreover, the selling of bonds to private persons in wartime might well
be aimed at the lower-income groups in order to reduce consumption and
release facilities for war production, while in a depression (where low
consumption is the chief problem) such sales of bonds to finance public
spending would have to be aimed at the savings of the upper-income
groups.
These
ideas on the role of
government spending in combating depression have been formally
organized into the "theory of the compensatory economy." This theory
advocates that government spending and fiscal policies be organized so
that they work exactly contrary to the business cycle, with lower taxes
and larger spending in a deflationary period and higher taxes with
reduced spending in a boom period, the fiscal deficits of the down
cycle being counterbalanced in the national budget by the surpluses of
the up cycle.
This
compensatory economy has not been applied with much success in any
European country except Sweden. In a democratic country, it would take
the control of taxing and spending away from the elected
representatives of the people and place this precious "power of the
purse" at the control of the automatic processes of the business cycle
as interpreted by bureaucratic (and unrepresentative) experts.
Moreover, all these programs of deficit spending are in jeopardy in a
country with a private banking system. In such a system, the creation
of money (or credit) is usually reserved for the private banking
institutions, and is deprecated as a government action. The argument
that the creation of funds by the government is bad while creation of
funds by the banks is salutary is ... [made] in a system based on
traditional laissez faire and in which the usual avenues of
communications (such as newspapers and radio) are under private, or
even banker, control.
Public
spending as a method of counteracting depression can vary very greatly
in character, depending on the purposes of the spending. Spending for
destruction of goods or for restriction of output, as under the early
New Deal agricultural program, cannot be justified easily in a
democratic country with freedom of communications, because it obviously
results in a decline in national income and living standards. Spending
for nonproductive monuments is ... hardly a long-run solution. Spending
for investment in ... equipment (like the TVA) is ... a permanent
departure from a system of private capitalism, and can be easily
attacked in a country with a capitalistic ideology and a private
banking system. Spending on armaments and national defense is the last
method of fighting depression and is the one most readily and most
widely adopted in the twentieth century.
A
program of public expenditure on armaments is a method for filling the
deflationary gap and overcoming depression because it adds purchasing
power to the market without drawing it out again later (since the
armaments, once produced, are not put up for sale). From an economic
point of view, this method of combating depression is not much
different from the method listed earlier under destruction of goods,
for, in this case also, economic resources are diverted from
constructive activities or idleness to production for destruction. The
appeal of this method for coping with the problem of depression does
not rest on economic grounds at all, for, on such grounds, there is no
justification. Its appeal is rather to be found on other, especially
political, grounds.
Among
these grounds we may list the following: a rearmament program helps
heavy industry directly and immediately. Heavy industry is the segment
of the economy which suffers earliest and most drastically in a
depression, which absorbs manpower most readily (thus reducing
unemployment) and which is politically influential in most countries.
Such a program is also easily justified to the public on grounds of
national defense, especially if other countries are dealing with their
economic crises by the same method of treatment.
The
adoption of rearmament as a method of combating depression does not
have to be conscious. The country which adopts it may honestly feel
that it is adopting the policy for good reasons, that it is threatened
by aggression, and that a program of rearmament is necessary for
political protection. It is very rare for a country consciously to
adopt a program of aggression, for, in most wars, both sides are
convinced that their actions are defensive. It is almost equally rare
for a country to adopt a policy of rearmament as a solution for
depression. But, unconsciously, the danger from a neighbor and the
advantages to be derived from rearming in the face of such a danger are
always more convincing to a country whose economic system is
functioning below capacity than it is to a country which is riding a
boom. Moreover, if a country adopts rearmament because of fear of
another country's arms, and these last are the result of efforts to
fill a deflationary gap, it can also be said that the rearmament of the
former has a basic economic cause.
As
we have mentioned, Fascism is the adoption by the vested interests in a
society of an authoritarian form of government in order to maintain
their vested interests and prevent the reform of the society. In the
twentieth century in Europe, the vested interests usually sought to
prevent the reform of the economic system (a reform whose need was made
evident by the long-drawn-out depression) by adopting an economic
program whose chief element was the effort to fill the deflationary gap
by rearmament.
Chapter
38—The Pluralist Economy and World Blocs
The
economic disasters of two wars, a world depression, and the post-war
fluctuations showed clearly by 1960 that a new economic organization of
society was ... [being developed by the Money Power]. The laissez-faire
competitive system ... [had been destroyed by the Money Power]. The
system of monopoly capitalism had helped in this ... [destruction], and
clearly showed that its efforts, in Fascist countries, [and other
nations] to protect its profits and privileges by authoritarian
government and ultimately by war were ... [successful] .... [although
the Fascist countries such as Germany and Italy were not able to win
the war they started]. Moreover, Communism, on the winning side of the
war, nonetheless showed that it, like any authoritarian system, failed
to produce innovations, flexibility, and freedom; it could make
extensive industrial advances only by copying freer peoples, and could
not raise its standards of living substantially because it could not
combine lack of freedom and force in political life and in the
utilization of economic resources with the increased production of food
and spiritual or intellectual freedom which were the chief desires of
its own peoples.
Laissez
Faire, Fascism and Communism Combined into a Common System
This
almost simultaneous failure of ... economic Fascism, and of Communism
to satisfy the growing popular demand both for rising standards of
living and for spiritual liberty has forced the mid-twentieth century
to seek some new economic organization. This demand has been
intensified by the arrival on the scene of new peoples, new nations,
and new tribes who by their demands for these same goods have shown
their growing awareness of the problems, and their determination to do
something about them. As this new group of underdeveloped peoples look
about, they have been struck by the conflicting claims of the two great
super-Powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The former
offered the goods the new peoples wanted (rising standards of living
and freedom), while the latter seemed to offer methods of getting these
goods (by state accumulation of capital, government direction of the
utilization of economic resources, and centralized methods of over-all
social planning) which might tend to smother these goals. The net
result of all this has been a convergence of all three systems toward a
common, if remote, system of the future.
A New
Economic Theory to Dominate the Earth
The
ultimate nature of that new system of economic and social life is ...
[what] we might call it the "pluralist economy," and characterize its
social structure as one which provides prestige, rewards, and power to
managerial groups of experts whose contributions to the system are
derived from their expertise and "know-how." These managers and
experts, who clearly are a minority in any society, are recruited from
the society as a whole, can be selected only by a process of "careers
open to talent" on a trial-and-error basis, and require freedom of
assembly, discussion, and decision in order to produce the innovations
needed for the future success, or even the survival, of the system in
which they function. Thus the pluralist economy and the managerial
society, from the early 1940's, have forced the growth of a new kind of
economic organization which will be totally unlike the four types of
pre-1939 (American laissez faire, Stalinist Communism, authoritarian
Fascism, and underdeveloped areas).
The
Characteristics of the New Pluralist Managerial System
The
chief characteristics of the new pluralist managerial system are five
in number:
1.
The central problem of decision-making in the new system will be
concerned with the allotment of resources among three claimants: (a)
consumers' goods to provide rising standards of living; (b)
investment in capital goods to provide the
equipment to produce consumers' goods; (c)
the public sector covering defense, public order, education, social
welfare, and all the central care of administrative activities
associated with the young, the old, and public welfare as a whole.
2.
The process of decision-making among these three claimants will take
the form of a complex, multilateral struggle among a number of
interested groups. These groups, which differ from one society or area
to another, are in constant flux in each society or area. In general,
however, the chief blocs or groups involved will be: (a)
the defense forces, (b) labor, (c)
the farmers, (d) heavy industry, (e)
light industry, (f) transport and communication
groups, (g) finance, fiscal, and banking groups, (h)
commercial, real-estate, and construction interests, (i)
scientific, educational, and intellectual groups, (j)
political party and government workers, and (k)
consumers in general.
The Central
Managerial Elite Operate the System
3.
The process of decision-making operates by the slow and almost
imperceptible shifts of the various blocs, one by one, from support to
neutralism to opposition toward the existing division of resources
among the three claimant sectors by the central managerial elite. If,
for example, there is excess allotment of resources to the defense or
governmental sector, the farming groups, consumers, commercial groups,
intellectuals, and others will become increasingly dissatisfied with
the situation and gradually shift their pressures toward a reduction of
the resources for defense and an increase of the resources for the
consumer or the capital investment sectors. Such shifts are complex,
gradual, reversible, and continuous.
4.
The working out of these shifts of resources to achieve the more
concrete goals of the diverse interest blocs in the society will be
increasingly dominated by rationalist and scientific methods
emphasizing analytical and quantitative techniques. This means that
emotional and intuitive forces will play, as always, a considerable
role in the shifting of interest blocs which dominate the allotment of
resources among the three sectors, but that rational rather than
emotional methods, on quantitative rather than qualitative bases, will
dominate the utilization of such resources within each sector for more
specific objectives. This will require considerable freedom of
discussion in such utilization even where, as in Communist states or in
underdeveloped areas, authoritarian and secretive methods are used in
reference to the allotments among sectors. And, in general, there will
be a very considerable modification of the areas and objectives of
freedom in all societies of the world, with gradual reduction of
numerous personal freedoms of the past accompanied by the gradual
increase of other fundamental freedoms, especially intellectual, which
will provide the technical innovations, the clash of ideas, and the
release of personal energy necessary for the success, or even the
survival, of modern state systems.
5.
The details of the
operations of this new system will inevitably differ from area to area
and even from state to state. In the Western bloc of states the shifts
of public opinion continue to be reflected very largely in shifting
political parties. Within the Communist bloc these shifts will take
place, as they have in the past, among a smaller group of insiders and
on a much more personal basis, so that shifts of targets and direction
of policy will be revealed to the public by shifts of personnel in the
state's bureaucratic structure. And in the underdeveloped countries,
where possession of power is frequently associated with support from
the armed forces, the process may be reflected by changes in policy and
direction by the existing elite and rulers who retain their power in
spite of changing policies.
In
the most general way, the
period since 1947 has shown that the differences between any two of the
three blocs are becoming less; the three methods for achieving policy
shifts (just mentioned) are becoming increasingly similar in essence
and in fact, however different they continue to be in law. Moreover, in
the same years since 1947, the solidarity of both the West and the
Communists has become increasingly less, while the unity of outlook,
policies, and interests of the uncommitted and underdeveloped peoples
of the intermediary zone between the two great Power blocs become
increasingly unified.
A Managed
Economic System
The
method of operation of
this newly formed pluralist-managerial system may be called "planning,"
if it be understood that planning may be both public and private and
does not necessarily have to be centralized in either, but is rather
concerned with the general method of a scientific and rational
utilization of resources, in both time and space, to achieve
consciously envisioned future goals.
Europe and
Japan Serve as the Model for the New System
In
this process the greatest
achievements have been by western Europe and by Japan. The latter,
relieved to a great extent from the need to devote resources to
defense, has been able to mobilize these for investment and, to a
somewhat lesser degree, for rising standards of living, and has been
able to achieve growth rates of gross national product of 7 to 9
percent a year. This has made Japan the only area of the non-Western
world and of the underdeveloped countries able to pass into the higher
level of industrialization capable of achieving substantial
improvements in individual standards of living. These improvements,
held back by the emphasis on reconstruction and investment in
1945-1962, have shifted slowly but steadily in the last few years
toward consumers' benefits, including such intangibles as increased
education, sports, leisure, and entertainment.
Western
Europe has had an
experience somewhat similar to that of Japan except that its chief
emphasis has been on improved standards of living (collectively known
as "welfare"), with more emphasis on defense and less emphasis on
investment than Japan. As a result, western Europe, especially West
Germany, Italy, France, Scandinavia, and Britain, have, for the first
time, come within striking distance of the very high standards of
personal consumption found in the United States. In this process these
countries have allowed the defensive power of their armed forces to
suffer for the sake of their welfare goals, but have felt safe in doing
so because of their reliance on American defensive power to deter any
Soviet aggression.
Western Europe
In
this process western Europe
has achieved growth rates in gross national product (GNP) of 4 to 8
percent a year as a consequence of three basic forces. These have been:
(1) the skillful (and perhaps lucky) use of financial and fiscal
techniques which have encouraged both investment and willingness to
consume; (2) the economic and technical aid of the United States,
beginning with the Marshall Plan of 1946 and continuing with United
States government military aid and investments of savings coming in
from the whole Western world; and (3) the growing integration of
Europe's economy in the Common Market which has made it feasible to
adopt mass-production techniques for a greatly enlarged market.
America
In
this same process the
achievements of the United States and of the Soviet bloc have been much
less spectacular from a purely economic point of view. In the United
States, where the standard of living has reached unprecedented heights
of affluence, the burdens of being a super-Power have hampered welfare
because of the conflicting claims of defense, governmental expenses,
prestige, and other rivalries with the Soviet Union, and the desire to
contribute to the growth of the underdeveloped areas of the world. As a
result, growth rates of GNP have been from 2 to 5 percent a year, and
the burden of the governmental sector, including defense and increasing
demands for such welfare items as education, health, and equalization
of personal opportunities, have put great pressures on the growth of
the consumers' sector.
Soviet Bloc
The
Soviet bloc as a whole,
apart from the Soviet Union as the dominant member of that bloc, has
been ambiguous in its economic growth. The demands of the defense
sector and of other reflections of the Cold War, such as the "space
race," have combined with the continued failures of Communist
agricultural practices and the intrinsic inefficiency of the Communist
system as a whole to limit severely the rise in standards of living. To
be sure, the standards of living of the Soviet Union itself have
reached the highest in Russia's history, while still lagging at only a
fraction of those in the United States. But in the Communist bloc as a
whole the picture has been far less happy. The non-Russian countries in
the bloc have been exploited by the Soviet Union, have been treated as
colonial areas (that is, sources of manpower, raw materials, and food
based on claims arising from political relations), and have achieved
little, if any, increase in GNP beyond that needed to sustain their
increasing populations. In the cases of more western areas, such as
East Germany, Hungary, and Poland, this has been reflected in absolute
declines in living standards. The sharp contrast between this and the
visible boom in West Germany has greatly increased the discontent in
the European satellites.
Lower
Developed Nations
The
position of the
underdeveloped nations has also been generally ambiguous. As a whole,
lack of know-how and trained manpower, lack of capital, waste of
resources by small privileged elites, absolute shortages of resources
in some areas, the rapid growth of populations almost everywhere, and
hopelessly unprogressive social structures and ideologies have combined
to prevent any considerable improvements in standards of living. These
have, in fact, decreased in much of Indonesia, the Near East, and Latin
America, and have kept only slightly ahead of the growing population in
India, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Only in Japan, as we have said, has
there been success from this point of view, while the failure of these
desires in China and in Latin America have tended to lead both of these
out of their former alignments with the Soviet bloc and the Western
bloc toward the more ambivalent political position of the uncommitted
nations. In fact, in this process China's enmity toward both the Soviet
Union and the United States has tended to place her in a new position,
apart from all the pre-1962 alignments of international politics, while
Latin America's growing discontent has tended to lead it, from many
points of view, toward the position of the Near East countries.
Part
Twelve—The Policy of Appeasement, 1931-1936
Chapter
39—Introduction
The
structure of collective
security, which had been so imperfectly built after 1919, by the
victorious Powers, was destroyed completely in the eight years
following 1931 under the assaults of Japan, Italy, and Germany. These
assaults were not really aimed at the collective security system or
even at the peace settlements of which it was a part. After all, two of
the aggressors had been on the winning side in 1919. Moreover, these
assaults, although called forth by the world depression, went far
beyond any reaction to the economic slump.
From
the broadest point of
view, the aggressors of 1931-1941 were attacking the whole nineteenth
century way of life and some of the most fundamental attributes of
Western Civilization itself. They were in revolt against democracy,
against the parliamentary system, against laissez faire and the liberal
outlook, against nationalism (although in the name of nationalism),
against humanitarianism, against science, and against all respect for
human dignity and human decency. It was an attempt to brutalize men
into a mass of unthinking atoms whose reactions could be controlled hy
methods of mass communication and directed to increase the profits and
power of an alliance of militarists, heavy-industrialists, landlords,
and psychopathic political organizers recruited from the dregs of
society. That the society which they came to control could have created
such dregs, men who were totally untouched by the traditions of Western
Civilization and who were restrained by no social relationships at all,
and that it could have allowed the militarists and industrialists to
use these dregs as an instrument for seizing control of the state raise
profound doubts about the nature of that society and about its real
allegiance to the traditions to which it paid lip service.
The
speed of social change in
the nineteenth century, by quickening transportation and communications
and by gathering people in amorphous multitudes in the cities, had
destroyed most of the older social relationships of the average man,
and by leaving him emotionally unattached to neighborhood, parish,
vocation, or even family, had left him isolated and frustrated. The
paths which the society of his ancestors had provided for the
expression of their gregarious, emotional, and intellectual needs were
destroyed by the speed of social change, and the task of creating new
paths for expressing these needs was far beyond the ability of the
average man. Thus he was left, with his innermost drives unexpressed,
willing to follow any charlatan who provided a purpose in life, an
emotional stimulus, or a place in a group.
The
methods of mass propaganda
offered by the press and the radio provided the means by which these
individuals could be reached and mobilized; the determination of the
militarists, landlords, and industrialists to expand their own power
and extend their own interests even to the destruction of society
itself provided the motive; the world depression provided the occasion.
The materials (frustrated men in the mass), the methods (mass
communications), the instrument (the psychopathic political
organization), and the occasion (the depression) were all available by
1931. Nevertheless, these men could never have come to power or come
within a measurable distance of destroying Western Civilization
completely if that civilization had not failed in its efforts to
protect its own traditions and if the victors of 1919 had not failed in
their efforts to defend themselves.
The
nineteenth century had
been so successful in organizing techniques that it had almost
completely lost any vision of goals. Control of nature hy the advance
of science, increases in production by the growth of industry, the
spread of literacy through universal education, the constant speedup of
movement and communications, the extraordinary rise in standards of
living—all these had extended man's ability to do things without
in any way clarifying his ideas as to what was worth doing. Goals were
lost completely or were reduced to the most primitive level of
obtaining more power and more wealth. But the constant acquisition of
power or wealth, like a narcotic for which the need grows as its use
increases without in any way satisfying the user, left man's "higher"
nature unsatisfied. From the past of Western Civilization, as a result
of the fusion of Classical, Semitic, Christian, and Medieval
contributions, there had emerged a system of values and modes of living
which received scant respect in the nineteenth century in spite of the
fact that the whole basis of the nineteenth century (its science, its
humanitarianism, its liberalism, and its belief in human dignity and
human freedom) had come from this older system of values and modes of
living. The Renaissance and Reformation had rejected the medieval
portion of this system; the eighteenth century had rejected the value
of social tradition and of social discipline, the nineteenth century
rejected the Classical and the Christian portion of this tradition, and
gave the final blow to the hierarchical conception of human needs. The
twentieth century reaped where these had sown. With its tradition
abandoned and only its techniques maintained, Western Civilization by
the middle of the twentieth century reached a point where the chief
question was "Can it survive?"
Against
this background the
aggressive Powers rose after 1931 to challenge Western Civilization and
the "satisfied" Powers which had neither the will nor the desire to
defend it. The weakness of Japan and Italy from the point of view of
industrial development or natural resources made it quite impossible
for them to have issued any challenge unless they were faced by weak
wills among their victims. In fact, it is quite clear that neither
Japan nor Italy could have made a successful aggression without the
parallel aggression of Germany. What is not so clear, but is equally
true, is that Germany could have made no aggression without the
acquiescence, and even in some cases the actual encouragement, of the
"satisfied" Powers, especially Britain. The German documents captured
since 1944 make this quite evident.
Chapter
40—The Japanese Assault, 1931-1941
With
one notable exception,
Japan's background for aggression presented a strong parallel to that
of Germany. The exception was the industrial strength of the two
Powers. Japan was really a "have not" nation, lacking most of the
natural resources to sustain a great industrial system. It lacked much
of the necessary basic materials such as coal; iron, petroleum, alloy
minerals, waterpower, or even food. In comparison, Germany's claim to
be a "have not" nation was merely a propaganda device. Other than this,
the similarity of the two countries was striking: each had a completely
cartelized industry, a militaristic tradition, a hardworking population
which respected authority and loved order, a national obsession with
its own unique value and a resentment at the rest of the world for
failure to recognize this, and a constitutional structure in which a
facade of parliamentary constitutionalism barely concealed the reality
of power wielded by an alliance of army, landlords, and industry. The
fact that the Japanese constitution of 1889 was copied from the
constitution of Bismarck goes far to explain this last similarity.
We
have already mentioned the
acute problem presented to Japan by the contrast between their limited
natural resources and their growing problems. While their resources did
not increase, their population grew from 31 million in 1873 to 73
million in 1939, the rate of growth reaching its peak in the period
1925-1930 (8 percent increase in these five years).
With
great ingenuity and
tireless energy, the Japanese people tried to make ends meet. With
foreign exchange earned from merchant shipping or from exports of silk,
wood products, or seafoods, raw materials were imported, manufactured
into industrial products, and exported to obtain the foreign exchange
necessary to pay for imports of raw materials or food. By keeping costs
and prices love, the Japanese were able to undersell European exporters
of cotton textiles and iron products in the markets of Asia, especially
in China and Indonesia.
The
possibility of relieving
their population pressure by emigration, as Europe had done earlier,
was prevented by the fact that the obvious colonial areas had already
been taken in hand by Europeans. English-speaking persons, who held the
best and vet unfilled areas, slammed the door on Japanese immigration
in the period after 1901, justifying their actions on racial and
economic arguments. American restrictions on Japanese immigration,
originated among laboring groups in California, were a very bitter pill
for Japan, and injured its pride greatly.
The
steady rise in tariffs
against Japanese manufactured goods after 1897, a development which was
also led by America, served to increase the difficulties of Japan's
position. So also did the slow exhaustion of the Pacific fisheries, the
growing (if necessary) restrictions on such fishing by conservationist
agreements, the decrease in forestry resources, and political and
social unrest in Asia. For a long time, Japan was protected from the
full impact of this problem by a series of favorable accidents. The
First World War w as a splendid windfall. It ended European commercial
competition in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific; it increased the demand
for Japanese goods and services; and it made Japan an international
creditor for the first time. Capital investment in the five years
1915-1920 was eight times as much as in the ten years 1905-1915;
laborers employed in factories using over five workers each increased
from 948 thousand in 1914 to 1,612 thousand in 1919; ocean shipping
rose from l.5 million tons in 1914 to 3 million tons in 1918, while
income from shipping freight rose from 40 million yen in 1914 to 450
million in 1918; the favorable balance of international trade amounted
to 1,480 million yen for the four years 1915-1918..
Social
life, the economic
structure, and the price system, already dislocated by this rapid
change, received a terrible jolt in the depression of 1920-1921, but
Japan rapidly recovered and was shielded from the full consequences of
her large population and limited resources by the boom of the 1920's.
Rapid technological advance in the United States, Germany, and Japan
itself, demand for Japanese goods (especially textiles) in southern and
southeastern Asia, American loans throughout the world, large American
purchases of Japanese silk, and the general "boom psychology" of the
whole world protected Japan from the full impact of its situation until
1929-1931. Under this protection the older authoritarian and
militaristic traditions were weakened, liberalism and democracy grew
slowly but steadily, the aping of Germanic traditions in intellectual
and political life (which had been going on since about 1880) was
largely abandoned, the first party government was established in 1918,
universal manhood suffrage was established in 1925, civilian governors
replaced military rule for the first time in colonial areas like
Formosa, the army was reduced from 21 to 17 divisions in 1924, the navy
was reduced by international agreement in 1922 and in 1930, and there
was a great expansion of education, especially in the higher levels.
This movement toward democracy and liberalism alarmed the militarists
and drove them to desperation. At the same time, the growth of unity
and public order in China, which these militarists had regarded as a
potential victim for their operations, convinced them that they must
act quickly before it was too late. The world depression gave this
group their great opportunity.
Even
before its onset,
however, four ominous factors in Japanese political life hung like
threatening clouds on the horizon. These were (a)
the lack of any constitutional requirement for a government responsible
to the Diet, (b) the continued constitutional
freedom of the army from civilian control, (c)
the growing use of political assassination by the conservatives as a
means for removing liberal politicians from public life, as was done
against three premiers and many lesser persons in the period 1918-1932,
and (d) the growing appeal of revolutionary
Socialism ;n laboring circles.
The
world depression and the
financial crisis hit Japan a terrible blow. The declining demand for
raw silk in competition with synthetic fibers like rayon and the slow
decline of such Asiatic markets as China and India because of political
disturbances and growing industrialization made this blow harder to
bear. Under this impact, the reactionary and aggressive forces in
Japanese society were able to solidify their control of the state,
intimidate all domestic opposition, and embark on that adventure of
aggression and destruction that led ultimately to the disasters of 1945.
These
economic storms were
severe, but Japan took the road to aggression because of its own past
traditions rather than for economic reasons. The militarist traditions
of feudal Japan continued into the modern period, and flourished in
spite of steady criticism and opposition. The constitutional structure
shielded both the military leaders and the civilian politicians from
popular control, and justified their actions as being in the
emperor’s name. But these two branches of government were
separated so that the civilians had no control over the generals. The
law and custom of the constitution allowed the generals and admirals to
approach the emperor directly without the knowledge or consent of the
Cabinet, and required that only officers of this rank could serve as
ministers for these services in the Cabinet itself. No civilian
intervened in the chain of command from emperor to lowly private, and
the armed services became a state within the state. Since the officers
did not hesitate to use their positions to ensure civilian compliance
with their wishes, and constantly resorted to armed force and
assassination, the power of the military grew steadily after 1927. All
their acts, they said, were in the name of the emperor, for the glory
of Japan, to free the nation from corruption, from partisan
politicians, and from plutocratic exploitation, and to restore the old
Japanese virtues of order, self-sacrifice, and devotion to authority.
Separate
from the armed
forces, sometimes in opposition to them but generally dependent upon
them as the chief purchasers of the products of heavy industry, were
the forces of monopoly capitalism. These were led, as we have
indicated, by the eight great economic complexes, controlled as family
units, known as zaibatsu. These eight controlled 75
percent of
the nation's corporate wealth by 1930 and were headed by Mitsui, which
had 15 per cent of all corporate capital in the country. They engaged
in openly corrupt relationships with Japanese politicians and, less
frequently, with Japanese militarists. They usually cooperated with
each other. For example, in 1927, the efforts of Mitsui and Mitsubishi
to smash a smaller competitor, Suzuki Company of Kobe, precipitated a
financial panic which closed most of the banks in Japan. While the
Showa Bank, operated jointly by the zaibatsu, took
over many
smaller corporations and banks which failed in the crisis and over
180,000 depositors lost their savings, the Cabinet of the militarist
General Tanaka granted 1,500 million yen to save the zaibatsu
themselves from the consequences of their greed.
The
militaristic and
nationalistic traditions were widely accepted by the Japanese people.
These traditions, extolled by the majority of politicians and teachers,
and propagated by numerous patriotic societies, both open and secret,
were given a free hand, while any opposing voices were crushed out by
legal or illegal methods until, by 1930, most such voices were
silenced. About the same date, the militarists and the zaibatsu,
who had previously been in opposition as often as in coalition, came
together in their last fateful alliance. They united on a program of
heavy industrialization, militarization, and foreign aggression.
Eastern Asia, especially northern China and Manchuria, became the
designated victim, since these seemed to offer the necessary raw
materials and markets for the industrialists and the field of glory and
booty for the militarists.
In
aiming their attack at
Manchuria in 1931 and at northern China in 1937, the Japanese chose a
victim who was clearly vulnerable. As we have seen, the Chinese
Revolution of 1912 had done little to rejuvenate the country. Partisan
bickering, disagreements on goals, struggles for selfish advantages,
and the constant threat to good government from military leaders who
were not much more than bandits disrupted the country and made
rehabilitation very difficult. North of the Yangtze River the war lords
fought for supremacy until 1926, while south of the river, at Canton,
the Kuomintang, a political party founded by Sun Yat-sen, and oriented
toward the West, set up its own government. Unlike the northern war
lords, this party had ideals and a program, although it must be
confessed that both of these were embodied in words rather than in
deeds.
The
Kuomintang ideals were a
mixture of Western, native Chinese, and Bolshevik Russian factors. They
sought to achieve a unified, independent China with a democratic
government and a mixed, cooperative, Socialistic, individualistic
economic system. In general, Dr. Sun went to China's own traditions for
his cultural ideas, to Western (largely Anglo-American) traditions for
his political ideas, and to a mixture, with strong Socialist elements,
for his economic ideas. His program envisaged the achievement of these
ideals through three successive stages of development of which the
first would be a period of military domination to secure unity and
independence, the second would be a period of Kuomintang dictatorship
to secure the necessary political education of the masses, and only the
third would be one of constitutional democracy. This program was
followed as far as Stage Two. This presumably was reached in 1927 with
the announcement that the Kuomintang would henceforth be the sole legal
political party. This had been preceded by eleven years of military
domination in which Chiang Kai-shek emerged as the military ruler of
most of China in the name of the Kuomintang.
The
Kuomintang, under Dr.
Sun's influence, accepted the support and some of the ideas of the
Communist International, especially in the period 1924-1927. Lenin's
theories of the nature of "capitalist imperialism" were quite
persuasive to the Chinese and gave them, they thought, the intellectual
justification for resisting foreign intervention in Chinese affairs.
Russian agents, led by Michael Borodin, came to China after 1923 to
assist China in "economic reconstruction," political "education," and
resistance to "imperialism." These Russians reorganized the Kuomintang
as a totalitarian political party on the Soviet Communist model, and
reorganized Chinese military training at the famous Whampoa Military
Academy. From these circles emerged Chiang Kai-shek. With German
military advisers playing a prominent role in his activities, he
launched a series of attacks which extended Kuomintang rule into the
territory of the war lords north of the Yangtze River. The chief of
these northern warlords, Chang Tso-lin, held his position by
cooperation with the Japanese and by resistance to Russian efforts to
penetrate Manchuria.
As
Chiang Kai-shek achieved
military success in these areas after 1926, he became increasingly
conservative, and Dr. Sun's program of democracy and Socialism receded
further into the future. At the same time, the interference and
intrigue of the Communist elements in the Kuomintang camp justified
increasingly vigorous repression of their activities. Finally, Chiang's
increasing conservatism culminated in 1927 in his marriage to a member
of the wealthy Soong family. Of this family, T. V. Soong was an
important banker and speculator, his brother-in-law, H. H. Kung, was in
a similar economic position, while another sister (alienated from the
family by her Communist sympathies) was Mrs. Sun Yat-sen. Soong and
Kung between them dominated the Kuomintang government, the former
becoming minister of finance while the latter was minister of industry,
commerce, and labor.
In
1927 the Communist
collaboration was ended by the Kuomintang, the Russians were expelled
from China, and the Kuomintang became the only legal party. The native
Chinese Communists, under Moscow-trained leaders like Mao Tse-tung,
concentrated their strength in the southern rural areas where they
established themselves by agrarian reforms, expropriating landlords,
reducing rents, taxes, and interest rates, and building a Communist
rural militia manned by the peasants. As soon as the Nationalist forces
under Chiang Kai-shek completed the conquest of northern China with the
capture of Peking in June 1928, they shifted their attack southward in
an effort to destroy the Communist center in Kiangsi. The Communist
army, whose growing exactions had disillusioned its peasant supporters,
retreated in an orderly withdrawal on a twisting six-thousand-mile
route to northwestern China (1934-1935). Even after the Japanese attack
on Manchuria in 1931, Chiang continued to fight the Communists,
directing five large-scale attacks upon them in the period 1930-1933,
although the Communists declared war on Japan in 1932 and continued to
demand a united front of all Chinese against this aggressor for the
whole period 1931-1937.
Though
the Japanese seizure of
Manchuria in the autumn of 1931 was an independent action of the
Japanese military forces, it had to be condoned by the civilian
leaders. The Chinese retaliated by a boycott of Japanese goods which
seriously reduced Japan's exports. To force an end to this boycott,
Japan landed forces at Shanghai (1932) and, after severe fighting in
which much Japanese abuse was inflicted upon Europeans, the Chinese
forces were driven from the city and compelled to agree to a
termination of the economic boycott against Japan. About the same time,
Manchuria was set up as a Japanese protectorate under the rule of Henry
P'ui, who had abdicated the Chinese throne in 1912.
As
early as January 1932, the
United States notified all signers of the Nine-Power treaty of 1922
that it would refuse to accept territorial changes made by force in
violation of the Kellogg-Briand Pact to Outlaw War. An appeal to the
League of Nations for support, made by China on September 21, 1931, the
same day that England went off the gold standard, passed through an
interminable series of procedural disputes and finally led to a
Commission of Enquiry under the Earl of Lytton. The report of this
commission, released in October, 1932, sharply condemned the actions of
Japan but recommended no effective joint action to oppose these. The
League accepted the Stimson Doctrine of Non-recognition, and expressed
sympathy for the Chinese position.
This
whole affair has been
rehashed endlessly since 1931 to the accompaniment of claims and
counterclaims that effective l.c ague action was blocked by the absence
of the United States from its councils, or by Stimson's delay in
condemning Japanese aggression, or by British refusal to support
Stimson's suggestions for action against Japan. All these discussions
neglect the vital point that the Japanese army in Manchuria was not
under the control of the Japanese civil government, with which
negotiations were being conducted, and that these civil authorities,
who opposed the Manchurian attack, could not give effective voice to
this opposition without rising assassination. Premier Yuko Hamaguchi
had been killed as recently as November 1930 for approving the London
Naval Agreement to which the militarists objected, and Premier Ki
Inukai was dealt with the same way in May 1932. Throughout, the League
discussions were not conducted with the right party.
Except
for its violation of
nationalist feelings and the completely objectionable means by which it
was achieved, the acquisition of Manchuria hy Japan possessed many
strategic and economic advantages. It gave Japan industrial resources
which it vitally needed, and could, in time, have strengthened the
Japanese economy. Separation of the area from China, which had not
controlled it effectively for many years, would have restricted the
sphere of Chiang's government to a more manageable territory. Above
all, it could have served as a counterpoise to Soviet power in the Far
East and provided a fulcrum to restrain Soviet actions in Europe after
the collapse of Germany. Unfortunately, the uncompromising avarice and
ignorance of the Japanese militarists made any such solution
impossible. This was made quite certain by their two major errors, the
attack on China in 1937 and the attack on the United States in 1941. In
both cases the militarists bit off more than they could chew, and
destroyed any possible advantages they might have gained from the
acquisition of Manchuria in 1931.
In
the seven years after the
first attack on Manchuria in September 1931, Japan sank 2.5 billion yen
in capital investments in that area, mostly in mining, iron production,
electric power, and petroleum. Year after year this investment
increased without returning any immediate yield to Japan, since output
from this new investment was immediately reinvested. The only items of
much help for Japan itself were iron ore, pig iron, and certain
chemical fertilizers. The Manchurian soy-bean crop, although it
declined under Japanese rule, was exchanged with Germany for needed
commodities obtainable there. For Japan's other urgent material needs,
such as raw cotton, rubber, and petroleum, no help could be found in
Manchuria. In spite of costly capital investment, it could produce no
more than its own needs in petroleum, chiefly from liquefaction of coal.
The
failure of Manchuria to
provide an answer to Japan's economic problems led the Japanese
military leaders toward a new act of aggression, this time directed
toward North China itself. As they were preparing their new assault,
Chiang Kai-shek was busy preparing a sixth campaign against the
Communists, still lurking in the remote northwestern part of China.
Neither the growing threat from Japan nor the appeals from the Chinese
Communists to form a united Chinese front against Nippon deterred
Chiang from his purpose to crush the Communists until, in December
1936, he was suddenly kidnaped by his own northern commander, Chang
Hsueh-liang, at Sian, and was forced, under a threat of death, to
promise to fight Japan. A Kuomintang-Communist united front was formed
in which Chiang promised to fight Japan rather than the Communists and
to relax the Kuomintang restrictions on civil liberties, while the
Communists promised to abolish their Chinese Soviet Government, become
a regional government of the Republic of China, end the expropriation
of the landlords, cease their attacks on the Kuomintang, and
incorporate their armed forces into the National Army of Chiang
Kai-shek on a regional basis.
This
agreement had hardly been
made, and had not yet been published, when the Japanese opened their
attack on North China (July 1937). They were generally successful
against a tenacious defense by the National government, driving it
successively from Nanking to Hankow (November 1937) and from Hankow to
Chungking on the remote upper reaches of the Yangtze River (October
1938). The Japanese, with quite inadequate forces of only seventeen
divisions totaling less than 250,000 men in all areas, tried to destroy
the Nationalist and Communist armies in China, to cut China off from
all foreign supplies by controlling all railroads, ports, and rivers,
and to maintain order in Manchuria and occupied China. This was an
impossible task. The occupied areas soon took the form of an open
lattice in which Japanese troops patrolled the rivers and railroads,
but the country between was largely in the control of Communist
guerrillas. The retreat of the Nationalist government to remote
Chungking and its inability to retain the allegiance of the Chinese
peasants, especially those behind the Japanese lines, because of its
close alliance with the oligarchy of landlords, merchants, and bankers,
steadily weakened the Kuomintang and strengthened the Communists.
The
rivalry between the
Chinese Communists and the Kuomintang broke out intermittently in
1938-1941, but Japan was unable to profit from it in any decisive way
because of its economic weakness. The great investment in Manchuria and
the adoption of a policy of wholehearted aggression required a
reorganization of Japan's own economy from its previous emphasis on
light industry for the export market to a new emphasis on heavy
industry for armaments and heavy investment. This was carried out so
ruthlessly that Japan's production of heavy industry rose from 3
billion yen in 1933 to 8.2 billion yen in 1938, while textile
production rose from 2.9 billion yen to no more than 3.7 billion yen in
the same five years. By 1938 the products of heavy industry accounted
for 53 percent of Japan's industrial output. This increased Japan's
need for imports while reducing her ability to provide the exports
(previously textiles) to pay for such imports. By 1937 Japan's
unfavorable balance of trade with the "non-yen" area amounted to 925
million yen, or almost four times the average of the years before 1937.
Income from shipping was reduced by military demands as well, with the
result that Japan's unfavorable balance of trade was reflected in a
heavy outflow of gold (1,685 million yen in 1937-1938).
By
the end of 1938, it was
clear that Japan was losing its financial and commercial ability to buy
necessary materials of foreign origin. The steps taken by the United
States, Australia, and others to restrict export of strategic or
military materials to Japan made this problem even more acute. The
attack on China had been intended to remedy this situation by removing
the Chinese boycott on Japanese goods, by bringing a supply of
necessary materials, especially raw cotton, under Japan's direct
control, and by creating an extension of the yen area where the use of
foreign exchange would not be needed for trading purposes. On the
whole, these purposes were not achieved. Guerrilla activities and
Japanese inability to control the rural areas made the achievement of a
yen area impossible, made trade difficult, and reduced the production
of cotton drastically (by about one-third). Export of iron ore from
China to Japan fell from 2.3 million tons in 1937 to 0.3 million in
1938, although coal exports rose slightly.
In
an effort to increase
production, Japan began to pour capital investment into the
still-unpacified areas of North China at a rate which rivaled the rate
of investment in Manchuria. The Four-Year Plan of 1938 called for 1,420
million yen of such investment by 1942. This project, added to the need
for Japan to feed and clothe the inhabitants of North China, made that
area a drain on the whole Japanese economy, so that Japanese exports to
that area rose from 179 billion yen in 1937 to 312 million in 1938. To
make matters worse, the people of this occupied territory refused to
accept or use the newly established yen currency because of guerrilla
threats to shoot anyone found in possession of it.
All
this had an adverse effect
on Japan's financial position. In two years of the China war, 1936-1937
to 1938-1939, the Japanese budget rose from 2.3 to 8.4 billion yen, of
which 80 percent went for military purposes. Government debt and
commodity prices rose steadily, but the Japanese people responded so
readily to taxation, government loans, and demands for increased
production that the system continued to function. By the end of 1939,
however, it was clear that the threefold burden of a conversion to
heavy industry, which ruined the export trade, a heavy rate of
investment in Manchuria and North China, and an indecisive war with
Nationalist China could not be borne forever, especially under the
pressure of the growing reluctance of neutral countries to supply Japan
with necessary strategic goods. I he two most vital needs were in
petroleum products and rubber.
To
the militarists, who
controlled Japan both politically and economically after 1939, it
seemed that the occupation of the Dutch Indies and Malaya could do much
to alleviate these shortages. The occupation of the Netherlands itself
by Hitler's hordes in 1940 and the involvement of England in the
European war since 1939 seemed to offer a golden opportunity for Japan
to seize these southern regions. To do so would require long lines of
communications from Japan to Indonesia. These lines would be exposed to
attack from the American bases in the Philippines or from the British
base at Singapore. Judging the American psychology as similar to their
own, the Japanese militarists were sure that in such circumstances
America would not hesitate to attack these vulnerable lines of
communication. Thus, it seemed to them that a Japanese attack on the
Dutch Indies would inevitably lead to an American war on Japan. Facing
this problem, the Japanese militarists reached u hat seemed to their
minds to be an inescapable decision. They decided to attack the United
States first. From this decision came the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Chapter
41—The Italian Assault, 1934-1936
Although
the Fascist
government of Benito Mussolini talked in a truculent and vainglorious
way from its accession to power in 1922, emphasizing its determination
to reestablish the glories of the Roman Empire, to dominate the
Mediterranean Sea, and to achieve strategic self-sufficiency by
increasing the quantity of home-grown food, its actions were much more
modest and did not go far beyond efforts to limit Yugoslav influence in
the Adriatic and to overly publicize a modest increase in domestic
wheat production. In general, Italy's situation Noms similar to
Japan's. Limited natural resources (especially an almost complete lack
of coal or oil) combined with a rapidly falling death rate to create
growing pressure of population. This problem, as in Japan, was
intensified by restrictions on the emigration of Italians or on the
outflow of Italian goods, especially after 1918.
The
important dates in modern
Italian history arc 1922, 1925, 1927 and, above all, 1934. In 1922 the
Fascists came to power in a parliamentary system; in 1925 this
parliamentary system was replaced by a political dictatorship with
nineteenth century Latin-American overtones rather than a
twentieth-century totalitarian character, since the economic system
remained that of orthodox financial capitalism; in 1927 an orthodox,
and restrictive, stabilization of the lira on the international gold
standard led to such depressed economic conditions that Mussolini
adopted a much more active foreign policy, seeking to create an
economic and political entente with the three defeated Powers of
central Europe (Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria); in 1934 Italy replaced
orthodox economic measures by a totalitarian economy functioning
beneath a fraudulent corporative facade and, at the same time, shifted
its dynamic foreign policy from central Europe to Africa and the
Mediterranean.
The
Italian drive to build up
a political and economic bloc in central Europe in the period 1927-1934
was both anti-German and anti-Little Entente. This was an impossible
combination, for the division of Europe into revisionist and
anti-revisionist Powers made it impossible for Italy to create a new
alignment cutting through this line of conflict. By following an
anti-Little Entente and pro-Hungarian policy, Mussolini w as
anti-French and thus inevitably pro-German, something which Mussolini
never was and never wished to be. It took him seven years, however, to
realize the illogic of his position.
In
these seven years,
1927-1934, Hungary rather than Germany was the most active revisionist
force in Europe. By working with Hungary, with the reactionary elements
in Austria and Bulgaria, and with dissident Croatian elements in
Yugoslavia, Mussolini sought to weaken the Little Entente (especially
Yugoslavia) and to create troubled waters for Fascist fishing. He
insisted that Italy was a dissatisfied Power because of disappointment
over its lack of colonial gains at Versailles in 1919, and the refusal
of the League to accede to Tommaso Tittoni's request for a
redistribution of the world's resources in accordance with population
needs made in 1920. It is true that Italy's population and raw-material
problems were acute, but the steps taken by Mussolini offered no hope
of alleviating them.
Italy's
Danube policy
culminated in a treaty of friendship with Austria in 1930 and a series
of political and economic agreements with Austria and Hungary known as
the "Rome Protocols" in 1934. The Austrian government under Engelbert
Dollfuss destroyed the democratic institutions of Austria, wiped out
all Socialist and working-class organizations, and established a
one-party, dictatorial, corporative state at Mussolini's behest in
February—April 1934. Hitler took advantage of this to attempt a
Nazi coup in Austria, murdering Dollfuss in July 1934, hut he was
prevented from moving into the country hy a hurried mobilization of
Italian troops on the Brenner frontier and a stern warning from
Mussolini. This significant event revealed that Italy was the only
major Power prepared to fight for Austria's independence and that
Mussolini's seven years of work for the revisionist cause had been a
mistake. It was, however, a mistake from which the Duce learned
nothing. Instead, he condoned an assassination plot by extreme
revisionist elements, including the Bulgarian IMRO, Croation
separatists, and Hungarian extremists. This resulted in the murder of
Alexander, the centralist Serb King of Yugoslavia, and Jean Louis
Barthou, the foreign minister of France, at Marseilles in October 1934.
Hitler's
ascension to
office in Germany in January 1933 found French foreign policy paralyzed
by British opposition to any efforts to support collective security or
to enforce German observation of its treaty obligations by force.
As
a result, a suggestion from Poland in April 1933 for joint armed
intervention in Germany to remove Hitler from office was rejected by
France. Poland at once made a nonaggression pact with Germany
and
extended a previous nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union
(January-May, 1934). This inaugurated a policy of balancing between
these two Great Powers which left Poland ripe for the Fourth Partition,
which came in 1939.
After
the advent to office in
France of a new conservative coalition government with Jean Louis
Bathou as foreign minister in February 1934, France began to adopt a
more active policy against Hitler. This policy sought to encircle
Germany by bringing the Soviet Union and Italy into a revived alignment
of France, Poland, the Little Entente, Greece, and Turkey. A Balkan
Pact of Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey was concluded as early
as February 1934; French relations with the Little Entente were
tightened as a consequence of visits by Barthou to the various
capitals. Russia was brought into the League of Nations in September
1934; a French-Italian agreement was signed in January 1935; a common
front against German rearmament (which had been announced in March) was
made by France, Italy, and Britain at the Stresa Conference in April
1935, and Germany's action was denounced by the League of Nations the
same week; a French-Soviet alliance and a Czech-Soviet alliance were
made in May 1935, the latter to be binding on Russia only after the
earlier French-Czech alliance went into effect. In the course of
building this united front against Germany, but before Italy had been
brought into it, Barthou and King Alexander were assassinated at
Marseilles, as we have indicated (October 1934). This did not stop the
project, for Pierre Laval tool; Barthou's place and carried out his
predecessor's plans, although much less effectively. It was,
accordingly, Pierre Laval who brought Italy into this arrangement in
January 1935 and the Soviet Union in May 1935.
Laval
was convinced that Italy
could be brought into the anti-German front only if its long-standing
grievances and unfulfilled ambitions in Africa could be met.
Accordingly, Laval gave Mussolini seven percent of the stock of the
Djibouti-Addis Ababa Railway (which ran from French Somaliland on the
Red Sea to the capital of Ethiopia), a stretch of desert 114,000 square
miles in extent but containing only a few hundred persons (sixty-two,
according to Mussolini himself) on the border of Libya, a small wedge
of territory between French Somaliland and Italian Eritrea, a
settlement of the citizenship and education status of Italian
immigrants in French Tunisia, and "the right to ask for concessions
throughout Ethiopia."
This
last point was an
important one because, while Laval insisted that he had made no
agreement which jeopardized Ethiopia's independence or territorial
integrity, he made it equally clear that Italian support against
Germany was more important than the integrity of Ethiopia in his eyes.
France had been Ethiopia's only real friend for many years. It had
engineered a Triparite agreement of Britain, Italy, and France to
permit no change in Ethiopia's status without Tripartite consent in
1906, and had brought Ethiopia into the League of Nations over British
objections in 1923. Italy, on the other hand, had been prevented from
conquering Ethiopia in 1896 only by a decisive defeat of her invading
force at the hands of the Ethiopians themselves, while in 1925 Britain
and Italy had cut Ethiopia up into economic spheres by an agreement
which was annulled by a French appeal to the League of Nations. Laval's
renunciation of France's traditional support of Ethiopian independence
and integrity was thus of great importance, and brought the three
governments concerned (Italy, Britain, and France) into agreement on
this issue.
This
point of view, however,
was not shared by public opinion in these three countries. In France,
opinion was too divided to allow us to make any categorical statements
about its nature, but it is probable that a majority was in favor of
extending collective security to Ethiopia, while an overwhelming
majority was convinced that Germany should be the primary object of
this instrument of international action. In Italy, it is likely that a
majority opposed both Mussolini's war on Ethiopia and the League's
efforts to stop this by economic sanctions.
In
England, an overwhelming
majority was in support of the League of Nations and sanctions against
Italy. This was clear from the so-called Peace Ballot of 1935 which, on
the basis of a privately conducted straw vote of the English
electorate, showed that, of 11 ½ million polled, over 11 million
supported membership in the League, over 10 million supported economic
sanctions, and over 6.7 million supported (while only 2 3 million
opposed) military sanctions against aggressors. This point of view was
opposed by the pacifist Left wing of the Labour Party and by the
imperialist Right wing of the Conservative Party. It was also opposed
by the British government itself. Sir John Simon (the foreign
secretary), Sir Bolton Eyres-Monsell (the first lord of the Admiralty),
and Stanley Baldwin (leader of the party and prime minister) denounced
the Peace Ballot and its collective-security basis while the polling
was in process but hastened to give their verbal support as soon as the
results became evident. Baldwin, who in November, 1934, had declared
that a "collective peace system" was "perfectly impracticable," assured
the organizers of the ballot that "the foreign policy of the Government
is founded upon the League of Nations," when the results were revealed
in July 1935. On this basis was erected one of the most astonishing
examples of British "dual" policy in the appeasement period. While
publicly supporting collective security and sanctions against Italian
aggression, the government privately negotiated to destroy the League
and to yield Ethiopia to Italy. They were completely successful in this
secret policy.
The
Italian aggression against
Ethiopia began with an incursion into Ethiopian territory at Wal Wal in
December 1934, and broke into full-scale invasion in October 1935. That
Italy had no real fear of British military sanctions against them was
evident when they put a major part of their military forces,
transports, and naval strength in the Red Sea, separated from home by
the British-controlled Suez Canal and the massed British fleet at
Alexandria. Their use of the Suez Canal to transport munitions and
troops naturally revealed their aggressive intentions to Britain at an
early stage. The British government's position on Ethiopia was clearly
stated in a secret report of an Interdepartmental Committee under Sir
John Maffey. The report, presented to the foreign secretary on June 18,
1935, declared that Italian control of Ethiopia would be a "matter of
indifference" to Britain. This report was mysteriously and
surreptitiously conveyed to the Italians and undiplomatically published
by them later. There can be no doubt that it represented the opinion of
the British government and that this opinion was shared by the French
government.
Unfortunately,
public opinion
in both countries and throughout most of the world was insisting on
collective sanctions against the aggressor. To meet this demand, both
governments engaged in a public policy of unenforced or partially
enforced sanctions at wide variance with their real intentions. In
consequence, they lost both Ethiopia and Italy, the former by their
real policy, the latter by their public policy. In the process they
gave the League of Nations, the collective-security system, and the
political stability of central Europe their death wounds.
Taking
advantage of the wave
of public support for collective security, Samuel Hoare (now foreign
secretary) went to the meeting of the Assembly of the League of Nations
in September 1935 and delivered a smashing speech to support of the
League, collective security, and sanctions against Italy. The day
previously he and Anthony Eden had secretly agreed with Pierre Laval to
impose only partial economic sanctions, avoiding all actions, such as
blockade or closure of the Suez Canal, which "might lead to war." A
number of governments, including Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, and
Britain, had stopped all exports of munitions to Ethiopia as early as
May and June 195, although Ethiopia’s appeal to the League of
Nations for help had been made on March 17, while the Italian attack
did not come until October 2, 1935. The net result was that Ethiopia
was left defenseless int eh face of an aggressor who was annoyed,
without being sensibly hampered, by incomplete and late economic
sanctions. Ethiopia’s appeal for neutral observers on June 19th
was never acknowledged, and her appeal to the United States for support
under the Kellogg-Briand Pact on July 3rd
was at once rejected, but Eden found time to offer Mussolini a portion
of Ethiopia as part of a deal which would avoid an open Italian
aggression (June 24th). The Duce was determined,
however, to
commit an open aggression as the only method for achieving that modicum
of Romany glory for which he thirsted.
Hoare's
speech in support of
collective security at Geneva in September evoked such applause from
the British public that Baldwin decided to hold a general election on
that issue. Accordingly' with a ringing pledge to support collective
action and collective security and to "take no action in isolation,"
the National government offered itself at the polls on November 14,
1935, and won an amazing victory. The government's margin of 431 seats
out of 615 kept it in power until the next General Election ten years
later (July 1945).
Although
Article 16 of the
League Covenant bound the signers to break off all trade and financial
relations with an aggressor, France and Britain combined to keep their
economic sanctions partial and ineffective. Imposed on November 18,
1935, and accepted by fifty-two nations, these sanctions established an
embargo in arms and munitions, on loans and on credit, and on certain
key commodities, and established a boycott on purchases of all Italian
goods. The embargo did not cover iron ore, coal, or petroleum products,
although the last item, of which Italy had less than a two-month supply
in October 1935, would have stopped the Italian aggression quickly and
completely. The imposition of oil sanctions was postponed time and
again until, by the spring of 1936, the conquest of Ethiopia was
completed. This was done in spite of the fact that as early as December
12th, ten states, which had been supplying three-quarters of Italy's
oil needs, volunteered to support the embargo. The refusal to establish
this sanction resulted from a joint British-French refusal on the
grounds that an oil sanction would be so effective that Italy would be
compelled to break off its war with Ethiopia and would, in desperation,
make war on Britain and France. This, at least, was the amazing logic
offered by the British government later.
Instead
of additional or
effective sanctions, Samuel Hoare and Pierre Laval worked out a secret
deal which would have given Italy outright about one-sixth of Ethiopia
and have yielded an additional third as a "zone of economic expansion
and settlement reserved to Italy." When news of this deal was broken to
the public by a French journalist on December 10, 1935, there was a
roar of protest from the supporters of collective security, especially
in England, on the grounds that this violated the election pledge made
but a month previously. To save his government, Baldwin had to
sacrifice Hoare, who resigned on December 19th, but returned to the
Cabinet on June 5, 1936, as soon as Ethiopia was decently buried.
Laval, in France, survived the first parliamentary assault but fell
from office in January 1936; he was succeeded at the Quai d'Orsay by
Pierre Flandin, who pursued the same policy.
Ethiopia
was conquered on May
2, 1936 and annexed to Italy a week later. Sanctions were removed by
the various cooperating states and by the League itself in the next two
months, just as they were beginning to take effect.
The
consequences of the
Ethiopian fiasco were of the greatest importance. Mussolini was much
strengthened in Italy by his apparent success in acquiring an empire in
the face of the economic barrage of fifty-two nations. The Conservative
Party in England was entrenched in office for a decade, during which it
carried out its policy of appeasement and waged the resulting war. The
United States was driven by panic to pass a "Neutrality Act" which
encouraged aggression by its provision that the outbreak of a war would
cut off supplies of American munitions to both sides, to the aggressor
who had armed at his leisure and to the victim yet unarmed. Above all,
the Ethiopian crisis destroyed French efforts to encircle Germany.
Britain had opposed these efforts from the beginning, and was able to
block them with the aid of a number of other factors for which Britain
was not primarily responsible. This point is sufficiently important to
demand detailed analysis.
Chapter
42—Circles and Counter-circles, 1935-1939
Laval's
agreement of January
1935 with Mussolini had been intended to bring Italy to the side of
France in the face of Germany, a goal which seemed perfectly possible
in the light of Mussolini's veto on Hitler's coup in Austria in July
1934. This result would have been achieved if Ethiopia could have been
taken by Italy without League action. In that case, Mussolini argued,
Africa would have been removed from the sphere of League action as
North America had been in 1919 (by the Monroe Doctrine amendment to the
Covenant) and Asia had been in 1931 (by the failure to take action
against Japan). This would have left the League as a purely European
organization, according to Mussolini.
This
view was regarded with
favor in France where the chief, if not the sole, role of the League
was to provide security against Germany. This view was completely
unacceptable to Britain, which wanted no exclusively European political
organization and could not join one herself because of her imperial
obligations and her preference for an Atlantic organization (including
the Dominions and the United States). Thus, Britain insisted on
sanctions against Italy. But the British government never wanted
collective security to be a success. As a result, the French desire for
no sanctions combined with the British desire for ineffective sanctions
to provide ineffective sanctions. Because there were sanctions, France
lost Italian support against Germany; because they were ineffective,
France lost the League system of collective security against Germany as
well. Thus France had neither bread nor cake. Worse than that, the
Italian involvement in Africa withdrew Italian political power from
central Europe and thus removed the chief force ready to resist the
German penetration of Austria. Still worse, the hubbub of the Ethiopian
crisis gave Hitler an opportunity to declare the rearmament of Germany
and the reestablishment of the German air force in March 1935 and to
remilitarize the Rhineland on March 7, 1936.
The
remilitarization of the
Rhineland in violation of the Versailles Treaty and the Locarno pacts
was the most important result of the Ethiopian crisis and the most
important event of the period of appeasement. It greatly reduced
France's own security and reduced even more the security of France's
allies to the east of Germany because, once this zone was fortified, it
could decrease greatly France's ability to come to the aid of eastern
Europe. The remilitarization of ';he Rhineland was the essential
military prerequisite for any movement of Germany eastward against
Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, or the Soviet Union. That such a
movement was the chief aim of Hitler's policy had been clearly and
explicitly stated by him throughout his public life.
German
rearmament had
proceeded so slowly that Germany had only twenty-five "paper" divisions
in 1936, and the German generals demanded and obtained written orders
to retreat if France made any move to invade the Rhineland. No such
move was made, although Germany had less than 30,000 troops in the
area. This failure arose from a combination of two factors: (1) the
expense of a French mobilization, which would have required the
devaluation of the franc at a time when France was working with
desperate energy to preserve the value of the franc; and (2) the
objections of Britain, which refused to allow France to take military
action or to impose any sanctions (even economic) against Germany or to
use Italy (against whom economic sanctions were still in force) in the
field against Germany as provided in the Locarno pacts. In a violent
scene with Flandin on March 12th, Neville Chamberlain rejected
sanctions, and refused to accept Flandin's argument that "if a firm
front is maintained by France and England, Germany will yield without
war.” Chamberlain’s refusal to enforce the Locarno pacts
when they fell due was not his personal policy or anything new. It was
the policy of the Conservative Party, and had been for years; as early
as July 13, 1934, Sir Austen Chamberlain had stated publicly that
Britain would not use troops to enforce the Rhineland clauses and would
use its veto power in the Council of the League to prevent this by
others under the Locarno pacts.
The
remilitarization of the
Rhineland also detached Belgium from the anti-German circle. Alarmed by
the return of German troops to its border and by the failure of the
British-Italian guarantee of Locarno, Belgium in October 1936 denounced
its alliance with France and adopted a policy of strict neutrality.
This made it impossible for France to extend its fortification system,
the Maginot Line, which was being built on the French-German border,
along the Belgian-German border. Moreover, since France was convinced
that Belgium would be on its side in any future war with Germany, the
line was not extended along the French-Belgian border either. It was
across this unfortified border that Germany attacked France in 1940..
Thus
Barthou's efforts to
encircle Germany were largely but not completely destroyed in the
period 1934-1936 by four events: (1) the loss of Poland in January
1934; (2) the loss of Italy by January 1936; (3) the rearmament of
Germany and the remilitarization of the Rhineland by March 1936; and
(4) the loss of Belgium by October 1936. The chief items left in the
Barthou system were the French and Soviet alliances with Czechoslovakia
and with each other. In order to destroy these alliances Britain and
Germany sought, on parallel paths, to encircle France and the Soviet
Union in order to dissuade France from honoring its alliances with
either Czechoslovakia or the Soviet Union. To honor these alliances
France required two things as an absolute minimum: (1) that military
cooperation against Germany be provided by Britain from the first
moment of any French action against Germany and (2) that France have
military security on her non-German frontiers. Both of these essentials
were destroyed by Britain in the period 1935-1936, and, in consequence,
France, finding itself encircled, dishonored its alliance with
Czechoslovakia, when it came due in September 1938.
The
encirclement of France had
six items in it. The first was the British refusal from 1919 to 1939 to
give France any promise of support against Germany in fulfillment of
the French alliances with eastern Europe or to engage in any military
commitments in support of such alliances. On the contrary, Britain made
clear to France, at all times, her opposition to these alliances and
that action under them was not covered by any promises Britain had made
to support France against a German attack westward or by any military
discussions which arose from any Anglo-French efforts to resist such an
attack. This distinction was the motivation of the Locarno pacts, and
explains the refusal of Britain to engage in military conversations
with France until the summer of 1938. The British attitude toward
eastern Europe was made perfectly clear on many occasions. For example,
on July 13, 1934, Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon denounced Barthou's
efforts to create an "eastern Locarno" and demanded arms equality for
Germany.
The
other five items in the
encirclement of France were: (1) the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of
June 1935; (2) the alienation of Italy over sanctions; (3) the
remilitarization of the Rhineland by Germany with British acquiescence
and approval; (4) the neutrality of Belgium; and (5) the alienation of
Spain. We have already discussed all these except the last, and have
indicated the vital role which Britain played in all of them except
Belgium. Taken together, they changed the French military position so
drastically that France, by 1938, found herself in a position where she
could hardly expect to fulfill her military obligations to
Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. This Noms exactly the position in
which the British government wished France to be, a fact made
completely clear by the recently published secret documents.
In
May of 1935 France could
have acted against Germany with all her forces, because the Rhineland
was unfortified, and there was no need to worry about the Italian,
Spanish, or Belgian frontiers or the Atlantic coastline. By the end of
1938, and even more by 1939, the Rhineland was protected by the new
German fortified Siegfried Line, parts of the French Army had to be
left on the unfriendly Italian and Spanish frontiers and along the
lengthy neutral Belgian frontier, and the Atlantic coastline could not
be protected against the new German fleet unless Britain cooperated
with France. This need for British cooperation on the sea arose from
two facts: (a) the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of
June 1935
allowed Germany to build a navy up to 35 percent of the British Navy,
while France was restricted to 33 percent of Britain's strength in the
chief categories of vessels; and (b) the Italian
occupation of
the Balearic Islands and parts of Spain itself after the opening of the
Spanish War in July 1936 required much of the French fleet to stay in
the Mediterranean in order to keep open the transportation of troops
and food from North Africa to metropolitan France The details of the
Spanish War will be discussed in the next chapter, but at this point it
must be realized that the shift in the control of Spain from pro-French
to anti-French hands was of vital importance to Czechoslovakia and the
Soviet Union as a factor in determining whether the French alliances
with these two would be fulfilled when the German attack came.
Parallel
with the encirclement
of France went the encirclement of the Soviet Union and, to a lesser
extent, of Czechoslovakia. The encirclement of the Soviet Union was
known as the Anti-Comintern Pact. This was a union of Germany and Japan
against Communism and the Third International. It was signed in
November 1936 and was joined by Italy a year later. Manchukuo and
Hungary joined in February 1939, while Spain came in a month after that.
The
last counter-circle was
that against Czechoslovakia. Hungary on the Czechoslovak southern
frontier and Germany on its northwestern frontier were both opposed to
Czechoslovakia as an "artificial" creation of the Versailles
Conference. The German annexation of Austria in March 1938 closed the
gap in the anti-Czech circle on the west, while the aggressive designs
of Poland after 1932 completed the circle everywhere except on the
insignificant Romanian frontier in the extreme east. Although the
Czechs offered the Poles a treaty and even a military alliance on three
occasions, in 1932-1933, they were ignored, and the Polish-German
agreement of January 1934 opened a campaign of vilification of
Czechoslovakia by Poland which continued, parallel to the similar
German campaign, until the Polish invasion of Czechoslovakia in October
1938.
Of
these three counter-circles
to Barthou's efforts to encircle Germany, the most significant by far
was the encirclement of France which alone made the other two possible.
In this encirclement of France the most important factor, without which
it could never have been achieved, was the encouragement of Britain.
Accordingly, we must say a word about the motivations of Britain and
the reactions of France.
Any
analysis of the
motivations of Britain in 1938-1939 is bound to be difficult because
different people had different motives, motives changed in the course
of time, the motives of the government were clearly not the same as the
motives of the people, and in no country has secrecy and anonymity been
carried so far or been so well preserved as in Britain. In general,
motives become vaguer and less secret as we move our attention from the
innermost circles of the government outward. As if we were looking at
the layers of an onion, we may discern four points of view: (1) the
anti-Bolsheviks at the center, (2) the "three-bloc-world" supporters
close to the center, (3) the supporters of "appeasement," and (4) the
"peace at any price" group in a peripheral position. The
"anti-Bolsheviks," who were also anti-French, were extremely important
from 1919 to 1926, but then decreased to little more than a lunatic
fringe, rising again in numbers and influence after 1934 to dominate
the real policy of the government in 1939. In the earlier period the
chief figures in this group were Lord Curzon, Lord D'Abernon, and
General Smuts. They did what they could to destroy reparations, permit
German rearmament, and tear down what they called "French militarism."
This
point of view was
supported by the second group, which was known in those days as the
Round Table Group, and came later to be called, somewhat inaccurately,
the Cliveden Set, after the country estate of Lord and Lady Astor. It
included Lord Milner, Leopold Amery, and Edward Grigg (Lord
Altrincham), as well as Lord Lothian, Smuts, Lord Astor, Lord Brand
(brother-in-law of Lady Astor and managing director of Lazard Brothers,
the international bankers), Lionel Curtis, Geoffrey Dawson (editor of The
Times), and their associates. This group wielded great
influence because it controlled the Rhodes Trust, the Beit Trust, The
Times of London, The Observer, the influential and highly
anonymous quarterly review known as The Round Table
(founded in 1910 with money supplied by Sir Abe Bailey and the Rhodes
Trust, and with Lothian as editor), and it dominated the Royal
Institute of International Affairs, called "Chatham House" (of which
Sir Abe Bailey and the Astors were the chief financial supporters,
while Lionel Curtis was the actual founder), the Carnegie United
Kingdom Trust, and All Souls College, Oxford. This Round Table Group
formed the core of the three-bloc-world supporters, and differed from
the anti-Bolsheviks like D'Abernon in that they sought to contain the
Soviet Union between a German-dominated Europe and an English-speaking
bloc rather than to destroy it as the anti-Bolsheviks wanted.
Relationships between the two groups were very close and friendly, and
some people, like Smuts, were in both.
The
anti-Bolsheviks, including
D'Abernon, Smuts, Sir John Simon, and H. A. L. Fisher (Warden of All
Souls College), were willing to go to any extreme to tear down France
and build up Germany. Their point of view can be found in many places,
and most emphatically in a letter of August I l, 1920, from D'Abernon
to Sir Maurice (later Lord) Hankey, a protégé of Lord
Esher who wielded great influence in the inter-war period as secretary
to the Cabinet and secretary to almost every international conference
on reparations from Genoa (1922) to Lausanne (1932). D'Abernon
advocated a secret alliance of Britain "with the German military
leaders in cooperating against the Soviet." As ambassador of Great
Britain in Berlin in 1920-1926, D'Abernon carried on this policy and
blocked all efforts by the Disarmament Commission to disarm, or even
inspect, Germany (according to Brigadier J. H. Morgan of the
commission).
The
point of view of this
group was presented by General Smuts in a speech of October 23, 1923
(made after luncheon with H. A. L. Fisher). From these two groups came
the Dawes Plan and the Locarno pacts. It was Smuts, according to
Stresemann, who first suggested the Locarno policy, and it was
D'Abernon who became its chief supporter. H. A. L. Fisher and John
Simon in the House of Commons, and Lothian, Dawson, and their friends
on The Round Table and on The Times
prepared the ground among the British governing class for both the
Dawes Plan and Locarno as early as 1923 (The Round Table
for March 1923; the speeches of Fisher and Simon in the House of
Commons on February 19, 1923, Fisher's speech of March 6th and Simon's
speech of March 13th in the same place, The Round Table
for June 1923; and Smuts's speech of October 23rd).
The
more moderate Round Table
group, including Lionel Curtis, Leopold Amery (who was the shadow of
Lord Milner), Lord Lothian, Lord Brand, and Lord Astor, sought to
weaken the League of Nations and destroy all possibility of collective
security in order to strengthen Germany in respect to both France and
the Soviet Union, and above all to free Britain from Europe in order to
build up an "Atlantic bloc" of Great Britain, the British Dominions,
and the United States. They prepared the way for this "Union" through
the Rhodes Scholarship organization (of which Lord Milner was the head
in 1905-1925 and Lord Lothian was secretary in 1925-1940), through the
Round Table groups (which had been set up in the United States, India,
and the British Dominions in T 910- 1917), through the Chatham House
organization, which set up Royal Institutes of International Affairs in
all the dominions and a Council on Foreign Relations in New York, as
well as through "Unofficial Commonwealth Relations Conferences" held
irregularly, and the Institutes of Pacific Relations set up in various
countries as autonomous branches of the Royal Institutes of
International Affairs. This influential group sought to change the
League of Nations from an instrument of collective security to an
international conference center for "nonpolitical" matters like drug
control or international postal services, to rebuild Germany as a
buffer against the Soviet Union and a counterpoise to France, and to
build up an Atlantic bloc of Britain, the Dominions, the United States,
and, if possible, the Scandinavian countries.
One
of the effusions of this
group was the project called Union Now, and later Union Now with Great
Britain, propagated in the United States in 1938-1945 by Clarence
Streit on behalf of Lord Lothian and the Rhodes Trust. Ultimately, the
inner circle of this group arrived at the idea of the "three-bloc
world." It was believed that this system could force Germany to keep
the peace (after it absorbed Europe) because it would be squeezed
between the Atlantic bloc and the Soviet Union, while the Soviet Union
could be forced to keep the peace because it would be squeezed between
Japan and Germany. This plan would work only if Germany and the Soviet
Union could be brought into contact with each other by abandoning to
Germany Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the Polish Corridor. This became
the aim of both the anti-Bolsheviks and the three-bloc people from the
early part of 1937 to the end of 1939 (or even early 1940). These two
cooperated and dominated the government in that period. They split in
the period 1939-1940, with the "three-bloc" people, like Amery, Lord
Halifax, and Lord Lothian, becoming increasingly anti-German, while the
anti-Bolshevik crowd, like Chamberlain, Horace Wilson, and John Simon,
tried to adopt a policy based on a declared but unfought war against
Germany combined with an undeclared fighting war against the Soviet
Union. The split between these two groups appeared openly in public and
led to Chamberlain's fall from office when Amery cried to Chamberlain,
across the floor of the House of Commons, on May 10, 1940, "In the name
of God, go!"
Outside
these two groups, and
much more numerous (but much more remote from the real instruments of
government), were the appeasers and the "peace at any price" people.
These were both used by the two inner groups to command public support
for their quite different policies. Of the two the appeasers were much
more important than the "peace at any price" people. The appeasers
swallowed the steady propaganda (much of it emanating from Chatman
House, The Times, the Round Table groups, or Rhodes
circles)
that the Germans had been deceived and brutally treated in 1919. For
example, it was under pressure from seven persons, including General
Smuts and H. A. L. Fisher, as well as Lord Milner himself, that Lloyd
George made his belated demand on June 2, 1919, that the German
reparations be reduced and the Rhineland occupation be cut from fifteen
years to two. The memorandum from which Lloyd George read these demands
was apparently drawn up by Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian), while the
minutes of the Council of Four, from which we get the record of those
demands, were taken down by Sir Maurice Hankey (as secretary to the
Supreme Council, a position obtained through Lord Esher). It was Kerr
(Lothian) who served as British member of the Committee of Five which
drew up the answer to the Germans' protest of May, 1 919. General Smuts
was still refusing to sign the treaty because it was too severe as late
as June 2 3, 1919.
As
a result of these attacks
and a barrage of similar attacks on the treaty which continued year
after year, British public opinion acquired a guilty conscience about
the Treaty of Versailles, and was quite unprepared to take any steps to
enforce it by 1930. On this feeling, which owed so much to the British
idea of sportsmanlike conduct toward a beaten opponent, was built the
movement for appeasement. This movement had two basic assumptions: (a)
that reparation must be made for Britain's treatment of Germany in 1919
and (b)
that if Germany's most obvious demands, such as arms equality,
remilitarization of the Rhineland, and perhaps union with Austria, were
met, Germany would become satisfied and peaceful. The trouble with this
argument was that once Germany reached this point, it would be very
difficult to prevent Germany from going further (such as taking the
Sudetenland and the Polish Corridor). Accordingly, many of the
appeasers, when this point was reached in March 1938 went over to the
anti-Bolshevik or "three-bloc" point of view, while some even went into
the "peace at any price" group. It is likely that Chamberlain, Sir John
Simon, and Sir Samuel Hoare went by this road from appeasement to
anti-Bolshevism. At any rate, few influential people were still in the
appeasement group by 1939 in the sense that they believed that Germany
could ever be satisfied. Once this was realized, it seemed to many that
the only solution was to bring Germany into contact with, or even
collision with, the Soviet Union.
The
"peace at any price"
people were both few and lacking in influence in Britain, while the
contrary, as we shall see, was true in France. However, in the period
August 1935 to March 1939 and especially in September 1938, the
government built upon the fears of this group by steadily exaggerating
Germany's armed might and belittling their own, by calculated
indiscretions (like the statement in September 1938 that there were no
real antiaircraft defenses in London), by constant hammering at the
danger of an overwhelming air attack without warning, by building
ostentatious and quite useless air-raid trenches in the streets and
parks of London, and by insisting through daily warnings that everyone
must be fitted with a gas mask immediately (although the danger of a
gas attack was nil).
In
this way, the government
put London into a panic in 1938 for the first time since 1804 or even
1678. And by this panic, Chamberlain was able to get the British people
to accept the destruction of Czechoslovakia, wrapping it up in a piece
of paper, marked "peace in our time," which he obtained from Hitler, as
he confided to that ruthless dictator, "for British public opinion."
Once this panic passed, Chamberlain found it impossible to get the
British public to follow his program, although he himself never
wavered, even in 1940. He worked on the appeasement and the "peace at
any price" groups throughout 1939, but their numbers dwindled rapidly,
and since he could not openly appeal for support on either the
anti-Bolshevik or the "three-bloc" basis, he had to adopt the dangerous
expedient of pretending to resist (in order to satisfy the British
public) while really continuing to make every possible concession to
Hitler which would bring Germany to a common frontier with the Soviet
Union, all the while putting every pressure on Poland to negotiate and
on Germany to refrain from using force in order to gain time to wear
Poland down and in order to avoid the necessity of backing up by action
his pretense of resistance to Germany. This policy went completely
astray in the period from August 1939 to April 1940.
Chamberlain's
... wanted peace
so that he could devote Britain's "limited resources" to social
welfare; but he was narrow and totally ignorant of the realities of
power, convinced that international politics could be conducted in
terms of secret deals, as business was, and he was quite ruthless in
carrying out his aims, especially in his readiness to sacrifice
non-English persons, who, in his eyes, did not count.
In
the meantime, both the
people and the government were more demoralized in France than in
England. The policy of the Right which would have used force against
Germany even in the face of British disapproval ended in 1924. When
Barthou, who had been one of the chief figures in the 1924 effort,
tried to revive it in 1934, it was quite a different thing, and he had
constantly to give at least verbal support to Britain's efforts to
modify his encirclement of Germany into a Four-Power Pact (of Britain,
France, Italy, Germany). This Four-Power Pact, which was the ultimate
goal of the anti-Bolshevik group in England, was really an effort to
form a united front of Europe against the Soviet Union and, in the eyes
of this group, would have been a capstone to unite in one system the
encirclement of France (which was the British answer to Barthou's
encirclement of Germany) and the Anti-Comintern Pact (which was the
German response to the same project).
The
Four-Power Pact reached
its fruition at the Munich Conference of September 1938, where these
four Powers destroyed Czechoslovakia without consulting
Czechoslovakia's ally, the Soviet Union. But the scorn the dictators
had for Britain and France as decadent democracies had by this time
reached such a pass that the dictators no longer had even that minimum
of respect without which the Four-Power Pact could not function. As a
consequence, Hitler in 1939 spurned all Chamberlain's frantic efforts
to restore the Four-Power Pact along with his equally frantic and even
more secret efforts to win Hitler's attention by offers of colonies in
Africa and economic support in eastern Europe.
As
a result of the failure of
the policy of the French Right against Germany in 1924 and the failure
of the "policy of fulfillment" of the French Left in 1929-1930, France
was left with no policy. Convinced that French security depended on
British military and naval support in the field before action began (in
order to avoid a German wartime occupation of the richest part of
France such as existed in 1914-1918), depressed by the growing
unbalance of the German population over the French population, and shot
through with pacifism and antiwar feeling, the French Army under
Pétain's influence adopted a purely defensive strategy and built
up defensive tactics to support it.
In
spite of the agitations
of Charles de Gaulle (then a colonel) and his parliamentary spokesman,
Paul Reynaud, to build up an armored striking force as an offensive
weapon, France built a great, and purely defensive, fortified barrier
from Montmédy to the Swiss frontier, and retrained many of its
tactical units into purely defensive duties within this barrier. It was
clear to many that the defensive tactics of this Maginot Line were
inconsistent with France's obligations to her allies in eastern Europe,
but everyone was too paralyzed by domestic political partisanship, by
British pressure for a purely western European policy, and by general
intellectual confusion and crisis weariness to do anything about
bringing France's strategic plans and its political obligations into a
consistent pattern.
It
was the purely defensive
nature of these strategic plans, added to Chamberlain's veto on
sanctions, which prevented Flandin from acting against Germany at the
time of the remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936. By 1938
and 1939, these influences had spread demoralization and panic into
most parts of French society, with the result that the only feasible
plan for France seemed to be to cooperate with Britain in a purely
defensive policy in the west behind the Maginot Line, with a free hand
for Hitler in the east. The steps which brought France to
this
destination are clear; they are marked by the Anglo-German Naval
Agreement of June 1935; the Ethiopian crisis of September 1935; the
remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936; the neutralization of
Belgium in 1936; the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939; the destruction of
Austria in March 1938; and the Czechoslovak crisis leading up to Munich
in September 1938. Along these steps we must continue our story.
Chapter
43—The Spanish Tragedy, 1931–1939
From
the summer of 1936 to the
spring of 1939, Spain was the scene of a bitter conflict of arms,
ideologies, and interests. This conflict was both a civil war and an
international struggle. It was a controversial problem at the time and
has remained a controversial problem since. For twenty or more years,
the bitter feelings raised by the struggle remained so intense that it
was difficult to determine the facts of the dispute, and anyone who
tried to make an objective study of the facts was subjected to abuse
from both sides.
The
historical past of Spain
has been so different from that of the rest of Western Civilization
that it sometimes seems doubtful if it should be regarded as part of
Western Civilization. This difference is increased by the fact that,
since the late fifteenth century, Spain has refused to share in the
experiences of Western Civilization and, if many powerful groups could
have had their wish, would have remained in its fifteenth- or
sixteenth-century condition.
From
the invasion of the Arabs
in 711 to their final ejection in 1492, Spanish life was dominated by
the struggle against this foreign intruder. From 1525 to 1648, Spain
was in a struggle with the new religious movements aroused by Luther.
Since 1648 it has been, except for brief intervals and for exceptional
personalities, at war with modern rationalism and modern science, with
the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Napoleon, with modern
democracy, modern secularism, modern liberalism, modern
constitutionalism, and the bourgeois conception of modern society as a
whole. As a result of more than a thousand years of such struggles,
almost all elements of Spanish society, even those which were not, in
theory, opposed to the new movements in Western culture, have developed
a fanatical intolerance, an uncompromising individualism, and a fatal
belief that physical force is a solution to all problems, however
spiritual.
The
impact of the bourgeois,
liberal, scientific, and industrialized West of the nineteenth century
upon Spain w as similar to its impact on other backward political units
such as Japan, China, Turkey, or Russia. In each case, some elements of
these societies wished to resist the political expansion of the West by
adopting its industry, science, military organization, and
constitutional structures. Other elements wished to resist all
westernization, by passive opposition if nothing more effective could
be found, to the death if necessary, and to keep secreted in their
hearts and minds the older native attitudes even if their bodies were
compelled to yield to alien, Western, patterns of action.
In
Spain, Russia, and China
this attitude of resistance was sufficiently successful to delay the
process of westernization to a date when Western Civilization was
beginning to lose its own tradition (or at least its faith in it) and
to shift its allegiance (or at least its behavior) to patterns of
thought and action which were quite foreign to the main line of Western
tradition. This shift, to which we have referred in the first section
of this present chapter, was marked by a loss of the basic element of
moderation to be found in the real tradition of the West. As
ideological intolerance or totalitarian authoritarianism, for example,
grew in the West, this was bound to have an adverse effect upon efforts
to carry Western democracy, liberalism, or parliamentary
constitutionalism to areas like Japan, China, Russia, or, the case in
point, Spain.
During
the nineteenth century,
the elements willing at least to compromise with the Western way of
life were not completely unsuccessful in Spain, probably because they
received a certain amount of support from the army, which realized its
inability to fight effectively without a largely westernized society to
support it. This, however, was destroyed by the efforts of the
"Restoration Monarchy" of 1875-1931 to find support among the opponents
of modernization and by the Spanish defeat at the hands of the United
States in 1898. Alfonso XII ( 1874-1885) came to the throne as a
military reaction after a long period of revolutionary confusion. The
defeat by the United States, like the Chinese defeat by Japan in 1894,
or the Turkish defeat by Russia in 1877, widened the gap between the
"progressive" and "reactionary" groups in Spain (if we may use these
terms to indicate a willingness or a refusal to westernize ).
Moreover,
the war of 1898, by
depriving Spain of much of its empire, left its oversized army with
little to do and with a reduced area on which to batten. Like a vampire
octopus, the Spanish Army settled down to drain the lifeblood of Spain
and, above all, Morocco. This brought the army (meaning the officers)
into alignment with the other conservative forces in Spain against the
scanty forces of bourgeois liberalism and the rapidly growing forces of
proletarian discontent. These conservative forces consisted of the
Church (meaning the upper clergy), the landlords, and the monarchists.
The forces of proletarian discontent consisted of the urban workers and
the much larger mass of exploited peasants. These latter groups, which
had no real acquaintance with the Western liberal tradition and found
it of little hope when they did, were fertile soil for the agitators of
proletarian revolution who were already challenging the bourgeois
liberalism of the West.
To
be sure, Spanish
individualism, provincialism, and suspicions of the state as an
instrument of the possessing classes made any appeal to the
totalitarian authoritarianism of Communism relatively weak in Spain. On
the other hand, the appeal of anarchism, which was both individualist
and anti-state, was stronger in Spain than anywhere else on earth
(stronger even than in Russia where anarchism received its most
complete verbal formulation at the hands of men like Bakunin).
Finally,
the appeal of
Socialism was almost as strong as anarchism, and much more effectively
organized. Socialism to many discontented Spaniards (including many
bourgeois intellectuals and professional men) seemed to offer a
combination of social reform, economic progress, and a democratic
secular state which was better fitted to Spanish needs than anarchism,
Bolshevism, or laissez-faire constitutionalism. The weak link in this
Socialist program was that the democratic, non-totalitarian state
envisaged by the Socialist intellectuals in Spain was quite compatible
with Spanish individualism (and basic democracy) but guise at variance
with Spanish intolerance. There was a legitimate ground for doubt that
any such Socialist state, if it came to power in Spain, would be
tolerant enough to permit that intellectual disagreement which is so
necessary for a democratic society, even one directing a Socialist
economic system.
The
bourgeoisie of Spain,
relatively few in numbers because of Spain's economic backwardness,
were in a difficult position. While the bourgeoisie of England and
France had attacked the forces of feudalism, bureaucratic monarchy,
militarism, and clericalism, and had created a liberal, secular state
and a bourgeois society before they were themselves attacked by the
rising forces of proletarian discontent on their Left, the bourgeoisie
of Spain could see the proletarian threat from the Left before they
were able to overcome the vested interests of the Right. As a result of
this, the bourgeoisie tended to split into two parts. On the one hand
were industrial and commercial bourgeoisie who supported the liberal
ideas of laissez-faire, constitutional parliamentarianism, private
property, anti-militarism, anti-bureaucratic freedom, anti-clericalism,
and a limited state authority. On the other hand were the intellectual
and professional bourgeoisie who would have added to this program a
sufficient degree of social reform, democracy, economic
interventionism, and nationalization of property to put them into the
Socialist camp. Both these divisions of the bourgeois group tended to
move further to the Right after 1931 as the growing pressure of
proletarian revolution threatened both private property and liberal
democracy. The bourgeois liberals feared the loss of private property
and, to save it, hastily abandoned their earlier anti-militarism,
anti-clericalism, and such; the bourgeois Socialists feared the loss of
liberal democracy, but they found nowhere to go because liberal
democracy could find no real basis in the fanatical intolerance of
Spain, a feature as prevalent on the Right as on the Left. In truth,
both bourgeois groups were largely crushed out, and their members
practically exterminated, by the Right because of their earlier
allegiance to anti-militarism, anti-clericalism, and anti-monarchism,
and by the Left because of their continued allegiance to private
property..
Strangely
enough, the only
defenders these bourgeois found outside their own group was in the
small but well-organized body of Stalinist Communists, whose
ideological preconceptions of the natural course of social development
were so strong that they insisted that Spain must pass through a period
of bourgeois liberal capitalism and industrialization before it would
be ripe for the later stage of totalitarian Communism. This point of
view, explicitly stated in Stalin's letter to the Spanish Left-wing
Socialist leader, Largo Caballero, on September 21, 1936, warned
against premature efforts toward social and economic reforms for which
Spain's degree of industrial development made it quite unready, and
called for general "anti-fascist" support for a liberal state against
the "reactionaries" of the Right. In consequence of this point of view,
the Communists in Spain were almost as willing to exterminate the
revolutionaries of the Left (especially the anarchists, "Trotskyist"
Communists, and left-wing Socialists) as they were to eliminate the
reactionaries of the Right.
This
complex and confused
situation in Spain was made even more involved by the struggle between
Castilian centralization (which was frequently unenlightened and
reactionary) and the supporters of local autonomy and separatism (which
were frequently progressive or even revolutionary) in Catalonia, the
Basque country, Galicia, and elsewhere. This struggle was intensified
by the fact that industrialism had grown up only in Catalonia and the
Basque provinces, and, accordingly, the strength of the revolutionary
proletariat was strongest in the areas where separatism was strongest.
Opposed
to all these forces
was that alignment of officers, upper clergy, landlords, and
monarchists which came into existence after 1898 and especially after
1918. The army was the poorest in Europe and relatively the most
expensive. There was a commissioned officer for every six men and a
general for every 250 men. The men were miserably underpaid and
mistreated, while the officers squandered fortunes. The Ministry of War
took about a third of the national budget, and most of that went to the
officers. Money was wasted or stolen, especially in Morocco, in lumps
of millions at a time for the benefit of officers and monarchist
politicians. Everything was done on a lavish scale. For example, there
were no less than five military academies. But the army remained so
inefficient that it lost 13,000 men a year for ten years fighting the
Riffs in Morocco, and in July 1921 lost 12,000 killed out of 20,000
engaged in one battle. The army had the right, incredible as it may
seem, to court-martial civilians, and did not hesitate to use this
power to prevent criticism of its depredations. Nevertheless, the
outcry against corruption and defeats in Morocco resulted in a
parliamentary investigation. To prevent this, a military coup under
General Primo de Rivera, with the acquiescence of King Alfonso XIII,
took over the government, dissolved the Cortes, and ended civil
liberties, with martial law and a strict censorship throughout Spain
(1923).
The
landlords not only
monopolized the land but, more important than that, squandered their
incomes with little effort to increase the productivity of their
estates or to reduce the violent discontent of their peasant tenants
and agricultural workers. Of the 125 million acres of arable land in
Spain, about 60 percent was not cultivated, while another 10 percent
was left fallow. The need for irrigation, fertilizers, and new methods
was acute, but very little was done to achieve them. On the contrary,
while the Spanish grandees wasted millions of pesetas in the gambling
casinos of the French Riviera, the technical equipment of their estates
steadily deteriorated. Making use of the surplus agricultural
population, they sought to increase rents and to decrease agricultural
wages. To permit this they made every effort to make leases shorter in
duration (not over a year) and revocable at the landlord's will and to
break up every effort of agricultural workers to seek government or
unionized action to raise wages, reduce hours, or improve working
conditions.
While
all this was going on,
and while most of Spain was suffering from malnutrition, most of the
land was untilled, and the owners refused to use irrigation facilities
which had been built by the government. As a result, agricultural
yields were the poorest in western Europe. While 15 men owned about a
million acres, and 15,000 men owned about half of all taxed land,
almost 2 million owned the other half, frequently in plots too small
for subsistence. About 2 million more, who were completely landless,
worked 10 to 14 hours a day for about 2.5 pesetas (35 cents) a day for
only six months in the year or paid exorbitant rents without any
security of tenure.
In
the Church, while the
ordinary priests, especially in the villages, shared the poverty and
tribulations of the people, and did so with pious devotion, the upper
clergy were closely allied with the government and the forces of
reaction. The bishops and archbishops were named by the monarchy and
were partly supported by an annual grant from the government as a
result of the Concordat of 1851. Moreover, the clergy and the
government were inextricably intertwined, the upper clergy having seats
in the upper chamber, control of education, censorship, marriage, and
the willing ear of the king. In consequence of this alliance of the
upper clergy with the government and the forces of reaction, all the
animosities built up against the latter came to be directed against the
former also. Although the Spanish people remained universally and
profoundly Catholic, and found no attraction whatever in Protestantism
and very little attraction in rational skepticism of the French sort,
they also became indelibly anti-clerical. This attitude was reflected
in the notable reluctance of Spanish men to go to church or receive the
sacraments during the interval between confirmation at the age of
thirteen and extreme unction on their deathbeds. It was also reflected
in the proclivity of the Spanish people for burning churches. While
other peoples expressed turbulent outbursts of anti-governmental
feeling in attacks on prisons, post offices, banks, or radio stations,
the Spaniards invariably burn churches, and have done so for at least a
century. There were great outbursts of this strange custom in 1808,
1835, 1874, 1909, 1931, and 1936, and it was indulged in by the Right
as well as by the Left.
The
monarchists were divided
into at least two groups. One of these, the Renovación
Española, supported the dynasty of Isabella II (1833-1868),
while the other, the Comunión Tradicionalista, supported the
claims of Isabella’s uncle, Don Carlos. The Renovation group was
a clique of wealthy landowners who used their contracts with the
government to evade taxes, and to obtain concessions and sinecures for
themselves and their friends. The Carlists were a fanatically
intolerant and murderous group from remote rural regions of Spain, and
were almost entirely clerical and reactionary in their aims.
All
these groups, the
landlords, officers, higher clergy, and monarchists (except the
Carlists), were interest groups seeking to utilize Spain for their own
power and profit. The threat to their positions following
the
First World War and the defeats in Morocco led them to support Primo de
Rivera's dictatorship. However, the general's personal instability and
his efforts to appease the industrialists of Catalonia, as well as his
unbalanced budgets and his efforts to build up a popular following by
cooperating with laboring groups, led to a shift of support, and he was
forced to resign in 1930, following an unsuccessful officers' revolt in
1929.
Realizing
the danger to his
dynasty from his association with an unpopular dictatorship, Alfonso
XIII tried to restore the constitutional government. As a first step,
he ordered municipal elections for April 12, 1931. Such elections had
been managed successfully by wholesale electoral corruption before
1923, and it was believed that this control could be maintained. It was
maintained in the rural areas, but, in 46 out of 50 provincial
capitals, the anti-monarchical forces were victorious. When these
forces demanded Alfonso's abdication, he called upon General Sanjurjo,
commander of the Civil Guard, for support. It was refused, and Alfonso
fled to France (April 14, 1931).
The
republicans at once began
to organize their victory, electing a Constituent Assembly in June
1931, and establishing an ultramodern unicameral, parliamentary
government with universal suffrage, separation of Church and State,
secularization of education, local autonomy for separatist areas, and
power to socialize the great estates or the public utilities. Such a
government, especially the provisions for a parliamentary regime with
universal suffrage, was quite unfitted for Spain with its high
illiteracy, its weak middle class, and its great inequalities of
economic power.
The
republic lasted only five
years before the Civil War began on July 18, 1936. During that period
it was challenged constantly from the Right and from the extreme Left,
the former offering the greatest test because it commanded economic,
military, and ideological power through the landlords, the army, and
the Church. During this time the nation was ruled by coalition
governments: first by a coalition of the Left from December 1931 to
September, 1933; then by the Center from September to October 1934;
third, by a coalition of the Right from October 1934 to the Popular
Front election of February 1936; and, last, by the Left after February
1936. These shifts of government resulted from changes in alignments of
the multitude of political parties. The Right formed a coalition under
José María Gil Robles in February 1933, while the Left
formed a coalition under Manuel Azaña in February 1936. As a
result, the Right coalition won the second parliamentary election in
November 1933, while the Left won the third, or Popular Front, election
of February 1936.
Because
of this shifting of
governments, the liberal program which was enacted into law in
1931-1933 was annulled or unenforced in 1933-1936. This program
included educational reform, army reform, separation of Church and
State, agrarian reform, and social assistance for peasants and workers.
In
an effort to reduce
illiteracy (which was over 45 percent in 1930), the republic created
thousands of new schools and new teachers, raised teachers' salaries to
a minimum of about $450 a year (this affected 21,500 out of 37,500
teachers), founded over a thousand new libraries, and encouraged adult
education..
Efforts
were made to obtain a
smaller, better paid, more efficient army. The 23,000 officers
(including 258 generals) were reduced to 9,500 officers (including 86
generals), the surplus being retired on full pay. The number of
enlisted men was reduced to about 100,000 with higher pay. Organization
was completely reformed. As a result, over $14 million was saved on the
cost of the army in the first year (1931-1932). Unfortunately, nothing
was done to make the army loyal to the new regime. Since the choice to
retire or stay on active duty was purely voluntary, the republican
officers tended to retire, the monarchists to stay on, with the result
that the army of the republic was more monarchist in its sympathies
than the army had been before 1931. Although the officers, disgruntled
at their narrowing opportunities for enriching themselves, were openly
disrespectful and insubordinate toward the republic, almost nothing was
done to remedy this.
The
Church was subjected to
laws establishing complete separation of Church and State. The
government gave up its right to nominate the upper clergy, ended the
annual grant to the Church, took ownership (but not possession) of
Church property, forbade teaching in public schools by the clergy,
established religious toleration and civil divorce, and required that
all corporations (including religious orders and trade unions) must
register with the government and publish financial accounts.
To
assist the peasants and
workers, mixed juries were established to hear rural rent disputes;
importation of labor from one district to another for wage-breaking
purposes was forbidden; and credit was provided for peasants to obtain
land, seed, or fertilizers on favorable terms. Manorial lands, those of
monarchists who had fled with Alfonso, and customarily uncultivated
lands were expropriated with compensation, to provide farms for a new
class of peasant proprietors.
Most
of these reforms went
into effect only partially or not at all. The annual contribution to
the Church could not be ended, because the Spanish people refused to
contribute voluntarily to the Church, and an alternative system of
ecclesiastical taxation enforced by the state had to be set up. Few of
the abandoned or poorly cultivated estates could be expropriated
because of lack of money for compensation. The clergy could not be
excluded from teaching because of the lack of trained teachers. Most
expropriated ecclesiastical property was left in the control of the
Church either because it was necessary for religious and social
services or because it could not be tracked down.
The
conservative groups
reacted violently against the republic almost as soon as it began. In
fact, the monarchists criticized Alfonso for leaving without a
struggle, while the upper clergy and landlords ostracized the papal
legate for his efforts to make the former adopt a neutral attitude
toward the new regime. As a result, three plots began to be formed
against the republic, the one monarchist led by Calvo Sotelo in
parliament and by Antonio Goicoechea behind the scenes; the second a
parliamentary alliance of landlords and clericals under José
María Gil Robles; and the last a conspiracy of officers under
Generals Emilio Barrera and Jose Sanjurjo. Sanjurjo led an unsuccessful
rebellion at Seville in August 1932. When it collapsed from lack of
public support, he was arrested, condemned to death, reprieved, and
finally released (with all his back pay) in 1934. Barrera was arrested
but released by the courts. Both generals began to prepare for the
rebellion of 1936.
In
the meantime, the
monarchist conspiracy was organized by former King Alfonso from abroad
as early as May 1931. As part of this movement a new political party
was founded under Sotelo, a "research" organization known as Spanish
Action was set up "to publish texts from great thinkers on the legality
of revolution," a war chest of l.5 million pesetas was created, and an
underground conspiracy was drawn up under the leadership of Antonio
Goicoechea. This last action was taken at a meeting in Paris presided
over by Alfonso himself (September 29, 932).
Goicoechea
performed his task
with great skill, under the eyes of a government which refused to take
preventive action because of its own liberal and legalistic scruples.
He organized an alliance of the officers, the Carlists, and his own
Alfonsist party. Four men from these three groups then signed an
agreement with Mussolini on March 31, 1934. By this agreement the Duce
of Fascism promised arms, money, and diplomatic support to the
revolutionary movement and gave the conspirators a first-installment
payment of 1,500,000 pesetas, 10,000 rifles, 10,000 grenades, and 200
machine guns. In return the signers, Lieutenant General Emilio Barrera,
Antonio Lizarza, Rafael de Olazabal, and Antonio Goicoechea, promised
when they came to power to denounce the existing French-Spanish "secret
treaty," and to sign with Mussolini an agreement establishing a joint
export policy between Spain and Italy, as well as an agreement to
maintain the status quo in the western
Mediterranean. ,
In
the meantime, Gil Robles's
coalition, known as CEDA (Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right
Parties), along with his own clerical party (Popular Action) and the
Agrarian Party of the big landlords, was able to replace the Left
Republican Manuel Azaña by the Right Republican Alejandro
Lerroux as prime minister (September 1933). It then called new
elections in November 1934, and won a victory with 213 seats for the
Right, 139 for the Center, and 121 for the Left. The Center Cabinet
continued in office, supported by the votes of the Right. It revoked
many of the reforms of 1931-1933, allowed most of the rest to go
unenforced, released all the Rightist conspirators from prison
(including Sanjurjo), gave an amnesty to thousands of monarchist
plotters and exiles, and restored their expropriated estates. By a
process of consolidating portfolios and abolishing Cabinet seats, Gil
Robles slowly reduced the Cabinet from thirteen ministers at the end of
1933 to nine two years later. Of these CEDA took three in October 1934
and five in March 1935.
The
advent to office of CEDA
in October 1934 led to a violent agitation which burst into open revolt
in the two separatist centers of the Basque country and Catalonia. The
latter, led by the bourgeois Left, received little support from the
workers, and collapsed at once; the uprising in Asturias, however,
spearheaded by anarchist miners hurling dynamite from slings, lasted
for nine days. The government used the Foreign Legion and Moors,
brought from Morocco by sea, and crushed the rebels without mercy. The
latter suffered at least 5,000 casualties, of which a third were dead.
After the uprising was quelled, all the Socialist press was silenced
and 25,000 suspects were thrown into prison.
This
uprising of October 1934,
although crushed, served to split the oligarchy. The fact that the
government had sent Moors to the most Catholic part of Spain (where
they had never penetrated during the Saracen invasions) and the demands
of the army, monarchists, and the biggest landlords for a ruthless
dictatorship alarmed the leaders of the Church and the president of the
republic, Alcala Zamora. This ultimately blocked Gil Robles's road to
power by parliamentary methods. After March 1935 he controlled the
portfolios of Justice, Industry and Commerce, Labor, and
Communications, but could not get the Interior (which controlled the
police). This was held by Portela Valladares, a moderate close to
Zamora. Gil Robles as minister of war encouraged reactionary control of
the army and even put General Franco in as his undersecretary for war,
but he could not get rid of Portela Valladares. Finally, he demanded
that the police be transferred from the Ministry of Interior to his own
Ministry of War. When this was refused, he upset the Cabinet, but,
instead of getting more from this action, he got less, for Alcala
Zamora handed the premier's seat over to moderates (Joaquin
Chapaprieta, a businessman, followed by Portela Valladares) and ordered
new elections.
For
these elections of
February 1936, the parties of the Left formed a coalition, the Popular
Front, with a published program and plan of action. The program was of
a moderate Left character, promising a full restoration of the
constitution, amnesty for political crimes committed after November
1933, civil liberties, an independent judiciary, minimum wages,
protection for tenants, reform of taxation, credit, banking, and the
police, and public works. It repudiated the Socialist program for
nationalization of the land, the banks, and industry.
The
plan of action provided
that while all the Popular Front parties would support the government
by their votes in the Cortes, only the bourgeois parties would hold
seats in the Cabinet, while the workers' parties, such as the
Socialists, would remain outside.
The
election of February 16,
1936 followed a campaign of violence and terrorism in which the worst
offenders were the members of a microscopic new political party calling
itself the Falange. Openly Fascist on the Italian model, and consisting
largely of a small number of rich and irresponsible youths, this group
was led by Primo de Rivera the younger. In the election, the Popular
Front captured 266 out of 473 seats, while the Right had 153 and the
Center only 54; CEDA had 96, the Socialists 87, Azaña's
Republican Left 81, the Communists 14.
The
defeated forces of the
Right refused to accept the results of this election. As soon as the
results were known, Sotelo tried to persuade Portela Valladares to hand
over the government to General Franco. That was rebuffed. The same day
the Falange attacked workers who were celebrating. On February 20th the
conspirators met and decided their plans were not yet ripe. The new
government heard of this meeting and at once transferred General Franco
to the Canary Islands, General Manuel Goded to the Balearics, and
General Emilio Mola from his command in Morocco to be governor-general
of Navarre (the Carlist stronghold). The day before Franco left Madrid,
he met the chief conspirators at the home of the monarchist deputy
Serrano Delgado. They completed their plans for a military revolt but
fixed no date.
In
the meantime, provocation,
assassination, and retaliation grew steadily, with the verbal
encouragement of the Right. Property was seized or destroyed, and
churches were burned on all sides. On March 12th the Socialist lawyer
who had drafted the constitution of 1931 was fired at from an
automobile, and his companion was killed. Five men were brought to
trial; the judge was assassinated (April 13th). The next day a bomb
exploded beneath a platform from which the new Cabinet was reviewing
the troops, and a police lieutenant was killed (April 14th). The mob
retaliated by assaults on monarchists and by burning churches. On March
15th there was an attempt to assassinate Largo Caballero. By May the
monarchist assassins were beginning to concentrate on the officers of
the Assault Guards, the only branch of the police which was completely
loyal to the republic. In May the captain of this force, Faraudo, was
killed by shots from a speeding automobile; on July 12th Lieutenant
Castillo of the same force was killed in the same way. That night a
group of men in the uniform of the Assault Guards took Sotelo from his
bed, and shot him. The uprising, however, was already beginning in
England and in Italy, and broke out in Morocco on July 18th..
One
of the chief figures in
the conspiracy in England was Douglas Jerrold, a well-known editor, who
has revealed some details in his autobiography. At the end of May 1936,
he obtained "so machine guns and a half million rounds of S.A.
ammunition" for the cause. In June he persuaded Major Hugh Pollard to
fly to the Canary Islands in order to transport General Franco by plane
to Morocco. Pollard took off on July 11th with his nineteen-year-old
daughter Diana and her friend Dorothy Watson. Louis Bolin, who was
Jerrold's chief contact with the conspirators, went at once to Rome. On
July 15th orders were issued by the Italian Air Force to certain units
to prepare to fly to Spanish Morocco. The Italian insignia on these
planes were roughly painted over on July 20th and thereafter, but
otherwise they were fully equipped. These planes went into action in
support of the revolt as early as July 27th; on July 30th four such
planes, still carrying their orders of July 15th, landed in French
Algeria, and were interned.
German
intervention was less
carefully planned. It would appear that Sanjurjo went to Berlin on
February 4, 1936, but could get no commitment beyond a promise to
provide the necessary transport planes to move the Moroccan forces to
Spain if the Spanish fleet made transport by sea dangerous by remaining
loyal to the government. As soon as Franco reached Morocco from the
Canaries on July 18th, he appealed for these planes through a personal
emissary to Hitler and through the German consul at Tetuan. The former
met Hitler on July 24th, and was promised assistance. The plans to
intervene were drawn up the same night by Hitler, Goring, and General
Werner von Blomberg. Thirty planes with German crews were sent to Spain
by August 8th, and the first one was captured by the Loyalist
government the next day.
In
the meantime, the revolt
was a failure. The navy remained loyal because the crews overthrew
their officers; the air force generally remained loyal; the army
revolted, along with much of the police, but, except in isolated areas,
these rebellious units were overcome. At the first ne\vs of the revolt,
the people, led by the labor unions and the militia of the workers'
political parties, demanded arms. The government was reluctant because
of fear of revolution from the Left as well as the Right and delayed
for several days. Two Cabinets resigned on July 18th and July 19th
rather than arm the Left, but a new Cabinet under José Giral was
willing to do so. However, because arms were lacking, orders were sent
at once to France. The recognized government in Madrid had the right to
buy arms abroad and was even bound to do so to some degree by the
existing commercial treaty with France.
As
a result of the failure of
the revolt, the generals found themselves isolated in several different
parts of Spain with no mass popular support and with control of none of
the three chief industrial areas. The rebels held the extreme northwest
(Galicia and Leon), the north (Navarre), and the south (western
Andalusia) as well as Morocco and the islands. They had the unlimited
support of Italy and Portugal, as well as unlimited sympathy and
tentative support from Germany. But the rebel position was desperate by
the end of July. On July 25th the German ambassador informed his
government that the revolt could not succeed "unless something
unforeseen happens." By August 25th the acting state secretary of
foreign affairs in Germany, Hans Dieckhoff, wrote, "it is not to be
expected that the Franco Government can hold out for long, even after
outward successes, without large-scale support from outside."
In
the meantime, Italian and
Portuguese aid kept the rebellion going. The French and British, whose
only desire at first was to avoid an open clash arising from the Great
Powers' supplying arms and men to opposite sides in the conflict were
prepared to sacrifice any interests of their countries to avoid this.
Impelled by pacifist sentiments, and a desire to avoid war at any cost,
French Premier Léon Blum and French Foreign Minister Yvon Delbos
suggested on August 1, 1936, that an agreement not to intervene in
Spain should be signed by the chief Powers concerned. This idea was
eagerly taken up by Britain and was acceptable to the Popular Front
government of France, since it was clear that if there was no
intervention, the Spanish government could suppress the rebels. Great
Britain accepted the French offer at once, but efforts to get Portugal,
Italy, Germany, and Russia into the agreement were difficult because of
the delays made by Portugal and Italy, both of which were helping the
rebels. By August 24th all six Powers had agreed, and by August 28th
the agreement went into effect.
Efforts
to establish some kind
of supervision by the Nonintervention Committee or by neutral forces
were rejected by the rebels and by Portugal, while Britain refused to
permit any restrictions to be placed on war materiel going to Portugal
at the very moment when it was putting all kinds of pressure on France
to restrict any flow of supplies across the Pyrenees to the recognized
government of Spain (November 30, 1936). Britain also put pressure on
Portugal to stop assistance to the rebels but with little success, as
Portugal was determined to see a rebel victory. Along with Italy and
Germany, Portugal delayed joining the nonintervention agreement until
it decided that such an agreement would hurt the Loyalist forces more
than the rebels. Even then there was no intention of observing the
agreement or permitting any steps to enforce it if such actions would
hamper the rebels.
On
the other hand, France did
little to help the Madrid government. while Britain was positively
hostile to it. Both governments stopped all shipments of war materiel
to Spain in the middle of August. By its insistence on enforcing
non-intervention against the Loyalists, while ignoring the systematic
and large-scale evasions of the agreement in behalf of the refuels,
Britain was neither fair nor neutral, and had to engage in large-scale
violations of international law. Britain refused to permit any
restrictions to be placed on war materiel going to Portugal (in spite
of its protests to Portugal for transshipping these to the rebels). It
refused to allow the Loyalist Spanish Navy to blockade the seaports
held by the rebels, and took immediate action against efforts by the
Madrid government to interfere with any kind of shipments to refuel
areas, while wholesale assaults by the rebels on British and other
neutral ships going to Loyalist areas drew little more than feeble
protests from Britain. In August 1936, when a Loyalist cruiser
intercepted a British freighter carrying supplies to Morocco, the
British battle cruiser Repulse went after the
Spanish cruiser
cleared for action. On the other hand, the British refusal to recognize
the rebel government, or to grant it belligerent status, placed
interference with shipping by these forces in the category of piracy;
yet Britain did almost nothing when in one year (June 1937-June 1938)
10 British ships were sunk, 10 were captured and held, 28 more were
seriously damaged, and at least 12 others were damaged by the rebels
out of a total of 140 British ships which went to Spain in that year.
By the beginning of 1937 Britain was clearly seeking a refuel victory,
and, instead of trying to enforce non-intervention or to protect
British rights on the seas, was actively supporting the rebel blockade
of Loyalist Spain. This was clearly evident when the British Navy after
May 1937 began to intercept British ships headed for Loyalist ports and
on some pretext, or simply by force, made them go elsewhere, such as
Bordeaux or Gibraltar. These tactics were admitted by the First Lord of
the Admiralty in the House of Commons on June 29, 1938.
The
rebel forces were fewer in
numbers than the Loyalists, and fought with less vigor and under poor
leadership, according to German secret reports from Spain at the time,
but were eventually successful because of their great superiority in
artillery, aviation, and tanks, as a result of the one-sided
enforcement of the nonintervention agreement. This was admitted by the
governments concerned as soon as the war was over, and by General
Franco on April 13, 1939. We have seen that Italian intervention began
even before the revolt broke out and that Portuguese intervention on
behalf of the rebels followed soon after. German intervention was
somewhat slower, although all their sympathies were with the rebels. At
the end of July, a German citizen in Morocco organized a Spanish
corporation called Hisma to obtain German supplies and assistance for
the rebels. This firm began to transport the rebel troops from Morocco
to Spain on August 2nd. It soon obtained a monopoly on all German goods
sold to rebel Spain and set up a central purchasing office for this
purpose in Lisbon, Portugal. By August all important units of the
German Navy were in Spanish waters, and their ranking admiral paid a
state visit to Franco in his headquarters in Morocco as early as August
3rd. These units gave naval support to the rebellion from then on.
Early
in October, General
Göring established a corporation called Rowak, with three million
reichsmarks credit provided by the German government. This was given a
monopoly on the export of goods to Spain, and orders were issued to the
German Navy to protect these goods in transit.
The
failure of the Franco
forces to capture Madrid led to a joint Italian-German meeting in
Berlin on October 20, 1936. There it was decided to embark on a policy
of extensive support for Franco. As part of this policy both Powers
recognized the Franco government and withdraw their recognition from
Madrid on November 1 8, 1936, and Italy signed a secret alliance with
the rebel government ten days later. Japan recognized the Franco regime
early in December, following the signature of the German-Japanese
Anti-Comintern Pact of November 25, 1936.
As
a result of all these
actions, Franco received the full support of the aggressor states,
while the Loyalist government was obstructed in every way by the
"peace-loving" Powers. While the Axis assistance to the rebels was
chiefly in the form of supplies and technical assistance, it was also
necessary to send a large number of men to work some of this equipment
or even to fight as infantry. In all, Italy sent about 100,000 men and
suffered about 50,000 casualties (of which 6,000 were killed). Germany
sent about 20,000 men, although this figure is less certain. The value
of the supplies sent to General Franco was estimated by the countries
concerned as 500 million reichsmarks by Germany and 14 billion fire by
Italy. Together this amounts to over three-quarters of a billion
dollars.
On
the other side, the
Loyalists were cut off from foreign supplies almost at once because of
the embargoes of the Great Powers, and obtained only limited amounts,
chiefly from Mexico, Russia, and the United States, before the
Nonintervention agreement cut these off. On January 18, 1937, the
American Neutrality Act was revised to apply to civil as well as
international wars, and was invoked against Spain immediately, but
"unofficial" pressure from the American government prevented exports of
this kind to Spain even earlier. As a result of such actions, shortages
of supplies for the Madrid government were evident at the end of August
and became acute a few weeks later, while supplies for the rebels were
steadily increasing.
The
Madrid government made
violent protests against the Axis intervention, both before the
Nonintervention Committee in London and before the League of Nations.
These were denied by the Axis Powers.
An
investigation of these
charges was made under Soviet pressure, but the committee reported on
November loth that these charges were unproved. Indeed, Anthony Eden,
nine days later, went so far as to say in the House of Commons that so
far as nonintervention was concerned, "there were other Governments
more to blame than either Germany or Italy."
Since
we have captured large
quantities of secret German and Italian documents and have not captured
any Soviet documents, it is not possible to fix the date or the degree
of Soviet intervention in Spain, but it is conclusively established
that it was much later in date and immensely less in quantity than that
of either Italy or Germany. On October 7, 1936, the Soviet
representative informed the Nonintervention Committee that it could not
be bound by the nonintervention agreement to a greater extent than the
other participants. Soviet intervention appears to have begun at this
time, three and a half years after Italian intervention and almost
three months after both Italian and German units were fighting with the
rebels. Russian military equipment went into action before Madrid in
the period October 29—November 11, 1936.
As
late as September 28, 1936,
the German charge d'affaires in the Soviet Union reported that he could
find no reliable proof of violation of the arms embargo by the Soviet
government, and on November 16th he reported no evidence of the
transport of troops from Odessa. Food shipments were being sent by
September 19th, and extensive shipments of military supplies began to
be reported a month later. Earlier, but unsubstantiated, reports had
arrived from German agents in Spain itself. The amount of Soviet aid to
Madrid is not known. Estimates of the number of technical advisers and
assistants vary from 700 to 5,000, and were probably not over 2,000; no
infantry forces were sent. In addition, the Third International
recruited volunteers throughout the world to fight in Spain. These went
into action early in November 1936 before Madrid, and were disbanded in
October 1938.
This
Soviet intervention in
support of the Madrid government at a time when it could find support
almost nowhere else served to increase Communist influence in the
government very greatly, although the number of Communists in Spain
itself were few and they had elected only 14 of 473 deputies in
February 1936. Communists came into the Cabinet for the first time
September 4, 1936. In general, they acted to maintain the Popular
Front, to concentrate on winning the war, and to prevent all efforts
toward social revolution by the extreme Left. For this reason, they
overthrew Largo Caballero's government in May 1937, and set up Juan
Negrín, a more conservative Socialist, as premier in a Cabinet
which continued on the same general lines until after the war ended.
The
small number of Russian or
other "volunteers" on the Loyalist side, in spite of the extravagant
statement of Franco's supporters at the time and since, is evident from
the inability of the rebel forces to capture any important numbers of
"foreign Reds" in spite of their great desire to do so. After the
Battle of Teruel, at which such "foreign Reds" were supposed to be very
active, Franco had to report to Germany that he had found "very few"
among the 14,500 captives taken; this fact had to be kept "strictly
confidential," he said (December 1937).
As
a matter of fact,
intervention in Spain by the Soviet Union was not only limited in
quantity; it was also of brief duration, chiefly between October 1936
and January 1937. The road to Spain was, for the Soviet Union, a
difficult one, as the Italian submarine fleet was waiting for Russian
shipping in the Mediterranean, and did not hesitate to sink it. This
was done in the last few mouths of 1936. Moreover, the Anti-Comintern
Pact of November 1936 and the Japanese attack on North China in 1937
made it seem that all Russian supplies were needed at home.
Furthermore, the Soviet Union was more concerned with reopening
supplies to Loyalist Spain from France, Britain, or elsewhere, because,
in a competition of supplies and troops in Spain, the Soviet Union
could not match Italy alone and certainly not Italy, Germany, and
Portugal together. Finally, the German government in 1936 gave the
Czechoslovak leader Edward Beneš documents indicating that
various Soviet Army officers were in contact with German Army officers.
When Beneš sent these documents on to Stalin, they gave rise to
a series of purges and treason trials in the Soviet Union, which
largely eclipsed the Spanish Civil War and served to put a stop to the
major part of the Soviet contribution to the 1,oyalist government.
Efforts to compensate for this decrease in Soviet support by an
increase in support by the Third International were not effective,
since the latter organization could get men to go to Spain but could
not obtain military supplies, which were what the Loyalist government
needed for their own manpower.
Although
the evidence for Axis
intervention in Spain was overwhelming and was admitted by the Powers
themselves early in 1937, the British refused to admit it and refused
to modify the nonintervention policy, although France did relax its
restrictions on its frontier sometimes, notably in April-June 1938.
Britain's attitude was so devious that it can hardly be untangled,
although the results are clear enough. The chief result was that in
Spain a Left government friendly to France was replaced by a Right
government unfriendly to France and deeply obligated to Italy and
Germany. The evidence is clear that the real sympathies of the London
government favored the rebels, although it had to conceal the fact from
public opinion in Britain (since this opinion favored the Loyalists
over Franco by 57 percent to 7 percent, according to a public-opinion
poll of March 1938). It held this view in spite of the fact that such a
change could not fail to be adverse to British interests, for it meant
that Gibraltar at one end of the middle passage to India could be
neutralized by Italy just as Aden at the other end had been neutralized
by the conquest of Ethiopia. That fear of war was a powerful motive is
clear, but such fear was more prevalent outside the government than
inside. On December 18, 1936, Eden admitted that the government had
exaggerated the danger of war four months earlier to get the
nonintervention agreement accepted, and u hen Britain wanted to use
force to achieve its aims, as it did against the piracy of Italian
submarines in the Mediterranean in the autumn of 1937, it did so
without risk of war. The nonintervention agreement, as practiced, was
neither an aid to peace nor an example of neutrality, but was clearly
enforced in such a way as to give aid to the rebels and place all
possible obstacles in the way of the Loyalist government suppressing
the rebellion.
This
attitude of the British
government could not be admitted publicly, and every effort was made to
picture the actions of the non-intervention Committee as one of
evenhanded neutrality. In fact, the activities of this committee were
used to throw dust in the eyes of the world, and especially in the eyes
of the British public. On September 9, 1936, Count Bismarck, the German
member of the committee, notified his government that France and
Britain's aim in establishing the committee was "not so much a question
of taking actual steps immediately as of pacifying the aroused feelings
of the Leftist parties in both countries by the very establishment of
such a committee—[and] to ease the domestic political situation
of the French Premier...."
For
months the meaningless
debates of this committee were reported in detail to the world, and
charges, countercharges, proposals, counter-proposals, investigations,
and inconclusive conclusions were offered to a confused world, thus
successfully increasing its confusion. In February 1937, an agreement
was made to prohibit the enlistment or dispatch of volunteers to fight
on either side in Spain, and on April 30th patrols were established on
the Portuguese and French borders of Spain as well as on the seacoasts
of Spain. At the end of a month, Portugal ended the supervision on her
land frontier, while Italy and Germany abandoned the sea patrol.
Constant
efforts by Portugal,
Italy, and Germany to win recognition for the rebels as "belligerents"
under international law were blocked by Britain, France, and Russia.
Such recognition would have allowed the rebel forces those rights on
the high seas which the recognized government of Madrid was in practice
being denied. Russia wished to extend belligerent rights to Franco only
if all foreign volunteers were withdrawn first. While debating and
quibbling went on about issues like belligerency, supervision by
patrols, withdrawal of volunteers, and such before the Non-intervention
Committee in London, the Franco rebel forces, with their foreign
contingents of moors, Italians, and Germans, slowly crushed the
Loyalist forces.
As
a result of the
non-intervention policy, the military preponderance of the rebels was
very large except in respect to morale. The rebels generally had about
500 or even more planes while the government had at one time as many as
150. It has been estimated that the greatest concentration of Loyalist
artillery was 180 pieces at the Battle of Teruel in December 1937,
while the greatest concentration of rebel artillery was 1,400 pieces
against 120 on the Loyalist side at the battle on the Ebro in July
1938. The Italian Air Force was very active, with 1,000 planes making
over 86,000 flights in 5,318 separate operations during which it
dropped 11,58 tons of bombs during the war. With this advantage the
“Nationalist” forces were able to join their southwestern
and northwestern contingents during 1936, to crush the Basques and form
a continuous territory between Galacia and Navarre across northern
Spain in 1937, to drive eastward across Spain to the east coast in
1938, thus cutting Loyalist Spain in two; to capture most of Catalonia,
including Barcelona, in January 1939; and to close in on Madrid in
1939. The Loyalist capital surrendered on March 28th.
England and France recognized the Franco government on February 27,
1939, and the Axis troops were evacuated from Spain after a triumphal
march through Madrid in June 1939.
When
the war ended, much of
Spain was wrecked, at least 450,000 Spaniards had been killed (of which
130,000 were rebels, the rest Loyalists), and an unpopular military
dictatorship had been imposed on Spain as a result of the actions of
non-Spanish forces. About 400,000 Spaniards were in prisons, and large
numbers were hungry and destitute. Germany recognized this problem, and
tried to get France to follow a path of conciliation, humanitarian
reform, and social, agricultural, and economic reform. This advice was
rejected, with the result that Spain has remained weak, apathetic,
war-weary, and discontented ever since.
Part
Thirteen—The Disruption of Europe: 1937-1939
Chapter
44—Austria Infelix, 1933-1938
The
Austria which was left
after the Treaty of Saint-Germain was so weak economically that its
life was maintained only by financial aid from the League of Nations
and the Western democratic states. Its area of population had been so
reduced that it consisted of little more than the great city of Vienna
surrounded by a huge but inadequate suburb. The city, with a population
of two millions in a country whose population had been reduced from 52
to 6.6 millions, had been the center of a great empire, and now was a
burden on a small principality. Moreover, the economic
nationalism
of the Succession States like Czechoslovakia cut this area off from the
lower Danube and the Balkans whence it had drawn its food supply in the
prewar period.
Worse
than this, the city
and the surrounding countryside were antithetical in their outlooks on
every political, social, or ideological issue. The city was Socialist,
democratic, anti-clerical if not antireligious, pacifist, and
progressive in the nineteenth-century meaning of the word "progress";
the country was Catholic if not clerical, ignorant, intolerant,
belligerent, and backward.
Each
area had its own
political party, the Christian Socialists in the country and the Social
Democrats in the city. These were so evenly balanced that in none of
the five elections from 1919 to 1930 did the vote polled for either
party fall below 35 percent or rise above 49 percent of the total vote
cast. This meant that the balance of power in Parliament fell to the
insignificant minor parties like the Pan-Germans or the Agrarian
League. Since these minor groups threw in their lot with the Christian
Socialists from 1920 onward, the dichotomy between the city and the
country was transformed into a division between the government of the
capital city (dominated by the Social Democrats) and that of the
federal government (dominated by the Christian Socialists).
The
Social Democrats, although
very radical and Marxist in word, were very democratic and moderate in
deed. In control of the whole country from 1918 to 1920, they were able
to make peace, to crush out the threat of Bolshevism from Hungary to
the east or from Bavaria to the north, to establish an effective
democratic constitution with considerable autonomy for the local states
(formerly provinces), and to give the new country a good impetus toward
becoming a twentieth-century welfare state. The measure of their
success may be seen in the fact that the Communists never were able to
get established after 1919 or to elect a member to Parliament. On the
other hand, the Social Democrats were unable to reconcile their desire
for union with Germany (called Anschluss) with the
need for financial aid from the Entente Powers who opposed this.
An
agreement between the Pan-Germans and the Christian Socialists to put Anschluss
on the shelf and concentrate on getting financial aid from the
victorious Entente made it possible to overthrow the coalition Cabinet
of Michael Mayr in June 1921, and replace it by a Pan-German-Christian
Socialist alliance under the Pan-German Johann Schober. In May 1922,
this alliance was reversed when the Christian Socialist leader,
Monsignor Ignaz Seipel, a Catholic priest, became chancellor. Seipel
dominated the federal government of Austria until his death in August
1932, and his policies were carried on after that by his disciples,
Dollfuss and Schuschnigg. Seipel was able to achieve a certain amount
of financial reconstruction by wringing international loans from the
victorious Powers of 1918. He achieved this, in spite of Austria's poor
credit status, by insisting that he would be unable to prevent Anschluss
if Austria reached a stage of financial collapse.
In
the meantime the Social
Democrats in control of the city and state of Vienna embarked upon an
amazing program of social welfare. The old monarchical system of
indirect taxes was replaced by a system of direct taxes which bore
heavily on the well-to-do. With an honest, efficient administration and
a balanced budget, the living conditions of the poor were transformed.
This was especially notable in regard to housing. Before 1914 this had
been deplorable. A census of 1917 showed that 73 percent of all
apartments were "one room" (with over go percent of workers' apartments
in this class), and of these, 92 percent had no sanitary facilities, 95
percent had no running water, and 77 percent had no electricity or gas;
many had no outside ventilation. Although this one room was smaller
than 12 feet by 15 feet in size, 17 percent had a lodger, usually
sharing a bed. As a result of the housing shortage, disease (especially
tuberculosis) and crime were rampant, and real-estate values rose over
2,500 percent in the fifteen years 1885-1900. These economic conditions
had been maintained by a very undemocratic political system under which
only 83,000 persons, on a property basis, were allowed to vote and
5,500 of the richest were allowed to choose one-third of all seats on
the city council.
Into
this situation the Social
Democrats came in 1918. By 1933 they had built almost 60,000 dwellings,
mostly in huge apartment houses. These were constructed with hardwood
floors, outside windows, gas, electricity, and sanitary facilities. In
these large apartment buildings more than half the ground space was
left free for parks and playgrounds, and central laundries,
kindergartens, libraries, clinics, post offices, and other conveniences
were provided. One of the largest of these buildings, the Karl Marx
Hof, covered only 18 percent of its lot, yet held 1,400 apartments with
5,000 inhabitants. These were built so efficiently that the average
cost per apartment was only about $1,650 each; since rent was expected
to cover only upkeep and not construction cost (which came from taxes),
the average rent was less than $2.00 a month. Thus the poor of Vienna
spend only a fraction of their income for rent, less than 3 percent,
compared to 25 percent in Berlin and about 20 percent in Vienna before
the war. In addition, all kinds of free or cheap medical care, dental
care, education, libraries, amusements, sports, school lunches, and
maternity care were provided by the city.
While
this was going on in
Vienna. the Christian Socialist-Pan-German federal government was
sinking deeper into corruption. The diversion of public funds to banks
and industries controlled by Seipel's supporters was revealed by
parliamentary investigations in spite of the government's efforts to
conceal the facts. When the federal government struck back
with its
own investigation of the finances of the city of Vienna, it had to
report that they were in admirable condition. All this served to
increase the appeal of the Social Democrats throughout Austria, in
spite of their antireligious and materialist orientation. This can be
seen from the fact that the Socialist electoral vote increased
steadily, rising from 35 percent of the total vote in 1920 to 39.6
percent in 1923 to 4Z percent in 1927. At the same time, the number of
Christian Socialist seats in Parliament fell from 85 in 1920 to 82 in
19Z3 to 73 in 1927 to 66 in 1930.
In
1927 Monsignor Seipel
formed a "Unity List" of all the anti-Socialist groups he could muster,
but he could not turn the tide. The election gave his party only 73
seats compared to 71 for the Social Democrats, 12 for the Pan-Germans,
and 9 for the Agrarian League. Accordingly, Seipel embarked on a very
dangerous project. He sought to change the Austrian constitution into a
presidential dictatorship as the first step on the road to a Habsburg
restoration within a corporative Fascist state. Since any
change in
the constitution required a two-thirds vote in a Parliament where the
Social-Democratic opposition held 43 percent of the seats, Monsignor
Seipel sought to break this opposition by encouraging the growth of an
armed reactionary militia, the Heimwehr (Home
Guard). This
project failed in 1929, when Seipel's constitutional changes were
largely rejected by the Parliament. As a result, it became necessary to
use illegal methods, a task which was carried out by Seipel's
successor, Engelbert Dollfuss, in 1932-1934.
The
Heimwehr first appeared in
1918-1919 as bands of armed peasants and soldiers formed on the fringes
of Austrian territory to resist incursions of Italians, South Slavs,
and Bolsheviks. After this danger passed, it continued in existence as
a loose organization of armed reactionary bands, financed at first by
the same German Army groups which were financing the Nazis in Bavaria
at the same time (1919-1924). Later these bands were financed by
industrialists and bankers as a weapon against the trade unions, and
after 1927 by Mussolini as part of his projects of revisionism in the
Danube area. At first, these Heimwehr units were fairly independent
with their own leaders in different provinces. After 1927 they tended
to coalesce, although rivalry between leaders remained bitter. These
leaders were members of the Christian Socialist or Pan-German parties
and sometimes had Habsburg sympathies. The leaders were Anton Rintelen
and Walter Pfrimer in Styria, Richard Steidle in Tyrol, Prince Ernst
Rüdiger von Starhemberg in Upper Austria, and Emil Fey in Vienna.
The "chief of the general staff" of the movement as it became unified
was a multi-murderer fugitive from German justice, Waldemar Pabst, who
had been involved in numerous political murders ordered by the
nationalists in Germany in the period 19r9-1923.
These
organizations openly
drilled in military formations, made weekly provocative marches into
industrial areas of the cities, openly declared their determination to
destroy democracy, labor unions, and the Socialists and to change the
constitution by force, and assaulted and murdered their critics.
Seipel's
efforts to amend the
constitution by using Heimwehr pressure against the Social Democrats
failed in 1929, although he did succeed in increasing the powers of the
Christian Democratic President Wilhelm Miklas somewhat. About the same
time, Seipel rejected an offer from the Social Democrats to disarm and
disband both the Heimwehr and the Social Democratic militia, the Schutzbund.
Seipel's
tactics alienated his
supporters in the Pan-German and Agrarian League so that his party no
longer commanded a majority in the chamber. It resigned in September
1930. Using the new constitutional reforms which had been passed the
year before, Seipel formed a "presidential" Cabinet, a minority
government, of Christian Socialists and Heimwehr. For the first time
this latter group obtained Cabinet posts, and these the most
threatening, since Starhemberg became minister of interior (which
controlled the police), and Franz Huber, another Heimwehr leader,
became minister of justice. This was done in spite of the fact that the
Heimwehr had just introduced into its organization an oath which bound
its members to reject parliamentary democracy in favor of the
one-party, cooperative, "leadership" state. From this point on, the
constitution was steadily violated by the Christian Socialists.
New
elections were called for
November 1930. Starhemberg promised Pfrimer that they would carry out a
Putsch to prevent the elections,
and Starhemberg publicly
announced, "Now we are here, and we will not drop the reins, whatever
the result of the elections." Chancellor Karl Vaugoin, however, was
convinced his group would win the elections; accordingly he vetoed the
Putsch. Minister of Justice Huber confiscated the papers of the
Pan-Germans, the Agrarians, and dissident Christian Socialists, as well
as of the Social Democrats, during the campaign on the ground that they
were "Bolshevik." In this confusion of cross-purposes the election was
held, the last election held in prewar Austria. The Christian
Socialists lost 7 seats, while the Social Democrats gained 1. The
former had 66, the latter 72, the Heimwehr had 8, and the
Pan-German-Agrarian bloc had 19. The minority Seipel government tamely
resigned, replaced by a more moderate Christian Socialist government
under Otto Ender with Pan-German-Agrarian support.
In
June 1931, though Seipel
tried again to form a government, he could not obtain sufficient
support, and the weak coalitions of moderate Christian Socialists and
Pan-Germans continued in spite of a Heimwehr revolt led by Pfrimer in
September 193 1. Pfrimer and his followers were brought to trial for
treason, and acquitted. No effort Noms made to collect their arms, and
it soon became clear that the Christian Socialist coalition, moved by
their own sympathies and fear of Heimwehr violence, were opening an
attack on the Social Democrats and the labor unions. These attacks were
intensified after May 1932, when a new Cabinet, with Dollfuss as
chancellor and Kurt Schuschnigg as minister of justice, took office.
This Cabinet had only a one-vote majority in the Parliament, 83 for and
8z against, and \vas completely dependent on the 8 Heimwehr deputies
which provided its majority. It would not call an election, because the
Christian Socialists knew they would be overwhelmed. Since they were
determined to rule, they continued to rule, illegally and eventually
unconstitutionally.
Although
the Nazis in Austria
were growing stronger and more violent every day, the
Christian-Socialist-Heimwehr coalition passed its time destroying the
Social Democrats. The Heimwehr militia would attack the Socialists in
the industrial parts of the cities, coming in by train from the rural
areas for the purpose, and the Christian Socialist government would
then suppress the Social Democrats for these "disorders." After one
such affair, in October 1932, Dollfuss appointed the Heimwehr leader,
Ernst Fey, as state secretary (later minister) for public security with
command of all the police in Austria. This gave the Heimvvehr, with 8
seats in Parliament, 3 seats in the Cabinet. Fey at once prohibited all
meetings except by the Heimwohr. From that point on, the police
systematically raided and destroyed Social Democrat and labor-union
property—"searching for arms," they said. On March 4, 1933, the
Dollfuss government was beaten in Parliament by one vote, 81-80. It
threw out one vote on a technicality and used the resulting uproar as
an excuse to prevent by force any more meetings of parliament.
Dollfuss
ruled by decree,
using a law of the Habsburg Empire of 1917. This law allowed the
government to issue emergency economic decrees during the war if they
were approved by parliament within a stated period subsequently. The
Habsburg Empire and the war were both finished, and the decrees of
Dollfuss were not concerned with economic matters nor were they
accepted by Parliament within the stated period, but the government
used this method to rule for years. The first decrees ended all
meetings, censored the press, suspended local elections, created
concentration camps, wrecked the finances of the city of Vienna by
arbitrary interference with tax collections and expenditures, wrecked
the supreme constitutional court to prevent it from reviewing the
government's acts, and reestablished the death penalty. These decrees
were generally enforced only against the Social Democrats and not
against either the Nazis or the Heimwehr, who were reducing the country
to chaos. When the Socialist mayor of Vienna disbanded the Heimwehr
unit of that city, he was at once overruled by Dollfuss.
In
May the Christian Socialist
Party conference failed to elect Dollfuss as head of the party. He at
once announced that parliament would never be restored and that all
political parties would be absorbed gradually into a single new party,
the "Fatherland Front." From this time on, Dollfuss and his successor
Schuschnigg worked little by little to build up a personal
dictatorship. This was not easy, as the effort was opposed by the
Social Democrats (who insisted on a restoration of the constitution),
by the Pan-Germans and their Nazi successors (who wanted union with
Hitler's Germany), and by the Heimwehr (who were supported by Italy and
wanted a Fascist state to dominate the Danube area).
While
Dollfuss continued his
attacks on the workers, the Nazis began to attack him and the Heimwehr.
The Nazi movement in Austria was under direct orders from Germany and
was financed from there. It engaged in wholesale attacks, parades,
bombings, and murderous assaults on the government's supporters. In May
1933, Hitler crippled Austria financially by putting a l,000-mark tax
on all German tourists going to Austria. On June 19 Dollfuss outlawed
the Nazis, arrested their leaders, and deported Hitler's "Inspector
General for Austria." The Nazi Party went underground but continued its
outrages, especially hundreds of bombings and thousands of acts of
vandalism. In June 1933 they tried to murder Steidle and Rintelen, and
in October they succeeded in wounding Dollfuss.
In
the face of these Nazi
atrocities, Dollfuss continued his methodical destruction of the
Socialists. Since 1930, and probably since 1927, Mussolini had been
arming Hungary and the Heimwehr in Austria. The Social Democrats,
supported by Czechoslovakia and France, opposed this. In January 1933,
the Socialist railway union revealed that a, trainload of 50,000 rifles
and 200 machine guns Noms en route from Mussolini to the Heimwehr and
to Hungary. In the resulting controversy a joint Anglo-French note
protesting this violation of the peace treaties and ordering the arms
to be either returned to Italy or destroyed was rejected by Dollfuss.
Instead, Dollfuss made an agreement with Mussolini for support against
the Nazis through the Heimwohr and for destroying the Socialists in
Austria. In March 1933, Dollfuss outlawed the Republican Defense Corps,
the militia of the Socialist party, took the Heimwehr into his Cabinet,
and ended Parliament.
Because
the continued
agitations of the Nazis in 1933 made necessary more support for
Dollfuss from Mussolini and the Heimwehr, the government began to take
steps to abolish the Socialist movement completely. At the end of
January 1934, orders were issued to the Heimwehr, and they began to
occupy union headquarters, Socialist buildings, and the city halls of
various provincial cities. On February loth Fey arrested most of the
leaders of the Socialist militia, and the following day made a speech
to the Heimwehr in which he said, "Chancellor Dollfuss is our man;
tomorrow we shall go to work, and we shall make a thorough job of it."
Bloodshed
had already occurred
in the provinces, and, when on February 12th Fey attacked the workers
in Vienna in their union centers, their Socialist headquarters, and
their apartment houses, full-scale fighting broke out. The government
had an overwhelming advantage, using the regular army, as well as the
Heimwehr and police, and bringing up field artillery to smash the great
apartment houses. By February 12th the fighting was finished, the
Socialist party and their labor unions were outlawed, their newspapers
declared illegal, hundreds were dead, thousands were in concentration
camps and prisons, thousands more were reduced to economic want, the
elective government of Vienna was replaced by a "federal commissar,"
all the workers' welfare, sports, and educational movements were
wrecked, and the valuable properties of these organizations had been
turned over to more favored organizations such as the Heimwehr and the
Catholic groups. Soon afterward, rents were raised in the Socialist
apartment houses, tenants were forced to pay for facilities which had
previously been free (including garbage collection), workers were
forced, in one way or another, to join the Fatherland Front, and even
the Socialist workers were forced to seek jobs through the employment
exchanges of the Catholic unions.
A
new constitution was
declared, under the emergency economic decree power of 1917, on April
24, 1934. It changed Austria from a "democratic republic" to a
"Christian, German, corporative, federal state." This constitution was
both fraudulent and illegal, and Dollfuss's efforts to make it more
legal, if not less fraudulent, had the opposite result. Dollfuss had
signed a concordant with the Vatican in June 1933. Since the Holy See
wanted this agreement to be approved by Parliament, Dollfuss decided to
kill several birds with one stone by convoking a rump of the old
Parliament to accept this document, to terminate the disrupted session
of March 4, 1933, and to accept the 471 decrees he had issued since
that date. Among these decrees was the new constitution of 1934. Since
the government insisted that the old constitution had never been
suspended or even violated, the new one had to be accepted either by a
plebiscite or by a two-thirds vote of the old Parliament with at least
half its members present. This was done on April 30, 1934, the various
acts being accepted by a fraction of the old Parliament. Because the
Socialists were prevented from attending, and the Pan-Germans refused
to attend, only 76 out of 165 were present, and some of these voted
against the acts proposed.
The
new constitution was of no
importance because the government continued to rule by decree, and
violated it as it pleased. For example, a decree of June 19, 1934,
deprived the courts of their constitutional power to rule on the
constitutionality of all the government's acts before July 1, 1934.
The
corporative aspect of the
new constitution was a complete fraud. In many activities no
corporations were set up; where they were set up, members were
appointed and not elected as provided in law; and, in any case, they
did nothing. Instead, the whole banking and industrial system was
filled witl1 the petty bureaucrats of the Fatherland Front. Because of
mismanagement and the world depression, the banks of Austria collapsed
in 1931-1933, precipitating the world banking crisis. The Austrian
government took over these banks and gradually replaced their
personnel, especially Jewish personnel, by party hacks. Since the banks
controlled about 90 percent of the country's industrial corporations,
these party hacks were able to place their friends throughout the
economic system. By 1934 almost nothing could be done in the business
world without "friends" in the government, and anything could be done
with "friends." Such "friendship" was best obtained by bribery, with
the result that periodical payments were being made from business to
political figures. Early in 1936 the scandal broke when it was revealed
that the Phoenix Insurance Company (of which Vaugoin, ex-chancellor and
leader of the Christian Socialist party, was now president), had lost
250 million in gifts and "loans" corruptly given. The government had to
admit this, and published a list of political groups and politicians
who had received a total of less than 3 million schillings. This left
most of the loss unexplained. It remained unexplained to the end. Legal
proceedings were begun against twenty-seven persons, but the
Schuschnigg government never brought any of them to trial.
This
corruption spread through
the government until finally a point was reached where, as Starhemberg
put it, "No one knew whom he could trust, and there was justification
for harbouring the most amazing suspicions." Outrages by the Nazis
increased in May and June 1934, to the point where bombings were
averaging fifteen a day. On July 12th, by decree, the government fixed
the death penalty for such bombings. The Nazis threatened a Putsch
at the first such sentence. This first
sentence was carried out on July 24th, but against a
twenty-two-year-old Socialist
after a summary trial. The same day the police and the Fatherland Front
were notified by their spies that the Nazis were going to attack the
next day. All the details were given to Fey, but he and Dollfuss spent
the evening discussing a possible Socialist uprising. The Cabinet
meeting of July 25th was postponed because of the warning, but no
effort was made to protect the ministers. About l:00 P. M. 154 Nazis in
eight trucks rushed into the chancellory without a shot being fired.
They at once murdered Dollfuss and locked themselves in. Another group
of Nazis seized the radio station of Vienna and announced a new
government with Rintelen as chancellor. There were also sporadic Nazi
uprisings in which scores were killed in the provinces. The Nazi
"Austrian Legion" in Germany and the German government did not dare to
move because of a stern warning from Mussolini that he would invade
Austria from the south if they did.
After
six hours of
negotiations in which Fey and the German minister acted as
intermediaries, the besieged men in the chancellery were removed to be
deported to Germany. When Dollfuss was found to he dead, thirteen were
executed and a large number imprisoned; all the Nazi organizations were
closed and their activities suspended. At the same time, those who had
tried to warn the government against the plot or to prevent it were
arrested and some were killed (including the police spy who had sent
the specific details the day before the crime).
Schuschnigg
and the Heimwehr
split the government between them after Dollfuss's death. Each took
four seats in the Cabinet. Schuschnigg was chancellor in the government
and vice-leader of the Fatherland Front, while Starhemberg was leader
of the Fatherland Front and vice-chancellor of the government.
From
July 1934 on, Schuschnigg
sought to get rid of the Heimwehr. especially Starhemberg, to create a
purely personal dictatorship with only one party, one trade union, and
one policy, to satisfy the Nazis without yielding any essential power
or positions, to keep the Socialists crushed, and to get as much
support from Mussolini as he could.
We
have said that Dollfuss and
Schuschnigg were faced by three opponents in 193Z: the Socialists, the
Nazis, and the Heimwehr. They sought to destroy these in this order by
mobilizing against each the power of the ones not yet destroyed, plus
the Christian Socialists. As the effort progressed, they tried to
destroy the Christian Socialists as wel1, by driving all groups into a
single amorphous and meaningless political party, the Fatherland Front.
This party's purpose was to mobilize support for these two leaders
personally. It had no real political principles and was completely
undemocratic, being bound to accept the decisions of the "leader." All
persons, no matter what their political beliefs, even Nazis, Catholics,
Communists, and Socialists, were forced to join by political, social,
and economic pressure. The result was that all political morale was
destroyed, public integrity was wrecked, and many among the politically
active portions of the population were driven to the two underground
extremist groups, the Nazis and the Communists, to the former in much
larger numbers than to the latter. Even the Socialists, in order to
prevent the loss of their angry members to the Communists, had to adopt
a more revolutionary attitude. Because everything was driven
underground, and the field was left to meaningless slogans, crass
materialist advantages, and pious expressions of righteousness, no one
knew what anyone's real thoughts were or whom they could trust.
The
loss of Italian support
for the Heimwehr and for an independent Austria after the Ethiopian
affair made it possible for Schuschnigg to get rid of Starhemberg and
his militia and made it necessary to conciliate the Nazis. Fey was
dropped from the government in October 1935. A political supplement to
the Rome Protocols was signed by Austria, Italy, and Hungary on March
Z3, 1936; it provided that no signer would enter an agreement with a
non-signatory state to change the political situation of the Danube
area without consultation with the other signers. In April Austria
copied Germany, and further alienated France and the Little Entente, by
decreeing the establishment of general military service. In the same
month, Schuschnigg ordered the disarmament of the Catholic militia. In
May 1936 three Heimwehr members, including Starhemberg, were dropped
from the Cabinet, and Starhemberg was removed as leader of the
Fatherland Front. A week later a series of decrees ordered the
disarmament of the Heimwehr, created an armed militia for the
Fatherland Front as the sole armed militia in the country, ordered that
in the future the leader of the Front and the chancellor must be the
same person, gave the chancellor the right to appoint the heads of all
local political units and to approve their appointments, prohibited all
parades and assemblies until September 30th, and declared that the
Fatherland Front was "an authoritarian foundation," a legal person, and
"the sole instrument for the formation of political will in the state."
Thus
"strengthened" in
Austria, and under pressure from Mussolini to make peace with Hitler,
Schuschnigg signed an agreement of July 1l, 1936, with Franz von Papen,
the German minister. According to the published portion of this
agreement, Germany recognized Austrian independence and sovereignty;
each country promised not to interfere in the domestic politics of the
other; Austria admitted it was a German state; and additional
agreements to relieve the existing tension were promised. In secret
agreements made at the same time, Austria promised an amnesty for
political prisoners, promised to take Nazis into positions of
"political responsibility," to allow them the same political rights as
other Austrians, and to allow Germans in Austria the same rights to use
their national symbols and music as citizens of third states. Both
states revoked financial and other restrictions on tourists. Mutual
prohibition on each other's newspapers were lifted to the extent that
five specifically named German papers could enter Austria and five
named Austrian papers could enter Germany. Other paragraphs promised
mutual concessions in regard to economic and cultural relations.
Austro-German
relations for
the next eighteen months were dominated by this agreement, Germany,
through Papen, trying to extend it bit by bit, while Schuschnigg sought
to hold Germany to its recognition of Austrian sovereignty and its
promise not to interfere in Austria's domestic political affairs. By
the end of that period Germany was insisting that, since the Austrian
Nazis were Germans, their desires and activities were not an Austrian,
but a German, domestic problem.
The
secret documents
published since 1945 make it quite clear that Germany had no carefully
laid plans to annex Austria, and was not encouraging violence by the
Nazis in Austria. Instead, every effort was made to restrict the
Austrian Nazis to propaganda in order to win places in the Cabinet and
a gradual peaceful extension of Nazi influence. At the same time,
military measures were held in reserve, prepared for use if necessary.
To be sure, wild men on the lower levels of the Nazi Party in Germany
were encouraging all kinds of violence in Austria, but this was not
true of the real leaders. These ordered von Papen to try to get at
least two years of peace in 1936, and they removed the Austrian Nazi
wild men who opposed this from their positions of leadership. In this
way the violent Tavs Plan of the Austrian Nazis was replaced by the
Keppler Plan of peaceful and gradual penetration through Papen and the
Austrian politician Artur von Seyss-Inquart.
The
invasion of Austria as
early as March 12, 1938, and the immediate annexation of Austria were a
pleasant surprise, even for the Nazi leaders in Germany, and arose from
several unexpectedly favorable circumstances. Accordingly, the decision
to invade was not made before March lo, 1938, and even then was
conditional, while the decision to annex was not made until noon on
March 12th by Hitler personally and was unknown to both Ribbentrop and
Göring as late as 10:30 P.M. On March 12th. The circumstances
which brought this unexpected speedup in the German plans were based on
two facts: (1) the international situation and (2) the events in
Austria. We shall discuss these in order.
As
far as obvious political
events are concerned, 1937 was the only quiet year after 1933. But the
capture and release of various secret documents now make it clear that
1937 was a critical turning point because in that year the German
government and the British government made secret decisions which
sealed the fate of Austria and Czechoslovakia and dominated the history
of the next three years.
The
decision made by the
German government (that is, by Hitler) was to prepare for open military
aggression against Czechoslovakia and Austria and to carry this out
before 1943-1945, probably in 1938. This decision was announced by
Hitler to a secret meeting of seven persons on November 5, 1937. Among
those present, besides Hitler and his aide, Colonel Hossback, were the
minister of war (Werner von Blomberg), the commanders in chief of the
army (Werner von Fritsch), the navy (Erich Raeder), and the air force
(Hermann Göring), and the foreign minister (Konstantin von
Neurath). It is evident from some of Hitler's statements that he had
already received certain information about the secret decisions being
made by Chamberlain on the British side; for example, he said flatly
that Britain wanted to satisfy the colonial ambitions of Germany by
giving it non-British areas like Portuguese Angola, something which we
now know was in Chamberlain's mind. Hitler further assured his
listeners that ''almost certainly Britain, and probably France as well,
had already tacitly written off the Czechs and were reconciled to the
fact that this question would be cleared up in due course by
Germany.... An attack by France without British support, and with the
prospect of the offensive being brought to a standstill on our western
fortifications, was hardly probable. Nor was a French march through
Belgium and Holland without British support to be expected.".
Hitler
thought that, by
reducing German support for Franco in Spain, the war there could be
extended, and, by encouraging Italy to stay in Spain, especially in the
Balearic Islands, the French African troops could be kept from crossing
the Mediterranean Sea for use in Europe, and in general that France and
Britain would be so tied down in the Mediterranean by Italy that they
would take no action against Germany over Czechoslovakia and Austria.
In fact, Hitler was so sure of an Anglo-French war against Italy in
1938 that he was confident Czechoslovakia and Austria could be
conquered by Germany in that year..
These
ideas were completely
unacceptable to Blomberg, Fritsch, and Neurath. They objected that
German rearmament was so backward that they did not have a single
motorized division capable of movement, that there was no reason to
expect an Anglo-French-Italian war in 1938, that Italy, in such a war,
could tie down only twenty French divisions, leaving more than enough
to attack Germany, and that such an attack would be very dangerous
because Germany's fortifications on her western frontier were
"insignificant." Hitler brushed these objections aside. He "repeated
his previous statements that he was convinced of Britain's
non-participation, and, therefore, he did not believe in the
probability of belligerent action by France against Germany."
As
a result of the opposition
from Blomberg, Fritsch, and Neurath in this conference of November
1937, Hitler replaced these three by more amenable subordinates in a
sudden coup on February 4, 1938. Hitler himself took the posts of
minister of war and commander in chief, with General Wilhelm Keitel as
chief of staff for all the armed forces of the Reich. Neurath was
replaced in the Foreign Ministry by the fanatical Ribbentrop. The very
able Dirksen was sent to London as ambassador, but his ability was
wasted, as Ribbentrop paid no attention to his reports and his
well-founded warnings.
In
the meantime the British
government, especially the small group controlling foreign policy, had
reached a seven-point decision regarding their attitude toward Germany:
1.
Hitler Germany was the front-line bulwark against the spread of
Communism in Europe.
2.
A four-Power pact of
Britain, France, Italy, and Germany to exclude all Russian influence
from Europe was the ultimate aim; accordingly, Britain had no desire to
weaken the Rome-Berlin Axis, but regarded it and the Anglo-French
Entente as the foundation of a stable Europe.
3.
Britain had no objection to German acquisition of Austria,
Czechoslovakia, and Danzig.
4.
Germany must not use force
to achieve its aims in Europe, as this would precipitate a war in which
Britain would have to intervene because of the pressure of public
opinion in Britain and the French system of alliances; with patience,
Germany could get its aims without using force.
5.
Britain wanted an agreement with Germany restricting the numbers and
the use of bombing planes.
6.
Britain was prepared to
give Germany colonial areas in south-central Africa, including the
Belgian Congo and Portuguese Angola if Germany would renounce its
desire to recover Tanganyika, which had been taken from Germany in
1919, and if Germany would sign an international agreement to govern
these areas with due regard for the rights of the natives, an
"open-door" commercial policy, and under some mechanism of
international supervision like the mandates.
7.
Britain would use pressure
on Czechoslovakia and Poland to negotiate with Germany and to be
conciliatory to Germany's desires.
To
these seven points we
should add an eighth: Britain must rearm in order to maintain its
position in a "three-bloc world" and to deter Germany from using force
in creating its bloc in Europe. This point was supported by
Chamberlain, who built up the air force which saved Britain in 1940,
and by the Round Table Group led by Lord Lothian, Edward Grigg, and
Leopold Amery, who put on a campaign to establish compulsory military
service.
The
first seven points were
reiterated to Germany by various spokesmen from 1937 onward. They are
also to be found in many recently published documents, including the
captured archives of the German Foreign Ministry, the documents of the
British Foreign Office, and various extracts from diaries and other
private papers, especially extracts from Neville Chamberlain's diary
and his letters to his sister. Among numerous other occasions these
points were covered in the following cases: (a) in a
conversation between Lord Halifax and Hitler at Berchtesgaden on
November 17, 1938; (b) in a letter from Neville
Chamberlain to his sister on November 26, 1937; (c)
in a conversation between Hitler, Ribbentrop, and the British
Ambassador (Sir Nevile Henderson) in Berlin on March 3, 1938; (d)
in a series of conversations involving Lord Halifax, Ribbentrop, Sir
Thomas Inskip (British minister of defense), Erich Kordt (Ribbentrop's
assistant), and Sir Horace Wilson (Chamberlain's personal
representative) in London on March 10-11, 1938; and (e)
in a
conference of Neville Chamberlain with various North American
journalists held at Lord Astor's house on May 10, 1938. In addition,
portions of these seven points were mentioned or discussed in scores of
conversations and documents which are now available.
Certain
significant features
of these should be pointed out. In the first place, in spite of
persistent British efforts lasting for more than two years, Hitler
rejected Angola or the Congo and insisted on the return of the German
colonies which had been lost in 1919. During 1939 Germany steadily
refused to negotiate on this issue and finally refused even to
acknowledge the British efforts to discuss it. In the second place, the
British throughout these discussions made a sharp distinction between
Germany's aims and Germany's methods. They had no objections to
Germany's aims in Europe, but they insisted that Germany must not use
force to achieve these aims because of the danger of war. This
distinction was accepted by the German professional diplomats and by
the German professional soldiers, who were quite willing to obtain
Germany's aims by peaceful means, but this distinction was not accepted
by the leaders of the Nazi Party, especially Hitler, Ribbentrop, and
Himmler, who were too impatient and who wanted to prove to themselves
and the world that Germany was powerful enough to take what it wanted
without waiting for anybody's permission.
These
wild men were encouraged
in this attitude by their belief that Britain and France were so
"decadent" that they would stand for anything, and by their failure to
see the role played by public opinion in England. Convinced that the
governing group in England wanted Germany to get Austria,
Czechoslovakia, and Danzig, they could not understand why there was
such an emphasis on using peaceful methods, and they could not see how
British public opinion could force the British government to go to war
over the methods used when the British government made it perfectly
clear that the last thing that they wanted was a war. This error was
based on the fact that these Nazis had no idea of how a democratic
government works, had no respect for public opinion or a free press,
and were encouraged in their error by the weakness of the British
ambassador in Berlin (Henderson) and by Rippentrop's associations with
the "Cliveden Set" in England while he had been ambassador there in
1936-1938.
In
the third place, the
British government could not publicly admit to its own people these
"seven points" because they were not acceptable to British public
opinion. Accordingly, these points had to remain secret, except for
various "trial balloons" issued through The Times,
in speeches in the House of Commons or in Chatham House, in articles in
The Round Table
and by calculated indiscretions to prepare the ground for what was
being done. In order to persuade the British people to accept these
points, one by one, as they were achieved, the British government
spread the tale that Germany was armed to the teeth and that the
opposition to Germany was insignificant.
This
propaganda first appeared
in the effusions of the Round Table Group whose leader, Lord Lothian,
has visited Hitler in January 1935 and had been pushing this
seven-point program in The Times, in The
Round Table, at Chatham House and Ali Souls, and with Lord
Halifax. In the December 1937 issue of The Round Table,
where most of the seven points which Halifax had just discussed with
Hitler were mentioned, a war to prevent Germany's ambitions in Europe
was rejected on the grounds that its "outcome is uncertain" and that it
"would entail objectionable domestic disasters." In adding up the
balance of military forces in such a war, it gave a preponderance to
Germany, by omitting both Russia and Czechoslovakia and by estimating
the French Army at only two-thirds the size of the German and placing
the British Army at less than three divisions. By the spring of 1938
this completely erroneous view of the situation was being propagated by
the government itself.
For
years before June 1938,
the government insisted that British rearming was progressing in a
satisfactory fashion. Churchil1 and others questioned this, and
produced figures on German rearmament to prove that Britain's own
progress in this field was inadequate. These figures (which were not
correct) were denied by the government, and their own rearmament
defended. As late as March 1938, Chamberlain said that British armament
were such as to make Britain an "almost terrifying power . . . on the
opinion of the world." But, as the year went on, the government adopted
a quite different attitude. In order to persuade public opinion that it
was necessary to yield to Germany, the government and its supporters
pretended that its armaments were quite inadequate in comparison with
Germany.
We
now know, thanks to the
captured papers of the German Ministry of War, that this was a gross
exaggeration. From 1936 to the outbreak of war in 1939, German aircraft
production was not raised, but averaged 425 planes a month of all types
(including commercial). Its tank production was low, and even in 1939
was less than Britain's. In the first nine months of 1939 Germany
produced only so tanks a month; in the last four months of 1939, in
wartime, Germany produced 247 "tanks and self-propelled guns," compared
to British production of 314 tanks in the same period. At the time of
the Munich Crisis in 1938, German had 35 infantry and 4 motorized
divisions none of them fully manned or equipped. At that time
Czechoslovakia could mobilize at least 33 divisions. Moreover, the
Czech Army was better trained, had far better equipment, and had better
morale and better fortifications. At that time Germany's tanks were all
below lo tons and were armed with machine guns, except for a handful of
18-ton tanks (Mark III) armed with a 37-mm. gun. The Czechs had
hundreds of 38-ton tanks armed with 75mm. cannon. In March 1939, when
Germany overran Czechoslovakia, it captured 469 of these superior tanks
along with 1,500 planes, 43,000 machine guns, and over 1 million
rifles. From every point of view this was little less than Germany had
at Munich, and, at Munich, if the British government had desired it,
Germany's 39 divisions with the possible assistance of Poland and
Hungary, would have been opposed by Czechoslovakia’s 34 divisions
supported by France, Britain, and Russia.
Before
leaving this subject it
should perhaps be mentioned that Germany in 1939 brought into
production a Mark IV tank of 23 tons armed with a 75-mm. Cannon but
obtained only 300 of the Mark III and Mark IV together before the
outbreak of war in September, 1939. In addition, it had obtained by the
same date 2,700 of the inferior Mark I and Mark II tanks which suffered
breakdowns of as much as 25 percent a week. At this same date
(September 1939) Germany had an air force of 1,000 bombers and 1,050
fighters. In contrast with this, the British air program of March 1934,
which emphasized fighter planes, was to provide a first-line force of
900 planes. This was stepped up, undrew the urging of Chamberlain, and
the program of May 1938 was planned to provide a first-line force of
2,370 planes. This was raised again in 1939. Under it, Britain produced
almost 3,000 “military” planes in 1938 and about 8,000 in
1939 compared to 3,350 “combat” planes produced in Germany
in 1938 and 4,733 in 1939. Moreover, the quality of British planes was
superior to that of Germany’s. It was this margin which made it
possible for Britain to defeat Germany in the Battle of Britain in
September 1940.
From
these facts it is
quite clear that Britain did not yield to superior force in 1938, as
was stated at the time and has been stated since by many writers,
including Winston Churchill, whose war memoirs were written two years
after the Reichswehr archives were captured. We have evidence that the
Chamberlain government knew these facts but consistently gave a
contrary impression and that Lord Halifax went so far in this direction
as to call forth protests from the British military attaches in Prague
and Paris.
The
Chamberlain government
made it clear to Germany both publicly and privately that they would
not oppose Germany's projects. As Dirksen wrote to Ribbentrop on June
8, 1938, "Anything which can be got without a shot being fired can
count upon the agreement of the British." Accordingly, it was clear
that Britain would not oppose the annexation of Austria, although they
continued to warn vigorously against any effort to use force. In
February 1938, Sir John Simon and Chamberlain announced in the House of
Commons that neither the League of Nations nor Great Britain could be
expected to support Austrian independence; on February 12th Hitler told
Schuschnigg that Lord Halifax agreed "with everything he [Hitler] did
with respect to Austria and the Sudeten Germans." On March 3rd Nevile
Henderson told Hitler that changes in Europe were acceptable if
accomplished without "the free play of force" and that he personally
"had often expressed himself in favor of the Anschluss." Finally, on
March 7th, when the crisis was at its height, Chamberlain in the House
of Commons refused to guarantee Austria or any small nation. This
statement was made to the cheers of the government supporters. The
following day the Foreign Office sent a message to its missions in
Europe in which it stated its "inability to guarantee protection" to
Austria. This made it so clear to Hitler that Britain would not move
that his orders to invade Austria also ordered no precautions to be
taken by the defense forces on Germany's other frontiers (March 11,
1938). In fact, Hitler was considerably more worried about Italy than
he was about Britain and France, in spite of Mussolini's agreement of
September 1937 to support Germany's ambitions in Austria in return for
German support of his ambitions in the Mediterranean.
Although
the international
stage had been set, the invasion and annexation would not have come
about in March had it not been for conditions in Austria, especially
Schuschnigg's determination to prevent the execution of the Keppler
Plan for Nazi penetration of the Austrian government. As soon as he
extended one concession, he took away another, so that the Nazi
position became a bitter joke. At last Papen persuaded Schuschnigg to
visit Hitler at Berchtesgaden on February 12, 1938. There the Austrian
chancellor was upbraided by an enraged Hitler and forced to sign a new
agreement which did much to fulfill the Keppler Plan. Although no
ultimatum was given to Schuschnigg, it was made quite clear that, if
peaceful methods did not work, warlike ones would be used. Schuschnigg
promised ( 1 ) to appoint Seyss-Inquart, a Nazi, as minister of
security with unlimited control of the police in Austria; (2) to
release from prison and to restore to their positions all Nazis who
were being held, including the rebels of July 1934; (3) to exchange one
hundred army officers with Germany; (4) to permit Nazis in Austria to
profess their creed and join the Fatherland Front with the same rights
as others, the Nazi Party to remain illegal. In return, Hitler repeated
the agreement of July 11, 1936.
On
his return to Austria,
Schuschnigg put these concessions into effect piecemeal without any
public statement, but he was still determined to resist. On March 2nd
he began to negotiate with the long-outlawed Socialist groups, and on
March 8th he suddenly announced a plebiscite for Sunday, March 13th.
This plebiscite, as planned, was completely unfair. There was only one
question, which asked the voter, "Are you for a free and German,
independent and social, Christian and united Austria, for peace and
work, for the equality of all those who affirm themselves for the
people and the Fatherland?" There were no voting lists; only yes
ballots were to be provided by the government; anyone wishing to vote no
had to provide his own ballot, the same size as the yes ballots,
with nothing on it but the word no.
The
Nazis were outraged.
Through Seyss-Inquart, Hitler sent an ultimatum that the plebiscite
must be postponed and replaced by one in which the opposite point of
view (union with Germany) could be expressed as well. As the day passed
(March 11th), these German demands were increased. In the afternoon, as
the German Army was marching toward the frontier, came the demand for
Schuschnigg to resign and for Seyss-Inquart to become chancellor. If an
affirmative answer came before 7: 30 P. M. the invasion was to be
stopped. Schuschnigg resigned, but President Miklas refused to name
Seyss-Inquart chancellor until 11:00 P. M.. By that time the Germany
forces were crossing the border, and their advance could not be
stopped. Orders had been given to the Austrians not to resist, and the
Germans were generally welcomed. Göring demanded a telegram from
Seyss-Inquart asking for German troops to restore order and thus
justify the invasion. He never got it, so he wrote one himself.
The
lack of resistance, the
welcome from the Austrians, and the inaction of Italy and the Western
Powers encouraged the Germans to increase their ambitions. During most
of March 12th they were talking about an early withdrawal after the
Seyss-Inquart government was established, but the uproarious welcome
given Hitler at Linz on that day, the need for such Austrian products
as wood, the manpower available in Austria's half-million unemployed,
the opportunity to plunder the Jews, and the complete lack of
opposition decided Hitler to annex Austria. This was done on March
13th, and a plebiscite was ordered for April 10th to approve the
action. In the meantime, those who had opposed the Nazis were
murdered or enslaved, the Jews were plundered and abused, and
extravagant honors were paid to the Nazi gangsters who had been
disturbing Austria for years. The plebiscite of April 10th, under great
pressure from the Nazis, showed over 99 percent of the Germans in favor
of the Anschluss.
Chapter
45—The Czechoslovak Crisis, 1937-1938
Czechoslovakia
was the most
prosperous, most democratic, most powerful, and best administered of
the states which arose on the ruins of the Habsburg Empire. As created
in 1919, this country was shaped like a tadpole and was made up of four
main portions. These were, from west to east, Bohemia, Moravia,
Slovakia, and Ruthenia. It had a population of 15,000,000 of which
3,400,000 were Germans, 6,000,000 were Czechs, 3,000,000 were Slovaks,
750,000 were Hungarians, 100,000 were Poles, and 500,000 were
Ruthenians. In general, these people lived on a higher level of
education, culture, economic life, and progressiveness as we move from
east to west, the Germans and Czechs being on a high level, while the
Slovaks and Ruthenians were on a lower level.
The
large number of
minorities, and especially the large number of Germans, arose from the
need to give the country defensible and viable frontiers. On the
northwest the obvious strategic frontier was along the Sudeten
Mountains, and, to secure this, it was necessary to put into
Czechoslovakia the large number of Germans on the south side of these
mountains. These Germans objected to this, although they had never been
part of Germany itself, because they regarded all Slavs as inferior
people and because their economic position was threatened. The Sudeten
area had been the most industrialized portion of the Habsburg Empire,
and found its markets restricted by the new territorial divisions.
Moreover, the agrarian reforms of the new republic, while not aimed at
the Germans, injured them more than others just because they had formed
an upper class. This economic discontent became stronger after the
onset of the world depression in 1929 and especially after Hitler
demonstrated that his policies could bring prosperity to Germany. On
the other hand, the minorities of Czechoslovakia were the best-treated
minorities in Europe, and their agitations were noticeable precisely
because they were living in a democratic liberal state which gave them
freedom to agitate.
Among
the Germans of the
Sudetenland, only part were Nazis, but these were noisy, well
organized, and financed from Berlin. Their numbers grew steadily,
especially after the Austrian Anschluss. The Nazi
Party in
Czechoslovakia was banned in 1934 but, under Konrad Henlein, merely
changed its name to the Sudeten German Party. With 600,000 members, it
polled 1,200,000 votes in the election of May 1935 and obtained 44
seats in the Parliament, only one less than the largest party. As soon
as Edward Beneš succeeded Tomáš Masaryk as
president of Czechoslovakia in 1935, he took steps to conciliate the
Sudetens, offering them, for example, places in the administration
proportionate to their percentage of the total population. This was not
acceptable to the Germans because it would have given them only
one-fifth of the places in their own area, where they were over 90
percent of the population, as well as one-fifth in Slovakia, where they
had no interest at all.
In
1937 the prime minister,
Milan Hodža, offered to transfer all the Germans in the national
administration to the Sudeten areas and to train others until the whole
bureaucracy in these areas was German. None of these suggestions was
acceptable to Konrad Henlein for the simple reason that he wanted no
concessions within Czechoslovakia, however extensive; his real desire
was to destroy the Czechoslovak state. Since he could not admit this
publicly, although he did admit it in his letters to Hitler in 1937, he
had to continue to negotiate, raising his demands as the government
made larger concessions. These concessions were a danger to the state
because the fortified zone against Germany ran along the mountains and
thus right through the Sudetenland. Every concession to the Sudetens
thus weakened the country's ability to defend itself against attack.
These two facts made all efforts to compromise with Henlein futile from
the beginning, and made the constant British pressure on the Czech
government to give additional concessions worse than futile. It is
worthy to note that no public demand was made by either Henlein or
Germany to detach the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia until after
September 12, 1938, although influential persons in the British
government were advocating this, both in public and private, for months
before this date.
The
Czech strength rested on
its army of approximately thirty-three divisions, which was the best in
Europe in quality, the excellent fortification system, and its
alliances with France, the Soviet Union, and the Little Entente. The
annexation of Austria surrounded Bohemia with German territory on three
sides, but its position, from a military point of view, was still
strong. A line drawn from Berlin to Vienna would pass by Prague, but
the German Army could not safely invade Bohemia across its weakly
fortified southern frontier with Austria because of the danger of a
Czech counterattack from its fortified base into Bavaria..
Within
two weeks of Hitler's
annexation of Austria, Britain was moving. It was decided to put
pressure on the Czechs to make concessions to the Germans; to encourage
France and eventually Germany to do the same; to insist that Germany
must not use force to reach a decision, but to have patience enough to
allow negotiations to achieve the same result; and to exclude Russia,
although it was allied to Czechoslovakia, from the negotiations
completely. All this was justified by the arguments that
Czechoslovakia, in a war with Germany, would be smashed immediately,
that Russia was of no military value whatever and would not honor its
alliance with the Czechs anyway, and that Germany would be satisfied if
it obtained the Sudentenland and the polish Corridor. All these
assumptions were very dubious, but they were assiduously propagated
both in public and in private and may, at times, even have convinced
the speakers themselves.
The
group which spread this
version of the situation included Chamberlain, Lord Halifax, John
Simon, Samuel Hoare, Horace Wilson, the Cliveden Set, the British
ambassador in Berlin (Sir Nevile Henderson), and the British minister
in Prague (Basil Newton). To make their aims more appealing they
emphasized the virtues of "autonomy" and "self-determination" and the
contribution to European peace which would arise if Germany were
satisfied and if Czechoslovakia were "neutralized like Switzerland" and
"guaranteed like Belgium." By "neutralization" they meant that
Czechoslovakia must renounce its alliances with the Soviet Union and
with France. By "guaranteed" they meant that the rump of Czechoslovakia
which was left after the Sudetenland went to Germany would be
guaranteed by France and Germany but emphatically not by Britain.
How
Czechoslovakia could be
guaranteed against Germany by France alone after its defenses had been
destroyed, when it could not, according to Britain, be defended in 1938
when its defenses were intact, and when it would be supported by
France, the Soviet Union, and Britain, is only one of the numerous
British illogicalities displayed in this crisis.
Nevertheless,
Britain was able to win support for these plans, especially in France
where Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet and Prime Minister Edouard
Daladier reluctantly accepted them.
In
France, fear of war was
rampant. Moreover, in France, even more obviously than in England, fear
of Bolshevism was a powerful factor, especially in influential circles
of the Right. The ending of the Soviet Alliance, the achievement of a
four-Power pact, and the termination of Czechoslovakia as "a spearhead
of Bolshevism in central Europe" had considerable appeal to those
conservative circles which regarded the Popular Front government of
Leon Blum as "a spearhead of Bolshevism" in France itself. To this
group, as to a less vociferous group in Britain, even a victory over
Hitler in war to save Czechoslovakia would have been a defeat for their
aims, not so much because they disliked democracy and admired
authoritarian reaction (which was true) as because they were convinced
that the defeat of Hitler would expose all of central, and perhaps
western, Europe to Bolshevism and chaos. The slogan of these people,
"Better Hitler than Blum," became increasingly prevalent in the course
of 1938 and, although nothing quite like this was heard in Britain, the
idea behind it was not absent from that country. In this dilemma the
"three-bloc world" of the Cliveden Set or even the German-Soviet war of
the anti-Bolsheviks seemed to be the only solution. Because both
required the elimination of Czechoslovakia from the European power
system, Czechoslovakia was eliminated with the help of German
aggression, French indecision and war-weariness, and British public
appeasement and merciless secret pressure.
There
is no need to follow the
interminable negotiations between Henlein and the Czech government,
negotiations in which Britain took an active role from March 1938 to
the end. Plan after plan for minority rights, economic concessions,
cultural and administrative autonomy, and even political federalism
were produced by the Czechs, submitted to Britain and Germany, and
eventually brushed aside as inadequate by Henlein. The latter's
"Karlsbad Demands," enunciated on April 24th after Henlein's conference
with Hitler, were extreme. They began with an introduction denouncing
the Czechs and the Czechoslovak state, insisting that the country must
abandon its foreign policy and cease to be an obstacle to the German
"Drive to the East." They then enumerated eight demands. Among these we
find (1) complete equality between Czechs and Germans, (2) recognition
of the German group as a corporation with legal personality, (3)
demarcation of the German areas, (4) full self-government in those
areas, (5) legal protection for citizens outside those areas, (6)
reparation for damages influenced by the Czechs on the Sudetens since
1918, (7) German officials in German areas, and (8) full freedom to
profess German nationality and German political philosophy. There is
here no hint of revision of the frontiers, yet when, after long weeks
of negotiations, the Czech government substantially conceded these
points under severe pressure from Britain, Henlein broke off the
negotiations and fled to Germany (September 7-12, 1938)..
As
early as March 17, 1938, five days after the Anschluss,
the Soviet government called for consultations looking toward
collective actions to stop aggression and to eliminate the increased
danger of a new world slaughter. This was summarily rejected by Lord
Halifax. Instead, on March 24th, Chamberlain announced in the House of
Commons Britain's refusal to pledge aid to the Czechs if they were
attacked or to France if it came to their rescue. When the Soviet
request was repeated in September 1938, it was ignored.
The
French prime minister and
the French foreign minister went to London at the end of April and
tried to get Britain to agree to three things: (1) naval conversations
aiming to ensure France's ability to transport its African troops to
France in a crisis; (2) economic support for the Little Entente to save
them from German economic pressure; and (3) a promise that if
Anglo-French pressure on Czechoslovakia resulted in extensive
concessions to the Sudetens and Germany then refused these concessions
and tried to destroy the Czech state, an Anglo-French guarantee would
then be given to Czechoslovakia. The first two of these were postponed
and the third was refused. It was also made clear to the French that,
in the event of any British-French war against Germany, Britain's
contribution to this joint effort would be restricted to the air, since
this was the only way in which Britain itself could be attacked,
although it might be possible at some time to send two divisions to
France. When the French tried to obtain assurance that these two
divisions would be motorized, it was reiterated that these units were
not being promised but were merely a possible future contribution and
that no assurance could be given that they would be motorized. The
violence of these Anglo-French discussions is not reflected in the
minutes published by the British government in 1949. The day after they
ended, Chamberlain wrote to his sister, "Fortunately the papers have
had no hint of how near we came to a break [with the French] over
Czechoslovakia."
It
is clear from the evidence
that Chamberlain was determined to write off the Sudetenland and not to
go to war with Germany unless public opinion in England compelled it.
In fact, he felt that Germany could impose its will upon Czechoslovakia
by economic pressure alone, although he did not go so far as to say,
with Sir Nevile Henderson and Lord Halifax, that this method could be
successful "in a short time." "If Germany adopted this course,"
according to Chamberlain, "no casus belli would
then arise
under the terms of the Franco-Czechoslovak treaty, and Germany would be
able to accomplish everything she required without moving a single
soldier." If Germany did decide to destroy Czechoslovakia, he did not
see how this could be prevented. But he "did not believe that Germany
wanted to destroy Czechoslovakia." Accordingly, by putting Anglo-French
pressure on the Czechs to negotiate, it would be possible "to save
something of Czechoslovakia and in particular to save the existence of
the Czechoslovak State." In any case, he was determined not to go to
war over it, because nothing could prevent Germany from achieving
immediate victory over the Czechs and, even if the Germans were
subsequently defeated after a long war, there was no guarantee that
Czechoslovakia could be reestablished in its existing form.
Chamberlain's
point of view
(which was the decisive force in this whole crisis) was presented in
more positive terms to a group of North American journalists at a
luncheon at Lady Astor's house on May lo, '938: he wanted a four-Power
pact, the exclusion of Russia from Europe, and frontier revisions of
Czechoslovakia in favor of Germany. Since these things could not be
obtained immediately, he kept up the intense diplomatic pressure on
Czechoslovakia to make concessions to the Sudeten Germans. Under French
pressure he also asked Germany what it wanted in this problem, but,
until September, obtained no answer, on the grounds that this was a
question to be settled by the Sudetens and the Czechs.
In
the meantime, the German
occupation of Austria changed the strategic situation for Germany so
that it was necessary for Hitler to modify his general order to the
armed forces for operational plans against France, Czechoslovakia, and
Austria. These orders had been issued on June 24, 1937. The new
directive, as drafted by General Keitel on May 20, 1938, and submitted
for Hitler's signature, began, "It is not my intention to smash
Czechoslovakia by military action in the immediate future without
provocation, unless an unavoidable development of the political
conditions within Czechoslovakia forces the issue, or political events
in Europe create a particularly favorable opportunity which may perhaps
never recur."
This
draft was entirely
rewritten by Hitler and signed on May 3o, 1938. Its opening sentence
then read, "It is my unalterable decision to smash Czechoslovakia by
military action in the near future." It then went on to say that in
case of war with Czechoslovakia, whether France intervened or not, all
forces would be concentrated on the Czechs in order to achieve an
impressive success in the first three days. The general strategic plan
based on this order provided that forces would be transferred to the
French frontier only after a "decisive" blow against Czechoslovakia. No
provision was made for war against the Soviet Union (except for naval
activity in the Baltic), and all regular forces were to be withdrawn
from East Prussia in order to speed up the defeat of the Czechs. X-day
was set for October 1st with deployment of troops to begin on September
28th.
These
orders were so
unrealistic that the German military leaders were aghast. They realized
that the reality was so different from Hitler's picture of it that
Germany would be defeated fairly readily in any war likely to arise
over Czechoslovakia. All their efforts to make Hitler see the reality
were completely unsuccessful and, as the crisis continued, they became
more and more desperate until, by the end of August, they were in a
panic. This feeling was shared by the whole Foreign Ministry except
Ribbentrop himself. Hitler was isolated in his mountain retreat, living
in a dream world and very short-tempered. He was cut off from outside
contacts by Ribbentrop, Himmler, and Hess, who told him that Russia,
France, and Britain would not fight and that the Czechs were bluffing. One
of the mysteries yet remaining is why Ribbentrop was so sure that
Britain would not fight. He was right.
The
German generals tried to
dissuade Hitler from his project, and, when they found that they had no
influence over him, they persuaded various important people who saw him
to intervene for the same purpose. Thus, they were able to get Admiral
Miklós Horthy, Regent of Hungary, to try to influence the
Führer during his visit of August 21-26, 1938. Hitler interrupted
by shouting, "Nonsense! Shut up!" The generals and several important
civil leaders then formed a conspiracy led by General Ludwig Beck
(chief of the General Staff). All the important generals were in it,
including General Erwin Witzleben (governor of Berlin) and General
Georg Thomas (chief of supply). Among the civil leaders were Baron
Ernst von Weizsäcker (state secretary in the Foreign Ministry),
Erich Kordt (head of Ribbentrop's office), and Ulrich von Hassell
(ambassador to Rome, 1932-1938). Their plot had three stages in it: (1)
to exert every effort to make Hitler see the truth; (2) to inform the
British of their efforts and beg them to stand firm on the Czechoslovak
issue and to tell the German government that Britain would fight if
Hitler made war on Czechoslovakia; (3) to assassinate Hitler if he
nevertheless issued the order to attack Czechoslovakia. Although
message after message was sent to Britain in the first two weeks of
September, by Weizsäcker, by Kordt, by the generals, and by others
in separate missions, the British refused to cooperate. As a result,
the plan was made to assassinate Hitler as soon as the attack was
ordered. This project was canceled at noon on September 28, 1938, when
news reached Berlin that Chamberlain was going to Munich to yield. The
attack order was to have been given by Hitler at 2:00 P.M. that day.
In
the meantime the Czechs
were negotiating with Konrad Henlein in an effort to reach some
compromise less radical than his Karlsbad demands. Pressure was
exercised on the Czechs by Britain and France.
From
May 31st onward, Lord
Halifax tried to force France to threaten the Czechs that their
alliance would be revoked or at least weakened if they did not make
concessions to the Sudetens. This threat was finally made on September
21, 1938.
The
pressure on the Czechs was
greatly increased by the sending of a British mission under Lord
Runciman to Czechoslovakia at the beginning of August. This mission was
presented to the public as being sent to mediate between Henlein and
the government at the request of the Czech government. In fact, it was
imposed on the Czech government, and its chief function was to increase
the pressure on that government to make concessions. It was publicly
announced that the members of this mission went as private persons and
that the British government was not bound by anything which they did.
Under this pressure the Czechs yielded little by little and, as already
stated, conceded the essence of the Karlsbad Demands on September 6th.
Since the Sudeten leaders did not want any settlement which would not
ensure the destruction of Czechoslovakia, they instigated a street riot
and broke off negotiations. The official British investigation reported
that the riot in question was entirely the fault of the Sudeten leaders
(who had attacked a policeman).
In
the meantime the British
had been working out a plan of their own. It involved, as we have said,
(1) separation of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, probably through
the use of a plebiscite or even by outright partition; (2)
neutralization of the rest of Czechoslovakia by revising her treaties
with Russia and France, and ( 3 ) guarantee of this rump of
Czechoslovakia (but not by Britain). This plan was outlined to the
Czech ambassador in London by Lord Halifax on May 25th, and was worked
out in some detail by one of Lord Halifax's subordinates, William (now
Lord) Strang, during a visit to Prague and to Berlin in the following
week. This was the plan which was picked up by Lord Runciman and
presented as his recommendation in his report of September 21, 938.
It
is worthy of note that on
September and Lord Runciman sent a personal message by Henlein to
Hitler in which he said that he would have a settlement drawn up by
September 15th. What is, perhaps, surprising is that Lord Runciman made
no use whatever of the Karlsbad Demands or the extensive concessions to
meet them which the Czechs had made during these negotiations, but
instead recommended to the British Cabinet on September 16th, and in
his written report five days later, the same melange of partition,
plebiscites, neutralization, and guarantee which had been in the mind
of the British Foreign Office for weeks. It was this plan which was
imposed on the Czechs by the Four-Power Conference at Munich on
September 30th.
It
was also necessary to
impose this plan on the French government and on the public opinion of
the world, especially on the public opinion of England. This was done
by means of the slowly mounting war scare, which reached the level of
absolute panic on September 28th. The mounting horror of the relentless
German mobilization was built up day by day, while Britain and France
ordered the Czechs not to mobilize in order "not to provoke Germany."
The word was assiduously spread on all sides that Russia was worthless
and would not fight, that Britain certainly would not go to war to
prevent the Sudetens from exercising the democratic right of
self-determination, that Germany could overwhelm the Czechs in a few
days and could wipe out Prague, Paris, and London from the air in the
first day, that these air attacks would be accompanied by gas attacks
on the civilian population from the air, and that, even if Germany
could be defeated after years of war, Czechoslovakia would never be
reconstructed because it was an artificial monstrosity, an aberration
of 1919.
We
now know that all these
statements and rumors were not true; the documentary evidence indicates
that the British government knew that they were not true at the time.
Germany had 22 partly trained divisions on the Czech frontier, while
the Czechs had 17 first-line and 1l other divisions which were superior
from every point of view except air support. In addition, they had
excellent fortifications and higher morale. These facts were known to
the British government. On September 3rd the British military attache
in Prague wrote to London that "there are no shortcomings in the Czech
army, as far as I have been able to observe, which are of sufficient
consequence to warrant a belief that it cannot give a good account of
itself [even fighting alone.] . . . In my view, therefore, there is no
material reason why they should not put up a really protracted
resistance single-handed. It all depends on their morale."
The
fact that the Germans were
going to attack with only 22 divisions was reported to London by the
military attache on September 21st. The fact that Russia had at least
97 divisions and over 5,000 planes had been reported by the attache in
Moscow, although he had a very low opinion of both. The fact that
Russia sold 36 of their latest-model fighting planes to Czechoslovakia
was also known. That Russia would fight if France fought was denied at
the time, but it is now clear that Russia had assured everyone that it
would stand by its treaty obligations. In 1950 it was revealed by
President Beneš that Russia had put every pressure on him to
resist the German demands in September 1938. Similar pressure was put
on France, a fact which was reported to 1,ondon at the time.
By
the third week of
September, Czechoslovakia had l,000,000 men and 34 divisions under
arms. The Germans in the course of September increased their
mobilization to 31 and ultimately to 36 divisions, hut this probably
represented a smaller force than that of the Czechs as many of the 19
first-line divisions were at only two-thirds strength, the other
one-third having been used as a nucleus to form the reserve divisions.
Of the 19 first-line divisions 3 were armored and 4 were motorized.
Only 5 divisions were left on the French frontier in order to overcome
Czechoslovakia as quickly as possible. France, which did not completely
mobilize, had the Maginot Line completely manned on a war basis, plus
more than 20 infantry divisions. Moreover, France had available lo
motorized divisions. In air power the Germans had a slight edge in
average quality, but in numbers of planes it was far inferior. Germany
had 1,500 planes while Czechoslovakia had less than l,000; France and
England together had over l,000; Russia is reported to have had 5,000.
Moreover, Russia had about 100 divisions. While these could not be used
against Germany., because Poland and Romania would not allow them to
pass over their territory, they would have been a threat to persuade
Poland to remain neutral and to bring Romania to support Czechoslovakia
in keeping the Little Entente intact and thus keeping Hungary neutral.
With Poland and Hungary both neutral, there is no doubt that Germany
would have been isolated. The neutrality of Poland and Romania would
not have prevented the Russian Air Force from helping Czechoslovakia
and, if worse came to worst, Russia could have overrun East Prussia
across the Baltic States and from the Baltic Sea, since it had been
almost completely denuded of regular German Army forces. It is quite
clear that Italy would not have fought for Germany.
The
evidence shows that the
Chamberlain government knew these facts but consistently gave a
contrary impression. Lord Halifax particularly distorted the facts.
Although all reports indicated that the morale of the Czech Army was
high, he took an isolated sentence from a poorly written report from
the British military attache in Berlin as authority for stating that
the morale of the Czechoslovak Army was poor and the country would be
overrun. Although General Maurice Gamelin, the French
commander in
chief, gave a very encouraging report on the Czech Army, and was quoted
to this effect by Chamberlain in a Cabinet meeting of September 26th,
Halifax the next day quoted him as saying that the Czech resistance
would be of extremely brief duration. The military attache in Prague
protested about the statement in reference to Czech morale, pointing
out that it was made in reference to the frontier police, which were
not military. The military attache in Paris questioned Lord Halifax's
statement about Gamelin's views, and quoted contrary views from
Gamelin's closest associates in the French Army. The falsehood that
Gamelin was defeatist was spread in the newspapers, and is still widely
current.
Just
when the crisis was
reaching the boiling point in September, the British ambassador in
Paris reported to London that Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh had just
emerged from Germany with a report that Germany had 8,000 military
airplanes and could manufacture 1,500 a month. We now know that Germany
had about 1,500 planes, manufactured 280 a month in 1938, and had
abandoned all plans to bomb London even in a war because of lack of
planes and distance from the target. Lindbergh repeated his tale of woe
daily both in Paris and in London during the crisis. The British
government began to fit the people of London with gas masks; the prime
minister and the king called on the people to dig trenches in the parks
and squares; schoolchildren began to be evacuated from the city; the
Czechs were allowed to mobilize on September 24th; and three days later
it was announced that the British fleet was at its war stations. In
general, every report or rumor which could add to the panic and
defeatism was played up, and everything that might contribute to a
strong or a united resistance to Germany was played down. By the middle
of September, Bonnet was broken, and Daladier was bending, while the
British people were completely confused. By September 27th Daladier had
caved in, and so had the British people.
In
the meantime, on September
13th, without consulting his Cabinet, Chamberlain asked Hitler by
telegraph for an interview. They met on September 15th at
Berchtesgaden. Chamberlain tried to reopen at once the discussions
toward a general Anglo-German settlement which Halifax had opened in
November 1937, but which had been broken off since Nevile Henderson's
conference with Hitler on March 3rd. Hitler interrupted to say that he
must have self-determination for the Sudeten Germans at once and that
the Czech-Soviet treaty must be abolished. If he did not get these,
there would be an immediate war. Chamberlain asked to be allowed to
return to London to confer with the French and Lord Runciman.
The
Anglo-French conference of
September 18, 1938, saw the last glimmering of French resistance to
Britain's plans, chiefly from Daladier. Chamberlain blamed Beneš
for Czechoslovakia's plight, while Lord Halifax repeated all the
mistaken arguments about the hopelessness of resistance and the
improbability of Czechoslovakia being revived with its present
boundaries even after a costly victory. Chamberlain excluded all
possible solutions from discussion except partition. To him the problem
was "to discover some means of preventing France from being forced into
war as a result of her obligations and at the same time to preserve
Czechoslovakia and save as much of that country as was humanly
possible." Daladier feebly tried to get the discussion to the real
problem, German aggression. Eventually he accepted the British solution
of partition of all areas of Czechoslovakia with over 50 percent
Germans, and a guarantee for the rest.
As
he yielded on the main
issue, Daladier tried to get certain concessions: (1) that the Czechs
must be consulted; (2) that the rump of Czechoslovakia should he
guaranteed by Britain as well as others; (3) that economic aid should
be extended to this rump. The last was rejected; the second was
accepted on the understanding that Czechoslovakia give up its alliances
and generally do what Britain wanted "in issues involving war and
peace"; the first was accepted.
The
way in which Chamberlain
applied "consultation with the Czechs" before partition was imposed is
an interesting example of his mind at work. The British, French, and
Czechs were agreed in opposition to the use of a plebiscite in this
dispute, although the Entente suggested it to put pressure on the
Czechs. Chamberlain said: "The idea of territorial cession would he
likely to have a more favorable reception from the British public if it
could be represented as the choice of the Czechoslovak Government
themselves and it could be made clear that they had been offered the
choice of a plebiscite or of territorial cession and had preferred the
latter. This would dispose of any idea that we were ourselves carving
up Czechoslovak territory." He felt it particularly important to show
that the Czechoslovak government preferred cession because they were so
definitely opposed to a plebiscite that they would fight rather than
accept a plebiscite.
This
Anglo-French decision was
presented to the Czechoslovak government at 2:00 A. M. on September
19th, to be accepted at once. The terms leaked to the press in Paris
the same day. After vigorous protests, the Czechoslovaks rejected the
Anglo-French solution and appealed to the procedures of the
German-Czechoslovak Arbitration Treaty of 1926. The Czechs argued that
they had not been consulted, that their constitution required that
their Parliament be consulted, that partition would be ineffective in
maintaining peace because the minorities would rise again, and that the
balance of power in Europe would be destroyed. Beneš refused to
believe that new guarantees could be more effective, when
Czechoslovakia would be weaker, than those which were now proving
inadequate. London and Paris rejected the Czech refusal. Pressure was
increased on the Czechs. The French threatened to revoke the
French-Czechoslovak alliance and to abandon the whole country to
Germany if the Anglo-French solution was not accepted. The British
added that the Sudetenland would not be returned to Czechoslovakia even
after a successful war against Germany. The British minister in Prague
threatened to order all British subjects from the country if he did not
receive an immediate acceptance. The Czechoslovak government accepted
at 5:00 P.M. on September 21st. Lord Halifax at once ordered the Czech
police to be withdrawn from the Sudeten districts, and expressed his
wish that the German troops move in at once.
The
next day, September 22nd,
Chamberlain took the Czech acceptance to Hitler at Godesberg on the
Rhine. He found the Führer in a vile temper, receiving messages
every few minutes about the atrocities being inflicted on the Sudetens
by the Czechs. Hitler now demanded self-determination for the
Hungarians, Poles, and Slovaks in Czechoslovakia, as well as for the
Sudetens. He insisted that he must have the Sudeten areas at once.
After that, if the Czechs challenged his choice of a frontier, he would
hold a plebiscite and prove how wrong they were. An international
commission could supervise the vote. At any rate, he must have the
German areas before October 1st, for on that day the German forces
would move in, war or no war. At Chamberlain's request he embodied his
demands in a memorandum which proved to be an ultimatum. This ultimatum
was at once carried to Prague to be presented to the Czechs by the
British military attache.
Back
in London, the Cabinet
agreed to reject the Godesberg Demands and to support France if it had
to go to war as a result. The French Cabinet also rejected these
demands. So did a new Czech Cabinet under General Jan Syrový.
The Soviet Union explicitly recognized its commitments to
Czechoslovakia, and even promised to come to the aid of the Czechs
without the necessary preliminary action by France if the case were
submitted to the League of Nations (this was to prevent Britain and
France from charging Russia with aggression in any action it might take
in behalf of Czechoslovakia). On the same day (September 23rd) Russia
warned Poland that it would denounce their Nonaggression Treaty if
Poland attacked Czechoslovakia.
Apparently
a united front had
been formed against Hitler's aggression—but only apparently. Mr.
Chamberlain was already beginning to undermine the unity and resolution
of this front, and he now received considerable assistance from Bonnet
in Paris. This culminated on September 27th when he made a speech on
the radio in which he said, "How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is
that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because
of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know
nothing . . . a quarrel that has already been settled in principle...."
The same day he sent a telegram to Beneš that if he did not
accept the German demands by 2:00 P. M. the following day (September
28th) Czechoslovakia would be overrun by the German Army, and nothing
could save it. This was immediately followed by another message that in
such a case Czechoslovakia could not be reconstituted in its frontiers
whatever the outcome of the war. Lastly, he sent another note to
Hitler. In this he suggested a four-Power conference, and guaranteed
that France and Britain would force Czechoslovakia to carry out any
agreement if Hitler would only abstain from going to war.
At
3:00 P.M. on Wednesday,
September 28th, Chamberlain met Parliament for the first time during
the crisis to inform it of what had been done. The whole city of London
was in a panic. The Honorable Members sat hunched on their benches,
waiting for Göring's bombs to come through the roof. As
Chamberlain drew to the end of his long speech, a message was brought
to him. He announced that it was an invitation to a four-Power
conference at Munich on Thursday. There was a roar of joy and relief as
Chamberlain hurried from the building without any formal ending to the
session.
At
Munich, Hitler,
Chamberlain, Mussolini, and Daladier carved up Czechoslovakia without
consulting anyone, least of all the Czechs. The conference lasted from
12:30 P. M. on September 28th to 2:30 A. M. when the agreement of the
four Powers was handed to the Czech minister in Berlin, who had been
waiting outside the door for over ten hours. The agreement reached
Prague only eighteen hours before the German occupation was to begin.
The
Munich agreement provided
that certain designated areas of Czechoslovakia would be occupied by
the German Army in four stages from October 1st to October 7th. A fifth
area, to be designated by an international commission, would be
occupied by October 10th. No property was to be withdrawn from these
areas. The international commission would order plebiscites which must
be held before the end of November, the areas designated being occupied
by an international force during the interval. The same international
commission was to supervise the occupation and draw the final frontier.
For six months the populations concerned would have the right of option
into and out of the areas transferred under the supervision of a
German-Czechoslovak commission. The rump of Czechoslovakia was to be
guaranteed by France and Britain. Germany and Italy would join this
guarantee as soon as the Polish and Hungarian minority problems in that
state had been settled. If they were not settled in three months, the
four Powers would meet again to consider the problem.
The
Munich agreement was
violated on every point in favor of Germany, so that ultimately the
German Army merely occupied the places it wanted. As a result, the
Czech economic system was destroyed, and every important railroad or
highway was cut or crippled. This was done by the International
Commission, consisting of German Secretary of State Weizsäcker and
the French, British, Italian, and Czech diplomatic representatives in
Berlin. Under dictation of the German General Staff, this group, by a 4
to 1 vote, accepted every German demand and canceled the plebiscites.
In addition, the guarantee of the rump of Czechoslovakia was never
given, although Poland seized areas in which the majority of the
population was not Polish on October 2nd and Hungary was given southern
Slovakia on November 2nd. The final frontier with Germany was dictated
by Germany alone to the Czechs, the other three members of the
commission having withdrawn.
Beneš
resigned as
president of Czechoslovakia under the threat of a German ultimatum on
October 5th and was replaced by Emil Hácha. Slovakia and
Ruthenia were given complete autonomy at once. The Soviet alliance was
ended, and the Communist Party outlawed. The anti-Nazi
refugees
from the Sudetenland were rounded up by the Prague government and
handed over to the Germans to be destroyed. All
these events
showed very clearly the chief result of Munich: Germany was supreme in
central Europe, and any possibility of curtailing that power either by
a joint policy of the Western Powers with the Soviet Union and Italy or
by finding any openly anti-German resistance in central Europe itself
was ended. Since this was exactly what Chamberlain and his friends had
wanted, they should have been satisfied.
Chapter
46—The Year of Dupes, 1939
Plans
for appeasement by
Chamberlain and plans for aggression by Hitler did not end with Munich.
Within three weeks of this agreement (October 21, 1938), Hitler issued
orders to his generals to prepare plans to destroy the rump of
Czechoslovakia and to annex Memel from Lithuania. A month later he
added Danzig to this list, although he signified his desire to achieve
this through a revolutionary action without a war against Poland. This
reluctance for war against Poland did not arise from any affection for
peace but from the fact that he had not made up his mind whether to
attack France or Poland. He was inclined at first to attack westward,
and did not change his mind and decide to deal first with Poland until
April 1, 1939. The plans to attack France and the Low Countries soon
were reported to London and Paris and had a good deal to do with
building up the war spirit in those areas.
In
addition, Italian demands
for territorial concessions from France in November 1938 aroused the
fighting spirit of that country from the level to which it had sagged
in September. Mussolini was seeking his share in the booty of
appeasement but lacked the strength to do much more than make a
nuisance of himself. His followers staged a great demonstration in the
Italian Chamber of Corporations on November 3o, 1938, in which there
were loud demands for Nice, Corsica, and Tunis from France. In December
the old Laval-Mussolini agreement of January, 1935, was denounced as
inadequate, and a violent anti-French campaign was waged in the Italian
press. These disturbances were encouraged by Chamberlain when he
pointedly announced in the House of Commons on December 12th that
Britain was not bound to come to the aid of France or its possessions
if they were attacked by Italy.
Bonnet
at once tried to repair
this damage by asking Chamberlain to make a reference to the fact that
Italy had bound itself to preserve the status quo
in the
Mediterranean in the Anglo-Italian ("Ciano-Perth") Agreement of April
1938. Chamberlain refused. Bonnet at once pointed out to London that
France had bound itself on December 4, 1936, to come to the assistance
of Britain if it were attacked and that this promise was still
completely valid. Nonetheless, it was only on February 6th, when
Hitler's plans to attack Holland and France "almost immediately" were
reported in London, that Chamberlain could persuade himself to state in
Commons that "any threat to the vital interests of France, from
whatever quarter it came, must evoke the immediate cooperation of this
country."
The
Italian demands on France
had two important results. The fighting spirits of the French people
were revived by being threatened by such a weak Power as Italy, and
Bonnet was driven to a new appeasement of Germany. On December 6th
Ribbentrop came to Paris, signed a treaty of friendship and neutrality,
and opened a series of economic discussions. On this occasion the
German foreign minister received from Bonnet the impression that France
would give Germany a free hand in eastern Europe. French fears that
Britain would seek to detach Mussolini from Hitler by making
concessions to Italy at the expense of France did not end until
February 1939, and reached their peak in January, when Chamberlain and
Halifax made a formal visit to Rome to recognize the King of Italy as
Emperor of Ethiopia. This had been agreed between the two Powers in the
Ciano-Perth Agreement of April 1938, and was carried into effect in
November, although the conditions originally set by Britain, the
withdrawal of Italian troops from Spain, had not been fulfilled.
Before
Hitler could carry on
any further aggressions, he had to dispose of the carcass of
Czechoslovakia. He and Ribbentrop were outraged that they had been
cheated out of a war in September, and immediately made up their minds
to wipe the rest of Czechoslovakia off the map as soon as possible and
proceed to a war. The next time, said Hitler, he hoped no "dirty pig"
would suggest a conference.
Orders
to plan an invasion of
the rump of Czechoslovakia were issued on October 21st, as we have
said. Keitel's plans, presented on December 17th, provided that the
task would be done by the peacetime army without mobilization. Any
possibility of opposition from Britain or France was effectively
disposed of by Lord Halifax's insistence that the guarantee to
Czechoslovakia be worded so as to be binding on all four of the Munich
Powers jointly (or at least on three of them) and would not be accepted
by Britain if worded in such a way as to bind the signers individually.
This made any guarantee meaningless, and this distasteful project was
indefinitely postponed by a German note to Lord Halifax on March 3,
1939.
By
this last date Hitler was
ready to strike at the rump of Czechoslovakia. Hungary was invited to
join in this operation, and eagerly accepted on March 13th. In the
meantime the projected victim was a nest of intrigue. Sudeten Nazis
were everywhere, seeking to make trouble. Poland and Hungary were
working to get a common frontier by obtaining Slovakia as a
protectorate for Poland and Ruthenia as a province of Hungary. They
hoped in this way to block Germany's movement to the east and to keep
Russian influence out of central Europe. Within the two autonomous
provinces, Slovakia and Ruthenia, and to a much lesser degree in
Bohemia-Moravia, there was turmoil as various reactionary and
semi-Fascist groups angled for power and German favor.
The
degree of political
maturity in Slovakia may be judged from the fact that the members of
Monsignor Tiso's Cabinet personally took bombs from the Nazis to stir
up trouble in their own province. Their efforts to break away from
Prague completely were hampered by the financial insolvency of
Slovakia. When they appealed to Prague for financial assistance on
March 9, 1939, President Hácha deposed the Slovak premier and
three of his ministers. Seyss-Inquart, accompanied by several German
generals, forced the Slovak Cabinet to issue a declaration of
independence from Prague. Tiso, summoned to Hitler’s presence in
Berlin on March 13th, was “persuaded” to approve
this action. The declaration was received with profound apathy by the
Slovak people, although the German radio filled the air with stories of
riots and disturbances, and various Nazi bands within both Slovakia and
Bohemia did their best to make the facts fit this description.
On
March 14th, Hácha,
the president of Czechoslovakia, was forced to go to Berlin. Although
he was sixty-six years old, and not in the best of health, Hácha
was subjected to a brutal three-hour long tongue-lashing by Hitler
during which he had to be revived from a fainting spell by an injection
administered by Hitler's physician. He was forced to sign documents
handing Czechoslovakia over to Hitler and ordering all resistance to
the invading German forces to cease. Ruthenia had already proclaimed
its independence (March 14th). Within a week, Bohemia-Moravia and
Slovakia were declared German protectorates, and the former was taken
within the German economic system. Ruthenia was annexed by Hungary
after one day of independence.
Europe
had not yet recovered
from the shock of March Isth when Germany seized Memel from Lithuania
on March 22nd, and Italy obtained its crumb of satisfaction by seizing
Albania on April 7, Iq39..
It
is usually said that the
events of March 1939 revealed Hitler's real nature and real ambitions,
and marked the end of appeasement. This is certainly not true as
stated. It may have opened the eves of the average man to the fact that
appeasement was merely a kind of slow suicide, and quite incapable of
satisfying the appetites of aggressors who were insatiable. It also
made clear that Hitler was not really concerned with self-determination
or with a desire to bring all Germans "back to the Reich." The
annexation of territories containing millions of Slavs showed that
Hitler's real aim was power and wealth and eventually world domination.
Thus, from March onward, it became almost impossible to sell
appeasement to the public, especially to the British public, who were
sufficiently sturdy and sensible to know when they had had enough.
But
the British public and the
British government were two different things, and it is quite untrue to
say that the latter learned Hitler's real ambitions in March 1939 and
determined to oppose them. Above all, it is completely wrong to say
this of Chamberlain, who, more and more, was running foreign policy as
his own personal business. Hitler's real ambitions were quite clear to
most men in the government even before Munich, and were made evident to
the rest during that crisis, especially by the way in which the German
High Command seized hundreds of villages in Czechoslovakia with
overwhelming Czech populations and only small German minorities, and
did so for strategic and economic reasons in the period October 1-10,
1938. But for the members of the government, the real turning point
took place in January 1939, when British diplomatic agents in Europe
began to bombard London with rumors of a forthcoming attack on the
Netherlands and France. At that moment, appeasement in the strict sense
ceased. To the government the seizure of Czechoslovakia in March was of
little significance except for the shock it gave to British opinion.
The government had already written off the rump of Czechoslovakia
completely, a fact which is clear as much from their direct statements
as by their refusal to guarantee that rump, and the attention given to
other matters even when the seizure was known (as it was after March
11th). For example, Lord Halifax sent President Roosevelt a long letter
analyzing the international situation on January :4th; it is completely
realistic about Hitler's outlook and projects, but Czechoslovakia is
not mentioned; neither is appeasement.
Nevertheless,
concessions to
Germany continued. But now parallel with concessions went a real effort
to build up a strong front against Hitler for the day when concessions
would break down. Moreover, concessions were different after March 17th
because now they had to be secret. They had to be secret because public
opinion refused any longer to accept any actions resembling
appeasement, but they were continued for several reasons. In the first
place British rearmament was slow, and concessions were given to win
time. In the second place the projects of the anti-Bolsheviks and
"three-bloc-world" supporters demanded continued concessions. In the
third place, Chamberlain continued to work to achieve his seven-point
settlement with Hitler in the hope that he could suddenly present it to
the British electorate as a prelude to a triumphant General Election
which he planned for the winter of 19391940. Of these three causes, the
first, to gain time for rearmament, w-as the least important, although
it was the one most readily used to justify secret concessions when
they were found out. This is clear from the nature of the concessions.
These were frequently such as to strengthen Germany rather than to gain
time for Britain.
The
projects of the
anti-Bolsheviks and the "three-bloc-world" supporters were too
dangerous to admit publicly, but they were sufficiently well known in
Berlin to lead to the belief, even in moderate circles, that Britain
would never go to war for Poland. For example, Weizsäcker, the
German secretary of state, chided Nevile Henderson in June 1939 for
abandoning his often-repeated statement that "England desired to retain
the sea; the European Continent could be left to Germany." However,
these two groups, although still active in 1939, and even in 1940, had
not originally envisaged the complete destruction of Czechoslovakia or
Poland. They had expected that Hitler would get the Sudentenland,
Danzig, and perhaps the Polish Corridor and that he would then be
stabilized between the "oceanic bloc" and the Soviet Union, with
contact with the latter across the Baltic States. It was expected that
a rump Czechoslovakia and a rump Poland would be able to survive
between Germany and Russia, as Holland or Switzerland could survive
between the oceanic bloc and Germany. Moreover, the "three-bloc-world"
supporters never wanted Hitler to drive southward either to the
Adriatic or to the Aegean. Accordingly, although divided in respect to
Romania and the Black Sea, they were determined to support Turkey and
Greece against both Germany and Italy.
As
a consequence of these
hidden and conflicting forces, the history of international relations
from September 1938 to September 1939 or even later is neither simple
nor consistent. In general, the key to everything was the position of
Britain, for the aims of the other countries concerned were relatively
simple. As a result of the dualistic or, as Lord Halifax's biographer
calls it, "dyarchic" policy of Britain, there were not only two
policies but two groups carrying them out. The Foreign Office under
Lord Halifax tried to satisfy the public demand for an end to
appeasement and the construction of a united front against Germany. Chamberlain
with his own personal group, including Sir Horace Wilson, Sir John
Simon, and Sir Samuel Hoare, sought to make secret concessions to
Hitler in order to achieve a general Anglo-German settlement on the
basis of the seven points. The one policy was public; the other was
secret. Since the Foreign Office knew of both, it tried to build up the
"peace front" against Germany so that it would look sufficiently
imposing to satisfy public opinion in England and to drive Hitler to
seek his desires by negotiation rather than by force so that public
opinion in England would not force the government
to declare a war that they did not want in order to remain in office.
This complex plan broke down because Hitler was determined to have a
war merely for the personal emotional thrill of wielding great power,
while the effort to make a "peace front" sufficiently collapsible so
that it could be cast aside if Hitler either obtained his goals by
negotiation or made a general settlement with Chamberlain merely
resulted in making a "peace front" which was so weak it could neither
maintain peace by the threat of force nor win a war when peace was
lost. Above all, these involved maneuvers drove the Soviet Union into
the arms of Hitler.
This
complex scheme meant that
the British government accepted the events of March 15th except for
feeble protests. These were directed less against the deed itself than
against the risk of agitating public opinion by the deed. On March Isth
Chamberlain told the Commons that he accepted the seizure of
Czechoslovakia, and refused to accuse Hitler of bad faith. But two days
later, when the howls of rage from the British public showed that he
had misjudged the electorate, he went to his constituency in Birmingham
on March 17th and denounced the seizure. However, nothing was done
except to recall Henderson from Berlin "for consultations" and cancel a
visit to Berlin by the president of the Board of Trade planned for
March 17-20. The seizure was declared illegal but was
recognized in
fact at once, and efforts were made to recognize it in law by
establishing a British consulate general accredited to Germany at
Prague. Moreover, £6,000,000 in Czech gold reserves in London
were turned over to Germany with the puny, and untrue, excuse that the
British government could not give orders to the Bank of England (May
1939).
The German
acquisition of the
Czech gold in London was but one episode in an extensive, and largely
secret, plan for economic concessions to Germany. For Chamberlain and
his friends, the Czechoslovak crisis of March 1939 was merely an
annoying interruption to their efforts to make a general agreement with
Germany in terms of the seven points we have already mentioned. These
efforts had been interrupted after March 3, 1938 by the Czechoslovak
crisis of that year, but they remained the chief item in Chamberlain's
plans, and he tried to get Hitler to discuss these projects when the
two leaders came face to face on September 15sth at Berchtesgaden.
Hitler interrupted, and turned the discussion at once to the crisis.
Again, after the Munich agreement was signed on September 30th,
Chamberlain tried to get Der Fuhrer to discuss a general settlement,
but he was evaded. This process was continued for a year, Chamberlain
and his friends proposing concessions and Hitler either evading or
ignoring them. There was a slight change, however, after September
1938: Chamberlain's project was widened to include economic
concessions, and the efforts to achieve it became increasingly secret,
especially after the events of March 1939.
After
September, 1938, the
seven-point project was broadened by adding an eighth point: economic
support for Germany, especially in exploiting eastern Europe. The
German economic situation was critical at the end of 1938 because of
the speed of rearmament, the expense and economic disruption arising
from the mobilization of 1938, and the great shortage of foreign
exchange, which hampered the importation of necessary commodities.
Göring, as commissioner of the Four-Year Economic Plan, presented
these facts at a secret conference on October 14, 1938. In the course
of his speech he spoke roughly as follows:
"I
am faced with unheard-of
difficulties. The Treasury is empty; industrial capacity is crammed
with orders for many years. In spite of these difficulties, I am going
to go ahead under all circumstances. Memoranda are no help; I want only
positive proposals. If necessary, I am going to convert the economy
with brutal methods to achieve this aim. The time has come for private
enterprise to show if it has a right to continued existence. If it
fails, I am going over to state enterprise regardless. I am going to
make barbaric use of the full powers given me by the Führer. All
the aims and plans of the state, the party, and other agencies which
are not along this line must be rejected pitilessly. Ideological
problems cannot be solved now, there will be time for them later. I
warn against making promises to labor which I cannot keep. The desires
of the Labor Front must sink into the background. Industry must be
fully converted. An immediate investigation of productive
plants is
to be started to determine whether they can be converted for armaments
or export, or whether they are to be closed down. The problem of the
machine-tool industry comes first in this.... It remains now to decide
who is going to carry out this task—the state or
self-administered industry."
The
Entente governments
were aware of these German problems, but, instead of seeking to
increase them, they sought to alleviate them. When economic and
political duress was put by Germany on the countries of southeastern
Europe in October and November 1938, Chamberlain defended Germany's
right to do so in the House of Commons. No economic support was granted
to these countries to help them to resist, except for a loan to Turkey.
On the contrary, the British government, through the Federation of
British Industries, began to negotiate with Germany to create a
complete system of industrial cooperation, with cartels dividing the
world's markets and fixing prices for over fifty industrial groups. A
coal agreement was signed, at Britain's request, at the end of January
1939, and a general agreement was signed between the Federation of
British Industries and the Reichsgruppe Industrie on March 16, 1939.
In
his speech of January 30,
1939, Hitler had said, "We must export or die." Two weeks later the
British government sent Frank Ashton-Gwatkin to Berlin "to find out, if
possible, what roads are still open to economic recovery and
reconstruction and might, therefore, be worth pursuing, and what roads
are closed." On March 5th he reported that Germany's critical economic
situation was caused by its political actions in 1938 and that it must
now turn to economic actions for 1939. This, he felt, "implies though
it does not necessitate, some limitation of the armaments race;
secondly, it means that Germany must look towards the United Kingdom
for assistance or cooperation in the economic sphere." He listed the
concessions that the Germans wanted, and concluded, "We should not
ignore the possibilities of a more peaceful development; and we should
not put Hitler in a position to say that once again he made an offer of
cooperation to England and that that offer was pushed aside."
Accordingly, the discussions continued and the British government
announced that the president of the Board of Trade, Oliver Stanley,
would go to Berlin on March 17th.
The
British military
attache in Berlin protested as violently as he dared against this
economic appeasement in a letter of February 27th, saying: "We can only
reduce the speed and scope of the universal armaments race by forcing a
reduction of tempo on Germany. Germany is apparently now in dire
economic straits. We have not applied the economic screw—Germany
has tightened it down herself—and it is surely unsound for us to
ease it before Germany has made an effort to do so herself. From the
military point of view, concessions made by us to the present regime in
Germany are generally to be deplored. The opposition in Germany and our
potential allies in a possible war— above all, America, are
becoming more and more convinced of our weakness and lack of will or
power to stand up to Germany."
When
the Bohemian crisis broke
on March 15, 1939, Chamberlain announced that Oliver Stanley's visit to
Berlin that weekend would be postponed but that the economic
conversations between the British and German industrial associations
were continuing. Public outcry continued so high that on March 28th it
was announced that these negotiations were being broken off because of
disturbed public opinion. However, on April 2nd, only five days later,
the German commercial attache in London was secretly informed that the
British were ready to reopen the discussions. The amazing fact is that
the British unilateral guarantee to Poland was given on March 31st,
exactly halfway between the public breaking off and the secret
resumption of the economic negotiations. It should perhaps be mentioned
that France throughout this period was also negotiating trade
agreements to send raw materials to Germany as a result of a
preliminary agreement signed during Ribbentrop's visit to Paris early
in December 1938. Although the documentation is not complete, we know
that this French-German agreement was in final draft by March 11th.
In
spite of these concessions
Hitler was thirsting for war, and replied to every concession with a
new bombshell which disturbed British public opinion once more. In
November 1938 the Germans engaged in several days of sustained
atrocities against the Jews, destroying their property, razing their
temples, assaulting their persons, and concluded by imposing on the
Jews of Germany a collective fine or assessment of one billion
reichsmarks. This was followed by a series of laws excluding the Jews
from the economic life of Germany.
Public
outrage at these
actions was still high when, in December, 1938, the Germans announced
that they were increasing their submarine fleet from 45 percent to 100
percent of Britain's, as provided in the Treaty of 1935, and were
remodeling two cruisers under construction from 6-inch-gun to
8-inch-gun vessels. Every effort by Britain to persuade Germany not to
do so or even to word their announcement in a way which would allay
public opinion was rebuffed by Germany. Finally, in March came the
complete destruction of Czechoslovakia. At the same time pressure began
to be applied to Poland.
Germany
opened its
negotiations with Poland in a fairly friendly way on October 24, 1938.
It asked for Danzig and a strip a kilometer wide across the Polish
Corridor to provide a highway and four-track railroad under German
sovereignty. Poland's economic and harbor rights in Danzig were to be
guaranteed and the "corridor across the Corridor" was to be isolated
from Polish communication facilities by bridging or tunneling. Germany
also wanted Poland to join an anti-Russian bloc. If these three things
were granted, Germany was prepared to make certain concessions to
Poland, to guarantee the country's existing frontiers, to extend the
Nonaggression Pact of 1934 for twenty-five years, to guarantee the
independence of Slovakia, and to dispose of Ruthenia as Poland wished.
These suggestions were generally rejected by Poland. They were repeated
by Germany with increased emphasis on March 21st. About the same time,
the Germans were using pressure on Romania to obtain an economic
agreement, which was signed on March 23rd.
On
March 17th London received
a false report of a German ultimatum to Romania. Lord Halifax lost his
head and, without checking his information, sent telegrams to Greece,
Turkey, Poland, Bulgaria, and the Soviet Union asking what each country
was prepared to do in the event of a German aggression against Romania.
Four replied by asking London what it was prepared to do, but Moscow
suggested an immediate conference in Bucharest of France, Britain,
Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union to try to form a united front
against aggression (March 18, 1939). This was rebuffed by Lord Halifax,
who wanted nothing more than an agreement among these states to consult
in a crisis, as if they would not do so anyway. Poland was reluctant to
sign any agreement involving Russia. However, when news reached London
of Hitler's demands on Poland, Britain suddenly issued a unilateral
guarantee of the latter state (March 31Ist). This was extended to
Romania and Greece after Italy's attack on Albania (April l 3th).
The
text of Chamberlain's
guarantee to Poland is of extreme importance. He said: "Certain
consultations are now proceeding with other governments. In order to
make perfectly clear the position of His Majesty's Government in the
meantime, before those consultations are concluded, I now have to
inform the House [of Commons] that during that period, in the event of
any action which clearly threatened Polish independence and which the
Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their
national forces, His Majesty's Government would feel themselves bound
at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power."
This
was an extraordinary
assurance. The British government since 1918 had resolutely refused any
bilateral agreement guaranteeing any state in western Europe. Now they
were making a unilateral declaration in which they obtained nothing but
in which they guaranteed a state in eastern Europe, and they were
giving that state the responsibility of deciding when that guarantee
would take effect, something quite unprecedented. A little
thought
will show that all these strange features really stultify the
guarantee, and the net result was to leave the situation exactly where
it had been before, except that a very severe warning had been conveyed
in this fashion to Germany to use negotiation and not force. If Germany
used force against Poland, public opinion in Britain would force
Britain to declare war whether there was a guarantee or not.
The
fact that Chamberlain's
guarantee was temporary and unilateral left the British free to cancel
it when necessary. The fact that it guaranteed Poland's "independence"
and not its territorial integrity left the way open for Germany to get
Danzig or the Corridor by negotiation, and the fact that it came into
effect when Poland wished made it impossible for Britain or British
public opinion to refuse to accept any change which Poland worked out
in negotiation with Hitler. Most of these points were recognized by the
German government. They were pointed out in The Times
of April 1st and accepted by Chamberlain.
The
guarantee was accepted by
Bonnet, who, as long ago as November, had said that he wanted to get
rid of both the Franco-Polish and the Franco-Soviet alliances.
If
the chief purpose of the
unilateral guarantee to Poland was to frighten Germany, it had
precisely the opposite effect. On hearing of it, Hitler made his
decision: to attack Poland by September 1. Orders to this effect were
issued to the German Army on April 3, and the plans for Operation
White, as it was called, were ready on April 11. On April 28, in a
public speech to the Reichstag, Hitler denounced the Anglo-German Naval
Agreement of 1935 and the German-Polish Nonaggression Pact of 1934. He
also announced the terms he had offered Poland which had been rejected.
As a result, negotiations broke off between the two Powers and were
never really resumed. Instead, the crisis was intensified by
provocative acts on both sides.
On
May 22 a German-Italian
alliance was signed, the "Pact of Steel," as Mussolini called it. Here,
again, the wording was important. It was a clearly aggressive alliance,
since the parties promised to support each other, not against
"unprovoked attack," as was customary, but in all cases. At the
signing, Germany was told flatly that Italy could not make war before
1943 and that the approaching war would be a "war of exhaustion." The
very next day, May 23, 1939, Hitler held a secret conference with his
generals. In the course of a lengthy speech he said:
"Danzig
is not the subject of
this dispute at all. It is a question of expanding our living space in
the East and of securing our food supplies, and the settlement of the
Baltic problems. Food supplies can be expected only from thinly
populated areas. Over and above the natural fertility, thoroughgoing
German exploitation will increase production enormously. There is no
other possibility in Europe. Beware of gifts of colonial territory.
These do not solve the food problem. Remember— blockade. If fate
brings us into conflict with the West, possession of extensive areas in
the East will be advantageous. We shall be able to expect excellent
harvests even less in wartime than in time of peace. The population of
these non-German areas will perform no military service and will be
available as a source of labor. The Polish problem is inseparable from
conflict with the West.... Poland sees danger in a German victory in
the West and will attempt to rob us of a victory there. There is,
therefore, no question of sparing Poland, and we are left with the
decision: To attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity. We cannot
expect a repetition of the Czech affair. There will be war. Our job is
to isolate Poland. The success of this isolation will be the decisive
factor. Therefore, the Führer must reserve the decision to give
the final order to attack. There must be no simultaneous conflict with
the Western Powers [France and England].... If there were an alliance
of France, England, and Russia, I would have to attack England and
France with a few annihilating blows. I doubt the possibility of a
peaceful settlement with England. We must prepare ourselves for the
conflict. England sees in our development the foundation of a hegemony
which would weaken England. England is therefore our enemy, and the
conflict with England will be a life-and-death struggle."
In
the face of this
misunderstanding and hatred on the part of Hitler, and in the full
knowledge that he had every intention of attacking Poland, Britain made
no real effort to build up a peace front, and continued to try to make
concessions to Hitler. Although the British unilateral guarantee to
Poland was made into a mutual guarantee on April 6, Poland guaranteed
Britain's "independence" in exactly the same terms as Britain had
guaranteed that of Poland on March 31st. No British-Polish alliance was
signed until August 2sth, the same day on which Hitler ordered the
attack on Poland to begin on August 26th. Worse than this, no military
agreements were made as to how Britain and Poland would cooperate in
war. A British military mission did manage to get to Warsaw on July
19th, but it did nothing. Furthermore, economic support to rearm Poland
was given late, in inadequate amounts, and in an unworkable form. There
was talk of a British loan to Poland of £100 million in May; on
August 1st Poland finally got a credit for $8,163,300 at a time when
all London was buzzing about a secret loan of £1,000,000,000 from
Britain to Germany.
The
effects of such actions on
Germany can be seen in the minutes of a secret conference between
Hitler and his generals held on August 22nd. The Fuhrer said: "The
following is characteristic of England. Poland wanted a loan from
England for rearmament. England, however, gave only a credit to make
sure that Poland buys in England, although England cannot deliver. This
means that England does not really want to support Poland."
Perhaps
even more surprising
is the fact that France, which had had an alliance with Poland since
1921, had no military conversations with Poland after 1925, except that
in August 1936 Poland was given 2,000,000,000 francs as a rearmament
loan (Rambouillet Agreement), and on May 19, 1939, the Polish minister
of war signed an agreement in Paris by which France promised full air
support to Poland on the first day of war, local skirmishing by the
third day, and a full-scale offensive on the sixteenth day. On August
23rd General Gamelin informed his government that no military support
could be given to Poland in the event of war until the spring of 1940
and that a full-scale offensive could not be made by France before
1941-1942. Poland was never informed of this change, and seems to have
entered the war on September 1st in the belief that a full-scale
offensive would be made against Germany in the west during September..
The
failure to support
Poland by binding political, economic, and military obligations in the
period before August 23rd was probably deliberate, in the hope that
this would force Poland to negotiate with Hitler. If so, it was a
complete failure. Poland was so encouraged by the British
guarantee
that it not only refused to make concessions but also prevented the
reopening of negotiations by one excuse after another until the last
day of peace. This was quite agreeable to Hitler and Ribbentrop. When
Count Ciano, the Italian foreign minister, who had been kept completely
in the dark by the Germans, visited Ribbentrop on August 11th he asked
his host: "What do you want? The Corridor or Danzig? . . . 'Not any
longer.' And he fixed on me those cold . . . eyes of his. 'We want
war.' " Ciano was shocked, and spent two days trying, quite vainly, to
persuade Ribbentrop and Hitler that war was impossible for several
years.
In
the light of these facts
the British efforts to reach a settlement with Hitler, and their
reluctance to make an alliance with Russia, were very unrealistic.
Nevertheless, they continued to exhort the Poles to reopen negotiations
with Hitler, and continued to inform the German government that the
justice of their claims to Danzig and the Corridor were recognized but
that these claims must be fulfilled by peaceful means and that force
would be inevitably be met by force. On the other hand, they argued, a
German agreement to use negotiation would ultimately bring them the
possibility of a disarmament agreement, colonial acquisitions, and
economic concessions in a settlement with England.
The
same point of view had
been clearly put by Lord Halifax at Chatham House on June 28th. The key
was "no use of force, but negotiations," then a chance to settle "the
colonial problem, the questions of raw materials, trade barriers, Lebensraum,
the limitations of armaments," and other issues. This emphasis on
methods, with the accompanying neglect of the balance of power, the
rights of small nations, or the danger of German hegemony in Europe,
was maintained throughout. Moreover, the British continued to emphasize
that the controversy was over Danzig, when everyone else knew that
Danzig was merely a detail, and an almost indefensible detail. The real
issue was Germany's plan to destroy Poland as one more step on the way
to the complete domination of Europe.
Danzig
was no issue on which
to fight a world war, but it was an issue on which negotiation was
almost mandatory. I his may have been why Britain insisted that it was
the chief issue. But because it was not the chief issue, Poland refused
to negotiate because it feared that if negotiation began it would lead
to another Munich in which all the Powers would join together to
partition Poland. Danzig was a poor issue for a war because it was a
free city under the supervision of the League of Nations, and, while it
was within the Polish customs and under Polish economic control, it was
already controlled politically by the local Nazi Party under a German Gauleiter,
and would at any moment vote to join Germany if Hitler consented.
In
the midst of all these
confusions, the British opened negotiations to get Russia to join the
"Peace Front." Although the documents probably never will be published
on the Soviet side, the course of the discussions is fairly clear. Both
sides thoroughly distrusted each other, and it is highly doubtful if
either wanted an agreement except on terms which were unacceptable to
the other. Chamberlain was very anti-Bolshevik, and the Russians, who
had seen him perform in regard to Ethiopia, Spain, and Czechoslovakia,
were not convinced that he had finally decided to stand up to Hitler.
In fact, he had not. A few words on this last point are relevant here.
We
have mentioned that the
economic discussions between Britain and Germany, which were publicly
broken off on March 28th, were secretly reopened five days later. We do
not know what became of these, but, about July 20th, Helmuth Wohlthat,
Reich commissioner for the Four-Year Plan, who was in London at an
international whaling conference, was approached with an amazing
proposition by R. S. Hudson, secretary to the Department of Overseas
Trade. Although Wohlthat had no powers, he listened to Hudson and later
to Sir Horace Wilson, Chamberlain's personal representative, but
rejected their suggestion that he meet Chamberlain. Wilson offered (1)
a nonaggression pact with Germany, (2) a delimitation of spheres of
interest, (3) colonial concessions in Africa along the lines already
mentioned, (4) an economic agreement, and (5) a disarmament agreement.
One sentence of Dirksen's report on this matter is significant. It
says, "Sir Horace Wilson definitely told Herr Wohlthat that the
conclusion of a nonaggression pact would enable Britain to rid herself
of her commitments vis-à-vis Poland." 1 hat Chamberlain wanted a
nonaggression pact with Germany was stated by him publicly on May 3rd,
only five days after Hitler denounced his nonaggression pact with
Poland.
Dirksen's
report of July 21st
continued: "Sir Horace Wilson further said that it was contemplated
holding new elections in Britain this autumn. From the point of view of
purely domestic political tactics, it was all one to the Government
whether the elections were held under the cry 'Be Ready for a Coming
War!' or under the cry 'A Lasting Understanding with Germany in
Prospect and Achievable!' It could obtain the backing of the electors
for either of these cries and assure its rule for another five years.
Naturally, it preferred the peaceful cry."
News
of these negotiations
leaked out, apparently from the French, who wished to break them off,
but the rumor was that the discussions were concerned with
Chamberlain's efforts to give Germany a loan of £1,000,000,000.
This is not supported by the documents. This outcry, however, made it
difficult to carry on the discussions, especially as Hitler and
Ribbentrop were not interested. But Chamberlain kept Lord Runciman busy
training to be the chief economic negotiator in the great settlement he
envisaged. On July 29th, Kordt, the German chargé d'affaires in
London, had a long talk with Charles Roden Buxton, acting, he believed,
on behalf of Chamberlain. It was along the same lines. These offers
were repeated in a highly secret conversation between Dirksen and
Wilson in the latter's residence on August 3rd. Wilson wanted a
four-Power pact, a free hand for Germany in eastern Europe, a colonial
agreement, an economic agreement, and so forth. Dirksen's record of
this conversation then reads:
"After
recapitulating his
conversation with Wohlthat, Sir Horace Wilson expatiated at length on
the great risk Chamberlain would incur by starting confidential
negotiations with the German government. If anything about them were to
leak out, there would be a grand scandal and Chamberlain would probably
be forced to resign." Dirksen did not see how any binding agreement
could be reached under conditions such as this, "for example, owing to
Hudson's indiscretion, another visit of Herr Wohlthat to London was out
of the question." To this, Wilson suggested that "the two emissaries
could meet in Switzerland or elsewhere." It was pointed out by Wilson
that if Britain could get a nonaggression pact with Germany, it would
adopt a nonintervention policy in respect to Greater Germany. This
would embrace the Danzig question, for example.
It
is clear that these
negotiations were not a purely personal policy of Chamberlain's but
were known to the Foreign Office. For example, on August 9th Lord
Halifax repeated much of the political portion of these conversations.
After Munich, he said, he had looked forward to fifty years of peace,
with "Germany the dominant power on the continent, with predominant
rights in southeastern Europe, particularly in the field of commercial
policy; Britain would engage only in moderate trade in that area; in
Western Europe, Britain and France protected from conflicts with
Germany by the lines of fortification on both sides and endeavoring to
retain and develop their possessions by defensive means; friendship
with America; friendship with Portugal; Spain for the time being an
indefinite factor which for the next few years at least would
necessarily have to hold aloof from all combinations of powers; Russia
an out-of-the-way, vast and scarcely surveyable territory; Britain bent
on safeguarding her Mediterranean communications with the dominions and
the Far East." This was "three-bloc-world" talk straight from All Souls
College or Cliveden.
It
was almost impossible to
keep negotiations such as these, or rather proposed negotiations,
secret. There can be no doubt that rumors about them reached the
Russians in July 1939 and, by strengthening their ancient suspicions of
Britain, made them decide to avoid any agreement with Britain and to
take instead the nonaggression pact offered by Hitler. The outburst of
public rage at Russia for doing this by Britain and America now seems
singularly inappropriate in view of the fact that the British
government was trying to do the same thing at the same time and the
fact that France had signed what Russia regarded as a nonaggression
pact with Germany on December 6, 1938. Indeed, Sir Nevile Henderson,
who undoubtedly was more extreme than some of his associates, went so
far as to condone an alliance between Britain and Germany, on August
28, 1939. Obviously, such an alliance could be aimed only at Russia.
The relevant portion of his report to Lord Halifax reads:
"At
the end Herr von
Ribbentrop asked me whether I could guarantee that the Prime Minister
could carry the country with him in a policy of friendship with
Germany. I said there was no possible doubt whatever that he could and
would, provided Germany cooperated with him. Herr Hitler asked whether
England would be willing to accept an alliance with Germany. I said,
speaking personally, I did not exclude such a possibility provided the
development of events justified it."
The
theory that Russia learned
of these British approaches to Germany in July 1939 is supported by the
fact that the obstacles and delays in the path of a British-Russian
agreement were made by Britain from the middle of April to the second
week of July, but were made by Russia from the second week in July to
the end on August 21st. This is supported by other evidence, such as
the fact that discussions for a commercial agreement between Germany
and Russia, which were broken off on January 30, 1939, were resumed on
July 23rd and this agreement was signed on August 19th.
The
negotiations for an
Anglo-Russian agreement were opened by Britain on April Isth, probably
with the double purpose of satisfying the demand in Britain and warning
Hitler not to use force against Poland. The first British suggestion
was that the Soviet Union should give unilateral guarantees to Poland
and Romania similar to those given by Britain. The Russians probably
regarded this as a trap to get them into a war with Germany in which
Britain would do little or nothing or even give aid to Germany. That
this last possibility was not completely beyond reality is clear from
the fact that Britain did prepare an expeditionary force to attack
Russia in March 1940, when Britain was technically at war with Germany
but was doing nothing to fight her.
The
Russians did not reject
the British suggestion of April 1939, but agreed to guarantee Poland
and Romania if the guarantee were extended to all the states on their
western frontier, including Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,
Poland, and Romania, and if it were accompanied by a mutual-assistance
pact of Britain, France, and Russia and by a military convention in
which each state specified what it would do if the pact came into
effect. This offer was a much greater concession than the British'
seemed to appreciate, since it meant that Russia was guaranteeing its
renunciation of all the territory in these six states which it had lost
to them since 1917.
Instead
of accepting the
offer, the British began to quibble. They refused to guarantee the
Baltic States on the ground that these states did not want to be
guaranteed, although they had guaranteed Poland on March 31st when
Józef Beck did not want it and had just asked the Soviet Union
to guarantee Poland and Romania, neither of whom wanted a Soviet
guarantee. When the Russians insisted, the British countered by
insisting that Greece, Turkey, Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland must
also be guaranteed. In place of the alliance which Russia wanted, to
protect itself against having to fight Germany alone, Britain suggested
that the Russian guarantee would become valid only if Britain and
France took action to fulfill their own guarantee first.
France
and Russia were both
pushing Britain to form a Triple Alliance, but Britain was reluctant.
Churchill and Lloyd George were pushing in the same direction, but
Chamberlain fought back on the floor of the House, refusing to "help to
form or to join any opposing blocs." He also refused to send a cabinet
minister to negotiate in Moscow, and refused Eden's offer to go.
Instead, he sent William (later Lord) Strang, a second-rank Foreign
Office official, and only on June 14th. Moreover. the British delayed
the discussions to the great irritation of the Soviet leaders, although
verbally they were always insisting on speed.
To
show its displeasure, the
Soviet Union on May 3rd replaced Litvinov with Molotov as foreign
minister. This should have been a warning. Litvinov knew the West and
was favorable to democracy, to collective security, and to the Western
Powers. As a Jew, he was anti-Hitler. Molotov was a contrast from every
point of view, and could not have been impressed with British sincerity
when he had to negotiate with Strang rather than with Halifax or Eden.
The conversations continued, with Molotov still in insisting on the
three essentials: (1) mutual assistance in a triple alliance, (2)
guarantees to all the border states, and (3) specific obligations as to
the amount of assistance by a military convention.
On
May 19th Chamberlain in
Commons refused "an alliance between ourselves and other countries,"
and pointed with satisfaction to "that great, virile nation on the
borders of Germany which under this agreement [of April 6th] is bound
to give us all the aid and assistance it can." He was talking about
Poland! He seemed not to realize that Poland was much weaker than the
Czechoslovakia he had wrecked in 1938, but he should have known better,
because the French clearly knew better. Poland, indeed, was opposed to
any agreement of the Western Powers with the Soviet Union, and refused
either to be guaranteed by the latter or to accept military assistance
from her, even if attacked by Germany. Poland feared that if Russian
troops ever entered the areas which it had taken from Russia in 1920,
they could never be persuaded to leave. When Russia suggested in May
that the Polish-Romanian Alliance of 1926, which was directed
exclusively against Russia, should now be extended to oppose Germany as
well, Poland refused, although Romania was willing.
In
the same month, Romania
agreed to allow Russian troops to cross the country to oppose Germany
if needed, and Romania's position was more delicate than Poland's
regarding territory previously taken from Russia because Russia had
never recognized the Romanian acquisition of Bessarabia. On June 6th
Latvia, Estonia, and Finland sent a flat refusal to be guaranteed by
Russia. The next day Estonia and Latvia signed nonaggression treaties
with Germany, and probably secret military agreements as well, since
General Franz Halder, the German chief of staff, went at once to these
countries to inspect their fortifications which were being constructed
by Germany.
Strang
arrived in Moscow only
on June 14th, almost two months after Britain had opened these
discussions. By July new difficulties arose because of the Russian
insistence on a military convention as an integral part of any treaty.
Britain demurred but finally reluctantly agreed to conduct the military
negotiations at the same time as the political negotiations. However,
the members of the military mission took a slow ship, chartered for the
occasion (speed thirteen knots), and did not reach Moscow until August
11th. They were again negotiators of the second rank: an admiral who
had never been on the Admiralty staff, a purely combat army general,
and an air marshal who was an outstanding flyer but not a strategist.
To negotiate with these three the Soviet Union named the commander in
chief of the Russian Army, the commander in chief of the Russian Navy,
and the chief of the Russian General Staff. In London, according to
rumor, neither side wanted an agreement, and the military mission had
been sent to Moscow to spy out Russia's defenses. From this time on,
the obstacles to an agreement were clearly coming from the Russian
side, although, considering Chamberlain's secret efforts to make a
settlement with Germany, there is no reason to believe that he wanted
an agreement with Russia. But perhaps his negotiators in Moscow did;
certainly the French did.
From
August 10th on, the
Russians demanded specific answers, and raised their own demands with
every answer. They wanted an exact military commitment as to what
forces would be used against Germany in the west so that she would not
be free to hurl her whole force against the east; they wanted
guarantees whether the states concerned accepted or not; they wanted
specific permission to fight across territory, such as Poland, between
Russia and Germany. These demands were flatly rejected by Poland on
August 19th. On the same day, Russia signed the commercial treaty with
Germany. Two days later France ordered its negotiators to sign the
documents offered by Russia, including the right to cross Poland, but
the Soviet Union refused to accept this signature until Poland
consented as well.
On
the same day, it was
announced that Ribbentrop was coming to Moscow to sign a nonaggression
pact. He arrived with a staff of thirty-two persons in a Condor plane
on August 23rd and signed the agreement with Molotov late that night.
The published portion of the agreement provided that neither signer
would take any aggressive action against the other signer or give any
support to a third Power in such action. The secret protocol which was
added delimited spheres of interest in eastern Europe. The line
followed the northern boundary of Lithuania and the Narew, Vistula, and
San rivers in Poland, and Germany gave Russia a free hand in Bessarabia.
This
agreement was greeted as
a stunning surprise in the Entente countries. There was no reason why
it should have been, as they had been warned of the possibility on
numerous occasions by responsible persons, including Germans like Kordt
and Weizsäcker. It was also stated that the negotiations leading
up to the agreement had been going on for months and that the
Anglo-Soviet discussions accordingly were always a blind. The evidence
seems to indicate that the first tentative approaches were made in May
1939, and were reported to Paris at once by the French ambassador,
Robert Coulondre, from Berlin. These approaches were distrustfully
received by both sides and were broken off completely at Hitler's order
on June 29th. They were reopened by the Germans on July 3rd. Only on
August 15th did Molotov announce his conviction that the Germans were
really sincere, and the negotiations proceeded rapidly from that point..
While
it is untrue to say that
the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact made the war inevitable, it
certainly made it possible for Hitler to start his war with an easier
mind. On August 25th he gave the order to attack on August 26th, but
canceled it within a few hours, as word arrived that the British had
signed an alliance with Poland that same day. Now began a week of
complete chaos in which scores of people ran about Europe trying to
avoid the war or to make it more favorable to their side. The British
begged the Poles and the Germans to negotiate; the Italians tried to
arrange another four-Power conference; various outsiders issued public
and private appeals for peace; secret emissaries flew back and forth
between London and Germany.
All
this was in vain,
because Hitler was determined on war. Most of his attention in the last
few days was devoted to manufacturing incidents to justify his
approaching attack. Political prisoners were taken from concentration
camps, dressed in German uniforms, and killed on the Polish frontier as
"evidence" of Polish aggression. A fraudulent ultimatum with
sixteen superficially reasonable demands on Poland was drawn up by
Ribbentrop and presented to the British ambassador when the time limit
had already elapsed. It was not presented to the Poles, perhaps because
they were so afraid of a second Munich that they hardly dared to talk
with anyone. Indeed, the Polish ambassador in Berlin had been ordered
by Beck not to accept any document from the Germans.
The
German invasion of Poland
at 4:45 A. M. on September 1, 1939, did not by any means end the
negotiations to make peace, nor, for that matter, did the complete
collapse of Polish resistance on September 16-17. Since these efforts
were futile, little need be said of them except that France and Britain
did not declare war on Germany until more than two days had elapsed.
During this time no ultimatums were sent to Germany, but she was begged
to withdraw her forces from Poland and open negotiations. While Poland
shuddered under the impact of the first Blitzkreig,
British
public opinion began to grumble, and even the government's supporters
in Parliament became restive. Finally, at 9:00 A. M. on September 3rd,
Henderson presented to Schmidt, Hitler's interpreter, an ultimatum
which expired at 11:00 A. M. In a similar fashion France entered the
war at 6:00 P. M. on September 3rd.
Part Fourteen—World War II: the Tide of
Aggression: 1939-1941
Chapter 47—Introduction
The
history of the Second
World War is a very complex one. Even now, after hundreds of volumes
and thousands of documents have been published, many points are not
clear, and interpretations of numerous events are hotly disputed. The
magnitude of the war itself would contribute to such disputes. It
lasted exactly six years, from the German invasion of Poland on
September 1, 1939 to the Japanese surrender on September 2, 1945.
During that period it was fought on every continent and on every sea,
in the heights of the atmosphere and beneath the surface of the ocean,
and fought with such destruction of property and lives as had never
been witnessed before.
The
total nature of the Second
lA7orld War can be seen from the fact that deaths of civilians exceeded
deaths of combatants and that many of both were killed without any
military justification, as victims of sheer sadism and brutality,
largely through cold-blooded savagery by Germans, and, to a lesser
extent, by Japanese and Russians, although British and American attacks
from the air on civilian populations and on nonmilitary targets
contributed to the total. The distinctions between civilians and
military personnel and between neutrals and combatants, which had been
blurred in the First World War, were almost completely lost in the
second. This is clear from a few figures. The number of civilians
killed reached 17 millions, of which 5,400,000 were Polish; while
Poland had less than 100,000 soldiers killed or missing in the Battle
of Poland in 1939, Polish civilians to the number of 3,900,000 were
executed, or murdered in the ghetto, subsequently.
The
armies which began to move
in September 1939 had no new weapons which had not been possessed by
the armies of 1918. They still used infiltration tactics, with columns
of tanks, strafing airplanes, and infantrymen moving in trucks, but the
proportions of these and the ways in which they cooperated with one
another had been greatly modified. Weapons for defense were also much
as they had been at the end of the previous war, but, as we shall see,
they were not prepared in proper amounts nor were they used in proper
fashions. These defensive weapons included antitank guns, antiaircraft
guns with controlled fire, minefields, mobile artillery on caterpillar
tracks, trenches, and defense in depth.
Germany
used the offensive
weapons we have mentioned in the new fashion, while Poland in 1939,
Norway, the Low Countries, and France in 1940, the Balkan countries and
the Soviet Union in 1941 did not use the available defensive tactics
properly. As a result, Hitler advanced from one astounding victory to
another. In the course of 1942 and 1943, new weapons created by
democratic science and new tactics learned in Russia, in North Africa,
and on the oceans of the world made it possible to stop the
authoritarian advance and to reverse the direction of the tide. In 1944
and 1945 the returning tide of Anglo-American and Soviet power
overwhelmed Italy, Germany, and Japan with the superior quality and the
superior quantities of their equipment and men. Thus the war divides
itself, quite naturally, into three parts: (1) the Axis advance
covering 1939, 1940, and 1941; (2) the balance of forces in 1942; and
(3) the Axis retreat in 1943, 1944, and 1945.
The
Germans were able to
advance in the period 1939-1941 because they had sufficient military
resources, and used them in an effective way. The chief reason they had
sufficient military resources was not based, as is so often believed,
on the fact that Germany was highly mobilized for war, but on other
factors. In the first place, Hitler's economic revolution in Germany
had reduced financial considerations to a point where they played no
role in economic or political decisions. When decisions were made, on
other grounds, money was provided, through completely unorthodox
methods of finance, to carry them out. In France and England, on the
other hand, orthodox financial principles, especially balanced budgets
and stable exchange rates, played a major role in all decisions and was
one of the chief reasons why these countries did not mobilize in March
1936 or in September 1938 or why, having mobilized in 1939 and 1940,
they had totally inadequate numbers of airplanes, tanks, antitank guns,
and motorized transportation..
There
was another reason for
the military inadequacy of the Western Powers in 1939. This, of even
greater significance than the influence of orthodox finance, arose from
conflicts of military theories in the period 1919-1939. Several
violently conflicting theories held the stage during the twenty years
of armistice, and paralyzed the minds of military men to the point
where they were unable to provide consistent advice on which
politicians could base their decisions. In Germany, on the other hand,
decisions (not necessarily correct ones) were made, and action could go
on.
One
theoretical dispute raged
around the role of tanks in combat. The tank had been invented to
protect advancing infantry against machine-gun fire by its ability to
put machine guns out of action. Accordingly, tanks were originally
scattered among the infantry, to advance with it, both moving at a rate
of speed no greater than that of a man on foot, consolidating the
ground, yard by yard, as both moved forward. This view of the tactical
function of tanks continued to be held in high military circles in
France and England until too late in 1940. It was sharply challenged,
even a decade earlier, by those who insisted that tanks should be
organized in distinct units (armored brigades or divisions) and should
be used, without close infantry support, moving as perpendicular
columns rather than in parallel lines against the defensive formations,
and should seek to penetrate through these formations at high speed and
without consolidating the ground covered, in order to fan out on the
rear of the defensive formations to disrupt their supplies,
communications, and reserves. According to these new ideas, the
breakthrough made by such an armored column could be exploited and the
ground consolidated by motorized infantry, following the armored
division in trucks and dismounting to occupy areas where this would be
most useful.
In
France, the new theory of
armored warfare was advocated most vigorously by Colonel Charles de
Gaulle. It was generally rejected by his superior officers, so that De
Gaulle was still a colonel in 1940. This theory was, however, accepted
in the German Army, notably by Heinz Guderian in 1934, and was used
very effectively against the Poles in and against the Western Front in
1940.
At
full strength a German panzer (armored)
division had two regiments of tanks and two regiments of motorized
infantry plus various specialized companies. This gave it a total of
14,000 men with 250 tanks and about 3,000 motorized vehicles. In
September 1939, Germany had six of these panzer divisions with a total
of 1,650 tanks of which one-third were 18-ton models with a 37-mm. gun
(Mark III), while two-thirds were 10-ton models (Mark II). By May 1940,
when the attack was made in the west, there were lo armored divisions
with a total of 2,000 tanks, some of which were the new Mark IV model,
a 23-ton conveyance carrying a 75-mm. gun. No major increase occurred
in the next year, but the number of armored divisions was doubled by
splitting the ten which existed in May 1940. Thus in June 1941, when
Germany attacked Russia, it had 20 armored divisions with a total of
3,000 tanks, of which several hundred were l\lark IV but l,000 were
still Mark II. In opposition to these, Poland had only a handful of
tanks in 1939, France had over 3,000 in May 1940, and the Soviet Union
had, in June 1941, about 15,000 scattered tanks, almost all light or
obsolescent models.
A
second theory which
paralyzed the Western Powers in the years before World War II was
concerned with the superiority of defensive over offensive tactics.
This defensive theory, of which the Englishman Basil Liddell Hart was
the most voluble proponent, assumed that attack would be made in lines,
as the Western Powers themselves were trained to attack, and that such
an attack would be very unlikely to succeed because of the great
increase in firepower of modern weapons. It was argued, on the basis of
the experience of World War I, that machine guns could hold up
advancing infantry indefinitely and that artillery fire, carefully
placed and ranged so that it could cover the field, could prevent tanks
from silencing the defensive machine guns to allow infantry to advance.
The
Maginot Line was based on
these theories. As such, it was not a defense in depth (which would
seek to break up offensive columns by allowing them to penetrate to
varying depths, thus separating tanks, infantry, and artillery so that
each could be dealt with by proper weapons as impetus was dispersed),
but was a rigid line (which sought to stop the offensive lines in front
of it, as a whole).
The
theory of defensive
superiority left the military forces of the Western states with
inadequate offensive training, poor offensive morale, and unable to
come to the help of distant allies (like Poland); it put a premium on a
passive, indecisive, inactive military outlook (such as shown by
Pétain or Gamelin in the years leading up to 1940) and left them
unable to handle any real offensive when it came against them. The
theory of continuous defensive lines, which must be kept intact or
instantly reestablished whenever they are breached, created a
psychology which was incapable of dealing with an assault which came at
it in columns and inevitably must breach any defensive line at the
point of impact. When this occurred in 1940, French military units
threw down their arms or tried to make a precipitous retreat to some
point where a new continuous line could be established. As a
consequence, the Poles in 1939 and, to a greater extent, the French in
1940, were constantly abandoning positions from which they had not been
driven, until units were too broken up to allow hope of reestablishing
any continuous line, and France proved to be too small to permit
continued retreat. The only alternative seemed to be surrender. As we
shall see later, another, highly effective, alternative was discovered,
mostly in Russia, by 1942.
In
the inter-war period there
was a third theory, violently disputed, about the effectiveness of air
power. In its most extreme form, this theory held that the chief cities
of Europe could be destroyed almost completely in the first twenty-four
hours of a war, devastated hy high-explosive bombs and rendered
uninhabitable by gas attacks from the air. This theory, frequently
associated with the name of the Italian General Giulio Douhet, was much
more prevalent in civilian circles than in military ones, and played an
important role in persuading the British and French peoples to accept
the Munich Agreement. Like most farfetched ideas, it was supported more
frequently by slogans than by logic or by facts, in this case by
mottoes like, "The bombers will always get through." The chief facts to
support the theory were to be found in the Spanish Civil War, notably
in the German destruction of Guernica in 1937 and the ruthless Italian
bombardment of Barcelona in 1938. No one paid much attention to the
fact that, in both of these cases, the targets were totally undefended.
The
military advocates of such
air bombardment, most of them considerably more moderate than General
Douhet, concentrated their attention on what was called "strategic
bombing," that is, on the construction of long-range bombing planes for
use against industrial targets and other civilian objectives and on
very fast fighter planes for defense against such bombers. They
generally belittled the effectiveness of antiaircraft artillery and
were generally warm advocates of an air force separately organized and
commanded and thus not under the direct control of army or naval
commanders. These advocates were very influential in Britain and in the
United States.
The
upholders of strategic
bombing received little encouragement in Germany, in Russia, or even in
France, because of the dominant position held by traditional army
officers in all three of these countries. In France, all kinds of air
power were generally neglected, while in the other two countries
strategic bombing against civilian objectives was completely
subordinated in favor of tactical bombing of military objectives
immediately on the fighting front. Such tactical bombing demanded
planes of a more flexible character, with shorter range than strategic
bombers and less speed than defensive fighters, and under the closest
control by the local commanders of ground forces so that their bombing
efforts could be directed, like a kind of mobile and long-range
artillery, at those points of resistance, of supply, or of reserves
which would help the ground offensive most effectively. Such
"dive-bombers," or Stukas, played a major role in the early German
victories of 1939-1941. Here, again, this superiority was based on
quality and method of usage and not on numbers. In the three major
campaigns of 1939-1941 Germany had a first-line air force of about
2,000 planes, of which half were fighters and half were tactical
bombers. On the other side, Poland had 377 military aircraft in 1939:
France and Britain had about 3,000 in 1940; while the Soviet Union had
at least 8,000 of very varying quality in 1941.
At
the outbreak of war in
1939, ideas about sea power were so generally held and with such firm
conviction that they were questioned only occasionally. One of these
ideas was that sea power was dominated by big-gun capital ships, all
other vessels serving simply as accessories to this backbone of the
fleet. A related idea assumed that the area in which a fleet could
function effectively was limited by the positions of its major bases,
such as Pearl Harbor, Gibraltar, Singapore, Toulon, or Kiel. Another
idea, rarely disputed, stated that no landing could be made from the
sea on a defended shore. These ideas on the nature and limits of sea
power had received only minor challenges in the inter-war period,
except from the extreme advocates of air power like General William
Mitchell of the United States Army Air Force. Such extremists, who
insisted that land-based planes could make all battleships (or even all
navies) obsolete, did not succeed in convincing the admirals or
politicians. In the United States Mitchell was subjected to a
court-martial and forced to resign. Although the experiences of the
Second World War did not support the extreme advocates of air power,
either in respect to the navy or to strategic bombing, the ideas of
land warfare and especially of sea warfare which were prevalent in rg3g
had to be drastically modified by 1945.
Chapter
48—The Battle of Poland, September 1939
The
German invasion of Poland
began with powerful air attacks at 4:40 A. M. on September 1. These
attacks, aimed at airfields, assembly points, and railroads, wiped out
the Polish air force of 377 planes, mostly on the ground, and, in
combination with the rapidly advancing German armored spearheads of
tank divisions, made it impossible for Poland to mobilize completely,
crippled Polish reconnaissance, destroyed any centralized system of
communications, and reduced Polish resistance to numerous fragments of
uncoordinated fighting units. The Poles had 30 infantry divisions, a
motorized brigade, 38 companies of tanks, and large masses of cavalry,
but could bring only a portion of these into action.
Germany
struck at Poland with
2,000 planes (of which 4oo were dive-bombers) supporting 44 divisions
(of which 6 were armored or panzer divisions and 6 were motorized).
These forces were organized into 5 armies. The Fourth Army drove down
from Pomerania in the northwest while the Eighth and Tenth armies drove
upward from Saxony, the three converging in a pincers movement at a
point west of Warsaw. At the same time, a much larger pincer converging
on the Bug River, a hundred miles east of Warsaw, was formed by the
German Third Army, advancing from the Polish Corridor and East Prussia,
and the German Fourteenth Army driving northeastward from Galicia and
Slovakia. The armored divisions, supported by dive-bombers, raced ahead
of their supporting infantry and disrupted all Polish plans,
communications, and supplies. The Polisl1 forces, caught in too
advanced positions, vainly tried to fight their way eastward to the
Vistula and the Bug rivers but were broken up, isolated, and destroyed.
Violent but hopeless fighting continued in the pockets, but by
September 15th, when Guderian's tanks entered Brest-Litovsk in eastern
Poland, the country had been destroyed.
Although
Britain and France
declared war on Germany on September 3rd, it cannot be said that they
made war during the next two weeks in which fighting raged in Poland.
British airplanes roamed over Germany, dropping leaflets for propaganda
purposes, and French patrols ventured into the space between the
Maginot Line and the German Westwall, but no support was given to
Poland. Although France had three million men under arms and Hitler had
left only eight regular divisions on his western border, no attack was
made by France. Strict orders were issued to the British Air Force not
to bomb any German land forces, and these orders were not modified
until April rg40; similar orders by Hitler to the Luftwaffe
were maintained for part of this same period. When some British Members
of Parliament, led by Amery, put pressure on the government to drop
bombs on German munition stores in the Black Forest, the air minister,
Sir H. Kingsley Wood, rejected the suggestion with asperity, declaring:
"Are you aware it is private property? Why, you will be asking me to
bomb Essen next!" Essen was the home of the Krupp munitions factories.
Similar
efforts to force the
French to take some action against Germany were rejected on the ground
that this might irritate the Germans so that they would strike back at
the Western Powers. To quiet the English parliamentary group which was
demanding action, its leading figure, Winston Churchill, was made first
lord of the Admiralty, but the British Navy went into action so slowly
that the German "pocket" battleships were able to escape from their
ports and from the North Sea out on to the high seas where they could
become commerce raiders. Blockade of Germany was established in such a
perfunctory fashion that large quantities of French iron ore, as well
as other commodities, continued to go to Germany through the neutral
Low Countries in return for German coal coming by the same route. These
exchanges continued for weeks. On his part Hitler issued orders to his
air force not to cross the Western frontier except for reconnaissance,
to his navy not to fight the French, and to his submarines nor to
molest passenger vessels and to treat unarmed merchant ships according
to the established rules of international prize law. In open
disobedience to these orders, a German submarine sank the liner Athenia,
westward bound in the Atlantic, without warning and with a loss of 112
lives, on September 3rd.
As
Poland was collapsing
without a hand being raised to help it, the Soviet Union was invited by
Hitler to invade Poland from the east and occupy the areas which had
been granted to it in the Soviet-German agreement of August 23rd. The
Russians were eager to move, in order to ensure that the Germans stop
as far as possible from the Soviet frontiers, but they were desperately
afraid that if they did enter Poland the Western Powers might declare
war on Russia in support of their guarantee to Poland and would then
wage war against the Soviet Union while not fighting Germany or even
while allowing economic and military aid to go to Germany.
Accordingly,
the Kremlin held
up its invasion of Poland until September 17th. On that day the Polish
government petitioned Romania to be allowed to seek refuge in that
state. The Soviet Union felt that it could not be accused of aggression
against Poland if no Polish government still existed on Polish soil.
The Soviet leaders sought to justify their advance into Polish
territory with the excuse that they must restore order and provide
protection for the Ruthenian and White Russian peoples of eastern
Poland. The Soviet and Nazi armies met without incidents. On September
28th a new agreement was made between Molotov and Ribbentrop, dividing
Poland. Accordingly, Lithuania was shifted into the Soviet sphere,
while in Poland itself the German sphere was extended eastward from the
Vistula to the Bug River along the old Curzon Line because Russia
wanted to follow the nationality boundary.
Chapter 49—The Sitzkrieg, September 1,
1939-May 1940
The
period from the end of the
Polish campaign to the German attack on Denmark and Norway on April 9,
1940, is frequently called the Sitzkrieg (sitting
war) or even
the "phony war," because the Western Powers made no real effort to
fight Germany. These Powers were eager to use the slow process of
economic blockade as their chief weapon, in order to avoid casualties.
So long as he remained in office, Chamberlain was convinced that no
military decision could be reached and that Germany could be beaten
only by economic measures. Even after the fall of France, the British
chiefs of staff declared, "Upon the economic factor depends our only
hope of bringing about the downfall of Germany.''
Early
in October, Hitler made
a tentative offer to negotiate peace with the Western Powers, on the
grounds that the cause of the fighting, Poland, no longer existed. This
offer was rejected by the Western Powers with the public declaration
that they were determined to destroy Hitler's regime. This meant that
the war must continue. The British answer to Hitler's offer, and
possibly the French answer as well, was not based so much on a desire
to continue with the war as it was on the belief that Hitler's rule in
Germany was insecure and that the best way to reach peace would be to
encourage some anti-Hitler movement within Germany itself. Chamberlain
had a passionate personal hatred of Hitler for having destroyed his
plans for appeasement. He hoped that a long economic blockade would
give rise to such discontent inside Germany that Hitler would be
removed and peace made.
German
Mobilization and the Allied Economical Blockade
Germany
was extremely
vulnerable to a blockade, but its effects were indecisive. In spite of
some casual threats by Hitler that Germany was prepared for a war of
any duration, no plans had been made for a long war, and there was no
real effort toward economic mobilization by Germany before 1943. The
country's industrial plant for making armaments was increased only
slightly in the five years 1937-1942, so that, contrary to general
opinion, Germany was neither armed to the teeth nor fully mobilized in
this period.
In
each of the four years
1939-1942, Britain's production of tanks, self-propelled guns, and
planes was higher than Germany's. In the first four months of the war
(September-December 1939), for example, England produced 314 tanks,
while Germany produced 247. The Germans expected each military campaign
to be of such brief duration that no real economic mobilization would
be necessary. This policy was successful until Hitler bogged down in
Russia in 1941, but, even there, the Fuhrer's conviction that Russia
would collapse after just one more attack delayed economic mobilization
for months.
As
late as September 1941,
Hitler issued an order for a substantial reduction in armaments
production, and the counter-order calling for full mobilization of the
German economic system w-as not issued until the last day of that year.
Even then the mobilization was never total or anything like it. The
captured records of the German War Ministry for the year 1944, the year
of the big effort, show that only about 33 percent of Germany's output
in that year went for direct war purposes compared to 40 percent in the
United States, and almost 45 percent in Britain. T he results of this
effort in airplane production can be seen in the fact that Germany
produced almost 40,000 aircraft of all kinds in that year 1944, while
England produced almost 30,000 and the United States produced over
96,000 military aircraft in the same year:
Germany's
economic
mobilization which began in 1942 was to have been carried out by Fritz
Todt, the engineer who had been in charge of the construction of the
Westwall. Todt, however, was killed in an airplane crash on February
12, 1942. His successor, Albert Speer, was an organizer of great
ability, but he had to share his functions with several other offices,
including Göring's Four-Year-Plan organization, and he spent most
of his time negotiating agreements to obtain needed resources from
these. A Central Planning Board, on which Speer was one of four men,
had powers of top allocation of material resources, but no control over
labor. On September 2, 1943, Speer's office was amalgamated with the
raw-materials department of the Ministry of Economics to form a
Ministry of Armaments and War Production. This new organization
obtained control of more and more of the production program without
ever obtaining important parts of it. It took eighteen months to get
control of naval construction, including submarines and guns (July 1943
to December 1944), while Speer took over production of fighter planes
only in March 1944, and of all other planes except "jets" in June 1944.
At the same time, more and more war production was getting into the
hands of the S.S. because its control of concentration camps gave it
the largest available supply of labor. As a result, Speer's office
never had anything like complete control of economic mobilization. It
is amazing that Germany could have carried on such a great war effort
with such a ramshackle organization of its economic life.
When
Germany began the war in
September 1939, less than a third of its oil, rubber, and iron ore were
of domestic origin; it had only two months' supply of gasoline at the
peacetime rate of consumption and about three months' supply of
aviation fuel. Germany expended less than100,000 tons of gasoline and
oil in Poland and less than 500,000 tons in the conquest of Denmark,
Norway, the Low Countries, and France in the period April-June 1940,
but captured in the process about two million tons, mostly in France..
At
first the British economic
warfare against Germany was quantitative rather than qualitative,
seeking to reduce the supply of all war materiel rather than
concentrating attention, as was done later, on interrupting the supply
of a few vital commodities such as ball bearings or aviation fuel. The
blockade, with little real effort, was able to cut off immediately over
half of Germany's supply of petroleum products and almost half of its
iron ore, but, in general, the blockade was established slowly. There
was very poor Anglo-French coordination for the whole period before the
fall of France in June 1940, and there was a general agreement not to
use aerial bombardment, preemptive buying, export control of enemy
products, or rationing of neutral purchases. These special techniques
of economic warfare began to be applied only in the spring of 1940,
just before they were disrupted by the fall of France.
The
early British efforts to
control contraband and to obtain a quantitative restriction on German
imports placed a burden on the navy which it was unable to bear,
particularly because of the demand for naval vessels for convoy duty.
In this last respect Britain was very fortunate, for here, also,
Germany was woefully unprepared for a major war. In the whole period
from the launching of the first German submarine in 1935 to the
outbreak of war, the German Navy built only 57 submarines. Only 26 of
these were equipped for service in the Atlantic. These were subject to
such limitations, especially in regard to their cruising range, that
less than ten could be kept in the shipping zone at any one time.
British minefields in the English Channel, which destroyed three
U-boats immediately, made it necessary for these vessels to go out by
the route north of Scotland, with the result that they could not
operate, by reason of limited cruising range, farther west than 12°
3o' W. (about 80 miles west of Ireland), so that the British Navy did
not have to convoy farther west than this line.
As
far as the U-boats were
concerned, there was no improvement in this situation until the latter
half of 1941. The number of U-boat sinkings reached seven a month, and
Germany's replacement capacity for building these weapons reached 15 a
month (compared to 2j a month in the First World War). This production
margin made it possible to raise the number of German submarines at
sea, by steady steps, from 15 in April 1941 to 60 at the end of the
year. This improvement, from the German point of view, was
counterbalanced by an improvement in the British antisubmarine defense
tactics, as we shall see, but the struggle became so severe that it is
deservedly known as the Battle of the Atlantic. Our present concern
with this subject lies in the fact that the inadequacy of the German
submarine attack in 1939-1941 made it considerably easier for the
British Navy to cope with the blockade problem.
In
contraband control work,
suspicious merchant vessels were forced to put into a control harbor
for search of their cargoes. Control points were placed in Canada, in
the Mediterranean, in the north of Scotland, and elsewhere, but the
United States would not permit one in the Caribbean Sea area. When
vessels being detained began to clog up these ports, whole categories
of vessels were exempt from control. This applied, for example, to
American ships after January 1940. In order to reduce congestion and
delay, vessels which certified that they had no contraband and gave
detailed reports of their lading were issued commercial passports,
called navicerts, by British representatives in their ports of
departure and were generally exempt from search or delay. This use of
navicerts, voluntary at first, was made compulsory in July 1940. At the
same time, the use of British credit, repair facilities, insurance,
refueling stations, charts, and all kinds of shipping aids were denied
to vessels which did not have a British "ship-warrant." This system,
with the unofficial support of the United States, gradually made it
possible to control most of the shipping of the world. The United
States and other countries also cooperated from 1940 in rerouting
passengers and mails through points like Bermuda or Gibraltar where
they could be searched by the British. This gave Britain control of
information and enemy funds for blockade purposes.
In
order to reduce the enemy's
ability to buy abroad, financial connections were cut, his funds abroad
were frozen, and his exports were blocked. [Actually the financial and
corporate monopolies and cartels in Germany, Britain, France and the
United States had established an elaborate secret system to supply
Germany with money and war supplies.] The United States cooperated in
these efforts as well, freezing the financial assets of various nations
as they were conquered by the aggressor Powers and finally the assets
of the aggressors themselves in June-July 1941. One of the chief steps
in this effort was the interruption of the export of German coal by sea
from the Baltic to Italy on March 5, 1940, three months before Italy
itself became a belligerent. This disrupted the Italian economy.
Efforts to supply only half of Italy's needs from Germany by rail
almost disrupted the German transportation system (since it required
the use of 15,000 railroad cars). At the same time, curtailment of
Italian exports and the need to buy British coal reduced the Italian
gold reserve, almost at once, from 2.3 to 1.3 billion fire.
Because
the British Navy
lacked ships to enforce any complete control of contraband by stopping
vessels for search, various devices were adopted. Beginning in December
1939, agreements were signed with neutrals by which these latter agreed
not to re-export their imports to Britain's enemies. Compulsory
rationing of neutral imports was established at the end of July 1940.
At the same time, preemptive buying of vital commodities at their
source to prevent Germany and its allies from obtaining them began.
Because of limited British funds, most of this task of preemptive
buying was taken over by the United States, almost completely so by
February 1941.
After
1941, the blockade
became increasingly effective, especially by the elimination of
neutrals (like the Soviet Union, Japan, and the United States) and by
the shift from quantitative to qualitative controls. Under this new
system the blockade concentrated on a few vital materials and
commodities, trying to increase the rate of German usage of these or to
reduce their stocks by bombardment or sabotage, and seeking out such
materials (like industrial diamonds) at their sources, frequently in
remote regions of the earth, then following them by
economic-intelligence information to a point where Britain could get
them by seizure or by preemptive purchase.
The
blockade was enforced by
Britain with little regard for international law or for neutral rights,
but there was relatively little protest from the neutrals, because the
most influential neutrals were already so deeply committed to one side
or to the other that they could hardly be regarded as neutrals and were
not prepared to defend such a status. The United States openly favored
Britain, while Italy and Japan equally openly favored Germany. The
Soviet Union favored neither side but was very fearful of attack from
both; until April 1940, it was more fearful of Britain and France,
while after the fall of Norway and France it became increasingly
fearful of Germany. Both of these fears, through geographic and
political circumstances, inclined it to a wholehearted economic support
of Germany. This continued to the day of the German attack on the
Soviet Union on June 22,1941.
The
Nazi-Soviet Trade
Agreement of August 19, 1939, promised that Germany would provide 200
million marks' credit to be used for machinery and industrial
installations for Russia in return for Russian raw materials to the
value of 180 million marks. On February 11, 1940, a new agreement
increased these exchanges to 750 million marks' value and provided that
Russian deliveries should be made in 18 months and be paid for by
German deliveries covering 27 months, the accounts to be balanced in
this z:3 ratio at six-month intervals. At the same time, Russia
promised to facilitate transshipment of goods to Germany from Iran,
Afghanistan, and the Far East, across Siberia.
This
Trans-Siberian leak in
the blockade of Germany could have been of great significance because
it allowed Germany to keep contact with allied Japan and provided a
route to the tin, rubber, and oil of the Netherlands Indies and
southeast Asia. However, transportation difficulties, lack of full
cooperation by the Russians and Japanese, as well as payment problems,
kept the 1940 total for Trans-Siberian freightage to Germany down to
about 166,000 tons, of which 58,000 were soybeans and 45,000 were whale
oil. In the five months of 1941, before the outbreak of war in Russia,
this transit of goods to Germany reached 212,000 tons with soybeans and
whale oil accounting for 142,000 tons of the total. Such essential
items as rubber, tin, copper, wool, or lubricating oils amounted to
only a small fraction of the total.
Germany
did much better in
obtaining goods from the Soviet Union itself, for the total on this
score reached 4,541,202 tons over the 22 months from September r, 1939
to June 22, 1941. The largest items in this figure were 1,594,530 tons
of grain, 777,691 tons of wood and timber, 641,604 tons of petroleum
products, 165,157 tons of manganese ore, and 139,460 tons of cotton,
but, once again, there were relatively small amounts of vital defense
materials which Germany urgently needed. On the other hand, the items
Germany did obtain were very profitable to it because Germany was far
behind on its repayments to Russia, a situation which became worse as
June 1941 approached. The materials Germany had promised in payment
were industrial products of great value to the Soviet defense, and
Germany delayed in its shipments as much as possible because of
Hitler's plans to attack eastward. The Soviet demands that the Germans
should catch up on their arrears of payment became one of the irritants
which hastened the Nazi attack on Russia in 1941.
On
the whole, the blockade had
no decisive effect on Germany's ability to wage war until 1945. After
examining the evidence on this problem, the chiefs of the blockade of
the Foreign Economic Administration in Washington wrote, "Germany's war
production and military operations were never seriously hampered by a
shortage of any essential raw materials or industrial products, with
the single exception of petroleum—and even that shortage resulted
from the combined effect of the Soviet Army's capture of Romanian oil
fields and the concentrated bombing of Germany's synthetic production
rather than directly from economic warfare." The same writers point out
that Germany's food supply, in calories per capita, was at the prewar
level until the very last months of the war.
The
ability of the Germans to
cope with the blockade was largely due to their high level of
engineering skill and their ruthless exploitation of conquered Europe,
especially of the manpower of dominated areas. German engineering
ability made it possible to get around material shortages or to repair
industrial plants damaged by air raids, but these efforts required more
and more manpower, which Germany lacked. An increase in the labor
supply was obtained by enslaving the captured peoples of Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Russia, and other countries. In the same way, the
German food supply was kept up by starving these enslaved peoples.
In
the early part of the war,
the blockade was not effective because of the low level of German
mobilization, the slow and faulty fashion in which the blockade was
(perhaps necessarily) applied, the large number of neutral and
nonbelligerent countries, the leaks to Germany across Soviet Russia and
Vichy France, the ineffectiveness of quantitative controls under a
limited naval patrol, and the succession of German conquests which
brought such valuable assets as the Norwegian iron-ore route, the
French iron mines and aluminum industry, the Romanian oil wells, or the
Yugoslav copper mines under direct German control.
The Soviet
Borderlands, September 1939-April 1940
During
the "phony war" from
September 1939 to April 1940, there were persons in Britain, France,
and Germany who were willing to fight to the bitter end and other
persons who were eager to make peace. Such persons engaged in extensive
intrigues and cross-intrigues in order to negotiate peace or to prevent
it. One of the most publicized of these efforts gave rise to the
so-called "Venlo incident" of November 1939. On October 8th Hitler
ordered his commanding generals to prepare for an immediate attack on
the Low Countries and France. Shortly afterward, two members of British
military Intelligence in the Netherlands, who were officially attached
to the British diplomatic mission at The Hague, were approached by a
man whom they believed to be an agent of discontented generals of the
German General Staff. This man, who may have been a "double agent"
working for both sides, wished to discuss the possibility of
negotiating peace if the German generals removed Hitler and his chief
associates by a coup d'état. The proposal sounded
authentic because the British leaders had been approached with similar
offers, which were known to be authentic, since August 1938, and there
was, at that very moment, late in 1939, a member of the German General
Staff who was passing information (including the date of Hitler's
projected attack on Holland) to the Netherlands military attache in
Berlin.
With
Lord Halifax's
permission, the two British officers, Major Richard Henry Stevens and
Captain Sigismund Payne-Best, with an observer from the Netherlands
government, Lieutenant Klop, held five meetings on Dutch territory with
the German negotiators. At the fifth meeting, at Venlo on November 8th,
the negotiators, who were really members of the Security Police of the
S.S., shot Lieutenant Klop, and escaped into Germany with his body, the
two British agents, a Dutch chauffeur, and the automobile in which they
had been traveling. The incident aroused great notoriety at the time
and, in some circles, was taken to indicate that Britain was really
eager to find some way out of the conflict, in spite of its proclaimed
determination to fight to a finish.
The
Venlo incident was but
one, and on the whole a rather unimportant one, of a number of
unsuccessful efforts to make peace between the Western Powers and
Germany in the six months following the defeat of Poland. These efforts
combined with the lack of fighting in the "phony war" to convince the
leaders of the Soviet Union that the Western Powers had little heart in
fighting Germany and would prefer to be fighting Russia. As we shall
see, this was probably true of Chamberlain and his close associates and
of Daladier and his successor as prime minister of France, Paul
Reynaud. To avoid or at least postpone an attack, from either the
Western Powers or Germany, became the chief aim of Soviet policy, and
every effort was made to strengthen Russia's military, strategic, and
political position. It was felt in the Kremlin, in the period from
September to May, that the danger of attack was greater from the
Western Powers than it was from Germany, since Germany was in such
great need of Russian raw materials that it would probably keep the
peace if the Soviet Union made serious efforts to fulfill the economic
agreements it had signed with Germany. Moreover, the political
agreements of August 23rd and September 28th, by giving the Soviet
Union a free hand east of a specified line, made it possible for Russia
to strengthen its defenses against Germany by advancing its frontiers
and military bases up to that line. Furthermore, the Soviet leaders
believed that full economic cooperation with Germany might persuade
Hitler to bring pressure on Japan to reduce its pressure on the Soviet
Far Eastern frontier.
The
Japanese pressure on the
Soviet Far East reached its peak in the years 1938 and 1939 with two
attacks by the Japanese Army on Soviet territory. The second of these
attacks, at Nomonhan on the Manchurian-Mongolian frontier, resulted in
a major Japanese defeat in which Nippon suffered 52,000 casualties; it
was ended by a truce signed on September 16, 1939, only one day before
Russian forces began to move into Poland. From the diplomatic point of
view the Soviet Far Eastern policy was a success, for Hitler, in the
years 1939-1941, put pressure on Japan to relax its efforts to expand
on the northern part of the Asiastic mainland and to replace this with
a movement against British Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies. The
Japanese defeat at Nomonhan and the fact that the raw materials which
Japan needed were to be found in the south rather than in Mongolia,
Siberia, or even northern China, persuaded Japan to accept the change
of direction. A Soviet ambassador returned to Tokyo in November 1939,
for the first time since June 1938.
During
the period 1929 to
October 1941, the Soviet Union had excellent information about Japanese
affairs from its "master spy" in the Far East, Richard Sorge. Sorge, a
member of the Nazi Party from 1933, representative of many German
newspapers in Tokyo from the same year, and press attache in the German
Embassy in Tokyo in 1939-1941, had an excellent knowledge of the most
secret matters in the Far East because of his own intimate relations
with the German ambassador and because of his secret agents (including
Saionji, adopted son of the "last Genro," and Ozaki, adviser to Prince
Konoye) in Japanese governing circles. By reporting to Moscow on the
condition of the Japanese military forces and the gradual triumph,
within the Japanese government, of the anti-British over the
anti-Russian influence, Sorge made it possible for the Soviet Union to
weaken its defenses in the Far East in order to strengthen them in
Europe.
In
Europe, after the
occupation of Poland (which shielded the Russian center), the Soviet
leaders were worried about two areas. In the south, including the
Balkans, the Dardanelles, or the Caspian oil fields, they were very
fearful of an Anglo-French attack, while in the Baltic they were
fearful of both the Western Powers and Germany.
The
Soviet fears of the
Western Powers in the south appear quite unfounded to us, but seemed
very real to them in 1939. The information which has been released
since 1945 shows that there was some basis for this fear but that the
Anglo-French threat to Russia was much greater in the Baltic than it
was in the south. In the latter area the Kremlin was suspicious of the
French Army of the Orient in Syria. The Russians believed that General
Maxime Weygand had a force of several hundred thousand men which he
wished to use across Iran or Turkey in an attack on the Russian oil
fields in the Caspian region. In January 1940, Germany obtained reports
from Paris that Weygand proposed to attack the Soviet Union from
Romania. As a matter of fact, Wevgat1d had only three poorly equipped
divisions totaling about 40,000 men, and his plans were largely
defensive. He hoped to support the Allied guarantees to Turkey, Greece,
and Romania (given in April 1939), and to protect the Romanian oil
fields by moving northward from Salonika if Germany, Hungary, or
Bulgaria made any warlike move in the Balkans.
The
political situation in the
Balkans was of such precarious stability that the Western Powers did
not dare to make a move in the area for fear everything would collapse.
Turkey, Greece, Romania, and Yugoslavia were joined in a Balkan Entente
aimed at preventing any Bulgarian aggression. Since these four states
could mobilize over a hundred divisions, although lacking all modern or
heavy equipment, they could keep Bulgaria quiet. Unfortunately, the
Balkan Entente was not designed for protection against Italy or
Germany, where the real danger lay.
Italy
had various projects to
attack Greece from the Albanian territory it had seized in April 1939.
It also had fully matured plans to disrupt Yugoslavia by subsidizing
and supporting a Croat revolt, under Ante Paveliæ, against the
dominant Serb majority in that state. During the "phony war" the
Italians hoped that the Western Powers would allow Italy to carry out
its project against Yugoslavia in order to block any German movement
into that area. Such permission seemed possible from the fact that the
democratic states had not guaranteed Yugoslavia as they had the other
three states of the Balkan Entente. Italy's project Noms set for early
June 1940, but was interrupted by Hitler's attack in the West, which
was made, without notifying his Italian partner, on May 10th.
Another
element of instability
in southeastern Europe was the position of Hungary, which aspired to
detach Transylvania from Romania. Since Hungary could not take this
area by its own power, it sought support from Italy rather than from
Germany (which the Hungarians feared). With Italian support, Hungary
refused to allow German troops to cross its territory to attack Poland
in September 1939, and began to negotiate an agreement with Italy by
which the Duke of Aosta would be offered the crown of Hungary, as an
anti-German solution to Hungary's ambiguous constitutional position.
This project, like the one in Croatia, was upset by the growing rivalry
of Germany and Russia in the Balkans.
During
the period from
September 1939 to June 1940, Hitler had no political ambitions with
respect to the Balkans or the Soviet Union. From both he wanted nothing
more than the maximum supply of raw materials and a political peace
which would permit these goods to flow to Germany. Both areas
cooperated fully with Germany in economic matters, but fear of Germany
was so great that both areas also sought political changes which might
strengthen their ability to resist Germany at a later date. Hungarian
efforts to obtain support from Italy were not successful, as we have
seen, because Italy wavered between fear of Germany and recognition of
the fact that its own ambitions in the Balkans, the Mediterranean, or
Africa could be obtained only with German support. The Balkan Entente
sought support and military supplies from the Western Powers but could
obtain little, since these Powers believed that they did not have the
equipment to defend themselves. The only important step they took was a
military alliance with Turkey. This was signed with France and England
on October 19, 1939 in the form of a mutual-assistance pact, except
that Turkey could not be compelled to take up arms against Russia. This
last clause was inserted on Turkish insistence but was kept secret and,
in consequence, the Soviet Union was not reassured by the agreement.
In
the meantime the Soviet
Union took steps to defend itself against any attack from the Baltic.
In the period September 29-October 10, 1939, three of the Baltic
states, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, were forced to sign
military-assistance pacts with Russia. Estonia and Latvia provided
naval and air bases for Russian forces, while the City of Vilna was
given to Lithuania by Russia. About 25,000 Russian troops were
stationed in each of the three countries. Appeals from these countries
to Germany for support against Russia were summarily rejected, and they
were advised to yield to the Soviet demands. As part of the
reorganization of this area, Hitler on September 27th ordered that the
so-called "Balts" (German-speaking residents of the Baltic states)
should be moved to Germany as quickly as possible. This was done within
a month.
From
the Soviet point of view
Finland provided a much more important problem than any of the Baltic
states. The city of Leningrad, one of Russia's greatest industrial
centers with a population of 3,191,000 persons, was joined to the
Baltic Sea by the Gulf of Finland. This gulf, about 150 miles long and
so miles wide, ran west to east, with its northern and eastern shores
occupied by Finland and its southern shore largely Estonian. Leningrad,
at the extreme southeastern corner of the gulf, was at the southern end
of the Karelian Isthmus, a neck of land running north and south between
the gulf and Lake Ladoga, some 20 miles farther east. The Finnish
frontier crossed this isthmus from the gulf to Lake Ladoga only 20
miles north of Leningrad.
On
October 14th the Soviet
Union demanded that the Finnish frontier north of Leningrad be pushed
back along the shore of the gulf so that the frontier would run
westward from Lake Ladoga instead of southward as formerly. This would
put the Finnish frontier about 50 miles from Leningrad, leaving Finland
about half of the Karelian Isthmus. In addition, the Bolsheviks
demanded a 30-year lease on the Finnish naval base at Hangö at the
entrance to the Gulf of Finland, a strip about 100 miles long and 10
miles wide in central Finland (where the Finnish frontier came closest
to the railroad line between Leningrad and Russia's ice-free port of
Murmansk on the Arctic Sea), and a small area of about 25 square miles
where the Finnish frontier reached the Arctic Ocean west of Murmansk.
In return for these concessions Moscow offered a nonaggression pact,
about 2,100 square miles of wooded area in central Finland, and
permission to Finland to fortify the Aaland Islands between Finland and
Sweden, something which had been forbidden since 1921.
It
is not yet clear why
Finland rejected the Russian demands of October 1939. The Germans and
Russians believed that it was done under British influence, but the
evidence is not available. At any rate, the Finn asked for German
support and were rebuffed as early as October 6-7 1939 (before the
Russian demands were received); they ordered mobilization of their
armed forces against the Soviet Union on October 8th, and were reported
by the German minister to be "completely mobilized" ten days later. In
the negotiations Stalin abandoned the Soviet demand for Hangö if
he could get the Island of Russarö nearby and the island of
Suursaari farther up the gulf, but insisted on most of the Karelian
demand; the Finns offered about a third of the Karelian demand but
refused to grant any naval bases in the gulf. On November 8th the
discussions broke down; four days later the Finnish negotiators went
home. For some unexplained reason, the Finns seem to have felt that the
Russians would not attack their country, but the Soviets attacked at
several points on November 28th.
If
the Finns had
misinterpreted the Soviet determination to attack, the Soviets
misinterpreted the Finnish determination to resist. Although attacked
at five major points by large forces with heavy equipment, the Finns
made very skillful use of the terrain and the winter weather. In the
first two months (December-January) a half-dozen or more Soviet
divisions were torn to pieces. Only in February 1940 did the Soviet
offensive begin to move, and by the end of the month Finland's forces
were so exhausted by superior numbers that they accepted the Soviet
terms. Peace was signed on March 12, 1940.
As
soon as Finland realized
that Russia seriously intended to attack, it set up a new Cabinet under
Risto Ryti to wage the war and simultaneously seek peace by
negotiation. This latter proved to be difficult because on December
2nd, Moscow set up a puppet Finnish government under a minor and
discredited Finnish Communist in exile, V. Kuusinen; a mutual-aid pact
was signed with this puppet state at once. The existence of this regime
discouraged Germany from offering any mediation seeking peace, in spite
of its eagerness to see the end of the fighting in Finland, but on
March 12th, when peace was made with the authentic Finnish government,
Kuusinen was simply left in the lurch by Moscow.
The
Soviet attack on Finland
provided the leaders in the Entente countries with a heaven-sent
opportunity to change the declared but un-fought war with Germany,
which they did not want, into an undeclared but fighting war against
the Soviet Union. The fact that a Russian war would be hundreds of
miles away, while the war with Germany was on their doorstep, was an
added advantage, especially in Paris, which had been steadily resisting
British suggestions for any unfriendly action against Germany along the
Rhine. Accordingly, Britain and France resurrected the moribund League
of Nations, violated the Covenant to put Finland, Egypt, and South
Africa on the Council, and illegally (according to the American Journal
of International Law) expelled Russia from the League as an aggressor.
That
Russia was an unprovoked
aggressor is beyond question, but there was at least a surface
inconsistency between the violence of the Anglo-French reaction against
Russian aggression in 1939 and the complacency with which they had
viewed other aggressions in 1931-1939. This last act of the League of
Nations was its most efficient. Although the League's consideration of
the Japanese aggression in China had required fifteen months and
resulted in no punishment, Russia was condemned in eleven days in
December 1939. The German aggressions of 1936-1939 had not even been
submitted to the League of Nations, and the Italian seizure of Albania
had been recognized by Britain with unseemly haste earlier in 1939, but
the Anglo-French leaders now prepared to attack the Soviet Union both
from Finland and from Syria.
In
the north, every effort was
made by France and Britain to turn the Soviet attack on Finland into a
general war against Russia. On December 19, 1939, the Supreme War
Council decided to provide Finland with "all indirect assistance in
their power" and to use diplomatic pressure on Norway and Sweden to aid
Finland against Russia. The Scandinavian countries w-ere informed of
this on December 27th. On February 5, 1940, the Supreme War Council
decided to send to Finland an expeditionary force of 100,000 heavily
armed troops to fight the Soviet hordes. Germany at once warned Norway
and Sweden that it would take action against them if the two
Scandinavian countries permitted passage of this force.
Germany
and Russia were both
eager to end the Finnish fighting before any Anglo-French intervention
could begin, the former because it feared that Anglo-French forces in
Scandinavia would be able to stop shipments of Swedish iron ore across
Norway to Germany through the seaport of Narvik, the Russians because
they were convinced of an Anglo-French desire to attack them. The
evidence supports both of these fears.
Because
of its very high
quality, Swedish iron ore was essential to the ,German steel industry.
In 1938 Germany imported almost 22 million tons of ore, of which almost
nine million tons came from Sweden and over five million came from
France. A German-Swedish trade agreement of December 22, 1939, promised
that Sweden would ship ten million tons of ore in 1940, of which two or
three million would go by way of Narvik. As early as September 1939,
the British were discussing a project to interrupt the Narvik shipments
either by an invasion of Norway or by mining Norwegian territorial
waters. When Germany heard of the Anglo-French expeditionary force
being prepared to cross Norway to Finland, it assumed that this was
merely an excuse to cut off the ore shipments. Accordingly, Germany
began to prepare its own plans to seize Norway first.
As
a matter of fact, the
Anglo-French expeditionary force was really intended to attack Russia,
but it was unable to arrive on time, although Britain and France did
all they could to force Finland to continue to fight until they could
arrive on the scene. In February word was sent that if Finland made
peace the two Western Powers would not be bound to support Finnish
independence after the great war ended. On January 3rd the British
ambassador was withdrawn from Moscow. On February 26th Lord Halifax
rejected a Soviet request that Britain convey its peace terms to
Finland; they had to be sent through Sweden instead. On March 4th
Daladier and Lord Ironsides formally promised Finland an expeditionary
force of 57,000 men. The Scandinavian countries put pressure on Finland
not to ask for troops, and informed Britain that they would tear up
their railroad tracks if the expeditionary force tried to cross.
When
the request from the
Finns did not arrive, Daladier, on March 8th, sent them a threatening
message which said: "I assure you once more, we are ready to give our
help immediately. The airplanes are ready to take off. The operational
force is ready. If Finland does not now make her appeal to the Western
Powers, it is obvious that at the end of the war the Western Powers
cannot assume the slightest responsibility for the final settlement
regarding Finnish territory."
According
to the Finnish
foreign minister, V. Tanner, Daladier at this time told the Finnish
military attache in Paris that if Finland stopped fighting Russia, the
Western Powers would make peace with Germany. According to the same
authority, Anglo-French agents did all they could, up to the final
moment, to prevent or to disrupt the Soviet-Finnish peace negotiations,
and had made plans to cross Scandinavia, even without permission, and
to use any Finnish appeal for an expeditionary force as a weapon to
arouse the Scandinavian people to overthrow their own governments. The
Swedish prime minister, in return, threatened to fight on the side of
Russia against any Entente effort to force a transit. When the Finnish
request did not come, Britain, on March 12th, informed Norway and
Sweden that it had arrived, and made a formal request for transit
across the two countries. This was refused, and Finland made peace the
same day.
The
Soviet-Finnish Peace
Treaty of March 12, 1940 was made at the insistence of the Finnish
commander in chief, Baron Mannerheim, although it was much more severe
than the Russian demands of October. In addition to the areas in the
north and the naval base at Hangö, the Soviet aggressors took many
of the islands of the Gulf of Finland and the whole of the Karelian
Isthmus, including all the shores of Lake Ladoga. These gains made it
possible for Russia to bring both official and unofficial pressure on
Finland to influence its foreign and domestic policy. To resist this
steady pressure, Finland began, in August 1940, secret military
conversations with Germany.
The
failure of the
Anglo-French expeditionary force to reach Finland does not mean that no
aid reached the Finns. Germany refused all aid, and intercepted most of
Italy's aid, releasing it again once peace had been made. The Western
Powers, however, encouraged volunteers to go and sent much valuable
equipment. Early in March, Chamberlain wrote to his sister about
Finnish aid as follows: "They began by asking for fighter planes, and
we sent all the surplus we could lay hands on. They asked for AA guns,
and again we stripped our own imperfectly-armed home defenses to help
them. They asked for small arms ammunition, and we gave them priority
over our own army. They asked for later types of planes, and we sent
them 12 Hurricanes; against the will and advice of our Air Staff. They
said that men were no good now, but that they would want 30,000 in the
spring."
The
Soviet-Finnish treaty of
March 12th did not put an end to the Anglo-French projects to attack
Russia or to cross Scandinavia. Anger against both the Soviet Union and
the Scandinavian countries remained high in Paris and London. The
Finnish expeditionary force was kept together in England, where its
existence gave a powerful incentive to the German project to invade
Norway before Britain did so. On April 5th, only four days before the
German attack on Norway, Lord Halifax sent a note to Norway and Sweden
threatening these countries with dire, if unstated, consequences at the
hands of Britain if they refused to cooperate with the Western Powers
in sending aid to Finland "in whatever manner they may see fit" in any
future Soviet attack on Finland.
Six
days later, two days after
Germany's aggression against Denmark and Norway, General Weygand was
ordered to attack the Soviet Union from Syria. This project had been
initiated on January 19, 1940, when Daladier ordered General Gamelin
and Admiral Jean Darlan to draw up plans to bomb Russia's Caucasian oil
fields from Syria. These plans were submitted on February z2nd but were
held up in favor of the Finnish project; on April 11th, a month after
the Soviet-Finnish peace, the new French premier, Reynaud, ordered
General Weygand to carry out the raid on the Soviet oil wells of the
Caucasus as soon as possible. Weygand was unable to do this before the
end of June. By that time France had been defeated by Germany, and
Britain was in no position to attack any new enemies.
The German
Attack on Denmark and Norway, April 1940
Hitler's
orders to attack
France through the Netherlands and Belgium were issued on October 9,
1939, and the date of the attack was set for November 8th. This was
postponed on November 7th; between that date and May loth, the order to
attack was given and revoked a half-dozen times because of adverse
weather conditions and lack of munitions. Each of these order was
reported to the West through the Dutch military attache in Berlin, but,
as no attack eventuated, it is probable that faith in this informant
declined.
Information
also came from
other sources. One order to attack was reported to the West by Count
Ciano, the Italian foreign minister, but the Italians were dependent on
their own spies, since they could get no information from Hitler, and
did not know of the date which was finally used on May 10th. In January
a German plane with operational orders for the attack made an emergency
landing in Belgium; the orders were captured before they could be
destroyed completely. This caused great alarm in the West, but no one
could be sure if the captured documents were authentic or part of a
Nazi false alarm.
In
the meantime, from December
1939, onward, plans to invade Norway were prepared at the insistence of
the German admirals. These plans were made in cooperation with Major
Vidkun Quisling, a former Norwegian minister of war and leader of the
insignificant Nazi Party in Norway. Formal orders were issued by Hitler
on March 1, 1940 to occupy both Denmark and Norway. Violations of
Norwegian neutrality by both sides in the early months of 1940
influenced these plans very little. In February the British Navy
intercepted the German prison ship Altmark in
Norwegian waters and released about three hundred British sailors who
had been captured by the German commerce raider Graf Spee;
on April 7th the British placed a minefield in Norwegian waters to
interrupt the flow of Swedish iron ore down the western coast of Norway
from Narvik to Germany. But by that time the German operations had
begun.
Denmark
yielded to a German
ultimatum on April 8th as German divisions overran the country; and
seaborne forces landed in Copenhagen harbor. The same morning secret
German agents inside Norway and troops smuggled into Norwegian harbors
in merchant vessels seized Norwegian airfields, radio stations, and
docks. They were supported at once by airborne infantry in Oslo and
Stavanger and by seaborne forces at Oslo, Trondheim, Bergen, and
Narvik. Although German naval losses were large, including three
cruisers and eleven destroyers, the operation was a complete success.
Oslo was captured in its sleep the first day, and the Luftwaffe had air
supremacy over most of Norway by the end of that day.
The
Allied expeditionary force
which had been prepared for Finland, with some additional forces from
France, was committed to Norway in a scattered and piecemeal fashion,
chiefly around Trondheim and Narvik. The Trondheim expedition was badly
bungled and had to be evacuated to sea on May 1st; the Narvik
expedition captured that city on May 27th but began to evacuate, taking
the Norwegian royal family with it, a week later. In the operation,
British naval losses were heavy, and included the aircraft carrier Glorious.
The
Norwegian fiasco brought
Britain's increasingly restive public opinion to the boiling point. In
the parliamentary debate of May 7-lo, Chamberlain feebly defended his
policies, but was subjected to a devastating attack from all sides. The
high point was reached when Leopold Amery, repeating Cromwell's words
to the Long Parliament, cried at Chamberlain: "You have sat too long
here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say—let us have
done with you. In the name of God, go!" In the following vote of
confidence Chamberlain w-as victorious, 281-200, but his nominal
majority of 200 had fallen to t31, equivalent to a defeat. The next
day, May 9, 1940, the Speaker was very busy preventing the Honorable
Members from continuing their attack on Chamberlain. On May loth, at
dawn, the German armies struck westward against the Netherlands,
Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. Chamberlain resigned, and was replaced
by a national government under Winston Churchill.
After
forty years of
parliamentary life, during much of which he had been the best-hated man
in the House of Commons, Churchill's arrival to the highest political
office was received by Englishmen with a sigh of relief. Right or
wrong, fairly or unfairly, Churchill had always been a fighter and, in
May 1940, as the German armies swept westward, what the forces of
decency and democracy needed was a fighter, to provide a nucleus about
which those who wished to resist tyranny and horror could rally. In his
first speech, the new prime minister provided such a nucleus: all he
had to offer was "blood, toil, tears and sweat.... Our only aim is
victory," he said, "for without victory there is no survival."
Chapter 50—The Fall of France, (May-June
1940)and the Vichy Regime
In
the next six months neither
victory nor survival seemed very likely for the West. The German forces
which attacked on May 10th were inferior in manpower to the forces
which faced them but were much more unified, used their equipment in an
effective fashion, and had a single plan which they proceeded to carry
out. Amounting to about 136 divisions, they were opposed by 156
divisions, but the defenders were divided into four different national
armies, were arranged improperly, were given tasks too difficult for
their size and equipment and, in general, were so managed that their
weakest points coincided completely with the most powerful German
attacks.
The
French plan of campaign
was dominated by two factors: the Maginot Line and Plan D. The Maginot
Line, an elaborate and expensive system of permanent fortifications,
ran from Switzerland to Montmédy. Behind this line, where they
could not be used in the great battle drawing near, were stationed 62
of 102 French divisions on this frontier. From Montmédy to the
sea, France had 40 divisions, plus the British Expeditionary Force of
lo divisions. According to Plan D, the anticipated German attack on the
Low Countries was to he met by the Allied forces north of
Montmédy advancing as rapidly as possible to meet the enemy. If
the Belgian Army of 20 divisions were successful in holding up the
German advance, it was hoped that a new Belgian-British-French line
could be formed along the Dyle River or even forty miles farther north
along the Albert Canal; if the Belgian defense were less successful,
the new line was to be formed along the Scheldt River, fifty miles
behind the Dyle. To carry out this rapid movement as soon as the German
attack was announced, the French placed their best and fastest
divisions on the extreme left (in Henri Giraud's Seventh Army) and
their poorest divisions close to the end of the Maginot Line (in
André Corap's Ninth Army), where they were expected to make a
relatively short advance to take a position between Sedan and Namur
along the Meuse River. Once this Plan D advance into the Low Countries
had been achieved' it was expected that the new line, from the sea to
Longwy (deep in the Maginot Line), would stand as follows:
Netherlands
forces—10 divisions
Giraud's
Seventh Army—7 divisions
Belgian
forces—20 divisions
Lord
Gort's British Expeditionary Force—10 divisions
Jean
Blanchard's First Army—6 divisions
Corap's
Ninth Army—9 divisions
Charles
Huntziger's Second Army—7 divisions
Originally
the German plans
were, as the French anticipated, a modified version of the Schliefen
Plan of 1905, involving a wide sweep through the Low Countries. The
false alarms of a German attack in the winter of 1939-1940 revealed to
the Germans, however, that the Allies would meet this attack by a rapid
advance into Belgium. Accordingly, at the suggestion of General Erich
von Manstein, the Germans modified their plans to encourage the Allied
advance into Belgium while the Germans planned to strike with their
greatest strength at Sedan, the pivot of the Allied turning movement.
Such an assault at Sedan made it necessary for the German forces to
pass over the narrow, winding roads of the Ardennes Forest, then to
cross the deep and swift Meuse River, and to break between Corap's and
Huntziger's forces, but, if this could be done and Sedan taken,
excellent roads and a railroad ran from Sedan westward across France to
the sea.
Under
the "Manstein Plan" the
German attack from the North Sea to Sedan was organized in four armies.
In the north, the Netherlands was attacked by the German Eighteenth
Army (one panzer and four infantry divisions); in the middle, Belgium
was attacked by the German Sixth Army (two panzer and 15 infantry
divisions) and the German Fourth Army (two panzer and 12 infantry
divisions); farther south, in the Ardennes area, France was attacked by
the German Twelfth Army (five panzer and four other divisions); from
Sedan to Switzerland, although Germany had about 30 divisions, all were
infantry formations and no major offensive was made.
The
"Manstein Plan" was a
total surprise to the French. They were so convinced that the Ardennes
were impassable for large forces, especially for tanks, that everything
was done to make the German task easier: Corap and Huntziger placed
their poorest forces (six Series B divisions, undermanned, with little
training) on either side of Sedan and their best forces on their fronts
most remote from the Ardennes (that is, from Sedan). In Huntziger's
case these better divisions were behind the Maginot Line itself.
Because of the Ardennes, Corap gave his four poor divisions near Sedan
no antitank guns, no antiaircraft guns, and no air support (reserving
these for his high-quality divisions forty miles farther north), and
expected them to defend a front of ten miles per division (while the
French Third Army, deep behind the Maginot Line, had a front of 1.8
miles per division). Moreover, Corap's poor divisions were not
stationed on the Meuse, but two days' march to the west of it, and were
required, once the German attack began, to race the Germans to the
intervening river.
The
German attack began at
5:35 on May loth. Two days later the panzer division with the German
Eighteenth Army broke through the Dutch defenses and began to join up
with parachute and airborne forces which had been dropped behind these;
the Netherlands collapsed. The Dutch field forces surrendered on May
14th, after much of the center of Rotterdam had been destroyed in a
twenty-minute air attack. The Netherlands royal family and the
government moved to England to continue the war.
The
great mass of the German
attack fell on Belgium, and was greatly aided by the failure of many
ordinary defensive precautions. Vital bridges over the Meuse and the
Albert Canal were destroyed only partly or not at all. The defenders on
the Albert Canal were attacked from the rear by parachutists and glider
forces which had been landed behind them. The powerful fort of Eben
Emael, covering the canal bridges, was captured by airborne volunteers
who landed on its roof and destroyed its gun apertures with explosives.
Belgium's forces fell backward toward the Dyle as the French and
British units, according to Plan D, wheeled northeastward, on Sedan as
a pivot, to meet them. As the Belgian forces withdrew northwest, while
the German attack swung southwest, the main burden of the German
assault now fell on the French First Army, to pin it down and thus
prevent it from reinforcing Corap farther south. In this the Germans
were successful; on May I:th, as news of the breakthrough at Sedan
became known, Gamelin ordered all forces in Belgium to fall backward
from the Dyle Line toward the Scheldt.
The
attack through the
Ardennes on Corap's Ninth Army was made by a special German force of
five panzer and three motorized divisions under General Paul von
Kleist. These passed through the forest and crossed the Meuse to fling
themselves on the right side of Corap's inexperienced divisions. By the
evening of May 15th, Corap's army had been "volatilized," and the
German spearhead was racing forward thirty-five miles west of Sedan.
The misplaced French Sixth Army, in reserve 300 miles south near Lyon,
began to move toward the breach, while General Giraud, with three
divisions from the Seventh Army, was ordered from the extreme
northwest, and seven other divisions were taken from the forces behind
the Maginot Line. All these arrived too late, because von Kleist's
advance units crossed France and reached the sea at Abbeville on May
20th, having covered 220 miles in eleven days. No coordinated attack
was ever made on this thin extended line, although orders were issued
for it to be attacked both from the north and the south.
The
Allied forces retreating
southward from Belgium were greatly hampered by masses of refugees
clogging the roads, were constantly harassed by Stukas, and had lost
communication between units. There was almost no contact or cooperation
between the French, British, and Belgians in the north, or between
these and the French forces south of Kleist's breakthrough. Panic swept
Paris. On May 16th sixteen French generals, including Gamelin, were
dismissed, and the command given to Weygand, who did not arrive from
Syria until May 20th. During this period, evacuation of the government
to Tours was ordered, and the secret archives of the Foreign Ministry
were burned in bonfires on the lawns of the Quai d'Orsay.
On
May 17th Reynaud replaced
Daladier as minister of national defense and generally shook up the
government, replacing many weak men by defeatists, appeasers, and
Fascist sympathizers. The chief new face was that of Marshal
Pétain, eighty-three years old, the man chiefly responsible for
the inadequacy of French military planning in the inter-war period.
Pétain was recalled from the ambassadorship in Madrid to be
vice-premier in the new Cabinet. Certain French politicians, including
Pierre Laval, hoped that Pétain might play a role in French
domestic politics such as Hindenburg had played in Germany: to protect
the organized vested interests of industry and business from changes by
the Left in a period of defeat.
Weygand
spent five days (May
20th-25th) in an unsuccessful effort to get a coordinated attack on
Kleist's salient. On May 25th-26th, Kleist, moving up the coast from
the Somme, on the rear of the northern Allied forces, captured Boulogne
and Calais, leaving Dunkerque as the only major port on the Allied
rear. Withdrawal to this port was threatened by a German break through
the Belgian Army toward Ypres. On May 27th, King Leopold of Belgium
made an unconditional surrender of his armies to the Germans, over the
objections of the Belgian civil government and without making certain
that the Allied Command had been informed. The British Expeditionary
Force at once began to evacuate the Continent through Dunkerque.
In
seven days, using 887 water
craft of all types and sizes, 337,131 men were taken off the beaches at
Dunkerque under relentless air bombardment (May 28th-June 4th). By
Hitler's direct order, no intensive ground attack was made on the
Allied forces within the Dunkerque perimeter, as Hitler was convinced
that Britain would make peace as soon as France was defeated, and
wished to save his dwindling armored forces and munitions for the
attack on the rest of France. In the interval before this new attack,
Weygand tried to form a new line along the Somme and Aisne rivers from
the sea to the Maginot Line and to eliminate three bridgeheads the
Germans already held south of the Somme.
The
Battle of France began on June 5th
with German attacks on the western and eastern ends of the "Weygand
Line." By June 8th the western end had been broken, and German forces
began to move to the rear of the Somme defenses. As the line collapsed
and the military forces fell back, they disintegrated among packed
masses of civilian refugees, hurried onward by German dive-bombers.
Paris and later all cities of France were declared open cities, not to
be defended. Just as in Kleist's original breakthrough, no effort was
made to hold up the Germans by road obstacles, civilian resistance,
house-to-house fighting, destruction of supplies, or (above all)
destruction of abandoned gasoline. The German armored units roamed at
will on captured fuel.
On
June 12th Weygand requested
the French government to seek an armistice; Reynaud refused to permit
any civilian surrender, since this was forbidden by an Anglo-French
agreement of March 12, 1940. Instead, he gave permission for a military
capitulation, if the civil government continued the war from French
North Africa or from overseas bases, as Norway, the Netherlands, and
Belgium were doing. Pétain, Weygand, and their supporters
refused to leave France. They also flatly rejected any military
capitulation, for they wanted to end the fighting with an armistice
which would allow France to maintain a French Army as a guarantee
against any economic or social changes in France.
There
was also considerable
pressure behind the scenes from anti-democratic French industrialists
in monopolistic lines such as chemicals, light metals, synthetic
fibers, and electrical utilities. These industrialists, together with
politicians like Laval and private or commercial banks, like the Banque
Worms, or the Banque de l'Indochine, had been negotiating cartel and
other agreements with Germany for ten years, and felt an armistice
would offer a splendid opportunity to complete and enforce these
agreements.
As
the military collapse
continued, piteous appeals for help were sent to London and to
Washington. Reynaud sent eighteen messages to Churchill asking for more
air support, but could obtain none, as the British War Cabinet wished
to save all the planes it still had for the defense of Britain after
the French collapse. Appeals to Roosevelt were no more successful; 150
planes and 2,000 75-mm. cannons were sent, but they sailed from Halifax
only on June 17th and were at sea when the fighting ceased.
The
chief concern in London
and Washington was over the fate of the French fleet and of French
North and West Africa, especially Dakar. If Hitler obtained the French
fleet or any considerable portion of it, British and American security
would be in acute jeopardy. The French fleet was of high quality and
included two new battleships (Richelieu and Jean Bart) which had just
been built but were not yet in service. Such a navy, in combination
with the German and Italian navies, might destroy Britain's sea
defenses and force a British surrender. This would place America in
great danger, as American security in the Atlantic had been preserved
by the British fleet since 1818 and, by 1940, the whole American battle
fleet had to be kept in the Pacific to face Japan.
Only
less immediate than these
dangers was the threat to both British and American security from a
German occupation of French North and West Africa. This would close the
British route through the Mediterranean immediately and allow the
Italian forces in Libya to invade Egypt with relative impunity. The
possession of Dakar by German forces would provide a base from which
submarines could attack the British route to the East by way of South
Africa and might permit an attack on Brazil, only 1,700 miles west of
Dakar.
With
these considerations in
mind, Washington and London did all they could to dissuade Mussolini
from attacking France and to persuade the French to avoid any armistice
which might yield either French Africa or the French fleet to Hitler.
Eventually Britain gave permission to France to seek an armistice if
the fleet sailed to British ports. This was rejected by the French
military and naval authorities. As a final effort, Churchill, on June
16th, offered France a political union with Britain, involving joint
Anglo-French citizenship and a joint Cabinet. This was never considered
by the French.
As
the military debacle
continued to grow and Reynaud would not make a separate peace and could
not get a Cabinet agreement to withdraw overseas, he resigned (June
16th) and was replaced by a new government headed by Marshal
Pétain. The old man, surrounded by defeatists and appeasers who
had been intriguing for deals with the Nazis for years, at once asked
for an armistice, and issued an ambiguous public statement which led
some French units to cease fighting immediately. On June loth Italy had
declared war, but was unable to make any important military advances
against French resistance. On June 14th the Germans entered Paris, the
French government having moved to Tours on June 14th and continuing to
Bordeaux on June 15th.
The
armistice negotiations
were conducted in the same railway carriage at Compiègne in the
forest of Rethondes where Germany had surrendered in 1918; they took
three days, and went into effect on June 25th. Hitler was so convinced
that Britain would also make peace that he gave surprisingly lenient
terms to France. In spite of Mussolini's demands, France did not have
to give up any overseas territory or any ports on the Mediterranean, no
naval vessels or any airplanes or armaments to be used against England.
Northern France and all the western coast to the Pyrenees came under
occupation, but the rest was left unoccupied, ruled by a government
free from direct German control and policed by French armed forces. The
chief burden of the surrender came from three provisions: ( 1) the
division of the country into two zones, with about two-thirds of French
productive capacity in the occupied zone; (1) all French prisoners of
war, amounting to almost two million men, were to remain in German
hands until the final peace treaty, while German prisoners were to be
released at once; and (3) all the expenses of the German occupation
were to be paid by unoccupied France. The two zones were sealed off so
completely that even postal communication was reduced to a minimum;
this crippled the economy of the unoccupied part. The
expenses of
the army of occupation were set at the outrageous sum of 400 million
francs a day. Moreover, by fixing the exchange rate at one reichsmark
for 20 francs, in place of the prewar rate of one for eleven francs, it
became possible for the occupying forces to buy goods very cheaply in
France, thus draining wealth to Germany.
The
governmental system of
Vichy France was a kind of bureaucratic tyranny. Pierre Laval pushed
through a series of constitutional laws which ended the Third Republic
and the parliamentary system, combining in the hands of Marshal
Pétain the joint functions of head of the state (formerly held
by the president) and head of the government (formerly held by the
prime minister), with the right to legislate by decree. Laval was
designated as Pétain's successor in holding these powers, and
the parliamentary chambers were dismissed.
In
spite of this appearance of
centralized authority, the government as a whole operated on the basis
of whim and intrigue, the various ministers following mutually
inconsistent policies and seeking to extend these by increasing their
influence over Pétain. The procrastinations, suspicions,
ambiguities, and secrecies of the marshal himself make it difficult to
determine what his own policy was, or even if he had one. It seems
likely that he followed various policies simultaneously, allowing his
legal powers to be exercised by quite dissimilar subordinates in an
effort to achieve a few clearly defined aims. These aims seem to have
been four in number, in decreasing importance: (1) to maintain, at all
costs, the independence of unoccupied France; (2) to secure the
release, as rapidly as possible, of the prisoners of war; (3) to reduce
the financial charges of the occupation forces; and (4) to reduce, bit
by bit, the barriers between the occupied and unoccupied zones.
The
ideology of Vichy was a
typical Fascist melange of nationalism, social-solidarity,
anti-Semitism, anti-democracy, anti-Communism, opposition to class
conflicts, to liberalism, or to secularism, with resounding blasts on
the virtues of discipline, self-sacrifice, authority, and repentance;
but all these things meant very little either to the rulers or the
ruled of the new regime. In general, corruption and intrigue, idealism
and self-sacrifice were about as prevalent under Vichy as they had been
under the Third Republic, but secrecy was more successful, civil
liberties were absent, the distance between propaganda and behavior
was, if anything, wider, and hypocrisy replaced cynicism as the chief
vice of politicians. The two strongest characteristics of the regime,
which made it sufficiently solid to continue to function, were negative
ones: hatred of the Third Republic and hatred of England. But these
ideas were too negative and too remote from the problems of day-to-day
existence to provide very satisfactory guides to Vichy policy. As a
result, there was complete confusion of policy.
Some
leaders, and these the
less influential, like Weygand, were resolutely anti-German, and were
patiently awaiting the day when Vichy could turn against the German
conquerors. Others, and these the more influential, like Laval or
Admiral Darlan, had faith in a final German victory over Britain, and
felt that France must accept the inevitable hegemony of Germany but try
to secure for itself a privileged position as "favorite satellite."
While Pétain's personal views were probably closer to those of
Weygand, his pessimistic and defeatist personality led him to embrace
the other point of view as a necessary evil. Accordingly, under German
pressure he removed Weygand from all participation in public life
(November 1941) and accepted Laval and later Darlan as his chief
advisers and designated successors. In this situation Darland had an
advantage over Laval, in view of Pétain's personal inclinations,
for Laval was a wholehearted and frank advocate of collaboration with
Hitler, while Darlan was a much more devious and ambiguous personality,
and thus closer to Pétain's own character and policy.
Accordingly, Laval was named foreign minister and successor in July
1940, but was removed from office, as unduly pro-German, on December
13, 1940. Darlan, who had been minister of the navy, became foreign
minister, vice-premier, minister of the interior, successor-designate
and chief adviser to Pétain in February 1941 and held these
positions until April 1942; at that date Hitler forced Pétain to
make Laval head of the government with full powers in both internal and
external affairs.
The
policy of Vichy France can
hardly be called a success under Pétain, Darlan, or Laval. Some
of the basic assumptions on which the regime had been founded proved to
be false. Britain did not surrender. Efforts to collaborate
with
Hitler did not succeed in releasing the prisoners of war, in reducing
the costs of occupation, or in lowering the barriers between the two
zones of France. More than a million prisoners were still in German
hands in January 1944. In addition, large numbers of French civilians
were forced to go to labor in Germany. In spite of all kinds of
resistance, the number of these reached 650,000 by late 1943. The
occupation payments were reduced from 400 million to 300 million francs
a day in May 1942, but were increased again, to 500 million in November
1942, and finally to 700 million a day in July 1944. In forty-five
months (to April 1944) France paid 536,000 million francs of these
charges. Such payments resulted in a completely unbalanced budget and
extreme inflation. Futile efforts to control this
inflation by
price-fixing, wage-fixing, and rationing gave rise to enormous
black-market transactions and widespread corruption, to the great
profit of both German and Vichy officials. The latter did not even
retain the satisfaction of believing that the armistice had preserved
the integrity of France and of its empire, for Alsace-Lorraine was, in
fact if not in law, annexed to Germany, and most of the overseas empire
fell out of Vichy control in 1942. Lorraine was Germanized, and those
inhabitants who remained loyal to France or to French culture were
persecuted and exiled, hundreds of thousands coming as refugees to
unoccupied France.
The
continued resistance of
Britain, the treatment of Alsace-Lorraine, the growing economic strain,
and, above all, Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 led to
the growth of an anti-German underground resistance in France. Russia's
involvement in the war shifted the Communists throughout the world, as
if by magic, from a pro-German, antiwar policy to an anti-German,
pro-war policy. Their discipline and fanaticism gradually made them the
dominant influence in the resistance, in France, and elsewhere in
Europe.
British
and American policies
toward Vichy France, as toward Franco Spain or neutral Russia, were
parallel but Tar from identical. London, which broke off diplomatic
relations with the new French regime in June 1940, followed a severe
policy but at the same time sought to win France back into some kind of
anti-Nazi resistance. Vichy weakness made this a hopeless task. At the
same time, London tried to build up General de Gaulle, as leader of the
"Free French," into a diluted French government-in-exile, although De
Gaulle's uncooperative personality and arrogant pride made this a
difficult and unpalatable task. De Gaulle obtained little support in
the French Empire and almost none in France itself, but continued to
enjoy a certain measure of British support.
In
Washington, on the other
hand, De Gaulle obtained almost no support. The United States continued
to recognize the Vichy regime, with Roosevelt sending Admiral Leahy as
his personal representative to Pétain and Robert Murphy as his
special agent in North Africa. In general the United States encouraged
France, offered certain economic concessions, especially in North
Africa, and sought little more than steadfast adherence to the
armistice terms and continued withholding of the fleet and empire from
Nazi hands. Both the United States and Britain made numerous secret and
special agreements with various representatives of the Vichy government
but achieved very little. An agreement of February 26, 1941, between
Robert Murphy and General Weygand did allow the United States, in
return for certain commercial promises, to maintain consular
"observers" in North Africa. These observers obtained large amounts of
valuable military and economic information for the United States and
Britain during the months preceding the Allied invasion of North Africa
on November 8, 1942.
Chapter
51—The Battle of Britain, July-October 1940
The
collapse of France was one
of the most astonishing events in European history. For weeks, or even
months, millions of persons in all parts of the world were stunned,
walking about in a painful fog. Equally important, although not
recognized at the time, was the determination of Britain to go on
fighting. Hitler, who had won a victory surpassing his expectations,
could not end the war, and was left without plans for continuing it. He
began to improvise such plans without adequate information to make them
good and without adequate preparation for carrying them out. If Germany
had concentrated on building submarines, the newly acquired U-boat
bases in Norway, in the Low Countries, and in France might have made it
possible to blockade Britain into surrender, but Hitler rejected this
plan. Instead he ordered an invasion of Britain (Operation Sealion), a
project in which no German, not even Hitler himself, had much
confidence.
At
the same time, Britain's
refusal to make peace revealed to the full the inadequacies of the
French armistice. Hitler sought to remedy these by a project to capture
Gibraltar (Operation Felix). Sealion and Felix required Hitler's active
attention from July to November 1940. In the first half of December,
Hitler put Sealion and Felix aside and replaced them with two new
projects. The new projects sought to conquer all the Balkans (Operation
Marita) and to attack the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa). These
went into operation in April-June 1941.
Hitler's
change of plans in
December 1940 was a consequence of four influences: (1) it was, by that
time, clear that Sealion could not be carried out; (2) Franco's refusal
to cooperate had made Felix impractical; ( 3 ) Mussolini's foolish
attempts to conquer Egypt and Greece had opened a hornets' nest in the
eastern Mediterranean; and (4 there was growing tension, much of it in
Hitler's own mind, between Germany and the Soviet Union.
Operation
Sealion was beyond
Germany's strength, but no one saw this at the time. It required, as a
first necessity, air supremacy for the Luftwaffe over southern England.
Following this, the invasion would require a large flotilla of invasion
craft to carry men and supplies across a lengthy stretch of water and
to assemble these forces in combat formation in England. The German
Navy was in no position to defend such a flotilla against the British
Navy with minefields and to preserve both the invasion flotilla and the
minefields by German air superiority.
Britain
had adequate manpower,
including the men evacuated from France and thousands of anti-Nazi
refugees from overrun countries, but had little heavy equipment and
certainly had only a fraction of the thirty-nine divisions the Germans
estimated to he the size of the defensive forces. These forces were
hurriedly prepared; barbed wire and mines were placed on all the
landing beaches; watchers were stationed everywhere; all road signs
which might guide the invaders were removed; and all able-bodied men,
many armed only with fowling guns, were drilled for defense against
parachutists. Fortunately, none of these defensive measures ever had to
be tested, because Germany was unable to win air superiority over
England.
Although
air superiority had
not yet been achieved by Germany, orders for the invasion were issued
at the middle of July, the date was finally fixed at September 21st,
but it was postponed, temporarily on September 17th and indefinitely on
October 12th. The attacks of the Luftwaffe were directed successively,
from July 10th to the end of October, at coastal defenses, at R.A.F.
installations, and at London itself. very heavy damage was inflicted on
England, but the losses to the German Air Force were more significant,
reaching 1,733 planes witl1 their pilots in three and a half months. In
the same period, the British dead reached 375 pilots and over 14,000
civilians. The greatest loss for the Germans in one day was 76 planes
on August Isth, but the turning point of the battle came on September
15th when 56 invading planes were shot down.
The
counterattack of the
R.A.F. on German bases was also very successful; hundreds of invasion
craft, in some cases loaded with German soldiers under training, were
destroyed. As the Battle of Britain drew to its close in October 1940,
the Germans shifted to night bombing of British cities. This practice
continued, night after night, with fearful destruction and great loss
of life, until Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. During
that time, millions of city dwellers, deprived of their sleep, night
after night, or crowded into ill-ventilated underground shelters,
emerged each morning into scenes of conflagration and ruin to resume
their daily work at the war effort.
The
calm courage and
methodical devotion to duty of the average Englishman ended Hitler's
sequence of diplomatic and military victories. and inflicted on Nazi
Germany its first and decisive defeat. The successful defense of
Britain, forcing Hitler to give up the project for invading England,
was the turning point of the European war. Coming as the first year of
war was ending, a year in which Hitler had achieved unprecedented
conquests, it ended any possibility of a short war, and forced the
Germans into a long struggle for which they had neither plans nor
resources.
The
defenders were victorious
in the Battle of Britain for six chief reasons: (1) the indomitable
spirit of the English people put surrender out of the question; (2)
British planes were equal in numbers and superior in quality to the
German planes; ( 3) British pilots were of better quality and with
better fighting spirit; (4) the British operational organization was
far superior; (5) fighting over their own land, British pilots could
usually be saved by parachuting; and (6) British scientific inventions
were far ahead of those of Germany. This sixth point is of vital
significance.
Radar
was used in scientific
experiments in Britain as early as 1924. Adapted for defense against
air attack in 1935, a chain of radar station, had been laid out in 1937
and began continuous operation in April 1939. Before war began in
September, these stations could detect most aircraft at distances up to
100 miles. Eventually a very elaborate centralized system could report
on all enemy planes over or near Britain. After the fa'.l of France,
special night-fighter planes with their own individual radar detectors
with a three-mile range were being provided. When they began to shoot
down German bombers in total darkness in December 1940, the Luftwaffe
did not know what was happening. By March 1940, effective radar-aiming
devices were being attached to antiaircraft guns on the ground. These
increased the effectiveness of such guns in shooting down enemy bombers
by fivefold. These new devices were so helpful that over 100 bombers
were shot down by night fighters in the winter of 1940 1941, and an
equal number by radar antiaircraft guns.
Science
was also applied to
the British night bombing raids on Germany, but at a much later date.
In 1940 and 1941 almost 45,000 tons of bombs were dropped on German
targets, but 90 percent fell harmlessly in fields. In 1941 new
navigational techniques, using intersecting radio beams from three
stations in England, were used to provide greater accuracy in
navigation for more planes. Using this method, Britain launched a
thousand-bomber raid on Cologne in May 1942. By the end of that year an
entirely new method was introduced; this had an accuracy of about one
yard per mile of distance from base, and could place over half of the
bombs dropped from 30,000 feet within 150 yards of the target at 250
miles' distance. About the same time (early 1943) radar was adapted to
allow bombers to see the target through night or clouds. As we have
already indicated, bomb damage, however great, had no decisive effects
on Germany's ability to wage war, but the growing effectiveness of
British and American bombing made it necessary for Germany to devote
increasing amounts of its resources and manpower to air defense and to
production of fighter planes, and, by drawing German planes back to
western Europe from Russia, aided the Russian defense very considerably.
Chapter 52—The Mediterranean and Eastern
Europe, 1940) June 1940-June 1941
The
collapse of France had a
shattering effect along the Soviet-German borderlands, from the Baltic
to the Aegean Sea. In the week following June 15, 1940, the Soviet
Union sent peremptory notes to Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia,
demanding that their governments be reorganized to include persons more
acceptable to the Kremlin. Since Soviet armed forces were already
within these states, and no hand of assistance was raised anywhere,
least of all in Berlin, the Baltic countries yielded to the Soviet
demands. In the first week of August, the three new governments held
elections, in typical Soviet fashion, with only a single list of
candidates; the newly elected parliaments at once sought, and obtained,
union with Soviet Russia as Socialist Soviet Republics.
Farther
south, Romania's hopes
that the Anglo-French guarantee of April 1939 might bring support from
Weygand's forces in Syria were dashed by Weygand's defeat in France. On
May 29, 1940, at a Romanian Crown Council, King Carol insisted that
protection must be sought elsewhere and that only an alignment with
Germany would permit Romania to resist any possible Soviet pressure. It
was felt that Germany's need for Romanian oil would make it very
unwilling to allow the war to spread to that area. Accordingly, Romania
abandoned its policy of neutrality and aligned itself with Germany, the
foreign minister, Grigore Gafencu, resigning in protest at the new
policy.
Romania
did not obtain the
benefits it had hoped from its change in policy. On June 26, 1940,
having previously notified Germany, the Soviet Union demanded
Bessarabia and northern Bukovina from Romania within twenty-four hours.
Germany protested against the demand for Bukovina, since this had not
been granted to Russia in the Nazi-Soviet Agreement of August 1939.
Otherwise Germany made no objection, although Hitler was personally
disturbed and had to he reassured hy Ribbentrop that he had actually
agreed to give Bessarabia to the Soviet Union.
The
loss of Bessarabia was a
severe blow to the more moderate leaders in Romania. But worse was yet
to come. On August 26th Hitler summoned Romanian leaders to Vienna and,
in the presence of Count Ciano and representatives of Hungary, forced
Romania to give two-thirds of Transylvania to Hungary. In return,
Germany gave Romania a guarantee of its new, reduced frontiers.
The
"Vienna Award" destroyed
the forces of moderation within Romania. Riots and assassinations
became the regular method of domestic political activity. These were
instigated very largely by the "Iron Guard," a reactionary anti-Semitic
political group which had been in a quasi-civil war with the Romanian
government since 1933, but had been suppressed by the strong-arm
tactics of King Carol. On September 5, 1940, an Iron Guard government
under Ion Antonescu took office in Bucharest. Its first act was to
depose the king and chase him into exile, replacing him on the throne
by his son Michael. Two days later, under indirect German pressure,
southern Dobruja was yielded to Bulgaria. Thus, in the space of a week,
the territorial gains Romania had made at the expense of three of her
neighbors in 1919 were largely canceled.
Moscow
protested against the
Vienna Award on the grounds that it had not been consulted and that no
guarantee of Romania by Germany was necessary. These protests were
rejected on the basis that Berlin had been informed of various Soviet
activities with equally small notice and that the guarantee was
necessary to forestall any possible British attack on the Romanian oil
fields. Shortly thereafter German military units began to move into
Romania, while Soviet units began to seize the uninhabited islands in
the mouths of the Danube. At the same time a German military occupation
of Finland began under the pretext that the forces in question were en
route to Norway (September 19th).
The
confusion following the
defeat of France spread quickly to the Mediterranean area. This was
dominated by two factors: (1) Mussolini's jealous determination to
obtain some glorious conquest in the Mediterranean to match Hitler's
impressive victories in the north, and (2) the complete inadequacy,
from Germany's point of view, of the terms of the French armistice. By
these terms neither Germany nor Italy obtained any units of the French
fleet, any naval bases in the Mediterranean, or any parts of the French
overseas territories. On June 24th, when the armistice was made, Hitler
had been so convinced that Britain would make peace that he had
neglected these items and had rebuffed Mussolini's efforts to include
them. Within a month, Hitler recognized his error and demanded from
France extensive military and naval bases and transport facilities in
North Africa (July 15, 1940). These demands were rejected by
Pétain at once..
Hitler
had little real
interest in the Mediterranean area at any time and simply hoped that it
would remain quiet. His personal belief, as soon as the invasion of
Britain became remote, was that Britain wished to hold out until the
Soviet Union became strong enougl1 to attack Germany from the east.
There is no evidence that the Soviet Union had any plans to do so, or
that it was in communication with Britain in any such project, however
remote, or that Hitler was afraid of Russia. On the contrary, the
Soviet Union became, if anything, increasingly cooperative toward
Germany, especially in the economic sphere, and by May 1941, was almost
obsequious; all efforts for improved Anglo-Soviet understanding were
rejected until after June 22, 1941; and Hitler, far from being fearful
of the Soviet Union, despised it completely, and was convinced that he
could conquer it in a few weeks. His decision to attack Russia, first
stated on July 29, 1940, and issued as a formal directive (Operation
Barbarossa) on December 18th, was based on two considerations: (1) only
by destroying Russia and all Britain's hopes based on Russia could
Britain be forced to ask for peace, and (2) Soviet cooperation with
Germany was Stalin's personal policy and depended on his life, a factor
regarded as too undependable to allow Germany to place any long-range
expectations on it.
In
spite of Hitler's desires,
the Mediterranean area could not be kept quiet. The inadequacy of the
French armistice, Mussolini's demands for a more active Mediterranean
policy, British naval successes against the Italian Navy, Admiral
Raeder's warning that some defensive measures must be taken to avert
any American intervention in French Africa— all these kept
calling the Mediterranean to Hitler's attention at a time when he
wanted to concentrate on the problem of how to attack the Soviet Union.
In
order to deter the United
States from any intervention in West Africa, and in the belief that it
would aid the anti-Roosevelt isolationists in the presidential election
of 1940, Germany, Italy, and Japan signed a military alliance on
September 27, 1940. This Tripartite Pact, announced with great
propagandist fanfare, provided that the signers would aid one another
in every way if one of them was attacked by a Power not already
involved in the European war or in the Sino-Japanese conflict. To aim
this agreement more specifically at the United States, and to allay the
natural anxieties of the Soviet Union, one clause provided that the new
pact would not change the existing relationships of the signers with
Russia. As we shall see in a moment, Ribbentrop's efforts, in November
1940, to obtain Soviet adherence to the Tripartite Pact led to a
turning point in the Nazi-Soviet collaboration.
As
France was falling in June
1940, Spain assured Hitler that it would enter the war on Germany's
side as soon as it had accumulated sufficient supplies, especially
grain, to be able to resist the British blockade. This assurance was
repeated by Ramon Serrano Suñer, the Spanish foreign minister,
brother-in-law of Señora Franco, in Berlin on September 17th.
About the same time, Admiral Raeder spoke to Hitler about the need to
exclude Britain from the Mediterranean hy capturing Gibraltar and Suez.
To these possible objectives Hitler added the idea of seizing some of
the Canary or Cape Verde islands, or even one of the Azores, to be used
as defensive points against any American attempt to land in French West
Africa.
About
the same time, in
September 1940, under pressure from pro-German collaborators led by
Laval, Marshal Pétain removed Weygand from his post as minister
of national defense and sent him to Africa as coordinator and commander
in chief of the French colonial possessions there. Fearful that Weygand
might cooperate with an American landing, Hitler at the middle of
October began serious efforts to settle the western Mediterranean
situation, once for all, in cooperation with Vichy France and Franco
Spain.
In
anticipation of such an
attempt, Britain in July 1940 had attacked and largely destroyed the
major vessels of the French fleet at anchor at Mers-el-Kebir (near
Oran, Algeria) and at Dakar (West Africa). With somewhat greater skill
the French units at Alexandria, Egypt, were demobilized by agreement.
These British attacks on French vessels and subsequent De Gaullist
attacks with British support on Dakar (September 23rd) and elsewhere
were probably unnecessary and served to drive the Vichy regime into the
arms of the Germans. On June 24, 1940, the French Navy had been ordered
to scuttle its vessels if there was any chance of their falling into
control of foreigners (be they German, Italian, or British). The fact
that Britain killed 1,400 French seamen by bombardment of anchored
vessels greatly increased the normally anti-British bias of the Vichy
regime and made it possible for the most anti-British members, such as
Laval or Admiral Darlan, to eliminate the more moderate ones like
General Weygand.
Hitler's
efforts to coordinate
Fascist Italy, Franco Spain, and Vichy France in a single policy in the
western Mediterranean was not an easy one, as Italy and Spain expected
to satisfy their shameless ambitions at French expense, while Hitler
trusted neither France nor Spain. On October 22, 1940, Hitler traveled
by train to the Spanish frontier to confer with Franco and obtain a
commitment to attack Gibraltar. Franco's demands were not modest. He
wanted French Morocco, parts of Algeria and French West Africa, about
half a million tons of grain, and the motor fuel and armaments
necessary for the capture of Gibraltar. For this, as Hitler bitterly
told Mussolini, Franco offered Germany his "friendship." Hitler also
obtained Franco's promise to enter the war on Germany's side at some
indefinite date in the future and to join the Tripartite Pact at once,
if this could be kept secret.
Disappointed
in the south,
Hitler's train returned northward across France. The following day,
October 24, 1940, Hitler and Ribbentrop met Pétain and Laval at
Montoire-sur-le-Loire and drew up a rather ambiguous agreement. This
document proclaimed the signers’ joint interest in the speedy
defeat of Britain and promised that France, in return for a favorable
attitude toward the territorial ambitions of Italy and Spain, would be
allowed to share in the booty of the disrupted British Empire at the
end of the war so that the total overseas possessions of France would
not be reduced in that area. Four days later, Laval was made foreign
minister of the Vichy regime.
At
this point Hitler's
disappointments began to flow over. Having just concluded
unsatisfactory agreements with Spain and France, he received at
Montoire a delayed message from Mussolini, forwarded from Berlin,
announcing that Italy was about to attack Greece. Since Hitler and
Ribbentrop had vetoed any attack on either Greece or Yugoslavia as
early as July 7th, and had repeated this warning several times since,
Hitler at once ordered his train from France to Florence to dissuade
Mussolini from his projected attack on Greece. When the two leaders met
in Florence, October 28, 1940, the Italian attack on Greece had already
begun, so they restricted their discussion to other topics, such as the
ingratitude of General Franco.
During
the summer of 1940,
Mussolini's irascible disposition had not been improved by the failure
of Italian ground forces against France, the meager results of the
French-Italian armistice, the failure of the Italian Navy to disrupt
British convoys to Malta and Alexandria, the complete collapse of the
Italian Air Force, and a series of German vetoes against any Italian
movement against Yugoslavia or Greece. The Duce’s efforts to
attack Egypt overland from Libya were resisted by his generals for
months. When Rodolfo Graziani finally attacked on September 13th, he
advanced, without difficulty, a distance of seventy miles in five days,
to Sidi Barrâni in Egypt. T here he stopped, and refused to go on.
Thirsty
for some success to
console his wounded ego, the Duce of Fascism decided to attack Greece.
The German military occupation of Romania was the final straw which
broke his imperious patience. "Hitler always faces me with a fait
accompli," he told Count Ciano. "This time I am going to pay him back
in his own coin. He will find out from the newspapers that I have
occupied Greece. In this way the equilibrium will be reestablished."
The Italian generals were unanimously against the project, and had to
be driven to it. In an outburst to Ciano, Mussolini threatened to go
personally to Greece "to see the incredible shame of Italians who are
afraid of Greeks."
Unfortunately
for Mussolini,
his generals had better judgment than he had. The attack, which began
from Albania on October 28th, was stopped completely within three
weeks; the subsequent Greek counterattack carried deep into Albania,
and Greek pressure continued throughout the winter.
As
promised in the guarantee
of April 1939, Britain joined Greece against Italy at once, but its own
weakness did not allow any substantial increase in its forces in the
area. On November 11, 1940, twenty-one British planes made a torpedo
attack on the chief units of the Italian fleet in Taranto harbor and
sank three out of six battleships at a cost of two planes and one pilot
killed. A month later, on December 7, 1940, Graziani's forces of 80,000
men in Egypt were suddenly attacked by General Archibald Wavell with
31,000 men and 225 tanks. In two months, at a cost of only 500 killed,
Wavell captured 130,000 Italians with 400 tanks and 1,300 cannon, and
advanced westward 600 miles to El Agheila. Shortly thereafter, in an
equally brief period (February 1 l-April 6, 1941), Italian East Africa
and Ethiopia were conquered and 100,000 Italian troops destroyed by a
British imperial force which suffered only 135 killed.
The
Italian failures in Greece
and Africa, along with Franco's refusal to attack Gibraltar, forced a
considerable rearrangement of Hitler's plans. In the space of two weeks
(December 7-21, 1940), Franco flatly refused to execute Operation Felix
(December 7th), and, accordingly, this project was canceled (December
11th); Italy decided to ask for German and Bulgarian aid against
Greece; the Nazi-Soviet rivalry in Bulgaria and Finland came to a head;
and three new war directives were ordered by Hitler, operations Attila,
Marita, and Barbarossa. Operation Attila (December 10th) sought partial
compensation for the abandonment of Operation Felix by ordering an
immediate occupation of all Vichy France, with a special effort to
capture elements of the French fleet in Toulon, if French North Africa
rebelled against the Vichy government. This plan was carried out when
the Western Powers invaded North Africa in November 1942.
The
Italian appeal to Germany
for aid against Greece (December 7th) led to a transformation of the
relationship between the two Powers: Italy's status changed from that
of an ally to that of a satellite. On December 1 8th Hitler promised to
attack Greece from Bulgaria, but not before March 1941, at the
earliest. He rejected a detailed Italian request for raw materials, on
the ground that he had no way of knowing how these would be used;
instead he suggested that large numbers of Italian laborers should be
sent to Germany and there work up the raw materials into finished
products which could then be sent to Italy to be used according to the
advice of German "experts" stationed in Italy. For the immediate relief
of Italy's military problems, Hitler refused to send any forces to
Albania to fight Greece, but instead offered an armored force, under
General Rommel, to fight in Libya, and a German air fleet (of about 500
planes) to be stationed in Sicily to protect Fascist convoys to Libya
and to disrupt British convoys through the Mediterranean.
The
German intervention in the
central Mediterranean in the early months of 1941 was a great success
on the ground and in the air, but was not able to prevent the British
from strengthening their position on the water. The first Malta convoy
of 1941 was badly battered by the first intervention of the Luftwaffe;
Britain's sole aircraft carrier in the eastern Mediterranean, Illustrious,
was damaged so badly that it had to limp to the United States (by way
of Suez and around Africa) for repairs; no other British convoy got
through the Mediterranean for four months. On the other hand, Rommel's
force was transported to Libya without loss.
These
two blows to Britain
were somewhat balanced by a British naval victory over the Italians off
Cape Matapan on March 28-29, 1941. With the loss of one man in one
plane, Britain sank three cruisers and two destroyers and damaged a
battleship. This battle is notable for the first use of
radar-controlled gunnery at sea. With this innovation, at night, the
opening salvo of six 15-inch guns by Warspite
scored five hits; earlier in the engagement, in the daylight, the
Italian battleship Vittorio Veneto
fired more than ninety 15-inch shells without a hit. As a consequence
of this battle, Mussolini ordered the Italian fleet not to operate
beyond the range of Italian land-based fighter planes until an aircraft
carrier could be built. Accordingly, the Italian Navy played no role in
the subsequent struggle for Libya, Greece, and Crete.
Rommel's
arrival in Libya
reversed the situation in North Africa. He had tanks and good air
support against British forces which had been largely depleted by
sending an armored division to Greece (landed at Piraeus on March 7th).
This division and three infantry divisions were sent to Greece over the
objections of the very able Greek commander in chief, General Alexander
Papagos, who "thought that withdrawal of troops from success in Africa
to certain failure in Europe was a strategic error." Striking at El
Agheila with a German armored division supported by two Italian
divisions on March 31, 1941, Rommel reached the Egyptian frontier on
April 11th.
In
the meantime, Ribbentrop
was engaged in involved diplomatic maneuvers. The Tripartite Pact of
September 1940, in spite of Russia's suspicions, was really intended to
frighten the United States to abstain from interference in the tumults
of Eurasia. To strengthen this threat, Ribbentrop sought to obtain
Russia's adherence to the Tripartite Pact and a Soviet-Japanese
nonaggression pact which would free Japan in Asia to allow it to strike
southward against Singapore. These maneuvers were a disaster for
Germany. Futile efforts to obtain Soviet adherence to the Tripartite
Pact merely succeeded in revealing the bitter German-Soviet rivalry in
Bulgaria and Finland, while the successful Soviet-Japanese
Nonaggression Pact of April 1 3, 1 94 1 made it possible to withdraw
Soviet troops from the Far East in sufficient numbers to save Moscow
from Hitler's attack on that city in November.
During
Molotov's visit to
Berlin on November 12-15, 1940, Germany offered the Soviet Union a
worldwide division of spheres of influence among the aggressor states:
Italy would take North and East Africa; Germany would take western
Europe, western and central Africa; Japan could have Malaya and
Indonesia; while the Soviet Union could have Iran and India; Germany,
Italy, and the Soviet Union would pursue a cooperative policy in the
Near East to free Turkey from its British connections and obtain for
Russia freer access to the Mediterranean through the Dardanelles.
Hitler offered Molotov a picture of a brilliant, if remote, future:
"After
the conquest of England
the British Empire would be apportioned as a gigantic world-wide estate
in bankruptcy of 40 million square kilometers. In this bankrupt estate
there would be for Russia access to the ice-free and really open ocean.
Thus far, a minority of 45 million Englishmen had ruled 600 million
inhabitants of the British Empire. He [Hitler] was about to crush this
minority. Even the United States was actually doing nothing but picking
out of this bankrupt estate a few items particularly suitable to the
United States.... He wanted to create a world coalition of interested
powers which would consist of Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Soviet
Russia, and Japan and, would to a certain degree represent a
coalition—extending from North Africa to Eastern Asia—of
all those who wanted to be satisfied out of the British bankrupt
estate."
Molotov
was only mildly
interested in these grandiose schemes about spheres of interest, and
seemed to have no ambitions in respect to the British Empire. Instead
he wanted detailed answers to specific questions: Why were German
troops stationed in Finland? Could not an accurate demarcation between
Soviet and Nazi interests be drawn in Finland? Why could not the Nazi
guarantee of Romania be balanced by a Soviet guarantee of Bulgaria, or,
failing in this, the Romanian guarantee be canceled? What
were the exact limits of Germany's New Order in Europe and of Japan's
East Asian Sphere?
After
hours of discussion,
during which the Germans evaded Molotov's questions about Finland and
Bulgaria, Ribbentrop offered Russia a protocol covering five points:
(1) the Soviet Union would join the Tripartite Pact; (2) the four
Powers would "respect each other's natural spheres of influence"; (3)
they would "undertake to join no combination of Powers and to support
no combination of Powers which is directed against one of the Four
Powers"; (4) the four respective spheres of influence would follow the
vague German suggestions; and (5) the three European Powers would seek
to detach Turkey from British influence and to open the Dardanelles to
the free passage of Soviet warships.
Molotov
immediately presented
Germany with additional proposals drawn up in a formal draft protocol.
These added to the German suggestions five other points: (I) that
German troops be withdrawn from Finland immediately, ( 2 ) that
Bulgaria sign a mutual-assistance pact with the Soviet Union and hand
over to it a base from which Russian naval and air forces could defend
the Dardanelles, ( 3 ) that the area from Batum and Baku to the Persian
Gulf be recognized as "a center of Soviet aspirations," (4) that Japan
yield to the Soviet Union its oil and coal concessions in northern
Sakhalin, and (5) that the prospective agreement with Turkey be
expanded to include a Soviet military and naval base "on the Bosporus
and Dardanelles" and a guarantee of Turkish independence and
territorial integrity by all three Powers.
Molotov's
conditions for
joining the Tripartite Pact enraged Hitler. Four weeks later he issued
orders for Operation Barbarossa, a joint Finnish-German-Romanian attack
on the Soviet Union. Before this could be carried out, however, the
ambiguous situation on the German right flank, in the Balkans, had to
be cleared up by Operation Marital The chief aims of this operation
were to drive from the area British forces which had entered Greece in
consequence of the Italian attack, and to prevent them from bombing the
Romanian oil fields while Germany was occupied with Russia. The
original plan called for a pincers movement into Greece from Bulgaria
and Yugoslavia after these two countries had been brought into the Axis
system by diplomatic activity.
German
forces moved steadily
into Romania beginning in October 1940; four months later, Moscow was
informed by Hitler that these occupying forces had reached
“almost 700,000" men. On March 1st Bulgaria
joined the Tripartite Pact, and these German forces began to occupy
that country the same day.
Yugoslavia
did not succumb so
easily. For almost six weeks, because of strong opposition in the
country and in the Cabinet, Regent Prince Paul resisted the German
demands. When Yugoslavia accepted and signed the Tripartite Pact at
Vienna on March 25th, it was able to obtain promises of substantial
concessions in return: freedom from any German military occupation,
release from any promise of military support to Germany under the pact,
and a promise of German support for Yugoslavia's desire for an outlet
on the Aegean at Salonika.
Soviet
opposition to these
German advances was somewhat indirect. There were vigorous protests
against the movement of German troops into Romania and Bulgaria. Turkey
was informed that Russia would abide fully by the Soviet-Turkish
Nonaggression Pact of 1925, if Turkey became involved in hostilities
with a third Power (meaning Germany). Most significant of all, a
military coup d'état in Yugoslavia overthrew the
Yugoslav regency and government on the night of March 26th-27th,
replacing the regent, Prince Paul, as head of the state by the young
King Peter and installing a less pliant Cabinet under General Dusan
Simoviæ. This new government signed a treaty of friendship and
nonaggression with the Soviet Union on the night of April 5th-6th. Less
than six hours later, Belgrade was subjected to a violent bombardment
from the Luftwaffe, and thirty-three German divisions began to invade
Yugoslavia and Greece. Both countries vv ere overrun within three weeks
and were divided up among the jackal collaborators of Nazi Germany.
From
Bulgaria and Hungary,
Yugoslavia was invaded by three German columns. The two satellite
states followed along behind to occupy the areas allotted to them.
Greek forces, overextended, into Albania in the west and outflanked by
the German capture of Salonika in the east, fell hack southward, but
were soon cut off from 68,000 British troops in Thessaly. On April 20th
the Greek government advised the British to evacuate because the
situation was hopeless, but the almost total destruction of the Piraeus
from the air and the sudden capture of the Corinth Canal by German
paratroopers made this operation very difficult. Without air
protection, the British Navy evacuated 44,000 British troops from
various beaches, landing 27,000 of them on the island of Crete.
After
a week of bitter
mountain fighting, much of it hand-to-hand, with the German Air Force
supreme in the sky, the British began to evacuate Crete. When the
operation had reached "almost 700,000" men. On March 1st Britain had
lost 55,000 men in Greece and Crete and had one battleship, seven
cruisers, and thirteen destroyers sunk or damaged; it had lost all
North Africa except Egypt itself, and had seen two more countries
overrun by Germany. T he only possible consolation was to be found in
the fact that Yugoslav and Greek resistance had delayed Hitler's attack
on the Soviet Union by three weeks, and the heavy German losses in
Crete (over 30 percent casualties) persuaded Hitler to renounce all
airborne operations in the future. A somewhat more remote benefit
rested in the fact that German brutality and Balkan stubbornness gave
rise to extensive guerrilla operations which drained Axis strength in
the mountains of Yugoslavia, Crete, and Greece.
The
loss of Crete gravely
threatened the British position in the Near East. In Iraq, on April
3rd, a group of army officers led by Rashid Ali el-Gailani overthrew
the government and seized power; a month later this new regime made an
attack on British treaty installations in Mesopotamia. Admiral Darlan
provided bases in Syria for German and Italian planes going to aid the
rebels, and on May 28th signed "Paris Protocols" which almost took
France into the war on the side of Germany. These agreements promised
to the Iraqi rebels most French military supplies in Syria, and to
provide Germany with air bases in Syria and at Dakar, to hand over
transport facilities, including ports and railroads in Syria, the port
of Bizerte in Tunisia, the railroad from Bizerte to Gabès,
French munitions for Germany, French ships for transporting supplies
across the Mediterranean, French naval vessels for protecting such
shipments, and a submarine base at Dakar. The violent objections of
Weygand and other officers against these agreements and the vigorous
protests of the United States persuaded Marshal Pétain to
overrule Darlan and to cancel the agreements (June 6th).
The
rebellion in Iraq was
overthrown in May, and a joint force of British and Free French
supporters of De Gaulle conquered Syria and Lebanon in June. About the
same time, by a tenacious defense of Malta and relentless attacks on
Axis convoys to Libya, the British Navy sought to restore its control
of the surface of the Mediterranean Sea. This made it necessary for the
Axis, in spite of the growing demands of the Battle of the Atlantic and
the Battle of Russia, to increase its air and underseas forces in the
Mediterranean. In November 1941, 70 percent of Axis supplies for Libya
were sunk. In September, Hitler sent the first German submarines (only
six of them) to the Mediterranean, and in December he sent the Second
Air Fleet of 500 planes under Marshal Albert Kesselring to Sicily. In
November the British lost an aircraft carrier and a battleship to
U-boats; the following month, in a daring personal exploit, the
Italians sent three two-man human torpedoes into Alexandria harbor and
sank the two British battleships left in the eastern Mediterranean.
By
June 1941, the attrition of
British sea-power was becoming almost unbearable. With only a handful
of operational U-boats, plus some support from surface raiders and
land-based planes, the Axis sank, in the period from September 1939 to
June 1941, a total of 1,738 merchant ships of a total tonnage of
7,118,112; in addition almost 3,000,000 tons were left damaged in
ports. In buying supplies, chiefly from the United States, Britain had
used up, by June 1941, almost two-thirds of its dollar assets, gold
stocks, and marketable United States securities.
Chapter
53—American Neutrality and Aid to Britain
When
the European war began in
September 1939, American public opinion was united in its determination
to stay out. The isolationist reaction following American intervention
in the First World War and the Paris Peace Conference in 1917-1919 had,
if anything, become stronger in the 1930's. Historians and publicists
were writing extensively to show that Germany had not been solely
guilty of beginning the war in 1914 and that the Entente Powers had
made more than their share of secret treaties seeking selfish
territorial aims, both before the war and during the fighting.
In
1934 a committee of the
United States Senate investigated the role played by foreign loans and
munition sales to belligerents in getting the United States involved in
World War I. Through the carelessness of th Roosevelt
Administration, this committee fell under the control of isolationists
led by the chairman, Republican Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota. As
a result, the evidence before the committee was mobilized to show that
American intervention in World War I had been pushed by bankers and
munitions manufacturers ("merchants of death") to protect their profits
and their interests [Foreign loans] in an Entente victory in the early
years of the war. Under these influences American public
opinion
in the late 1930's had an uncomfortable feeling that American youths
had been sent to die in 1917-1918 for selfish purposes concealed behind
propaganda slogans about "the rights of small nations," "freedom of the
seas," or "making the world safe for democracy." These feelings were
reinforced in the late 1930's by growing disillusionment with the
cynicism of authoritarian aggression and the weakness of British
appeasement. All this helped to create a widespread determination to
keep out of Europe's constant quarrels in the future and, above all, to
avoid any repetition of what was regarded as the "error of 1917."
The
isolationist point of view
had been enacted into American statute law, not only in the 1920's by
restrictions on contact with the League of Nations and other
international organizations but also later, in the Roosevelt
administrations, in the so-called Neutrality Acts. These misnamed laws
sought to avoid any repetition of the events of 1914-1917 by curtailing
loans and munition sales to belligerent countries. Originally enacted
in 1935, and revised in the next two years, these laws provided that
export of arms and munitions to belligerents would cease whenever the
President proclaimed a state to be a participant in a war outside the
Americas. Any materials, including munitions, named by the President
had to be sold on a "cash-and-carry" basis, with full payment and
transfer of title before leaving the United States, and had to be
transported on foreign ships. The "cash" but not the "carry" provision
also applied to all other trade with belligerents. In addition, loans
to belligerents were forbidden, and American citizens could be warned
not to travel on belligerents' ships.
An
early statute, the Johnson
Act of 1934, prevented loans to most European Powers by forbidding such
loans to countries whose payments were in arrears on their war debts of
World War I. Moreover, by a so-called "moral embargo" the Roosevelt
Administration sought to restrict export of war materials on ethical or
humanitarian grounds where no legal basis existed for doing so. Under
this provision, for example, airplane manufacturers were asked not to
sel1 planes to countries which had bombed civilians, as Italy had done
in Ethiopia, Japan had done in China, or the Soviet Union had done in
Finland.
In
the years 1935-1939 the
neutrality laws proved to be quite un-neutral in practice, and a
considerable encouragement to aggressors. The Italian attack on
Ethiopia showed that an aggressor could arm at his leisure and then, by
making an attack, prevent his victim from purchasing from the United
States the means to defend himself. These laws gave a great advantage
to a state like Italy, which had ships to carry supplies from the
United States or which had cash to buy them here, in contrast with a
country like Ethiopia which had no ships and little cash. By special
legislation the Neutrality Acts had been extended to civil wars to
cover the Spanish uprising of 1936 and had cut the recognized
government of Spain off from purchasing munitions while the rebel
regime continued to obtain such munitions from the Axis Powers.
The
obvious unfairness of
these laws in the Sino-Japanese crisis of 1937 persuaded President
Roosevelt to refrain from proclaiming a state of war in East Asia,
although in fact it was clear to everyone that a war was going on
there. Above all, by 1939, it was obvious that the Neutrality Acts were
encouraging Nazi aggression, since Germany, by making war on Britain
and France, could cut them off from American armaments. For this
reason, the Roosevelt Administration tried to get the Congress to
repeal the embargo provision of the Neutrality Acts but was unable to
overcome isolationist opposition led by Senator William E. Borah of
Idaho (July 1939)
As
soon as the war began in
Europe, Roosevelt called a special session of Congress to revise the
neutrality laws so that the Entente Powers could obtain supplies in the
United States. Under the resulting revision of these acts, in November
1939, the embargo on munitions was repealed and all purchases by
belligerents were placed on a "cash-and-carry" basis; loans to
belligerent Powers were forbidden, Americans were excluded from travel
on belligerent ships, and American ships were not to be armed, to carry
munitions, or to go to any areas the President had proclaimed as combat
areas. Under this last provision, all European ports on the Baltic or
the Atlantic from Bergen south to the Pyrenees were closed to American
ships. As the war spread, these areas were extended by proclamation.
The
collapse of France in June
1940, combined with the arrogant Japanese demands on the Netherlands
East Indies and French Indochina (August-September 1940) and the
signing of the Tripartite Pact, gave rise to a severe crisis in
American foreign affairs. We have already indicated the danger to
American security which could arise from the French fleet or Dakar
falling into German hands or from a successful Nazi invasion of
Britain. This danger raised the controversy over American foreign
policy to a feverish pitch and widened the extremes of public opinion.
These extremes ranged from the advocates of immediate intervention into
the war on the side of Britain on the one hand to the defenders of
extreme isolationism on the other. The extreme interventionists
insisted that Britain could be saved only by an immediate American
declaration of war on Germany, not because of America's ability to
fight at once, which was recognized to be small, but because British
morale needed such a declaration to provide it with the strength to go
on fighting. The isolationists, on the other hand, argued that it was
no concern of the United States whether Britain collapsed or survived,
since Hitler had no desire to attack America, and, even if he did, the
Western Hemisphere could withdraw into itself and survive with security
and prosperity. Most American opinion, in the summer of 1940, was
undecided or confused but tended to incline to a point of view
somewhere between the two extremes.
In
order to unify America's
political front, Roosevelt took two outstanding leaders of the
Republican Party (both interventionists) into his Cabinet as
secretaries of war and of the navy. Henry L. Stimson had been secretary
of war in the Taft administration and secretary of state in the Hoover
Administration, and Frank Knox had been the Republican candidate for
Vice-President in 1936; both were promptly repudiated by the Republican
leaders, but played a major role in the Roosevelt Administration
thereafter. In combination with the secretary of the treasury (Henry
Morgenthau), the secretary of state (Cordell Hull), and the secretary
of the interior (Harold Ickes), this gave Roosevelt a preponderantly
interventionist Cabinet. Roosevelt himself was sympathetic to this
point of view, but his strong sense of political realism made him aware
of the powerful currents of isolationism in American public opinion,
especially in the Midwest. As a consequence, Roosevelt, who seemed to
the outside public to be an advanced interventionist, was definitely a
restraining influence inside the Administration. In his own mind his
role clearly was to act as a brake on his Cabinet colleagues while he
used the prestige and publicity of his office to educate American
public opinion in the belief that America could not stand alone,
isolated, in the world and could not allow Britain to be defeated if
any acts of ours could prevent it.
Outside
the Administration,
American public opinion was being bombarded by paid and volunteer
agitators of all shades of opinion from inside the country and from
abroad. Many of these were organized into lobbying and pressure groups
of which the most notable were, on the interventionist side, the
Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies and, on the
isolations" side, the America First movement. The controversy reached
its peak during the presidential campaign of 1940 and subsequently, as
Congress enacted into la\v the vital defensive measures desired by the
third Roosevelt Administration..
The
international crisis ...
[gave] Roosevelt [the opportunity] to violate the constitutional
precedent against a third term. In spite of the fact that the
Republican candidate, Wendell Willkie, was in general agreement with
Roosevelt's position on foreign affairs, his desire to win the election
had led him to indulge in what he subsequently called "campaign
oratory" and to make violent accusations against his opponent. Among
others, he assured the American people that Roosevelt's reelection
meant that "we will be at war." To counteract these charges and to win
back antiwar voters who might have been attracted by the generally
isolationist outlook of the Republican Party, especially of its senior
congressional leaders, Roosevelt replied with some campaign oratory of
his own. Some of his assurances were thrown back in his face later: in
New York he said, "We will not send our army, navy or air forces to
fight in foreign lands outside of the Americas, except in case of
attack"; and in Boston he said most emphatically, "I have said this
before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not
going to be sent into any foreign wars."
This
"campaign oratory" on
both sides was based on the general recognition that the overwhelming
majority of Americans were determined to stay out of war, but the
confusion in the minds of this majority was revealed on numerous
occasions, as on October 5, 1940, when a Gallup Poll of public opinion
showed that 70 percent of Americans felt it was more important to
defeat Hitler than to keep out of war. This poll was close enough to
Roosevelt's own sentiments for him to feel justified in taking any
actions which would increase the chances of a Hitler defeat and improve
the ability of America to defend itself.
The
fall of France raised the
problem of American defense in an acute form. The American army and air
force were pathetically weak, while the navy was adequate to its tasks
only in the Pacific. To remedy these deficiencies it was agreed, in
July 1940, to seek an army of 1,400,000 men and an air force of 18,000
planes by April 1942, and a "two-ocean" navy increased by 1,3 2 5,000
tons of ships as soon as possible. These objectives could not be
achieved, in view of the slowness of American mobilization, both
economic and military, and were made even more unattainable by the
constant demands of Britain, China, Greece, and others for military
equipment as soon as it came off the production line. Two months after
these goals had been set, an official memorandum estimated that the
United States had no more than 55,000 men in its army and 189 planes in
its air force ready for immediate action (September 25, 1940).
As
the military forces of
the country slowly grew, a series of strategic plans were drawn up to
fix the way in which these forces would be used. All these plans
decided that Germany was the major danger, witl1 Japan of secondary
importance, and, accordingly, that every effort, including actual
warfare, should be used to defeat Germany and that, until this goal was
achieved, every effort must be made to postpone any showdown of
strength with Japan. The priority of a German defeat over a Japanese
defeat was so firmly entrenched in American strategic thinking that, as
early as November, 1940, it was seriously considered that it might be
necessary, if Japan attacked the United States, for the United States
to make war on Germany in order to retain this order of priority. As
events turned out, Germany's declaration of war on the United States
four days after the Japanese attack saved the United States from the
need to attempt something which American public opinion would never
have condoned—an attack on Germany after we had been attacked by
Japan.
Although
$17.7 billion had
been appropriated by the American government for re-armaments by
October 1940, the actual production of armaments remained insignificant
until 1942. There were several reasons for this slow progress. In the
first place, the governmental side of the rearmament effort was not
centralized.... Instead, similar and conflicting powers were scattered
about among various administrators or were granted to unwieldy
committees made up of conflicting personalities, while the really vital
powers of duress over labor, industry, or material priorities were
largely nonexistent. In the second place, industry was very reluctant,
in view of the recent economic depression with its great volume of
unused capital equipment, to build new plant or new equipment for
defense manufacture, unless the government gave them such concessions
in regard to prices, taxes, or plant depreciation that the new
equipment would cost the corporation little or nothing. Even then the
more monopolistic corporations (which formed the overwhelming majority
of the corporations with defense contracts) were reluctant to expand
production facilities, since this would jeopardize price and market
relationships in the postwar period.
Accordingly,
most
industrialists, especially the largest ones, who were in closest
contact with the government, rejected the Administration's plans for
defense production as grandiose and impossible. This was most emphatic
following Roosevelt's statement in May 1940 that America's goal was to
produce 50,000 planes a year. Although the industry was almost
unanimous in calling this a "fantastic" figure, issued only as a "New
Deal propagandist trick," America's plane production in the next five
years was about six times this figure, and reached 96,000 in 1944. These
results were achieved because the government paid for nine-tenths of
the new factories and compelled modern mass-production methods to be
adopted by what was still, even in 1941, a handicraft industry.
In
addition to the reluctance
to expand capacity, both industry and labor w ere reluctant to convert
existing equipment from peacetime production to war production at a
time when government spending was creating a level of peacetime demand
and peacetime profits such as had not been known in many years.
Businessmen accepted war contracts but continued to allocate capacity,
materials, and labor forces to civilian products because these were
more profitable, satisfied old customers who were expected to remain
customers in the postwar period, and required no conversion of capacity
or disruption of distribution facilities.
This
was particularly true of
the automobile industry, which refused to convert or even to give up
the unnecessary luxury of annual model changeovers until, in January
1942, the government ended pleasure-car manufacture for the duration of
the war. But as a result of reluctance to do this earlier, about two
years of wartime production by the automobile industry was lost and
more pleasure cars were manufactured in 1941 than in almost any year in
history. In December 1940, Walter P. Reuther, head of the United
Automobile Workers, suggested that the unused capacity of the
automobile industry (which he estimated at 50 percent) be used to
produce airplanes; this was rejected by both airplane and automobile
manufacturers. The latter insisted that only 10 or 15 percent of their
machine tools could be used in the manufacture of munitions. After the
forced conversion of 1942, 66 percent of these machine tools were used
in this way, and the automobile industry eventually built two-thirds of
all the combat airplane engines produced in the United States between
July 1940 and August 1945.
In
most industries the
government had little or no authority to compel defense contracts to be
carried out before civilian contracts, with the result that the latter
were generally given preference until 1942. Even in such a vital
product as machine tools, no effective system of compulsory priorities
for defense was set up until May 1942. This was so typical of the war
mobilization that it can be said with assurance that no real
mobilization was established until after June 1942. A year later, by
July 1943, there had been an astonishing increase. We produced only 16
light tanks in March 1941, and these were too light for service in
Europe; our first medium tank (the General Grant) was finished in April
1941, but thirty months later, late in 1943, we were turning out 3,000
tanks a month. In July 1940, the United States produced 350 combat
planes, and in March 1941, could do no better than 506 such planes, but
by December 1942, we produced 5,400 planes a month, and in August 1943,
reached 7,500. A similar situation existed in shipbuilding. In all of
1939 the United States built only 28 ships totaling 342,000 tons, and
in 1940 could raise this to no more than 53 ships of 641,ooo tons. In
September 194 l, when the German U-boats were aiming to sink 700,000
tons a month, the United States completed only 7 ships of 64,450 tons.
But among those seven ships of September 1941 was the first "Liberty
ship," a mass-production model largely based on a British design. Two
years later, in September 1943, the United States launched 155 ships,
aggregating 1,700,000 tons, and was in a position to continue at this
rate of five ships a day, or 19 million tons a year, indefinitely.
It
must always be remembered
that these impressive figures were reached almost two years after the
attack on Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941, and that for two years after
the fall of France the United States faced a critical diplomatic crisis
with almost no military resources to fall back on or to meet the
piteous appeals for aid which came from Britain, China, Greece, Turkey,
Sweden and dozens of other countries. Except for Britain, most of these
appeals received little satisfaction. China, for example, received only
48 planes in the first eight months of 1940 and only 59 million worth
of all kinds of arms and munitions in the whole year 1940. Of the 2,251
combat planes produced in the United States from July 7, 1940, to
February 1, 1941, 1,512 went to Britain and 607 went to our own army
and navy.
Boxed
in between the steady
advance of authoritarian aggression, the inadequacy of American war
production, the appeals of the aggressors' potential victims, and the
outraged howls of American isolationists, the Roosevelt Administration
improvised a policy which consisted, in almost equal measure, of
propagandist public statements, tactical subterfuges, and hesitant
half-steps. In September 1940, in spite of the adverse effect it might
have on Roosevelt’s chances in the November election, the
Administration persuaded the Congress to enact a Selective Service Act
to build up the manpower of the armed forces through compulsion. It
provided for one year of training for 900,000 men, and stipulated that
they must not be used outside the Western Hemisphere.
In
the same month, September
1940, Roosevelt proclaimed a limited National Emergency and, by
executive fiat, gave fifty old destroyers of World War I to Britain in
return for ninety-nine-year leases of naval and air bases in British
possessions in this hemisphere from Newfoundland to Trinidad.
The
opening of a new session
of Congress in January 1941 gave Roosevelt an opportunity to state the
aims of America's foreign policy. He did so in the famous "Four
Freedoms" speech: America was looking forward to a world founded upon
four essential human freedoms: freedom of speech and expression,
freedom of every person to worship God in his own way, freedom from
want, and freedom from fear. In casting about for some way in which
America could contribute to these ends while still remaining out of the
war, and without enraging the isolationists completely, the Roosevelt
Administration, in the early months of 1941, came up with a number of
procedures which they summed up in the phrases "America as the Arsenal
of Democracy" and "Lend-Lease."
The
Arsenal of Democracy
idea meant that America would do all it could to supply armaments and
essential supplies to countries resisting aggressors, especially to
Britain. The British side of this idea was reflected in a public
statement of Winston Churchill’s: "Give us the tools and we'll
finish the job." These statements are of historical significance
because, even as they were being made, the military experts in both
America and Britain were trying to persuade the political leaders that
material contributions from the United States to Britain, no matter how
large, would not be sufficient: American fighting men would also be
needed.
The
Arsenal of Democracy
project, even if not adequate to defeat Hitler by itself, faced the
tremendous obstacles of Britain’s inability to pay and Britain's
inability to ensure that war materials from the United States could be
delivered in England. These two problems occupied much of Roosevelt's
attention in 1941, the one in the months January to March and the other
in the months March to December.
At
the outbreak of war in
September 1939, Britain had about $4,500,000,000 in assets which could
be converted readily into dollars to buy supplies in the United States
(gold, dollar exchange, or American securities). In the first sixteen
months of the war, Britain earned another $2,000,000,000 of dollars
from sales of gold or of those goods, like Scotch whiskey or English
woolens, which America was willing to buy. But in that sixteen months,
Britain paid out nearly $4,500,000,000 for American goods and placed
orders for about $2,500,000,000 more, so that the year 1941 opened with
Britain's uncommitted dollar reserves down to about $500,000,000. In
the first few months of that year 1941, Britain was selling United
States securities (which had been taken over from British subjects) at
a rate of $10,000,000 a week. It was clear that Britain's ability to
pay in dollars for urgently needed supplies was reaching the end. This
end could not be postponed by means of loans, since they were forbidden
by the Neutrality Acts and the Johnson Act. Moreover, the experience of
the First World War had shown that loans left a most unhappy postwar
legacy.
To
Roosevelt's ... mind it
seemed foolish to allow monetary considerations to stand as an obstacle
in the way of self-defense (as he regarded the survival of Britain).
Rather, he felt that the resources of war should be pooled between the
United States and Britain so that each could use what it needed from a
common store. He emphasized that Englishmen were already dying in our
defense and that the British had already given us hundreds of millions
of dollars to build factories and machines to manufacture planes,
engines, ships, or tanks; they were also giving us, without cost, vital
secrets in radar and submarine detection, our first successful
liquid-cooled airplane engine (the Rolls-Royce "Merlin," built by
Packard in a factory constructed with British money and used in our
best escort fighter plane, the P-51 Mustang), many secret features
incorporated in the engines of our B-24 (Liberator) bombers, and the
Whittle jet engine (which was later adapted to produce the General
Electric Company's jet engine used in the P-80 Shooting Star).
As
early as December 17, 1940,
Roosevelt expressed his point of view to the American people in the
following characteristic statement: "Suppose my neighbor's house
catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred
feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his
hydrant, I may help him put out the fire. Now what do I do? I don't say
to him before that operation, 'Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15;
you have to pay me $15 for it.' What is the transaction that goes on? I
don't want $15—I want my garden hose back after the fire is
over...." A bill embodying these ideas was introduced in the Congress
on January 10, 1941 as H.R. 1776, and became law two months later as
the Lend-Lease Act.
During
these two months,
debate raged both on Capitol Hill and throughout the nation, with the
isolationists using every possible argument against it. Senator Burton
K. Wheeler, who had been vice-presidential nominee on a third-party
ticket in 1924 and had become increasingly isolationist and reactionary
with the passing years, said that the bill would "plow under every
fourth American boy." Other opponents argued that Britain had tens of
billions in concealed dollar assets and that Lend-Lease was merely a
clever trick for foisting the costs of Britain’s war on the backs
of American taxpayers. Still others insisted that Lend-Lease was an
un-neutral act which would arouse German rage and eventually involve
the American people in a war they had no need to get in. The bill
finally passed by a largely party-line vote; in the House of
Representatives this vote was 260 - 161, with only 25 Democrats voting
against it and only 24 Republicans voting for it. It provided that the
President could "sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend, or
otherwise dispose of . . . any defense article" to any nation whose
defense he found vital to the defense of the United States; the payment
could be made to the United States by any "payment or repayment in kind
or property or any other direct or indirect benefit which the President
deems satisfactory." By November 1941, $14.3 billion had been provided
for carrying out these provisions.
The
Lend-Lease Act was to
expire in two years. The change in American public opinion can be
judged from the fact that it was renewed in March 1943 by a vote of
476-6 in the House and 82-0 in the Senate.
In
spite of the large
appropriations for Lend-Lease provided in 1941, it moved little
additional supplies to any fighting nation before 1942. The American
productive system was almost completely clogged up with unfilled orders
which had been placed previously by either the British or the American
governments. When the Soviet Union came into the war in consequence of
Germany's attack in June 1941, no additional outlet was provided for
Lend-Lease goods by this event, because American public opinion was too
strongly anti-Communist to allow the Soviet Union to partake of
Lend-Lease benefits. Only at the end of the year was Russia admitted to
these benefits.
Shortly
afterward the
productive log jam in war industries was broken by the so-called
Victory Program of August 1941. This program ended the attempt to build
a war-productive system out of the surplus capacity of the peacetime
civilian industrial system, and courageously faced the issue that
adequate economic mobilization for war could be achieved only if it
were based on three fundamental principles: (1) civilian production
must he curtailed to provide labor, materials, and capital for war
industry; (2) any adequate war industry requires a great increase in
investment in new industrial capacity; and (3) economic mobilization is
impossible unless there is some degree of centralized control by the
government and some degree of duress on business, labor, and consumers.
As
part of this effort,
Roosevelt at the end of August 1941 set up a new agency of the
government, the Supply Priorities and Allocations Board, which, while
it had all the weaknesses of a committee organization in contrast with
a single executive organization, began, for the first time, to face the
fact that there could be no real economic mobilization without a single
over-all plan of priorities and allocations among the many different
groups demanding access to economic resources. Behind this
whole
effort toward economic mobilization w as a secret decision of
Roosevelt's military advisers, made in the summer of 1941, that the war
could not be won unless the United States planned eventually to raise
the number of men in its armed forces to 8,000,000.
An
8,000,000-man army looked
very remote in the summer of 1941 as the 900,000 draftees provided by
the Selective Service Act of 1940 approached the end of their year of
training and eagerly began to prepare to disperse to their civilian
activities again. To have permitted this would undoubtedly have
inflicted a dangerous blow to the preparedness program. Accordingly,
the Roosevelt Administration asked the Congress to extend the terms of
service of these men. At once the isolationists were in full cry, and
this time they found a greater response in American public opinion. It
seemed to many to be very unfair to keep in service for several years
men who, when they reported for service, had been assured that they
need serve for only one year. The supporters of the extension argued
that America's preparedness and security must take precedence over any
such mistaken assurances. An Act extending the period of
selective-service training by an additional eighteen months passed the
Congress on August 12, 1941, by the narrow margin of one vote, 203-202.
Once again, the Republicans were solidly opposed to the Act, only 21
voting for it, while 133 voted against it.
As
the voting on the extension
of selective service was being counted, the historic Atlantic
Conference of Roosevelt and Churchill was being held on the battleship Prince
of Wales
in a small harbor in Newfoundland. After four days of conferences
(August 9-12, 1941), the chiefs of government of the United States and
Britain issued the so-called Atlantic Charter as their first formal
enunciation of war aims. According to this document they renounced all
ambitions toward territorial aggrandizement for themselves and, for
others, hoped to obtain territorial settlements and forms of government
in accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.
They also aspired to see equal access to trade and raw materials for
all states, international economic collaboration, freedom of the seas,
and postwar disarmament..
Certain
differences of outlook
which emerged from the discussions between the British and Americans
were either omitted or compromised in the public announcement. The
British were still in favor of imperial preference and a certain
measure of bilateralism, commercial discrimination, and economic
autarchy in international trade, while Secretary Hull's influence set
the American delegation solidly in opposition to these and in favor of
multilateral, nondiscriminatory trade relations on most-favored-nations
principles. A second difference, which was soon pushed into the
background, rested in the contrast between Churchill's desire for some
statement of preference for a long-range postwar plan for an
international organization to replace the League of Nations, and
Roosevelt's preference for an immediate postwar system based on police
action by the few Great Powers, or even by a simple Anglo-American
partnership. At any rate, Roosevelt was too reluctant to rouse the
unsleeping dogs of isolationism to allow the Atlantic Conference to
issue any public statement on international organization.
The
Atlantic Charter was
issued to the world as soon as the conference ended; at least equal in
importance were the simultaneous military and strategic conversations
which were kept secret. Once again, these decided that the defeat of
Germany must have priority over the defeat of Japan, but there was a
wide difference of opinion on how Germany could be defeated. The
British had no plans or expectations for making any large-scale
invasion of Europe with ground forces. Instead, they hoped that Germany
could be worn down to defeat, after a very long war, by blockade,
aerial bombardment, subversive activity, and propaganda. They wanted
large numbers of heavy bombers, and hoped for American intervention in
the war, as soon as possible, largely for its propaganda value against
German morale. Apparently, no one pointed out that a German defeat by
British methods would leave the Soviet armies supreme in all Europe,
with no Axis, Anglo-American, or local forces to oppose them.
On
military grounds alone, the
Americans at the Atlantic Conference rejected the British theories.
They rejected any immediate American intervention into the war on the
grounds that the United States was not sufficiently armed to be
effective. The only immediate contribution which the United States
could add by intervention, they felt, would be in escorting convoys of
British supply vessels to Europe. The American military
experts
rejected the idea that Germany could be defeated by blockade,
propaganda, air attacks, or by anything less than a large-scale
invasion by ground forces. For this purpose the War Department in
Washington was planning an army of 8,000,000 men.
An
additional difference of
opinion between the British and Americans emerged from the discussions
regarding Japanese aggression. The British wanted a joint or parallel
message to Japan, accompanied, if possible, by threatening naval
movements, to demand a cessation of aggressive Japanese actions. The
Americans were reluctant, fearing to take any steps which might speed
up Japanese aggression and thus distract attention from the German
problem; Roosevelt even said that continued peace with Japan was so
essential that "he would turn a deaf ear if Japan went into Thailand,
but not if they went into the Dutch East Indies." In the latter case he
envisaged nothing more than economic warfare for a considerable period.
Immediately
following the
Atlantic Conference, Roosevelt was concerned with two major European
problems, leaving the rising tension with Japan in Hull's hands. The
two problems were naval escort of convoys to Britain and military
supplies for the Soviet Union.
During
the spring, summer, and
autumn of 1941, Roosevelt was under constant pressure from many of his
Cabinet to grab the bull by the horns and establish American naval
escort of supply ships to Britain. At first he yielded to this
pressure, but by July he became convinced that American public opinion
would not accept convoy escort all the way to Britain, and substituted
for this escort to the meridian of Iceland, with the argument that this
was still within the Western Hemisphere. Orders to organize convoy
escorts all the way to Britain had been issued on February 26th. To
protect these, an Atlantic Fleet, under Admiral King, had been created
on February 1st. This was reinforced by three battleships, an aircraft
carrier, four cruisers, and numerous destroyers, transferred from the
Pacific in May. In March, Roosevelt ordered two destroyer bases and two
seaplane bases to be constructed witl1 Lend-Lease funds in northern
Ireland and Scotland. At the same time, he gave Britain ten Coast Guard
cutters to be based in Iceland, and seized possession of sixty-five
Axis and Danish ships anchored in American harbors. A month later,
Greenland was declared to be in the Western Hemisphere, and the United
States took over its protection and began to construct bases.
The
Red Sea was declared not
to be a combat area, thus reopening it to American merchant ships
carrying supplies to Egypt (April 10, 1941). The financial assets of
the Axis Powers and of all occupied and belligerent countries in Europe
were frozen, and Axis consulates in the United States were closed (June
14-16, 1941). American flying schools were made available to train
British aviators. Four thousand marines who had been ordered to occupy
the Azores in anticipation of a Nazi move toward Gibraltar or the
Atlantic islands were released from this assignment when Hitler moved
eastward in June. Accordingly, they were reassigned to occupy Iceland,
which they did, in agreement with the Icelandic government, in July.
In
the meantime, hy
presidential proclamation, the American Neutrality Zone which had been
defined in September 1939 as west of 60° W. longitude was extended
to 26° W. longitude, the meridian of Iceland. The United States
Navy was ordered to follow all Axis raiders or submarines west of this
meridian, broadcasting their positions to the British. On July 19,
1941, American naval convoys were ordered as far eastward as this
meridian. The first such convoy left on September 16, 1941. In
practice, American escort vessels covered about 1,200 miles of distance
in the mid-Atlantic between 52° W. and 26° W., picking up from
Canadian escorts south of Newfoundland and delivering their charges to
British escorts south of Iceland. This gave the Canadians and British
routes of about 650 miles to cover on either end. By this time, Axis
submarines had moved from the waters off the British Isles to the
mid-Atlantic, where they were operating by a "wolf-pack" technique.
Under this method, as soon as a convoy was discovered, a dozen or more
submarines would assemble in its path and attack on the surface at
night. This proved to be a very effective method, especially against
inexperienced American escorts, which maintained too rigid stations too
close to their convoys. But this method had the great weakness that it
required extensive radio communication with Germany for orders; this
revealed the locations of the U-boats, and eventually became a fatal
weakness.
American
naval escort of
British convoys could not fail to lead to a "shooting war" with
Germany. The Roosevelt Administration did not shrink from this
probability. The growing tension with Japan combined with the American
strategic decision that Germany must be defeated before Japan to compel
an increasingly active policy in the Atlantic in order to avoid a
situation where we would be at war in the Pacific while still at peace
with Germany. Fortunately for the Administration's plans, Hitler played
into its hands by declaring war on the United States on December 11,
1941. By that date "incidents"' were becoming more frequent.
On
October 17th the United States destroyer Kearney
suffered casualties when it was torpedoed; two weeks later the destroyer
Reuben James
was blown to pieces, with great loss of life, by a chain of explosives
from a German torpedo, its own forward magazine, and its own depth
charges. On November 10th an American escort of eleven vessels,
including the carrier Ranger, picked up a convoy of
six vessels, including America's three largest ocean liners, the
America, the Washington, and the Manhattan,
with
20,000 British troops, and guarded them from off Halifax to India and
Singapore. Pearl Harbor was attacked as this convoy was passing South
Africa, and the Washington eventually reached home
by crossing the Pacific to California.
Many
of the activities of the
American Navy in the summer of 1941 were known not at all or w ere
known only very imperfectly to the American public, but it would seem
that public opinion generally supported the Administration's actions.
In September, Roosevelt sought congressional action to repeal the
section of the Neutrality Acts forbidding the arming of merchant
vessels. This was done on October 17th, the vote in the House going
259-138, with only 21 Democrats opposing the change and only 39
Republicans supporting it. On that same day the Kearney
was
torpedoed. Two weeks later all the essential portions of the Neutrality
Acts were repealed (November 13th). The vote in the House, 212-194,
once again showed the partisan nature of the Administration's foreign
policy, for only 22 of 159 Republican votes were for repeal. By this
vote the United States "resumed its traditional right to send its ships
wherever it pleased and to arm and protect them in every way possible."
This meant that open naval warfare with Germany was in the immediate
future.
During
this period, from June
to December 1941, Roosevelt was also kept occupied by the problem of
military aid for the Soviet Union. The Nazi forces which flung
themselves on Russia, on June 22, 1941, were at the peak of their
powers, and the Soviet Union was soon in grave need of any aid it could
get. Churchill ... was willing to accept anyone, "even the devil," as
he put it himself, as an ally against the Nazi menace, and to extend
whatever aid was available to such an ally. Roosevelt shared these
ideas to a considerable extent, but the American people were suspicious
of Bolshevism, and American military experts were generally agreed that
the Soviet Union could not hold out against Hitler long enough for any
aid to be effective. Accordingly, it was several months before
Roosevelt was in a position to make Lend-Lease supplies available to
the Kremlin.
Chapter 54—The Nazi Attack on Soviet Russia,
1941-1942
In
planning his attack on
Soviet Russia, Hitler used the customary German strategic concepts;
these gave priority to the destruction of enemy armies over the seizure
and occupation of enemy territory and resources. This destruction was
to be achieved (and quickly achieved, according to Hitler), in a series
of gigantic pincers movements of the double-arm type which had worked
so well against Poland in 1939. In these operations a huge outer
pincers of armored-division spearheads and a simultaneous but smaller
inner pincers of infantry-division columns would enclose a mass of
enemy troops, the armored pincers cutting a large segment of these off
from their supplies and communications while the infantry columns would
slice up the enclosed mass of enemy forces into smaller masses willing
to surrender. This method was used, again and again, with extraordinary
success against the Soviet armies, after June 1941, enclosing, and
frequently capturing, hundreds of thousands of Russians at a time, but
the very size of the operations used up Nazi men, materials, and (above
all) time without inflicting any fatal blow on the Soviet capacity to
resist.
Because
of these German
strategic ideas, no geographical objectives were given primary priority
in the German plans. Secondary priority Noms given, at Hitler's
insistence, to the capture of Leningrad in the north and to the capture
of Kiev and the Caucasus to the south. These geographical objectives
were set in order to link up with the Finns and cut the Murmansk
railway in the north, and to capture, or at least cut off from Russian
armies, the Soviet oil centers in the south. The capture of Moscow was,
by Hitler's direct orders, given only tertiary priority in the German
strategic plans.
The
German generals disagreed
with Hitler's geographic conceptions, and insisted that Moscow be made
the chief geographic goal of the German advance because it was the
vital railroad center of European Russia; it was also an important
industrial center, and contained the heart and brain of the whole
Soviet autocracy. Its capture would, according to the generals, cripple
Russia's ability to shift troops and supplies north and south and would
thus make it possible to isolate, for easier conquest, the Leningrad or
the Kiev fronts. Moreover, its capture would paralyze the
over-centralized system of Soviet tyranny, and strike such a blow to
Bolshevik prestige that it would probably be unable to survive.
In
the first three months of
the campaign of 1941 and for all of the campaign of 1942, Hitler
resisted the pressure from his generals and insisted that the maximum
German effort should be devoted to the two areas originally set in the
north and the south. Only in September 1941, when it was too late for a
successful assault on Moscow, did Hitler recognize that his own
geographic objectives could not be achieved, with the result that he
fell back on his generals' advice for an attack on Moscow. This
dispersal and shifting of geographic objectives, combined with German
inability to destroy the Soviet armies completely, brought Germany to
the point which Hitler had always insisted must be avoided above all
else: a two-front war of attrition by a Germany which was nowhere near
total economic mobilization.
German
authorities estimated
that Russia had over 200 divisions (of which 30 to 35 were in the Far
East), with 8,000 aircraft of diverse quality, and 115,000 tanks,
mostly light or obsolescent. On the European front they expected to
encounter 125 infantry, 25 cavalry, 25 motorized, and at least 5
armored divisions. Against these Russian forces, Hitler planned to hurl
141 German and 33 satellite (Finnish, Romanian, Italian, Hungarian,
Slovak, and Croat) divisions. The German forces included 19 (half-size)
armored divisions with 3,2oo tanks, 14 motorized divisions, and 3 air
fleets with 2,000 planes. These forces were organized into three army
groups (northern, central, and southern) aiming in the general
direction of Leningrad (500 miles away), Moscow (750 miles), and the
lower Volga (Stalingrad, 800 miles away). Each army group consisted of
infantry and panzer armies placed alternately across the front, in
order to operate the double-clawed pincer movements we have mentioned.
The whole German front, from north to south, had seven infantry armies
and four panzer armies organized in this alternating fashion, with two
infantry armies forming each end of the line, and the satellite forces
on the extreme flanks (Finns to the north, the others to the south).
The
Soviet Union was warned of
the impending Nazi attack from Washington and London, as well as by its
own spies, and had the exact date of the assault almost as soon as it
was set in Berlin. An anti-Nazi German in Berlin gave a copy of
Hitler's secret directive for Operation Barbarossa to the American
commercial attache within three weeks of its formulation; this was sent
to the Kremlin by Secretary of State Hull early in March 1941. All
these helpful moves were received with ill grace by the Soviet leaders,
and those who offered them were treated as troublemakers. Moscow made
no effort to escape the Nazi pincers by withdrawing its forces from
their exposed frontier positions, but continued to hope that its abject
economic collaboration with Hitler would lead him to cancel the attack
orders, in recognition of the fact that he could obtain more, in an
economic sense, from collaborating in peace than from conquest in war.
This hope was futile, because Hitler had such a gigantic disrespect for
Russia's fighting powers that he expected a complete German victory in
about six weeks. So convinced was Hitler on this point that he flatly
rejected, in June, again in July, and once again in August, suggestions
from the chief of the Great General Staff that any preparations be made
for fighting in winter. For this refusal Germany was to suffer bitterly.
Hitler's
estimates about the
weakness of the Soviet armies and the brevity of the approaching
campaign were generally shared by military men throughout the world. In
the United States, Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall believed
that Germany would be victorious in six weeks.
The
Nazi armies sprang forward
at dawn on Sunday, June 22, 1941. At the end of five days two
envelopments had been closed and on the following day a third was
completed. In these pockets there were such large Russian forces that
the perimeters could not be closed completely, and broken Russian units
escaped through the German lines. Nevertheless, from these pockets were
taken 289,874 prisoners, 2,585 tanks, and 1,149 cannon. By July 2sth
several more encirclements had been completed on the central front
(yielding 185,487 more prisoners with 2,030 tanks and 1,918 guns).
At
this point a crisis arose
in the German High Command. All the great successes we have mentioned
were on the central front, while the northern and southern fronts,
which Hitler wanted emphasized, were advancing much more slowly. This
resulted from the fact that Hitler's generals did not share the
Führer's strategic ideas, and had disposed the German forces so
that, in effect, they overruled his directives and gave preponderance
to their own goal, the capture of Moscow. For this reason they had
given two of their four panzer armies to Field Marshal Fedor von Bock's
Army Group Center, and one to each of the other army groups. Since the
Russians had massed their strength in the south, German Army Group
South, under Gerd von Rundstedt, had only 800 tanks, while his Soviet
opponent, Marshal S. M. Budënny had 2,000.
The
brilliant success of the
German Army Group Center led the German General Staff and Hitler to
change their minds, but in opposite directions. The weakness of the
Soviet defense persuaded Bock to adopt a plan, advanced by Guderian,
that Army Group Center abandon further efforts at pincers encirclements
and send its armored units on a straight all-out drive to Moscow, one
hundred miles away. About the same time, Hitler decided to strengthen
the advance of Army Groups North and South, by directing the efforts of
the two panzer armies of Army Group Center away from their own front
and onto the fronts of the two flanking army groups. This would have
left Army Group Center with infantry forces only, thus slowing its
advance and restricting its operations to tactical mopping-up
activities, but it would have increased the ability of the flanking
army groups to close pincer envelopments by giving each of them the use
of two panzer armies. By Directive No. 33, on July 19th, Hitler issued
orders for this change. Although the generals resisted and stalled in
carrying out these instructions, the advance on Moscow was broken.
General
Franz Halder wrote in
his diary on July 26th: "The Führer's analysis, which at many
points is unjustly critical of the Field Command, indicates a complete
break with the strategy of large operational conceptions. You cannot
beat the Russians with operational successes, he argues, because they
simply do not know when they are defeated. On that account it will be
necessary to destroy them bit by bit, in small encircling actions of a
purely tactical character." Against these ideas of Hitler's his
generals argued for weeks, in vain. On August 21st, Hitler issued
Directive No. 34. It began: "The proposals of the Army High Command for
the continuance of the operations in the east, dated August 18, do not
conform to my intentions.... The principal object is not the capture of
Moscow." In place of this, it set the following objectives: to seize
the Crimea and the Dombas coal mines, to cut off the Caucasian oil
supplies, to isolate Leningrad, and to make direct contact with the
Finns.
As
a consequence of the shift
of emphasis to the south, German Army Group South completed a colossal
envelopment east of Kiev (August 24-September 21). In a great bag 200
miles wide, the Germans captured 665,000 prisoners with 3,718 cannon
and 884 tanks. Hitler called this "the greatest battle in the history
of the world"; his chief of staff called it "the greatest strategic
blunder of the Eastern Campaign."
At
this point in the
campaign a curious phenomenon appeared: large numbers of anti-Stalinist
Russians began to surrender to the Nazis. Most of these were
Ukrainians, and the majority were eager to fight with the Nazis against
the Stalinist regime of the Soviet Union. If the Nazis had been willing
to cooperate with this movement, and to treat these deserters in a
decent fashion, it is extremely likely that the flood of Russian
deserters would have become an overwhelming torrent and the Moscow
regime would have collapsed. Instead, the Nazis, led by Hitler,
resolutely refused to adopt the role of "Liberator of the Slavs," and
instead insisted on playing the role of "Annihilator of the Slavs." The
arrogance, sadism, and racism of the Nazi system soon presented itself
in a form as hateful to the average Slav as Stalinism itself.
As
soon as the conquering
German armies seized Soviet territory, various Nazi and satellite
organizations of exploitation, of enslavement, and of extermination
moved in, led by the SS. Prisoners of war and civilians were rounded up
by the millions and deported to German slave-labor camps where they
were starved, frozen, and beaten into subhuman derelicts at the very
time that they were expected to work, fifteen or more hours a day, on
Nazi war production. Those inhabitants of conquered areas who escaped
deportation or imprisonment generally were deprived of most of their
possessions, especially of their food stores and livestock. All
industrial equipment which had not been removed by the retreating
Soviet armies was stolen or destroyed by the Nazis. The deserters who
wished to fight with the Nazis against Stalin would have been welcomed
by many German Army officers, but their use in this fashion was
generally discouraged and frequently forbidden by the Nazi political
leaders such as Hitler or Himmler. In spite of this, some Russian units
in the Nazi armies were formed, although generally they were used only
for guard or garrison duties. The size of this movement of
anti-Stalinist deserters can be judged from the fact that, in spite of
the obstacles we have mentioned, the number of such deserters serving
in the Nazi armed forces reached 900,000 in June 1944. These were
nominally under the leadership of a renegade Soviet general, A. A.
Vlasov, who had served as Soviet military adviser to Chiang Kai-shek in
China in 1938, with the rank of major general, and had been captured by
the Nazis when serving as deputy commander of the Volkhov front, in
June 1942. Nothing effective could be done with "Vlasov formations"
because of the opposition of Hitler and Himmler. When Germany was
clearly on the road to defeat in November 1944, Himmler withdrew his
opposition, and allowed Vlasov to issue a call for an anti-Stalinist
liberation army of Russians. In six weeks this organization received a
million applications for membership, but could obtain almost no
equipment and could organize combat units of no more than 50,000 men. At
the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of Vlasov's supporters fled
westward to the American and British armies for refuge from Stalin's
vengeance, but were handed over to the Soviet Union to be murdered out
of hand or sent to slave-labor camps in Siberia. The dimensions of
human suffering involved in this whole situation is beyond the human
imagination. The number of Soviet prisoners captured by the
Nazis,
according to the records of the German Army, reached over 2,000,000 by
November 1, 1941, and reached 3,060,000 by March 1, 1942. Over 500,000
of these died of starvation, typhus, or froze to death in prison camps
in the winter of 1941-1942. In the whole Eastern campaign up to January
1944 the Nazis captured 5,553,000 prisoners.
On
September 6, 1941, in
Directive No. 35, Hitler suddenly accepted the suggestions of his
generals, and ordered an attack on Moscow. After two weeks of
reorganization of forces, this attack began. About the same time,
Leningrad was encircled, thus commencing an unsuccessful siege which
continued until the city was relieved twenty-eight months later.
By
October 8, 1941, two great
encirclements west of Moscow closed on 663,000 Soviet prisoners with
5,412 cannon and 1,242 tanks. Mopping up took two weeks. By that time
the weather had broken, and the Germans were advancing through pouring
rain, sleet, and mud. They suffered their first cases of frostbite on
November 7th, but, with Moscow only thirty-eight
miles away,
the attack continued. A week later, Siberian divisions, moved from the
Far East, in consequence of the Japanese-Soviet Nonaggression Pact and
Richard Sorge’s information that the Japanese had decided to
attack Singapore rather than Siberia, appeared before Moscow. The first
Soviet counter-offensive came on November 28th,
just as the 2nd
German Armored Division caught sight of the towers of the Kremlin from
a distance of fourteen miles. The next night the temperature fell to
22° below zero Fahrenheit. The Germans, without any preparation for
a winter campaign, began to suffer horribly. Yet when Field Marshal von
Rundstedt, commander of Army Group South, allowed some of his units to
withdraw, he was removed by Hitler.
On
December 19th the commander
in chief, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch was relieved and his
post taken by Hitler himself. The Führer issued an order which
said: "The army is not to withdraw a single step. Every man must fight
where he stands." A few days later, Guderian was removed for violation
of this order. In spite of Hitler's attitude, Russian pressure
throughout the winter made necessary one German withdrawal after
another. By the spring of 1942, many units had fallen back a hundred or
more miles. During this period the Luftwaffe generally could not
operate for lack of winter lubricants, and when its planes did take to
the air they had to be used to carry supplies to ground forces which
were cut off by Russians. Tanks could he used only after their engines
had been warmed up for twelve hours. Frostbite casualties in the German
Army ran about a thousand a day, and by February 28, 1942, the total
German casualties in the Russian offensive reached over a million (31
percent).
We
have mentioned that
military assistance to the Soviet Union from the United States was held
up by the slowness of American economic mobilization, the
anti-Bolshevism of American public opinion, and the general lack of
confidence in Soviet ability to withstand the Nazi attack. These
obstacles were not decisive with Churchil1 or Roosevelt. On July 12,
1941, Britain signed an alliance with Russia. Four weeks later Harry
Hopkins returned from a hurried visit to Moscow to report to the
Atlantic Conference his conviction that the Soviet Union would be able
to hold out against the Nazi attack. He also brought a completely
unreasonable demand from Stalin for an immediate British invasion of
western Europe to relieve the German pressure on Russia. Unable to
grant any hopes of such an invasion in 1941 or even in 1942, Roosevelt
and Churchill decided to send a full-scale economic mission to Moscow
to determine Russia's material needs. This mission, headed by Averell
Harriman and Lord Beaverbrook, was in Moscow for three days at the end
of September 1941, and signed an agreement for Soviet aid to June 30,
1942
In
the postwar period it
was frequently stated that the Roosevelt Administration should have
taken advantage of Stalin's urgent need for supplies in September 1941,
by forcing him to sign agreements to recognize the independence and
territorial integrity of various countries in eastern Europe. Strangely
enough, during the discussions in Moscow at the time, Stalin was eager
to obtain a formal statement on war aims and on specific territorial
boundaries, but the United States was reluctant: it objected to any
"secret accords" which might hamper freedom of action later, and was
unwilling either to abandon the peoples of eastern Europe to Russia or
to insist on their rights vigorously enough to drive the Soviet Union
to make a separate peace with Hitler....
The
agreement of September
30, 1941, provided that, in the next nine months, the Anglo-Americans
would send to the Soviet Union l,050,000 tons of supplies, including
300 fighting planes, 100 bombers, and 500 tanks a month. Up to that
moment Russia had purchased about $100,000,00 of supplies in the United
States with its own money, had obtained $29,000,000 in supplies from
United States loans to be repaid in future deliveries of gold bullion,
and had obtained from Britain considerable supplies, including 450
planes, 3,000,000 pairs of boots, and 22,000 tons of rubber. But
financing the new Moscow agreement was quite a different task, and
could be done only under Lend-Lease. By the end of November, Roosevelt
was able to get American public opinion, and especially American
Catholic opinion, to reduce its objections to such a step sufficiently
to allow him to establish it.
As
with Lend-Lease aid to
Britain, such aid to Soviet Russia raised the problem of how supplies
could be delivered. In the first two years of Lend-Lease, 46 percent of
the total shipped went across the Pacific to Siberia in Soviet ships;
23 percent took the 76-day route to the Persian Gulf to go north over
the completely inadequate trans-Iranian route; 41 percent took the
12-day sea route to Murmansk or Archangel. The dangers of this last
route can be seen from the fact that 21 percent of the cargoes on it
were lost by German attack, partly by submarines and surface raiders,
but chiefly by air attacks from Finnish and Norwegian bases. The
horrors of this northern route to Russia are almost beyond description.
In the summer, twenty-four hours of light each day allowed attacks to
be continuous; in the winter water temperature was so low that
torpedoed seamen could survive no more than a few minutes in it. And in
both seasons there was no relief at the end of the voyage, for the
Russian ports were within easy bombing range of German air bases under
conditions of visibility (notably surrounding hills and poor Soviet
cooperation) which allowed only a few seconds' warning before any
attack.
Part Fifteen—World War II: the Ebb of
Aggression: 1941-1945
Chapter
55—The Rising in the Pacific, to 1942
Traditionally,
American policy
in the Far East had sought to preserve the territorial integrity and
political independence of China and to maintain an "Open Door" for
China's foreign trade. These goals became increasingly difficult to
achieve in the course of the twentieth century because of the growing
weakness of China itself, the steady growth of aggression in Japan, and
the deepening involvement of other Powers with Far Eastern interests in
a life-or-death struggle with Germany. After the fall of France and the
Low Countries in the summer of 1940, Britain could offer the United
States little more than sympathy and some degree of diplomatic support
in the Far East, while the Netherlands and France, with rich colonial
possessions within reach of Japan's avid grasp, could provide no real
opposition to Japan's demands. After Hitler's attack on Russia in June
1941, the Soviet Union, which had actually fought Japanese forces in
the Far East in 1938 and again in 1939, could exert no pressure on
Japan to deter further Nipponese aggression. Thus, by the summer of
1941, Japan was ready for new advances in the Far East, and only the
United States was in a position to resist.
This
situation was complicated
by the domestic political divisions within the United States and Japan.
In general, these divisions tended to postpone any showdown between the
two Powers. On the one hand, the American government had developed a
fissure between its military strategic plans and its diplomatic
activities, just at the time when isolationist opinion within the
country was making its most vociferous objections to the
Administration's policies in both these fields. On the other hand, the
Japanese government was by no means united, either on the direction or
on the timing of its next moves.
The
divisions in public
opinion within the United States and even within the Roosevelt
Administration are obvious enough to Americans, but the equally great
divisions in Japan are largely ignored. It should be recognized by
Americans today, as it was recognized by the Japanese leaders at the
time, that the Japanese aggressions of 1941 which culminated in the
attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th were based on fear and weakness
and not on arrogance and strength. To be sure, the earlier aggressions
which began in Manchuria in 1931 and in North China in 1937 had been
arrogant enough. The Japanese had been supremely confident of their
ability to conquer all China, if necessary, even as late as 1939. As a
consequence, their advance had been accompanied hy brutality against
the Chinese, by various actions to drive all Europeans and all European
economic enterprises out of China, and by insults and humiliations to
Europeans found in China, especially in Shanghai.
By
1939 all of this was
beginning to change. The attack on China had bogged down completely.
The Japanese economy was beginning to totter under a combination of
circumstances, including the exhausting effort to strangle China and to
administer a fatal blow to the retreating Chinese government by octopus
tactics, the reorganization of Japan's home industry from a light basis
to a heavy industrial plant (for which Japan lacked the necessary
resources), the gigantic capital investment in Manchuria and North
China, the growing restrictions on Japanese trade imposed by Western
countries, and, finally, the combination of a rapidly growing
population with acute material shortages. Problems such as these might
have driven many nations, even in the West, to desperate action. In
Japan the situation was made more critical by the large-scale diversion
of manpower and resources from consumption to capital formation at a
very high rate. And, finally, all this was taking place in a country
which placed a high esteem on military arrogance.
In
theory, of course, Japan
might have sought to remedy its material shortages in a peaceful way,
by seeking to increase Japan's foreign trade, exporting increasing
amounts of Japanese goods to pay for rising Japanese imports. In fact,
such a policy had obvious weaknesses. The world depression after 1929
and the growth of economic autarchy in all countries, including the
United States, made it very difficult to increase Japanese exports. The
excessively high American Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, although not so
intended, seemed to the Japanese to be an aggressive restriction on
their ability to live. The "imperial preference" regulations of the
British Commonwealth had a similar consequence. Since Japan could not
defend itself against such economic measures, it resorted to political
measures. To do otherwise would have been contrary to Japanese
traditions. But, by embarking on this course, Japan was heading in a
direction which could hardly have a favorable outcome. If Japan adopted
political measures to defend itself against economic restrictions, the
Western Powers would inevitably defend themselves with even greater
economic restrictions on Japan, driving Japan, by a series of such
stages, to open war. And, in such a war, in view of its economic
weakness, Japan could hardly hope to win. These stages were confused
and delayed over a full decade of years (1931-1941), by indecision and
divided counsels in both Japan and the Western Powers. In the process
Japan found a considerable advantage in the parallel aggressions of
Italy and Germany. It also found a considerable disadvantage in the
fact that Japan's imports were vital necessities to her, while her
exports were vital necessities to no one. This meant that Japan's trade
could he cut off or reduced by anyone, to Japan's great injury, but at
much smaller cost to the other nation.
The
steps leading to open war
between Japan and the Western Powers were delayed by the long-drawn
indecision of the Sino-Japanese War. For years Japan hoped to find a
solution for its economic and social problems in a decisive victory
over China, while in the same years the Western Powers hoped for an end
to Japanese aggression by a Japanese defeat in China. Instead, the
struggle in that area dragged on without a decision. The Western Powers
were too divided at home and among themselves, too filled with pacifism
and mistaken political and economic ideas to do anything decisive about
China, especially when open war was impossible and anything less than
war would injure China as well as Japan. Thus, no sanctions were
imposed on Japan for its aggression on Manchuria in 1931 or for its
attack on North China in 1937. The American Neutrality Act was not
applied to this conflict because President Roosevelt adopted the simple
legalistic expedient of failing to "find" a war in the Far East. But
the mere existence of laws which might have imposed economic sanctions
or economic retaliation on Japan revealed to that country the basic
weakness of its own position.
In
1937 Japan received a
series of lessons in the precarious state of its strategic-economic
position. In the first half of that year, as background for its growing
military pressure on China, Japan bought a record amount of American
scrap iron and steel, 1.3 million metric tons in six months. Agitation
to curtail this supply, either by applying the Neutrality Act to the
Sino-Japanese conflict or by some lesser action, was growing in the
United States. Early in October 1937, President Roosevelt caused a
controversy by a speech suggesting a "quarantine" of aggressor nations.
Isolationist sentiment in the United States, especially in the Midwest,
was too strong to allow the administration to take any important steps
toward such a "quarantine." Nevertheless, Stimson, who had been
American secretary of state at the time of the Manchurian crisis in
1931, made a public appeal for an embargo on the shipment of war
materials to Japan. A month later, November 3-24, 1937, a conference of
the signers of the Nine-Power Treaty of 1922, which guaranteed the
integrity of China, met at Brussels to discuss what steps might be
taken to end Japan's aggression in China. There was considerable talk
of economic sanctions, but no Great Power was willing to light the fuse
on that stick of dynamite, so the occasion lapsed, and nothing was
done. But the lesson was not wasted on Japan; it intensified its
efforts to build up Japanese power to a position where it could use
political action to defend itself against any economic reprisals.
Naturally, the political actions it took in this direction served only
to hasten economic reprisals against itself, especially by the United
States, the world's most devoted defender of the status quo
in
the Far East and the only Great Power in any position, especially after
Hitler's attacks, to adopt an active policy against Japan.
Japan
could have achieved
little toward a political solution of its problems if it had not been
for the aggressions of Italy and Germany on the other side of the
world. A full year before the Brussels Conference, on November 25,
1936, Japan had joined the league of aggressors known as the
Anti-Comintern Pact. Discussions seeking to strengthen this arrangement
into a full German-Japanese alliance went on for years, but were not
concluded until September 1940.
Hitler
was not sure whether he
wanted Japanese support against the Western democracies or against the
Soviet Union, and, accordingly, sought an agreement which could be
swung either way, while Japan was interested in a German alliance only
if it ran against the Soviet Union. At the same time, Germany objected
to the Japanese war on China, since this prevented Japan's strength
from being directed against either of Germany's possible foes, and
jeopardized German economic interests in China. All these difficulties
continued, although Ribbentrop's advent to the post of foreign minister
in Berlin in February 1938 inaugurated a period of wholehearted
cooperation with Japan in China, replacing Neurath's earlier efforts to
maintain some kind of neutral balance in the Sino-Japanese War. The
German military advisers with Chiang Kai-shek were withdrawn, although
some of them had been in their positions for ten years and were likely
to be replaced by Soviet advisers; the German ambassador was withdrawn
from China, and the protection of German interests was generally left
to lesser officials, using Japanese officials in areas under Japanese
occupation; the Japanese regime in Manchukuo was explicitly recognized
(20 February 1938); all shipments of German war materials to China
(which reached a value of almost 83 million marks in 1937) were ended,
and in-completed contracts totaling 282 million marks were canceled;
the Japanese claim that their attack on Nationalist China was really an
anti-Communist action, although recognized as a fraud in Berlin, was
tacitly accepted; and the earlier German efforts to mediate peace
between China and Japan ceased.
In
spite of these concessions,
Japan continued its efforts to curtail German economic enterprises in
China, along with those of other Western nations. The alienation of
these two aggressor countries by the summer of 1939 can be judged by
the fact that the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of August 1939 was
made in flagrant violation of the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern
Agreement of November 1936, since this latter document bound the
signers to make no political agreements with the Soviet Union without
the previous consent of the other signatory state. This was regarded in
Tokyo as such a blow to the prestige of the Japanese government that
the prime minister resigned.
In
the meantime the American
government began to tighten the economic pincers on Japan just as Japan
was seeking to tighten its military pincers on China. In the course of
1939 Japan was able to close all the routes from the outside into China
except through Hong Kong, across French Indochina, and along the rocky
and undeveloped route from Burma to Chungking. The American government
retaliated with economic warfare. In June 1938 it established a "moral
embargo" on the shipment of aircraft or their parts and bombs to Japan
by simply requesting American citizens to refuse to sell these articles.
Early in 1939 large American and British loans to China sought to
strengthen that country's collapsing financial system.
In September 1939 Washington gave the necessary six-month notice to
cancel the 1911 commercial treaty with Japan; this opened the door to
all kinds of economic pressure against Japan. At the same time, the
"moral embargo" was extended to eleven named raw materials which were
vital to Japan's war machine. In December this embargo was extended to
cover light metals and all machinery or plans for making aviation
gasoline.
In
general, there was
considerable pressure in the United States, both inside the
administration and elsewhere, to increase American economic sanctions
against Japan. Such a policy was opposed by the isolationists in the
country, by our diplomatic agents in Tokyo, and by our quasi-allies,
Britain, France, and the Netherlands. These diverse opinions agreed
that economic sanctions could be enforced, in the long run, only by
war. To put it bluntly, if Japan could not get petroleum, bauxite,
rubber, and tin by trade, it could be prevented from seizing areas
producing these products only by force. To avoid this obvious
inference, Cordell Hull sought to make America's economic policy
ambiguous so that Japan might be deterred from evil actions by fear of
sanctions not yet imposed and won to conciliatory actions by hopes of
concessions not yet granted. Such a policy was a mistake, but it
obtained President Roosevelt's explicit approval in December 1939. It
was a mistake, since it paralyzed the less aggressive elements in
Japanese affairs, allowing the more aggressive elements to take
control, because the uncertainty it engendered became so unbearable to
many, even of the less aggressive, that any drastic action seeking to
end the strain became welcome; there was no real faith in America's
intentions, with the result that the period of sustained uncertainty
came to be interpreted in Japan as a period of American rearmament
preliminary to an attack on Japan, and the ambiguity of American
commercial policy toward Japan was, over the months of 1940-1941,
slowly resolved in the direction of increasing economic sanctions.
There was a steady increase in America's economic pressure on Japan by
extensions of the "moral embargo," by the growth of financial
obstacles, and by increasing purchasing difficulties, presumably based
on America's rearmament program..
Japan
continued to advance in
China with brusque disregard of Western interests, citizens, or
property. By the end of 1939, Japan controlled all the chief cities,
river valleys, and railroad lines of eastern China, but faced constant
guerrilla opposition in rural areas and had no control over the deep
interior of China, which remained loyal to Chiang Kai-shek's government
in far-off Chungking on the Upper Yangtze in southwestern China. In
March 1940 the Japanese set up a puppet Chinese government at Nanking,
but the reality of its power deceived no one.
In
the winter of 1939-1940,
Japan began to make vigorous commercial demands on the Netherlands East
Indies. These demands, chiefly concerned with petroleum and bauxite,
were increased after the German victories in France and the Low
Countries. From these victories and from Hull's doctrinaire refusal to
encourage any Japanese hope that they could win worthwhile American
concessions from a more moderate policy, the advocates of extremism in
Japan gained influence. A Japanese demand was made on France, following
the latter's defeat by Germany, to allow Japanese troops to enter
northern Indochina, in order to cut off supplies going to China. This
was conceded at once by the Vichy government. At the same time (June
1940), Britain received a demand to withdraw its troops from Shanghai
and close the Burma Road to Chinese imports. When Hull refused to
cooperate with Britain, either in forcing Japan to desist or in any
policy aiming to win better Japanese behavior by concessions, Britain
withdrew from Shanghai and closed the Burma Road for three months.
Just
at that moment a powerful
new weapon against Japan was added to the American arsenal, by an
amendment to the National Defense Act giving the President authority to
embargo the export of supplies which he judged to be necessary to the
defense of the United States. The first presidential order under this
new authority required licenses for many goods which Japan needed,
including aluminum, airplane parts, all arms or munitions, optical
supplies, and various "strategic" materials, but left petroleum and
scrap iron unhindered.
As
France was falling in June
1940, Roosevelt, for reasons of domestic policy, added to his Cabinet
two leaders of the Republican Party, Henry L. Stimson and Frank C.
Knox; both of these were interventionists in behalf of Britain, while
Stimson, for years, had been demanding economic sanctions against
Japan, assuring the more cautious of his audience that such a policy
would bring about a Japanese retreat rather than any war. The error in
this point of view was clearly revealed at Pearl Harbor in December
1941, but the exact nature of the error is not always recognized.
The
real error in the American
negotiations with Japan in 1940-1941 was a double one. On the one hand,
there was no correlation between our demands on Japan and our actual
power in the Pacific, since our demands were vastly more extensive than
our strength. On the other hand, there was no correlation between our
strategic plans and our diplomatic activity, with the consequence that
there was no correlation between our German policy and our Japanese
policy. The American strategic plans were based on the premise that
Germany must be defeated before Japan. From this perfectly correct
premise followed several corollaries which were not fully grasped by
American leaders, especially by the nonmilitary leaders. One of these
corollaries provided that America must not get into war with Japan
before it got into war with Germany, for, if it did so, it would either
have to abandon its strategic plans and proceed to fight Japan or
declare war on Germany itself. The much greater danger from Germany,
and especially from a German victory over either Britain or the Soviet
Union, made the first of these unacceptable, while American public
opinion would never have accepted an American declaration of war
against Germany when we were already in a state of war with Japan. A
second corollary from all these conditions was that American diplomatic
pressure on Japan must be timed in terms of American-German relations
and not in terms of American-Japanese relations in order to avoid
pushing Japan into desperate action before American-German relations
had passed the breaking point.
As
we shall see, American
diplomatic pressure on Japan was increased on the basis of moral
outrage, high-flown principles, incidental retaliation, and an
unrealistic conception of international legality, without any attempt
to coordinate this pressure either with our relations to Germany or,
what was even worse, with our actual power in the Pacific. Hull was
able to do this because his attitudes were generally shared by the
civilian heads of the two service departments, by Stimson as secretary
of war, and by Knox as secretary of the navy; thus the more realistic
views of the military and naval leaders, and their better appreciation
of the implications of America's strategic plans, did not have their
proper weight on America's policy-making on the Cabinet level or even
at the White House. Fortunately, America was saved from many of the
consequences of these errors when Hitler made his greatest mistake by
declaring war on the United States.
By
the beginning of 1941, the
Japanese attack on China had bogged down and was in such imminent
danger of collapse that something drastic had to be done. But there was
no agreement within Japan as to what direction such drastic action
should take. A timid majority existed, even within the Japanese
government itself, which would have been willing to withdraw from the
Chinese "incident" if this could have been done without too great "loss
of face." On the whole, this group was timid and ineffectual because of
the danger of assassination by the extreme militarists and
hyper-nationalist groups within Japan. Moreover, it was impossible to
reach any agreement with the Chinese Nationalist government which would
allow Japan to retain its "face" by covering a real withdrawal from
China with an apparent diplomatic triumph of some sort.
The
advocates of an aggressive
policy in Japan were divided among the insignificant group who still
believed that an all-out assault on China could be brought to a
successful conclusion and the more influential groups who would have
sought to redeem the stalemate in China by shifting the offensive
against either Soviet Siberia or the rich Anglo-Dutch possessions of
Malaysia and Indonesia. In the long run, the group which advocated a
drive to the south was bound to prevail, because Malaysia and Indonesia
were obviously weak and rich, while Soviet Siberia lacked those items
(such as petroleum, rubber, or tin) which Japan most urgently needed,
and it had demonstrated its power in the battles of 1938-1939. Germany,
which originally encouraged the Japanese to move southward against
British Malaysia and then, when it was too late, sought to redirect the
Japanese blow against Siberia, played an insignificant role in Japan's
policy. The decision to move southward, where the defense was weaker
and the prizes so much greater, was made in an ambiguous and
halfhearted way in the summer of 1941. The critical turning point was
probably during the last week in July.
During
the six-week period,
March 12-April 22, Matsuoka, the fire-eating foreign minister, was
absent from Tokyo on a visit to Berlin and to Moscow. In the German
capital he was advised to make no political agreements with the Soviet
Union, because of the imminent approach of war between that country and
Germany. Matsuoka at once went to Moscow, where he signed a
Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact on April 13, 1941. In the meantime, in
March, Japanese diplomats won special economic concessions in Siam,
while in June the nine-month-old trade discussions with the Netherlands
East Indies broke down without Nippon obtaining any of the concessions
it desired. These agreements, if obtained, might have put Japan in a
position where it could have withstood a total American petroleum
embargo. Failure to obtain these meant that Japan's large oil reserves
would continue to decrease to the point where Japan would be militarily
helpless from total lack of oil. America could accelerate this process
either by curtailing the supply of oil or by forcing Japan into actions
which would increase the rate of its consumption. Japanese oil
production in 1941 was only three million barrels a year compared to a
consumption rate of about 3z million barrels a year. Reserves, which
had been 55 million barrels in December 1939, were below 50 million in
September 1941, and fell to about 43 million by Pearl Harbor.
On
July 21, 1941, Japan's
threats won from Vichy France the right to move troops into southern
Indochina. This was a threat to British Malaya rather than to the Burma
Road in China. Within a week, on July 26, 1941, the United States froze
all Japanese financial assets in the United States, virtually ending
trade between the two countries. The members of the British
Commonwealth issued similar orders, while the Netherlands Indies
established special licenses for all exports to Japan. No licenses were
issued for vital commodities like oil or bauxite. In the same week, an
American military mission went to China, and the Philippine Army was
incorporated into the American Army.
As
a result of these
pressures, Japan found itself in a position where its oil reserves
would be exhausted in two years, its aluminum reserves in seven months.
The chief of the General Staff of the Japanese Navy told the emperor
that if Japan resorted to a war to break this blockade it would be very
doubtful that it could win. The president of the Japanese Planning
Board confirmed this gloomy opinion. The armed forces insisted that
Japan had a choice between a slow decline to extinction under economic
pressure or war which might allow it to break out of its predicament.
The navy had little hope of victory in such a war, but agreed with this
analysis. It was also agreed that war, if it came, must begin before
the middle of December, when weather conditions would become too
adverse to permit amphibious belligerent operations; it was clear that
economic pressure was too damaging to allow Japan to postpone such
operations until the resumption of good weather in 1942. Accordingly,
the decision was made to make war in 1941, but to continue negotiations
with the United States until late October. If an agreement could be
reached by that date, the preparations for war could be suspended;
otherwise the negotiations would be ended and the advance to open war
continued. Matsuoka, the foreign minister, who was opposed to
continuing the negotiations with the United States, was dropped from
the Cabinet on July 16th; from that date on, the civilian portion of
the Cabinet desperately sought to reach an agreement in Washington,
while the military portion calmly prepared for war.
In
the course of 1941, Japan's
preparations for war were gradually expanded from a project to close
the southern routes into China by an attack on Malaya, to an attack on
the United States. The decision to close the Burma Road by force meant
that Japan must move into French Indochina and Siam, and cross British
Malaya, after neutralizing the British naval base at Singapore. Such a
movement had numerous disadvantages. It would mean war with Britain; it
would leave the Japanese lines of communication southward open to a
flank attack from American bases in the Philippines; it was doubtful if
China could be defeated even when all Western supplies were cut off
(after all, these supplies were so insignificant that in 1940 American
arms and munitions to China were worth only $9 million); even a total
defeat of China would leave Japan's material shortages acute,
especially in respect to the greatest material need, petroleum
products. In view of these disadvantages, under which Japan would
expend so much to gain so little, it seemed to many Japanese leaders
that very considerable gains could he obtained with only a slight
additional effort if an attack on the rich Netherlands Indies were
combined with the attack on Malaya and the Burma Road. Such an advance
to the tin and bauxite of Malaya and to the oil of the Dutch Indies had
every advantage over any alternative possibility, such as an attack on
eastern Siberia, especially as the Japanese Army (but not the Navy) had
a higher opinion of Soviet power than they had of Anglo-American
strength.
Having
given the attack on
Malaya and Indonesia the preference over any possible attack on
Siberia, the Japanese leaders accepted the fact that this would mean
war with Britain and the United States. In this they were probably not
wrong, although some Americans have claimed that America would not have
gone to war if Japan had passed by the Philippines and left other
American territories untouched on its road to the south. It is
certainly true that such actions would have touched off a violent
controversy within the United States between the isolationists and the
interventionists, but it seems almost certain that the policies of the
Roosevelt Administration would have been carried out, and these
policies included plans for war against Japan's southern movement even
if American areas were not attacked. In any case, judging American
reactions in terms of their own, the Japanese decided that an American
flank attack from an untouched Philippines on their extended
communications to the southward would be too great a risk to run;
accordingly, an attack on the Philippines to prevent this was included
in the Japanese plans for their southern movement.
This
decision led at once to
the next step, the project to attack the American fleet at Pearl Harbor
on the grounds that an inevitable war with the United States could be
commenced most effectively with a surprise attack on the American Navy
rather than by waiting for an intact American fleet to come to seek out
the Japanese in their zones of active operations in the southwestern
Pacific. It must be recognized that one of the chief factors impelling
the Japanese to make the attack on Pearl Harbor was that few Japanese
(and these mostly in the army) had any hope that Japan could defeat the
United States in any war carried to a decisive conclusion. Rather, it
was hoped that, by crippling the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, Japan
could conquer such a large area of the southwestern Pacific and
southeastern Asia that peace could be negotiated on favorable terms.
Here, once again, the Japanese misjudged American psychology.
The
negotiations in Washington
between Kichisaburo Nomura and Secretary Hull were among the strangest
diplomatic discussions ever carried on. Although Nomura probably was
not informed of the Japanese plans to make war, he could not have
failed to infer them because he had received instructions that he must
reach an agreement hy late October if peace were to be preserved. He
found it impossible to reach such an agreement because Hull's demands
were extreme, and his own superiors in Tokyo were unwilling to make any
political concessions to win a relaxation of economic restrictions.
The
Americans had a clear view
of the situation because they had broken the secret Japanese codes and
generally had Nomura's instructions from Tokyo before he did. Thus the
Americans knew that Nomura had no powers to yield on any vital
political issue, that he had been given a deadline in October, and that
war would begin if he failed to obtain relaxation of the economic
embargo before that deadline. They did not, however, have any details
on the Japanese military plans, since these were not communicated by
radio, and they did not realize that these plans included an attack on
Pearl Harbor. In the course of November American Naval Intelligence
knew that Japanese armed forces were mobilizing and moving southward;
by November 20th it became clear that a task force of the navy,
including four of the largest Japanese aircraft carriers, had vanished.
At the end of November intercepted Japanese messages showed clearly
that the negotiations were no longer of significance. In early December
these showed that the Japanese Embassy in Washington had been ordered
to destroy all its codes and to prepare its staff for departure.
The
negotiations between Hull
and Nomura were lengthy, technical, and hopeless. In essence they
boiled down to the conclusion that America would not relax its economic
restrictions on Japan unless (1) Japan promised to refrain from acts of
force in the southwest Pacific area; (2) Japan agreed to violate its
treaty with Germany to permit the United States to support Britain even
to the point of war with Germany without any Japanese intervention on
the side of Germany; and (3) that Japan would agree to withdraw its
armed forces from Indochina and from China and restore equality of
economic opportunity in the latter country on a schedule to be worked
out later.
When
it became clear on
October 15, 1941, that agreement was impossible, Hideki Tojo, leader of
the activist military group in Japan, forced Prince Fumimaro Konoye to
resign. The new Cabinet had General Tojo as Premier, Minister of the
Army, and Minister of Home Affairs (controlling domestic police). This
was clearly a war government, but the negotiations continued in
Washington.
On
November 10th operations
orders were issued to the Japanese Navy to destroy the American fleet
in Pearl Harbor on December 7th. Orders had already been issued to
conquer Thailand, Malaya, the Philippines, Borneo, and Sumatra; the
rest of the Netherlands East Indies were to be taken in a second
movement and all the conquered areas enclosed in a defensive perimeter
to run from the Japanese Kurile Islands, through Wake Island and the
Marshall Islands, along the southern and western edges of Timor, Java,
and Sumatra, to the Burma-India border. By November 20th the American
defensive forces knew that Japan was about to strike but still felt
that the blow would he southward.
On
November 27th a war warning
was sent from Washington to Pearl Harbor, but no changes were made
there for increased precautions or a higher level of alertness.
Fortunately, the three carriers of the American Pacific Fleet were not
in Pearl Harbor on the morning of the attack, but the Japanese had
detailed anchorage sites for the vessels which were there, including
seven battleships and seven cruisers. The Japanese attack force
consisted of six carriers with 450 planes escorted by two battleships,
two cruisers, eleven destroyers, twenty regular submarines, and five
midget submarines. This force, in complete radio silence and without
encountering any other vessels, sailed in 1 l days in a great northward
circle from the Kuriles to a point 275 miles north of Pearl Harbor.
From that point, at 6:00 A. M. on December 7, 1941, was launched an air
strike of 360 planes, including 40 torpedo planes, 100 bombers, 130
dive-bombers, and go fighters. The five midget submarines,
dropped
from larger submarines, were already operating at Pearl Harbor and were
able to enter because the anti-torpedo net was carelessly left open
after 4:58 A. M. on December 7th. These submarines were detected at
3:42 before they entered the harbor, but no warning was sent until 6:54
after one had been attacked and sunk.
About
the same time, an army
enlisted man, using radar, detected a group of strange planes coming
down from the north 132 miles away, but his report was disregarded. At
7.30 an enlisted sailor noticed two dozen planes about a mile over his
ship hut did not report it. In the next half-hour these early arrivals
from the Japanese carriers were joined by others, and at 7:55 the
attack began. Within thirty minutes the Battle Line of the Pacific
Fleet had been wiped out. The American losses included 2,400 men
killed, almost 1,200 wounded, four battleships sunk with three others
hardly damaged, many other vessels sunk or damaged, and hundreds of
planes destroyed on the grounds. The greatest damage was inflicted by
special shallow-water torpedoes launched from planes which came in
below the 100-foot altitude. In all, the Japanese losses were small,
amounting to no more than a couple of dozen planes, because the
surprise was so great. The Japanese fleet was not found after the
attack, because the search order was issued 180 degrees off direction
through an error in interpretation.
Pearl
Harbor was but one of
several attacks made by the Japanese in their opening assaults on
December 7th-10th. Air attacks on Wake Island, Midway Island, Guam, the
Philippines, and Malaya destroyed hundreds of planes, mostly on the
ground, and set fire to large stores of supplies. Lack of antiaircraft
facilities, inadequate air power and fields, and carelessness by higher
officers transformed the defenders' situations from critical to
hopeless, although personal bravery and resourcefulness made the
Japanese pay heavily for their gains.
Midway
Island, 1,300 miles
northwest of Honolulu and linked to it hy a very important cable,
survived a hit-and-run attack of December 8, 1941, and hy 1942 was
America's westernmost base, especially valuable for planes, submarines,
and reconnaissance. Wake Island, 1,200 miles southwest of Midway, was
struck on December 8th and surrendered on December 23rd after a heavy
two-day assault. Guam, 1,500 miles west of Wake and in the midst of the
Japanese-mandated Mariana Islands, was invaded at the beginning and
gave up on December loth. The Philippines, 3,ooo miles west of Wake,
were attacked by landings at nine points in the seventeen days before
Christmas; by December 27th the Japanese had compelled the American
ground forces to evacuate Manila and to retire into their last defense
areas, the rocky caves of the island of Corregidor and the forests of
the Bataan Peninsula. Savage fighting continued until May 6, 1942, when
the last American forces on Corregidor surrendered. The commanding
officers, General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Thomas Hart, had
already withdrawn to Australia.
Fifteen
hundred miles wrest of
the Philippines, a Japanese army invaded Thailand from Indochina, and
on December 8th captured Bangkok without a struggle. About the same
time Japanese landings were made on the Malay Peninsula north of
Singapore. When the British battle cruiser Repulse
and the new battleship Prince of Wales ventured
north without air cover (since their accompanying carrier, Indomitable,
ran aground), they were sunk by Japanese land-based planes (December
loth). These were the only Allied capital ships west of Pearl Harbor.
But the event had much more significance than this. It showed that the
capital ship was no longer the mistress of the seas, as it had been for
at least two generations, and, by doing so, it showed that the American
losses at Pearl Harbor, concentrated as they were on battleships, were
not nearly so important as they had seemed to be. But, even more
significant, these sinkings off the east coast of Malaya marked the end
of British supremacy on the seas which had begun with the destruction
of the Spanish Armada in 1588. For the next two years supremacy on the
seas was in dispute, but at the end of that time the decision was
falling clearly in favor of a new champion, the United States.
Fanning
outward as they spread
over the southwestern Pacific and southeastern Asia, the Japanese
forces captured Hong Kong on December 25, 1941 and advanced on
Singapore across the swamps on its landward side. This great naval
base, the bastion of all British power in the Far East, had to
surrender on February 15, 1942, without even being able to defend
itself, its great guns, aimed seaward at an army which never came,
being completely useless against the Japanese who crept up on it from
the landward side.
Lying
north of Australia in a
great curve from Singapore to New Guinea was the Malay Barrier,
originally intended to form the southern perimeter of the Japanese
defense area. Like beads on a necklace across a distance of 3,500 miles
were stretched dozens of islands: Sumatra, Java, Bali, Lumbok, Flores,
Timor, New Guinea, and others. These were taken so rapidly by the
Japanese octopus that the straits between the various islands were
closed before some Allied ships could escape through to the south. Five
Allied cruisers and many destroyers were caught in this way and sunk in
the week of February 26, 1942; Sumatra, Java, and Timor surrendered by
March 8th; and Netherlands forces were wiped out, British forces
withdrew to Ceylon, and the few surviving American vessels limped home
for repairs. Rangoon, the Burmese capital, surrendered on March 8th,
and exactly a month later the triumphant Japanese naval forces swept
westward to strike at Ceylon. In the first week of April, Holy Week of
1942, Japanese Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who had led the attack on Pearl
Harbor, made a similar attack on Ceylon, sinking the British carrier Hermes,
two heavy cruisers, and many lesser vessels (including 136,000 tons of
merchant ships).
At
this dark moment, mid-April
of 1942, the tide of battle in the Pacific began to turn. The three
American aircraft carriers which had been spared at Pearl Harbor (Lexington,
Enterprise, and Saratoga) were joined by
one of the two carriers from the Atlantic (Yorktown).
These, with cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and supply ships, became
nuclei for "task forces" which relentlessly prowled the Pacific. On
April 2, 1942, the new carrier Hornet, with sixteen United States Army
Mitchell bombers (B-25's) wedged on its deck, sailed from San Francisco
with a message for Tokyo. Escorted by the Enterprise Task Force to a
point 850 miles from the Japanese capital (and thus 2,100 miles from
their assigned landing fields in China) the sixteen B-25's were taken
off the plunging deck of the carrier by their army crews of eighty men
led by Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle. Four hours later they
dumped sixteen tons of bombs on the Japanese capital, and continued
westward to China. Fifteen planes crashed in China after running out of
gasoline, while the sixteenth found internment in Siberia. With Chinese
help, seventy-one of eighty crew members returned to America. The whole
episode was more spectacular than fruitful, but it did give a great
boost to American morale, and frightened the Japanese so badly that
they kept four Japanese air groups in Japan for defense.
During
this period of the war
the United States had amazingly correct information regarding Japanese
war plans. Some of this came from our control over the Japanese codes,
but much of the most critical intelligence came from other sources
which have never been revealed. Through these channels, while Admiral
William Halsey was still en route back from the Tokyo raid with two
carriers, American naval authorities learned of two Japanese projects.
The first of these planned to send an invasion force from Rabaul in New
Britain, north of New Guinea, to capture Port Moresby on the southern
shore of New Guinea. The second plan hoped to extend the Japanese
defense perimeter eastward by seizing the Aleutian Islands and Midway
Island in the northern Pacific. The former project was frustrated in
the Battle of the Coral Sea, May 7-8, 1942, while the second project
was disastrously defeated in the decisive Battle of Midway, June 4,
1942.
The
Coral Sea, brilliantly
blue and white, forms a rectangle more than l,000 miles wide from east
to west and slightly longer from north to south. Open on the south, it
is boxed in on the other three sides with Australia to the west, the
New Hebrides and New Caledonia to the east, and New Guinea and the
Solomon Islands to the north. On May 8th, as the Japanese invasion
force for Port Moresby came into this area from the northwest, it was
intercepted by an American task force, including the carriers Lexington
and Yorktown.
The invasion force was turned back, a small Japanese carrier was sunk,
and a large carrier severely damaged, while fires on both American
carriers were extinguished. After the battle, however, the Lexington
blew apart from gasoline fires ignited by an electric-motor spark deep
within its hull.
Chapter 56—The Turning Tide,
1942-1943:Midway, E1 Alamein, French Africa, and Stalingrad
The
Second World War was a
gigantic conflict because it was an agglomeration of several wars. Each
of these wars had a different turning point, but all of these occurred
in the year following the surrender of Corregidor on May 6,1942. The
first turning point to be reached, in the war between the United States
and Japan, occurred at Midway on June 4, 1942, while the second was
reached in the defeat of the Italo-German attack on Egypt on November
2, 1942. The American war on Germany took a turn for the better with
the successful American invasion of French North Africa on November 8,
1942, while, at the same time, the crucial struggle between Nazi
Germany and the Soviet Union reached its turn in the long agony at
Stalingrad from November 1942 to February 1943. Needless to say, long
and hitter exertions were needed to push the three aggressor states
hack from their points of farthest advance.
The
Battle of Midway arose
from a Japanese trap which was supposed to destroy the rest of the
Pacific Fleet but resulted quite differently. Whatever illusions the
Japanese Army may have had, the Japanese Navy fully recognized that it
could not possibly win in the Pacific until the American fleet was
totally destroyed. To achieve this, a trap was set to draw the fleet
out from Pearl Harbor bN7 the threat of a Japanese amphibious invasion
of Midway Island from the southwest. When the Americans hurried out to
attack this invasion fleet at Midway, they were to have been destroyed
by the planes from four Japanese carriers lying in ambush 200 miles
northwest of Midway. The ambush was reversed because Admiral Chester
Nimitz at Pearl Harbor had a clear picture of the Japanese plans and
sent his own carriers out to spring on the Japanese carriers from a
point 200 miles northeast of their position.
The
American counter-ambush
worked because of a most extraordinary series of fortunate chances. The
four Japanese carriers expected the American counterattack to come from
Pearl Harbor after several days' delay, and accordingly felt free to
use their own carrier planes to bombard the Midway defenses, softening
them up for the benefit of the invading force coming up on Midway from
the southwest. These bombardment planes had returned from Midway to
their carriers and were still feverishly refueling on the flight decks
when the American carrier "strike" came in: 116 planes from Enterprise
and Hornet were followed shortly after by 35 planes
from Yorktown.
Caught
in a horrible tactical
position, the Japanese defended so skillfully that 37 out of 41
American torpedo-bombers were lost, hut, as wave after wage of
dive-bombers continued to come in, the Japanese defense was
"saturated," and soon all four carriers were sinking in flames. Before
the fourth Japanese carrier went down, it sent off 40 planes which
torpedoed the Yorktown. The American carrier w-as
incapacitated
and mistakenly abandoned, so that it was easily sunk by a Japanese
submarine two days later. This loss, even in combination with the loss
of the Lexington in the Coral Sea a month earlier,
was a cheap
price to pay for the destruction of five Japanese carriers in these two
areas in the space of five weeks, since the United States had the
industrial capacity to replace its losses, while Japan did not.
Two
events of November 1942,
the British victory at El Alamein and the Anglo-American invasion of
French North Africa, provided tactical lessons and strategic reversals
fully as great as those provided in the Pacific five months earlier.
During most of 1942, the British clung to their lifeline across the
Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Malta and Egypt by no more than a
fingernail's margin. Italo-German submarine and air attacks were
steadily intensified. While the whole northern shore of the
Mediterranean from Gibraltar to the Aegean was under Axis control or
sympathetic to it, the Italian foothold on the southern shore of the
Mediterranean in Libya was steadily strengthened, largely by German
reinforcements, and German pressure was brought to bear on Vichy France
to increase Nazi influence in French North Africa.
As
long as the British were
opposed only by Italian forces in the Mediterranean, they were able to
keep convoys moving, but on January lo, 1941, the German Air Force
intervened in the central Mediterranean with devastating effect. From
that point onward, for a period of two years (until May 1943) it was
impossible to get a merchant convoy through the Mediterranean from
Gibraltar to Alexandria; accordingly, the British imperial forces in
Egypt had to be supplied by the longer route around Africa. Even
British naval vessels found it difficult to pass through the
Mediterranean; in the course of 1941 all the British capital ships and
carriers in the central and eastern Mediterranean were sunk or damaged
so badly that they had to be withdrawn.
The
island of Malta, situated
in the middle of the Axis supply lisle from Italy to Africa, was
pulverized from the air for more than nineteen months (until October
1942), and all vessels, even submarines, had to be withdrawn from its
harbors. Efforts to replenish its supplies of food and ammunition
became suicidal, but had to be continued, as its civilian population
stood up magnificently under the pounding and could not be left without
supplies by the fighting services. For months at a time, no convoys
could get through, but each time supplies approached exhaustion,
fragments of a convoy arrived with enough to keep the island fighting a
little longer. In June 194 l ten merchant ships from Alexandria and six
from Gibraltar were sent simultaneously in order to divide the enemy;
although protected by a battleship, two carriers, twelve cruisers and
forty-four destroyers, only two of the sixteen cargo vessels arrived at
Malta, at a cost of three destroyers and a cruiser sunk and many others
damaged. Two months later, when Malta had only a week's supplies left,
fourteen very fast merchant vessels were sent from Gibraltar with an
escort of two battleships, four carriers, seven cruisers, and
twenty-five destroyers. Five badly damaged merchant ships reached Malta
with a naval loss of a carrier, two cruisers, and a destroyer sunk,
another carrier and two cruisers badly damaged.
This
severe fighting in the
central Mediterranean arose from the vital need, by both sides, to
control the communications of that area. The northern shore of the
Mediterranean Sea, from west to east, was controlled by Franco Spain,
by Vichy France, by the Axis, and by Turkey. Spain was pro-Axis but
unable, through economic weakness, to intervene in the war until
Britain was thoroughly beaten; Vichy France remained ambiguous and a
major leak in the economic blockade of Europe until November 1942;
Turkey was pro-British but unable to offer anything more than
benevolent neutrality. On the southern shore of the Mediterranean,
Libya (consisting of Tripolitania in the west and Cyrenaica in the
east) was in between Egypt and French North Africa, and could be used
as a base to attack either, because of the Axis supply lines from Italy
and Sicily. These lines were greatly strengthened by the Axis conquest
of Greece and Crete in may and June 1941.
From
this base in Libya the
Axis struck at Egypt three times, and were answered by three British
counterattacks. These provide the historian with an amazing sequence of
movements in which the battle lines surged across Africa between Egypt
and French Tunis, a distance of 1,200 miles. T he real struggle was for
control of Cyrenaica, and especially for its seaports strung like beads
from Benghazi eastward 270 miles by way of Derna and Tobruk to Sollum
on the Egyptian frontier. If the Germans could control this stretch,
they could use Tobruk as a supply port free from interference from
Malta, while, if the British could control it, they could provide air
cover for Malta from African fields.
The
first Axis advance, by the
Italians under Graziani, went no farther than Sidi Barrâni in
Egypt, so miles east of Sollum (September 1940). This was repulsed by
an amazing British advance of 500 miles from Sidi Barrâni to E1
Agheila, 150 miles beyond Benghazi (December 1940February 1941). It was
to stop this Italian retreat, early in 1941, that the Nazis intervened
with an air fleet of 500 planes, under Kesselring, and the famous
Afrika Korps, under Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Rommel, a tactical
genius, had three German divisions (two armored and one motorized)
supported by seven Italian divisions (six infantry and one armored). By
a series of smashing blows, Rommel advanced eastward to Egypt'
destroying most of the British armor on the way, but his advance
stopped at Sollum in April 1941. Hitler held up most of the supplies
going to Rommel because he needed them in Greece, Crete and, later, in
Russia. The supply routes to Rommel were very precarious because of
British naval attacks out of Alexandria, only 250 miles to the east,
and because of an Australian division left in Tobruk, that, although
surrounded by Rommel and besieged for months, denied him the use of its
port.
While
Rommel's supplies were
dwindling and the British Navy was being driven from the central
Mediterranean by Axis air power and submarines, the defense of Egypt
was being built up by the circum-Africa supply line. Over this
10,000-mile route came 951 light tanks and 13,000 trucks, many of these
under Lend-Lease, by the end of 1941. With this equipment General
Claude Auchinleck attacked Rommel in November 1941 and in two months
relieved Tobruk and forced the Germans back to El Agheila (January
1942). Within a week Rommel counter-attacked and advanced eastward,
being stopped forty miles west of Tobruk (mid-February 1942). Both
sides rested there, while the Western Powers feverishly built up their
supplies in Egypt. At the end of May 1942, Rommel struck again; this
time he captured Tobruk and was finally stopped at El Alamein, only
sixty miles short of Alexandria, after five days of furious fighting at
that point (July 1-5, 1942).
In
August, General Bernard L.
Montgomery, later Field Marshal and First Viscount Montgomery of
Alamein, replaced General Auchinleck. His forces were equipped with
every piece of armament that could be spared from the United States,
including 700 two-engine bombers, 1,000 fighting planes, over 400 M-4
Sherman tanks, go new American self-propelled guns, and 25,000 trucks
and other vehicles. On October 23rd, while Rommel was absent in
Germany, Montgomery attacked the Axis forces at their strongest point,
along the coast road, and after twelve days of violent combat broke
through the German position. Rommel returned, but could not stop the
rout. By November 20th he had lost Benghazi and was still retreating.
Worse than that, on November 8th, only four days after El Alamein,
Rommel heard that a large-scale American invasion of French North
Africa had already landed at three points. These had to be hurled
backward, for the German forces could be cut off if the Americans
passed Tunis.
The
American invasion of North
Africa on November 8, 1942 (Operation Torch) arose as a compromise of
quite dissimilar strategic ideas in Moscow, London, and Washington.
Stalin was insistent that the Anglo-Americans must open a "second
front" in western Europe in 1942 in order to reduce the Nazi pressure
on Russia. He was completely unreasonable in his attitude, going so far
as to taunt Churchill with cowardice at the Moscow Conference in August
1942. In London there was, indeed, great lack of faith in any possible
invasion of Europe; instead, there was hope that the Germans could be
brought to terms by air attacks and economic blockade after perhaps ten
years; Churchill went a little further by speaking of a possible
invasion of the Continent from the Mediterranean through what he
mistakenly called the "soft underbelly of the Axis." In Washington the
military leaders were convinced, from the earliest stages of the war,
that Hitler could not be beaten without a full-scale invasion of
western Europe. As early as April 1942, Harry Hopkins and General
Marshall appeared in London with plans for an invasion of western
Europe by thirty American and eighteen British divisions. The British
were very reluctant, but, as Stalin kept insisting on a "second front"
in 1942, Roosevelt, on July 25th, obtained, as a compromise, an
agreement to invade French North Africa in the autumn of 1942.
There
was hardly time for
adequate planning, and no time for adequate training, before the
landings were made on November 8th. Although the operation was a joint
British-American venture, the British role was little publicized to
avoid antagonizing French—especially French naval—feelings,
which were still hostile because of the British attacks on Dakar, Oran,
and Syria. In addition, a difficult problem arose about the question of
political cooperation with the French authorities in North Africa. The
British had placed most of their faith in General de Gaulle, but it
soon became clear that he had very little support in North Africa, and
was too difficult and uncooperative personally to be made part of the
invasion plans.
The
Americans, who had
maintained diplomatic relations with Vichy, believed it would be
necessary to replace the local Vichy leaders as soon as North Africa
had been conquered; they pinned their faith on the heroic General Henri
Giraud, who had obtained considerable publicity by his spectacular
escapes from German prisons in both world wars. Unfortunately, as the
invasion proceeded, it was discovered that Giraud had even less
influence in North Africa than De Gaulle, especially in the French
Navy, which was providing the chief combat resistance to the invasion.
Accordingly, in order to stop the fighting, it became necessary to make
a deal with Admiral Darlan, who was in North Africa at the time; this
deal, which recognized Darlan as the chief political authority in all
French North Africa, with Giraud as his commander in chief, has given
rise to much controversy. It was argued that the high principles
enunciated in our declared war aims, especially in the Atlantic
Charter, were being unnecessarily sacrificed by making a deal with an
unprincipled Nazi collaborator such as Darlan.
The
deal was justified by its
makers, General Mark Clark on behalf of General Eisenhower and
Ambassador Robert Murphy on behalf of President Roosevelt, on grounds
of military urgency. This argument is rather weak, since Darlan's
cease-fire order, made at noon on November 8th, was not obeyed in two
combat areas (Morocco and Oran) and obeyed only partially in the third
area (Algiers), and by the time the formal deal was made on November
11th, organized fighting by the French forces had ceased everywhere.
The additional justification made, to the effect that some kind of
legal continuity with the Vichy regime had to be established to avoid
French guerrilla resistance, involves too many unknown factors to
permit any convincing judgment of its value. It seems weak, since the
German reaction to the Allied invasion of North Africa took an
anti-French direction which was so drastic that any French resistance
to the Americans or British would have been clearly pro-German, and
thus most unlikely behavior for any patriotic Frenchmen. In any case,
the Darlan deal was soon swallowed up in the swift pace of events, and
was personally ended when Darlan was assassinated by his French enemies
on December 24th.
The
Anglo-American invasion of
North Africa, known as Operation Torch and under the over-all command
of General Eisenhower, involved landings at three points: on the
Atlantic coast of Morocco near Casablanca by a force coming from North
America, and at two points on the Mediterranean coast in Algeria by
forces coming from England. The Morocco attack was almost foolhardy,
since it involved carrying 35,000 completely inexperienced and
inadequately trained troops with 250 tanks, all in 102 vessels, a
distance of 4,000 miles across the ocean to make a night landing on a
hostile coast. In spite of these obstacles and tenacious French
resistance at certain points, the operation Noms a success, and
fighting ceased in three days. The other portion of Operation Torch,
the landings in Algeria, were on a larger scale, since they involved
49,000 American and 23,000 British troops, and were equally successful.
By November 14th the Allies were moving eastward into Tunisia to cut
off Rommel's retreat from the east, and by November 28th they were only
twelve miles from Tunis. From that point they were hurled backward by
the Germans.
Hitler's
reactions to Torch
were vigorous. All France was occupied by Nazi forces; his efforts to
capture the French fleet at Toulon were frustrated when most of the
vessels were scuttled at their anchorages or were sunk trying to escape
from the harbor; as early as November loth, German airborne troops,
with Laval's blessings, were occupying Tunisia. These German forces
held up the Allied advance from the west, inflicting a bitter defeat on
the American forces at the Kasserine Pass in February 1943. In this way
Rommel, who had been forced out of El Agheila by Montgomery on December
13th, was able to withdraw westward into Tunisia and take a stand along
the Mareth Line below Gabès in southeastern Tunisia in February.
During
the third week in
January 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their staffs met in secret
conference at Casablanca. Once again the Americans had to struggle
against English reluctance to commit themselves to any "cross-Channel"
invasion of Europe, to any offensive against Japan or, indeed, to any
long-range planning. From the compromises of the conference emerged
agreement to postpone any cross-Channel operation, to keep up pressure
on Germany in Europe by air attacks, and to allow the United States to
take any offensive actions against Japan which would not jeopardize the
priority still given to the defeat of Germany. Two other decisions were
to proceed to the military occupation of Sicily and to demand the
"unconditional surrender" of the three totalitarian Powers. Naturally,
the military decision on Sicily was kept secret, but the political
decision on unconditional surrender was published with great fanfare,
and at once initiated a controversy which still continues.
The
controversy over
unconditional surrender is based on the belief that the expression
itself is largely meaningless and had an adverse influence by
discouraging any hopes within the Axis countries that they could find a
way out by slackening their efforts, by revolting against their
governments, or by negotiations seeking some kind of "conditional"
surrender. There seems to be little doubt that the demand for
unconditional surrender was incompatible with earlier statements that
we were fighting the German, Japanese, and Italian governments rather
than the German, Japanese, and Italian peoples and that this demand, by
destroying this distinction, to some extent solidified our enemies and
prolonged their resistance, especially in Italy and Japan, where
opposition to the war was widespread and active. Even in Germany the
demand for unconditional surrender discouraged those more moderate and
peace-loving Germans upon which our postwar policy toward Germany must
be based and, in fact, has been based. But in 1943, and for most of the
duration of the war, the Allied Powers had neither time nor inclination
to look ahead toward any postwar policy with respect to Germany, and
issued the demand for unconditional surrender without any analysis of
its possible effects on the enemy peoples, either during the war or
after it was over. The demand for unconditional surrender was made,
rather, as a morale booster for the Allied Powers themselves, and in
this function it may well have had some slight influence at the time.
As
the Allied leaders were
conferring in Casablanca after turning back the German assault in
Africa, Soviet forces were inflicting an even greater defeat on Hitler
in eastern Europe. Hitler's Russian campaign of 1942 was very similar
to that of 1941 except that his original plan was restricted to a
single aim: to capture the oil fields of the Caucasus. The German
forces, consisting of 44 infantry, 10 armored, and 6 motorized
divisions, along with 43 satellite divisions and 7oo planes, were to
drive along the north shore of the Black Sea, pass through a congested
bottleneck at Rostov, and capture the Soviet oil fields (the chief of
which, at Baku, was 700 miles beyond Rostov). To protect the long
northern flank of this drive, other German attacks were ordered farther
north toward Voronezh and toward Stalingrad on the Volga River. The
German offensive did reach the Caucasus, advancing almost as far as
Grozny (400 miles beyond Rostov), but did not capture the chief oil
fields. As in the 1941 offensive, scores of Soviet divisions were
destroyed and hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners were captured,
but no vital injury was inflicted on the Soviet Union.
Suddenly,
on July 18th, after
seven weeks of advance, Hitler ordered the capture of Stalingrad. Since
all the available armored forces had been put into the Caucasus
offensive, where they uselessly clogged up Rostov, the attack on
Stalingrad could not begin until September 12th. After two months of
savage house-to-house fighting, the Germans had possession of almost
all the city, but it had been completely demolished. In late November,
Russian counteroffensives north and south of Stalingrad broke through
Romanian armies on either side of the German Sixth Army and joined
together on its rear. Hitler forbade any retreat or any effort by the
Sixth Army to fight its way westward out of the trap. Instead he
undertook to supply the Sixth Army from the air until new German forces
could break in to relieve it. The surrounded Sixth Army consisted of 20
divisions, about 270,000 men, including 3 armored and 3 motorized
divisions. Although a force of this size required about 1,500 tons of
supplies each day, the Luftwaffe was never able to deliver as much as
200 tons a day, and lost about 300 planes in the effort. Nor could the
German forces to the west, although only 4o miles away, fight their w
av in to the Sixth Army..
While
this was going on at
Stalingrad from December 1942 through January 1943, another Soviet
offensive, striking down from the northeast toward Rostov, was trying
to cut off the whole German force in the Caucasus by capturing the city
of Rostov and thus closing the bottleneck north of the Sea of Azov. The
German withdrawal from the Caucasus began on the first day of 1943.
With extraordinary skill the Germans succeeded in keeping the Rostov
passage open, although hy January 23rd it was no more than 3o miles
wide. The German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, although frozen, starved,
and hardly able to fight for lack of supplies, was not permitted to
surrender because, as soon as it did so, the three Soviet armies which
had surrounded it would be freed to drive west and close the Rostov
passage. On January 23rd General Friedrich von Paulus, commanding the
Sixth Army, accepted Hitler's radio order to fight to the last man in
order to gain time. A week later Hitler promoted him to field marshal,
and two days later he surrendered. Of 270,000 Germans originally
surrounded, over 100,000 were dead, 34,000 had been evacuated by air,
and 93,000 surrendered. Ten days after Paulus's surrender, the Germans
abandoned Rostov. For the next two weeks it looked as if a new Soviet
offensive from Voronezh might cut off the whole of German Army Group
South, but Field Marshal von Manstein succeeded in reestablishing a
stable defensive line by April 1st, just about at the line where the
German offensive of 194Z had begun eleven months earlier. But, in that
eleven months, Hitler had lost about 38 German divisions, an equal
number of satellite divisions, had reduced all German divisions from
nine battalions to six, had failed to capture the Caucasus oil fields,
Moscow, or Leningrad, and had not been able to cut the Murmansk railway.
Over
that railway, and by
other routes, a growing flood of American supplies was flowing to the
Soviet armies. By October 1942, 85,000 trucks had arrived, with the
result that the Soviet Army from that date to the end of the war had
greater mobility than the Germans. Luftwaffe forces on the eastern
front had 2,000 planes in the campaign of 1941, 1,300 at the opening of
the campaign of 1942, and could hardly be kept at l,000 after the end
of that campaign. Allied pressure in the w est made it necessary to
reduce the portion of the German Air Force allotted to the east, with
the result that Germany had only 265 operational planes on the Russian
front on May 1, 1944. At the same time, American supplies' including
planes, flowed into the Soviet Union in an amazing flood. The German
U-boats were unable to prevent this flow of goods, although they did
sink 77 out of 2,660 vessels loaded with Lend-Lease supplies. Many of
these sinkings occurred on the frightful Murmansk route.
In
1941 and 1942 the Allies
sent the Soviet Union almost 2,000,000 tons of supplies. This was
followed hy over 4,500,000 tons in 1943 and a total of over 15,000,000
tons worth $10,000,000,000 before the end of the struggle. Included in
the final total were 375,000 trucks, 52,000 jeeps, 7,056 tanks, 6,300
other combat vehicles, 2,328 artillery vehicles, 14,795 aircraft, 8,212
antiaircraft guns, 1,900 steam locomotives, 66 diesel locomotives,
11,075 railway cars, 415,000 telephones, 3,786,000 vehicle tires,
15,000,000 pairs of military boots, 4,478,116 tons of food, and
2,670,371 tons of petroleum products. In contrast with this, the German
armored divisions were kept idle for lack of fuel for weeks at a time
as early as 1942, and both operational and training flights of the
Luftwaffe were drastically curtailed from 1942 onward. The lack of fuel
was so acute that Hitler decided, late in 1942, to decommission most of
the surface vessels of the German Navy. When Grand Admiral Raeder
protested too vigorously, he was removed from his position as head of
the navy, and replaced by the U-boat specialist Admiral Karl Doenitz,
in January, 1943.
All
these events should
have made it clear that Germany could not possibly win the war, but for
the next two years Hitler and his immediate associates became
increasingly fanatical, increasingly merciless, and increasingly remote
from reality. Anyone who audibly doubted their insane vision of the
world was speedily liquidated.
Chapter
57—Closing in on Germany, 1943-1945
The
year 1943 represented the
turning point in the European struggle as the year 1942 had seen the
turning point in the Pacific. In 1943 North Africa was freed from the
Nazi grasp in May, Sicily was overrun in July and August, the southern
part of Italy was occupied, and the German armies were pushed backward
from eastern Europe. As a consequence, the Mediterranean was opened to
Allied traffic, and Italy was forced to surrender in September 1943.
These
were the obvious events
of this critical year 1943, open to public view and hopeful in their
implications for the future. But the role of this year as a turning
point in the conflict with Germany was much greater than this, fur,
behind the scenes, the military successes of the year forced decisions
on strategic plans and postwar projects whose implications are still
being worked out today. And still very much behind the scenes, these
strategic and postwar plans revealed deep fissures and rivalries among
the three Allied Powers.
Rivalries
among the members of
a coalition are always to be expected and are usually, and necessarily,
kept secret during the war itself. In the Second World War they were
most significant in the year 1943. In the years before 1943 these
disputes were more concerned with strategic decisions than with postwar
planning, while in the later years, when strategy had been set, postwar
plans were the chief causes of disputes. The year 1943, however, had
its full share of both, since the major strategic decisions were made
in that year, and these decisions, in themselves, played a major role
in determining the nature of the postwar world.
In
the years 1941-1943 the
chief strategic questions were concerned with two problems: (1) Should
the European war against Germany continue to receive priority over the
Pacific war against Japan? and (2) Should Germany be attacked,
indirectly, by aerial bombardment, blockade, and guerrilla forces or
should Europe be invaded with large infantry forces, either from
England directly across the Channel to western Europe or from the
Mediterranean through southern Europe; the answers given to these
strategic questions, especially the last one, played a major role in
establishing the postwar political settlement in Europe.
In
the earlier years a certain
direction was given to postwar planning by Roosevelt’s
proclamation of the Four Freedoms in January 1941, and the
Anglo-American publication of the Atlantic Charter in August 1941. When
the stunning news of Pearl Harbor reached London on December 7, 1941,
Foreign Minister Eden was just leaving for Moscow. It was decided that
he should go anyway but that Prime Minister Churchill should go
simultaneously to Washington to do all he could to prevent popular,
anti-Japanese feeling in the United States from reversing the agreement
that the military defeat of Germany must have priority over the defeat
of Japan. In Washington, at what was called the Arcadia Conference
(December 22, 1941-January 14, 1942), the exuberant prime minister
found no desire to change the military priorities, and was able to plan
intensified military activity along the lines already established. At
the same time Roosevelt presented him with a draft for a public
“Declaration of the United Nations.” This document declared
that the twenty-six signatory states were fighting “to defend
life, liberty, independence, and religious freedom and to preserve
human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands,
and that they are now engaged in a common struggle against savage and
brutal forces seeking to subjugate the world." Each signer promised "to
employ its full resources and to make no separate armistice or peace"
in the struggle for victory over Hitlerism.
Most
of the secret discussions
leading up to the publication of this declaration on January 1, 1942
were concerned with verbal or procedural issues, but some of these were
symbolic of future problems. There was considerable discussion as to
the order in which the signatures should be affixed to the document;
the decision to rank them in two groups, with the four "Great Powers"
of the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China
followed by twenty-two lesser states in alphabetical order, was an
early indication of the similar division which still exists in the
United Nations today. The inclusion of China, in spite of its obvious
weakness, among the Great Powers was a concession made to the United
States by the other Powers. The American leaders, from Roosevelt down,
insisted that China was, or at least should be, a Great Power, although
the only evidence they could find to support this argument was its
larger population. The Americans seemed to hope that by encouragement
and reiteration, or perhaps even by invocation, China could be made
into a Great Power, able to dominate the Far East after the defeat of
Japan.
Other
notable features of this
United Nations Declaration were: (1) the fact that De Gaullist France
was excluded from the signers in order not to recognize it as a
government, (2) the fact that the United States was ranked first among
the Great Powers, and (3) the difficulty in wording the declaration so
that Japan, with which the Soviet Union was not at war, should not
specifically be included among the enemy and yet, at the same time,
should not be excluded from the "brutal forces" which were condemned.
In
the meantime, in Moscow,
Anthony Eden was being faced with Soviet demands for a specific
delimitation of the post-war boundaries of eastern Europe. In the
north, the Bolshevik leaders wanted explicit British recognition that
Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania were parts of the Soviet Union and that
the Soviet-Finnish frontier should be as it had existed after the
"winter war" of 1939-1940; in the center, the Soviets demanded a
frontier with Poland along the so-called Curzon Line, which followed,
it was true, the linguistic frontier, but was 150 miles west of the
Polish-Soviet frontier of the 1921-1939 period; in the south, Stalin
wanted Eden to agree to a Soviet-Romanian border which would have
allowed Russia to have Bessarabia and Bukovina. These demands sought
recognition of the Soviet Union’s western boundary as it existed
between the Nazi-Soviet Pact of September 1939 and Hitler's attack in
June 1941, except that the Curzon Line was, in some places, slightly to
the east of the 1940 line.
Although
these Soviet demands
were clearly in conflict with the high purposes of the Atlantic
Charter, Churchill was not averse to accepting therm on grounds of
physical necessity, but American objections to any settlement of
territorial questions while the war was still going on forced him to
refuse Stalin's requests. In general, the British found themselves in a
difficult position between the high and proclaimed principles of the
Americans and the low and secret interests of the Russians. Because of
American pressure, Eden avoided any territorial commitments, and
persuaded Stalin to accept a twenty-year treaty of alliance with
Britain. This Anglo-Soviet Treaty of May 26, 1942 had no territorial
provisions, and included a statement that the signers would "act in
accordance with the two principles of not seeking territorial
aggrandizement for themselves and of non-interference in the internal
affairs of other States."
Although
the Soviet Union
accepted the terms of the British alliance, in 1942 their suspicions of
the West were still high, and their relations with Britain became
increasingly unfriendly, reaching a critical stage by 1943. In Moscow
there was fear that the West wished to protract the war in order to
bleed both Germany and the Soviet Union to death. It was feared that
this end could be obtained if American supplies to Russia were placed
at a level sufficiently high to keep Russia fighting but insufficiently
high to allow her to defeat Hitler. To avoid this, Moscow continued to
insist, with unreasonable repetition, on the need to increase
Lend-Lease supplies to it and, above al1, on the need to open a second
front on the Continent by an immediate Anglo-American invasion of
Europe from England. Judging, perhaps, that American psychology would
work along the same lines of "power politics" as their own, a mistake
which the Japanese, with considerably greater reason, had made in the
months before Pearl Harbor, the Russians could not conceive that the
United States would grant sufficient aid to Russia to permit a speedy
defeat of Hitler, since such a policy, almost inevitably, would leave
the victorious Soviet armies supreme in eastern, and probably also in
central, Europe.
As
a matter of fact, while
some Americans unquestionably did think in terms of "power politics"
and may, in a few cases, have gone so far as to prefer a Hitler victory
over Stalin to a Stalin victory over Hitler, such people were very
remote from the centers of power in the American government. At those
centers of power there was complete conviction in the value of
unrestricted aid to Russia, the speediest possible defeat of Germany,
and a full "cross-Channel" invasion of Europe as soon as possible. In
fact, these aims were so firmly embraced by those Americans with whom
the Russians had relationships, men like Harry Hopkins, General
Marshall, or Roosevelt himself, that these men sometimes misled the
Russians by expressing their hopes rather than their expectations, with
the consequence that Russian suspicions were roused again, at a later
date, when these hopes were not fulfilled. Immediately after the
signing of the Anglo-Soviet alliance, Soviet Foreign Commissar Molotov
came to Washington to urge the need for an immediate second front in
Europe. Although such a project would have been unwise, if not
impossible, in 1942, the White House communique of June Tl, 1942 sought
to satisfy the Russians and to frighten the Germans by saying that
"full understanding was reached with regard to the urgent tasks of
creating a second front in Europe in 1942."
In
the early summer of 1942
Soviet messages to Washington and to London continued to insist on the
need for an immediate second front in Western Europe in order to reduce
the Nazi military pressure on the Soviet forces. Recognizing the
impossibility of such a venture in 1942, the Anglo-Americans sought to
relieve the pressure on Russia by landing at a place where the German
defense would not be so strong. It was this desire which resulted in
the decision of July 25, 1942 to invade North Africa in November.
Having made the decision to substitute this project for any possible
cross-Channel attack in 1942, it was necessary to convey the news to
the Soviet Union. Churchill undertook this delicate task on his first
meeting with Stalin in Moscow in August 1942. The result was a most
unpleasant explosion by Stalin. The Soviet leader charged that Molotov
had obtained a definite promise for a second front in 1942, that
failure to carry out this promise would jeopardize Soviet military
plans, and that Churchill was opposed to such a venture from cowardice!
The
strategic disputes among
the three Allied Powers were sharp and based on very different
outlooks, but in no case did cowardice play any role. The Soviet
insistence on an immediate, all-out cross-Channel attack to relieve
Nazi pressure on Russia was perfectly understandable, although
insistence on such an attack in 1942 was unrealistic. Equally
understandable was Russia's fear that the Anglo-Americans might divert
their power from Germany in order to avoid a Soviet-dominated postwar
Europe, although this fear showed no realistic appreciation of the
American outlook. On the other hand, the British reluctance to attempt
the cross-Channel attack was perfectly clear. Sir Alan Brooke, the
chief of the Imperial General Staff, opposed all plans for such an
assault, while others, like Churchill, wanted to postpone such an
attack indefinitely or reduce it to no more than a series of small
raids to establish permanent anti-German bridgeheads in western Europe.
The difficulties of such raids were shown on August 19, 1942 when a
force of 5,000 men, mostly Canadians, landed at Dieppe and suffered
3,350 casualties in a few hours.
The
Americans, especially
General Marshall, were convinced that Germany could be defeated only by
a cross-Channel attack, and advocated one on the largest possible scale
at the earliest possible date..
These
differences of strategic
opinion reflected basic differences of outlook. The American outlook
was largely military. They were cager to defeat Germany and end the war
as soon as possible and had little time or energy for political
problems or postwar planning. The British, on the other hand, were much
concerned witl1 political issues and the way in which the postwar
situation would he influenced hy strategic and military actions
earlier. The Soviet leaders, to some extent, represented a combination
of the two other points of view and could do so because there was no
such divergence between their military and political or between their
wartime and postwar aims. The more deeply the Anglo-Americans could be
involved in the struggle with Germany, the sooner Germany could be
defeated, and such a defeat, especially if it arose from a
cross-Channel attack, would deliver all of eastern Europe into the
power of the Red armies, which would find no rivals in that area.
Churchill
and other British
leaders could not forget the terrible casualties Britain had suffered
in the trench warfare of 1916. They felt that these casualties had
injured Britain permanently by wiping out a whole generation of
Britain's young people, especially among the better-educated class, and
they were determined not to repeat this error in 1944. These leaders
wanted a Balkan or Aegean offensive which, they believed, would, with
fewer casualties, leave the English-speaking Powers dominant in the
Mediterranean and in the Near East, would make it possible to balance
Soviet power in eastern Europe, and would cut the Soviet Union off from
the Balkans and some of central Europe. The possibility of Britain
obtaining American consent to such an Aegean offensive was so remote
that little effort was made to get it by direct persuasion. On the
contrary, efforts to move toward it, step by step, were persistent.
These efforts sought to postpone, or to reduce the emphasis on, the
cross-Channel invasion, since this would, inevitably, have compelled
the end of Britain's Mediterranean projects. But here, again, American
insistence on the cross-Channel invasion was so emphatic that the
British could not challenge this directly, just as they could not
advocate an Aegean invasion directly. Instead, while accepting the
cross-Channel invasion explicitly, the British offered, one after
another, alternative projects which would postpone or distract from the
cross-Channel invasion.
The
North African invasion was
the first of these distractions, followed by the Sicilian campaign, and
then by the Italian invasion. These were accepted by the Americans,
since they felt it was urgent to do something to meet the Soviet
demands for Anglo-American action against Hitler. Some kind of Balkan
intervention was the next British proposal, but there was no hope of
obtaining American consent to such a project. It was formally rejected
by the Combined Chiefs of Staff on September 9, 1943. Churchill did not
give up, but continued to push these peripheral schemes as best he
could. He ordered General Wilson, British commander in the Near East,
"to be bold, even rash" in attacking the Germans in the Aegean and he
also tried to persuade Eisenhower to shift forces from Italy to the
Aegean or to persuade Turkey to declare war on Germany. The only
success Churchill had in these efforts was to persuade the Americans to
engage in an amphibious attack on Italy at Anzio after the Americans
had canceled plans for such an attack and had decided to choke off the
Italian offensive in order to concentrate on the cross-Channel attack.
In
the long run Churchill had
to accept the American strategic plans because America would provide
most of the supplies and even a majority of the men for any direct
attack on Europe. The American ability to compel British acquiescence
in strategic decisions was a very real element in the conduct of the
war. It arose from the great British need for American manpower and
supplies, and it functioned through the mechanism of the Combined
Chiefs of Staff.
When
Churchill came to the
Arcadia Conference in Washington at the end of '941, his chief aim was
to retain the established priority of "Germany first." He obtained this
very easily on its own intrinsic merits, but at the same time he had to
accept something he did not want—a Combined Chiefs of Staff
organization to control strategy on a worldwide basis. This new
committee developed more power than Churchill, or anyone else,
expected, because it had control of the supply of weapons. This power
was decisive. Since no military operation could be conducted without
weapons or supplies, control over these gave the Combined Chiefs of
Staff control over all operations and, thus, over the strategic conduct
of the war and over all local commanders. The Combined Chiefs of Staff
operated through weekly meetings within the framework of the general
policy decisions made by Roosevelt and Churchill at their periodic
conferences. In this way Britain's dependence on the United States for
its implements of war gave the United States control of British
strategic decisions and military operations, even in those areas (such
as southeast Asia or the Near East) where a British commander was
nominally in charge. In the same way, the United States had indirect
control over much of Britain's postwar planning.
In
spite of the fact that the
Anglo-Americans had agreed in ambiguous terms with Molotov's insistence
on the need for a direct attack on Hitler in Europe in 1942, it was
perfectly clear that no such assault could be made that early in the
war, so the attack on North Africa was offered as a substitute. In the
course of the North African fighting it became clear that the
cross-Channel attack could not be mounted before the spring of 1944.
Accordingly, when the Germans in North Africa surrendered in May 1943,
it was necessary to open a new front against Hitler quickly, since it
would have been very dangerous to leave Hitler free to throw most of
his forces against Russia for a full year. Plans for attacks on
Sardinia or Sicily had been prepared, and on January 23, 1943, orders
were issued to invade the latter island during the "favorable July
moon." This was not regarded by the Russians as a major effort, and
their resentment rose to the boiling point. As Secretary of State Hull
put it in his memoirs, the atmosphere in Anglo-Russian relations became
reminiscent of what it had been exactly four years earlier, just before
the Nazi-Soviet Treaty of August 1939. It was at this time, apparently,
that two fateful, and mutually incompatible, decisions were made on the
highest levels of authority in Washington and Moscow.
The
decision made in
Washington is one we have already mentioned—the decision to try
to win Soviet cooperation in the postwar world by doing everything
possible to win her trust and cooperation in the wartime period. This
decision was probably based on the belief that it was not possible to
control Russia's postwar behavior by any policy of force against her
during the war itself, since such an effort would benefit Hitler
without winning any enforceable agreements from Stalin.
At
this time, it would appear,
Stalin made his decision to seek Russian security in the postwar world,
not through any scheme for friendly cooperation in some idealistic
international organization, as Roosevelt hoped, but by setting up, on
the Soviet Union's western frontiers, a buffer area of satellite states
under governments friendly to Moscow. Such governments, probably in
Communist control, would replace the Cordon sanitaire
which the Western Powers had created to isolate Russia following the
First World War, with what might be called a Cordon "insanitaire"
which could serve to isolate the Soviet Union from the outside world
following World War II. Washington was informed of this possibility by
the American ambassador in Moscow on April 28, 1943, but paid little
attention to the warning, probably because of the near-impossibility of
finding any alternative policy toward the Soviet Union.
In
spite of Soviet scorn, the
military operations in Africa and the Mediterranean were major efforts
for the inexperienced forces of un-militarized nations, although they
obviously could not compare to the Nazi-Soviet death-lock involving
hundreds of divisions on the plains and in the forests of eastern
Europe. The victory in North Africa was completed in May 1943. Two
months later came the invasion of Sicily. The attack on this strategic
island was the greatest landing-assault of the war, eight divisions
coming ashore simultaneously side by side. The island is almost a
right-angle triangle, with its right angle in the extreme northeast,
separated from the Italian mainland by the Strait of Messina, only
three miles wide. The landings were made on the opposite side of the
island, on the hypotenuse of the triangle, where the coast faces
southwestward toward Tunisia. The British Eighth Army, under General
Montgomery, with 250,000 men in 818 ships and escort vessels, landed on
the southeastern point of the Sicilian triangle, while the American
Seventh Army (General George Patton), with 228,000 men and 580 vessels,
landed on the British left on either side of Gela.
The
defensive forces of four
Italian divisions and two German panzer divisions were widely scattered
on the island, and the Allied landings were skillfully executed against
light resistance (July 10, 1943). Once ashore, however, the campaign
was ineptly carried on because occupation of territory was given
precedence over destruction of enemy forces: Patton drove
north-westward to seize Palermo (July 22nd), and then followed the
enemy forces eastward to Messina along the northern coast; Montgomery,
moving slowly northward parallel to the eastern coast, made a detour to
the west of Mount Etna.
No
efforts were made to close
the Straits of Messina; as a result, the Germans were able to send
almost two divisions as reinforcements from Italy and, later, when the
island had to be abandoned, they were equally free to evacuate it,
carrying almost 40,000 troops with 9,650 vehicles and 17,000 tons of
stores over the Straits of Messina to Italy in seven days without loss
of a man. At the same time, in a separate operation, 62,000 Italian
troops also escaped to the mainland. By August 17th Sicily had been
conquered, but the evacuated enemy forces were reorganizing to defend
Italy itself.
The
Italians had no taste for
the defense of Italy. They had been dragged into the war by Mussolini's
action and against their own desires, in June 1940, and by 1943 they
were heartily sick of the whole thing. This discontent was fully
developed long before the attack on Sicily in June. In February the
Duce had dismissed Count Ciano, his son-in-law, and Count Dino Grandi
from their posts as ministers of foreign affairs and of justice because
of their defeatism and opposition. But these qualities continued to
spread, even in the innermost circles of the government. The invasion
of Sicily gave the final spurt to this development. On July 24th the
Fascist Grand Council passed a motion calling for the restoration of
the constitutional functions of all agencies of the government and the
restoration to the king of full command of the armed forces. This
motion, carried 18-8, was essentially a vote of no-confidence in
Mussolini. The following morning the king demanded the Duce's
resignation and, as he was leaving the palace, had him arrested.
The
fall of Mussolini, on July
25, 1943, after being in power for over twenty years, did nothing to
improve Italy's position. The king, who was opposed to the
establishment of a parliamentary regime or a responsible government,
put Marshal Pietro Badoglio, the conqueror of Ethiopia, in as head of
the government but would not allow him to establish a Cabinet of
non-Fascist leaders. The Fascist Party was abolished and the Fascist
Militia was incorporated into the regular army, but it was impossible
to get rid of Fascist sympathizers from either the administrative
system or from the armed services. On the whole, the fall of Mussolini
was welcomed by the Italian people, not because of any political ideas
but simply because they believed that it would lead to the end of the
war and the end of food rationing. It achieved neither of these,
because the powers of contending forces were too evenly balanced in
Italy to allow any decisive outcome to be reached.
The
history of Italy in 1943
is a history of lost opportunities, perhaps necessarily lost, but,
nevertheless, a disappointment to everyone concerned. If events had
turned out favorably, Italy might have got out of the war in the summer
of that year and the Germans might have been ejected from the peninsula
shortly afterward. Instead, Italy was torn to pieces; its peoples and
the invading Allied troops suffered great hardships; and the country
got out of the war so slowly that Germans were still fighting on
Italian soil at the final surrender in 1945.
These
general misfortunes of
Italy were the result of a number of forces working together. One was
the military weakness of Italy in respect to Germany; this made it
impossible for Italy to end the war, or even to surrender to the
Allies, because any effort to do so would lead to an immediate German
seizure of the whole country and of its leaders, the exploitation and
devastation of the one and the massacre of the others. Italy was far
too weak to hold the Germans back long enough to permit an Allied
occupation of Italy. A second factor was the weakness of the Allies
because of the diversion of their power to Britain in preparation for
Overlord: this meant that the Allies lacked the strength to move
quickly into Italy to protect it from complete German occupation, even
if Italy could surrender secretly to the Allies and cooperate with
their entrance. A third factor was the complete mistrust of the
Italians both by the Germans and by the Allies. This mistrust, for
which the political conduct of the Italians, both foreign and domestic,
over at least two generations, was responsible, provided the key to the
whole situation. The only way in which the fighting in Italy could have
been ended quickly would have been for Italy to surrender secretly to
the Allies and cooperate with them in an immediate large-scale invasion
of northern Italy, but the Allies were too distrustful of the Italians
to cooperate with them in a project such as this or even to accept a
secret surrender. And, finally, a fourth obstacle was the wooden and
inflexible Allied insistence on unconditional surrender which,
meaningless as it might have been, nevertheless made it impossible for
the Badoglio government either to cooperate with the Allies as
co-belligerents against the Germans (as it wished to do) or to keep the
surrender secret from the Germans long enough to forestall their
violent reactions. Not only did unconditional surrender exclude both
co-belligerency and secrecy; it also left the Italians helpless to
resist the Germans. Above all, these four factors made it impossible to
prevent a German seizure of Rome, which was, in some ways, the center
of the whole problem.
The
Germans, who had eight
divisions in Italy, doubled this number as soon as they heard of the
fall of Mussolini. They refused a request from the Badoglio government
to allow any of the fifty-three Italian divisions in the Balkans and
Russia to return home, thus holding them as hostages. When the Badoglio
government made contact with the Allies through Madrid on August 16tl1
and offered to join them in fighting Germany, all it could obtain was a
demand for unconditional surrender. After days of discussion, an
armistice accepting the Allied terms was signed on September 3rd, with
the understanding that it would be kept secret until the Allies had
troops ready to land in force on the mainland. Three days later, the
Italian government discovered that the Allied landing operation,
already in progress, was only a small force and was headed for Salerno,
south of Naples, where it would he no help to the Italians in resisting
any German efforts to take over most of Italy. They insisted that the
publication of the armistice and a tentative Allied paratrooper "drop"
in Rome must be put off until sufficient Allied forces were within
striking distance of Rome to protect the city from the German troops
near it. Eisenhower refused, and published the Italian surrender on
September 8th, one day before the American Seventh Army landed at
Salerno.
The
Germans reacted to the
news of the Italian "betrayal" and of the Allied invasion of southern
Italy with characteristic speed. While the available forces in central
Italy converged on the Salerno beachhead, an armored division fought
its way into Rome, Italian troops were disarmed or intimidated
everywhere, and the Badoglio government, with King Victor Emmanuel, had
to flee to the British-controlled area around Brindisi. Much of the
Italian fleet escaped to Allied control in the Mediterranean, but
numerous vessels were sunk by the Germans or were scuttled to escape
falling into their hands. In most of Italy, there was political
paralysis and confusion; at some places Italians fought one another, or
simply murdered one another, while opinion ranged the whole gamut from
complete indifference on one extreme to violent fanaticism on the other.
In
order to have some legal
excuse for controlling Italy, the Germans sent parachutists to rescue
Mussolini from his "prison" in a summer hotel in the mountains of the
Gran Sasso, escaping with him by air to northern Italy where he was
presented with a German-picked government of "neo-Fascists" under the
name Italian Social Republic (September 13-15, 1943). Broken and weary,
the ex-Duce of Fascism became a pliant tool of German ruthlessness and
of the corrupt and criminal neo-Fascists who surrounded him. In this
group the most influential were the family of Mussolini's mistress,
Clara Petacci, which Count Ciano called "that circle of prostitutes and
white slavers which for some years have plagued Italian political life."
In
Allied hands, the king and
Badoglio were forced, on September 29, 1943, to sign another, much
longer, armistice; by its provisions "the Italian Government were bound
hand and foot, and made completely subject to the will of the Allied
Governments as expressed through the Allied Commander-in-Chief." In
conformity to this will, on October 13th the
king's government declared war against Germany..
As
the Allied forces slowly
recovered Italian territory from the tenacious grasp of the Germans,
the royal government remained subservient to its conquerors. Civilian
affairs immediately behind the advancing battle lines were completely
in military hands under an organization known as Allied Military
Government of Occupied Territory, or AMGOT; farther back, civilian
affairs were under an Allied Control Commission. The creation of these
organizations, on a purely Anglo-American basis, to rule the first Axis
territory to be "liberated" became a very important precedent for
Soviet behavior when their armies began to occupy enemy territory in
eastern Europe: The Russians were able to argue that they could exclude
the Anglo-Americans from active participation in military government in
the east since they had earlier been excluded from such participation
in the west.
While
these political events
were taking place, the military advance was moving like a snail. The
Allied invasion of Italy, at American insistence, was given very
limited resources for a very large task. This limitation of resources
in Italy sought to prevent the British from using the Italian campaign
as an excuse for delaying or postponing the cross-Channel attack on
Europe scheduled for the spring of 1944. It was only under such
limitations of resources, explicitly stated, that the Americans had
accepted the British suggestion for any invasion of mainland Italy at
all. In May 1943, at a plenary meeting in Washington, the Combined
Chiefs of Staff had set May 1 944 as target date for a cross-Channel
invasion of Europe with 29 divisions, had ordered a full-scale aerial
offensive on Germany with 2,700 heavy and 800 medium bombers, had given
the American Joint Chiefs of Staff complete control over the Pacific
war against Japan, and had asked General Eisenhower to draw up plans
for an invasion of Italy using no forces beyond what he had on hand.
This last limitation was repeated on July 26th when the general was
ordered to carry out his plans..
The
invasion of Italy was a
two-pronged effort. On September 3rd two British divisions under
General Montgomery crossed the Straits of Messina and began to move
northward against little opposition. Six days later a British airborne
division from Bizerte was landed at Taranto and began to move up the
Adriatic coast. On the same day, September 8th, the Fifth Army of two
American and two British divisions under Lieutenant General Mark W.
Clark landed at Salerno. The landing site was in the next bay south of
the famous Bay of Naples, and separated from it by the rugged Sorrento
Peninsula. There was no preliminary bombardment by naval guns, in order
to retain tactical surprise, and the American Units came over the
heavily mined and barbwired beaches right into the face of the German
16th Panzer Division. Within three days, six German divisions, four of
them motorized, were around the Salerno beachhead, with six hundred
tanks. In fierce fighting, the area was slowly expanded, although at
one point the German counterattacks almost broke through to the beach.
Naval gunfire against the German tanks was the decisive factor in a
seesaw struggle.
On
September 13th the American
82nd Airborne Division was dropped behind the beachhead. About the same
time, Rommel, in command in northern Italy, refused to release
reinforcements to Kesselring in the south. On September 16th the latter
commander authorized a withdrawal from the area in order to get beyond
the range of naval gunfire. On the same day, Montgomery's Eighth Army
made contact with Clark's Fifth Army, and an Allied line was stretched
across Italy to the Adriatic. This line moved slowly northward,
capturing Naples on the first day of October 1943. The city was a
shambles, filled with wreckage and heavily booby-trapped; the water
supply had been deliberately polluted, and all food stores and
government records had been destroyed; the harbor area, completely in
flames, was filled with sunken ships, locomotives, and other large
objects to make it unusable. This was the kind of situation where
American energy, humanitarianism, anti ingenuity excelled; sanitation
and order were restored at once, food was provided for the hungry
Italians, and the harbor was cleaned up so successfully that it \vas
handling tonnage beyond its prewar rated capacity within three months.
By
October 7th the Allied
advance had been stopped on the Volturno River line twenty miles north
of Naples. Two months later, when General Eisenhower was transferred to
take over the Supreme Command for the approaching invasion of western
Europe, the Allied lines had moved northward no farther than the German
Gustav Line. This line, eighty miles south of Rome and following,
roughly, the Rapido River in the west and the lower Garigliano in the
east, took every advantage of the rugged terrain, and allowed the enemy
to inflict heavy casualties on the attackers, especially by artillery
fire from the greatly feared German 88-mm. guns. To outflank this
position, an amphibious landing was ordered beyond the German rear at
Anzio, just north of the Pontine Marshes, thirty miles south of Rome.
Originally the landing was to have been made in one operation, leaving
the Allied forces on a beach with supplies for eight days and no
provision for any reinforcements or replenishment from the sea. This
was based on the expectation that the main Allied forces would come up
from the south in time to relieve the new beachhead. When it became
clear that the Allied forces could not advance up the peninsula, the
plan was canceled on December 22'nd. Three days later, at a hurriedly
summoned conference at Tunis, Churchill was able to have the plan
reinstated, offering a British division to go with the single American
division originally planned.
On
January 20, 1944, General
Clark tried to cross the flooded Rapido River at the foot of the great
hill on which stood the ancient Benedictine Monastery of Monte Cassino.
His aim was to advance northward toward Anzio. After two days of bloody
fighting, the crossing had to he abandoned; that same day (January
22nd) the two Allied divisions landed at Anzio, hoping to cut the
German communications going southward toward Monte Cassino. The landing
was easy, but within a week Marshal Kesselring was able to shift
sufficient forces from the subsiding Rapido front to seal off the Anzio
beachhead. Although the Allies committed four more divisions to the
Anzio operation, giving six in all, they could not break out of the
German vise. The result was a stalemate in which the Germans could hold
both the Rapido line and the Anzio line by shifting forces rapidly from
one to the other as seemed necessary.
As
is usual in a stalemate,
there was much of criticism of these operations, especially from the
Allied side. It was suggested that the German success in holding the
Rapido was due to the accuracy of their artillery fire and that this
was being spotted from the ancient monastery (founded hy St. Benedict
in A.D. 529) on the top of Monte Cassino. It was further suggested that
General Clark should have obliterated the monastery with aerial
bombardment but had failed to do so because he was a Catholic. After
February 15, 1944, General Clark did destroy the site completely by Air
Force bombs without helping the situation a bit. We now know that the
Germans had not been using the monastery; but, once it was destroyed by
us, they dug into the rubble to make a stronger defense.
The
stalemate on the Gustav
Line was broken in the latter half of May 1944. By that time French,
Polish, and Italian units were fighting on the Allied side, giving
twenty-seven Allied divisions against twenty German. On May I 6th a
French corps crossed the Garigliano River, and three days later, after
terrible casualties, a Polish division captured Monte Cassino.
Kesselring sullenly withdrew northward, followed by the Allied forces.
The latter were greeted with hysterical enthusiasm by the liberated
Italians. On May 2sth contact was made with the Anzio forces, and, on
June 4, 1944, the American 88th Division, an all-selective-service
unit, entered Rome.
As
the liberating forces came
in and the Germans hurriedly withdrew, Rome was little short of a
madhouse. Hundreds of prisoners held by the Germans and neo-Fascist
secret police were murdered in their cells, and helpless civilians were
murdered as hostages or in reprisal by the retreating German forces.
Guerrilla bands behind the German lines performed good services to the
Allied cause, harassing communications, assisting Allied intelligence,
and helping escaping prisoners. Many of these guerrillas were fighting
for social revolution as well as for the liberation of Italy, and there
was a good deal of rivalry and even of violent conflict among them. The
dominant influence was that of the Communists, who were more highly
disciplined and more closely controlled than the non-Communist units.
The
fall of Mussolini gave a
considerable impetus to postwar planning within the Allied camps. There
had been a certain amount of this during the dark days from 1939 to
1943, but on the whole the Allied leaders were reluctant to commit
themselves to any projects which might restrict their freedom of action
in conducting the war or in manipulating its diplomatic and
propagandist background. The collapse of one of the enemy states,
however, made it necessary to devote some serious attention to postwar
plans. At the same time, experiences in Italy showed that the problems
of the post-war era would be much broader than merely political or
diplomatic, and would include social, economic, and ideological
problems on a scale never experienced previously. It was clear that the
poverty, confusion, and human suffering found by our advancing armies
in Italy would be increased tenfold when the much more bitter
resistance of Germany had been overcome.
In
order to avoid any
repetition of the widespread Allied "deals" with Darlan and other
"Vichyites," the occupied areas of Italy were subjected to a completely
military Allied government, although, to obtain legal continuity and
legal justification for this government, the various agreements were
signed by Badoglio. Even this small amount of contact with ax-Fascist
leaders aroused adverse comment in certain circles in the United
States, although at the same time and, usually, in the same circles,
there was objection to the use of a purely military administration as
an alternative. The only other possibility would have been to turn the
newly liberated areas over to the local anti-Fascist native groups.
This last solution was out of the question, for these groups were
generally so determined on social and economic revolution that they
would have created conflicts and disturbances which would have
jeopardized the position of our armies of occupation and would
certainly have increased the social and economic problems which most
Americans were eager to reduce. These social and economic problems were
mostly of a very practical nature and were concerned with starvation,
disease, public order, and the care of displaced persons.
All
these problems were
drastically increased by the ruthless destructiveness of the German
forces as they withdrew toward Germany itself. Food supplies were taken
away or were destroyed; millions were left homeless, many of them far
from their homes and in pitiful conditions of semi-starvation and
disease. These conditions, whicl1 became steadily worse as the war drew
to its close, made a great appeal to the humanitarian feelings of
Americans, and presented problems with which American generosity and
organizational efficiency were well able to deal. On the other hand,
Americans had weak political interests and narrow ideological training
and were eager to avoid problems such as forms of government, patterns
of property distribution, or nationalistic disputes. It is, then, not
surprising that American postwar planning and the behavior of American
administrators neglected the latter kinds of problems to devote their
energies to the more practical tasks of material survival. On the
political, legal, or ideological problems the American "liberators" had
little to offer beyond rather vague and idealistic praise of democracy,
private ownership, and freedom.
While
the military efforts of
the Anglo-Americans were, in full public view, passing from victory to
victory in the early months of 1943, a very ominous situation had
arisen behind the scenes in respect to their relations with the Soviet
Union. We have already mentioned the evidence that quite incompatible
decisions about the postwar world had been made in Washington and
Moscow at this time. The decision in Washington seems to have been that
every effort would be made, through wartime concessions to the Soviet
Union, to obtain Russian cooperation in a postwar international
organization and that all territorial problems should be left to the
postwar period. The decision in Moscow seems to have been that the
Anglo-American Powers could not be trusted and that the Soviet Union
must seek to ensure its postwar security by creation of a series of
satellite and buffer states on its western frontier. The
incompatibility of these points of view gave rise to the Polish crisis
of May 1943
After
the Nazi-Soviet division
of Poland in September 1939, a Polish government-in-exile was
established in France and later in London, with General Wladyslaw
Sikorski as prime minister. This government, although recognized as the
successor to the defeated Polish government by most of the world, was
not recognized by the Axis Powers or by the Soviet Union. These
pretended that Poland had ceased to exist. Russia, which had received
half of Poland, with 13.2 million of Poland's 35 million inhabitants,
incorporated these areas into the Soviet Union, imposing Soviet
citizenship on the inhabitants, and forced over a million of them to go
to other parts of Russia to work in mines, in factories, or on farms.
Most educated or professional persons among the Poles were arrested and
put into concentration camps with the captured officers of the Polish
armies. In the meantime the portions of Poland taken by Germany had
been divided into two parts, of which the western (with 10.5 million
inhabitants) was incorporated into Germany, and the rest (with 11.5
million inhabitants, and including Warsaw) was organized as the
government-general of Poland under German administration. The Nazis
sought to force all ethnic Poles into the government-general; to
exterminate, either directly or through the exhaustion and malnutrition
of slave labor, all the educated elements among the Polish people; and
to murder without compunction the country's large Jewish population.
The
German attack on the
Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 led to a brief reversal of the Kremlin's
attitude toward Poland. In an apparent effort to obtain Polish support
in the struggle with Germany, the Soviet Union reestablished diplomatic
relations with the Polish government-in-exile in London, and signed an
agreement on July 30, 1941 by which the Soviet-German partition
treaties of 1939 were canceled, a general amnesty was granted Polish
citizens imprisoned in the Soviet Union, and General Wladyslaw Anders
was allowed to organize a new Polish army from the Poles in the Soviet
Union. Efforts to create this army were hampered by the fact that about
10,000 Polish officers along with about 5,000 Polish intellectuals and
professional persons, all of whom had been held in three camps in
western Russia, could not be found. In addition at least 100,000 Polish
prisoners of war, out of the 230,000 captured by Soviet forces in
September 1939, had been exterminated in Soviet labor camps from
starvation and overwork, and over a million Polish civilians were being
similarly treated.
Constant
obstacles were
offered by the Soviet authorities to the efforts of General Anders to
reconstruct a Polish army in the east. When rations were cut to 26,000
to feed a force of 70,000 soldiers and many thousands of Polish
civilian refugees, Anders obtained permission to evacuate his force to
Iran (March 1942). It was this group which fought so well the following
years in Italy and in western Europe..
As
soon as Anders's forces
left Russia, the Soviet leaders began to organize a group of Polish and
Russian Communists into a so-called Union of Polish Patriots which
sponsored a Polish-language radio station and a new
Communist-controlled Polish army in Russia. In January 1943, Moscow
informed the Sikorski government in London that all Poles originating
from the provinces occupied by Soviet forces in September 1939 would be
regarded as Soviet subjects.
While
Soviet-Polish relations
were deteriorating, the German radio suddenly announced, on April 13,
1943, that German forces in occupied Russia had discovered, at Katyn
near Smolensk, Russia, mass graves containing the bodies of 5,000
Polish officers who had been murdered by the Soviet authorities in the
spring of 1940. Moscow called this a Nazi propaganda trick and declared
that the Polish officers had been murdered and buried by the Nazis
themselves when they captured the officers and the locality by
overrunning this Soviet territory and its concentration camps in August
1941. When the Polish government in London requested an investigation
of this crime at the site by the International Red Cross, the Soviet
government broke off diplomatic relations with the Sikorski government
on the grounds that it had fallen victim to Nazi propaganda because of
anti-Soviet feeling.
The
Katyn massacres were a
subject of controversy for years. Today there is no doubt that the
great mass of evidence indicates that these victims, numbering 4,243,
met their deaths by being shot through the back of the neck in the
early spring of 1940 and not August 1941 (or later), when the area was
in German possession. This evidence, which clearly indicates Soviet
guilt, includes the following points: (1) the victims were wearing the
uniforms and boots issued to them at the outbreak of war in 1939, and
these were in good condition, showing a minimum of wear as might be the
case in April 1940, but could not have been true in August 1941; (2)
all letters, journals, or documents on the bodies had dates previous to
May 1940, and in no case later; (3) the victims were arranged in the
graves in groups in the same order in which they had been removed from
the Soviet concentration camp at Kozielski in March and April 1940; (4)
the victims wrote letters to their families at home up to April 1940,
but not later; (5) letters to victims from their families were
delivered by Soviet authorities up to April 1940, but were returned to
the senders as undeliverable after that date; (6) in private
conversations various Soviet authorities at various times admitted the
murders. There is much other evidence showing Soviet guilt in this
affair, but it must not be forgotten that both Soviet Russia and Nazi
Germany were determined to exterminate all Polish leaders and the
Polish nation by reducing the leaderless Poles to the status of slave
laborers and that Germany also would have killed these Polish officers
if they had captured them, since the Germans did exterminate 4,000,000
Poles in this way during the war. Although the number of bodies at
Katyn was less than 5,000, the number of officers murdered was almost
twice this figure, the rest, apparently, having been drowned in the
White Sea..
The
crisis in Soviet-Polish
relations in the spring of 1943 marks a turning point in the relations
of the three Great Powers fighting Germany, although every effort was
made to conceal this fact at that time. From March 1943 onward, the
Soviet authorities did all they could to build up the Union of Polish
Patriots as the center of aspirations of the Poles still suffering in
their own country, while, at the same time, Washington began to pay the
Polish government-in-exile an annual subsidy of $12.5 million to
finance its underground organizations in Poland and its diplomatic
relations with Latin-American countries. Within Poland itself, the
London government soon had a secret army and a secret underground
government, including a parliament, schools, and a system of courts.
This government met in secret, made decisions, and executed sentences
on disloyal Poles, especially on collaborators with the Nazis.
Nazi
plans aimed at the
eventual extermination of the Poles and the Polish nation. In the
winter of 1939-1940, all Poles were deported, street hy street with
only a few hours' notice, from the western areas annexed to Germany
into the government-general. In the latter areas, under the rule of
Hans Frank and Arthur Seyss-Inquart, all wealth which could be used by
Germany was confiscated and removed; all Polish institutions of higher
learning or culture were abolished, so that only elementary schools
(and these conducted in the German language) were allowed; all
outstanding persons were murdered; millions were deported westward to
work as slave laborers in German factories; the food consumption of
those who remained was reduced by German seizure of food supplies to a
quarter of the daily need (to 600 calories); and various measures, such
as separation of the sexes, were taken to prevent the reproduction of
Poles. Under these circumstances it is remarkable that Polish spirit
could not be broken, that hundreds of thousands of Poles continued to
resist in guerrilla bands, in the underground "Home Army" under
Generals "Grot" (Stefan Rowecki) and "Bor" (Thaddeus Komorowski), and
that sabotage, propaganda, spying, and communication with the Polish
government in London continued to flourish.
At
the time these events were
taking place, the people of the English-speaking world were almost
totally ignorant of the diplomatic controversies behind the scenes and
almost equally ignorant of the conditions of life in German-occupied
Europe. On the other hand, they were fully aware of the victory in
North Africa, of the conquest of Sicily, and of the invasion of Italy.
The strategic decisions involved in these campaigns and, above all, the
decision of September 1943 to reject Churchill's plans for a Balkan
campaign in order to concentrate on the cross-Channel offensive for
1944, were of vital importance in setting the form that postwar Europe
would take. If the strategic decision of 1943 had been made
differently, to postpone the cross-Channel attack and, instead, to
concentrate on an assault from the Aegean across Bulgaria and Romania
toward Poland and Slovakia, the postwar situation would have been quite
different. This we can say with assurance even though we cannot say
with any certainty what the difference would have been.
In
the course of 1943, while
Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin were still devoting their chief
attention to the conduct of the war, their foreign ministers, Cordell
Hull, Anthony Eden, and Vyachislav Molotov, were giving increasing
attention to planning for postwar problems. The chief of these problems
which were discussed were: (1) the economic demobilization of the
victor Powers, (2) the relief and rehabilitation of the defeated
countries and of the liberated areas, (3) problems involving refugees
and displaced persons, (4) problems of finance and of international
monetary exchanges, (5) the punishment of "war criminals" in the
defeated states, (6) the forms of government of these states and of the
liberated states, (7) territorial questions such as the boundaries of
Germany, of Hungary, or of Poland, (8) the disposition of the colonial
possessions, or, as they were called, the "dependent areas," of both
victors and vanquished, (9) the problem of the postwar political
relationships of the victorious states and of the world as a whole.
It
is evident that many of
these problems were of an explosive nature and could lead to disputes
among the Allies and possibly even to a weakening of their joint
anti-German efforts. As a consequence, the foreign ministers'
discussions of many of these problems were tentative and hesitant and
were frequently interrupted to confer with the three heads of
governments. Even on this higher level, agreement could not be reached
in some cases, and these problems were generally put aside lest efforts
to reach an agreement alienate the Allies to the detriment of their war
efforts against Germany. This was most emphatically true of questions
involving the possible postwar situation in eastern Europe where the
frontiers of Germany, of Poland, and of the Soviet Union or the status
of Poland and of the Baltic states were far too controversial to be
raised except in a most tentative way.
It
has frequently been argued
in recent years that failure to reach any agreement on the territorial
and governmental settlement of eastern Europe while the war was still
in progress meant that these questions would tend to be settled by the
military situation in existence at the end of the war with little
consideration for questions of legality, humanity, freedom,
nationalism, the rights of small states, or other factors which were
mentioned so frequently in the Allied wartime propaganda. Specifically,
this meant that the Soviet armies would undoubtedly dominate eastern
Europe once Germany was defeated and that these armies could make a
settlement based on force unless the Soviet Union had been compelled,
before the complete defeat of Germany, to make agreements with its
fellow Allies for some more desirable settlement in eastern Europe.
These arguments usually assume that the Soviet Union was reluctant to
make an early agreement on this subject and that it could have been
forced to do so because of its need for American supplies during the
fighting. This assumption implies that America should have threatened
to reduce or to cut off Lend-Lease supplies going to the Soviet Union
unless we could obtain Soviet agreement to the kind of eastern European
settlement we wanted. These arguments are based on hindsight and not on
any realistic understanding of the historical facts as they developed.
It
is now clear, from the
published documents, that the Soviet Union was eager to obtain some
early agreement on the eastern European postwar settlement and that
both the United States and Britain were reluctant to make such an
agreement, apparently because of the fear that we could do so only at
the price of extensive concessions to Russia at the expense of the
smaller eastern European states. We were unwilling to use our control
of Lend-Lease supplies to force concessions from Russia because any
reduction of such supplies, by weakening the Soviet Union's resistance
to Germany, would increase Germany's ability to fight the Americans and
would lengthen the war. Moreover, Soviet ideas on the Baltic states and
the eastern frontiers of Poland were so rigidly uncompromising that no
concessions could have been obtained on these points except, perhaps,
by reducing Lend-Lease shipments to a degree which the Anglo-Americans,
in their own interests, were unwilling to do. It was feared that any
drastic Anglo-American pressure on Russia in this form would lead to
violent protests from the electorate in Britain and in the United
States, since the citizens of the two democratic Powers were much more
concerned with getting on with the war than they were with the postwar
situation of the Poles or of the Baltic states. Moreover, the
Anglo-American leaders were fearful that, if Russia's ability to fight
Germany was reduced by any curtailing of supplies, the Soviet leaders
might make a separate peace with Hitler, allowing the Nazis to turn the
full brunt of their fury westward. Rumors of possible Soviet-Nazi
discussions looking toward a separate peace were circulating in London
and Washington at various times, particularly in the latter part of
1943, and the Anglo-American leaders were too clearly aware of the
sudden Nazi-Soviet agreement of August 1939 to push the Russians so
hard that they might make another, more fateful, agreement of a similar
character.
The
... [strategy taken] by
the Anglo-American leaders throughout the war was that full-scale
Soviet resistance to Germany seemed essential if the Nazis were ever to
be beaten.... [The allied nations were already preparing the post-war
world by building up the Soviet Union for the so-called Cold War.]
Winston Churchill, in June 1941, had welcomed the Russians as allies
against Hitler with the statement that he would be ready to ally with
the devil in hell if the devil was ready to fight Hitler. Naturally,
this point of view became less extreme as the defeat of Hitler became
less remote, but the Germans fought so well, up to the very end of the
war, that it never became possible to force any Soviet concessions in
regard to the postwar political settlement in eastern Europe. Instead,
the tactic was adopted, wholeheartedly by President Roosevelt, more
reluctantly by Prime Minister Churchill, of trying to win the Soviet
leaders, especially Stalin, to a less suspicious and more conciliatory
mood by full-scale cooperation in the war and by friendly concessions
to Soviet sensibilities on wider issues. This alternative policy was by
no means an easy one, for Soviet suspicions were so close to the
surface and Soviet sensibilities were so touchy that cooperation with
these people proved to be a very delicate and unpleasant business. It
was, however, a business at which Roosevelt was personally adept, and
it worked, adequately enough, until the war with Germany and
Roosevelt's life drew to their close together in the spring of 1945.
The
various postwar problems
we have mentioned were discussed at a series of high-level conferences
during the war years. At a conference in Washington in March 1943, Eden
and Roosevelt agreed that Germany should he broken up into three or
four states after its defeat, but did not see eye to eye on many other
matters. Roosevelt felt that only the four Great Powers would need to
be armed in the postwar world and could keep the peace for all other
states if they could agree among themselves. Other states, relieved of
the burden of armaments, could devote all their resources to economic
reconstruction. The four Great Powers would be helped in the task of
keeping the peace for all by their joint possession of various
strategic points throughout the world, like Dakar or Formosa, and could
work together to instruct the public opinion of the world by a joint
sponsorship of informational centers scattered about the globe. In such
a system, in which lesser states did not have to defend themselves,
there could be no objection, in Roosevelt's thinking, to separating
peoples, like the Serbs and Croats, who could not agree, or in
providing independence for dependent areas, such as Hong Kong. Most of
this made little sense to Eden, who was not prepared to give up Hong
Kong or other portions of the British colonial possessions or to see
the Soviet Union on the borders of a Europe in which all other states
were disarmed. The chief areas of agreement at this conference were
that Germany should be dismembered after the war and that Poland could
obtain East Prussia.
Two
months later, at the
so-called "Trident" Conference in Washington, Churchill and Roosevelt
went over the same matters (May 1943). The cross-Channel attack,
Overlord, was set for May 1944, and an intensified aerial bombardment
of Germany ordered as a preliminary. No important decisions could be
made on postwar problems, although the atmosphere was brightened by a
Soviet announcement of the abolition of the Communist International and
an Anglo-American announcement renouncing extraterritorial rights in
China.
The
next conference, held in
May and June 1943 at Hot Springs, Virginia, was of a technical nature,
and discussed postwar food and agricultural problems. From this
conference there emerged a United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO), an advisory body to collect and disseminate
agricultural information, as had been done previously by the League of
Nations affiliate, the International Institute of Agriculture in Rome.
Closely
related to FAO, but of
a temporary rather than permanent character and possessing
administrative rather than simply advisory powers, was the United
Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). At the first
meeting of this international organization, at Atlantic City, New
Jersey, in November 1943, forty-four nations agreed to contribute I
percent of their national incomes to purchase relief supplies for
war-devastated peoples. Herbert Lehman, former governor of New York,
was elected director-general of the new organization.
In
the meantime, in August
1943 at Quebec, in what is sometimes called the "Quadrant" Conference,
Churchill and Roosevelt found some time for discussion of postwar
policy, although their chief concern was with Italy, with Overlord, and
with a new supplement to Overlord consisting of an invasion of southern
France from the Mediterranean Sea and up the Rhone Valley. This new
invasion, known as Anvil, was to be launched in the summer of 1944.
At
Quebec, Churchill accepted
Roosevelt's postwar projects with considerable reluctance. The prime
minister felt strongly that the United States and the Soviet Union
would be the two giants of the postwar world and that Britain's best
interests lay in building some kind of British sphere of influence in
Europe and in Asia as a balance against these two giants. He wished to
see two regional associations for these two areas, with Britain in
both, the two forming part, if necessary, of some larger, worldwide
association. It soon became clear that the United States would accept
no regional associations of this character, and insisted on a worldwide
association of individual countries. The American insistence on no
spheres of influence and no settlement of frontiers while the war was
on, like the American insistence that China was a Great Power, was
regarded by the other two Allies as childishly unrealistic and even
hypocritical, especially as both Britain and Russia were convinced that
the United States was aiming to create American spheres of interest, if
not regional associations, in its areas of chief concern, Latin America
and the Far East.
Churchill
had to accept
Roosevelt's projects for a postwar international organization for fear
that resistance to these might lead to a revival of American
isolationism following the Second World War, as had happened after
1919. This, above all, Churchill had to prevent, since it would leave
Britain facing the Soviet Union with no Great Power companionship.
Accordingly, at Quebec in August 1943, Churchill accepted Hull's draft
for a postwar United Nations Organization, consisting of four Great
Powers and associated lesser Powers on a worldwide basis. This meant
that Britain was committed to seek support against the Soviet Union
from the United States within the United Nations organization rather
than through some tripartite balance-of-power system with spheres of
influence.
One
important consequence of
this British commitment to the American point of view appeared in 1943
with respect to the explosive problem of the Polish frontiers. Britain
and Russia reached a tentative agreement to move the whole Polish state
westward by wholesale transfers of population, drawing its eastern
boundary along the Curzon Line and compensating for this loss of
territory in the east by moving its western boundary to the Oder and
Neisse rivers. Churchill sincerely felt that this shift would greatly
strengthen Poland, since the areas lost in the east to Russia were
largely swamps and pine barrens, while the areas to be acquired from
Germany in the west were rich in agricultural and mineral resources.
This project had to be abandoned, however, when it was rejected by both
the United States and Poland. The only agreement which could be reached
was an informal one that Poland should obtain East Prussia.
In
preparation for the
forthcoming first meeting of the Big Three (Roosevelt, Churchill, and
Stalin) in Teheran, their foreign ministers met in Moscow in October
1943. Russian suggestions to force Turkey into the war or to demand air
bases in Sweden were rejected, and it was generally agreed not to
dismember Germany after the war but to force Germans to pay reparations
for damages and to undergo punishment for crimes against humanity or
international law. It was agreed that a disarmed Germany should be
ruled jointly under an Inter-Allied Commission and that Austria should
be reestablished as an independent country.
The
chief achievement of the
conference was the signature of a Four-Nation Declaration on the United
Nations. This document stated that the signers would continue to
cooperate after the war "for the organization and maintenance of peace
and security." It further promised to create "a general international
organization based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all
peace-loving states and open to membership by all such states." The
four Powers also promised not to use their armies in the postwar period
in the territories of other states "except for the purposes envisaged
in this declaration and after joint consultation" and to cooperate
together to regulate post-war armaments. This declaration was
significant because of the American promise not to relapse into
isolation again and because of the American success in having China
accepted, admittedly with reluctance, as a Great Power.
In
reporting to a joint
session of Congress on the significance of this agreement, Secretary of
State Hull voiced that kind of naive idealism which made Churchill
squirm. He said, "As the provisions of the Four-Nation Declaration are
carried into effect, there will no longer be need for spheres of
influence, for alliances, for balancing of power, or any other kind of
special arrangements through which, in the unhappy past, the nations
strove to safeguard their security or to promote their interests." He
went on to point out, as a desirable fact, that questions of boundaries
had been left in abeyance until the end of hostilities, as the United
States had desired.
Just
at this time considerable
efforts were being made in the United States to obtain popular
commitments against any postwar return to isolationism. On September 7,
1943, a conference of leaders of the Republican Party at Mackinac
Island, Michigan, endorsed the hopes for a post-war international
organization. Two weeks later, the Fulbright Resolution favoring such
an organization passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 360 to
29, and in November a similar expression, the Connally Resolution, was
accepted in the United States Senate by a vote of 85 to 5.
The
Moscow Conference of
Foreign Ministers Noms followed, within a month, by the first meeting
of the Big Three, held at Teheran from November 28 to December I, 1943.
Since Russia was not at war with Japan, there were no Chinese
representatives at Teheran, and the Anglo-Americans met with these at
two separate conferences in Cairo before and after the sessions in
Teheran (November 22-26 and December 3-6, 1943). Although the war
against China was being fought quite independently from the war against
Germany, the Cairo discussions formed a background for the Teheran
negotiations, and undoubtedly influenced them. Once again, this
influence was exerted through strategic discussions.
Originally,
American strategy
against Japan had, under General MacArthur's influence, given a major
role to the army with supporting roles for the navy and air force. This
earlier strategy had taken a form known as "island-hopping" and had
envisaged a major role for China and the Chinese Army. This strategy
intended to approach Japan from Australia, island by island, landing on
each and wiping out the Japanese garrisons on each before going on to
the next. Eventually this method would have brought the American Army
into contact with China, both across Burma into the southwestern
provinces and also along the southeastern coast at the traditional
points of entry to China, at Hong Kong and Canton. Once contact with
China had been made in this way, the final assault on Japan would be
made by using Chinese forces and Chinese bases as major elements in
this final assault.
Just
as the Teheran Conference
was meeting, this Far East strategy was being modified as a result of
three factors. In the first place, the success of the United States
Navy with carrier-based planes and with amphibious landing operations
was showing that an attack on Japan could be made directly from the
open Pacific without any need to recapture many of Japan's island bases
beyond those which were needed as bases for our own air-force attacks
on Japan and that this could be done without any preliminary contact
with the Chinese mainland....
It
was just at this moment
that Stalin indicated his willingness to intervene in the war on Japan
and to provide Soviet forces for the elimination of the Japanese troops
in Asia as soon as the war with Germany was finished. As American faith
in China's ability to overcome the Japanese forces on the Asiastic
mainland steadily dwindled and their faith in America's ability to
strike a fatal blow at Japan itself from the open Pacific grew, it
became increasingly a part of America's aims to obtain a Soviet
commitment to enter the war against Japan in order to overcome the
Japanese troops in Asia. This desire, forced on Roosevelt by his
military leaders, greatly weakened the President in his negotiations
with Stalin, since Roosevelt could not be adamant on Russia's position
in eastern Europe, or even in eastern Asia, if he w as seeking to
obtain a Soviet commitment to go to war with Japan.
At
Teheran, Stalin was chiefly
motivated by an intense fear of Germany and a desire to strengthen the
Soviet Union along its western border as protection against Germany.
Apparently, this fear was so great that Stalin did not want Germany to
go Communist after the war, possibly from fear that such a change would
strengthen it. Instead, he demanded, and obtained, Polish frontiers on
the Curzon Line and the Oder-Neisse Line and won acquiescence for his
rather moderate plans for Finland. The latter included the 1940
frontier, a Soviet naval base at Hangö or Petsamo, reparations to
Russia, and a complete break with Germany.
The
British were generally
unsuccessful in obtaining their desires at Teheran. They hoped to
postpone Overlord and the projected campaign to
reopen the Burma
Road, shifting the Burma equipment instead to the Aegean, but were
forced to accept a May 1944 target date for Overlord, while Stalin
emphatically vetoed any Turkish, Aegean, or Balkan projects. Stalin and
Roosevelt did authorize Churchill to negotiate with Turkey in an effort
to persuade that country to go to war on Germany, but no one had much
hope that these efforts would be successful, and Roosevelt and Stalin
generally opposed them for fear they might delay Overlord.
Roosevelt
was mostly concerned with military questions at Teheran. Having fixed a
date for Overlord,
he announced his decision to give the supreme command of that operation
to Eisenhower. On the same day, as a result of Stalin's announcement
that the Soviet Union would go to war with Japan as soon as Germany was
beaten, he made the decisive shift in Far East strategy from the
Chinese approach to the Pacific approach to Japan, leaving the Japanese
Asiastic forces to Russia rather than to the Chinese, and decided to
allow the Burma campaign to languish. At the same time, he asked Stalin
for the use of heavy-bomber bases in European Russia and in the
Siberian Maritime Provinces. The Siberian bases were to be used against
Japan, but never came into action because Stalin was reluctant and
because the rapid American advance across the Pacific gave the United
States substitute bases, especially on Okinawa. The bases in European
Russia were to have been used for a "shuttle-bombing'' technique by
which American heavy bombers would fly from England to Russia, and
return, bombing Germany on both trips. The technique was used several
times but could not be continued because the Russians did not provide
sufficient antiaircraft protection for the eastern bases, with the
result that the German Air Force bombed American planes on the ground
with relative impunity and heavy losses.
The
Teheran Conference reached
important conclusions regarding Iran and Yugoslavia. A joint
declaration was signed and issued by which the three Powers agreed to
maintain the independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of
Iran. This was regarded as a victory for the Anglo-American cause,
since Russian intrigues in Persia had been threatening its independence
and integrity since the days of the czars and had been particularly
objectionable since the Anglo-Soviet military occupation of the country
in August 1941. This occupation had been undertaken to force the
expulsion of about seven hundred German agents and technicians, and was
justified under the Soviet-Persian Treaty of 1921. That treaty
permitted Russia to send troops into Persia if it were ever threatened
by other forces. As the Russians occupied the northern portion of the
country, the British occupied the south. Iranian public opinion was
sullenly submissive. The assembly accepted an Allied demand that the
German, Italian, Romanian, and Hungarian legations be expelled, and a
week later the shah abdicated in favor of his son, Muhammad Riza
Pahlavi. On January 29, 1942, Britain, the Soviet Union, and Iran
signed an alliance by which the first two promised to respect and
protect Iran's integrity, sovereignty, and independence, while Iran
gave the two powers military control over the trans-Iranian trade route
until six months after the war ended, and promised as well to sever
diplomatic relations with all countries which had broken with the other
two signers.
Reorganization
and
re-equipment of the trans-Iranian route under American guidance made it
possible to ship to the Soviet Union over this route 5.5 million tons
of supplies during the war. These efforts carried a considerable
disruption of Iranian life, especially by price inflation and acute
food shortages, but the chief disturbance arose from Soviet political
actions in northern Iran. The Russians excluded most Iranian officials,
and encouraged local separatist and revolutionary forces. On several
occasions the United States secretary of state sent inquiries to Moscow
about these activities, but never received a satisfactory reply. [In]
... the Declaration of Teheran of December 1, 1943 ... Stalin joined
with Roosevelt and Churchill in guaranteeing Iran's independence and
integrity.
The
Teheran agreement about
Yugoslavia was even more significant than the one about Iran, and could
not, in any honesty, be called a victory for the West. The South Slav
state had been suffering under a brutal Axis occupation since the
spring of 1941 and was also split by a civil war between two
underground movements which spent more energy fighting each other than
they used to fight the Axis. The earlier of these undergrounds, that of
the Chetniks, supported the Yugoslav legitimate government now in exile
in London; it was led by General Draža Mihajloviæ, minister of
war in the exiled government. The second underground movement, known as
the Partisans, was Leftish and republican in its sympathies and was
dominated by the Communists led by Moscow-trained Josip Broz, known as
Tito.
The
contrast between these two
underground movements was a sharp one, but to Churchill and Roosevelt
these differences were largely ignored in favor of the more immediate
question of which was more willing to fight the Axis. The answer to
that question, in Churchill's opinion was Tito. For this reason
Churchill at Teheran made the fateful suggestion that the Allied
supplies going to Yugoslavia be shifted from Mihajloviæ to Tito
and that Russia should send a military mission to Tito to join the
British military mission already there. These suggestions were accepted
by the Big Three apparently without any clear idea of what this change
in policy meant, but it was a change filled with significance since it
meant that the Communists would control Yugoslavia in the postwar
period. This outcome was certainly not intended by at least two of the
Big Three, but they were willing to overlook obvious facts in their
eagerness to defeat Germany. Among these obvious items was the fact
that Mihajloviæ represented the forces of royalism, of Serb
centralism, and of social conservatism, while the Partisans represented
the forces of republicanism, of South Slav federalism, and of social
revolution.
Mihajloviæ's
reluctance
to continue guerrilla attacks on the Axis forces lost him British
support but was, from his point of view, the only possible tactic.
Every guerrilla attack on the Germans was answered by German reprisals
on the Serbs in which thousands were massacred, undefended villages
were destroyed, and hundreds of peasants had to flee to the mountains
where they were recruited into Partisan bands. Tito, who had no desire
to maintain the previous social, economic, or ideological structure of
Yugoslavia, had no desire to avoid German reprisals which
simultaneously destroyed the old social structure and provided recruits
for his Partisan forces. Accordingly, Tito was more willing to fight
Germans, and thus won the right to Allied support at Teheran. But
Tito's willingness to fight Germans was only slightly more eager than
that of Mihajloviæ, since the chief aim of each was to keep his
forces strong enough to take over Yugoslavia when the Axis was driven
out. Moreover, neither group, even with Allied supplies, was
sufficiently strong to drive the Axis out of the country or to take
over control of any significant parts of the country. The Italian
forces in Yugoslavia were defeated by the Anglo-American victory in
Italy itself, while the German forces were ultimately expelled by the
advance of Soviet and Bulgarian forces from the east in the winter of
1944-1945. Nevertheless, the Teheran decision to shift Allied supplies
from the Chetniks to the Partisans was of major significance in forming
postwar Europe.
The
Allied leaders parted
after the Cairo and Teheran conferences in hopeful moods and proceeded
to direct their full energies to military matters. Thus, there was no
other important meeting until the Second Quebec Conference in September
1944, and no other meeting of the Big Three until Yalta in February
1945. The nine months following Teheran were devoted to military
matters of which the chief was Overlord, begun on
D-Day, June 6, 1944.
The
preparations for Overlord
were among the most elaborate in military history. The planning, under
British General Frederick E. Morgan, occupied almost a year before
Eisenhower came to England to take command in January 1944. The
preparatory work involved the accumulation of enormous manpower and
supplies in England, extensive intelligence work and retraining of
troops, detailed planning on a very large scale, the accumulation of
much special equipment, including over 5,000 escort vessels and landing
craft, two artificial floating harbors, numerous block ships and
caissons for emergency piers, and strenuous exertions to overcome the
German Air Force and submarine fleet before the project began.
The
Eighth American Air Force
had been established in England in August 1942, but had not delivered
the full impact of its attack because of constant diversion of men and
planes to North Africa and the Mediterranean. At Casablanca in January
1943, the divergent British and American ideas on aerial bombardment
were reconciled in what was called the "Combined Bomber Offensive." The
Americans believed that Germany could be crippled to the point of
paralysis by precision daylight bombing on strategically chosen plants
of German industry; the British, who felt that daylight bombing would
be too costly, placed their hopes in nighttime saturation bombing of
whole areas, thus destroying civilian morale and exhausting German
manpower as well as destroying military facilities. The Combined Bomber
Offensive sought "round-the-clock" bombing of Germany by allowing each
Ally to concentrate on its special type of attack. Gradually the very
heavy casualties suffered by the Americans in daylight raids, along
with recognition that "precision bombing" was far too inaccurate to
fulfill the goals set for it, plus technical advances such as radar and
radio-locating which improved the precision of night bombing brought
the Americans to some extent to the British point of view.
The
Combined Bomber Offensive
shifted its targets several times, and at the beginning of 1944
concentrated on the elimination of German fighting planes. This was
achieved by killing off German pilots faster than they could be
trained, a goal which was greatly assisted by the fact that fuel
supplies in Germany were not sufficient to permit adequate training
flights. In spite of Allied bombing on factories, German production of
fighter planes rose steadily in 1944 and was at 2,500 a month just
before D-Day. But pilot training, from lack of gasoline, had been cut
from 260 to 100 hours and even in some cases to so hours. As a result,
losses of planes from accidents were almost as high as losses from
Allied action and, in February 1944, reached the extraordinarily high
figure of 1,300 planes, half of the month's production of new planes.
In the meantime, losses of American bombing planes on raids over
Germany were approaching lo percent, and in one case, over the
ball-bearing factory at Schweinfurt, reached 25 percent of the planes
sent. In the early months of 1944 a series of raids on Berlin was
launched with the deliberate purpose of provoking the German fighter
forces into combat so that they could be destroyed. This was a complete
success. On the last of these raids the Allied bombers were not
attacked by German fighters at all, and by June the Allies had won
complete aerial supremacy over Germany.
A
similar result, somewhat
earlier and not so conclusive, was reached in the antisubmarine
warfare. In this effort, thanks to radar and combined air and sea
attacks, the U-boats were driven completely from the North Atlantic.
The turning point occurred in May 1943, when 30 percent of the German
submarines which put to sea failed to return. The number of Allied
ships torpedoed fell from 141 in March 1943 to 19 in June 1944 and only
3 in August 1944. At the same time the Allied shipbuilding program was
growing so rapidly that even in 1943, after losses had been subtracted,
it increased by almost 11 million tons.
The
Germans were poorly
prepared to cope with any Allied landing in the west. Two-thirds of
their forces were fighting in Russia and eastern Europe, and the rest
had to be spread from the Aegean to the Pyrenees and thence north to
Norway and Finland. The drain on German manpower and vital materials
was so great that the country grew steadily weaker. Still it fought on,
the leaders becoming more and more ruthless and more and more remote
from reality until finally they were living in an insane frenzy of
hatred, suspicion, and frustration. Lack of manpower, particularly of
trained hands, and lack of materials, even of such ordinary commodities
as concrete or steel, made it impossible to strengthen the German
defenses to the necessary degree. Above all, lack of gasoline made it
impossible even to withdraw equipment before the advancing Russians. In
the last two months of 1943, the German armies lost almost a thousand
tanks and half as many self-propelled guns to Soviet forces. Repairs
became as difficult to achieve as new construction. In June 1943 the
Germans had 2,569 operational tanks and 463 under repair; in February
1944 the corresponding figures were 1,5.9 and 1,534.
In
the west the German
defenses had, necessarily, been allowed to run down in order to
strengthen the Russian front. While there were a few good divisions in
the west, the majority of the German forces there were in units not
prepared for combat, and totally lacking in mobility. The men were
over-age or very young, physically unfit or convalescing, prepared to
serve as occupation police and beach-watchers but quite unfit for real
fighting. There was even one division made up almost entirely of men
with digestive disorders. Most divisions in the west were only two
regiments, and, because they were totally lacking in transport, they
were classified as "static" (not fully combatant) units.
Although
Hitler had ordered
the coast to be fortified, this was done almost nowhere, for lack of
concrete and manpower. Allied aerial bombardment increased these lacks;
almost a million men were engaged in air defense in Germany itself.
Disruption of railway transportation made it difficult to get the
supplies that were available to the shore area. In May, for example,
with a daily need of 240 carloads of cement for one area, the arrival
was 16 a day. When Rommel took over the active defense in the west, he
ordered a continuous belt of land mines to be laid, requiring, at a
minimum, 50 million mines. Only 6 million were laid. Similarly, sea
mines were ordered laid off the coast, plus a renewal of the
mid-Channel mines which had been put down in 1943 and were now too old
to function properly. The last could not be done at all, while the
coastal mines were put down in the wrong area.
The
chief German defensive
forces were the Fifteenth Army defending the Pas-de-Calais and the
Seventh Army farther southwest in Normandy and Brittany. The Germans
expected the attack to come in the Pas-de-Calais, since it was closer
to England. They continued to believe this, even after D-Day, since
they thought that the Normandy landings were merely a diversion
preliminary to the main attack farther north. Moreover, the Germans
were convinced that the attacks would come just before high tide in
order to minimize the width of beach to cross and, accordingly,
constructed their obstacles and laid mines down to the half-tide mark
only.
Although
the Allied
cross-Channel attack was not a large one, being only five attack
divisions preceded by parts of three airborne divisions, it was
beautifully planned, competently carried out, and encountered a number
of very lucky chances, especially from the weather.
The
desired landing conditions
were low tide, just after dawn, following a moonlit night. These
occurred only once a month and lasted for only three days. In June 1944
these days were the 5th, 6th, and 7th. Bad weather, making air
operations difficult, and impossibly heavy surf forced Eisenhower to
postpone the attack on June 5th; but because better weather
information, expertly interpreted, showed the Allies that the weather
would improve suddenly, the supreme commander ordered the attack to
take place on June 6th, at a time when the Germans expected the adverse
weather to continue. The two American divisions went ashore on either
side of the Vire River near Carentan with "Utah Beach" to the west and
"Omaha Beach" (between the Vire and the Drôme rivers) to the
east. A Canadian and two British divisions went ashore between the
Drôme and the Orne rivers, in front of Bayeux and Caen. Airborne
divisions were dropped inland on either flank of the attack area to
hold up any German counter-thrust, and another airborne division was
dropped inside Utah Beach to seize the causeways which crossed the
lagoons inside the beach. Tactical surprise was achieved at all points,
so completely, in fact, that at Omaha Beach the strongest German
coastal battery in the west was found unmanned and unguarded. Except at
Omaha Beach, where high bluffs had to be scaled under fire, the
landings were immediately successful. At Omaha the issue hung on the
balance into the second day. As a result, 2,000 casualties were
suffered at Omaha compared to 200 at Utah Beach.
As
soon as the landings were
established, men and equipment were poured into the beachheads. A great
gale of June 19th-23rd stopped all unloading for two days and destroyed
the American artificial harbor at Omaha, but, by the time the gale
began, there had been put ashore 629,000 men, 95,000 vehicles, and
218,000 tons of supplies. The millionth man landed on July 6th, just a
month after the first..
In
spite of this success, the
Allied forces were hemmed in in Normandy for two months. On the left,
the British forces under the cautious Montgomery were unable to take
Caen; the American forces under General Bradley were stopped in the
center before Saint-Lô. Only on the right was movement possible,
to cross the peninsula (June 18th) and turn westward to storm and
capture Cherbourg. This great seaport, taken with its 40,000 German
troops on June 27th, was so devastated that it could not be brought
into service until late in August, and Allied supplies continued to
come in over the Normandy beaches.
In
the first 18 days of July,
Caen and Saint-Lô were taken after severe fighting initiated by a
terrific aerial bombardment by over 2,200 planes which dropped 7,000
tons of explosives on one town and 4,000 on the other. Both towns were
wrecked, but the Allied forces were still unable to move, meeting
furious resistance from German forces as they fought their way across
field after field, each bordered by an impenetrable hedgerow.
As
the Allies crept forward in
this way, two sensational events occurred elsewhere in western Europe.
On June Isth the first of Hitler's "vengeance weapons," the V-l, was
fired from Pas-de-Calais on London. This was a small jet-propelled,
pilotless, and automatically guided plane, moving at 400 miles per hour
and carrying a one-ton explosive charge. About 8,000 of these were
fired in 80 days, but the defense was steadily improved so that, late
in August, go percent were being stopped before they reached London.
Nevertheless, 2,300 reached their targets, inflicting over 20,000
casualties, one-quarter of them fatal, and forcing a million women and
children to evacuate the city.
On
September 8, 1944, the V-l
was replaced by the much superior V-2, a rocket which could not be
intercepted because it moved faster than sound. A total of 1,050 of
these weapons fell on England before the end of the war, killing over
2,700 persons and injuring three times that number. On the whole these
weapons, while frightening, used Up large German resources and energies
but achieved no military results.
Equally
spectacular was the
attempt to assassinate Hitler by exploding a bomb concealed in a
briefcase beside his chair at his headquarters in East Prussia. This
was the last of several attempts of this kind, made by the same group
which had tried in vain to negotiate with Chamberlain, Halifax, and
Churchill in September 1938. The conspirators, mostly from the
conservative upper classes, consisted chiefly of army officers, with a
minority of civilian and diplomatic leaders. The chief military figures
were Generals Ludwig Beck, Georg Thomas, Erwin von Witzleben, Karl von
Stuelpnagel, and others; the chief civilian leader was Carl Goerdeler,
one-time mayor of Leipzig; the chief intellectual figure was Count
Helmut von Moltke, son of the German commander in chief of 1914; the
leading diplomatic figures were the brothers Kordt, Theodor and Erich,
the first in the London Embassy, while the second headed Ribbentrop's
office in the Foreign Ministry; among those linked with the
conspiracies in an ambiguous fashion were Admiral Wilhelm Canaris,
chief of Military Counter-intelligence, and Paul Schmidt, Hitler's
personal interpreter.
This
group for years discussed
ways of getting rid of Hitler and what should he done with Germany
afterward. Sporadically they made attempts to kill the Führer. All
of these were unsuccessful because of a combination of bad luck, lack
of resolution, and Hitler's extraordinary intuition.
On
July 20, 1944, however,
success seemed near when Colonel Count Klaus Schenk von Stauffenberg,
chief of staff of the Home Army, made his daily report to Hitler, and
left the conference without picking up his briefcase, which rested
against the leg of Der Führer's chair. In the briefcase was an
English-made bomb with a ten-minute fuse. When the bomb exploded,
Stauffenberg gave the signal for the military units in Berlin, Paris,
and elsewhere to seize control of these areas from the fanatical Nazi
SS units..
Unfortunately,
Hitler's
conference on July 20th, because of the heat, was held in a wooden shed
instead of the usual concrete bunker. This allowed the explosion to
dissipate itself. Moreover, a few seconds before the bomb went off,
Hitler left his chair to go to a map on the most distant wall of the
conference room. As a result, some in the room were killed or badly
injured, but Hitler escaped relatively unscathed. This was broadcast on
the radio at once by the Nazis, and, by contradicting Stauffenberg's
signal, threw the conspirators into sufficient confusion and
irresolution to enable the SS and loyal Nazis to disrupt the plot.
About
7,000 suspects were
arrested and about 5,000 were killed, usually after weeks or even
months of horrible tortures. A few, like Field Marshal Rommel, were
allowed to commit suicide, as a special reward for their past services
to the Nazis. As a consequence of this fiasco, the anti-Hitler
opposition was destroyed, the most fanatical and least sane Nazis
increased their power within Germany, any chance of negotiating
peace—admittedly a remote possibility at all times—became
impossible, and the inner administration of the Nazi regime became a
complete madhouse.
In
the meantime, in the west,
the main strength of the German forces was concentrated against the
British near Caen. As the latter slowly inched southward toward Calais,
a newly formed American Third Army, mostly armored, under General
George S. Patton, drove southward from Saint-Lô to Avranches
(July 18-August 1). While some units turned westward from Avranches
into Brittany in an effort to capture additional seaports at
Saint-Malo, Brest, and Saint-Nazaire, the armored units swung eastward
to Le Mans (August 11th) and then northward to Argentan, leaving only a
narrow gap (Calais-Argentan) between American and British forces, as an
escape route through which eight shattered German divisions might
escape eastward (August 19-21, 1944). Many broke through, but 25,000
men were captured in this pocket, and the German defensive forces in
France were completely disrupted. From Le Mans units of the American
Third Army, moving at speeds up to forty miles a day, drove eastward
south of Paris, passing the city to reach the Seine at Fontainebleau.
On their left, the American First Army reached the river below Paris on
the same day, while farther west British and Canadian armies swung left
toward the lower Seine.
In the midst of
this excitement the American Seventh Army, with strong French forces,
landed on the Mediterranean coast of France (August Isth) and began to
drive northward up the Rhône Valley. The landings, made between
Toulon and Cannes against negligible resistance, quickly captured
Marseille. At the end of two days, the German High Command ordered all
German forces to withdraw from the French Atlantic and Mediterranean
coasts except from seaports and fortresses. At the end of eight days,
the Seventh Army had advanced 140 miles up the Rhone and had taken
57,000 prisoners. Both Lyon and Dijon were taken without a fight, and
contact was made with the United States Third Army near
Châtillon-sur-Seine on September 12th.
In
the meantime, on August r9,
1944, the citizens of Paris rose in revolt, led by 50,000 armed members
of the French Forces of the Interior (FFI), as the underground
resistance armies were called. Here, as elsewhere in Europe, these
forces were dominated by Communists. General Jean Leclerc, with the
French 2nd Armored Division, burst into the city on August 24th and
accepted the surrender of the German garrison of 10,000 men eager to
escape from the FFI. By this time the resistance forces were rising in
n1ucll of France, attacking German forces and wreaking vengeance on
Frenchmen who had collaborated with the Germans. On August 26th De
Gaulle entered Paris and immediately was made president of a
provisional government formed by a coalition of returning exiles and
underground leaders. General Eisenhower reviewed a triumphal march of
Allied forces down the Champs Elysees, but the main Allied armies swept
by both sides of Paris toward the German frontiers.
During
the autumn of 1944, the
Allied advance in the west was slowed up, as much by its own problems
of transport and supply as it was by German opposition. This advance
had to cross a series of famous rivers, the Seine, the Somme, the
Aisne, and the Meuse. All were crossed without difficulty because of
weak German resistance. But the big problem looming ahead was the
Rhine, where German resistance would inevitably be tenacious. On an
Allied front over two hundred miles wide, the American Third Army, on
the right, captured Verdun as early as August 3rd; the American First
Army, in the center, took Sedan and entered Belgium (August 31st); on
the left the British Second Army passed Amiens heading for Lille
(August 31st), while on the extreme left the Canadian First Army had
the unrewarding task of sealing off the entrenched German garrisons in
the Channel ports. These were taken, one by one, after very bitter
fighting, but in most cases the harbors could not be used at once
because of damage or other causes. Antwerp, taken on September 4th,
could not be used for two months because the Germans continued to hold
the river banks nearer the sea.
On
September 11th the United
States First Army crossed the German frontier near Trier and headed for
the Rhine. When Aachen, the first German city to be reached, refused to
surrender, it was almost completely destroyed by bombardment and taken
by bitter street fighting. Most German cities subsequently preferred to
surrender.
At
this point, a sharp
difference of opinion arose between Eisenhower and Montgomery. The
former wished to continue the broad-front assault on Germany, while the
latter wished to put every hope on a single lightning thrust across the
lower Rhine and into the essential industrial area of the Ruhr. The
lower Rhine splits into a number of small rivers as it approaches the
sea; in order to pass several of these in one rush Montgomery offered a
daring plan: three airborne divisions were to be dropped at
step-intervals ahead of the British Second Army to capture the river
crossings and open the way for a sixty-mile advance by the Second Army.
On August 15th, this attempt was made. The American 8:nd Airborne
Division dropped at Eindhoven to cover the Meuse River; the American
101st Airborne Division dropped near Nijmegen to cover the Waal
crossing; and the British 1st Airborne Division was dropped near Arnhem
to cover the northernmost branch of the Rhine, the Neder Rijn, above
Rotterdam. German resistance to the advance of the Second Army was so
great that it was unable to reach Arnhem, and after a week of furious
fighting, the remnants of this heroic group, less than a quarter of
those dropped, vv-ere evacuated. This failure doomed the hopes for one
vital thrust across the Rhine to the Ruhr.
By
mid-December the Allied
armies were struggling eastward toward the Rhine, in fog and rain, with
short days and long nights. Conditions were particularly bad in the
thick forests of the Ardennes. There the Germans determined to make
their last counteroffensive. Secretly concentrating 25 divisions in
weather too bad for air reconnaissance, the Germans struck westward,
chiefly with armored forces, into General Omar Bradley's Twelfth Army
Group, splitting it wide open and threatening to break through over the
Meuse. Although the First and Third American armies were separated by a
German advance of over 60 miles, no vital points were reached largely
because of the stubborn American resistance, even when surrounded, as
at Bastogne. By December 26th the German drive had stopped, and three
weeks later most of the lost ground had been recovered. In the attack
the Germans inflicted casualties of about 76,000 on the Americans, but
suffered casualties of about 90,000 themselves and used up
irreplaceable supplies and equipment. Before this Battle of the Bulge
could be finished, Hitler had to withdraw from it many of the forces
which had made the original attack, in order to send them hurriedly to
the east in a vain attempt to slow down the Soviet winter offensive
which began on January l2, 1945.
The
Battle of the Bulge was
hardly over before the German defenses in the west had to sustain a
series of shifting hammer-like blows preparatory to the Allied invasion
of Germany. Plans for the spring offensives showed 85 Allied divisions
attacking 80 under-strength German divisions. In the east the Germans
were already reeling before the Soviet winter offensive of 155
divisions. On March 7, 1945, the American 8th Armored Division captured
the Ludendorff Railway Bridge across the Rhine at Remagen a few minutes
before it was to have been blown up by the Germans. In spite of
desperate Nazi efforts to destroy it, this could not be done for ten
days. By that time it was too late, for other crossings had been
established, and many Allied divisions were across. By the end of March
1945, German strength in the west amounted to no more than 46 divisions
heavily pressed by 85 Allied divisions. As the official History
of the United States
put it, "The German Army could no longer he considered a major
obstacle." But the German military leaders, under the fanatical
insistence of Hitler and Himmler, were not permitted to surrender.
The
Allied advance in the west
was regarded with mixed feelings in Moscow, where there was real
concern that the Germans might shift all their strength to the east to
oppose Russia while admitting the Anglo-American forces in the west.
The Germans regarded the Russians as sub-humans aroused to frenzy by
German atrocities on Soviet soil, and had every reason to fear Russian
occupation and retaliation, while everyone knew that any American
occupation would be motivated by humanitarian considerations rather
than by retaliation. The Nazi leaders were too much absorbed in their
own irrationalities to adopt such tactics as these, however, although
the Soviet leaders continued to dread the possibility and convinced
themselves, in spite of the contradictory evidence, that it was likely.
Accordingly, the Soviet advance became a race with the Western Powers,
even though these Powers, by Eisenhower's orders, held back their
advance at many points (such as Prague) to allow the Russians to occupy
areas the Americans could easily have taken first.
From
midsummer of 1943 until
the war's end in May 1945, the Soviet offensive in the east was almost
continuous. In January 1944, Russian forces crossed the old border into
Poland; in February they pushed the Germans back from besieged
Leningrad, and, in the following month, they began a southern offensive
which crossed the Prut into Romania. In July 1944, the Soviet armies
reached the Vistula River, across from Warsaw, and began an offensive
to overrun Romania. These events raised in acute form the problem of
who would rule over the liberated areas of eastern Europe.
In
general, the
Anglo-Americans recognized the Russian need for security along their
western frontier, but felt that this could be obtained if independent
states with constitutional governments (in which the Communist Party
played a role) could be established in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria,
Greece, and Yugoslavia. They saw no hope of liberating the Baltic
states from Russia, and paid little attention to Finland. It was
generally felt that Russian security in eastern Europe could he assured
if the victorious Powers, including Russia, could retain their unity in
the postwar period and operate together in a United Nations
organization in peacetime as they had done in war. While the Western
Powers recognized that the Russians had a justifiable suspicion of
international organizations based on their unhappy experiences with the
League of Nations, it was felt that this could be overcome by the
English-speaking Powers giving evidence of their new spirit of
cooperation and by the existence of regional arrangements, such as the
Anglo-Soviet twenty-year alliance of May 26, 1942, or the French-Soviet
agreement of December 10, 1944. All efforts to achieve some arrangement
with Russia over the lesser states was deeply involved with the
indecisive negotiations about the fate of Germany.
There
was general agreement
about Germany to the extent that the errors of October 1918 would not
be repeated: German military leaders would be forced to sign a total
capitulation without any legal restrictions on the victors' future
behavior toward Germany; Germany would then fall under the victors'
rule directly through military government; considerable portions of
eastern Germany, possibly as far west as the western Neisse River (the
line of the Oder), would be taken from Germany; Germany would be
completely disarmed and industrially crippled; and considerable
reparations in kind would be taken from her. The apparent conflict
between the desire to reduce Germany's industrial level and the desire
to obtain reparations from her was glossed over temporarily by a plan
to dismantle German industrial plants as reparations for Russia.
These
agreements about Germany
left unsettled at least three major questions and, in consequence, left
Stalin with a strong feeling of insecurity about Germany's future:
there was no agreement whether Germany would be dismembered or be
treated as a unity, even under military occupation; there was no
agreement about the nature of the future German government; and there
was no agreement about methods for permanent enforcement of German
disarmament and restricted industrial development.
We
need not narrate the
continuous series of negotiations, temporary agreements,
misunderstandings, and reinterpretations which went on for years among
the Allied Powers regarding the fate of Germany and of the liberated
countries. The idea that the Soviet Union and the Anglo-American Powers
could continue to cooperate in peace as they had done in war, either by
diplomacy and conference of their leaders or within some structure of
international organization, was naive. Such a possibility was
foreclosed by two factors: the fundamental underlying suspicions on
both sides, even in wartime, and the very nature of the political power
of modern states.
For
these two reasons, both
sides, in the midst of reassuring public statements about their
solidarity of outlook and plans for postwar cooperation, began to work
toward another, more realistic arrangement of spheres of interest and
power balances. This alternative, and ultimately inevitable, path was
adopted earlier by Stalin and Churchill than by Roosevelt, not because
the latter was naive or ill but because he wanted to smother the naked
opposition of power balances by a chaotic blanket of legal
restrictions, conflicting public opinion, and alternative institutional
arrangements which would hamper the outright operation of power
conflicts and which would allow men like himself to divert and postpone
crises from day to day, wl1ile they improvised better economic and
social arrangements for their peoples in the successive intervals of
peace won from the postponement of forcible solutions to power
conflicts. None of this could be achieved, in Roosevelt's view, unless
Stalin's mania of suspicion of capitalist Powers could be reduced by
granting him as concessions things he could not be prevented from
taking anyway. In the last resort Roosevelt's sense of the realities of
power were quite as acute as Churchill's or Stalin's, but he concealed
that sense much more deliberately and much more completely under a
screen of high-sounding moral principles and idealistic statements of
popular appeal. It is unlikely that Roosevelt had any alternative plan
based on power politics to fall back upon if his stated aims of postwar
cooperation and United Nations failed. Churchill, on the other hand,
while sincerely pursuing cooperative goals, had a secondary outline
based on power balance and spheres of interest. Stalin reversed
Churchill's priorities, giving primary position to spheres of power and
secondary, rather ironic, acceptance of cooperation and international
organizations.
So
far as eastern Europe was
concerned, the Stalin priorities made quite impossible any mechanism of
cooperation or international agreement. There can be little doubt that
Stalin was determined to achieve security on the Soviet western
frontier by establishing a buffer of states under complete Communist
control. This covered Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria necessarily and any
others he might get incidentally. He was not concerned with Greece,
Albania, or Austria, had little hope of getting Czechoslovakia, hoped
to retain Yugoslavia, and had considerable, but unspecified, fears over
Iran. The technique to be used to get Communist control over these
states was similar to that used by Hitler in Austria: (1) to establish
a coalition government containing Communists; (2) to get in Communist
hands the ministries of Defense (the army), Interior (the police), and,
if possible, Justice (the courts); (3) to use administrative decrees to
take over education and the press and to cripple opposition political
parties; and (4) to establish, finally, a completely Communist regime,
under the protection of Soviet military forces if necessary.
The
success of these steps in
Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania was assured, while the war was still
going on, by the Western Powers' acceptance of coalition governments
containing Communists as a necessary price for Soviet security locally
and for Soviet cooperation elsewhere (especially the Far East) and by
the fact that Russian armies were in occupation of the areas concerned.
One
of the first evidences of
Churchill's alternative policy based on spheres of power was Eden's
suggestion to the Soviet ambassador in London on May 5, 1944 that
Britain would permit Russia to take the lead in policies about Romania
in return for Russian support for Britain's policies in Greece. This
was defended as being based on "military realities," was opposed by
Secretary of State Hull, but Noms accepted by Roosevelt "for a three
months' trial." It led to an agreement between Churchill and Stalin, at
the Moscow Conference of October 9-18, 1944, that Anglo-Soviet
interests in the Balkans might be divided on a percentage basis, with
Russia predominant in Romania and Bulgaria, with England predominant in
Greece, and with Hungary and Yugoslavia divided fifty-fifty. [The] ...
agreement was put down on paper and signed. At Stalin's insistence, the
gist of the arrangement had already been sent to Washington, where
Roosevelt initialed it during Hull's absence on vacation (June 12,
1944).
This
agreement had little
influence on Churchill's actions. He continued to work for cooperative
constitutional arrangements in eastern Europe and elsewhere. When
Belgian Foreign Minister Paul Henri Spaak, in the summer of 1944,
sought to obtain a Western defense bloc, extending from Norway to the
Iberian Peninsula and including Britain, Churchill and Eden both
rebuffed the plan on the grounds that it would divide Europe into two
blocs, Western and Soviet, which would outbid each other for German
support in the postwar world. The British chiefs of staff, however, in
the autumn of 1944, sought to establish, as an alternative policy, the
dismemberment of Germany and the incorporation of industrialized west
Germany into Western defense plans in the event of Russian hostility in
postwar eastern or central Europe. The British civil leaders, led by
Eden, in September and again in October, rejected these General Staff
suggestions and reiterated their determination to pursue a policy of
unity and cooperation within the United Nations and to renounce any
efforts to form any anti-Soviet bloc, least of all with Germany. The
chiefs of staff yielded, unconvinced, and warned of the need to prepare
an alternative policy if the United Nations broke down owing to
differences with Russia and the need then arose to face a united
Germany dominated by, or in collaboration with, Russia.
In
the meantime the Soviet
Union, in 1944, under cover of the continued violence of war and the
negotiations to establish a united postwar world organization, took
steps to establish its western buffer of Communized satellite states.
In
August 1944, Finland,
Romania, and Bulgaria sought to get out of the war. King Michael of
Romania overthrew the pro-Nazi government of General Antonescu and sent
a delegation, led by a Communist, to Moscow to sign a formal armistice.
The surrender, signed on September 12th, was to the United Nations, but
its enforcement was left to the Soviet High Command, with the
Anglo-British members of the Allied Control Commission relegated to the
status of observers. A similar armistice was signed with Finland on
September 19th.
The
Bulgarian surrender was
more complicated, since that country was not at war with Russia. A new
Bulgarian government, formed on September 4th, proclaimed its
neutrality, and requested withdrawal of all German forces. Russia
declared war the next day, marched unopposed into Sofia on September
16th and supported a coup d'état which established
a
Communist-dominated government. The new regime at once declared war on
Germany and was occupied by Russian forces. Churchill and Eden, from
Quebec, vetoed an armistice like the Romanian one, but the final
Bulgarian armistice of October 28, 1944 was little different.
Soviet
forces meanwhile had
crossed Bulgaria and invaded Yugoslavia, liberating Belgrade on October
Isth. They then swung north into Hungary, reached Budapest on November
11th, and surrounded it by the end of the month. The Germans prevented
a Hungarian surrender by seizing control of the government on October
15, 1944, and as a result Budapest was largely destroyed in fierce
fighting during November and December. Only on January 20, 1945, was
the provisional government of General Miklos able to conclude an
armistice with the Russians, although fighting continued in the country
for several months longer. The agreement left Hungary largely under
Soviet military control (signed January 20, 1945)..
Vain
efforts extending over
several years were made by the Western Powers, especially Britain, to
prevent Yugoslavia and Poland from falling under complete Communist
influence. In the course of r943, rather futile efforts were made,
through control of supplies of weapons and the work of British liaison
officers, to get the Chetniks and Partisans to fight Germans rather
than each other. Growing evidence that the pro-Serb Chetniks under
royalist General Mihajloviæ were collaborating with the Germans
inclined the British to shift their support to Tito, but it proved as
difficult to get the royal Yugoslav government-in-exile in London to
accept Tito as it was to get the latter to accept the royal government.
A successful German attack on Tito, which forced him to flee to the
Adriatic islands, brought both sides to terms, and, in October 1944,
royal Prime Minister Ivan Subasic agreed to join a Tito government in
which the Partisans would hold an overwhelming majority of the posts.
The agreement promised free elections for a constituent assembly within
three months of total liberation and the return of King Peter only
after he had been accepted by a plebiscite. The king refused to accept
this agreement until Churchill threatened to expel him from England.
The new government, accepted by the Powers at Yalta, was established in
Belgrade on March 4, 1945.
As
might be inferred, the
Polish settlement was even less happy than the Yugoslav one, since the
Poles were under the full weight of the Soviet armies, and inaccessible
to Western power. As early as 1943, the Polish Cabinet in London, which
operated an underground army and underground government in Poland, was
threatened by Russian demands that the Polish eastern frontier be moved
westward to the Curzon Line and that anti-Soviet members of the
government be removed. Futile negotiations dragged on for months. In
July 1944, when the Soviet armies were approaching the Vistula, a
Communist "Polish Committee of National Liberation" was set up under
Soviet protection in Russia. It claimed full legal sovereignty over
Poland under the Constitution of 1921 and denounced the Polish
government in London as illegal.
Polish
ministers hurried from
London to Moscow to negotiate. While they were still talking there, and
when the Soviet Army was only six miles from Warsaw, the Polish
underground forces in the city, at a Soviet invitation, rose up against
the Germans. A force of 4o,ooo responded to the suggestion, but the
Russian armies stopped their advance and obstructed supplies to the
rebels, in spite of appeals from all parts of the world. On October 3,
1944, after sixty-three days of hopeless fighting, the Polish Home Army
had to surrender to the Germans. This Soviet treachery removed the
chief obstacle to Communist rule in Poland, and the London government
accordingly was ignored. On January 5, 1945, Russia recognized the
Committee of National Liberation as the government of Poland, while the
Western Powers continued to recognize the government in London.
Only
in Greece was it possible
to save a Balkan state from Communist domination; this was achieved
because the country was accessible to British forces arriving by sea.
The guerrillas resisting the Germans in Greece were controlled by two
groups: a Communist one was known from its initials as ELAS, while a
smaller local group of anti-Communist resistance fighters in Epirus was
known as EDES (under pro-English Colonel Zervas). British efforts to
unite the two groups under a common government and program were
frustrated by the extreme unpopularity of the king. Finally, such a
government was formed under a liberal republican, George Papandreou,
with British General R. M. Scobie as commander in chief of all
guerrilla fighters. In mid-October 1944, British forces returned to
Athens with this government, but armed ELAS groups prowled Athens as a
constant threat to public order. A decision to disarm these led to an
armed uprising in the city. Defeated by the British, they took to the
hills, but received no support from Russia, and, on February 13, 1945,
accepted disarmament and amnesty under the regency of Archbishop
Damaskinos, with General Nicholas Plastiras as prime minister in a
non-Communist government.
In
spite of these conflicts
with Communist elements in eastern Europe, the Western Powers continued
to cooperate with the Soviet Union in the military subjugation of
Germany and the diplomatic negotiations to establish a general postwar
arrangement. In the latter negotiations the problem of a European,
particularly a German, postwar settlement was inextricably mingled with
the establishment of a world security organization. The central core of
both was the hope that the three Great Powers would be able to
cooperate in peace as they had done in war, but this rather tenuous
hope was concealed under a mass of other considerations.
We
have already seen the
dominant role played in Soviet operations by Russia's insistence on
security along its western frontier. Britain had equally forceful
aspirations, of which the chief w ere to prevent an American reversiol1
into postwar isolationism as in 1921 and to maintain the unity of the
Commonwealth. The Roosevelt Administration in Washington was equally
fearful of any resurgence of American isolationism, and hoped to avoid
it by a symphonic appeal to mingled notes of American idealism and
interests: The United States would be the greatest Power in a world
security organization which would prevent future wars but, at the same
time, would be unable to impose any decisions on the United States.
Under that peace the world would be reconstructed economically to
satisfy the basic needs of all human beings, end poverty and disease by
American technical skill and science, and raise standards of living
everywhere to the simultaneous satisfaction of American idealism and
American industry's need for profitable markets.
The
outlines of this American
post-war paradise were sketched as goals by such proclamations as the
Four Freedoms speech of January 1941, the Atlantic Charter of August
14, 1941, and the United Nations Declaration of January 2, 1942.
Differences of view among the Big Three in drawing up the latter
document were concealed in its final wording, but are of some
significance. They included American insistence on excluding France and
including China as Great Powers, British efforts to include social
security and to protect imperial preference, and Soviet objections to
the importance of religious freedom..
The
organizational structures
to secure these goals in the post-war period were sketched out in a
number of international conferences on various governmental levels.
These included the major summit conferences of heads of governments
already mentioned and subsequent ones at Second Quebec (September
1944), Moscow (October 1944), Malta (January 1945), Yalta (February
1945), and Potsdam (July 1915), and a number of specialists'
conferences. The latter included: (1) a conference on post-war economic
problems at London in September 1941; (2) another on food and
agriculture at Hot Springs, Virginia, in May-June 1943; (3) one on
refugees and emergency postwar relief held at Atlantic City, New
Jersey, in November 1943; (4) a conference on international monetary
problems at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944; (5) the
Conference of Ministers of Education of the Allied Governments, held in
London in April 1944; and (6) the two conferences to establish an
international security organization at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, in
October 1944, and at San Francisco in April-June 1945.
These
conferences were
surrounded with preliminary and subsequent negotiations and gave rise
to the basic international organizations of the postwar period. Among
these were the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), now stationed
in Rome; the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration
(UNRRA); the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for
Reconstruction and Development (World Rank), now in Washington; the
United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO), now in Paris; and the United Nations security organization
now operating out of its glittering glass buildings along the East
River, New York City. The arguments and conflicts whose compromises and
resolutions provided these post-war organizations of "one world"
idealism will be discussed later; during the war itself they were
largely lost under the din of world conflict.
While
the Western Powers were
thus laying the foundations for their ... [New Imperial Order for] the
post-war world during 1943-1945, the basically destructive,
pathological, and irrational character of Nazism was turning Germany
and occupied Europe into a madhouse. By September 1943, no objective
person in Germany could expect a German victory; by September 1944,
every German military leader saw that defeat was imminent. Yet the Nazi
hierarchy and its jackal collaborators, isolated from reality by their
obsessive delusions, only increased the violence of their insane
frenzies. This violence was turned increasingly inward in a
determination to destroy everything in one vast holocaust if Hitler's
New Order could not be achieved. Efforts to destroy entirely
those
peoples, such as Jews, gypsies, Slavs, and the "politically
unreliable," who were special targets of the Nazi psychosis, were
accelerated as the Western and Soviet armies slashed deeper into the
Reich. Eager subordinates worked overtime to slaughter the emaciated
prisoners in concentration camps before the whole system collapsed.
More significantly, persons held as resisters and opponents in crowded
prisons were condemned to destruction by shooting or hanging before
they could be released by the invading armies.
In
many places within Germany
the uproar of the war itself was almost lost in the crackle of the
executioners' guns, the screams of the tortured, the acrid smell of the
gas chambers, the moans of millions of victims of avarice and hate, the
stench of burning bodies, and the scurrying around of the bestial Nazis
seeking to hide or destroy documentary evidence, to conceal the
treasures looted from centuries of Europe's earlier culture in the days
of Hitler's victories; to secrete the jewels and precious metals
(including gold yanked from the teeth of murdered Jews), and to satisfy
their last impulses of avarice and spite. Hundreds of millions of
dollars of such hidden loot were uncovered by the armies in their final
stages of victory.
When
these victorious armies
broke into Germany, late in 1944, the Nazis were still holding the
survivors of 8,000,000 enslaved civilian workers, 10,000,000 Jews,
5,750,000 Russian prisoners of war, and millions of prisoners from
other armies. Over half of the Jews and Russians and several millions
of the others, possibly 12,000,000 in all, were killed by murder,
overwork, or deliberate neglect before final victory in the spring of
1945. The work of these enslaved and exploited millions allowed the
great majority of Germans to escape the economic stringencies of the
war. While the standards of living of the British were pushed downward
by rationing and shortages to levels where energy and work were
hampered, and at a time when German-occupied countries were frequently
forced below the subsistence level, German standards of living were, on
the average, higher than they had been since 1928, and the mobilization
of Germans for work or war service was less stringent than in any other
major combatant country. This was especially true of women and
nonessential workers. By mid-1943, for example, the number of persons
in domestic service in Germany was only about 8 percent less than four
years earlier, while in Britain over the same four years the reduction
was 67 percent. Over the same period the number of workers in heavy
industry increased 68.5 percent in Britain, but only 18.8 percent in
Germany. In August 1944, Albert Speer, minister of armaments and war
production and one of the few rational figures in high position in
Germany, estimated that there were still 7.7 million unproductive
employees in Germany, including 1.4 million in domestic service. The
number of women mobilized for war production in the first four years of
the conflict was 2.25 million in Britain compared to 182,000 in Germany.
This
relative ease of the
Germans in the midst of history's most destructive war was possible
because of the convergence of a number of factors of which the most
significant were the slowness of industrial mobilization, the ruthless
looting of occupied areas, and the working to death of millions of
enslaved peoples. As one consequence of this situation, recognition
that the war was lost came to the Germans, as it came to Hitler,
relatively late and with surprising suddenness, but the leaders of the
armed forces recognized their hopeless position a year, or even two
years, before the end. Fear of Hitler's terror prevented them from
taking any steps to end the war or even from mentioning it to Hitler,
from fear of his rage; and their efforts to kill Hitler, though
persistent, were pathetically incompetent.
Thus
Hitler's fanatical
devotion to destruction made surrender impossible and drove the war on
to its bitter end. This bitterness was carried to the majority of
Germans by the Combined Bomber Offensive, approved by the Combined
Chiefs of Staff on June 10, 1943. Before this offensive the bombardment
of Germany from the air was of little significance. In the whole war
almost l.5 million tons of bombs were dropped on Germany, but only
15,000 of this fell in 1940, and about 46,000 in 1941. The 1942 figure,
even with the help of the United States Eighth Air Force, was only
7,000 tons higher than that for 1941. Thus 95 percent of the total
bombs dropped on Germany in the war fell after January 1943.
The
Combined Bomber Offensive
was an effort to carry out the largely erroneous ideas of an Italian
general, Giulio Douhet, whose most significant achievement was a book, The
Command of the Air: An Essay on the Art of Aerial Warfare,
published in Italian in 1921. In this and other works, Douhet made a
series of claims and assumptions which were almost totally wrong and
had a pernicious influence on subsequent history.
These
included the following:
(1) that the defensive supremacy prevailing in land warfare in 1916
would continue, and, accordingly, no decision could be reached by
ground combat; (2) that air forces, on the contrary, had an offensive
supremacy against which no defense was possible; (3) that decision in
war, accordingly' could be reached by air forces alone and could be
reached, on that basis, within the first twenty-four hours of a future
war; (4) that all air power must be devoted to such strategic purposes
(immediate total defeat of the enemy) and must not allow themselves to
become involved, on a tactical basis, with ground or naval forces; (5)
that aerial victory would be achieved by the immediate and total
collapse of civilian morale under minimal bombardment; (6) accordingly,
that attack by air must be directed at civilians in enemy cities, with
poison gas as the chief weapon supplemented by incendiary bombs but
with high-explosive bombs unnecessary beyond a minimum and token amount
of about twenty tons. (Any city, he felt, would be destroyed totally by
500 tons of bombs, mostly gas.)
To
this nonsense Douhet added
a number of subsidiary ideas, including the following: (1) war must
begin with a preemptive (first) strike from the air on enemy cities
without any formal declaration of war; (2) since antiaircraft guns are
totally ineffective and fighter planes are almost equally futile,
bombers do not need high speed and will never need escort by fighter
planes; and (3) since whole cities will collapse immediately, there is
no problem of target selection, no need for economic warfare or
economic mobilization, and little need for concern for replacements or
reserves of planes or other equipment.
On
their face these ideas seem
so unconvincing that it is almost inconceivable that they played a
major role in twentieth-century history, but they did play such a role,
and made a substantial contribution toward forming the new age in which
we live. These ideas were almost wholly ignored in the Soviet Union and
were largely rejected in Germany; they created great controversy in
France; and were accepted to a large extent among airmen in Britain and
the United States. Wherever they were accepted they led airmen to
struggle to escape from tactical operations by getting free from the
other services (land or sea) by the creation of a third service, the
independent air force.
Acceptance
of Douhetism by
civilian leaders in France and England was one of the chief factors in
appeasement and especially in the Munich surrender of September 1938.
Baldwin reflected these ideas in November 1932, when he said: "I think
it is well also for the man in the street to realize that there is no
power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people
may tell him, the bomber will always get through.... When the next war
comes, and European civilization is wiped out, as it will be, and by no
force more than that force, then do not let them lay blame on the old
men." In September 1938, the Chamberlain government reflected these
ideas and prepared the way to Munich by issuing 35 million gas masks to
city dwellers.
And
as a consequence of
Douhetism among British and American airmen, the strategic bombing of
Germany was [deliberately and strategically] mishandled from the
beginning until almost the end of the war. Correctly, such strategic
bombing should have been based on careful analysis of the German war
economy to pick out the one or two critical items which were essential
to the war effort. These items were probably ball bearings, aviation
fuels, and chemicals, all of them essential and all of them
concentrated. After the war German General Gotthard Heinrici said that
the war would have ended a year earlier if Allied bombing had been
concentrated on ammonia plants. Whether this is correct or not, the
fact remains that strategic bombing was largely a failure, and was so
from poor choice of targets and from long intervals between repeated
attacks. Relentless daily bombardment, with heavy fighter escort, day
after day, in spite of losses, with absolute refusal to be distracted
to area or city bombing because of losses or shifting ideas might have
made a weighty contribution to the defeat of Germany and shortened the
war substantially. As it was, the contribution by strategic bombing to
the defeat of Germany was relatively incidental, in spite of the
terrible losses suffered in the effort.
The
shift to city bombing was
... [deliberate and strategic for it prolonged the war and preserved
key estates, industries and cartels of the German Industrialists
secretly aligned with Britain and the United States]. In spite of the
erroneous ideas of Chamberlain, Baldwin, Churchill, and the rest, the
war opened and continued for months with no city bombing at all, for
the simple reason that the Germans had no intentions, no plans, and no
equipment for strategic bombing. The British, who had the intentions
but still lacked the plans and equipment, also held back. After the
fall of France, where almost all German bombardment was tactical or
psychological with the major exception of the attack on Rotterdam, the
Battle of Britain was fought and lost by tactical bombing on shipping
and occasional airdromes or airplane factories.
The
attack on cities began by
accident when a group of German planes which were lost dumped their
bomb loads, contrary to orders, on London on August 24, 1940. The RAF
retaliated by bombing Berlin the next night. On September 2, 1940, as
counter-retaliation, Goring announced the beginning of city bombardment
for September 7th, but the policy had already begun with a series of
attacks on Liverpool after August 28th. The British efforts to
counterattack by daylight raids on military objectives in Germany
resulted in such losses that the air offensive was shifted to night
attacks. This entailed also a shift from industrial targets to
indiscriminate bombing of urban areas. [This change was deliberately
designed to protect the private property, estates, industries, etc., of
the German Industrialists secretly aligned with Britain and the United
States and to prolong the war.] This was justified with the wholly
mistaken argument that civilian morale was a German weak point and that
the destruction of workers' housing would break this morale. The
evidence shows that the German war effort was not weakened in any way
by lowering of civilian morale, in spite of the horrors heaped upon an
effort was made to begin "thousand-bomber" raids against a single
target in one night, and three of these were carried out, the first at
Cologne on May 30th. This was a terrible shock to the Germans, but had
little impact on their ability to wage war. Since the British Bomber
Command had about 450 first-line bombers, a raid as large as that on
Cologne required use of all reserves and training planes, with
instructors flying about a quarter of the planes. Of 1,046 planes sent
off, 898 reached the target and dropped 1,455 tons of bombs, with 40
planes lost in action and 12 more damaged beyond repair. In the city
474 persons were killed, 565 hospitalized, over 5,000 injured, 45,000
made homeless, and hundreds of factories destroyed, yet the life of the
city was back to normal in two weeks, with war production in the city
back to normal in about six weeks. The next thousand-plane raid (really
956), on Essen two days after the attack on Cologne, was so
ineffective, partly from cloudy weather, that the German air defense
did not even report an attack on Essen that night, while reporting
attacks on three other Ruhr cities.
Improvements
in finding their
targets, heavier attacks, and the arrival of the American Eighth Air
Force (which inaugurated "round-the-clock bombing" in 1943) increased
the damage from strategic bombing of Germany, without reducing the
scale of the German war effort. This failure resulted from a number of
factors which should be understood. The chief one was that the Western
governments had, from 1933 on, entirely misconceived the nature and
amount of German munitions production. It was overestimated by a wide
margin (twofold or threefold) in 1933-1943, and was underestimated hy
an equal margin in 1943-1945. The British assumed that there was full
industrial mobilization for war in Germany as early as 1938; but this
was never achieved and was not even attempted until December 1943.
Consequently,
Germany, until
the winter of 1944-1945, had a cushion of un-mobilized resources which
allowed an astonishingly rapid repair of bomb damage and an even more
astonishing increase in production of war goods as late as January 1945.
Failure
by the Western Powers
to analyze the German war economy led to changeable and misguided
efforts to attack it. When successful attacks were made on vital
objects, such as ball-hearing or chemical plants, they were not
followed up, thus giving the Germans time to repair or even to disperse
these facilities. Much effort was expended on bombing almost wholly
unrewarding targets, such as airfields, submarine pens, ports, railroad
yards, tank factories, and others. For a variety of reasons, these
targets could not be damaged sufficiently to make substitution or
repair impossible. The original decision for the Combined Bomber
Offensive in January 1943 gave highest target priority to submarine
construction yards. A fraction of the planes and crews used in this
unremunerative task could have contributed greatly to defeat the
submarine if they had been used in night searches for the submarines
themselves on the Atlantic.
As
early as June 10, 1943, the
Combined Bomber Offensive top priority was shifted from submarine yards
to German fighter-plane production, but here the error was made of
concentrating on body and assembly plants (of which there were many)
instead of on engine factories, which were few and more vulnerable. By
April 1944, with production of German fighter planes increasing
rapidly, this effort had failed, and the Bomber Offensive at last
turned, in May 1944, toward a vulnerable target: airplane-fuel
production. To this was added, in October 1944, an attack on the
general rail and canal transport system. The fuel attack incidentally
disrupted the chemical industry, and this combination, along with
transportation, brought the German economic base for war to its knees
in February 1945. The delay was partly caused by the lack of
determination in concentrating on the targets selected and the constant
attraction of the mirage of city bombing. Even after May 1944, when the
chief target was fuel factories, only 16 percent of the bombs dropped
were aimed at these, and 27 percent were still being thrown away on
bombing civilian residences in cities. The importance of choosing the
correct target in strategic bombing may be seen from one incidental,
and probably accidental, success. The Germans had only one factory
producing the Maybach heavy HL engine used in their Tiger and Panther
tanks. This was destroyed by an aerial bomb in 1944. This immobilized
hundreds of these heavy tanks on the Russian front and contributed
substantially to a successful Russian breakthrough.
The
British effort to break
German civilian morale by area night bombing was an almost complete
failure. In fact, one of the inspiring and amazing events of the war
was the unflinching spirit under unbearable attack shown by ordinary
working people in industrial cities. This was as true in Russia (in
Moscow and above all in Leningrad) as it was in Germany or Britain
(above all in the dock areas of East London). Attacks on these peoples
had a greater influence on the morale of their soldiers fighting on the
front than it did on the suffering peoples themselves.
The
most extraordinary example
of this suffering occurred in the British fire raids on Hamburg in
1943. For more than a week, beginning on July 24th, Hamburg was
attacked with a mixture of high-explosive and incendiary bombs so
heavily and persistently that entirely new conditions of destruction
known as "fire storms" appeared. The air in the city, heated to over a
thousand degrees, began to rise rapidly, with the result that
ground-level winds of gale or even hurricane force rushed into the
city. These winds were so strong as to knock people off their feet or
to move flaming beams and walls through the air. The heat was so
intense that normally nonflammable substances burned, and fires were
ignited yards from any flame. The water supply was destroyed on July
27th, but the flames were too hot for water to be effective: it turned
to steam before it could reach flaming objects, and all ordinary
methods of quenching flames by depriving them of oxygen were made
impossible by the storm of fresh air roaring in from the suburbs.
Nevertheless, the supply of oxygen could not keep up with the
combustion, and great layers of carbon monoxide settled in the shelters
and basements, killing the people huddled there. Those who tried to
escape through the streets were enveloped in flames as if they were
walking through the searing jet of a blowtorch. Some who wrapped
themselves in blankets dipped in water from a canal were scalded as the
water turned suddenly to steam. Hundreds were cremated, and their ashes
dispersed by the winds. No final figures for the destruction were
possible until 1951, when they were set by German authorities at 40,000
dead (including 5,000 children), 250,000 houses destroyed (about half
the city), with over l,000,000 persons made homeless. This was the
greatest destruction by air attacks on a city until the fire raid on
Tokyo of March 9, 1945, which still stands today as the most
devastating air attack in human history.
The
arrival of the American
strategic air forces and the beginning of the Combined Bomber Offensive
in the summer of 1943 gave a new turn to the air attack on Germany. The
first great American effort, against Schweinfurt, a city which produced
80 percent of German ball bearings, showed the difficulty of the
American aim of precision daylight bombing of military targets (October
14, 1943). A force of 228 heavy bombers dropped 450 tons of explosives
on the target, but 62 planes and 599 men failed to return. Such losses
could not be sustained, and resulted from the fact that escorting
fighter planes were of such short range that they had to turn back at
the German border. As a result, Schweinfurt was not bombed again for
four months, during which most of its ball-bearing production was
dispersed to five small nearby towns. A series of well-aimed attacks
after February 21, 1944, cut production about a quarter in the next
eight weeks, but this had little influence on Germany's fighting power.
The
figures on German
munitions production are revealing. In 1944, when Germany had armed
forces of about 150 full divisions of 12,000 men each, it manufactured
sufficient armaments to equip completely 250 infantry and 40 panzer
divisions. In some cases, full expansion continued into 1945. The total
production of munitions in Germany in January 1945 was a quarter larger
than in January 1943. Aircraft production in January 1945 was the same
as January 1944, and both were almost 40 percent over January 1943.
Production of weapons in January 1945 was 4 percent more than the same
month of 1944. Production of tanks, with January-February 1942 taken as
100, was up 54 percent in January 1943; up 338 percent in January 1944;
and up 457 percent in January 1945. The following figures for actual
production of specific items will help to put the strategic bombing of
Germany into perspective:
Items Year Germany United
Kingdom
Military
aircraft 1942 14,200
23,600
1944 39,600
26,500
Tanks 1942 6,300
8,600
1944 19,000
4,600
Heavy
trucks 1942 81,000
109,000
1944 89,000
91,000
Heavy
antitank
guns 1942 2,100
500
1944 13,800
1,900
Antiaircraft
guns 1942 4,200
2,100
1944 8,200
200
Machine
guns 1942 320,000
1,510,000
1944 790,000
730,000
Small-arms
ammunition 1942 1,340
million 2,190 million
(rounds) 1944 5,370
million 2,460 million
It
would probably not be
unfair to say that Germany in January 1945, after two years of heavy
air bombardment from the Western Powers, was not only outproducing the
United Kingdom on most significant items of military equipment but had
also improved its relative position. Some of this, of course, can be
attributed to the fact that the United States was taking over
production of some items, but the chief cause was the unbelievable
economic mobilization of Germany in the year from December 1943 to
December 1944. The relative costs of the strategic bombing effort may
be shown in figures. The Americans and British together lost 40,000
planes and 158,906 airmen, almost equally divided between them. The
Germans suffered about 330,000 civilians killed, almost l,000,000
injured, and about 8,000,000 made homeless; for the last year and a
half of the war over l,000,000 Germans were employed clearing and
repairing bomb damage. All these things contributed indirectly to
hamper the German war effort.
The
direct contribution of
strategic bombing to the war effort came chiefly after September 1944,
and was to be found mainly in the disruption of fuel and
transportation. Even this could have been avoided if Hitler had been
willing to take the advice of his subordinates and adopt proper
defensive measures against the Western air attacks. Hitler himself
insisted on priority of flak (antiaircraft guns) over fighter planes
and of retaliatory bombing of England over defense by German fighter
planes, both mistaken decisions. If the men and materials which Germany
devoted to its efforts to bomb England had been entirely used for
defensive fighter planes, the influence of Allied strategic bombing on
the outcome of the war would have been insignificant.
Germany
would still have been
defeated, because in the long run its position was hopeless, once
Hitler attacked Russia while Britain was still undefeated. This defeat
arose from the destruction of the German armies in battle, and was made
inevitable from the economic point of view by the loss of the Romanian
oil supply in August 1944, and the loss of the Ruhr industrial region
in April 1945.
One
unforeseen (and still
largely unrecognized) event in the defeat of Germany's ground armies
was Hitler's greater resistance to Western than to Soviet advances. It
had been assumed, especially in the Kremlin, that Hitler's hatred of
Communism would lead him to weaken his defenses in the west in order to
resist more effectively the advance of Russia. He did exactly the
opposite. In the late summer of 1944, two-thirds of Germany's fighting
men were resisting the Russians in the east (2,000,000 in all), with
300,000 in Italy and 700,000 elsewhere in the west. By the time of
Yalta (February 1, 1945), Germany had 106 divisions in the west (of
which 27 were in Italy) facing an equal number of slightly larger
divisions of the Western Powers, while they had 133 in the east (24
less than on June 1, 1944), of which only 75 (including 4 armored)
faced Russia's 100 divisions (with 80 more in reserve) along the
600-mile front from the Carpathian Mountains to the Baltic.
This
shift in German forces
can be explained on military grounds, but the real causes were much
deeper and were embedded in the distorted recesses of Hitler's brain
and in the very nature of Nazism. In spite of Hitler's verbal attacks
on Communism, his real hatred was directed at the values and traditions
of Western Civilization and at Christian and middle-class ways of life.
This hatred impelled him to overrule the objections of his military
commanders in order to mobilize all his dwindling reserves of manpower
and supplies (especially truck transport and gasoline) to hurl his
final offensive effort against the Western Powers on December 16, 1944.
This futile effort stopped the Western attack on Germany for two
months, but opened the east to annihilating Soviet blows which began on
January 12, 1945.
The
Western ground attack on
Germany was not resumed after the Battle of the Bulge until February 8,
1945. Two months later a pincers was extending eastward, north and
south of the Ruhr. On April 1st this closed to complete the
encirclement of the great industrial area; seventeen days later Field
Marshall Walter Model surrendered his 325,000 Germans and at once
killed himself. Ten days later again, the German-Italian forces in
Italy, trapped in Lombardy between Army Group C and impassable swamps,
sea, and rivers, began to surrender a force about three times as large.
On April 28th, Mussolini, on his way to the Swiss frontier with
extensive treasure, was captured and killed by Italian guerrillas; his
body was taken back to Milan, scene of his earliest triumphs to hang by
the heels in a public square alongside that of his mistress, Clara
Petacci. The long-drawn Italian campaign, which had served its purpose
by tying down dozens of German divisions in the peninsula, ended with a
total of 536,000 German and 312,000 Allied casualties.
Meanwhile,
General Eisenhower,
following the victory in the Ruhr, ignored Berlin to the northeast and
drove directly eastward toward Dresden. He was unduly disturbed by
rumors that the Germans had prepared a final defensive "redoubt" in
southeastern Germany. Churchill and others, for political bargaining
purposes, wanted the American advance redirected to Berlin, but the
Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington refused to interfere with
Eisenhower's decisions in the field. These decisions, based on [secret
political and military agreements between Churchill, Roosevelt and
Stalin] ... permitted the Soviet forces to "liberate" all of the
capital cities of central Europe. Budapest fell to the Russians on
February 13th, followed by Vienna on April 13th. On April 25th Russian
forces encircled Berlin and made contact with American troops seventy
miles to the south, at Torgau on the Elbe. The previous day,
Eisenhower, advancing on Prague, had been warned by the Soviet General
Staff that Russian forces would occupy the Moldau Valley (which
included the Czech capital). As late as May 4th, when the American
forces were sixty miles from Prague and the Soviet armies more than a
hundred miles from the city, an effort by the former to advance to the
city was stopped at the request of the Soviet commander, despite a last
vain message from Churchill to Eisenhower to take the Czech capital for
political bargaining purposes. [This secret strategy set the stage for
the post-war world where Russia dominated Eastern Europe and turned
those countries into the Captive Nations or colonies of Russia. It was
an act of betrayal that has few rivals in history.]
In
the meantime, the Russian
troops, screaming, looting, and raping, were smashing into Berlin. On
April 20th, following Hitler's fifty-sixth birthday celebration, which
most of the Nazi Party and military leaders attended, the Fuhrer
refused to leave the doomed city. Most of the rest escaped that night
through the last narrow corridor to central Germany. For another nine
days Hitler continued to telephone orders from his bunker in the garden
of the new Chancellery building, but few paid any attention to these.
His former lieutenants were scattered throughout central Germany,
intriguing to take over as Leader or planning to vanish from sight.
Only Goebbels, with his wife and six young children, and Hitler's
mistress, Eva Braun, planned to remain to the end. The Führer
experienced a complete mental breakdown on April 22nd. A week later
only a few subordinates remained to carry out his last wishes. With
Russian shells falling all about the Chancellery, he married Eva Braun,
ordered Göring and Himmler arrested for treachery, and drew up a
"Political Testament" which blamed the war and all Germany's
misfortunes on the Jews, and told the nation, "The aim must still be to
win territory in the East for the German people." On the afternoon of
April 30, 1945, with the Russian soldiers only a block away, Eva Braun
took poison and Hitler shot himself through the mouth. Subordinates, in
accord with their instructions, flooded the bodies with gasoline and
burned them in a Russian shell-hole in the Chancellery garden. [There
are those who believe that Hitler and his closes aides were smuggled
out of Germany and into South America and lived out their lives in
seclusion.]
At
Hitler's death, leadership
of the wreckage of Germany was bequeathed to Admiral Karl Doenitz. His
efforts to surrender to the Western Powers while continuing the war
against the Soviet Union were rebuffed on May 4th, and three days later
all German forces were surrendered unconditionally to all the victor
Powers. The latter's armies continued to advance, overrunning
concentration and prison camps with the ovens still hot, finding
thousands of bodies of murdered inmates stacked up like cordwood, with
other thousands, staggering out, like walking skeletons in filthy rags,
to meet the incredulous gaze of well-fed, softhearted American youths.
Soon
the names Buchenwald,
Dachau, and Belsen were being repeated with horror throughout the
world. At Belsen 35,000 dead bodies and 30,000 still breathing were
found. The world was surprised and shocked. There was no excuse for the
surprise, for Hitler's aims and these methods, including the genocide
of any peoples or groups his twisted mind condemned, had been common
knowledge among students of Nazism long before 1939 and had been
explicitly advocated in Mein Kampf, a book which
sold 227,000
copies before Hitler came to power and over a million copies in 1933,
his first year as chancellor. That Hitler's government in practice was
making every effort to carry out all the vile purposes which it
embraced in theory had been made explicitly clear to all informed
persons by 1939, most notably, perhaps, in The Revolution of
Nihilism by Hermann Rauschning, former Nazi leader in Danzig,
or in The Book of the Hitler Terror,
based on evidence from refugees, and published in 1933. There was no
excuse for the world's press to be surprised at Nazi bestiality in
1945, since the evidence had been fully available in 1938. By V-E Day,
May 8, 1945, this bestiality had brought death to more than 30,000,000
human beings as sacrifices to mystic Germanic tribalism.
Chapter
58—Closing in on Japan, 1943-1945
When
Germany surrendered on
May 8, 1945, Japan was already defeated, but could not make itself
accept unconditional surrender and was trying to stave off that
inevitable end by suicide tactics. In the thirty-five months from the
Battle of Midway to the German surrender, the Japanese Navy and
merchant marine had been swept from the western Pacific and largely
destroyed in the process, cutting the home islands off from vital
overseas supplies and leaving millions of their armed forces isolated
in southeast Asia, China, New Guinea, the Phillippines, and other
island pockets.
The
war against Germany and
the war against Japan were separate wars, although involving the same
victorious nations. Weapons, strategy, and tactics were quite
different, chiefly because one was a war of air and land, while the
other was a struggle of naval and air forces over an immense ocean.
Even American strategic bombing was different in the Pacific, using
B-29's, unknown in Europe, for area bombing of civilians in cities,
something we disapproved in Europe. The great weapons against Japan
were the aircraft carriers, which relentlessly prowled the ocean and
provided the necessary protection for amphibious assaults on the island
stepping-stones which led to Japan. The total destruction of the
Japanese Navy and Air Force were almost incidental to this process of
protecting landing forces of marines and army units.
Even
where the same weapons
were used in the European and Pacific struggles, the outcomes were
different. In the former, the German submarines were hunted down and
destroyed, while in the Pacific, American submarines made a great
contribution to victory by the almost total annihilation of the
Japanese merchant fleet. Japan's minimal need for merchant shipping to
keep its civilian population from starvation was about 2 million tons.
It had started the war with 6 million tons, added 3.5 million tons
during the war from building and capture of foreign vessels, but had
8.2 million tons sunk during the war and finally surrendered with only
231 vessels of 860,936 tons still able to operate. Of the loss, 5.l
million tons were sunk by submarines, 2.3 million by aircraft, and 0.3
million by mines. By the spring of 1945 Japanese merchant shipping was
already below its minimum civilian-survival level.
Immediately
after Midway, the
vital issue for the United States became the need to stop the Japanese
advance against Australia in the southwestern Pacific. At that time the
southern edge of the Japanese defense perimeter ran east and west
through New Guinea just north of Australia. Its advanced base was
Rabaul on New Britain Island, taken from Australia in January 1942.
This base, a magnificent but remote harbor 3,000 miles from Tokyo, was
linked to the Japanese capital by two fortified bases which had been
constructed illegally in the Japanese Mandated Islands. About 800 miles
north of Rabaul was Truk in the Caroline Islands, and almost 700 miles
north of Truk was Saipan, in the Marianas Islands. From Saipan, later a
B-29 base for bombing Tokyo, it was almost 1,600 miles to the Japanese
capital. Just before Midway the Japanese extended their threat 600
miles farther south from Rabaul, southwest to New Guinea (thus
threatening Australia) and southeast to Guadalcanal, the southernmost
of the Solomon Islands (2,375 miles north of Wellington, New Zealand).
The
American counterattack to
this Japanese southward push took the form of two parallel thrusts
northward, passing to the east and west of Rabaul and Truk. The western
thrust, under General MacArthur, aimed to reconquer New Guinea and move
northward through the Admiralty Islands and the Philippines to the
China Sea. The eastern American thrust, under naval control, sought to
go northward through the Solomon Islands, then bypass Rabaul and Truk
far to the east through the Marshall Islands, returning to the Tokyo
road by attacking the Marianas from the Marshall Islands (700 miles
east of Truk). This double movement is usually referred to as a
"ladder" in which alternative advances on either side by the Americans
led to Japanese counterattacks from Rabaul and Truk between the two
legs.
At
first much of the fighting
was piecemeal, with inadequate supplies for both sides, but American
supplies continued to come, while Japanese support was much more
intermittent. This eventually became the story of the Pacific war, as
American supplies, delivered from 6,000 or more miles away, buried the
Japanese beneath water and earth. This struggle northward from
Australia and New Zealand was to have been accompanied by a third
thrust, under General Joseph W. Stilwell and Lord Louis Mountbatten
from India, across Burma, to reestablish connections with southwestern
China. For some time it was expected that MacArthur and Stilwell,
converging on China from the Philippines and Burma, would establish a
mainland base from which the final assault on Japan could be made. The
Burma Campaign, held up by the difficulties of the terrain and constant
diversion of men and supplies to other theaters, did not reach China,
over the hand-built Burma Road, until February 1945. MacArthur was held
up for two years (1942-1944) in the New Guinea area. Thus we must focus
our attention on the eastern drive from New Zealand northward through
the Solomons.
This
eastern drive began on
August 7, 1942, when Guadalcanal was invaded by naval and marine forces
from Wellington, New Zealand, 2,375 miles farther south. By February 8,
1943, after six months of horrible jungle combat, often without either
air or sea support, the Solomons were conquered. Six drawn naval
battles during the struggle greatly weakened the enemy surface forces,
while his air forces were crippled. In the same period, Japanese
advance bases were expelled from the Aleutian Islands, and at least
135,000 enemy ground forces were left isolated in New Guinea and Rabaul.
By
the autumn of 1943, the
Allied forces had reached the great barrier of the Japanese Mandated
Islands in the central Pacific. These were passed in a series of
amphibious operations called "island hopping." The first of these,
Tarawa, in the Gilbert archipelago, was a small operation in comparison
with subsequent "landings," but its name still brings horror to those
who remember it. In four days 3,100 marines were torn to pieces (a
third fatally) to capture a small coral island defended by 2,700
Japanese with 2,000 civilian laborers. The fanaticism of the Japanese
was a revelation, and may be measured by the fact that 4,500 were
killed. We learned a great deal about amphibious warfare at Tarawa,
especially the need for thorough preliminary naval bombardment and for
detailed knowledge and planning in regard to tides, winds, reefs, and
local fire support.
In
February 1943, this
experience was applied at Kwajalein, the world's largest atoll, 560
miles north of Tarawa, and at Eniwetok, 340 miles west of Kwajalein, in
the Marshall Islands. In these landings Americans had their first
large-scale experience of the irrationalities of fighting Japanese.
Officers of the Mikado attacked tanks with ornamental swords, while
privates sometimes killed themselves when they had Americans at their
mercy. But usually they fought skillfully and tenaciously until the
outcome was hopeless, when they made suicidal "Banzai!" charges. These
two landings cost 695 American dead to kill 11,556 Japanese. During
these operations Admiral Raymond Spruance led a carrier task force in a
strike on Truk which destroyed over 200 Japanese planes and a dozen
naval vessels at a cost of 17 American aircraft.
In
the course of 1943 the
American advance up the right leg of the Pacific "ladder" to Tokyo got
so far ahead of schedule that several projected landings were
eliminated, all future landings were advanced in date by a couple of
months, and the whole weight of the advance was shifted from its
original project of a final assault on Japan from Formosa or the
Asiatic mainland to an undated and unspecified amphibious attack from
Pacific bases. This left three major problems: (1) the need for an
island close enough to Japan for preliminary bombardment by land-based
planes; (2) the possibility of very large American casualties when the
Japanese invasion came off (possibly in 1946); and (3) what could be
done about the millions of Japanese ground forces in northern China and
in Manchuria. The last two of these problems led to efforts to obtain
Soviet intervention in the war against Japan; they meant, almost
certainly, that considerable concessions must be made to the Russians
in the Far East and that the final assault on Japan must be left until
several months after the final defeat of Germany, to allow Soviet
forces to be shifted from Europe to the Far East. In the meantime, the
need for an air base for land-based bombers within range of Japan
resulted in the conquest of the Marianas Islands.
The
Marianas were 700 miles
north of Truk, over l,000 miles northwest of Eniwetok, and almost 1,600
miles from Tokyo. The conquest of Saipan in the middle of this
archipelago in June and July 1944 was the second great amphibious
landing that summer, two marine divisions, under Lieutenant General
Holland M. Smith, hitting the beach at Saipan on June Isth, only nine
days after D-Day in Normandy. The Japanese had 29,000 men on Saipan,
7,000 on Tinian, and 18,000 on Guam. All three were eliminated by the
end of July. Japanese resistance was so intense on Saipan that an
American Army division, held in reserve at sea for the other islands,
had to be thrown ashore at Saipan on the second day. That island was
conquered by July 9th, with 27,000 of the Japanese garrison of 32,000
killed to 3,400 Americans dead and 13,000 wounded. Over 24,000 Japanese
and 2,214 Americans were killed on the other two islands.
Efforts
by the Japanese fleet
to disrupt the Marianas attack led to the Battle of the Philippine Sea
(June 19-20, 1944). This was another "naval" battle in which no surface
vessels fired upon, or even saw, each other, since it was fought
entirely in the air and under the surface. On the opening day the
Japanese lost 402 planes, while destroying 26 American planes, and two
of their carriers were sunk by American submarines. As the Japanese
fleet, denuded of air protection, fled westward, Spruance's planes
pursued and sank a carrier and several lesser vessels at a cost of 20
planes. This engagement shattered the Japanese naval air support and
left the Philippines open to American assault.
In
September 1944, another
amphibious attack landed in the Palau group of the western Caroline
Islands, 1,175 miles directly west of Truk and only 610 miles directly
east of Mindanao, the large southern island of the Philippines.
Feverish haste was made to conquer this group and to prepare Ulithi
Atoll, the best harbor in the area, as a base for American surface
vessels, since the invasion of Leyte in the Philippines had been moved
up from December 20th to October 20th, only four weeks after the
occupation of Ulithi on September 23rd. The invasion forces of two
divisions had left Hawaii on September 15th with their original
destination at Yap, just south of Ulithi, but were diverted to
rendezvous with two divisions from MacArthur at sea, 450 miles east of
Leyte. In the meantime, in the first half of 1944, the Japanese fleet
shifted from the Inland Sea of Japan to Lingga Roads, off Singapore, in
order to be closer to a supply of fuel oil; and the Japanese Army on
the mainland of China drove southward from Hankow to Hanoi (Indochina),
cutting Chiang Kai-shek off from all eastern China and overrunning the
American strategic bombing bases in the area.
On
July 27th President
Roosevelt, Admiral Chester Nimitz, and General MacArthur, meeting at
Pearl Harbor, decided to speed up the assault on Japan, to recapture
the Philippines without awaiting the defeat of Germany, and to force
Japan "to accept our terms of surrender by the use of sea and air power
without an invasion of the Japanese homeland." On September 13th
Admiral William F. Halsey suggested cancellation of four projected
intermediate landings and use of these troops for the immediate seizure
of Leyte. The suggestion, conveyed to Roosevelt and Churchill at the
Second Quebec ("Octagon") Conference, was approved and ordered within
ninety minutes (September 15, 1944). The Palau landing began the same
day.
Both
the time and place of the
American landing at Leyte were anticipated in Tokyo, but the Japanese
were unable to reinforce the single division on the spot. To cover the
landing Admiral Halsey led the Third Fleet of 9 fleet carriers, 8
escort carriers, 6 battleships, 14 cruisers, and 58 destroyers to pound
the Ryukyu Islands, Formosa, and Luzon (October 10-17, 1944). Witl1
over l,000 American planes in the air at a time, this force destroyed
915 enemy- planes and hundreds of naval vessels. Since Japanese naval
planes had been critically reduced in the Battle of the Philippine Sea
and since most of these destroyed in Halsey's sweep were land-haled,
the Japanese were critically short of trained pilots after October
17th, and began to adopt kamikaze (suicide) tactics. In these tactics
half-trained pilots dived their planes, loaded with bombs, onto the
decks of American ships. These new tactics inflicted severe losses on
the Americans in the next few months.
In
the week of October 17-24,
Halsey's Third Fleet was back off Leyte to cover the invasion force of
732 ships. In five days 132,400 men and 200,000 tons of supplies were
landed against only moderate opposition. To destroy this landing the
Japanese gave orders which resulted in the Battle of Leyte, the largest
naval conflict in history.
The
eastern shore of the
Philippines may be regarded as two very large islands, Luzon on the
north and Mindanao to the south, separated by a cluster of smaller
islands (the Visayas) which include almost contiguous Samar and Leyte
on the eastern shore. Between Luzon and Samar was San Bernardino
Strait, w hire, farther south, Leyte and Mindanao are separated by
Surigao Strait. The Japanese plan was to send a small force as bait
from Japan to entice Halsey's Third Fleet northeast from Luzon, while
three other Japanese forces (one from Japan and two from Singapore)
would secretly approach from the west, with the Center Force under
Admiral Takao Kurita passing through San Bernardino Strait, and the
Southern Force under Admirals Kiyohide Shima and Shoji Nishimura
passing through Surigao Strait to converge on Admiral Frederick C.
Sherman's Seventh Fleet to destroy both it and the Leyte beachhead
before Halsey could return from his northern pursuit of Admiral
Jisaburo Ozawa's sacrificial "bait."
These
plans, requiring precise
timing and ruthless execution, failed only because the quality of
American fighting men was so superior to that of Japanese admirals that
it overcame Japanese superiority in guns and ships in actual combat.
The resulting Battle of Leyte ended the Japanese Navy as an effective
fighting force. On one side were 216 American and 2 Australian ships,
with 143,668 men, plus many auxiliary vessels, while the enemy had 64
major ships manned by 42,800 Japanese.
The
Japanese Northern Force
was made up of 2 heavy, 1 large, and 3 small carriers, which could no
longer be used as carriers because of lack of naval aviators. These 6
vessels, escorted by 3 light cruisers and 8 destroyers, sailed down
from Japan to entice "Bull" Halsey's Third Fleet, with almost all the
American heavy striking power, northward away from the Leyte landing.
Unexpectedly it escaped observation until October 24th, a day later
than expected, and had to sail in circles waiting for Halsey to come
north.
In
the meantime, Kurita's
Center Force, which hoped to remain undetected, had been intercepted by
American submarines, and reported. This Japanese force, headed for San
Bernardino Strait, had 7 battle. ships (including the two largest in
the world of 68,000 tons, with 18.1inch guns), 11 heavy cruisers, 2
light cruisers, and 19 destroyers. All these major vessels were faster
and heavier than comparable American ships but had little air cover,
poor fire control, and inferior morale. On October 23rd the American
submarines Darter and Dace
torpedoed three of Kurita's
heavy cruisers, sinking two (including Kurita's flagship). While Kurita
was being rescued from the water and dried out, Halsey, warned by
Darter, sent an air strike over the top of the Philippines and sank the
68,000-ton battleship Musashi with 19 torpedoes
and 17 bomb
hits, and also knocked out a heavy cruiser. Hours earlier, Japanese
land planes from Luzon made a strike at Halsey and were mostly
destroyed, but a single bomb, exploding in the carrier Princeton's
bakery,
set a fire which ignited its torpedoes and aviation gasoline and blew
it apart, inflicting heavy casualties on the cruiser Birmingham
which had come to the rescue. When Halsey's planes, returning from west
of the Philippines, gave exaggerated reports on the damage to Kurita
and announced that he had turned westward, Halsey took off with 65
ships (including all his heavy vessels) northward to where Ozawa's
"bait" of 17 ships was patiently circling. Kurita, seven hours behind
schedule, resumed his course to San Bernardino Strait and Leyte Gulf.
In
the meantime, two other
Japanese forces were converging on Surigao Strait, far to the south.
Together they had 2 battleships, 3 heavy cruisers, a light cruiser, and
8 destroyers. Their approach was reported to the American Seventh Fleet
off Leyte. This moved southward to meet the threat at Surigao Strait,
assuming that Halsey would continue to cover San Bernardino Strait. The
intercepting force of Admiral Thomas Kinkaid's Seventh Fleet had 6
battleships, 4 heavy cruisers, 4 light cruisers, and z8 destroyers.
As
the Japanese Southern Force
plowed through Surigao Strait in the long, dark night of October 24-25,
it was attacked by 30 PT boats; these were dispersed after great
confusion. Then came more than 100 torpedoes from American destroyers,
scoring 9 hits, which sank 3 Japanese destroyers and a battleship.
Gunfire from the American heavy ships then sank most of the Southern
Force; damaged vessels were pursued by air and submarine, until, by
November 5th, only one cruiser and 5 destroyers of the whole force were
still afloat.
As
the Seventh Feet disengaged
from the remnants of the Southern Force at 5:00 A. M. on October 2sth,
the main Japanese force, under Kurita, 175 miles to the north, had
emerged from San Bernardino Strait and was bearing down on Leyte, which
was protected by a flotilla of 6 escort carriers with a screen of 7
destroyers under Rear Admiral Clifton Sprague. These small vessels were
off Samar Island with about 25 planes each and were backed by two
similar flotillas farther south. Surprise was complete on both sides,
at 6:47 A.M., when a patrol plane discovered Kurita's presence. The
news had hardly registered, when the Japanese big guns opened fire.
Fortunately, Kurita was completely disconcerted by the encounter, and
believed he had run into Halsey's fleet.
Sprague,
under cover of
smokescreens and rain squalls, tried to escape the heavy Japanese
gunfire, while holding the enemy out of Leyte Gulf by vigorous air
strikes from his "baby flat-tops" and torpedo attacks from his
destroyers. The Japanese shells, of 5- to 16-inch caliber, were all
armor-piercing and went through the thin plates of Sprague's vessels
without exploding; but, with up to forty holes each, these ships were
soon leaking freely. They attacked so vigorously, however, using their
e-inch guns when all torpedoes were gone, that Kurita's fleet was
scattered, and he decided to withdraw to regroup his forces. He had
sunk two American destroyers, an escort carrier, and a destroyer
escort, but lost three heavy cruisers in return. By this time (9:15 A.
M.) air attacks were beginning to come in from all over the
Philippines, and Kurita had received news that only one destroyer had
survived the Southern Force's defeat at Surigao. He began to withdraw
through San Bernardino Strait. Sprague's escort carriers were much cut
up, and still under heavy pounding from the earliest kamikaze attacks.
These sank St. Lô, an escort carrier, about 1 l: 30.
At
8:45 A. M. urgent appeals
to Admiral Halsey had detached a force of five fast carriers with
escort vessels to pursue Kurita. Two hours later, while still 335 miles
away, these launched a series of air strikes, 147 planes in all, of
which 14 were lost without significant damage to the Japanese. The
following day strikes of 257 planes sank another of Kurita's cruisers.
During
this same eventful
October 25th, Admiral Ozawa's Northern Force, the "bait," had been
swallowed. In five air attacks, totaling 527 planes, Halsey's carriers,
commanded by Admiral Mitscher, sank four Japanese carriers and a
destroyer. Among these was the last of the six carriers which had
attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941.
The
Battle of Leyte,
strategically ill-advised from the Japanese point of view, ended its
navy as a significant force in the Pacific. From that date, the
American advance was held up chiefly by suicide tactics (the kamikaze
attacks). Leyte is of great historical significance as the last naval
battle in which battleships participated and played a role, admittedly
minor. The Third Fleet's Battle Line of six great ships did not even
fire its heavy guns.
While
General MacArthur and
the army were clearing up the Philippines, capturing Manila after
fierce house-to-house combat on March 14, the navy and air arms pressed
on toward Japan. By October 1, 1944, two intermediate targets had been
set: one was to capture Iwo Jima in the Bonin Islands, about halfway
from Saipan to Tokyo, to be used as an emergency landing area and
fighter-plane base for the B-29's attacking Tokyo from Saipan. The
other was to capture Okinawa and other islands in the Ryukyus as bases
for land forces to invade Japan itself.
Iwo
Jima was invaded on
February 19th and secured by March 26th. Bitter fighting which involved
flushing Japanese, one by one, out of caves yielded 20,703 Japanese
killed and only 216 prisoners by March 26th; 2,469 more (of which a
third were killed) were disposed of in the next two months. The
Americans lost about 5,000 killed, but three divisions suffered over
two-thirds casualties in the struggle to capture this island of 4.5 by
2.5 miles. The dead on both sides thus amounted to 2,400 per square
mile..
Iwo
will always be remembered
for the famous raising of the American flag on the top of 550-foot
Mount Suribachi at the southern tip of the island on February 23rd,
while fighting was still severe. On April 7th the value of the island
was shown when, for the first time, B-29's returning from Tokyo jolted
down onto Iwo for relief; fifty-four landed that day. These big planes,
flying the round trip from Saipan to Tokyo in about seven hours, were
already engaged in the systematic destruction of all Japanese cities.
The flimsy houses of these crowded urban areas made them very
vulnerable to incendiary bombs, but the distance was so great that only
moderate-sized bomb loads could be carried. On March 9, 1945, the Air
Force tried a daring experiment. The defensive armament was removed
from 279 B-29's, releasing weight for additional incendiaries, and
these planes, without guns but carrying 1,900 tons of fire bombs, were
sent on a low-level attack on Tokyo. The result was the most
devastating air attack in all history. With a loss of only 3 planes, 16
square miles of central Tokyo were burned out; 250,000 houses were
destroyed, over a million persons were made homeless and 84,793 were
killed. This was more destructive than the first atomic bomb over
Hiroshima five months later.
The
conquest of Okinawa was a
much bigger task than Iwo Jima; 760 miles west of Iwo, it was only 360
miles from the Chinese mainland, and almost the same distance from both
Formosa and Japan. It was 830 miles southwest of Tokyo Bay, a full 900
miles north of Leyte, and over 1,200 from the United States Navy's
refuge in Ulithi Atoll. The size of the island, almost 500 square
miles, made it a possible staging area for an invasion of Japan.
The
magnitude of the assault
on heavily populated Okinawa is almost beyond belief. The fighting navy
of 110 combat vessels with over 100 supply ships protected an
amphibious attack of 1,213 vessels carrying 182,113 assault troops. The
preliminary bombardment by naval guns fired 40,412 rounds in 16- to
5-inch calibers. The assault, on a perfect Easter morning, April I,
1945, hit the coral reef, with four divisions on a front five miles
wide. The size of the whole operation may be judged from the fact that
the supply tankers in eight weeks (to May 27th) delivered 8 3/4 million
barrels of fuel oil and 2 ½ million gallons of aviation
gasoline; in five of these weeks the same tankers delivered over 24
million letters to men engaged in the attack.
The
Okinawa campaign was the
most severe of the Pacific War. It required three months of intense
combat to secure the island against the 77,000 Japanese defenders, most
of whom had to be killed or committed suicide. The invasion force had
40,000 casualties, of which almost one-fifth were killed. The naval and
air support suffered intensely from 1,900 kamikaze attacks which sank
30 and damaged 368 naval vessels, with the loss of 763 fleet aircraft,
and with 10,000 naval casualties (of which half were killed)..
The
degree and kind of
resistance from the Japanese at Okinawa raised grave questions
regarding the final defeat of Japan. By May 1945, a major part of the
Japanese population was completely disillusioned with the war and eager
to find a way out of it. These sentiments were shared by most of the
civilian leaders and by a good portion of the naval leaders. Some of
the army, however, still believed that they could make the costs of an
American invasion of Japan too high to be acceptable to American
opinion. Somewhat similar ideas occurred to some of the American
leaders. These Japanese fanatics believed that they could get a major
part of Japan's fighter-plane construction dispersed and placed
underground by mid-September 1945. If these facilities were used to
build cheap, un-instrumented kamikaze planes manned by untrained
suicide volunteers (who were available in large numbers) and
supplemented by human torpedoes, it might be possible to inflict
unbearable losses on any American invasion of Japan itself.
As
part of this project the Japanese had perfected a manned glider bomb,
called Baka (foolish)
by the Americans, which carried a man and 2,645 pounds of
trinitroanisol in a 20-foot fuselage with 16.x-foot wingspan. Without
any engine, but carrying three thrust rockets, this weapon was dropped
from a conventional plane and came in on its target at over 600 miles
per hour. Even with air cover and using proximity fuses, American ship
defenses could be "saturated" and exhausted if enough of these came in
over sufficiently extended periods. Several incidents in the Okinawa
campaign raised fears of this nature. On April 16th the destroyer Laffey
sustained 22 attacks in 80 minutes and destroyed all of them, but 6
kamikazes hit the ship, knocking it out. On May 11th, the picket ship Hadley
was attacked by lo planes simultaneously; all were destroyed but the
vessel was hit hy a Baka, a kamikaze, and a bomb,
and was knocked out.
Neither
of these ships was
sunk, but casualties were so heavy that American leaders shuddered to
think of the results if such attacks were hurled at troop transports
coming in on amphibious attack. In June 1945, American estimates of
their casualties in such an attack were over half a million. It is true
that Japan could have offered such resistance, for at mid-August 1945,
when 2,550 kamikaze planes had been expended, the Japanese still had
5,350 left, with adequate pilots ready, and had about 5,000 planes for
orthodox bombing attacks, plus about 7,000 more in storage or under
repair. These, with bombs and gasoline, were being saved for the
American invasion. These considerations form the background to the
Yalta and Potsdam conferences and the decision to use the atom bomb on
Japan.
The
conference of Roosevelt,
Churchill, and Stalin held at Yalta, in the Crimea, on February 4-12,
1945, sought to reach agreement on most of the issues of the war and of
the immediate postwar period ....
As
the discussions proceeded,
the victorious armies were pressing forward rapidly into Germany in the
Soviet offensive which began on January 12, 1945, and Eisenhower's
attack which had begun on February 8,1945. Victory could clearly be
foreseen in the European war, but in the Far East the future was much
more clouded.
In
Europe the attitude of
mutual trust seems to have been high, probably higher than the actual
relationships of the three Powers justified, but this was so prevalent
that no efforts were made to establish limits of demarcation for the
advancing armies within Germany. There was rapid agreement on joint
postwar administration of Germany, with a four-Power control commission
(to include France) and three separate zones of military occupation
(any zone for France to be taken out of the area assigned to the
Western Powers). Berlin, outside any zone, was to be governed jointly
by a Kommandatura of commandants assigned by the
respective
zone commanders in chief. Access to Berlin, as a military question and
on the advice of the United States War Department, was left to
subsequent military arrangements with "freedom of transit" as the
guiding principle.
Differences
regarding the
rules of the United Nations Organization were settled with surprising
ease. Stalin accepted Roosevelt's suggestion that the members of the
Security Council be unable to veto discussion of disputes involving
themselves within the Council, and the Anglo-Americans, in turn,
accepted the Soviet demand for extra seats in the Assembly by offering
them two, for the Ukraine and White Russia.
The
crucial problem of Poland
was subject to agreements which gave the Russians much of what they
wanted. The Curzon Line of 1919 was accepted as its eastern frontier,
but the western border was left indefinite, since Stalin would have
placed it farther to the west (involving deportation of additional
millions of German residents) than either Roosevelt or Churchill
considered acceptable. It was no longer possible to find a government
for Poland by fusion of the London group with the Communist-dominated
Lublin Committee, since the former, after the resignation of
Mikolájczyk, had become openly anti-Soviet and the latter, on
December 31, 1944, had been recognized by Moscow as the government of
Poland. Compromise was reached by agreement to expand the Lublin group
by the addition of "democratic leaders from Poland abroad" and that
this expanded government would be recognized when it had been "pledged
to the holding of free and unfettered elections as soon as possible on
the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot." No form of
supervision of these elections, even by their ambassadors, could be
obtained by the English-speaking countries.
Much
of the Yalta Conference
was concerned with the Far East. It would [not] be a mistake to regard
these discussions as revolving about payments to Soviet Russia in the
Far East in return for its intervention in the war with Japan. All
three Powers were agreed that Japanese imperialist gains at the expense
of Russia and China since 1854 should be undone, and Stalin was as
ready to enter the war against Japan after the defeat of Germany as
Roosevelt was eager to have Russia do so. The talk was concerned rather
witl1 the terms and details of both of these actions.
The
First Cairo Conference of
Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek on December 1, 1943 had
agreed to a "Declaration" which promised that "Japan will be expelled
from all territories which she has taken by violence and greed." At
Yalta this declaration was extended and specified. It was agreed to
undo the results of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 as follows:
Southern
Sakhalin would be
granted to the Soviet Union along with a lease on the Port Arthur naval
base and a dominant position in the "internationalized" port of Dairen;
the Chinese Eastern Railroad and the South Manchurian Railroad which
serves Dairen would be operated jointly by a Soviet-Chinese company in
which Soviet interests would be dominant, although full sovereignty
over Manchuria would be retained by China. In addition the Kurile
Islands would be ceded to the Soviet Union; and Outer Mongolia, which
had been free of Chinese power for decades, would be granted autonomy
permanently.
These
agreements, drawn up in
a formal document at Yalta and specified as the price of Soviet
intervention in the war on Japan, were kept secret, although it was
agreed that they should be conveyed to Chiang Kai-shek. This could not
be done much before the Soviet intervention in the war, because
security was so poor in Chungking that there were no secrets from the
Japanese there; accordingly, the Chinese were not informed of the
secret Yalta agreements until President Truman told the Chinese prime
minister and foreign minister, T. V. Soong, about June 10, 1945.
During
this period, the Great
Powers were thoroughly disillusioned with China. ... Trade had reached
a point of semi-collapse, inflation was rampant; capital of the most
fundamental kinds, such as farm tools, roads, and communications, was
worn out; go percent of the railroads were out of operation; and the
chief concern of almost all Chinese was survival.... The existing
political divisions offered little hope of remedying any of China's
ills even after Japan had been defeated. [Actually the Great Powers
were secretly setting the stage for Stalin to introduce communism into
China, to set up Mao as the new leader, betray the Chinese people,
including their leader Chang Kai-shek and establish a Communist Nation
that would be time take over leadership of Asia. The fall of China into
the hands of communism could have been completely avoided in the United
States and its allies would have supported Chiang Kai-shek and his
forces. However, this strategy was not part of the secret plan they
were following to create a giant new communist nation and a new
Imperial Order after the war.]
The
dominant Kuomintang
Party[‘s] ... chief aim seemed to be to maintain its armed
blockade of the Communist forces operating out of Yenan in northwestern
China. There the highly disciplined Communist armies had taken over the
area and appeared to have gained some degree of local support..
American
hopes of fusing the
two parties into a common and energetic Chinese government, however,
broke down on the refusals of the Kuomintang and the remoteness of the
Communists....
As
became clear even in 1944,
however, the United States was not going to get its wishes in China....
[That is a coalition government with the communists in charge.] As
early as September 1944, Roosevelt was so completely disillusioned with
the Chinese war effort, especially with Chiang's lack of energy in
fighting the Japanese, that he suggested that General Stilwell should
be given command of all Chinese forces. This demand, sent to Chiang on
September 16th, was answered within ten days by a blunt demand from
Chiang that Stilwell be removed from China. [The deliberate betrayal by
the United States and Britain of the Chinese people into the hands of
communism has few parallels in history.]
These
circumstances made it
inevitable at the time that American leaders, especially the military,
should welcome possible intervention of Soviet forces against Japan on
the mainland of Asia and should doubly welcome the addition of the
first atomic bombs to their arsenal of weapons. [Actually it was
planned that Russia would enter the war against Japan to ensure that
the communist forces of Mao would be successful in China. The U. S. did
not need Russia to enter the war to defeat Japan. The war was nearly
over.]
The
making of the first atomic
bombs is surely the most amazing story of World War II. It is a long,
complex, and technical study which most historians would like to omit,
but it is not possible to understand the history of the mid-twentieth
century without some understanding of how this almost unbelievable
weapon was achieved and especially why the Western Powers were able to
achieve it and the Fascist Po\vers were not. The gist of this story
will be told in the next chapter. Here we need only record that the
United States obtained its first three atom bombs over a three-week
period from July I5 to August lo, 1945.
The
theory on which the
nuclear explosions were based was known to the scientists of all
countries before April 1939, and the direction in which practical
efforts to achieve a bomb must go were established and equally known
before worldwide secrecy descended a year later, in April 1940, just
before the fall of France. Scientific ignorance, however, was so
universal among political and military leaders throughout the world
that the use of the existing scientific knowledge would not have been
achieved anywhere but for two factors: (1) many of the world's greatest
nuclear scientists had fled as refugees from Fascism to England and the
United States, and (2) Franklin Roosevelt was quite willing to listen
to unconventional suggestions if his attention could be obtained.
In
the years 1939-1941 the
refugee scientists in the United States were so fearful that Hitler
would obtain the atomic bomb that they were able to prevail upon the
best known among them, Einstein, to allow his name to be used to catch
Roosevelt's attention. Once this had been done, the urging of these
same scientists and the growing urgency of the war itself made it
possible for the administrative talents of American scientists to
utilize the enormous resources made available to them to reach the goal
they sought. After September 1942, Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves,
U.S.A., was in charge of the whole project and, in an atmosphere of
fanatical secrecy, brought it to a successful conclusion with an
expenditure of about $2 billion and the work of about 150,000 persons.
In
this, as in other matters,
the sudden death of President Roosevelt on April 12, 1945 had a great
and incalculable effect. Vice-President Truman knew nothing of the
atomic-research program until he was told of it by Secretary of War
Henry Stimson, briefly on April 12th and at greater length two weeks
later. In fact, Truman had been kept so far outside the whole war
effort that his first few months as President required an almost
superhuman effort of absorbed attention to get the major lines of
policy into his hands. To avoid a repetition of this situation in case
of his own death, he decided to place James F. Byrnes, perhaps the most
widely experienced man in American government, into the office of
secretary of state, since at that time the incumbent of this first
Cabinet post was designated as second in line of succession, after the
Vice-President, to the Presidency. The new secretary of state, however,
had been serving as "Assistant President" largely concerned with
domestic questions, and he was almost as unfamiliar with the main
problems of foreign policy as Truman himself.
The
problems which Truman,
Byrnes, and their advisers faced in reestablishing the peace of the
world were greatly intensified by the obstructionism of the Soviet
government and by the fact that Winston Churchill had set an election
in England, the first in ten years, for July 5, 1945, to renew his
government's mandate. The result was not clear until July 27, 1945,
because of the need to count absentee ballots from soldiers overseas,
but these eventually showed a smashing two-to-one victory of the Labour
Party over Churchill's Conservatives.
Thus
Byrnes became secretary
of state only on June 30th. He went with President Truman to the
Potsdam Conference, which opened on July 17th and lasted until August
2nd, but on July 28, 1945, Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin, the new
prime minister and foreign secretary of Britain, replaced Churchill and
Eden as delegates at Potsdam. The transition was made somewhere easier
by the fact that Attlee had been deputy prime minister since 1942 and
had been on the British delegation to Potsdam from the opening of the
conference. Nevertheless, the fact that Stalin was the sole survivor of
the Big Three heads of government who had conferred so often during the
war undoubtedly weakened the West in this last, "Terminal," conference.
In
general, the American
delegation seemed to regard as its chief aims to seek to continue the
Big Three cooperation into the postwar world within the structure of
the United Nations whose charter had been adopted at San Francisco on
June 2sth. The American delegation felt that Europe was falling very
rapidly into two antithetical parts in which Britain would seek to
balance a Soviet-dominated eastern Europe by a British-dominated
western Europe. The Americans wished to avoid this and particularly to
prevent two possible consequences of this: a revival of Germany by
Britain to help serve as a shield against Soviet power in the east and
the jeopardizing of western Europe's and the world's economic revival
by the splitting of Europe into opposed blocs. As one evidence of this
American attitude, we might mention President Truman's refusal to
confer separately with Churchill before the main conference at Potsdam
and his refusal to allow the State Department and the Foreign Office to
make any advance agreement on joint policies.
On
July 16th, while Truman was
surveying the devastation of Berlin, the atomic scientists were
gathered on the desolate open plain of Alamo-gordo, New Mexico, 125
miles southeast of Albuquerque. There an implosion-type plutonium bomb
at the top of a steel tower one hundred feet high was detonated at 5:30
A.M. The result was an explosion beyond all expectations: a burst of
blinding light far brighter than the sun expanded into a ball of fire
two miles high, which lasted, second after second, as a great
mushrooming pillar of radioactive smoke and dust surging upward to a
height of almost eight miles. Almost a minute later, as if the door of
a hot oven had been opened, the blast reached "base camp," ten miles
from the bomb point, with sufficient force to push some people
backward. The light was seen 180 miles away by early risers, and the
sound, by some freak, split windows at that distance. At the scene,
General Thomas F. Farrell said to General Groves, "The war is over,"
but the scientists, stricken with horror at their success in releasing
a force equivalent to 17,500 tons of TNT from about 12 pounds of
plutonium, had had a glimpse of hell. In that instant, many of them
became politicians, convinced of the social responsibilities of
science, especially to avoid war and to direct the unlimited power of
science to human welfare. It was soon established that the steel bomb
tower had been volatilized, as was a 4-inch iron pipe, 16 feet high,
deeply set in concrete 1,500 feet away. Another forty-ton steel tower,
70 feet high and a half-mile away, had been torn to pieces.
The
first message of the great
event in New Mexico reached Secretary of War Stimson at Potsdam on July
17th. It had only three words: "Babies satisfactorily born." More
details followed, and General Groves's detailed account arrived by
courier on July 21st. All this information was given to Churchill as it
arrived. It was agreed to give the Russians no information, but merely
to mention the success of the new bomb as casually as possible to
prevent any later accusations of withholding information when the story
became public. The prime minister at once saw the significance of the
event, but his chief of staff, Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, belittled
Churchill's excitement, and wrote in his diary:
"He
had absorbed all the minor
American exaggerations and, as a result, was completely carried away.
It was now no longer necessary for the Russians to come into the
Japanese war; the new explosive alone was sufficient to settle the
matter. Furthermore, we now had something in our hands which would
redress the balance with the Russians."
Lord
Alanbrooke's ignorance,
based on his illiteracy in scientific matters, was shared by almost all
military men of all armies in the world and by the overwhelming mass of
politicians as well. Among the latter group was Stalin, but fortunately
not Truman. The President on July 18th ordered the second bomb to be
dropped on Japan as soon as it was ready, and on July 24th he chose the
list of possible targets: Hiroshima, Kokura, Nigata, and Nagasaki.
Secretary Stimson, moved by the tears of Professor Edwin O. Reischauer
and his own memories of the place, persuaded the President to drop from
the list Kyoto, a city of temples, shrines, and artistic treasures.
These cities were already being spared from B-29 air raids to reserve
them for the test of the atom bomb.
On
this same day Truman told
Stalin of the successful test. There is no doubt that the President, in
order to discourage any questions from Stalin, overdid the casualness
of his communication. Moreover, he spoke to him aside, using a Russian
interpreter whose English was limited. Truman's own account shows that
Stalin either did not understand or was ignorant of the fact that an
atomic explosion was a significant event. The President wrote:
"I
casually mentioned to
Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force. The
Russian Premier showed no special interest. All he said was that he was
glad to hear it and hoped we would make good use of it against the
Japanese."
It
seems likely that Stalin's
personal interest in atomic fission in June 1945 was about the same as
that of Lord Alanbrooke, although, as we shall see in the next chapter,
lesser men in the Soviet system were more aware of the significance of
the subject.
The
atom bomb thus seems to
have played no role at Potsdam. General Marshall and Secretary Stimson,
as well as Churchill, realized that Soviet assistance was no longer
needed to defeat Japan, but no move was made to avoid such
intervention. It is, however, extremely likely that the frantic and
otherwise inexplicable haste to use the second and third bombs,
twenty-one and twenty-four days after Alamo-gordo, arose from the
desire to force a Japanese surrender before any effective Soviet
intervention.
The
chief task of Potsdam was
to lay the basis for a peace settlement. This was to be worked out, in
each case, by a council of foreign ministers of the Big Three, France
and China, using general principles agreed on at Potsdam. These
principles were vague and were interpreted or violated subsequently so
that, on the whole, the Soviet Union achieved what it wished east of
the Oder River and Adriatic and north of Greece, while the Western
Powers obtained their general desires west and south of these
boundaries. As usual, the chief problem was Germany. There the Soviet
Union still wanted some kind of partition in order to dominate the
fragments, while, in the west, only France, from continued fear of
Germany, sought to fragment and weaken that country, while the
English-speaking countries wanted as unified an administration as
feasible and a level of economic revival sufficient to make American
economic aid unnecessary. In addition, the United States was determined
to avoid any repetition of the 1920's when German reparations had been
paid to the other victors from resources borrowed from the United
States.
The
chief principles for
postwar Germany, as established at Potsdam. were: (1) permanent and
total disarmament and dispersal of all military forces; (2) complete
de-Nazification of public and private life; (3) nullification of all
Nazi discriminatory laws; (4) punishment of individuals guilty of war
crimes and atrocities; (5) indefinite postponement of any central
German government (and thus of any German peace treaty), but
maintenance of a central, national, administrative machine to be used
by the Control Council for economic activities of national scope; (6)
decentralization and democratization of political life and of the
judicial system; (7) a multiparty system with only Nazi groups
forbidden; (8) democratization and westernization of German education;
(9) establishment of basic Western freedoms of speech, press, religion,
and labor-union activities.
On
the economic side, it was
agreed that Germany should be treated as a single economic unit, with
uniform control measures in all zones, aimed at establishing a
consumer-oriented economy, under German control. and able to ensure
maintenance of occupying forces and refugees, with a standard of living
for the Germans themselves no higher than that of non-Russian
continental Europe. This somewhat modified version of the Morgenthau
scheme (which had sought the complete ruralization of German economic
life to an agrarian basis) was modified almost at once by a number of
factors.
The
first modifying factor was
the desire for reparations. The Americans insisted that reparations
must be taken, as far as possible, from existing stocks and plants
rather than from future production (a complete reversal of the American
position of 1919) in order to avoid the error of the 1919-1933 period,
the overbuilding of German capital equipment and American financing of
German reparation payments into the indefinite future. No total and no
division of reparation benefits were set, but it was provided that all
reparations come from Germany as a whole and be credited to the victors
on a percentage basis. To administer this, to escape from Polish
reparation claims, and to get the Russians out of the Italian question
(so that that country could become a partner of the Western Powers),
Secretary Byrnes worked out a complicated deal.
The
central basis for this
deal was that Germany had an industrialized west and an agricultural
east. The Soviet Union wanted reparations from the industrial plants of
the west, while the United States and Britain wanted agricultural
products (not reparations) from eastern Germany to feed the western
Germans and the millions of German refugees and repatriates who were
pouring westward from all Communist-dominated areas of the east and
from the lands lost to Poles, Czechs, and others. In simple terms,
Byrnes's compromise was that each country take reparations from its own
zone, but that Russia would get 40 percent of the heavy war industrial
equipment of western Germany for which it would pay for only 25 percent
in food, coal, and other basic needs from the east. From this total the
Soviet Union would pay the reparation claims of Poland, release Italy
from all Russian reparation claims, and agree to the immediate
admission of Italy into the United Nations.
One
of the critical events of
this period was the Soviet refusal to supply food or coal to the areas
of Berlin occupied by the democratic Powers. This and the millions of
Germans streaming westward to seek refuge beyond the reach of vengeful
Russians, Poles, and Czechs played a great role in arousing sympathy
for Germans in the west and in establishing a common front of
cooperative work and mutual dependence in that area.
On
July 26, 1945, Truman,
Attlee, and Chiang Kai-shek issued an ambiguous ultimatum to Japan,
warning the latter that it must accept immediate unconditional
surrender or suffer complete and utter destruction. This was regarded
by the three leaders as a threat of atomic holocaust unless Japan laid
down its arms, but the atomic threat was unspecified and, to the
Japanese, meaningless, while their chief concern, whether
"unconditional surrender" meant removal of the emperor, was equally
unspecified. The Japanese premier, Admiral Kantaro Suzuki, who had been
put into office to find a way out of the war, was caught in a trap. If
he made any serious effort to surrender, he could be murdered by the
militarists, while his secret efforts had been rebuffed by the West as
too vague. To ward off the former, he made a public statement that the
Potsdam Declaration was ''unworthy of notice."
On
July 26th the heavy cruiser Indianapolis,
top-heavy with new antiaircraft and radar equipment and still
unequipped with underwater submarine detection devices, unloaded the
bomb without its last essential part of Uranium-23: on Tinian. It put
to sea at once and, in the night of July 28th, between Guam and Leyte,
was practically blown apart by torpedoes from Japanese submarine I-58.
In fourteen minutes, with all communications knocked out, the great
ship rolled over and dived to the bottom. One-third of her 1,200 men w
ere already dead; the rest were left struggling in the water. Four days
passed without anyone in the American armed forces asking a question
about the Indianapolis. Then an American plane
spotted
survivors in a large oil patch; 316 were picked up in the next few
days. But the bomb was safe on Tinian..
While
the I-58 was stalking the Indianapolis in the
Pacific, the heavy cruiser Augusta was
in mid-Atlantic, bringing President Truman and his assistants back from
Potsdam. From mid-ocean the President sent the signal to Washington and
Tinian to drop the bomb on Japan. By August 5th all was ready, and at
2:45 A. M. the following morning the modified B-29 Enola Gay,
Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., in command, went roaring down the long
Tinian runway on its 7-hour flight to Hiroshima. Only one man aboard, a
scientist commissioned as a navy captain, William S. Parsons, knew
exactly what the strange new bomb was or why Colonel Tibbets had been
given such unorthodox orders regarding bombing technique. These orders
were to dive for maximum speed and turn 150 degrees the moment the bomb
was released. Parsons directly violated his orders to arm the bomb
before it was loaded in the plane, because he had seen several B-29's
en route to Japan crash on takeoff, and he realized that an atomic
accident might destroy Tinian airfield with its hundreds of
million-dollar planes and its tens of thousands of trained men. Just
before takeoff, Captain Parsons borrowed a loaded revolver to use on
himself if the Enola Gay landed in Japanese
territory.
Six
and a half hours later, 1,700 miles north of Tinian, the Enola
Gay
came in sight of its target. The doomed city lay quiet in flooding
early-morning sunshine. At 9:15, precisely on schedule, the giant plane
went into its bombing run at 31,600 feet, speed 328 mph. As the bomb
was released, the plane twisted violently away to get as far as
possible from the blast. Seconds ticked off as the bomb fell almost
five miles to 2,000 feet; then the two masses of uranium came together
at lightning speed and turned to energy. The fireball expanded outward,
enveloping the center of the city, its intense heat and blast driving
outward to shatter buildings and ignite the debris. Fifteen miles away,
the Enola Gay was slapped twice by the concussion.
An hour and
a half later, from 360 miles away, the crew could look back and still
see the mushroom cloud rearing up to 40,000 feet. Under that cloud, at
least 40,000 Japanese were killed instantly; an additional 12,000 died
in the next few days; and eventually 60,175 perished, with an equal
number injured. The city was over half destroyed, with the area of
devastation extending out a mile from ground zero.
News
of this great disaster
was released at once in Washington, but in Japan communications were
disrupted, and there was no agreement on what had happened. The emperor
sent word to Premier Suzuki to accept the Potsdam Declaration, but the
militarists insisted on three conditions: (1) Japan would disarm its
own troops, (2) the occupation of Japan would be limited, and (3) war
criminals would be tried by Japanese courts. All assumed that the
emperor's position was beyond discussion. The stalemate continued, as
the Soviet Union declared war on Japan (late on August 8th). The
Japanese Supreme War Council remained deadlocked day after day, in
spite of a second, plutonium, bomb dropped on Nagasaki with about
100,000 casualties, of which one-third were dead (August 9, 1945).
Early
on the morning of August
10th, when the War Council had been in continuous session for sixteen
hours, Emperor Hirohito personally ordered it to make peace. A message
accepting the Potsdam terms, with reservation of the emperor's
position, was sent the same day. This Noms accepted by an American note
which provided that the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP)
would issue orders to the emperor and government of Japan. A military
coup was attempted in Japan but was suppressed on August Isth. Seven
Japanese generals and admirals committed hara-kari. The emperor then,
for the first time in history, spoke on the radio, asking his people to
accept the peace. Many listeners expected him to ask them to fight to
the death. All were stunned, and remained in this strange condition for
weeks. They had been so misled by their own propaganda that many had
believed they were about to win the war. A cease-fire was issued late
on August 16th. On September 2nd the final surrender was signed on the
deck of the battleship Missouri in the shadow of
the great
16-inch guns and under the thirty-one-star flag which Perry had flown
at the same anchorage ninety-two years before.
Thus
ended six years of world
war in which 70 million men had been mobilized and r 7 million killed
in battle. At least 18 million civilians had been killed. The Soviet
Union and Germany had lost most heavily. The former had 6.1 million
soldiers killed and 14 million wounded, hut lost over lo million
civilian dead. Germany lost 6.6 million servicemen killed or died in
service, with 7.2 million wounded and 1.3 million missing. Japan's
armed forces had 1.9 million dead. Britain's war dead were 357,000,
while America's were 294,000.
All
this personal tragedy and
material damage of untold billions of dollars was needed to demonstrate
to the irrational minds of the Nazis, Fascists, and Japanese
militarists that the Western Powers and the Soviet Union were stronger
than the three aggressor states and, accordingly, that Germany could
not establish a Nazi continental bloc in Europe nor could Japan
dominate an East-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. This is the chief function
of war: to demonstrate as conclusively as possible to mistaken minds
that they are mistaken in regard to power relationships. But, as we
shall see, in demonstrating these objective facts in order to change
mistaken subjective pictures of these facts, war also changes most
drastically the objective facts themselves.
Part Sixteen—The
New Age
Chapter
59—Introduction
Any
war performs two rather
contradictory services for the social context in which it occurs. On
the one hand, it changes the minds of men, especially the defeated,
about the factual power relationship between the combatants. And, on
the other hand, it alters the factual situation itself, so that changes
which in peacetime might have occurred over decades are brought about
in a few years.
This
has been true of all
wars, but never has it been truer than in respect to World War II. The
age which began in 1945 was a new age from almost every point of view.
Looking back, it is now clear that the first generation of the
twentieth century, from about 1895 to 1939, was a long period of
transition from the nineteenth-century world to a totally different
world of the twentieth century. Some of these changes are obvious: a
shift from a period of democracy to an age of experts; from a world
dominated by Europe, and even by Britain, to a world divided into three
great blocs; from a world in which man still lived ... surrounded by
nature, to a situation where nature is dominated, transformed and, in a
sense, totally destroyed by man; from a system where man's greatest
problems were the material ones of man's helplessness in the face of
the natural threats of disease, starvation, and the unpredictability of
natural catastrophes to the totally different system of the 1960's and
1970's where the greatest threat to man is man himself, and where his
greatest problems are the social (and nonmaterial) ones of what his
true goals of existence are and what use he should make of his immense
power over the universe, including his fellow-men.
For
thousands of years, some
men had viewed themselves as creatures a little lower than the angels,
or even God, and a little higher than the beasts. Now, in the twentieth
century, man [believes he] has acquired almost divine powers, and it
has become increasingly clear that he can no longer regard himself as
an animal (as the leading thinkers of the nineteenth century did), but
must regard himself as at least a man (if he cannot bring himself to
break so completely with his nineteenth-century predecessors as to come
to regard himself as obligated to act like an angel or even a god).
The
whole trend of the
nineteenth century had been to emphasize man's animal nature, and in
doing so, to seek to increase his supply of material necessities, his
indulgence in creature comforts, his experiences of food, movement,
sex, and emotion. This effort had resulted in the sharp curtailment or
almost total neglect of the conventions of man's earlier history,
conventions which had been, on the whole, based on a conception of man
as a dualistic creature in which an eternal spiritual soul was encased,
temporarily, in an ephemeral, material body. This older conception had
been embodied, in the form in which the nineteenth century challenged
it, largely in the seventeenth century, and had been reflected in that
earlier period in the widespread influence of Puritanism, of Jansenism,
and of other, basically pessimistic, inhibiting, masochistic, and
self-disciplining ideologies. The eighteenth century had been a long
age of struggle to get free of this older, seventeenth-century outlook,
and had been so prolonged largely because those who turned away from
the seventeenth century could neither envisage, nor agree upon, the
newer ideology they wanted to put in the place of the older one they
wished to reject.
This
newer ideology was found
in the nineteenth century, and may be regarded as one which emphasized
man's freedom to indulge his more animal-like aspects: to obtain
freedom, for his body, from disease, death, hunger, discomfort, and
drudgery.... The outlook ... may be symbolized by Charles Darwin, whose
writings came to stand for [alleged] proof of the animal nature of man,
and of Sigmund Freud, whose writings were taken to [allegedly] show
that sex was the dominant, if not the sole, human motivation and that
inhibitions w-ere the great bane of human life. This latter point of
view came to be accepted on the most pervasive level of human
experience in the attacks on inhibitions and discipline which we call
"progressive" education as represented in the outpourings of such
semi-popular thinkers as Rousseau in the earliest stage of the movement
(in Emile) or John Dewey in the latest stage....
Thus,
the humanism of the
sixteenth century had reacted against the scholasticism of the medieval
period and was reacted against in turn by the Puritanism of the
seventeenth century, the materialism of the nineteenth century, and the
reaction against this latest outlook by the "flight from freedom" and
blind mass discipline of reactionary totalitarianism in the Fascist and
Nazi aberrations....
This
can be seen most
essentially in the fact that the great achievements of the nineteenth
century and the great crisis of the twentieth century are both related
to the Puritan tradition of the seventeenth century. The Puritan point
of view regarded the body and the material world as sinful and
dangerous and, as such, something which must be sternly controlled by
the individual's will. God's grace, it was felt, would give the
individual the strength to curb both his body and his feelings, to
control their tendencies toward laziness, the distractions of pleasure,
and the diversions of enjoyment, and make it possible for the
individual, by total application to work, to demonstrate that he was
among the chosen recipients of God's grace.
This
Puritan outlook, rejected
outwardly in the nineteenth century's vision of the truth, was,
nevertheless, still an influential element in the nineteenth century's
behavior, especially among those who contributed most to the nineteenth
century's achievement of its own goals. The Puritan point of view
contributed elements of self-discipline, self-denial, masochism,
glorification of work, emphasis on the restrictions of enjoyment of
consumption, and subordination both of the present to the future and of
oneself to a larger whole. These became significant elements in the
bourgeois, middle-class pattern of behavior which dominated the
nineteenth century. The middle classes were themselves largely products
of the seventeenth century, and had adopted this point of view as one
of the features which distinguished them from the more self-indulgent
attitudes of the other two social classes—the peasants below them
or the aristocracy and nobility above them.
In
the nineteenth century the
elements of the Puritan point of view were quite detached from the
other-worldly goals they had served in the seventeenth century (God and
personal salvation) and were attached to individualistic and largely
selfish, this-worldy, goals, but they carried over attitudes and
patterns of behavior which remained largely detached from the
nineteenth century's stated goals, and these, by a combination of
seventeenth-century methods with nineteenth-century goals, produced the
immense physical achievements of the nineteenth century.
These
methods appeared in a
number of essential ways, notably in an emphasis on self-discipline for
future benefits, on restricted consumption and on saving, which
provided the capital accumulation of the nineteenth century's
industrial development; in a devotion to work, and in a postponement of
enjoyment to a future which never arrived.... To such people, and to
the prevalent middle-class ideology of the nineteenth century, the most
adverse comments which could be made about a "failure," to distinguish
him from a "successful" man, were that he was a "wastrel," a "loafer,"
a "sensualist," and "self-indulgent." These terms reflected the value
that the middle classes placed on work, saving, self-denial, and social
conformity. All these values were carried over from seventeenth-century
Puritanism, and were found most frequently among the religious groups
rooted in that century, the Quakers, Presbyterians, Nonconformists (so
called in England), and Jansenist survivals, and were less evident
among religious groups with older orientations, such as Roman
Catholics, High Anglicans, or orthodox Christians. These older creeds
were more prevalent among the lower and the upper classes and in
southern and eastern Europe rather than in northern or western Europe.
This explains why the energy' self-discipline, and saving which made
the world of 1900 was middle class, Protestant, and northwestern
European. As we shall see later, in discussion of the American crisis
of the twentieth century, these outlooks, values, and groups are now
being superseded by quite different outlooks, values, and groups....
We
shall speak later of these
essential features of the nineteenth-century point of view, because
their disappearance in the twentieth century, associated as it is with
the crisis of the middle classes, is an essential part of the crisis of
the twentieth century, where it is to be seen most clearly in the
English-speaking and Scandinavian countries. We shall call these
features, as a single bundle, "future preference," and understand that
it includes the gospel of saving, of work, and of postponed enjoyment,
consumption, and leisure. Closely related to it is a somewhat different
idea, based on a constant and irremedial dissatisfaction with one's
present position and present possessions. This is associated with the
nineteenth century's emphasis on acquisitive behavior, on achievement,
and on infinitely expansible demand, and is equally associated with the
middle-class outlook. Both of these together (future preference and
expansible material demands) were basic features in nineteenth-century
middle-class society, and indispensable foundations for its great
material achievements. They are inevitably lacking in backward, tribal,
underdeveloped peasant societies and groups, not only in Africa and
Asia but also in many peripheral areas and groups of Western
Civilization, including much of the Mediterranean, Latin America,
central France, or in the Mennonite communities of southern
Pennsylvania and elsewhere. The lack of future preference and
expansible material demands in other areas, and the weakening of them
in middle-class Western Civilization, are essential features of the
twentieth-century crisis.
Though
this crisis, which has
appeared as a breakdown, disruption, and rejection of the nineteenth
century's way of doing things, was fully evident by the year 1900, it
was brought to an acute stage by the two world wars and the world
depression. If we may be permitted to oversimplify, two antithetical
ways of dealing with this crisis appeared. One way, going back to men
like Georges Sorel (Reflections on Violence,
1908),
sought a solution of this crisis in irrationalism, in action for its
own sake, in submergence of the individual into the mass of his tribe,
community, or nation, in simple, intense concrete feelings and acts.
The other tendency, based on nineteenth century's science, sought a
solution of the crisis in rationalization, science, universality,
cosmopolitanism, and the continued pursuit of eternal—if rapidly
retreating—truth. While the great mass of people in Western
Civilization either ignored the problem and the antithetical character
of the two proffered solutions, drifting unconsciously toward the one
or struggling confusedly toward the other, two smaller groups were
quite aware of the antithesis and rivalry of the two. From the crisis
itself and the myriad individual events which led through it, came
World War II. Although few were consciously aware of it, this war
became a struggle between the forces of irrationality, represented by
Fascism, and the forces of Western science and rationalization,
represented hy the Allied nations.
The
Allied nations won this
fearful struggle because they represented the forces of the ancient
traditions of the West which had made Western Civilization the most
powerful and most prosperous civilization that had ever existed in the
past six thousand years of experience of this form of human
organization. This ability to use the Western tradition appeared in a
capacity to use rationalization, science, diversity, freedom, and
voluntary cooperation—all long-existent attributes of Western
Civilization.
Chapter
60—Rationalization and Science
The
application of
rationalization and science to World War II is one of the basic reasons
(although not necessarily the most important reason) for the victory of
the West in the war. As a consequence of that victory, these two
methods survived the challenge from reactionary, totalitarian,
authoritarian Fascism, and expanded from the limited areas of human
experience where they had previously operated to become dominant
factors in the twentieth-century world. The two are obviously not
identical; and neither is equivalent to rationalism (although both use
rationalism as a prominent element in their operations). Rationalism,
strictly speaking, is a rather unconvincing ideology. It assumes that
reality is rational and logical, and, accordingly, is comprehensible to
man's conscious mental processes, and can be grasped by human reason
and logic alone. It assumes that what is rational and logical is real,
that what is not rational and logical is dubious, unknowable, and
unimportant, and that the observations of the human senses are
unreliable or even illusory.
Rationalization
and science
differ from rationalism in two chief ways: (1) they are more empirical,
in that they are willing to use sense observations, and (2) they are
more practical, in that they are more concerned with getting things
done in the temporal world than they are with discovering the nature of
ultimate truth. They do not necessarily deny the existence of such an
ultimate truth, but they agree that any conclusions reached about its
nature, using their methods, are proximate rather than ultimate. Both
methods, thus, are analytical, tentative, proximate, modest, and
relatively practical. The chief difference between them is that science
is a somewhat narrower subdivision of rationalization, because it has a
more rigid and self-conscious methodology.
Taken
together, these two have
played significant roles in Western Civilization for centuries, but
have always remained somewhat peripheral to the experience of ordinary
men. One of the chief consequences of World War II is that they are no
longer peripheral. Of course, it must be recognized that
rationalization and science are not yet, by any means, central to the
experience of ordinary men, or even to the majority of men. But now
they almost certainly must become matters of firsthand experience for
the majority of men if Western Civilization is to survive. As the
novelist of these matters, Sir Charles P. Snow, has said, scientists
increasingly play a vital role in those crucial, secret decisions
"which determine in the crudest sense whether we live or die."
Before
World War II, science
was recognized by all to be a significant element in life, but few had
firsthand contact with it, and very few had any real appreciation of
its nature and achievements. It was reserved largely for academic
people, and for a small minority of these, and it touched the lives of
most men only indirectly, by its influence on technology, especially on
medical practice, transportation, and communications. There was very
clearly, before 1939, what Sir Charles Snow has called "Two Societies"
in our one civilization. This meant that most men lived in an ignorance
of science almost as great as that of a Hottentot and almost equally
great among highly educated professors of literature at Harvard,
Oxford, and Princeton. It also meant that scientists were quite out of
touch with the major realities of the world in which they lived, and
were smitten by the impacts of war, depression, and political
disturbances under conditions of ignorance, naivete, and general
bafflement at least as great as that of the uneducated ordinary man.
World War II brought science into government, and especially into war,
and brought politics, economics, and social responsibility into science
in a way which must be beneficial to both but which was almost
unimaginably shocking to both. Reading, for example, the interchange of
questions and answers which go on between scientists and politicians
before congressional committees concerned with outer space, atomic
energy, or medical research is a revelation of the almost total lack of
communication which takes place behind that prolific interchange of
words.
The
impact of rationalization
is almost as great, although much less recognized. It had always
existed in an incidental and minor way in men's experiences, but hardly
justified a special name until it became a conscious and deliberate
technique. It is a method of dealing with problems and processes in an
established sequence of steps, thus: (1) isolate the problem; (2)
separate it into its most obvious stages or areas; (3) enumerate the
factors which determine the outcome desired in each stage or area; (4)
vary the factors in a conscious, systematic, and (if possible)
quantitative way to maximize the outcome desired in the stage or area
concerned; and (5) reassemble the stages or areas and check to see if
the whole problem or process has been acceptably improved in the
direction desired.
Such
rationalization is
analytical and quantitative (even numerical). It was first used on an
extensive scale at the end of the nineteenth century to solve problems
of mass production, and led, step by step, to assembly-line techniques
in which regulated quantities of materials (parts), power, labor, and
supervision were delivered in a rational arrangement of space and time
to produce a continuous outflow of some final product. All elements in
the process were applied to measurable units to a system operated in
accord with a dominant plan to achieve a desired result. Naturally,
such a process serves to dehumanize the productive process and, since
it also seeks to reduce every element in the process to a repetitive
action, it leads eventually to an automation in which even supervision
is electronic and mechanical.
From
the basically engineering
problem of production, rationalization gradually spread into the more
dominant problem of business. From maximizing production, it shifted to
maximizing profits. This gave rise to "efficiency experts" such as
Frederick Winslow Taylor (whose The Principles of Scientific
Management appeared in 1911) and, eventually, to management
consultants, like Arthur D. Little, Inc..
This
point had been reached by
1939, when rationalization was still remote from ordinary life and very
remote from politics and war. As in so many other innovations, the
introduction of rationalization into war was begun by the British and
then taken over, on an enormous scale, by the Americans. Its origin is
usually attributed to the efforts of Professor P. M. S. Blackett (Nobel
Prize, 1948) to apply radar to antiaircraft guns. From there Blackett
took the technique into antisubmarine defense, whence it spread, under
the name "Operational Research" (OP), into many aspects of the war
effort. In its original form, the Anti-Aircraft Command Research Group,
known as "Blackest's circus," included three physiologists, two
mathematical physicists, one astrophysicist, a surveyor, a general
physicist, two mathematicians, and an army officer. It was a mixed-team
approach to operational problems, emphasizing an objective, analytical,
and quantitative method. As Blackett wrote in 1941, "The scientist can
encourage numerical thinking on operational matters, and so can help to
avoid running the war on gusts of emotion."
Operational
research, unlike
science, made its greatest contribution in regard to the use of
existing equipment rather than to the effort to invent new equipment.
It often gave specific recommendations, reached through the techniques
of mathematical probability, which directly contradicted the
established military procedures. A simple case concerned the problem of
air attack on enemy submarines: For what depth should the bomb fuse be
set? In 1940 the RAF Coastal Command set its fuses at 100 feet. This
was based on estimates of three factors: (1) the time interval between
the moments the submarine sighted the plane and the plane sighted the
submarine; (2) the speed of approach of the plane; and (3) the speed of
submergence of the submarine. One fixed factor was that the submarine
was unlikely to be sunk if the bomb exploded more than 20 feet away.
Operational Research added an additional factor: How near was the
bomber to judging the exact spot where the submarine went down? Since
this error increased rapidly with the distance of the original
sighting, a submarine which had time to submerge deeply would almost
inevitably be missed by the bomb in position if not in depth; but, with
100-foot fuses, submarines which had little time to submerge were
missed because the fuse was too deep even when the position was
correct. OP recommended setting fuses at 25 feet to sink the near
sightings, and practically conceded the escape of all the distant
sightings. When fuses were set at 35 feet, successful attacks on
submarines increased 400 percent with the same equipment.
The
British applied OP to many
similar problems: (1) With an inadequate number of A.A. guns, is it
better to concentrate them to protect part of a city thoroughly or to
disperse them to protect all of the city inadequately? (The former is
better.) (2) Repainting night bombers from black to white when used on
submarine patrol increased sightings of submarines 30 percent. ( 3 )
Are small convoys safer for merchant ships than large ones? (No, by a
large margin.) (4) With an inadequate number of patrol planes, was it
better to search the whole patrol area some days (as was the practice)
or to search part of it every day with whatever planes were available?
(Calculations of a mathematician, S. D. Poisson, who died in 1840,
showed that the latter was better.)
Some
of OP's improvements were
very simple. For example, a statistical study of sightings of German
submarines by patrol planes showed that twice as many were seen on the
left side of the plane as on the right side. Investigation showed this
was because the plane flew on automatic pilot, allowing the pilot (on
the left side) almost full time to watch the sea, while the copilot on
the right side was busy much of the time. Assignment of another crewman
to the right side when the copilot was busy increased sightings about
30 percent. Until late 1941 the RAF bombed German cities as they were
able. Then OP, using the German bombing of Britain as a base,
calculated the number of people killed per ton of bombs dropped, and
applied this to Germany to show that the casualties inflicted on
Germany were about 400 civilians killed per month— about half the
German automobile-accident death rate—while 200 RAF crewmen were
killed per month in doing the bombing. Such bombing could never
influence the outcome of the war. Later it was discovered that the
raids were really killing only 200 German civilians (almost all
noncombantants contributing little to the war effort) at the cost of
the 200 RAF fighting men each month, and thus were a contribution to a
German victory! These estimates made it advisable to shift planes from
bombing Germany to U-boat patrol, so that the German submarine war,
which was really strangling Britain, could be brought under control. A
bomber, in its average life of 30 missions, dropped Too tons of bombs
on Germany, killing 20 Germans and destroying a few houses. The same
plane in thirty missions of submarine patrol saved, on the average, 6
loaded merchant vessels and their crews from submarines. As might be
expected, this discovery was violently resisted by the head of the RAF
Bomber Command, Chief Marshal Sir Arthur ("Bomber") Harris.
Closely
linked with this was
the question whether it was better to use Britain's shipbuilding
capacity to construct escort vessels or merchant ships. This involved
the choice between saving existing merchant ships or outbuilding the
losses from submarines. It required a statistical study of the
effectiveness of escort vessels. At the time, the Admiralty regarded
small convoys as safer and large ones as dangerous, and had forbidden
convoys of over sixty ships. They assigned escort vessels to each
convoy at the rate of three plus one-tenth of the number of ships
protected. OP w as able to show that this assignment rule was
inconsistent with the prejudice against large convoys. Studying past
losses, they showed that convoys of under 4o ships (averaging 32 each)
suffered losses of 2.5 percent, while large convoys of over 4o ships
(averaging 54 ships each) were twice as safe, with losses of only l. l
percent. Using information from rescued German U-boat crews, OP was
able to show that U-boat success depended on the density of escort
vessels around the perimeter of the convoy and that the percentage of
ships sunk was inversely proportional to the size of the convoy. By
1944 a convoy of 187 ships arrived without loss. If the shift to large
convoys had been made in the spring of 1942, rather than in the spring
of 1943, a million tons of merchant shipping (or 200 ships) could have
been saved. The combination of larger convoys, and the shift of some
planes from bombing Germany to submarine patrol, turned the corner on
the U-boat menace in the summer of 1943 and helped save many ships
which were used in the Allied amphibious landings, especially on D-Day
in 1944.
The
shock of the fall of
France in June 1940 marked a turning point in the relations between
universities and government in the United States. At that time, the
chief contacts between the two were the National Academy of Sciences,
founded in 1863, and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics
(NACA), founded in 1915. The former vv-as a non-governmental body
electing its own members from American scientists and bound to advise
the government, upon request, in scientific or technical matters. A
dependent body, the National Research Council, had members from the
government at large and representatives of over a hundred scientific
societies to act as liaison between the academy and the scientific
community. The NACA was a government agency which performed a similar
function in aeronautics and did extensive research in its field with
government funds. In 1938 Vannevar Bush, professor of electrical
engineering and vice-president of Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, an outstanding figure in applied mathematics and
electronics, best known as the inventor of the differential analyzer
(for mechanical solution of differential equations in calculus), became
a member of NACA. The following year he became president of the
Carnegie Institution of Washington and chairman of NACA.
As
France fell, Bush persuaded
President Roosevelt to create a National Defense Research Committee
with Bush as chairman. The twelve members served without pay, and
consisted of two each from the army, the navy, and the National Academy
of Sciences, with six others. Bush named Frank B. Jewett, president of
Bell Telephone Laboratories and the NAS; Karl T. Compton, president of
MIT; James B. Conant, president of Harvard; Richard C. Tolman, of
California Institute of Technology; and others. They set up
headquarters at the Carnegie Institution and Dumbarton Oaks, a Harvard
Byzantine research center in Washington.
The
NDRC in its first year
gave over two hundred contracts to various universities, and thus
established the pattern of relations between government and the
universities which still exists. In that first year it spent only $6.5
million, but in the six years 1940-1946 it spent almost $454 million.
During that whole period, there was only one shift in the civilian
personnel of the NDRC. In May 1941 a higher and wider organization was
created, the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), with
Bush as chairman and Conant as his deputy. Conant took Bush's place as
chairman of NDRC, and Roger Adams, professor of chemistry at the
University of Illinois, was added to NDRC. These groups were the
supreme influence in America in introducing rationalization and science
into government and war in 1940- 1946, fostering hundreds of new
technical developments and inventions, including the atom bomb. One of
their earliest acts was to make a census of research facilities and a
National Roster of Scientific and Specialized Personnel (with 690,000
names); they did not hesitate to call upon the services of both as
needed. When money ran short, they found it from private sources, as in
June 1941, when, simply by asking, they obtained half a million dollars
from MIT and an equal sum from John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to pay
salaries when congressional appropriations ran short.
Somewhat
similar organizations
grew up in Britain, in the Soviet Union, and in the enemy countries,
but none worked so successfully as that of the Americans, who, here, as
elsewhere, showed a genius for improvised large-scale organization. On
the whole, the British were more fertile in new ideas than the
Americans (probably because they were less conventional in their
thinking processes), but the Americans were superior in development and
production. The Soviet Union, which was very lacking in new ideas, was
fairly successful (considering its obvious handicaps, such as enemy
invasion and industrial backwardness) in development. Its organization
was somewhat like that in the United States but much more centralized,
since its Academy of Sciences controlled government funds and allotted
both tasks and funds to university and special research groups.
Germany, which had a high degree of innovation (comparable to that in
the United States) was paralyzed by myriad conflicting and overlapping
authorities in control of development and production and by the fact
that the whole chaotic mess was under the tyranny of vacillating
autocrats. Japan, almost lacking in innovation, achieved a surprising
degree of production under a system of conflicting autocratic
authorities almost as bad as that of Germany.
Rationalization
of behavior,
as represented in Operations Research, and the application of science
to new weapons, as practiced by the English-speaking countries, were in
sharp contrast with the methods of waging war used by the Tripartite
aggressors. Hitler fought the war by basing his hopes on inspiration
(his own) and willpower (usually, refusal to retreat an inch);
Mussolini tried to fight his war on rhetoric and slogans; the Japanese
tried to gain victory by self-sacrifice and willingness to die. All
three irrational methods were obsolete as compared with the
Anglo-American method of rationalization and science.
First
news of the success of
Operations Research in Britain was brought to the United States by
President Conant in 1940 and was formally introduced by Vannevar Bush,
as chairman of the New Weapons Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
in 1942. By the end of the war, the technique had spread extensively
through the American war effort, and, with the arrival of peace, became
an established civilian profession. The best-known example of this is
the Rand Corporation, a private research and development firm, under
contract to the United States Air Force, but numerous lesser
organizations and enterprises are now concerned with rationalization
techniques in political life, the study of war and strategy, in
economic analysis, and elsewhere. Similar groups arose in Britain. One
of the most complex applications of the technique has been Operation
Bootstrap, by which the Puerto Rican Industrial Development
Corporation, advised by Arthur D. Little, Inc., has sought to transform
the Puerto Rican economy. Persons interested in OP have organized
societies in England (1948) and the United States (1949) which publish
a quarterly and a journal.
A
great impetus has been given
to the rationalization of society in the postwar world by the
application of mathematical methods to society to an unprecedented
degree. Much of this used the tremendous advances in mathematics of the
nineteenth century, but a good deal came from new developments. Among
these have been applications of game theory, information theory,
symbolic logic, cybernetics, and electronic computing. The newest of
these was probably game theory, worked out by a Hungarian refugee
mathematician, John von Neumann, at the Institute for Advanced Study.
This applied mathematical techniques to situations in which persons
sought conflicting goals in a nexus of relationships governed by rules.
Closely related to this were new mathematical methods for dealing with
decision-making. The basic work in the new field was the book Theory
of Games and Economic Behavior, by John von Neumann and Oskar
Morgenstern (Princeton, 1944).
Similar
impetus to this whole
development was provided by two other fields of mathematics in which
the significant books in America were C. E. Shannon and W. Weaver, The
Mathematical Theory of Communication (University
of Illinois, 1949), and Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or
Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1949). A flood of books have
amplified and modified these basic works, all seeking to apply
mathematical methods to information, communications, and control
systems. Closely related to this have been increased use of symbolic
logic (as in Willard von Orman Quine, Mathematical Logic,
Harvard, 1951), and the application of all these to electronic
computers, involving large-scale storage of information with speedy
retrieval of it and fantastically rapid operations of complex
calculations. These, and related techniques, are now transforming
methods of operation and behavior in all aspects of life and bringing
on a large-scale rationalization of human life which is becoming one of
the most significant characteristics of Western Civilization in the
twentieth century.
Closely
related to all this,
both in the war and in the postwar period, have been advances in
science. Here, also, the great impetus came from the struggle for
victory in the war and the subsequent permeation of all aspects of life
by attitudes and methods (in this case science) which had been
peripheral to the experience of most people in the prewar period. The
consequences of this revolution now surround us on all sides and are
obvious, even to the most uncomprehending, in television and
electronics, in biology and medical science, in space exploration, in
automation of credit, billing, payroll, and personnel practices, in
atomic energy, and above all in the constant threat of nuclear
incineration which now faces all of us. In much of this the fundamental
innovations were British, or at least European, but their full
exploitation and production processes have been American.
The
mobilization of these
processes under the OSRD and NDRC by those two Massachusetts Yankees,
Bush and Conant, is one of the miracles of the war. In sharp contrast
with the OSS, it achieved its goals with a minimum of administrative
friction, by the use of existing agencies, except in the few cases,
such as the atom bomb, where no agency had existed previously. Probably
no new group in the history of American government achieved so much
with such a high degree of helpful cooperation. Most of this was the
result of Bush's broad vision, tact, and total lack of desire for
personal celebrity. Much of it was done quietly in individual
discussions and unpublicized committee meetings. For example, as
chairman of the Joint Committee on New Weapons and Equipment (JNW) of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff from its founding in May 1942 to the end of
the war, Bush achieved wonders, not only in persuading military men to
use new weapons and new techniques but also in persuading the different
services to integrate their introduction of new methods and their
future plans.
The
impetus to the use of
science in many fields came from the British. This began in World War I
when men like (Sir) Henry T. Tizard, (Sir) Robert A. Watson-Watt, and
Professor Frederick A. Lindemann (Lord Cherwell after 1956) studied
aviation problems scientifically. This link between government and
science in aviation was maintained in Britain, as it w as in the United
States, during the Long Armistice. After Hitler came to power, Dr. H.
E. Wimperis, Director of Scientific Research at the Air Ministry, and
his colleague A. P. Rowe, set up a Committee on Research on Air
Defence, with Tizard as chairman and Rowe as secretary, with Professors
A. V. Hill and P. M. S. Blackett as members, and Watson-Watt as
consultant. Professor Hill, physiologist, had won the Nobel Prize in
192z, while Blackett, ex-naval officer and nuclear physicist, was the
initiator of Operational Research and won a Nobel Prize in physics in
1948. Watson-Watt may be regarded as the chief discoverer of radar.
In
sharp contrast with OSRD
and NDRC in America, this committee had a stormy life. In 1908, while
studying physics in Berlin with Walther Nernst (Nobel Prize, 1920),
Tizard met a fellow student, F. A. Lindemann, who was born and educated
as a German, but held a British passport from his wealthy father's
naturalization in England before his birth. Lindemann became a moody,
driving, uncompromising, and erratically trained amateur scientist who
devoted his best hours and energy to upperclass English social life,
and combined intermittent flashes of scientific brilliance with total
lack of objectivity and consistently poor judgment. Tizard, a fairly
typical English civil servant, was, nonetheless, attracted to
Lindemann, and in 1919 helped secure for him an appointment as
professor of experimental philosophy at Oxford. At the time, science
was at a low ebb at Oxford, and Lindemann, over the next two decades,
built up its Clarendon Laboratory toward the high level which the
Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University had achieved under Lord
Rutherford. During this period Lindemann became the close friend and
scientific adviser of Winston Churchill. Through Churchill's influence,
Lindemann was forced on Tizard's Committee for the Scientific Survey of
Air Defence, where he acted as a disruptive influence from July 1935,
until the three scientific members (Hill, Blackett, and Wimperis)
forced him off in September 1936 by resigning together. The whole
committee was then dissolved and reappointed under Tizard without
Lindemann. The latter reversed the tables four years later when
Churchill became prime minister with Lindemann as almost his only
scientific adviser. Tizard was dropped from the committee in June 1940.
But by that time the great work in radar was done.
The
Tizard Committee, with
only £10,000 for research, held its first meeting on January 28,
1935, and by June 16th (before Lindemann joined) had a radar set on
which they followed a plane 40 miles. On March r 3, 1936, they
identified a plane flying at 1,500 feet 75 miles away. In September
1938, five stations southeast of London followed Chamberlain's plane
flying to the Munich Conference, and on Good Friday 1939, as Mussolini
was invading Albania, a chain of twenty stations began continuous
operations along the eastern coast.
One
of the chief advances here
was Watson-Watt's use of a cathode vacuum tube (such as we now use in
television) to watch the returning radio signal. This signal, sent out
from a radio vacuum tube in pulses, returned through a crystal detector
to appear as a "blip," or spot, on the cathode tube's fluorescent
screen. The shorter the wavelength of the sending wave, the sharper and
more accurate the returning signal the shorter the necessary aerial,
and the lower the transmitting tower; but vacuum tubes could not
broadcast waves less than lo meters in length (300,000 kilocycles).
Just as the war began, Professor John T. Randall, at the University of
Birmingham, invented the resonant-cavity magnetron, an object no bigger
than a fist, which broadcasts high-power, very short, radio waves. This
ended interference from ground reflections or reflections from the
ionosphere, and allowed sharp discrimination of objects without need
for long antennae or high towers. By the time the magnetron came into
use (1941), broadcasting from tubes had been improved to allow use of
l.5 meter waves, but the magnetron was developed for 0.1 meter waves.
All subsequent radar development was based on it. At the same time,
great advances were being made in crystals for detectors. This later
grew into the use of artificial crystals (transistors) for
amplification in receivers as well as for detection.
In
August 1940, Sir Henry
Tizard, ousted from his committee by Lindemann, led a British
scientific mission to Washington. He brought a large box of blueprints
and reports on British scientific work, including radar, a new
explosive (RDX, half again as powerful as TNT), studies on gaseous
diffusion of uranium isotopes for an atom bomb, and much else. This
visit gave a great impetus to American scientific work. As one
consequence of it, 350 men from the United States were working in the
radar net stations in England by November 1941 (a month before Pearl
Harbor).
Of
the many inventions which
emerged from science in World War II, we have space here to mention
only a few: shaped charges, proximity fuses, medical advances, and the
atom bomb.
Six
hundred years of ordnance
research on artillery had brought guns to a high state of excellence
long before World War II, but artillery, with all its advantages of
range and accuracy, had three intrinsic disadvantages: the backward
thrust of the explosive gases of propulsion gave it a violent recoil;
the same gases corroded and wore down the inside of the barrel very
rapidly; and the projectile, on hitting the target, dispersed its
explosive force, sending most of it backward into the air from the
resistance of the target itself. A rocket avoids the first two of these
problems because it directs the recoil forward to push the rocket, and
needs no container barrel at all. The Russians, who had greatly
developed the use of rockets, used them in large numbers against the
Germans in 1941. Since rockets need no barrel to shoot through but
merely require a holder until they can fully ignite, rockets allow an
infantryman to supply his own artillery support, especially against
tanks. By the end of the war, American rockets were delivered for use
in individual, disposable plastic launchers which were thrown away
after the rocket inside had been fired.
The
great disadvantages of
rockets were their inaccuracy and short range, both of which came from
the weak and uneven burning of the propellant. Great improvements were
made in the study of propellants by the Germans, especially from the
work of Hermann Oberth, Walter Dornberger, and Werner von Braun at
Peenemünde Rocket Research Institute on the Baltic Sea. These men,
working on the basis of earlier studies by the American professor,
Robert H. Goddard (A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,
1929), and by a Polish high school teacher in Russia, K. E. Ziolkovsky
(1857-1935), greatly advanced rocketry during the war and developed the
V-2, which devastated London and Antwerp from September 8, 1944 until
the war's end. The English had been expecting this attack, since a
German test rocket had gone astray in June 1944, and had exploded over
Sweden. The pieces from it, which were handed over to the Allies, made
it possible to reconstruct the characteristics of the rocket, but left
them in dread that it was being held back until the Germans could
perfect an atomic-bomb warhead. From this point of view, the first V-2
on England at 6:43 P. M., September 8, 1944, followed by another,
sixteen seconds later, was a relief: they carried warheads of
conventional explosives. But that warhead of 1,654 pounds came in on a
46-foot rocket traveling at three times the speed of sound, coming down
from an altitude of 60 miles from a launching site 200 miles away. More
than 1,100 of these rockets killed 3,000 British before they were
stopped.
Just
as a rocket reversed the
recoil of a gun, directing it forward, so a shaped charge reversed the
shape of the projectile. An artillery projectile is bullet-shaped, with
its forward end pointed or convex. In 1888 C. E. Munroe had shown that
if the explosive charge were made concave, with the cavity at its
forward end against the target, the explosive force would be directed
forward toward the target (as rays of light go forward from a concave
headlight cavity) instead of backward. The American bazooka of 1942
combined this shaped charge with a rocket to provide an infantry weapon
with which a single man could knock out a tank. A relatively small
charge carried to a tank with an impetus no greater than a well-hit
baseball exploded most of its power forward in a narrow pencil of
explosive force which sometimes penetrated six inches of armor or six
feet of masonry. A hole less than an inch wide on a tank could destroy
its crew by spraying them with molten metal forced inward from the
shaped charge. In a few cases, this occurred through eight-inch armor
without the armor being fully penetrated. Thus the tank, triumphant in
1940, was brought under control, and by 1945 was used largely as mobile
artillery.
An
even more remarkable
advance was the proximity fuse. This was a fuse containing a tiny radar
set which measured the distance to the target and could be adjusted to
explode at a fixed distance. First used to explode A.A. shells within
lethal distance of enemy planes, it soon was adapted to explode just
over the heads of ground forces. The latter use, however, was not
permitted for more than two years, for fear the enemy would obtain a
dud and be able to copy it.
The
proximity VT fuse was,
after the atom bomb, the second greatest scientific achievement of the
war, although the magnetron contributed more than either to an Allied
victory. Producing the fuse seemed impossible: It would be necessary to
make a radar sending and receiving set to fit in a space smaller than
an ice-cream cone; to make it strong enough to withstand 20,000 times
the force of gravity in original acceleration and the spin in flight of
475 rotations per minute; to have it detonate at a precise instant in
time with no chance of exploding earlier to endanger the gunner; and to
be sure that it would explode entirely if it missed its target zone so
that there would never be a dud. These problems were solved, and
production began in 1942. By the end of the war, Sylvania had made over
130 million minute radio tubes, of which five were needed in each fuse.
First
used in action by the U.S.S. Helena against
a Japanese dive-bombing plane on January 5, 1943, it destroyed the
attacker on the second salvo. An order of the Combined Chiefs of Staff
prohibited use of the fuse except over water, where the enemy could not
recover duds, but late in 1943 secret intelligence obtained plans of
the V-1 robot plane which Hitler was preparing to bomb London. The CCS
released proximity fuses to be used over England against this new
threat. The first V-l came over on June 12, 1944, the last, 80 days
later, the VT fuses being used only during the final four weeks. In the
last week, VT fuses destroyed 79 percent of the V-l's that came over.
On the final day only 4 out of ro4 reached London. They were being
destroyed by three machines developed by NDRC and made in the United
States: detected by SCR-584 radar, their courses predicated by M-9
computers, and shot down by VT fuses. General Sir F. A. Pile, Chief of
British A.A. Command, sent Bush a copy of his report on this operation,
inscribed, "With my compliments to OSRD who made the victory possible."
The
VT fuse was released by
CCS for general use on land at the end of October 1944, and was first
used against German ground forces in the Battle of the Bulge. The
results were devastating. In thick fog the Germans massed their men
together, believing they were safe since the range could not be
measured for orthodox artillery time fuses; they were massacred by VT
shells exploding over their heads, and even those who crouched in
foxholes were hit. On another evening, near Bastogne, German tanks were
observed entering a wood for the night. After they were settled, the
area was blasted with VT shells. In the morning seventeen German tanks
surrounded by their dead crews were found in the area.
One
of the greatest victories
of science in the war was in the treatment of the wounded. Ninety-seven
percent of the casualties who reached the front-line dressing stations
were saved, a success which had never been approached in earlier wars.
The techniques which made this possible, involving blood transfusions,
surgical techniques, and antibiotics, have all been continued and
amplified in the postwar world, although the destruction of man's
natural environment by advancing technology has created new hazards and
new causes of death by advancing cancer, disintegrating circulatory
systems, and increasing mental breakdowns.
The
greatest achievement of
science during the war, and, indeed, in all human history, was the atom
bomb. Its contribution to victory was secondary, since it had nothing
to do with the victory over Germany and at most, shortened the war with
the Japanese only by weeks. But this greatest example of the power of
cooperating human minds has changed the whole environment in which men
live. The only human discovery which can compare with it was man's
invention of the techniques of farming almost nine thousand years
earlier, but this earlier advance was slow and empirical. The advance
to the atom bomb was swift and theoretical, in which men, by
mathematical calculations, were able to anticipate, measure, judge, and
control events which had never happened previously in human experience.
It is not possible to understand the history of the twentieth century
without some comprehension of how this almost unbelievable\goal was
achieved and especially why the Western Powers were able to achieve it,
and the Fascist Powers were not.
As
late as the fall of France
in 1940, all countries were equal in their scientific knowledge,
because science was then freely communicable, as it must be, by its
very nature. Much of that knowledge, in physical science, rested on the
theories of three Nobel Prize winners of 1918-1922. These were Max
Planck (1858-1947), who said that energy did not move in a continuous
flow like water but in discrete units, called quanta,
like
bullets; Albert Einstein (1879-1955), whose theory of relativity
indicated that matter and energy were interchangeable according to the
formula E = mc2; and Niels Bohr (1885-1962), who offered a picture of
the atom as a planetary structure with a heavy, complex nucleus, and
circum-rotating electrons in fixed orbits established by their energy
levels according to Planck's quantum theory. At that time (1940) all
scientists knew that some of the heavier elements naturally
disintegrated and were reduced to somewhat lighter elements by
radioactive emission of negatively charged electrons or of positively
charged alpha particles (helium nuclei, consisting of two positively
charged protons with two uncharged neutrons).
As
early as 1934, in Rome,
Enrico Fermi (Nobel Prize, 1938) and Emilio Segre (Nobel Prize, 1959),
without realizing what they had done, had split uranium atoms into
lighter elements (chiefly barium and krypton) by shooting neutrons into
the uranium nucleus. (Such neutrons had been isolated and identified in
1932, by Sir James Chadwick, Nobel Prize winner in 1935.) Although Ida
Noddack at once suggested that Fermi had split the atom, the suggestion
was generally ignored until Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, and Fritz
Strassmann in Germany, in 19371939, repeated Fermi's experiments and
sought to identify the bewildering assortment of lighter radioactive
elements which emerged when uranium was bombarded with a stream of
neutrons.
By
February 1939, it was
established that the heaviest element, 92 uranium, could be split in
various ways into lighter elements nearer the middle of the atomic
table and that large amounts of energy were released in the process.
For example, 92 uranium might be split into 56 barium and 36 krypton.
The reason for the release of energy was that the nuclear particles
(protons and neutrons) had smaller masses in the nucleus of elements
near the middle of the atomic table than they had in the nuclei of
elements nearer the top or the bottom of the table or than the
particles had alone outside any nucleus. This meant that the nuclear
particles had the least mass in the elements near 26 iron and that
energy would be released if heavier elements could be broken into
lighter ones nearer iron or if lighter elements could be built up into
heavier elements nearer iron. Now that scientists can do both of these
things, at least at the very top (hydrogen) and the very bottom
(uranium) of the table, we call the splitting process "fission" and the
building-up process "fusion" of nuclei. As explosive forces, they are
now represented by the "atomic" bomb and the "hydrogen," thermonuclear,
bomb. The amount of energy released by either process can be calculated
by Einstein's equation, E = mc2, where c is the speed of light (3o
billion centimeters, or about 186,000 miles a second). By this
equation, if only an ounce of matter is destroyed, 5,600,000 kilowatt
hours of energy would be released. In 1939, of course, no one could
conceive how lighter elements could be fused into heavier ones, as
scientists had just revealed uranium could be fissured.
To
the historian of these
events, the months of January and February are of crucial significance.
On January and, Fermi, self-exiled from Mussolini's Italy, reached New
York with his wife and children, from Stockholm, where he had just
received the Nobel Prize. Four days later the Hahn-Strassmann report on
uranium fission was published in Germany, and Otto Frisch, sent by his
aunt, Lise Meitner, from Sweden (where they were both refugees from
Hitler's Germany), dashed to Copenhagen to confer with Bohr on the real
meaning of Hahn's report. Bohr left the next day, January 7th, to join
Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, while Frisch
and Meitner, in Sweden, repeated Hahn's fissure of uranium and reported
on the results in quantitative terms, in the English journal Nature
on
February 11 and 18, 1939. These reports, which first used the word
"fission," introduced the "Atomic Age," and showed that, weight for
weight, uranium fission would be twenty million times more explosive
than TNT.
Such
a burst of energy would,
of course, not be noticed in nature if only a few atoms of uranium
split; moreover, no large number would split unless the uranium was so
pure that its atoms were massed together and unless the stream of
splitting neutrons continued to hit their nuclei. Immediately, in
February 1939, a number of scientists thought that these two
conditions, which do not exist in nature, might be created in the
laboratory. It took only a few minutes to realize that this process
would become an almost instantaneous chain reaction if extra neutrons,
to serve as fission bullets, were issued by the splitting process.
Since the uranium nucleus has 146 neutrons, while barium and krypton
together have only 82 plus 47, or 129, it is obvious that each split
uranium atom must release 17 neutrons capable of splitting other
uranium atoms if they hit their nuclei with the right momentum.
This
idea was tested at once
by Frédéric Joliot-Curie (Nobel Prize, 1935) in Paris,
and by Fermi and another refugee, Leo Szilard, with their associates,
at Columbia University, New York. The three teams submitted their
reports to publication in March r939. Bohr and others had already
suggested that large-scale uranium fission does not occur in nature
because natural uranium was widely dispersed atomically by being
overwhelmingly diluted in chemical combination and mixture with other
substances in its ores; they pointed out also that even pure natural
uranium would probably not explode because it was a mixture of three
different kinds, or isotopes, of uranium, all with the same atomic
number 92 (and thus with the same chemical reactions, since these are
based on the electrical charge of the nucleus as a whole) but with
quite different atomic weights of 234, 235, and 238. These isotopes
could not be separated by chemical means, since their identical atomic
numbers (or nuclear electrical charges) meant that they had the same
chemical reactions in joining to form different compounds. They could
be separated only by physical methods based on their slightly different
mass weights.
As
uranium is extracted only
with great difficulty, and in small amounts, from its ores, 99.28
percent of it is U-238, 0.71 percent of it is U-235, and only a trace
is U-2 34. Thus, natural uranium has 140 times as much U-238 as U-235.
It was soon discovered that U-235 was split by slow or very fast
neutrons, but, when it split, it emitted very energetic neutrons
traveling at high speeds. These fast neutrons would have to be slowed
down to split any more U-235, but since U-238 gobbles up all neutrons
which come by at intermediate speeds, chain-reaction fission in uranium
cannot occur in nature, where each atom of U-235 is surrounded by atoms
of U-238 as well as by other neutron-absorbing impurities.
From
this it was clear that a
chain reaction could be continued in either of two cases: (1) if very
pure natural uranium could be mixed with a substance (called a
"moderator") which would slow down neutrons without absorbing them or
(2) if a mass of U-235 alone could be obtained so large that the fast
neutrons emitted by fission would slow down to splitting speed before
they escaped from the mass. The former reaction could probably be
controlled, but the latter mass of U-235 would almost certainly explode
spontaneously, since there are always a few slow neutrons floating
around in space to start the chain reaction. Even in 1939 scientists
guessed that ordinary water, heavy water (made of hydrogen with a
nucleus of a neutron and a proton instead of only one proton), or
carbon would make good moderators for a controlled reaction. They also
knew at least four ways in which, by physical methods, U-235 could be
separated from U-238.
At
the very end of 1939,
scientists had worked out what happened when U-238 gobbled up
intermediate speed neutrons. It would change from 92 U-238 to 92 U-239,
but almost at once the U-239, which is unstable, would shoot out a
negative charge (beta ray or electron) from one of the 147 neutrons in
its nucleus, turning that neutron into a proton, and leaving the weight
at 239 while raising its positive charges (atomic number) to 93. This
would be a new element, one number beyond uranium, and therefore named
neptunium after the planet Neptune, one planet beyond Uranus as we move
outward in the solar system. Theory seemed to show that the new
"transuraniac" element 93 Np-239 would not be stable, but would soon
(it turned out to be about two days) shoot out another electron from a
neutron along with energy in the form of gamma rays. This would give a
new transuraniac element number 94 with mass of 239. This second
transuraniac element was called plutonium, with symbol 94 Pu-239. At
the very end of 1939 theory seemed to indicate that this plutonium,
like U-235, would be fissured by slow neutrons, if a sufficiently large
lump of it could be made. Moreover, since it would be a different
element, with 94 positive charges, it could be separated from the 92
U-238, in which it was created, by chemical methods (usually much
easier than the physical methods of separation required for isotopes of
the same element).
Theory
reached this far by the
spring of 1940. At that time, in the space of the months April to June,
several things happened: (1) the Nazis overran Denmark and Norway,
capturing Bohr in one country and the world's only heavy-water factory
in the other country; (2) news reached America that the Nazis had
forbidden all further sales of Czechoslovakia's uranium ores and had
taken over the greater part of Germany's major physical research
laboratory, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, for uranium
research; (3) a blanket of secrecy was dropped throughout the world on
scientific research on nuclear fission; and (4) the Nazis overran the
Netherlands, Belgium, and France, capturing, among others,
Joliot-Curie. At that time uranium was a largely worthless commodity of
which a few tons a year was used for coloring ceramics, it was produced
only incidentally as a byproduct of efforts to produce other minerals
such as cobalt or radium. Just before war began, Edgar Sengier,
managing director of Union Minière of Katanga, Belgian Congo,
learned from Joliot-Curie his discovery of chain fission of
Uranium-23s. Accordingly, after the fall of France, Sengier ordered all
available uranium ore, 1,250 tons of it, shipped to New York. This ore
was 65 percent uranium oxide, compared to marketable North American
ores of 0.2 percent, and the full-scale postwar exploitation of South
African ores of .03 percent! For more than two years Sengier could find
no one in the United States interested in his ores, which lay in a
warehouse on Staten Island until the end of 1942.
Just
before the curtain of
secrecy on atomic research fell in the spring of 1940, astounding
information on the subject was published in Soviet Russia, but, like
most Russian-language publications, w-as ignored in the outer world. In
1939 the Soviet Academy of Sciences set up, under the chairmanship of
V. I. Vernadsky, director and founder (1922) of the Leningrad Radium
Institute, an "Isotopes Committee" to work on the separation of uranium
isotopes and the production of heavy water. The first cyclotron in
Europe, an atom smasher of four million electron volts (4 MeV) which
had been operational since 1937, went into full experimental use in
April 1940, and, at the same time, the Academy of Sciences ordered
immediate construction of a cyclotron of 1 l MeV, comparable to the
world's largest, the 60-inch cyclotron at the University of California,
operated by Ernest 0. Lawrence, the inventor of these machines (Nobel
Prize, 1939).
In
this same fatal spring of
1940, a conference on isotope separation in Moscow publicly discussed
the problem of separation of U-235; subsequently, Y. B. Khariton and Y.
B. Zeldovich published a paper on the problem of the critical mass for
spontaneous explosion of this isotope ("The Kinetics of Chain
Decomposition of Uranium," in Zhurnal Eksperimentalnoi i
teoreticheskoi,
X, 1940, 477). This was followed by publication of similar papers, some
even in 1941, which might have shown clearly to anyone who wished to
see that the Soviet Union was further developed than the United States
at that time. No one, unfortunately, did wish to see. About the same
time, Edwin A. McMillan (Nobel Prize, 1951) and Philip H. Abelson,
using E. O. Lawrence's great cyclotron at Berkeley, California, had
studied the results arising from neutron bombardment of Uranium-238,
and indicated the nature of 93 neptunium and the fissionable
possibilities of 94 plutonium (Physical Review, June
15, 1940).
Bohr, as well as Louis A. Turner of Princeton, had already indicated
some of the characteristics, including fissionability, of plutonium.
The
Soviet position in atomic
research in 1940 is astonishing in view of the depredations inflicted
on Soviet scientists by Stalin in the purges of 1937-1939. In June
1940, Soviet science in this subject was about on a level with that of
the German scientists who remained in Nazi Germany, although both were
far behind the refugee scientists who were still making their ways
westward to the English-speaking world. The Soviet scientists were,
apparently, interested in atomic research only for industrial power
purposes, and were not much concerned with achieving atomic explosives.
Accordingly, they concentrated on atomic piles of mixed uranium
isotopes, rather than on uranium separation, and most of their work was
suspended after the Nazi invasion in 1941. In a similar way the
remaining German scientists, although seeking the bomb, decided in
February 1942 that large-scale separation of isotopes was too expensive
to be practical, and spent the rest of the war years on the hopeless
task of trying to devise an atomic pile which could be used as a bomb.
The great German error was their failure to reach the conception of
"critical mass," the point which had been published in Russia in 1940.
In
the United States and
Britain the impact of the events of 1940 was much more intense among
the refugee scientists than among the Americans. On the whole, the
refugees had a higher level both of scientific training and of
political awareness than the native scientists, and most of the
outstanding American scientists had acquired their specialized
knowledge in Europe, chiefly at Göttingen or elsewhere in Germany.
As early as April 1939, a group of Hungarian refugees, led by Leo
Szilard and including Eugen Wigner, Edward Teller, and John von
Neumann, tried to establish a voluntary censorship of research
information and to arouse the American government to the significance
of the possible atom bomb. On March 17, 1939, Fermi visited the admiral
in charge of the Technical Division of Navy Operations but could arouse
no interest. In July Szilard, driven once by Wigner and a second time
by Teller, made two visits to Einstein and persuaded him to send a
letter and memorandum to President Roosevelt through the banker
Alexander Sachs. The President read the material on October 11, 1939,
and the wheels of government began to move, but very slowly. Only on
December 6, 1941, the day before Pearl Harbor, was the decision taken
to make an all-out effort to unlock atomic energy.
When
the curtain of secrecy
fell in June 1940, all the theory needed for the task was known by all
capable physicists; what was not known was (1) that their theories
would work, and (2) how the immense resources needed for the task could
be mobilized. As late as 1939, less than an ounce of uranium metal had
ever been made in the United States. Now it was necessary to make tons
of it in extremely refined form. To build an atomic pile for a
controlled nuclear reaction, hundreds of tons of heavy water or of
graphite refined to a degree hitherto unknown were also needed. This
task, entrusted to the direction of Arthur H. Compton (Nobel Prize,
1927), with Fermi doing the actual work, was set up at the University
of Chicago. The pile of purified graphite with lumps of uranium all
through it was built in a squash court under the West Stands of Stagg
Field, where football had been discontinued. The pile of graphite,
shaped as a roughly flattened sphere about 24 feet in diameter, had
12,400 pounds of uranium in small scattered lumps distributed in a cube
at its center. Neutron counters, thermometers, and other instruments
kept track of the fission rate going on inside it. Before the top
layers could be added, these indicators began to rise increasingly
rapidly to danger levels; therefore rods of cadmium steel were inserted
through the graphite lattice. Cadmium, which absorbs large quantities
of neutrons without being changed, could be used to hold back the
fission process until the pile was finished. On December 2, 1942,
before a team of scientists, these cadmium rods were slowly withdrawn
to the point where a chain nuclear reaction took off. It could be
damped down or speeded up to explosive level simply by pushing the rods
in or pulling them out. This first sustained nuclear reactor was a
great success, but it contributed little toward an atom bomb. Within
it, at full operation, plutonium was made at a rate which would require
70,000 years to obtain enough for a bomb. This pile operated on
purified natural uranium in which the U-238 was 140 times the U-235.
To
separate U-235 from U-238
by physical methods, four techniques were attempted on parallel paths.
Two of these ceased to be significant after the end of 1943. The two
survivors were gas diffusion and electromagnetic separation. In the
latter, gaseous compounds of uranium were electrically charged so that
they would move along a vacuum tube and pass through a powerful magnet
which made them swerve. The heavier U-238 compounds would swerve less
than the slightly lighter U-235 compounds, and the two could be
separated. Using the gigantic new cyclotron magnet at the University of
California, which was r84 inches across, Ernest O. Laurence and Emilio
Segre showed that it would require about 45,ooo such units to separate
a pound of U-235 a day.
The
electromagnetic separator
plant (called Y-12) as set up at Oak Ridge in 1943 covered 825 acres
and was housed in 8 large buildings (t\vo of which were 543 feet by 312
feet). Several thousand magnets, most of which were 20 feet by 20 feet
by 2 feet, consumed astronomical quantities of electricity in
separating uranium isotopes into gigantic tanks. These tanks, weighing
fourteen tons each, were pulled out of line by as much as three inches
by the magnetic attractions created, straining the pipes carrying
uranium compound, and eventually they had to be fastened to the floor.
Since copper for electrical connections was in such short supply,
14,000 tons of silver from the Treasury reserve of American paper money
was secretly taken from the Treasury vaults (although still carried
publicly on the Treasury balance sheets) and made into wiring for the
Y-12 plant. From this plant came much of the U-23s used in the
Hiroshima A-bomb.
The
gaseous-diffusion method,
which had been carried fairly far by the British before America took it
over, took advantage of the fact that atoms of lighter U-235 gas move
more rapidly than the heavier U-238 and thus pass more rapidly through
a porous barrier. If a mixture of the t\vo isotopes, in the only
available gaseous form of the unstable and violently corrosive uranium
hexafluoride, were pumped thus through 4,000 successive barriers, with
billions of holes, each not over 4 ten-millionths of an inch, the
mixture after the last barrier would be largely the U-235 form of the
compound (go percent pure).
By
the end of April 1943, in
three adjacent valleys near Oak Ridge, Tennessee, three plants were
under construction for gaseous diffusion and electromagnetic separation
of U-235 and for a large uranium pile to make plutonium out of U-238.
By the end of the war, Oak Ridge, covering 70 square miles, had a
population of 78,000 persons and was the fifth largest community in
Tennessee. Because the plutonium plant was so dangerous, owing to its
enormous generation of heat and radioactivity, a larger and more
isolated plant was begun on a tract of 670 square miles near Hanford,
Washington. A construction camp of 60,000 workers was set up there in
April 1943; construction of the first fission pile was begun in June;
and it began to operate in January 1945. It is interesting to note that
the two sites at Oak Ridge and Hanford were chosen for their proximity
to the hydroelectric power plants of the Tennessee Valley Authority and
Grand Coulee which had been built by Roosevelt's New Deal. By the end
of the war, nuclear production was using a large fraction of the total
electricity produced in the United States, and would have been
impossible without these great electrical-generating constructions of
the New Deal (which were still regarded with intense hatred by American
conservatives).
A
third site, for research on
the bomb itself and its final assembly, was built on a flat mesa near
Los Alamos, New Mexico, twenty miles from Santa Fe. Robert Oppenheimer
of the University of California, with the world's greatest assemblage
of working scientists (including almost a dozen Nobel laureates),
planned and constructed the earliest bombs at that isolated spot.
Until
May 1, 1943, these
complex projects were operated by committees and subcommittees of
scientists of which the chief chairmen were James B. Conant, Vannevar
Bush, E. O. Lawrence, Harold Urey, and A. O. Compton. The actual
construction work was delegated to the United States Army Corps of
Engineers in charge of Leslie R. Groves, an expert on constructing
buildings, whose chief achievement was the Pentagon Building in
Washington. From his graduation at West Point, Groves had held only
desk jobs, had been a lieutenant for seventeen years, and was still a
major when war began. He was raised to brigadier general on his
appointment as head of the Manhattan District, in charge of the
physical administration of the atom-bomb project in September . On May
1, 1943, he took over total charge of the whole project.
An
earnest, hard-working man,
Groves had little imagination, no sense of humor, and not much
familiarity with science or scientists (whom he regarded as
irresponsible "long-hairs" ). Although he drove himself and his
associates relentlessly, he greatly hampered the progress of the task
by his fanatical obsession with secrecy. This obsession was based on
his belief that the project involved fundamental scientific secrets
(there were no such secrets). His efforts were quite in vain, as the
only real secrets, the technological ones regarding isotope separation,
critical mass, and trigger mechanisms of the bombs, were revealed to
the Soviet Union, almost as soon as they were achieved, by British
scientists. The secrecy, thus, was secrecy for the American public
rather than for the Germans or the Russians (neither of whom were
actually seeking the information, since, like General Groves himself,
they had little faith in the feasibility of the project).
For
security reasons General
Groves "compartmentalized" the work, and allowed only about a dozen
persons to see the project as a whole. Consequently, the vast majority
of those working on the project were not allowed to know what they were
really doing or why, and this lack of perspective greatly delayed the
solution of problems. The whole project of about 150,000 persons were
segregated from their fellow citizens; all communications were cut off
or censored; and the project was overrun with guards and security
officials who did not hesitate to eavesdrop, read mail, monitor
telephones, record conversations, and isolate individuals. These
activities significantly delayed American achievement of the atom bomb
without achieving their ostensible purpose, since there is no evidence
either that the three enemy Powers could have made the bomb or that
Russia's making of the bomb was significantly delayed by General
Groves's extreme degree of secrecy.
General
Groves's personal
position was paradoxical. He took the assignment with disappointment
and reluctance, had no real faith that the project would be successful
until it actually was, carried secrecy to the nth degree, yet was
convinced that the engineering problems were so colossal that the
Soviet Union, even if it had the knowledge of how we did it, would be
unable to repeat the achievement in less than twenty years, if ever. I
myself heard General Groves make these statements in 1945. On the other
hand, General Groves was a tireless and driving manager and an expert
manipulator of the personal, political, and military arrangements which
made the bomb possible.
In
the last two years of the
project (July 1943-July 1945), it passed through crisis after crisis in
a frenzied sequence which made it appear, every alternative month, that
it would be a $2 billion fiasco. In January 1944, when the enormous
gaseous-diffusion plant at Oak Ridge was under full construction but
without the diffusion barriers, since no effective ones could be made,
it became necessary to junk the barriers on which tests had been made
for almost two years and to turn to mass production of millions of
square feet of a new barrier which had scarcely been tested. When this
plant began to operate, section by section, at the end of the year, it
worked so ineffectively that it seemed almost impossible that the
concentration of U-235 could ever be raised over 15 or 20 percent
without the construction of miles of additional barrier which would
delay the bomb by months and use up fantastic quantities of uranium
hexafluoride gas just to fill the chambers. Similarly, the
electromagnetic separator plants suffered breakdown after breakdown,
and operated at a level which made it seem impossible to raise the
U-235 content over 50 percent.
By
April 1944, it seemed clear
that 95 percent U-23s could not be obtained before 1946 even if the
gas-diffusion and electromagnetic plants were run in series instead of
parallel, with the latter starting off with 20 percent U-235 from the
former instead of both trying to process natural uranium from scratch.
At that point, Oppenheimer discovered that Philip Abelson (who had
originally discovered how to make uranium hexafluoride) had been
working for the navy, trying to make enriched U-235 to be used to
propel a nuclear submarine. He was using thermal separation, one of the
two methods (the other was centrifuge) that the Manhattan District had
rejected in 1942. Thermal separation was based on the fact that a
liquid mixture in a container with a hot wall and an opposite cold wall
will tend to separate; the heavier liquid will tend to accumulate near
the cold wall, will cool, and sink, while the lighter liquid will tend
to gather near the hot wall, get warmer, and rise. Abelson, who knew
nothing of the work of the Manhattan District, or of the successful
nuclear pile at Chicago, was working at the Philadelphia Navy Yard
where he had 102 vertical, double concentric pipes, each 48 feet long,
in which the inner pipe was heated by steam, the outer pipe was kept
cool, and the ring-shaped space between the two was filled with a
uranium liquid mixture whose two isotopes tended to separate from each
other. From the top of these pipes he hoped to be able to draw
one-fifth ounce a day of 5 percent U-235 by July 1, 1944.
Groves
grasped at this straw,
and on June 27, 1944 signed a contract for a thermal-diffusion plant at
Oak Ridge to be ready in ninety days. The new plant, which eventually
cost over $15 million, was 522 feet long, 82 feet wide, and 75 feet
high, and was to contain twenty-one exact copies of Abelson's plant
(2,142 tubes in all); it would yield U-23s enriched to a few percentage
points to be fed into the inadequate gas-diffusion plant. It began to
produce in March 1945. By placing the three separation methods in
sequence and working night and day to improve the efficiency of all
three, it began to look as if U-23: for one bomb might be available in
the second half of 1945.
These
disappointments with
U-23s naturally turned men's hopes to the plutonium being made at
Hanford. When the first giant pile went "critical" there on September
27, 1944, it shut itself down after a day and then restarted itself
again after another day. Frenzied study and consultation with the
smaller piles at Oak Ridge and at Chicago finally revealed the
unexpected production, within the pile, of a neutron-absorbing isotope,
Xenon 135, with a half-life of 9 hours; the pile started itself again
when this decayed, and thus stopped draining neutrons from the uranium
fission process. This problem was eventually solved by greatly
increasing the uranium tubes in the pile.
All
through this worry, Los
Alamos was having problems wit11 the trigger mechanisms. Experiment and
calculations eventually showed that the critical mass of U-235 was less
than 11 pounds, about the size of a small grapefruit, if it were
properly compressed and in spherical shape. To achieve this, two
mechanisms were conceived, known as the "gun" and "implosion." The
"gun" was designed to create a critical mass hy shooting a lump of
U-235 at high velocity into a sub-critical mass so that the combination
would be over the critical mass. The resulting shape, however, was so
un-spherical that it was calculated that the whole amount of U-235
necessary for the gun trigger bomb would be almost twice the ideal
critical mass. This increase from about 11 to about 21 pounds of U-235
per bomb would extend the date on which the bomb was ready by weeks,
since the output of U-235 was so small.
The
second trigger, called
"implosion," planned to make a hollow sphere of U-235 or plutonium
which was critical in total amount but kept sub-critical by the hole in
the center. This metallic sphere would be crushed together into the
space in its center to make a critical mass there by the explosion of
twenty or more crescent-shaped pieces of TNT which surrounded the
sphere. The difficulty was that all the surrounding TNT had to explode
at the same instant in order to ram the nuclear material together at
the center; any lag would simply bulge the nuclear material erratically
and prevent the achievement of critical mass. All the ordnance experts,
including Captain Parsons, of the United States Navy, in charge of this
part of the work at Los Alamos, were convinced that such accurate
timing of TNT explosion, with two dozen pieces exploded within a
millionth of a second, would be impossible.
This
brought up another crisis
because Glenn Seaborg (Nobel Prize, 1951) and Segre predicted and then
demonstrated that the Plutonium-238 which they were seeking from the
Hanford piles spontaneously changed itself, at a slow rate, into its
isotope Plutonium-240. Since Pu-240 was a spontaneous fissioner, this
impurity would prematurely explode the target mass of plutonium in the
gun-type trigger, since the inefficiency of the gun mechanism made it
necessary to have the target mass so large (perfectly safe with U-235,
but suicide with Pu-238 if there was Pu-240 in it also). The plutonium,
therefore, had to be used with an implosion trigger, and, if that could
not be devised, the $400 million cost of the Hanford plant had been
practically thrown away.
Fortunately,
George
Kistiakowsky, chemistry professor from Harvard and a great authority on
explosives, came to Los Alamos, and by the spring of 1945 had worked
out an ignition by which all the TNT would explode within a few
millionths of a second. This saved the plutonium scheme, but it was
clear that this material would hardly be available in a bomb amount
until late summer of 1945 and that there would not be enough to test
the implosion trigger on it, if it were to be used in the war.
By
July 1945, everyone
concerned with the bomb was working around the clock, and a few had
begun to fear that the war would be over before the bomb would be
ready. On the other hand, a group of the scientists, led by Szilard who
had instigated the project, were beginning to agitate that the bomb
should not be used against Japan. Their motives \have been questioned
since, but were both simple and honorable. They had pressed for the
atom bomb in 1939 because they feared that Germany was working on one
and might get it first. Once the defeat of Germany ended that danger,
many scientists regarded continued work on the bomb as immoral and no
longer defensive (since there was no chance of Japan's developing one).
No one in July 1945 realized that all the significant information about
making the bomb, notably the relative merits of different kinds of
uranium, methods of plutonium separation, and the two kinds of trigger
mechanisms, had been sent on to the Soviet Union, chiefly from Klaus
Fuchs and David Greenglass by way of Harry Gold and Anatoli A. Yakovlev
in June 1945. Even today American "security" agents are trying to keep
secret these facts which have been fully explained in easily available
technical publications.
For
many years after 1945 the
American people were kept in a state of alarm by stories of "networks"
of "atomic spy rings," made up of Communist Party members or
sympathizers, who were prowling the country to obtain by espionage what
the Soviet Union was unable to achieve by its own efforts in scientific
research and industrial development....
When
we speak of atomic
secrets and spying, we must distinguish three quite different types of
information: (1) scientific principles, (2) questions of general
production tactics (such as, which methods are workable or unworkable),
and (3) detailed information of engineering construction. No secrets of
Group I existed; and secrets of Group 3 would usually have required
elaborate blueprints and formulas which could not be passed hy spying
methods of communication. There remains information of Group 2, which
could be extremely helpful in saving wasted time and effort. In most
cases information of this type would have little meaning to anyone
without a minimum of scientific training. This kind of information, so
far as present information allows a judgment, would seem to have been
passed to the Russians from two English scientists, Alan Nunn May and
Klaus Fuchs, and an American Army enlisted man, David Greenglass, in
the period to September 1945. Nunn May had little directly to do with
the A-bomb, but he had worked on the heavy-water nuclear pile in Canada
and had visited the graphite pile in Chicago several times. He gave
Soviet agents Lieutenant Angelov and Colonel Zabotin, in Canada,
considerable information about atomic piles, as well as the daily
output of U-235 and plutonium at Oak Ridge (400 and 800 grams,
respectively), and handed over a trace of the uranium isotope U- 233.
The
information from Fuchs,
which was much more valuable, culminated about the same period (June
1945) and gave information on gaseous diffusion, the two trigger
devices, and the fact that work had been done without much success
toward a fusion H-bomb. Greenglass, at the same time, gave the same
Russian contact, Harry Gold, a rough sketch of part of the "implosion
trigger" for the A-bomb. There may have been other spying episodes of
which we are not now aware, but the information passed to the Russians
of which we are now aware probably did not contribute much significant
aid to their achievement of the A-bomb. The H-bomb will be considered
later. Statements frequently made that the Russians could not have made
the A-bomb without information obtained from espionage, or statements
that such information speeded up their acquisition of the bomb by years
(or even by eighteen months) are most unlikely, although here again we
cannot be sure. They must have been saved from trying some
unremunerative lines of endeavor, but the real problems in making the
bomb were engineering and fiscal problems, which Russia could overcome,
on a crash basis, once it was known that we had such a bomb. This
knowledge was given to the world by the destruction of Hiroshima.
Chapter
61—The Twentieth-Century Pattern
The
decision to use the bomb
against Japan marks one of the critical turning points in the history
of our times....The scientists who were consulted had no information on
the status of the war itself, had no idea how close to the end Japan
already was, and had no experience to make judgments on this matter.
The politicians and military men had no real conception of the nature
of the new weapon or of the drastic revolution it offered to human
life. To them it was simply a "bigger bomb," even a "much bigger bomb,"
and, by that fact alone, they welcomed it.
Some
people, like General
Groves, wanted it to be used to justify the $2 billion they had spent.
A large group sided with him because the Democratic leaders in the
Congress had authorized these expenditures outside proper congressional
procedures and had cooperated in keeping them from almost all members
of both houses by concealing them under misleading appropriation
headings. Majority Leader John W. McCormack (later Speaker) once told
me, half joking, that if the bomb had not worked he expected to face
penal charges. Some Republicans, notably Congressman Albert J. Engel of
Michigan, had already shown signs of a desire to use congressional
investigations and newspaper publicity to raise questions about misuse
of public funds. During one War Department discussion of this problem,
a skilled engineer, Jack Madigan, said: "If the project succeeds, there
won't be any investigation. If it doesn't, they won't investigate
anything else." Moreover, some air-force officers were eager to protect
the relative position of their service in the postwar demobilization
and drastic reduction of financial appropriations by using a successful
A-bomb drop as an argument that Japan had been defeated by air power
rather than by naval or ground forces.
After
it was all over,
Director of Military Intelligence for the Pacific Theater of War Alfred
McCormack, who was probably in as good position as anyone for judging
the situation, felt that the Japanese surrender could have been
obtained in a few weeks by blockade alone: "The Japanese had no longer
enough food in stock, and their fuel reserves were practically
exhausted. We had begun a secret process of mining all their harbors,
which was steadily isolating them from the rest of the world. If we had
brought this operation to its logical conclusion, the destruction of
Japan's cities with incendiary and other bombs would have been quite
unnecessary. But General Norstad declared at Washington that this
blockading action was a cowardly proceeding unworthy of the Air Force.
It was therefore discontinued."
...
The degree to which it has
since been distorted for partisan purposes may be seen from the
contradictory charges that the efforts to get a bomb slowed down after
the defeat of Germany and the opposite charge that they speeded up in
that period. The former charge, aimed at the scientists, especially the
refugees at Chicago who had given America the bomb by providing the
original impetus toward it, was that these scientists, led by Szilard,
were anti-Nazi, pro-Soviet, and un-American, and worked desperately for
the bomb so long as Hitler was a threat, but on his demise opposed all
further work for fear it would make the United States too strong
against the Soviet Union. The opposite charge Noms that the Manhattan
District worked with increasing frenzy after Germany's defeat, because
General Groves was anti-Soviet. A variant of this last charge is that
Groves was a racist and was willing to use the bomb on non-whites like
the Japanese but unwilling to use it against the Germans. It is true
that Groves in his report of April 23, 1945, which was presented to
President Truman by Secretary Stimson two days later, said that Japan
had always been the target. The word "always" here probably goes hack
only to the date on which it was realized that the bomb would be so
heavy that it could not be handled by any American plane in the
European theater and, if used there, would have to be dropped from a
British 1,ancaster, while in the Pacific the B-29 could handle it.
...
The original decision to
make the bomb had been a correct one based on fear that Germany would
get it first. On this basis the project might have been stopped as soon
as it Noms clear that Germany was defeated without it. By that time
other forces had come into the situation, forces too powerful to stop
the project. It is equally clear that the defeat of Japan did not
require the A-bomb, just as it did not require Russian entry into the
war or an American invasion of the Japanese home islands. But, again,
other factors involving interests and nonrational considerations were
too powerful. However, if the United States had not finished the bomb
project or had not used it, it seems most unlikely that the Soviet
Union would have made its postwar efforts to get the bomb.
There
are several reasons for
this: (1) the bomb's true significance was even more remote from Soviet
political and military leaders than from our own, and would have been
too remote to make the effort to get it worthwhile if the bomb had
never been demonstrated; (2) Soviet strategy had no interest in
strategic bombing, and their final decision to make the bomb, based on
our possession of it, involved changes in strategic ideas, and the
effort, almost from scratch, to obtain a strategic bombing plane (the
Tu-4) able to carry it; and (3) the strain on Soviet economic resources
from making the bomb was very large, in view of the Russian war damage.
Without the knowledge of the actual bomb which the Russian leaders
obtained from our demonstration of its power, they would almost
certainly not have made the effort to get the bomb if we had not used
it on Japan. [Russia was also working on the bomb. Russia was well
aware of German progress in bomb development at the time.]
On
the other hand, if we had
not used the bomb on Japan, we would have been quite incapable of
preventing the Soviet ground forces from expanding wherever they were
ordered in Eurasia in 1946 and later. We do not know where they might
have been ordered because we do not know if the Kremlin is insatiable
for conquest, as some "experts" claim, or is only seeking buffer
security zones, as other "experts" believe, but it is clear that Soviet
orders to advance were prevented by American possession of the A-bomb
after 1945. It does seem clear that ultimately Soviet forces would have
taken all of Germany, much of the Balkans, probably Manchuria, and
possibly other fringe areas across central Asia, including Iran. Such
an advance of Soviet power to the Rhine, the Adriatic, and the Aegean
would have been totally unacceptable to the United States, but, without
the atom bomb, we could hardly have stopped it. Moreover, such an
advance would have led to Communist or Communist-dominated coalition
governments in Italy and France. If the Soviet forces had advanced to
the Persian Gulf across Iran, this might have led to such
Communist-elected governments in India and much of Africa.
From
these considerations it
seems likely that American suspension of the atomic project after the
defeat of Germany or failure to use the bomb against Japan would have
led eventually to American possession of the bomb in an otherwise
intolerable position of inferiority to Russia or even to war in order
to avoid such a position (but with little hope, from war, to avoid such
inferiority). This would have occurred even if we assume the more
optimistic of two assumptions about Russia: (1) that they would not
themselves proceed to make the bomb and (2) that they are not
themselves insatiably expansionist. On the whole, then, it seems that
the stalemate of mutual nuclear terror without war in which the world
now exists is preferable to what might have occurred if the United
States had made the decision either to suspend the atomic project after
the defeat of Germany or to refuse to use it on Japan. Any other
possible decisions (such as an open demonstration of its power before
an international audience in order to obtain an international
organization able to control the new power) would probably have led to
one of the two outcomes already described. But it must be clearly
recognized that the particular stalemate of nuclear terror in which the
world now lives derives directly from the two decisions made in 1945 to
continue the project after the defeat of Germany and to use the bomb on
Japan.
This
nuclear stalemate, in
turn, leads to pervasive consequences in all aspects of the world in
the twentieth century. It gives rise to a frenzied race between the two
super-Powers to outstrip each other in the application of science and
rationality to life, beginning with weapons. This effort provides such
expensive equipment and requires such skill from the operators of this
equipment that it makes obsolete the army of temporarily drafted
citizen-soldiers of the nineteenth century and of "the armed hordes" of
World War I and even of World War II, and requires the use of highly
trained, professional, mercenary fighting men.
The
growth of the army of
specialists, foretold by General de Gaulle in 1934 and foreseen by
others, destroys one of the three basic foundations of political
democracy. These three bases are (I) that men are relatively equal in
factual power; (2) that men have relatively equal access to the
information needed to make a government's decisions; and (3) that men
have a psychological readiness to accept majority rule in return for
those civil rights which will allow any minority to work to build
itself up to become a majority.
Just
as weapons development
has destroyed the first of these bases, so secrecy, security
considerations, and the growing complexity of the issues have served to
undermine the second of these. The third, which was always the weakest
of the three, is still in the stage of relative vitality and relative
acceptability that it had in the nineteenth century, but is in much
greater danger from the threat of outside forces, notably the changes
in the other two bases, plus the greater danger today from external war
or from domestic economic breakdown.
One
great danger in regard to
the second of these basic foundations (availability of information
necessary for decision-making) is the impact upon it of the expansion
of rationalization. While this has led to automatic and mechanical
storage and retrieval of information, it has also led to efforts to
establish automatic electronic decision-making on the basis of the
growing volume and complexity of such information. This renunciation of
the basic feature of being human—judgment and
decision-making—is very dangerous and is a renunciation of the
very faculty which gave man his success in the evolutionary struggle
with other living creatures. If this whole process ... is now to be
abandoned in favor of some other, unconscious and mechanical, method of
decision-making, in which the individual's flexibility and awareness
are to be subordinated to a rigid group process, then man must yield to
those forms of life, such as the social insects, which have already
carried this method to a high degree of perfection.
This
whole process has been made the central focus of a recent novel, Fail-Safe,
by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. The reduction of men to
automatons in a complicated nexus of expensive machines is well shown
in that book. To its picture must be added two points: (1) It does not
require a blown condenser, as in the book, to unleash the full dangers
of the situation; it is a situation which is dangerous in itself even
if it functions perfectly; and (2) the avoidance of the ultimate total
catastrophe in the book, because a few men, at and near the top, were
able to resume the human functions of decision, self-sacrifice, love of
their fellow-men, and hope for the future, should not conceal the fact
that the whole world in that story came within minutes of handing its
resources over to the insects.
Regardless
of the outcome of
the situation, it is increasingly clear that, in the twentieth century,
the expert will replace ... the democratic voter in control of the
political system. This is because planning will inevitably replace
laissez faire in the relationships between the two systems. This
planning may not be single or unified, but it will be planning, in
which the main framework and operational forces of the system will be
established and limited by the experts on the governmental side; then
the experts within the big units on the economic side will do their
planning within these established limitations. Hopefully, the elements
of choice and freedom may survive for the ordinary individual in that
he may be free to make a choice between two opposing political groups
(even if these groups have little policy choice within the parameters
of policy established by the experts) and he may have the choice to
switch his economic support from one large unit to another. But, in
general, his freedom and choice will be controlled within very narrow
alternatives by the fact that he will be numbered from birth and
followed, as a number, through his educational training, his required
military or other public service, his tax contributions, his health and
medical requirements, and his final retirement and death benefits.
Eventually,
in two or three
generations, as the ordinary individual who is not an expert or a
skilled professional soldier or a prominent industrial executive
becomes of less personal concern to the government, his contacts with
the government will become less direct and will take place increasingly
through intermediaries. Some movement in this direction may be seen
already in those cases where taxpayers whose incomes are entirely from
wages or salaries find that their whole tax is already paid by their
employer or in the decreasing need for the military draftee to be
called to serve by a letter from the President. The development of such
a situation, a kind of neo-feudalism, in which the relationships of
ordinary people to government cease to be direct and are increasingly
through intermediaries (who are private rather than public
authorities), ... [has already arrived].
One
consequence of the nuclear
rivalry has been the almost total destruction of international law and
the international community as they existed from the middle of the
seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth. That old
international law was based on a number of sharp rational distinctions
which no longer exist; these include the distinction between war and
peace, the rights of neutrals, the distinction between combatants and
noncombatants, the nature of the state, and the distinction between
public and private authority. These are now either destroyed or in
great confusion. We have already seen the obliteration of the
distinctions between combatants and noncombatants and between neutrals
and belligerents brought on by British actions in World War I. These
began with the blockade of neutrals, like the Netherlands, and the use
of floating mines in navigational waters. The Germans retaliated with
acts against Belgian civilians and with indiscriminate submarine
warfare. These kinds of actions continued in World War II with the
British night-bombing effort aimed at destroying civilian morale by the
destruction of workers' housing (Lord Cherwell's favorite tactic) and
the American fire raids against Tokyo. It is generally stated in
American accounts of the use of the first atom bomb that target
planning w as based on selection of military targets, and it is not
generally known even today that the official orders from Cabinet level
on this matter specifically said "military objectives surrounded by
workers' housing." The postwar balance of terror reached its peak of
total disregard both of noncombatants and of neutrals in the policies
of John Foster Dulles, w ho combined sanctimonious religion with
"massive retaliation wherever and whenever we judge fit" to the
complete destruction of any noncombatant or neutral status.
Most
other aspects of
traditional international law have also been destroyed. The Cold War
has left little to the old distinction between war and peace in whicl1
wars had to be formally declared and formally concluded. Hitler's
attacks without warning; the Korean War, which was not a "war" in
international law or in American constitutional law (since it was not
"declared" by Congress); and the fact that no peace treaty has been
signed with Germany to end World War II, while we are already engaged
in all kinds of undeclared warlike activities against the Soviet Union,
have combined to wipe out many of the distinctions between war and
peace which were so painfully established in the five hundred years
before Grotius died (in 1645).
Most
of these losses are
obvious hut there are others, equally significant hut not yet widely
recognized. The growth of international law in the late medieval and
Renaissance periods not only sought to make the distinctions we have
indicated, as a reaction against "feudal disorder"; it also sought to
make a sharp distinction between public and private authority (in order
to get rid of the feudal doctrine of dominia) and
to set up
sharp criteria of public authority involving the new doctrine of
sovereignty. One of the chief criteria of such sovereignty w-as ability
to maintain the peace and to enforce both law and order over a definite
territory; one of its greatest achievements was the elimination of
arbitrary non-sovereign private powers such as robber barons on land or
piracy on the sea. Under this conception, ability to maintain la\v and
order became the chief evidence of sovereignty, and the possession of
sovereignty became the sole mark of public authority and the existence
of a state. All this has now been destroyed. The Stimson Doctrine of
1931 ...in the American refusal to recognize Red China, shifted
recognition from the objective criterion of ability to maintain order
to the subjective criterion of approval of the form of government or
liking of a government's domestic behavior.
The
destruction of
international law, like the destruction of international order, has
gone much further than this. As long as the chief criterion for a
state's sovereignty, and hence of recognition, was ability to maintain
order, states in international law were regarded as equal. This concept
is still recognized in theory in such organizations as the Assembly of
the United Nations. But the achievement of nuclear weapons, by creating
two super-Powers in a Cold War, destroyed the fact of the equality of
states. This had the obvious result of creating Powers on two levels:
ordinary and super; but it had the less obvious, and more significant,
consequence of permitting the existence of states of lower levels of
power, far below the level of ordinary Powers. This arose because the
nuclear stalemate of the two super-Powers created an umbrella of fear
of precipitating nuclear war which falsified their abilities to act at
all.
As
a result, all kinds of
groups and individuals could do all kinds of actions to destroy law and
order without suffering the consequences of forcible retaliation by
ordinary powers or by the super-Powers, and could become recognized as
states when they were still totally lacking in the traditional
attributes of statehood. For example, the Léopoldsville group
were recognized as the real government of the whole Congo in spite of
the fact that they were incapable of maintaining law and order over the
area (or even in Léopoldsville itself). In a similar way a gang
of rebels in Yemen in 1962 were instantly recognized before they gave
any evidence whatever of ability to maintain control or of readiness to
assume the existing international obligations of the Yemen state, and
before it was established that their claims to have killed the king
were true. In Togo in the following year a band of disgruntled soldiers
killed the president, Sylvanus Olympio, and replaced him with a
recalled political exile.
Under
the umbrella of nuclear
stalemate, the boundaries of old states are shattered by guerrillas in
conflict, supported by outsiders; outside governments subsidize murders
or revolts, as the Russians did in Iraq in July 1958, or as Nasser of
Egypt did in Jordan, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere in the whole period
after 1953, and as the American CIA did in several places, successfully
in Iran in August 1953, and in Guatemala in May 1954, or very
unsuccessfully, as in the Cuban invasion of April 1961. Under the Cold
War umbrella, small groups or areas can obtain recognition as states
without any need to demonstrate the traditional characteristics of
statehood, namely, the ability to maintain their frontiers against
their neighbors by force and the ability to maintain order within these
frontiers. They can do this either by securing the intervention
(usually secret) of some outside Power or even by preventing the
intervention of a recognized Power fearful of precipitating nuclear or
lesser conflict. In this way areas with a few states (such as southeast
Asia) were shattered into many; states went out of existence or
appeared (as Syria did in 1958 and 1961); and so-called new states came
into existence by scores without reference to any traditional realities
of political power or to the established procedures of international
law.
The
number of separate states
registered as members in the United Nations rose steadily from 51 in
1945 to 82 in 1958 to 104 in 1961, and continued to rise. The
difference in power between the strongest and the weakest became
astronomical, and the whole mechanism of international relations,
outside the UN organization as well as within it, became more and more
remote from power considerations or even from reality, and became
enmeshed in subjective considerations of symbols, prestige, personal
pride, and petty spites. By 1963 single tribes in Africa were looking
toward recognition of statehood through membership in the UN even when
they lacked the financial resources to support a delegation at UN
headquarters in New York City or in the capitals of any major country
and were, indeed, incapable of controlling police forces to maintain
order in their own tribal areas.
In
this way the existence of
nuclear stalemate within the Cold War carried on the total destruction
of traditional international law and the gradual loss of meaning of the
established concepts of state and public authority, and opened the door
to a feudalization of authority somewhat similar to that which the
founders of the modern state system and of international law had sought
to overcome in the period from the twelfth century to the seventeenth.
Part Seventeen—Nuclear Rivalry and the Cold
War: American Atomic Supremacy: 1945-1950
Chapter 62—The
Factors
Historically,
the period 1945
to early 1963 forms a unity. During this period a number of factors
interacted upon one another to present a very complicated and
extraordinarily dangerous series of events. That mankind and civilized
life got through the period of almost two decades may be attributed to
a number of lucky chances rather than to any particular skill among the
two opposing political blocs or among the neutrals.
The
period as a whole is so
complex that no successful effort has been made by any historian to
present it as a unity. Instead, it is usually treated as a series of
separate, relatively isolated, developments, such as events in the Far
East, United States domestic history, Soviet domestic history,
developments in science and technology, the rise of the neutrals, and
other developments. Such a presentation is not adequate because it
falsifies the historical fact that these (and other) developments
occurred simultaneously, and constantly reacted upon one another.
Moreover, the central fact of the whole period, and the one which
dominated all the others, was the scientific and technological rivalry
between the United States and the Soviet Union, because this rivalry
formed the very foundation and core of the Cold War, which was
recognized by everyone to be the dominant political factor of the
period.
Unfortunately,
the Cold War is
almost always described in terms which put minor emphasis on, or which
may even neglect, the role of Soviet-American technological rivalry.
This is done because most historians do not feel competent to discuss
it; but chiefly it is done because much of the evidence is secret.
Because of such secrecy, the story of this Soviet-American
technological rivalry falls into two quite distinct, and even
contradictory, parts: (1) what the real situation was and (2) what
prevalent public opinion believed the situation to be. For example, in
1954-1955 the Soviet Union had a thermonuclear so-called H-bomb many
months before we did, when public opinion believed the opposite; again,
in late 1960 there was a widespread belief throughout the world in a
so-called "missile gap," or American inferiority in nuclear missile
weapons, when no such inferiority existed; and finally, for a period of
several years, from 1957 to about 1960, the Russians were in advance of
the United States and the free world generally in missile technology
and in missile-guidance mechanisms, although this was not reflected,
then or later, in any superiority in nuclear missile weapons, because
of their simultaneous inferiority in nuclear warheads for missiles, an
inferiority by a wide margin both in numbers and in variety of such
explosive weapons.
In
dealing with this central
factor of the world situation, the historian is prevented by secrecy on
both sides from making any assured or final judgments, and must simply
make a judicious estimate of the situation on the basis of available
information. Unfortunately, the influence of this factor is so central,
and thus so all-pervasive, that inability to be sure of the facts on
this matter brings a fair amount of uncertainty into many other areas,
such as, for example, the foreign policy of John Foster Dulles or the
real significance of the so-called "atomic espionage cases." Such
uncertainty, however, is always present in historical analysis of the
recent past, and most historians, knowing that the documents and thus
the facts are unavailable for contemporary history (say, the last
twenty years), usually leave the most recent past to others, to
political scientists, journalists, or biographers.
In
the history of the period
1945-1963 there are six chief factors: (1) the Cold War and the nuclear
balance; (2) demobilization and re-mobilization, with special emphasis
on inter-service rivalries and the pressures from industrial complexes;
(3) partisan political struggles in the United States, centering on the
rise and decline of unilateralism; (4) personal political struggles in
the Soviet Union, centering on the succession to Stalin; (5) intra-bloc
discords, centering on the relations between the United States and its
allies on one side and the relations between the Soviet Union and its
satellites on the other side; and (6) the role of neutralism, revolving
around backward nationalisms and anti-colonialism. The history of the
period can be understood only in terms of the interplay of these six
factors, in all their complexities, treated simultaneously, but before
we attempt to do this we must make a brief examination of each factor
separately in order to define our terms and to establish secondary
chronological sequences.
The
Cold War, as we shall see
in the next chapter, was an inevitable consequence of the defeats of
Germany, Japan, France, and Italy, and the collapse of Nationalist
China, but it was raised to an acute and sustained crisis by the
existence of nuclear weapons and the development of rocket missiles.
The combination threatened the survival of man as a civilized being,
although it probably did not threaten his continued existence, after a
nuclear holocaust, on a degraded social level as a distinct species of
living being. The fear of human extermination was spread by many
well-intentioned, mistaken, or mercenary people, and reached its peak,
perhaps, in the commercial success of Nevil Shute's On the
Beach,
both as novel and as motion picture. The annihilation of man, as shown
in such works, is technically possible, but will certainly not result
from the weapons which would be used in total thermonuclear war.
However, there is always a remote possibility that a madman such as
Hitler might decide to destroy the human race as revenge for the
frustration of his insane ambitions. This could be done in a number of
ways, of which the simplest would be to encase a large number of
thermonuclear bombs in thick layers of cobalt; the ensuing fallout of
radioactive cobalt 60 could extinguish all animal life on earth
(excluding most plants, insects, and other invertebrates). No sane
policy would use such a bomb, since cobalt 60 is 320 times as
radioactive as radium, and it would require at least four hundred such
bombs, each at least one ton in weight, to release enough radioactivity
to extinguish all animal life on earth.
However,
even without a cobalt
bomb, any extensive nuclear war would kill hundreds of millions of
human beings and would release sufficient radioactivity to inflict such
extensive genetic damage that subsequent generations of human beings
would produce a substantial percentage of monsters; this fact, added to
the genetic damage to bird-life, might create a situation where men
would be unable to compete successfully with insects (who are much more
immune to genetic damage from radioactivity ) .
The
balance of nuclear weapons
is a central factor in the Cold War, since no agreement on cessation of
nuclear testing, nuclear disarmament, conventional disarmament, or
relaxation of tension can occur until both sides recognize that a
nuclear balance of equilibrium (the so-called "nuclear stalemate") has
been achieved. This came close to achievement early in 1950, when both
sides had atomic weapons, hut was destroyed at that time by President
Truman's order to proceed with the development of the hydrogen bomb. It
was not achieved again until the end of 1962, because when both sides
had achieved the H-bomb by 1956, that balance was disturbed by the
missile race, which reached its widest disequilibrium with the Soviet
success with "Sputnik" in October 1957. This led to the subsequent race
to obtain an intercontinental ballistic missile with nuclear warhead
(ICBM) in 1957-1962.
By
1963, w hen both sides had
these weapons, the balance of terror was established and negotiation
was possible. As a matter of fact, the balance was not equal, since the
American total capability in nuclear war was far superior to that of
the Soviet Union in 1963, but weapons development had reached
approximately the same point; the United States was more vulnerable to
Russia's fewer weapons because a larger part of its population was
industrial and urban, and the Soviet Union had growing problems in
other areas, notably its alienation from Communist China. At the same
time, gross fissures began to appear in the Western bloc from De
Gaulle's efforts to turn Europe out of the American camp and into a
Third ("neutralist") Force. About the same time, the Cuban Crisis of
October 1962, somewhat like the Fashoda Crisis of 1898, by bringing the
United States and the Soviet Union to the edge of a war that neither
wanted, revealed to both the mutual balance of error and the need to do
something about it. All this marked the end of the historical period
which began in 1945.
The chief subdivisions of the history of nuclear
balance over the period 1945-1963 are as follows:
1.
The American Atomic
Monopoly from Alamogordo in June 1945 to the first Soviet atom bomb
("Joe I") in August 1949.
2.
A brief nuclear balance from 1949 to 1950.
3.
The Race for the Hydrogen
Bomb from January 1950 through the first American hydrogen fusion at
Eniwetok in November 1952 and the first Soviet H-bomb explosion of
August 1953 to the American achievement of a practical thermonuclear
weapon in March 1954. This contest continued for two more years as each
side tried to perfect the new weapon as an aerial bomb. The United
States made its first successful air drop of a fusion bomb on May 21,
1956—almost certainly later than the comparable Soviet test.
4.
The Race for the ICBM from
1956 to 1962 has been widely misunderstood because propaganda
falsehoods from both sides sought to conceal the true situation and
often confused even themselves. Basically the problem was, at the
beginning, how to combine the American Nagasaki bomb, which weighed
9,000 pounds, with the German V-2 rocket, which carried a warhead of
1,700 pounds only 200 miles. The Soviet government sought to close the
gap between rocket power and nuclear payload by working toward a more
powerful rocket, while the Americans, over the opposition of the air
force and the aviation industry, sought to close the gap by getting
smaller bombs. The result of the race was that the Soviet government
acquired a series of very powerful rocket boosters ranging in thrust
from 800,000 pounds to l.5 million pounds, and capable of hurling
capsules from one to over seven tons in weight. These were demonstrated
to an astonished world from October 1957 onward.
These
Soviet successes in
space made the American effort in rocket boosters look very
second-rate, but this impression was rather misleading. It was
perfectly true that the United States in 1957-1960 had no powerful
rocket boosters capable of hurling large space vehicles into orbit or
past the moon (as was done with the 3,245-pound Soviet Lunik I in
January 1959), but the United States in this period had a large number
of fission and fusion warheads in a great variety of sizes, and was
rapidly developing moderately powerful rockets able to carry these
great distances. In fact, the first American ICBM was fired from Cape
Canaveral in December 1957, two months after Sputnik I, and went full
range in November 1958.
By
1961 the United States had
a varied assortment of missiles, troth solid- and liquid-fueled, some
able to be fired in minutes, and capable of carrying nuclear warheads,
whose explosive power was equivalent to as little as 750,000 tons of
TNT (thus forty-three times the force of the Hiroshima A-bomb) to
5,000,000 or more tons of TNT. These could be delivered distances from
l,000 to over 6,000 miles and with such accuracy that at least half
could be landed in a circle within 3 miles of a target.
These
developments left the
Soviet Union with a much smaller number of giant rockets able to carry
20-megaton (20,000,000 tons of TNT) warheads, but so large that their
locations were soon spied out by American high-flying U-2 photographic
planes. To remedy this overemphasis on size, the Soviet Union, in
October 196r, broke the moratorium on nuclear explosive testing which
had existed since October 1958, and exploded a great variety of small
bombs from I to 5 megatons, as well as a gigantic one of 25 megatons
and a colossal one of 58 megatons; the latter, the largest bomb ever
exploded, was equal to one-third the total of all previous nuclear
explosions from 1945 to the end of previous testing in December 1958.
Even
before these final tests,
in 1960 elaborate calculations on the giant electronic computers in the
Pentagon were estimating the consequences of a hypothetical total
nuclear war in June 1963. Two answers were: (1) If the Soviet Union
struck first and the United States retaliated, the war would be over in
a single day with a Russian victory in which they lost 40 million of
their 220 million population dead and 40 percent of their industrial
capacity, while America would have 150 million of its 195 million
people dead and 60 percent of its industry destroyed. (2) If the United
States struck first with a nuclear attack, in reply to a Soviet advance
of ground troops into Germany, 75 million Russians and 110 million
Americans would be killed, half the industry of both would be
destroyed, and neither could win. On this basis, some relaxation of
tension became imperative, as soon as the Soviets could be satisfied
they had achieved stalemate by their 1961-1962 nuclear tests.
Closely
related to this
four-stage sequence of nuclear capability is the quite different
four-stage sequence of strategic planning. This is concerned with what
we plan to do as distinct from what we are able to do. From the
American side it has four stages, as follows:
1.
"Great Power Cooperation" within the United Nations Organization,
1945-1946
2.
"Containment of" Soviet
expansion by all means available, including economic aid to others (the
Marshall Plan), conventional forces (as in NATO), and nuclear weapons,
1946-1953.
3.
"Liberation," "Massive
Retaliation," and the "New Look," 1953-1960. This period, associated
with the influence of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, sought to
deal with foreign crisis by the use of slogans and quite unrealistic
policies which could never have been used. Our allies, the neutrals,
and even the Russians were ignored and often despised, while the State
Department engaged in what Dulles himself called, in January 1956,
"going to the brink" of war. This policy sought to reduce government
spending and balance the budget by reducing expenditures for all local
or conventional wars and to base our strategy and our foreign policy on
the threat that any Soviet advance of any kind anywhere of which we
disapproved would be stopped by our "massive retaliation" with all-out
nuclear attack anywhere we judged appropriate, on a unilateral (without
consultation with our allies) and on a "first-strike" basis (that is,
we would do this even if the Soviet Union had not attacked us and had
not used nuclear weapons). This policy was hopelessly irresponsible and
not only alienated allies (such as France) and neutrals (such as
India), but could not be used, since we would never adopt such suicidal
and ineffective tactics to reply to a Communist local advance in Korea,
southeast Asia, Tibet, Afghanistan, Iran, Egypt, Yugoslavia, or most
other places on the periphery of the Soviet bloc. This policy abandoned
NATO, in fact if not in theory, and meant that we had publicly adopted
a policy we would never carry out; because even if we were willing to
accept the full consequences of the Soviet nuclear counter-blow to our
"massive retaliation" we could not ever win in such a war, since Soviet
ground forces, with their 125 divisions in Europe, could easily overrun
NATO's 25 divisions and would occupy all Europe except Britain and
Spain. The Kremlin leaders, moving to Paris or Rome (perhaps in the
Vatican) would he beyond our reach and could hold London under nuclear
threat, while both the United States and the Soviet Union were
devastated. The Dulles doctrine was not a doctrine of action but solely
a doctrine of threats, since it expected that the threat alone would
stop Soviet advances and that it would never he necessary to carry out
the threat. The policy worked, in the sense that the world and the
United States lived through it, only because the Soviet Union, at the
same time. was in the "interregnum" between the death of Stalin (March
5, 1952) and the accession to full power of Khrushchev (July 4, 1957 to
March 27, 1958). The last two years were occupied by the Eisenhower
administration's efforts to get back to a more workable defense policy
based on a variety of responses to Soviet actions and to do so without
either repudiating Dulles or excessively unbalancing the budget.
4.
"Graduated deterrence,"
from 1960 onward, was really an effort to get back to the polices of
1950 as advocated by the National Security Council paper NSC 58 of
March 1950, and generally to the advice given by Robert Oppenheimer
before his public career had been destroyed by the "massive
retaliation" advocates in 1953. This revived doctrine called for a
graduated and varied strategic response to Soviet aggression combined
with cooperation with our allies, recognition of the rights of neutrals
to be neutral, increased economic and cultural aid to both groups, and
relaxation of tension with the Soviet Union by cultural and scientific
cooperation. This broad and varied progran1 had at its core development
of at least four levels of possible war: (1) war with conventional
weapons; (2) addition of tactical nuclear weapons; (3) strategic
nuclear attack on a "no cities" basis (with attacks aimed only at
Soviet military bases and installations); and (4) the
"total-devastation response." Each of these had sub-gradations and gave
rise to unsolved problems such as "escalation," that is, the
possibility that one level would develop gradually into a more intense
level in the heat of combat. Moreover, such complex responses required
immense outlays of money, even if the achievement of the whole was
spread over many years. But this cost, it was felt, would be
worthwhile, since nuclear warfare on a "no cities" basis would save
about 100 million American lives in the first week of war in comparison
with war on the "total-devastation" level. One element in this whole
strategic shift was the shift of the emphasis of our response from
Strategic Air Command (SAC) nuclear bombing to conventional army forces
and to the navy's nuclear submarines with Polaris missiles. The former
would reduce the temptation to the Soviet Union to instigate local
"brush-fire" wars, while the latter would be even more successful in
preventing any Soviet nuclear "first strike," since such an attack
would be much less able to find and destroy Polaris submarines than it
would be to wipe out fixed SAC bases.
The
next great aspect of
postwar history was the partisan political struggles within the United
States, centering on the rise and decline of unilateralism and
neo-isolationism. As we shall sec in a later chapter, the party
struggle in the United States took the form of a struggle between the
party of the middle classes, the Republicans, and the party of the
fringes, the Democrats. This lineup, with its multitude of exceptional
cases, found the intellectuals (including the scientists), the
internationalists, the minorities, and the cosmopolitans in the
Democratic Party, with the businessmen, bankers, and clerks in the
Republican Party. The isolationism of the latter, combined with their
inability to cope with the world depression or with the international
crisis arising from Hitler, kept the Democrats in the White House for
twenty years (1933-1953). The defeat of Dewey by Truman in 1948 was a
particularly bitter pill, and the Republican partisans after that event
were ready to adopt any weapon which could be used to discredit the
Democratic administration. They found such a weapon ready at hand in
the neo-isolationist forces within the Republican Party which were
entrenched in the Congress by the seniority system of committee
controls which operated there. Since either party in the United States
wins a presidential election on a national (and not on a local) basis
and by appealing to the moderate middle-group people who are willing to
shift their vote and to consider the issues presented, a party which is
long out of the White House will be reduced to the control of its
local, narrow, ignorant, and extremist core which is unwilling to
consider issues or the national welfare, or to shift their party stand
and votes. For these reasons, the Republican Party had fallen into
congressional control (represented by Senate figures such as Senators
Robert Taft, Kenneth Wherry, Styles Bridges, and William Jenner) ....
This
group, to whom we often
give the name "neo-isolationist," knew nothing of the world outside the
United States, and generally despised it. Thus, they gave no
consideration to our allies or neutrals, and saw no reason to know or
to study Russia, since it could be hated completely without need for
accurate knowledge. All foreigners were regarded as unprincipled, weak,
poor, ignorant, and evil, with only one aim in life, namely, to prey on
the United States. These neo-isolationists and unilateralists were
equally filled with suspicion or hatred of any American intellectuals,
including scientists, because they had no conception of any man who
placed objective truth higher than subjective interests, since such an
attitude was a complete challenge to the American businessman's
assumption that all men are and should be concerned with the pursuit of
self-interest and profit.
At
the end of the war, it was
but natural that many Americans should seek to return from foreign and
incomprehensible matters, including countries, peoples, and problems
which were a standing refutation of the American neo-isolationist's
ideas of human nature, of social structure, and of proper motivations.
Neo-isolationism
had a series
of assumptions which explain their statements and actions and which
could not possibly be held by anyone who had any knowledge of the world
outside American lower-middle-class business circles. These beliefs
were at least seven in number:
1.
Unilateralism: the belief
that the United States should and could act by itself without need to
consider allies, neutrals, or the Soviet Union.
2.
National omnipotence: the
belief that the United States is so rich and powerful that no one else
counts and that there is, accordingly, no need to study foreign areas,
customs, or policies, since America's policies can be based exclusively
on its own power and its own high moral principles (which have no real
meaning to anyone else).
3.
Unlimited goals (or
utopianism): the belief that there are final solutions to the world's
problems. This assumes that American power permits it to do what it
wishes and that demonstration of this power to trouble-making
foreigners will make them leave the United States alone and secure
forever. This idea was reflected in its crudest form in the belief that
America's power could be applied to the world in one final smash after
which everything would be settled forever. Upholders of this view
refused to accept that America's security in the nineteenth century had
been an untypical and temporary condition and that constant danger and
constant problems were a perpetual condition of human life except in
brief and unusual circumstances. This kind of impatience with foreign
problems and danger was clearly stated by Dulles in his article "A
Policy of Boldness" in Life magazine, May 19, 1952.
There he
insisted that the Truman policy of containment must be replaced by a
policy of "liberation," since the former was based on "treadmill
policies which at best might perhaps keep us in the same place until we
drop exhausted." These policies, he argued, would lead to financial
collapse and loss of civil liberties, were "not designed to win victory
conclusively," and did not seek to solve the problem of the Soviet
Union but to live with it, `'presumably forever." His solution was to
refuse to recognize Communist control either in the European satellites
or in China, to deny the existence of the Iron Curtain, and to free
millions enslaved by Communism. Although the only way these millions
could be freed was by war, Dulles refused to advocate preventive war,
and established no method of achieving his goals except his belief
that, if he refused to face reality, reality would change. However, he
did accept preventive war in the form of massive retaliation if the
Communists made any further advances, and he established the argument
that the Truman policy of containing the Communists was a policy of
refusing to defeat them, from softness or fear or sympathy. This became
the basis for future partisan Republican charges that Democratic
administrations were "soft on Communism" and pursued "no-win" policies.
4.
The neo-isolationist belief
in American omnipotence and foreign inferiority led, almost at once, to
the conclusion that continuance of the Soviet threat arose from
internal treason within America and that the Russian nuclear successes
must be based on treason and espionage and could not possibly be based
on foreign science or Soviet industrial capability. The
neo-isolationists were convinced that the only threat to America came
from internal subversion, from Communist sympathizers and "fellow
travelers," since no foreign threat could harm our omnipotence. All
opposition to neo-isolationist views was branded as "un-American," and
was traced to low motivations or corruption of American life by such
non-American innovations as economic planning, social welfare, or
concern for foreigners. Henry Wallace and Mrs. Roosevelt, w ho were the
special targets of these isolationists, were accused of conspiring to
give away America's wealth (in order to weaken it): "a quart of milk to
every Hottentot."
5.
Since the chief "high moral
principle" whicl1 motivated the neo-isolationists was their own
economic self-interest, they were especially agitated by high taxes,
and insisted that Soviet Russia and the Democrats were engaged in a
joint tacit conspiracy to destroy America by high taxes by using Cold
War crisis to tax America into bankruptcy.
6.
Since the neo-isolationists
rejected all partial solutions or limited goals, and were unwilling to
pay to increase America's military power (sine' they insisted it was
already overwhelmingly powerful), there was little they could do in
foreign affairs except to talk loudly and sign anti-Communist pacts and
manifestos. This explains Dulles's verbal bluster and "missile
rattling" and his pactomania which kept him running about the world
signing documents which bound people to pursue anti-Communist policies.
7.
The unrealistic and
un-historic nature of neo-isolationism meant that it could not actually
be pursued as a policy. It was pursued by John Foster Dulles, with
permanent injury to our allies, the neutrals, and the personnel of
American government, but it was not followed in the Pentagon and was
followed only halfheartedly by Eisenhower in the White House. The
President sought to keep the moderate middle group of voters in his
camp by radiating his personal charm around the country, but the
Pentagon refused to follow Dulles's tactics of appeasing the
neo-isolationists by refusing to defend their departmental employees.
When Senator McCarthy turned his extravagant charges of subversion and
treason from the State Department to the army, the employees of the
latter were defended by Secretary Robert Stevens, and McCarthy's
downfall began. The neo-isolationist forces, although defeated at the
ballot box in 1960 and 1962, still continue in an increasingly
irresponsible form under a variety of names....
Much
less obvious to the
public eye than neo-isolationism, but equally in creating the history
of 1945-1963, was the struggle within the American defense services as
to what use would be made of the nuclear weapon. In 1945 the atom bomb
was at once hailed as the "absolute weapon" against which there was "no
defense." If true, this would have meant the end of the army and navy,
since the existing bomb, shaped like a hen's egg, 10 feet 8 inches
long, 5 feet in diameter, and weighing 10,000 pounds, could be handled
in the B-29 only by modifying its bomb drop to widen the opening, and
could not be handled by the ground forces or by navy guns or carrier
planes. Morever, the range and intensity of its destruction gave rise
to immediate claims from the advocates of air power that massed ground
forces, slow-moving armored equipment, and all naval vessels,
especially the expensive carriers and capital ships, were made obsolete
by the new weapon. These extravagant claims were made more critical in
their impact by the Strategic Bombing Surveys of World War II and the
demobilization problems at the war's end.
The
advocates of air power
from at least 1908 had made extravagant claims, usually based on future
rather than on presently available equipment, that the airplane
provided the final supreme weapon which made all other methods of
warfare unnecessary. This was seen in the arguments of General Giulio
Douhet of Italy, General "Billy" Mitchell of the United States, and the
refugee Russian airplane designer Alexander de Seversky. Douhet as
early as 1921 preached that the next war would be ended in the first
twenty-four hours by the total destruction of all enemy cities from the
air; Mitchell in the mid-1920's raised a great furor with his claims
that land-based planes had made battleships and lesser naval vessels
obsolete; and Seversky, before, during, and after World War II, claimed
that air power had made other arms needless. We have seen how these
claims had a considerable and pernicious influence on men's actions
before and during World War II. Many airmen who did not believe these
claims nevertheless felt that they had to support them in order to
obtain a large slice of their country's defense funds from civilian
politicians who w ere in no position to judge the merits of sucl1
claims.
The
experience of World War 1I
did not, at first glance, support the claims of the advocates of air
power. On November 3, 1944, the United States Secretary of War, on
order of the President, set up a committee of twelve to conduct a
Strategic Bombing Survey to examine the contribution of strategic
bombing to final victory by evaluating bomb damage, assessing captured
German and Japanese documents, and interviewing the leaders of the
defeated countries. The German survey, which came out in 208 parts over
several years, beginning in 1945, did not, on the whole, support the
claims of the air enthusiasts, but rather showed that the air-force
contribution was much less than had been anticipated or hoped and had
become substantial, chiefly in transportation and in gasoline supplies,
only after October 1944, when Germany was already beaten (with tactical
air-force help) on the ground.
These
conclusions were very
unwelcome to the army air-force officers devoted to strategic bombing,
and especially to the airplane-manufacturing industry, which had
reached the multibillion-dollar size and hoped to retain at least some
of its market after the war's end. In the last few months of the war
against Japan, at least $400 million worth of Boeing B-29's and parts
were in action in the Pacific. Loss of faith in strategic bombing would
expose air-force officers and the air-force industry to a grim and
poverty-stricken postwar world. Accordingly, it became necessary to
both groups to persuade the country that Japan had been defeated by
strategic air power. The Strategic Bombing Survey of Japan did not
support this contention, although by concentrating on strategic bombing
it helped to cover up the vital role played by submarines in the
destruction of the Japanese merchant marine, the equally vital role
played by the early Marine Corps work in amphibious warfare, and, above
all, in the magnificent job done by naval supply forces for all arms,
including the strategic bombing bases themselves. The protection and
supply of these bases in the Marianas was in sharp contrast with the
loss of B-29 bases in continental China to Japanese ground forces, and
showed to any unbiased outsider the need for a balanced distribution of
all arms in any effective defense system. In such a balanced system the
role of strategic bombing and of large long-range planes in general (as
contrasted with tactical planes and fighters) would obviously be less
than either the air-force officers or the airplane industrialists
considered satisfactory.
Accordingly,
it became urgent
for these two groups and their supporters to convince the country (1)
that the atom bomb was not "just another" weapon but was the final,
"absolute," weapon; (2) that the atom bomb had been the decisive factor
in the Japanese surrender; and (3) that nuclear weapons were fitted
only for air-force use and could not be, or should not be, adapted for
naval or ground-force use. The first two of these points were fairly
well established in American public opinion in 1945-1947, but the
third, because of atomic secrecy, had largely to be argued out behind
the scenes. All three points were largely untrue (or true only if
hedged about with reservations which would largely destroy their value
as air-force propaganda), but those who used them were defending
interests, not truth, even when they insisted that the interests they
were defending were those of the United States and not merely those of
the air force. In this controversy, the scientists, most of whom were
naively defending truth, were bound to be crushed. On the other hand,
any dissident scientist could obtain access to money and support by
making an alliance with the air force.
At
the center of this problem
was the struggle for control of nuclear reactions within the United
States, but the ultimate objective of the struggle was the right to
exercise influence on the subdividing of the national defense budget.
Thus, the struggle centered on the personnel of the Atomic Energy
Commission (AEC) and especially of its scientific advisory panel of
outstanding scientists, the so-called General Advisory Committee (GAC)
of the AEC. And at the center of the whole struggle was Robert
Oppenheimer.
Robert
Oppenheimer, wartime
director of the Los Alamos laboratory which made the A-bombs, was not a
great scientist of the class including Einstein, Bohr, or Fermi, but
his knowledge of the subject was profound, and wider than most. He was
very well educated in cultural matters, especially literature and
music, and could quote Homer in Greek and the Bhagavad-Gita in Sanskrit
at appropriate occasions. His social and, to a greater extent, his
political education did not begin until about 1935, when he was
thirty-one and already a full professor at California Institute of
Technology and at the University of California. His political naivete
continued until after the war. He had always been a persuasive talker,
got along very w-ell with a wide diversity of people, and during the
war he discovered he was an excellent administrator. By 1947 he was the
chief scientific adviser to most of the important agencies of the
government, informally, if not formally, since other scientists
frequently consulted with him before giving their decisions on
problems. From 1947 on, he was chairman of the GAC, as well as a member
of the Atomic Energy Committee of the Defense Department's Research and
Development Board; of the National Science Foundation; of the
President's Scientific Advisory Board; chairman of the board of the Bulletin
of Atomic Scientists;
and consultant on atomic energy to the CIA, to the State Department, to
the National Security Council, to the American delegation to the United
Nations, and to the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy (the
congressional watchdog over the AEC)—in all, he was on a total of
thirty-five government committees..
In
spite of Oppenheimer's
exalted positions in 1947-1953, which included the directorship of the
great Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (American copy of All
Souls College at Oxford), there was a shadow on Oppenheimer's past. In
his younger and more naive days he had been closely associated with
Communists. Certainly never a Communist himself, and never, at any
time, disloyal to the United States, he had, nonetheless, had long
associations with Communists. Partly this arose from his political
inexperience, partly from the prevalence of Communists among the
intellectual circles of the San Francisco Bay region where he spent the
years 1929-1942 as a professor, and partly from his sudden and belated
realization of the terrible tragedy of the world depression and of
Hitler about 1936. At any rate, his brother, Frank Oppenheimer, and the
latter's wife were Communist Party workers in San Francisco at least
from 1937 to 1941, while Oppenheimer's own wife, whom he married in
1940, was an ex-Communist, widow of a Communist who had been killed
fighting Fascism in Spain in 1937.
The
Oppenheimers continued to
have friends who were Communists, and Oppenheimer contributed money
until the end of 1941, through Communist channels, to Spanish Refugee
Relief and to aid for migratory farm workers in California. As late as
1943 he had some kind of remote emotional relationship with a girl,
daughter of a fellow professor, who was a Communist. All of this
"derogatory" information was known to General Groves and to Army
Intelligence, G-2, before Oppenheimer was made head of Los Alamos in
1942. The appointment was made because his talents were urgently
needed, and there was no reason to feel that he was a Communist himself
or that he had ever been, or would ever be, disloyal to the United
States.
For
the next four years
Oppenheimer was kept under constant surveillance by M-2; his
conversations secretly recorded, telephone calls and letters monitored,
and all his movements shadowed. In 1954, under oath, General Groves
testified to his belief in Oppenheimer's discretion and loyalty, and he
repeated this in his memoirs, published in 1962. The significance of
all this is that this ancient evidence, plus Oppenheimer's alleged
opposition to efforts to make the H-bomb in 1946-1949, was used by the
advocates of air power, the neo-isolationists, the exponents of massive
retaliation, and the professional anti-Communists in 1953-1954 to
destroy Oppenheimer's public reputation, to end his opportunity for
continued public service, and to discredit the preceding Democratic
administration in Washington. It was an essential element in the
massive retaliation, neo-isolationist, McCarthyite, Dulles interregnum
of 1953-1957, which ran almost exactly parallel to the post-Stalin
interregnum in the Soviet Union during the same years.
The
last significant factor in
this postwar period of eighteen years was provided by the events in the
Far East. In this factor also there are three sub-periods, of which the
most significant was the middle one from "the loss of China" to the
Communists late in 1949 to the Geneva "Summit Conference" of July 1955.
In this period the Far East was in confusion over the Chinese victory
in mainland China; the outbreak of war in Korea in June 1950; the
Korean armistice of July 1953; the Indo-Chinese war and armistice in
1953-1954; and the threatened Chinese Communist attack on Quemoy, if
not on Formosa, in the winter of 1954-1955. The earlier period of Far
Eastern history saw the slow decay of the Nationalist Chinese regime of
Chiang Kai-shek and the revival of Japan, while the later, third,
period centered upon the growing strength and dangerous pugnacity of
"Red" China. This third period ended with the Chinese attack on India
in October 1962 and the break between Communist China and the Soviet
Union at the end of 1962.
The
interweaving of these six
factors makes up a major part of the history of the period 1945-1963.
In each case we can discern three stages, of which the middle one is
the most critical. The dates of these stages are not, of course, the
same for all six factors, but they are close enough so that the whole
eighteen years can be examined successfully as three consecutive
sub-periods organized around the central core of the nuclear rivalry
between the United States and the Soviet Union. Accordingly, we can
examine this whole period in the three stages: (1) American atomic
supremacy, 1945-1950; (2) the race for the H-bomb, 1950-1957; and (3)
the race for the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (IBM) from 1957 to
early 1963.
Chapter
63—The Origins of the Cold War, 1945-1949
The
surrender of Japan left
much of the world balanced between the mass armies of the Soviet Union
and the American nuclear monopoly. It was an unequal balance, because
the United States would not have used its atomic weapon against the
Russians for anything Russia was likely to do. Stalin realized this,
and largely ignored the atom bomb, although his designer, Andrei
Tupolev, successfully copied four B-29's captured by the Russians in
the Far East in 1944 and brought these to production (as Tu-4's) in
1947. Otherwise, the Kremlin's assessment of the situation was quite
mistaken.
Stalin
assumed that the United
States would soon relapse into isolationism, as it had done after World
War I, and would be fully occupied witl1 a postwar economic collapse
like that of 1921. Accordingly, he regarded Britain as the chief
obstacle to his plans, and, seeing that it was both small and weak,
with most unpromising economic prospects, he proceeded to carry out his
designs with relatively little attention to the reactions of either
English-speaking Power. These plans involved the creation of a
Soviet-controlled buffer fringe of satellite states on the Soviet
frontiers in all areas occupied by Soviet armies, and Communist
coalition governments beyond these areas. In both cases the local
Communists would be controlled by leaders of their own nationality who
had been trained under Comintern auspices in the Soviet Union. In some
cases, these Communist leaders had been exiles in Russia for more than
twenty years.
The
chief error in Stalin's
postwar strategy was his total misjudgment of President Truman and, on
a wider stage, of the American people as a whole. Some of this error
undoubtedly arose from Stalin's ignorance of the world outside Russia
and from the fact that his terrorist tactics in Russia in the 1930's
had made it difficult for him to get reliable foreign information from
his diplomatic corps, which was shielded from contact with foreigners
and was more concerned with sending Stalin the information he expected
than with that derived from independent observations. In any case, the
Kremlin misjudged both Truman and the American people.
Truman,
in spite of a natural
suspicion of the Russians, ended the war with every intention of trying
to carry out Roosevelt's original plans for postwar cooperation with
the Soviet Union. In addition, having learned much from the 1920's, he
intended to make every effort to avoid either a postwar economic
depression or a relapse into isolationism. His success in avoiding
these events made it possible to reverse his inherited policy of
cooperation with Russia when Stalin's actions in 1946-1947 made it
clear that cooperation was the last thing the Kremlin wanted. These
actions appeared most clearly in regard to Germany.
We
have already noted the
Soviet subversion of Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria by native Communists
returning from Russia under the protection of the Soviet armies. The
same thing occurred, but more gradually, in eastern Germany. There the
Communists at first pretended to cooperate with any "anti-Fascist"
groups, but their unwillingness to cooperate with the Western Powers in
the administration of Germany appeared almost at once. They gradually
closed off their occupation zone and refused to carry out the earlier
agreements to treat Germany as a single administrative and economic
unit. This meant that the usual economic exchange within Germany of
food from the agricultural eastern portion of the country for the
industrial products of western Germany was broken. Instead, East German
food was drained to the Soviet Union. To prevent starvation of the West
Germans, the United States and Britain had to send in hundreds of
millions of dollars' worth of food and other supplies. On May 3, 1946,
General Lucius D. Clay, head of the American Military Government in
Germany, informed the Russians that no future agreements would be made
to ship West German industrial equipment as reparations to Russia until
the Russians agreed to treat Germany as an economic unit and to give
some accounting of their reparations plundering of East Germany. Both
points referred to open violations of the Potsdam Agreement regarding
the treatment of Germany.
The
Soviet Union justified
these and other violations of earlier agreements on the urgent need for
their own economic rehabilitation. There can be no doubt that the
Soviet Union had suffered great economic damage from the war, possibly
the loss of a quarter of its prewar wealth, more than all the other
victor countries combined, but the Kremlin could have obtained much
more by continued cooperation with the United States than it did from
its postwar policy of studied enmity. This enmity was based on a number
of factors: In the first place, Stalin was misled by the false ideology
of Marx and Lenin which spoke of the inevitable struggle of capitalism
and Communism, of the inevitable economic breakdown of the capitalist
system, and of the capitalist endeavor to avoid such a breakdown by
militarist aggression. On this basis, Stalin could not believe that the
United States was prepared to be generous and cooperative toward the
Soviet Union.
Moreover,
Stalin was worried
by the weakness in depth of the Soviet system from economic damage and
from ideological dissent. The war had been fought on an ideology of
patriotism and nationalism, not as a Communist ideological struggle,
and the Kremlin by 1946 was eager to get back to its Communist
ideology, partly as justification of the new hardships of
reconstruction under the fourth Five-Year Plan (March 13, 1946) and
partly to overcome the Russian soldiers' admiration for what they had
seen of the West. These soldiers, for example, were amazed to discover
that the "exploited" German workers of whom they had heard so much had
standards of living several times higher than those of the ordinary
Russian. The discovery that ordinary Germans had watches, even
wristwatches, was an astounding revelation to the Russian soldiers, who
proceeded to seize these wherever they saw them.
A
third factor guiding Soviet
behavior was the discovery that there was no mass support for Russia or
for Communist ideology in eastern and central Europe, especially among
the peasants, and that the buffer of Communist states along Russia's
western border would have to be built on force and not on consent. The
governments of these states could be recruited from men of the
respective nations who had been living in the Soviet Union for years
under endless Communist indoctrination, but the un-indoctrinated masses
in each country would have to be held in bondage by Soviet military
forces, at least until local Communist parties and local secret-police
organizations subservient to Moscow's orders could be built up. The
urgent need for this, from the Kremlin's point of view, was shown, when
Austria and Hungary, although under Soviet military occupation, were
permitted relatively free elections in November 1945. Both resulted in
sharp defeats for the local Communist parties. Because such an outcome
could not be permitted in the buffer satellites farther east, elections
there had to be postponed until the local governments were sufficiently
communized and entrenched to be able to guarantee a favorable outcome
to any election.
It
was this situation which
made it impossible, in Russia's view, to carry out the promises made at
Yalta and elsewhere about free elections in Poland or other countries
neighboring on Russia. The United States, through Secretary of State
Byrnes, assured the Kremlin that it wanted these neighboring states to
have "democratic" governments "friendly" to the Soviet Union. The
Kremlin knew, although Byrnes apparently did not, that these were
mutually exclusive terms. They insisted these governments must be
"friendly," while he insisted that they must be "free" and "democratic"
in the Western sense. Since the Kremlin assumed that Byrnes knew as
well as they did of the contradiction in terms here, they assumed that
his insistence on "democratic" governments in eastern Europe indicated
that he really wanted governments unfriendly to the Soviet Union. They
were willing to call any governments which were friendly "free" and
"democratic," but Byrnes refused to accept this reversal of the
ordinary American meaning of these words..
These
disputes over Germany
and eastern Europe, which u ere regarded in the West as Soviet
violations of their earlier agreements at Yalta and Potsdam, were
regarded in Moscow as evidence for Stalin's conviction of the secret
aggressive designs of the West. By the winter of 1945-1946, the Russian
peoples were being warned of the dangers from the West. This began in
1945 with attacks on ''cosmopolitanism'' and prohibitions of Soviet
soldiers "fraternizing" with aliens, especially soldiers of the United
States or Britain, in the course of their occupation duties. Early in
November 1945, Molotov warned the Moscow Soviet that Fascism and
imperialist aggression were still loose in the world. Similar speeches
were made hy other Soviet leaders, including Stalin. B,, the spring of
1946, xenophobia, one of the oldest of Russian culture traits, was
rampant again. In September 1946, and again in September 1947, Andrei
Zhdanov, the Kremlin's leader of the international Communist movement,
made speeches which were simply declarations of ideological war on the
West. They presented the Soviet Union as the last best hope of man,
surrounded by prowling, capitalist beasts of prey seeking to destroy it.
On
this basis the Soviet Union
found it impossible to cooperate with the West or to accept the
American economic assistance in reconstruction which was offered. The
American Congress in the last renewal of the Lend-Lease Act in 1945 had
forbidden use of these funds for postwar rehabilitation, but other
funds were made available. For the transitional period these amounted
to about $9 billion. These transitional funds were made available on a
humanitarian and economic basis and not on political or ideological
grounds. Accordingly, they were available to the Soviet Union and other
areas under Communist control in accordance with the provisions of each
fund. For example, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation
Administration (UNRRA), was an international organization which handled
goods worth $3,683 million, of which 65 percent was provided from the
United States, 15 percent from Britain, and 3.5 percent from Canada.
Its grants went to 17 countries with China first ($518 million), Poland
next ($478 million), Italy with $418 million, Yugoslavia with $416
million, and the Ukraine, seventh, with $188 million.
Beyond
the primary,
humanitarian aim of most United States assistance was the desire to get
local economies functioning, and efforts to further America's basic
conviction of the value of a high level of international trade on a
multilateral basis. The United States was opposed to all restrictive
trade measures such as autarchy, bilateralism, or quotas, and had as
its ultimate aim the restoration of multilateral trade at the highest
possible level, with freely convertible international monetary
exchanges. It was convinced that such a system would be advantageous
for all peoples, and did not see that it was anathema to the Soviet
system, which had restrictions and quotas on economic life, even within
the country, so that, while most Russians lived in poverty, a
privileged minority, buying in special stores with special funds and
special ration cards, had access to luxuries undreamed of by the
ordinary person.
In
the American plans for
economic recovery, Great Britain, as the world's greatest trader, had a
special role. The United Kingdom could not exist without very large
imports, but it could not pay for these without large exports. Such
exports had to be much larger than before the war, even to pay for the
prewar level of imports, because many of Britain's prewar sources of
overseas incomes from investments, shipping, insurance, and so on, had
been drastically reduced by the war. In 1945 the British
balance-of-payments deficit was about 875 million pounds sterling, and
in 1946 it was still 344 million pounds. To tide over this deficit
until British exports could recover, the United States in July 1946
provided Britain with a credit of $3,750 million, with interest at 2
percent and repayment in fifty annual installments to begin on December
31, 1951. The interest was to be waived whenever the British trade
balance would not pay for imports on her 1936-1938 level. In return for
this, Britain gave rather indefinite promises to work to reduce its
bilateralism in trade, especially imperial preference, and to release,
as soon as feasible, its blocked sterling accounts.
Lend-Lease
was ended in
September 1945, with the Japanese surrender, and all claims were
settled with Britain under an agreement of December 1945. This canceled
the American grants under Lend-Lease of over $30,000 million and gave
Britain permanent establishments on British soil, with supplies in
Britain or en route, for a settlement of $650 million payable on the
same terms as the British loan just mentioned.
Assistance
similar to these
was available to the Soviet Union but was generally rebuffed. Even in
1945, efforts to establish international emergency committees for coal,
transportation, and economic recovery in Europe were boycotted by the
Soviet Union, with the exception of the one on transportation, which
was necessary to supply the Russian troops. Little cooperation could be
obtained from Soviet authorities for handling or aiding refugees,
except for their demands for the return, to concentration camps or
slave labor, of those who had fled from eastern Europe. On October 15,
1945, Moscow signed an agreement similar to Britain’s by which
they agreed to pay, after July 1954, for the quarter-billion
dollars’ worth of goods on their final Lend-Lease demands yet
unfilled when Lend-Lease ended; but they refused to discuss any general
Lend-Lease settlement and they refused to negotiate for a general loan,
similar to that made to Britain, although Stalin had asked for one of
$6 billion as early as January 1945. An American offer to discuss such
a credit was rejected by Russia as “financial aggression”
in March 1946. The offer was renewed in April and again in September
1946, but the American aims of multilateral trade free of artificial
restraints except tariffs, like the American insistence on free
elections, were regarded in Moscow as clear evidence of America’s
aggressive aims.
One
significant, but perhaps
not essential, factor in the deterioration of the relations of the Big
Three in 1945 and 1946 lies in the provincial ignorance of the three
foreign ministers, Byrnes, Bevan, and Molotov, who conducted the
negotiations. All three were men of limited background and narrow
outlook who saw the world from a narrow nationalistic point of view and
were incapable of appreciating the outlook of different cultures or the
different values and verbal meanings to be found in alien minds.
Nevertheless, it does seem clear that the postwar breakdown of
cooperation was inevitable in view of the conceptions of public
authority, state power, and political security to be found in all three
countries.
On
the whole, if blame must be
allotted, it may well be placed at the door of Stalin's office in the
Kremlin. American willingness to cooperate continued until 1947, as is
evident from the fact that the Marshall Plan offer of American aid for
a cooperative European recovery effort was opened to the Soviet Union,
but it now seems clear that Stalin had decided to close the door on
cooperation and adopted a unilateral policy of limited aggression about
February or March of 1946. The beginning of the Cold War may be placed
at the date of this inferred decision or may be placed at the later and
more obvious date of the Soviet refusal to accept Marshall Plan aid in
July 1947. The significance of the latter date is revealed by the fact
that Czechoslovakia, which accepted on July 7th, was forced by Stalin's
direct order to Prime Minister Gottwald to reverse this decision on
July 10th.
One
significant encouragement
to Soviet aggression came from the almost total demobilization of the
American war effort. Pressure from special-interest groups such as
business, labor unions, and cattlemen, aroused public opinion for the
ending of price controls and rationing and obtained cooperation from an
anti-New Deal coalition in Congress to end most of the nation's
economic controls in 1946. At the same time came almost total military
demobilization. In spite of Ambassador Harriman's explicit warnings
from Moscow in April 1945, and Stalin's declaration of cold warfare in
February 1946, the American government carried out the demobilization
plan of September 1943, which was based on individual rather than on
unit discharges. This destroyed the combat effectiveness of all units
by the end of 1945, when almost half the men had been demobilized, and
every unit, as a result, was at 50 percent. The army's 8 million men in
August 1945 was at 4 1/4 million by the end of the year and reached 1.9
million by July 1946. The air force fell from 218 combat groups to 109
groups in the last four months of 1945. The navy fell from 3.4 million
men in August 1945 to 1.6 million in March 1946.
The
most critical example of
the Soviet refusal to cooperate and of its insistence on relapsing into
isolation, secrecy, and terrorism is to be found in its refusal to join
in American efforts to harness the dangerous powers of nuclear fission.
Long before the test at Alamogordo, some of the nuclear scientists,
spurred on once again by Szilard, were trying to warn American
political leaders of the unique character of the dangers from this
source. Centered in the Chicago Argonne Laboratories, this group wished
to prevent the use of the bomb on Japan, slow up bomb (but not general
nuclear) research, establish some kind of international control of the
bomb, and reduce secrecy to a minimum. Early in April 1945, Szilard
wrote to President Roosevelt to this effect, and, on the latter's
death, sought out Byrnes and repeated his views verbally. The future
secretary of state found difficulty in grasping Szilard's arguments,
especially as they were delivered in a Hungarian accent, but the new
President Truman soon set up an "Interim" Committee to give advice on
nuclear problems. This committee, led by Secretary of War Stimson, was
dependent on its scientific members, Bush, Conant, and Karl T. Compton,
for relevant facts or could call on its "scientific panel" of
Oppenheimer, Fermi, Arthur H. Compton, and E. O. Lawrence for advice.
All these scientists except Fermi were "official" scientists, deeply
involved in governmental administrative problems involving large
budgets and possible grants to their pet projects and universities, and
were regarded with some suspicion by the agitated, largely refugee,
scientists in the Manhattan District laboratories. These suspicions
deepened as the "official" scientists recommended use of the bomb on
Japan "near workers' houses."
At
Chicago seven of the
agitated scientists, led by James Franck of Göttingen (Nobel
Prize, 1925) and including Szilard and Eugene Rabinowitch, sent another
warning letter to Washington. They forecast the terror of a nuclear
arms race which would follow use of the bomb against Japan. Later, in
July 1945, they presented a petition seeking an international
demonstration and international control of the new weapon. Szilard
obtained sixty-seven signatures to this petition before it was blocked
by General Groves and Arthur Compton, using military secrecy as an
excuse. After Hiroshima this group formed the Association of Atomic
Scientists, later reorganized as the Federation of Atomic Scientists,
whose Bulletin (BAS) has been the greatest
influence and source
of information on all matters concerned with the political and social
impact of nuclear weapons. The editor of this amazing new periodical
was Eugene Rabinowitch..
The
energetic lobbying of this
group of atomic scientists had a considerable influence on subsequent
atomic history. When the "official scientists," late in 1945, supported
the administration's May-Johnson bill, which would have shared domestic
control of atomic matters with the armed services, the BAS group
mobilized public opinion behind the junior senator from Connecticut,
Brian McMahon, and pushed through the McMahon bill to presidential
signature in August 1946. The McMahon bill set up an Atomic Energy
Commission (AEC) of five full-time civilian commissioners, named by the
President, with David Lilienthal, former TVA czar, as chairman. This
commission, from August 1946, had ownership and control of all
fissionable materials (uranium and thorium) from the mine to the final
disposal of atomic wastes, including control of all plants and process
patents, with the right to license private nuclear enterprises free of
danger to society.
The
AEC as it functioned was a
disappointment to the BAS scientists. They had sought freedom from
military influence and reduced emphasis on the military uses of nuclear
fission, free dissemination of theoretical research, and a diminution
of the influence of the official scientists. They failed on all these
points, as the AEC operated largely in terms of weapons research and
production, remained extravagantly secretive even on purely theoretical
matters, and was, because of the scientific ignorance of most of the
commissioners, inevitably dominated by its scientific advisory
committee of "official" scientists led by Oppenheimer.
To
the BAS group and to a
wider circle of non-scientists, the AEC was a more or less temporary
organization within the United States, whose work would be taken over
eventually by a somewhat similar international organization. As a first
step in this direction, the United Nations, at the suggestion of Bush
and Conant and on the joint invitation of three heads of
English-speaking governments (President Truman, Prime Minister Attlee,
and Prime Minister Mackenzie King of Canada), set up a United Nations
Atomic Energy Commission (UNAEC) of all members of the Security Council
plus Canada (January 1946). A State Department committee led by
Undersecretary Dean Acheson and David Lilienthal and a second committee
of citizens led by Bernard Baruch spent much of 1946 in the monstrous
task of trying to work out some system of international control of
nuclear energy. The task of educating the non-scientists generally fell
on Oppenheimer, who gave dozens of his brilliant, extemporaneous,
chalk-dusted lectures on nuclear physics The final plan, presented to
the UN by Baruch on June 14, 1946, provided an international control
body similar to the AEC. It would own, control, or license all uranium
from the mine through processing and use, with operation of its own
nuclear facilities throughout the world, inspection of all other such
facilities, absolute prohibition of nuclear bombs or diversion of
nuclear materials to non-peaceful purposes, and punishment for evasion
or violation of its regulations free from the Great Power veto which
normally operated in the Security Council of UN. The vital point in
Baruch's plan was that it would go into effect by stages so that
inspection and monopoly of nuclear materials would be operative before
the American atomic plants were handed over to the new international
agency and before the American stockpile of nuclear bombs was
dismantled.
This
extraordinary offer, an
offer to give up the American nuclear monopoly, technical secrets, and
weapons to an international agency, in return for a possibly
ineffective system of international inspection, was brusquely rejected
by Andrei Gromyko on behalf of the Soviet Union within five days. The
Soviet spokesman demanded instead a reverse sequence of stages covering
(1) immediate outlawing and destruction of all nuclear weapons, with
prohibition of their manufacture, possession, or use; (2) a subsequent
agreement for exchange of information, peaceful use of atomic energy,
and enforcement of regulations; and (3) no tampering whatever with the
Great Power veto in the UN. Since only the United States had the atom
bomb at the time, the adoption of this sequence could require the
United States to give up the bomb without any assurance that anyone
else would do anything, least of all adopt any subsequent control
methods, methods which might allow the Soviet Union to make its own
bombs in secret after the United States had destroyed its in public.
The nature of this Soviet suggestion shows clearly that the Soviet
Union had no real desire for international control, probably because it
was unwilling to open the secret life of the Soviet Union, including
bomb-making, to international inspection.
The
Soviet refusal of the
American efforts at international nuclear control, like their refusal
of American loans and economic cooperation, provides some of the
evidence of the Kremlin's state of mind in 1946. This evidence became
overwhelming in 1947 and 1948, when Soviet aggression appeared along
the whole crescent from Germany, across Asia, to the Far East.
In
Germany, as we have seen,
the area under Soviet occupation was increasingly isolated from the
West and increasingly communized internally. The Soviet military forces
encouraged the formation of a dominant German Socialist Unity Party
(SED) under Communist control. Local provincial elections in the winter
of 1946-1947 gave victory to the SED in the Soviet zone and to
democratic parties, the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, in
the provinces of the three Western zones.
Austria
was also divided into
four areas of military occupation, except that it had a single central
government of its own under the old Social Democrat leader, Karl
Renner, who had also been chancellor in 1919. While the Anglo-Americans
supported the Austrians against starvation by the use of UNRRA
assistance, the Soviet zone was systematically ransacked. This
destroyed all Communist influence in the country, as was clear when the
election of November 1945, reduced them to four seats in an assembly of
165 members. Only in May 1955, two years after Stalin's death, was it
possible to get Soviet consent to a peace treaty and withdrawal of all
four occupying forces (October 1955).
Even
the friends of Russia
suffered from Stalin's pressure and his insistence that the Kremlin
must remain the center for Communist decisions throughout the world. In
Yugoslavia, where Tito was originally as anti-Western as Stalin
himself, Moscow's efforts to dominate Yugoslavia alienated Tito
completely by a combination of economic, diplomatic, and propaganda
pressure. The rivalry between the two Slavs came to a head at the end
of 1947 when Tito tried to build up a non-Russian Communist bloc by
signing friendship treaties with Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania. By
March 1948, a complete break between Belgrade and Moscow was reached.
Tito took his place next to Trotsky in Stalin's list of the damned, and
the next few years were filled with efforts to overthrow Tito, and the
purging of Tito sympathizers by Stalin's cooperative jackals in the
other Communist satellites.
Farther
east, strong Soviet
pressure had been put on Greece, Turkey, and Iran since 1945. On Greece
this pressure came through the Communist regimes in Albania,
Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria, but in Turkey and Iran it came from the
Soviet Union directly. These pressures were probably designed to bring
into power in the three countries governments relatively favorably
inclined toward the Soviet Union to the extent that the latter could
obtain a veto power over any collaboration of the three with the
Western Powers, especially with Great Britain. This was an effort in
which Stalin had few good cards and which showed his ignorance of
political conditions in countries outside his own. In these three, as
in other countries, most people desired two things: political
independence and economic aid. Neither of these could be or would be
obtainable from Stalin, the first because it violated his imperious
nature and the second because of economic scarcity in the Soviet Union
itself.
Nevertheless,
the effort was
made. In Greece the election of March 31, 1946 gave the Popular Party
(which supported the king) 231 out of 354 seats in the Chamber. The
following September a plebiscite on the return of the monarchy gave 69
percent favorable votes. The Communist groups refused to accept these
results and by 1946 were carrying on guerrilla warfare in the
mountains, using the three adjacent Communist states as bases for
supplies, training, and rest areas. A commission of the Security
Council of the UN studied the situation in the early months of 1947 and
condemned Greece's three northern neighbors, but a Soviet veto stopped
any further action by the UN.
Instead,
the guerrilla leader
"General Markos" set up a Greek Provisional government in the
mountains, but alienated much support among Greece's impoverished
peasants by the banditry of his guerrillas and especially by their
kidnaping of thousands of peasant children who were smuggled into the
three Communist countries for Communist indoctrination. Many of these
children did not return for eight or ten years, and hundreds vanished
forever. Large groups returned from Albania as late as 1963.
The
Soviet pressure on Turkey
was uncalled for and totally unremunerative. We have already noted that
the Soviet-German accords of 1940 1941 showed Soviet ambitions for
bases "on the Bosporus and the Dardanelles" and for a sphere of
political influence "south of Batum and Baku in the general direction
of the Persian Gulf." Thus in this area, as in the Far East, Stalin
resumed the expansionist aims of czarist Russia. At Potsdam, Stalin had
looked even farther afield by asking for a trusteeship in the former
Italian colony of Libya and a less definite influence in Eritrea on the
western shore of the Red Sea. These aims were formally demanded by
Moscow in September 1945 and in April 1946 (Conference of Foreign
Ministers in Paris).
As
early as March 19, 1945,
Russia denounced its treaty of friendship with Turkey and within a few
months made demands, both official and unofficial, for Kars, Trebizond,
and other areas of northeastern Turkey. Anti-Turkish agitation was
encouraged among the Kurds (a non-Turkish people living at the base of
the Anatolian peninsula and divided among Turkey, Iran, and Iraq), and
the Georgia Socialist Soviet Republic demanded eight Turkish provinces
covering much of the Black Sea coast and Kurdistan. On August 8, 1946,
Molotov demanded a joint Soviet-Turkish defense of the Straits. Only
after Stalin's death, on May 3o, 1953, did the Kremlin renounce the
earlier territorial demands on Turkey, but by that time the alienation
was complete: Turkey had been driven into the Western camp, soon allied
with Greece and Yugoslavia in a defensive alignment against the north
Balkan Soviet satellites (August 1954), and became the eastern pillar
of NATO.
The
Soviet aggressions on Iran
began in 1945 when Soviet-sponsored Communists, under the protection of
the Russian armies occupying northern Iran, set up "independent"
Communist governments at Tabriz and in Iranian Kurdistan. These were
apparently intended to be incorporated into Soviet Azerbaidzhan with
the Kurdish areas to be taken from Turkey, but the failure of the
latter scheme made this impossible. Nevertheless, the Russian Army
refused to evacuate northern Iran in March 1946, as it was bound to do
by the agreement of January 29, 1941, which had admitted it. Only in
May did Iran win Soviet evacuation of its forces by agreeing to form a
joint Soviet-Iranian oil company to exploit the petroleum resources of
northern Iran (a project which never was fulfilled).
By
the end of 1946 Britain
found the burden of providing military and economic aid to Greece and
Turkey too heavy for its over-strained resources. It was, moreover,
eager to overcome the American aloofness in the Near East, where it
felt it was bearing much of the Soviet pressure alone. Accordingly, in
February 1947, it threatened to withdraw completely from Greece and
Turkey by April 1st. On March 12th the American President enunciated
the "Truman Doctrine" to a joint session of Congress. This stated that
"it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who
are resisting attempted subjugation hy armed minorities or by outside
pressures." He asked for financial assistance to "free peoples to work
out their own destinies in their own way." His request for $400 million
for aid to Greece and Turkey was granted, after considerable debate, in
May 1947. Two weeks later, at Harvard's commencement, Secretary of
State General George C. Marshall enunciated the "Marshall Plan," which
offered American economic support for a European Recovery Program which
would include the Soviet Union and other Communist states. Once again
Stalin's ignorance committed him to an unrewarding path. He rejected
this offer, and forced Czechoslovakia, which had previously accepted,
to do the same.
The
path Stalin was following
took a more aggressive turn in 1947 and 1948. This involved complete
Soviet domination of the area already under Communist control, the
shift of Communist parties from coalition to opposition in other areas,
the instigation of Communist outbreaks in "colonial" areas (especially
in the Far East), and the expulsion of the Western Powers from their
enclave in Berlin. All this was to be achieved while avoiding an open
clash with the United States. As part of this process, which was badly
bungled everywhere except in Czechoslovakia, the Communists withdrew
from the "bourgeois" coalition governments which they had joined in
1944-1945: in Belgium in March 1947, in France and Italy in May, and in
Austria in the autumn. At the same time, agitation from
Communist-dominated trade unions was increased, and the first postwar
large-scale strikes began at the end of the year. As part of this same
harassment, the Soviet Union in the UN vetoed applications for
membership by Italy and Finland.
In
the states already under
Communist control, the Soviet influence was intensified by efforts to
establish a system in which the local parties and secret police were
controlled hy Soviet agents in the Russian embassies. As part of this
effort, the Third International, or Comintern, which had been dissolved
in theory by Stalin in December 1943 (but had continued to operate
secretly out of Moscow), was reestablished under the new name
"Cominform." This was done under Zhdanov's direction at a meeting of
representatives of the Communist parties of France, Italy, Poland,
Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia held in
Poland in September 1947. The delegates were told by Zhdanov and Georgi
Malenkov of the Soviet Union that the world was now divided into two
antithetical forces—the "imperialist group" headed by the United
States and the "peace-loving" group headed by the Soviet
Union—and that it was necessary to reestablish direct operational
control of the Communist parties.
The
Soviet effort to obtain
operational control of the party in Yugoslavia was vigorously resisted
by Tito. As a final effort in this direction, Stalin in February 1948
tried to force Yugoslavia into a federation with more docile Bulgaria.
Tito flatly refused. As a result, Yugoslavia was expelled from the
Cominform in June 1948, and all-out economic, propaganda, ideological,
and political warfare was begun by the Soviet bloc against Tito. The
conflict was used by Stalin as an excuse to purge all oppositionist
Communists within the bloc as "Titoists." As part of this struggle,
Tito closed the Yugoslav border to the Greek guerrillas, with the
result that they, with General Markos, ended their disturbances in
1949, and Tito, became a recipient of American economic aid which
eventually reached $700 million. This process reached its climax with
the achievement of a Greek-Yugoslav alliance in 1954.
A
parallel effort by Stalin to
take Czechoslovakia completely into the Communist camp was more
successful, and was, in fact, the most successful of his numerous
efforts to increase his power in the last six years of his life. In
Czechoslovakia the Russian-trained Communist Klement Gottwald had
become prime minister in a coalition government in July 1946. In
February 1948, the Communist minister of the interior replaced eight
Prague police officials by Communists, was overruled by the Cabinet,
but refused to back down, calling out into the streets the workers'
militia, armed factory workers, and the police (all three under
Communist control) to sustain his refusal. When the non-Communist
ministers protested and some threatened to resign, Gottwald threatened
the ill President Beneš with civil war if he did not dismiss
twelve non-Communist ministers. Beneš, who had been determined
to seek support from Russia and not from the Western Powers since his
unhappy disillusionment with the latter at Munich in September 1938,
yielded to Gottwald's demands on February 25, 1948; he himself resigned
on May 4th and died in September 1948. His friend, Foreign Minister Jan
Masaryk, son of the founder of Czechoslovakia, and the chief Czech
advocate of a pro-Western policy, died mysteriously hy a fall from a
window on May 10th. The Communist control of
Czechoslovakia was then complete.
Stalin's
victory in
Czechoslovakia was followed by an even more dramatic defeat, in an
effort to eject the United States, France, and Britain from their
sectors in West Berlin. Apparently he believed that the United States
was considering a withdrawal from Berlin and that a Soviet push would
hasten that event. The former belief may have been based on good
evidence, but the latter inference from it was quite mistaken.
American
policy in Germany for
almost three years (April 1945-April 1948) was a confusion of
conflicting and ambiguous objectives. The basic idea, going back to
1942, was to make it impossible for Germany to wage aggressive war
again, but no plans had been made, even on a tentative basis, as to how
this goal should be sought. Two decisions left unsolved were whether
Germany would be broken up and how reparations might be obtained from
her without building the country up economically to provide these.
Efforts by the State Department to settle these questions were blocked
by other departments, notably by the Civil Affairs Division of the War
Department, which wanted them left unsettled, and by the Treasury
Department, which had totally different aims from State.
In
a farsighted message from
London in August 1944, Ambassador John Winant warned that lack of an
agreed reparations policy would inevitably lead to a breakdown of joint
Allied control of Germany and to a struggle with Russia for control of
Germany. These wise words were ignored, and President Roosevelt, to
stop the bickering, postponed all decisions. Secretary of the Treasury
Morgenthau took advantage of this lacuna and of his close personal
friendship with Roosevelt to push forward his own pet scheme to reduce
Germany to a purely agricultural state by almost total destruction of
her industry, the millions of surplus population to be, if necessary,
deported to Africa! The secretary, supported by his assistant
secretary, Harry Dexter White, was deeply disturbed by Germany's
history of aggression and by her efforts to annihilate other "races,"
and was fairly certain that an American relapse into isolationism would
make it possible for Germany to try again. The only way to prevent such
an attempt, he felt, was to reduce Germany's industry, and thus her
war-making capacity, as close to nothing as possible. The resulting
chaos, inflation, and misery would be but slight repayment for the
horrors Germany had inflicted on others over many years.
By
personal influence
Morgenthau obtained acceptance of a somewhat modified version of this
plan by both Roosevelt and Churchill at the Quebec Conference of
September 1944. There is little doubt that Churchill's approval had
been won by his scientific adviser, Lord Cherwell, who had personal
animosities against Germany and had been the chief civilian advocate of
indiscriminate bombing of German cities.
The
error at Quebec was
quickly repudiated, but no real planning was done, and the Morgenthau
Plan played a considerable role in JCS 1067, the directive set up to
guide the American military occupation of Germany. In the same context
the vague and unsettled reparations discussions at Yalta proposed that
reparations of $20,000 million, of which half to go to Russia, be
obtained by the dismantling of German industry. The JCS 1067 directive
ordered that Germany be treated as a defeated enemy and not as a
liberated country, with the chief objective that of preventing future
German aggression; no steps were to be taken to secure its economic
recovery. At the Potsdam Conference it was agreed that the German
economy should not be permitted to recover higher than a level which
would sustain the occupation forces and displaced refugee persons, with
standards of living for the German people themselves no higher than the
average standards of living of other European countries. This rather
ambiguous level was subsequently defined as equal to the German
standard of living of 1932, at the bottom of the depression, the level,
in fact, which had brought Hitler to power in January 1933.
It
took more than two years of
misery for Germany and frustrating relations with the Soviet occupation
forces to secure any change in these American objectives. During these
two years, lack of equipment, of fertilizers, and of encouragement to
enterprise made German economic and social conditions worsen until the
end of 1947. Much of the country was still in ruins, housing was
lacking, production of food and coal were in almost total collapse,
unemployment was very high, inflation was rampant, crime (especially
from bands of displaced persons, ex-Nazis, and juvenile delinquents)
was widespread, and the black market, using cigarettes as a monetary
standard, was flourishing. Hunger and cold in the winter took a
considerable toll, and the Germans, for two years, experienced some of
the misery they had inflicted on others in the preceding dozen or more
years.
Without
a revival of industry,
which was hampered by disarmament, reparations, and war damage, it was
impossible to resume the two vital necessities of recovery, increased
mining of coal and export of industrial products to pay for food
imports. By the end of 1947, the Americans and British were thoroughly
tired of paying astronomical sums each year to keep food flowing to
western Germany. All efforts to make an economic reunion with eastern
Germany failed because of Soviet insistence that such a reestablishment
of interchange of food for industrial products between the two halves
of Germany must be tied in with recognition of renewed Soviet claims
for $10 billion in reparation payments to be taken from current
production, two points which had been unsettled by the wartime
agreements.
To
revive German industry so
that it could pay for imports of food, the Anglo-Americans devised a
reform of the German currency. The Soviet government objected violently
to this, because it might work but also because it would inevitably
bind West Germany economically to the West: if the products of a
revived West German industry could not be exchanged for eastern
European food, they would have to be exchanged for food and raw
materials from the West.
The
German currency reform of
1948 is the fiscal miracle of the postwar world. From it came (1) an
explosion of industrial expansion and economic prosperity for West
Germany; (2) the tying of the West German economy to the West; (3) an
example and model for other western European countries (and for Japan)
in economic expansion; and (4) a wave of prosperity for western Europe
as a whole which continued year after year and refuted completely the
claims of Communists (or even Socialists) and, to a lesser extent, the
claims of American businessmen that they held the sole key to
prosperity. The reform, which went into effect on June 1, 1948,
drastically reduced the volume of money in western Germany by
exchanging new Deutschemarks for the current Reichsmarks on a
one-to-one basis for the first 60 but on a 6.5-to-100 basis for all
over 60. The new marks were blocked in banking accounts in complicated
ways which encouraged their use for production.
The
Soviet Union used the
monetary reform in West Germany as an excuse for its blockade of Berlin
which lasted in extreme form from June 24, 1948, to May 12, 1949
(although it had begun, on a partial basis, on March 31st). It began in
an atmosphere of rapidly rising East-West tension. In December 1947,
the King of Romania was forced into abdication and exile. Shortly after
the new year, the SED in East Germany was purged of any leaders likely
to show independence toward Stalin. The Czech takeover in February 1948
was preceded by Soviet invitations to Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and
Finland to sign military alliances with Russia. All did so, but the
Finnish delegates (in February) flatly refused Stalin's demand that the
Soviet have the right to move troops into Finland on its own decision.
In Italy, on April 18, 1948, desperate Communist efforts to get a
strong foothold in the Italian government were defeated in the first
general elections under the new Republican constitution. This election
marks the turning point in postwar Italian history just as the
simultaneous Berlin crisis and monetary reform mark the turning point
in postwar German history. The Communists had participated in all three
of Italy's postwar governments, under the Christian Democrat Prime
Minister Alcide De Gasperi, but went into opposition in his fourth
government, set up on May 31, 1947 (as they did in all countries of
western Europe about the same time). The new constitution of January 1,
1948, required a new election during which the fate of newly democratic
Italy hung in the balance. The results were a great defeat for the
Communists, who obtained only 182 seats in their Popular Front alliance
with the Left-wing Socialists, compared to 307 Christian Democrat
members in the Assembly of 570 seats.
The
Soviet decision to push
the Western Powers out of their occupation sectors in western Berlin
was part of this general Soviet movement. It was accompanied by claims
that the whole city was an integral part of the Soviet occupation zone
of eastern Germany and that the Western Powers were present there only
on sufferance. To this the Western Powers answered that their presence
in Berlin was on exactly the same basis as that of the
Russians—the right of conquest. The Kremlin at no time admitted
that it was establishing a blockade or that its aim was to eject the
Western Powers. Its aims, rather, were to close access to smugglers,
criminals, and eventually to the new "illegal" marks introduced by the
monetary reform.
As
we have seen, through the
neglect of General Lucius Clay, as Eisenhower's deputy in 1945, the
Western Powers had obtained no Soviet recognition of their access
rights to Berlin from the western occupation zones of Germany. Rail,
canal, road, and air traffic to the west were under Soviet control and
were constantly harassed by shifting regulations, delays, and open
obstacles. By the early months of 1948, rail and road routes were tied
in knots, and air traffic along the recognized corridor was jeopardized
by trespassing Soviet fighter planes, intruding barrage balloons, and
unannounced aircraft gunfire. On May 5th a Russian fighter pilot,
buzzing a British transport plane as it approached Berlin, collided
with it and killed himself and the fifteen persons on the British
plane. On June 24th all traffic by ground to Berlin from the west was
closed, on a variety of excuses, and only the harassed air corridor was
open. Hopes of supplying the 2,000,000 persons in the western sectors
of the city by air were dim, as the population's need for food was over
2,000 tons a day and the need for coal for power would be about 5,000
tons a day, excluding home heating. Nevertheless, the attempt began.
Day after day the operation became more intense and more efficient,
with planes landing, originally at two, later at three, airports, as
fast as they could act in. This continued night and day, reached 3,000
tons in 362 planes on July 5th and erratically crept upward, in spite
of deteriorating weather conditions and lengthening darkness, through
the winter.
In
September the city
government, broken up by Communist mobs, moved from the Soviet sector
to the western part of the city, but was replaced by a new, completely
Communist city government in the eastern sector. The Western Powers
stopped all goods flowing between zones to the east and began to merge
the three zones of the Western Powers and took steps to create a
Western German government to rule over them in succession to the
military occupation regime. To indicate the temporary nature of the new
system, until the reunion of eastern Germany could permit establishment
of a permanent government, the new regulations were called a Basic Law
rather than a constitution, and were drawn up by a council of delegates
from the provincial assemblies rather than by an elected constituent
assembly. The new West German regime began to operate in May 1949, in
the same month as the ending of the Berlin blockade..
The
Berlin blockade was won by
the West because of the tireless efficiency of the airlift and the
resolute determination of the Berliners themselves to undergo any
personal hardships or death rather than to submit to another despotic
government. Food was scarce, other supplies nonexistent, and heat
almost totally lacking through the winter of 1948-1949. Some starved,
and many froze, but the resistance did not waver, and the airlift went
on. Night and day, in spite of weather, weariness, and accidents (which
killed 61 airmen), the planes roared in and out again. Soviet
harassment of the airlift, by night flying on instrument in the air
corridor, was never sufficient to stop it, as the Soviet clearly feared
to push the dispute to open conflict. By September, planes were
landing, around the clock, every three minutes. Daily tonnage crept
slowly upward, passed 5,000 tons a day as the New Year opened, and by
April passed 8,000 tons a day. One day that month, 1,398 planes,
landing every 62 seconds, delivered 12,941 tons of supplies. The Soviet
blockade had been defeated.
On
May 12th, after elaborate
negotiations, the ground routes to the city were reopened. In eleven
months the American airlift had landed more than 1.6 million tons of
freight in about 200,000 flights, a demonstration which undoubtedly
awed even the Russians. And, in the interval, West Germany had been
united from three zones to one and had obtained its own German
government. The West German elections of August 14, 1949, gave the
Christian Democrats 31 percent of the vote, with 139 seats in the
Parliament. The chief opposition party, the Social Democratic, had 29
percent, with 131 seats. The Communists, with 5 percent and 15 seats,
were in fifth place, after two other minority groups, the conservative,
centralist Free Democrats with 52 seats, and the moderate,
anti-Prussian, federalist German Party with 17 seats. Though the first
chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, an anti-Nazi who had been imprisoned by
Hitler, won his post by only a single vote, he kept it until 1963.
Chapter
64—The Crisis in China, 1945-1950
The
critical year 1949, which
showed so clearly that the Kremlin's influence in Europe was severely
limited within the area of control of the Soviet armies, saw also a
shift of Stalin's activity to the Far East, where he tried new tactics
in new circumstances. In Europe, outside the area of Soviet military
occupation, even in West Berlin, Stalin had met a series of defeats in
Austria, Germany, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Iran, and even Finland.
In the Far East, where there was no extensive area of Soviet military
control, different tactics were both necessary and possible. There also
Stalin was largely defeated, although it took many years to demonstrate
this fact. His defeat arose from his failure to recognize that
Communism could advance in backward areas only so long as it was
anti-colonial rather than Communist and worked to further local
interests rather than those of Moscow. Stalin did not recognize these
truths, and Soviet success in adopting tactics based on them was
largely reserved for his successors after 1953.
At
first glance the Communist
success in ejecting the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek from
China does not seem to support these remarks....
Stalin
was like a shrewd old
wolf of the north Siberian forest. Understanding nothing outside his
own experience, he never forgot what had happened to himself. Stalin
had been involved once before, in 1927, in an effort to communize
China, and had failed ... in the attempt.... [In] the Far East ... he
wanted a weak China surrounded by small states in which American
influence was minimal. Such a weak China could be guaranteed by
continued rule under the Nationalist government, possibly with the
Communists playing a role in a coalition, as the United States seemed
to wish. Through such a weak and divided China, Stalin could anticipate
no threat to himself either from American efforts or from China itself.
To reduce the danger of either of these alternatives, Stalin would have
welcomed Communist or largely Communist regimes in Japan, Korea,
southeast Asia, and Indonesia, with an autonomous or independent
Communist Chinese regime in control of northwestern China, and possibly
even Manchuria, as a buffer to the Soviet Union's own territory.
At
the end of the war in the
Far East in 1945, it was clear to most observers that Roosevelt's
pretense that Nationalist China was a great Power, like his equally
confused pretense that France was not a significant Power, was
mistaken. China's war effort against Japan weakened fairly steadily
from Pearl Harbor to the end. This decline resulted, very largely, from
the almost total corruption of the regime, which left the Chinese
peasant in sullen discontent and roused open disfavor among many urban
groups, notably students. Many portions of the huge area of China were
only nominally subject to Chiang Kai-shek's rule, and a very
considerable extent in the western and northwestern far interior were
subjected to the Communist regime of Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai,
operating out of Yenan, in barren northern Shensi Province.
Chiang
Kai-shek was a man of
considerable ability and experience, and ... was deeply involved ...
with cliques [Warlords and landlords] ... whose chief aims were to
profit from their public positions and from their close associations
with Chiang and to resist, by any means, efforts to reform or
strengthen China which might reduce their opportunities for ...
[personal gain]. These relationships, in 1945, in some cases had
continued for almost twenty years. American aid and the contributions
of the Chinese themselves disappeared in the network of ... mutually
beneficial relationships which were spread throughout the system and
which made it impossible for the Chiang regime to provide a decent
living for the people of China or even to defend itself against
possible enemies, internal or external. Arms and supplies from abroad
were dissipated, vanishing in one way or another, sometimes forever;
but on other occasions they turned up subsequently in the hands of
guerrillas or of the Communist enemies of Chiang's regime. An enormous
and incompetent army drained from the peasants, at low prices, large
requisitions which were sold, usually for private profit, at high
prices into urban black markets. In the two years following the defeat
of Japan, $1,432 million in American assistance to China vanished in
one way or another, and at the end the Chinese Army and the Chiang
regime was weaker than ever. [The aid was secretly diverted to the
communists.].
In
spite of this weakness ...
the Nationalist government refused to obey American advice either to
reform or simply to consolidate itself in the parts of China it still
controlled. It was determined to destroy the Communist regime,
especially when Mao began to take steps to consolidate the buffer area
which he and Stalin wished to establish in northwestern and northern
China. This determination became a panic to prevent the Russian forces
in Manchuria from turning over that rich area to the Communist units.
The Soviet forces there, after looting the area under the guise of
reparations from Japan, began to withdraw early in 1946. By a simple
process of informing Mao and not informing Chiang of their withdrawal
schedules, they ensured that the abandoned areas should be occupied
immediately by Communist forces. The United States, which had been
engaged in evacuating three million Japanese from China, moved fourteen
Nationalist Chinese armies, most of which had been trained and equipped
by the United States, to North China and Manchuria to block the
Communist takeover. After the defeat of the Communist forces in the
north, however, the Nationalists, contrary to American advice,
attempted to crush the Communist forces everywhere. They did succeed in
capturing the Communist capital of Yenan in March 1947, but, as the
effort continued, their own forces were dispersed and defeated, while
the Chinese forces, supported by disgruntled peasants, took over much
of rural China.
General
Marshall, on a mission
from President Truman, spent much of 1946 in China. At first he hoped
to work out some kind of coalition regime which would stop the civil
war by taking Communists into the Chiang government in a minority role.
Because this was not acceptable to either side, Marshall, and later
(1947) General Wedemeyer, tried to get Chiang to reform and to
consolidate in the areas he still controlled. Promises were free, but
efforts to carry them out were insignificant. In an attempt to force
the Nationalist government to stop the civil war and carry out the
American program of reform, consolidation, and coalition with the
Communists, an American embargo on arms shipments to China existed for
eleven months, from August 1946 to July 1947. Unfortunately, this was
just the period in which the Communists were expanding their forces
with captured Japanese arms obtained from the Russians and with large
acquisition of earlier American arms shipments to the Nationalists
which were ... allowed to go to the Reds. To stop this ... it would
have been necessary to allot at least 10,000 American officers to
Chiang's forces, attached to every unit down to company level. Neither
side wanted to do this, as the problems of language translation, of
inability to enforce recommendations, or to overcome personal Chinese
resentment against such interference by foreigners were almost
insuperable.
Marshall,
in 1946, became
convinced that the Nationalist regime was hopeless and that it could
overcome the Communists only if the United States took actual control
by American personnel and fought the Communists with American troops.
[Actually his mind was already made up at this time and he was secretly
working with those in Washington, D. C. and elsewhere who were planning
the betrayal of the Chinese people and the forces of Chiang Kai-shek.]
He was unwilling to do this because he felt that the Chinese would
resent it themselves, and it would make impossible any American effort
to save Europe from direct Soviet control. Since there could be no
question that Europe was more significant by an immense margin, he made
the choice, represented by the Marshall Plan, to save Europe. [The
Marshall Plan was a gigantic American taxpayer supported build up of
the German Industrial machine.] He did not regard the Chinese position
as total loss because he was convinced that any Chinese regime,
Nationalist or Communist, would find it almost impossible to create a
strong and prosperous China. General Wedemeyer, whose report was
submitted to Washington in 1949 ... felt that large American aid and
control should be extended, as a method of delaying the Communist
advance. However, Wedemeyer, unlike Marshall, gave less consideration
either to Europe or to political possibilities in Washington.
The
policy adopted in the
Truman Administration was something of a compromise between the
Marshall and Wedemeyer recommendations. On the whole, the
administration secretly adjusted its outlook to the hopelessness of the
Chiang regime and its future, but it did continue assistance by
appropriating $400 million in Chinese aid in 1948. [In reality the
opposite was true, the Truman Administration, like the Roosevelt
Administration was upholding the secret agreements it had made with
Stalin to turn over China to the communists.] The inability of the
Chiang government to make any substantial use of such aid continued to
be revealed in 1947-1949. The printing of paper money for the
government's expenses continued until the Chinese paper dollar became
almost valueless. In August 1948, a new yuan currency replaced the
previous Chinese dollar at a rate of one yuan to $3 million, but the
new money was decreased in value by deflation as the old had been.
[Actually the forces of Chiang Kai-shek were opposed at every
conceivable way to ensure the victory of Mao and his forces.]
...
On November 6th the
American military mission decided unanimously that the situation could
not be saved without the use of American ground forces and that "no
amount of military assistance would save the present situation." At
mid-January 1949, the main field armies north of the Yangtze were
destroyed by Communist forces. By that time, Mao's successes were going
far beyond the limits expected ... Soviet agents from central Asia took
over Sinkiang Province, but in China itself Mao's advance ... could be
financed from Chinese areas already controlled and could be fought with
weapons captured from National forces to add to the captured Japanese
weapons obtained from Soviet sources earlier.
The
Communist victories were
carried to conclusion in 1949. In January, Peiping was captured from
the Nationalists and, three months dater, the Yangtze River was
crossed, and Nanking fell (April, 3rd). In the course of the summer,
all the south fell, and the Nationalist government, eight years to the
day after Pearl Harbor, fled from the mainland to Taiwan (Formosa),
where they were protected from Communist pursuit by the United States
Seventh Fleet.
In
December 1949 Mao Tse-tung
and Stalin met in Moscow .... These led to a mutual-assistance treaty
signed on February 14, 1950. By this agreement Mao sought economic and
technical assistance which he needed to build up China, while Stalin
sought to use these needs to turn China's unexpected developments in
directions he desired. Most of the agreements remained secret, but the
chief included a defensive military alliance, detailed agreements by
which most of the railways and ports controlled by the Russians in the
north would be turned over to the Red Chinese by the end of 195: (these
included Port Arthur), and a loan to China of 560 million a year for
five years at I percent interest (much less in total than China had
sought). Less tangible agreements left Outer Mongolia and Chinese
Tannu-Tuva in Soviet control, set up a condominium in Sinkiang, left
North Korea in the area of Soviet control, and turned China's
expansionist ambitions southward. At the same time, a secret agreement
may have been made to support the projected North Korean attack on
South Korea, as 50,000 Koreans in the Chinese Communist forces were
weeded out and transferred to the North Korean Army in the next five
months.
One
consequence of the
Sino-Soviet agreements of February 1950 was a mass influx of Soviet
advisers and technicians into China to guide their allies in use of the
new equipment and methods made possible by the Soviet loan. These rose
to scores of thousands, of which about half were military. At the same
time, about 6,000 Chinese students were admitted to university study in
Russia....
Chapter
65—American Confusions, 1945-1950
The
American response to the
Soviet refusal of postwar cooperation was confused and tentative. For
months after the Truman Administration recognized the situation, it was
reluctant to make any public announcement of this fact because our
military demobilization could not be reversed until it had run its
course in 1947 and until a new strategic system and consequent military
organization could be reached. For this reason, the first announcement
came from Winston Churchill in his speech in Fulton, Missouri, in June
1946. In this he spoke of the "Iron Curtain" which Stalin was lowering
between the Soviet bloc and the West. It was also British initiative
over Greece and Turkey at the end of the year which led to the "Truman
Doctrine" of March 1947.
Truman
could not get any
constructive help from the leaders of the armed forces in establishing
a new strategy (they were much too busy fighting each other in
protection of the vested interests surviving from World War II), so he
was forced to fall back on other forms of resistance, particularly
economic, diplomatic, and ideological. The resulting strategy is known
as "containment." It lasted from early 1947 to 1953, and was resumed
gradually after 1958. Its chief characteristics were economic and
financial aid to other nations, to eliminate the misery and ignorance
which fosters Communism, and acceptance of the rights of neutrals and
allies to follow their own policies and to be consulted on our
policies, without primary reliance on our military force.
As
early as August 1945,
Truman asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to draw up recommendations
for America's postwar security needs. The bitter rivalries among the
three services made it impossible for the JCS to agree on a common
strategy, and thus they could not ascertain the country's weapons
needs. At the time, the air force was convinced that the next war would
be very brief and would be settled by the Strategic Air Command
dropping atom bombs on enemy cities. In its view the army and navy's
roles would be restricted to mopping up after SAC had defeated the
enemy. Accordingly, it wanted 70 air groups of the new 6-engine,
propellered B-36 bombers (Convair), which flew in prototype in 1946
after six years' work but which would not be available in quantity
until 1949 (when jet propulsion made them obsolete).
The
navy in 1945 was much
larger than all other navies of the world combined—"a five-ocean
navy to fight a no-ocean opponent," said the air force—but its
future had been placed in great jeopardy by the atom-bomb tests staged
at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in 1946. These tests showed that a fleet
would suffer very great damage, unless widely dispersed, from atomic
explosions in the air, while a blast under water would drench it with
almost irradicable radioactivity. Nonetheless, the navy had to seek a
role in the growing rivalry with Russia, and pinned its hopes on its
ability to reach the enemy with atom-armed planes flown from the deck
of a 65,000 ton "super-carrier" of astronomical cost.
The
army, almost eclipsed by
the plans of its more glamorous rivals, wanted Universal Military
Training (UMT) leading to highly trained reserve units, in spite of the
air force's insistence that World War III would be over before ground
forces could be mobilized.
These
disagreements between
services made it impossible for the JCS to achieve any agreement on
strategy or on weapons needs in answer to Truman's request of 1945.
Accordingly, in June 1946, they informed the President that a unified
strategy could he reached only after achievement of a unification of
the three services into a single organization. For this reason, it was
not until April 1950, that the United States obtained a strategic
military policy to underlie Truman's policy of containment, which was
then three years old. The new strategic policy was embodied in NSC 68,
which, despite its code identification, did not come from the National
Security Council, but was the child of the Policy Planning Staff of the
State Department, led by Paul Nitze.
The
inability of the armed
services to provide the country with a defense policy, because of
inter-service rivalries, is a consequence of the fact that military
leaders are specialists and technicians, concerned with means rather
than with goals, and, like all technicians, need guidance (or goals)
set by other persons with larger perspectives. This weakness is more
obvious in peacetime than in war, and is more common among Americans
than among some others. Americans work together best when the
organization's goal is explicitly established. In this they differ from
the British, who can work together perfectly well in organizations
without any apparent goals and are, indeed, suspicious of any desire to
establish explicit goals or overriding policy. Americans, when goals
are established (as they are in business in peacetime by the balance
sheet or as they are in war by the desire for victory) work together
very effectively, but political work in peacetime, with its ambiguous
goals, is relegated to rivalry, bickering, and total inability to
relate means to goals. As a result, the means themselves tend to become
goals.
It
was the emphasis upon means
rather than goals, and the compromises between conflicting means, which
led to the National Security Act of 1947. This sought to evade the need
for clear hard thinking about goals and the subordination of means to
goals by reorganization of the top levels of governmental operation
concerned with security. It set up a system based on secrecy and
anonymity which may, in time, revolutionize the whole American system
of government. In this reorganization there were at least three major
parts: (1) unification of the armed services; (2) creation of the
National Security Council as an advisory board to the President; and
(3) reorganization of the whole system of intelligence and spying,
through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the code-breaking
National Security Agency (NSA)..
Basically,
rivalry among the
American armed services was a rivalry for congressional appropriations,
a struggle over slicing the annual budget. In this struggle each
service sought to convince congressmen that its particular weapons
provided the best defense for the United States. The air force, which
in 1946 was still a branch of the army, touted the claims of the manned
bomber; the navy, only recently disillusioned with its old love, the
battleship, had now shifted its affections to the aircraft carrier; the
army had to stick with the humble foot soldier but almost concealed him
from view with its insistence on trucks, tanks, and cannon. As a matter
of fact, the manned bomber, the aircraft carrier, and the tank were all
obsolescent in 1946, but their supporters were unwilling to concede
this, since such a concession would, they thought, shift appropriations
to the other services. The manned bomber was threatened by rockets with
homing devices which would bring such rockets, at speeds higher than
manned bombers could ever reach, in for the kill by seeking out the
plane's engine exhaust heat or by use of radar and electronic-eye
devices. The aircraft carrier was threatened hy atomic bombs, since it
was too vulnerable to these to justify its cost of over $100 million.
The tank was threatened by shaped charges, and, in general, the whole
tactical outlook of ground forces, with their traditional emphasis on
mass and concentration, was challenged by nuclear, biological, and
chemical weapons which put great value on dispersal.
In
these struggles between the
services, the clashes are particularly bitter in a period of
demobilization, and this bitterness is accentuated by the fact that
each service has alliances with the industrial complexes which supply
their equipment. These complexes not only supply funds, such as
advertising, for each service to carry its message to the Congress and
the people, hut also exert every influence to retain equipment and
tactics in obsolescent modes and types (but newer models) by dangling,
before the high officers who can influence contracts, offers of future
well-paving consultant positions with the industrial firms concerned. Most
high officers of the American armed forces in the war and postwar
period retired before the fixed age of sixty-two, often on a disability
basis (which exempted retirement pay from income taxes), and then took
consultant jobs with industrial firms whose chief business was in war
contracts.
Thus,
four-star general Brehon
B. Somervell, chief of Army Service Forces in World War II, retired on
a disability salary of $16,000 a year at the age of fifty-four to join
a number of industrial firms, including Koppers, which paid him
$125,000 a year; three-star general L. H. Campbell, chief of ordnance
in World War II, retired on disability at $9,000 a year at age
fifty-nine and became an executive, at $50,000 a year, of firms from
whom he had previously purchased $3 billion in armaments. Four-star
General Clay retired at fifty-two on $16,000 a year, but signed up at
once with General Motors and Continental Can at over $100,000 a year.
Three-star air-force General Ira C. Eaker left the service at age fifty
with $9,000 a year and joined Hughes Tool Company at $50,000. Another
three-star air-force general, Harold C. George, went with Eaker to
Hughes, at $40,000. General Joseph T. McNarney, in 1952, took his four
stars, and $16,000 a year, to join Consolidated Vultee at $100,000.
These
are but a few of more
than a hundred general officers whose post-retirement alliances with
industrial firms encouraged their successors, still on active service,
to remain on friendly terms with such appreciative business
corporations. These connections undoubtedly inhibit officers of the
armed services in their efforts to obtain fresh ideas, fresh tactics,
and fresh equipment for America's defense.
In
this struggle there occurs
rivalry between the services to secure larger shares of existing
budgets, but there also occurs cooperation to increase the total joint
budget. The best way to do the latter is by war scares, which
undoubtedly increase appropriations for all services. The spectacular
increase in the joint defense budget of the United States from about
$14 billion in the late 1940's to about $60 billion in the early 1960's
is partly caused by a [pretended] Soviet threat to the United States,
but it is also partly caused by a scare engendered by the armed
services. If the Soviet Union has been deterred from aggression by
those expenditures, the money was well spent, but, since the
Soviet Union never has had any intention of engaging the United States
in open war,
it is legitimate to believe that many of the billions spent could have
been used to fight the Soviet Union in more remunerative ways than by
the purchase of manned bombers, aircraft carriers, or tanks.
The
struggles between the
services in the United States after 1945 have been vigorous and often
unscrupulous. They have involved putting pressure on administrators in
the executive branch from the President down, and especially on the
high civilian heads in the Pentagon, of misleading congressmen, and of
propagandizing the public.
The
air force, for a variety
of reasons, was the most successful of the three services in this
propaganda war. After all, flyers had plenty of experience, since they
had been propagandizing the world since about five years after the
first plane flew, without benefit of publicity, in 1903. The air force
was interested only in strategic bombing, and had little interest in
tactical work under command of ground forces which, the flyers
insisted, hampered their special genius. To get free of the army and
become a separate service, coequal with the navy and army, the army air
forces in 1946 put their full pressure behind legislation to "unify"
the armed services. "Unify" here really meant change two into three.
This was done by reducing the two Cabinet posts for war and navy to a
single post for defense, with three equal secretaries for army, navy,
and air outside the Cabinet. The "unity" presumably was to be obtained
from the secretary of defense's control over the three service
secretaries, but this was impossible since they were named by the
President, not by the secretary of defense, and they had little
influence over their services, each of which looked to its chief
commander on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The
fact that the Joint Chiefs
had operational command of their departments meant that they had to
defend the diverse interests of these, and could contribute little to
unity or to any general ideas, even strategic ones; while if they had
been separated from their actual commands in order to be free to reach
a general consensus on strategic ideas they would have retained no
control over their services. The only real lines of authority in the
whole system were those in the hands of the President himself and those
lines of command going downward from the Joint Chiefs to their own
services. There were only very weak lines between the secretary of
defense and the Joint Chiefs or to his service secretaries, or between
the latter and the services for which they were responsible. As a
result, very little unification was achieved, even after amendments to
the Act, and in 1949 the inter-service rivalries reached their most
intense peak. By the end of that year UMT, the super-carrier, and the
70-group air force were all dead, killed off by inter-service
rivalries, in spite of the fact that all public-opinion polls showed
strong support for all of them.
James
Forrestal, who had been
secretary of the navy since 1944, and who, on behalf of the navy, had
emasculated the unification bill, was made first secretary of defense,
and was called upon to administer it in 1947. Within a year he had
reversed his opinions and was demanding amendments to strengthen the
Act, especially the powers of his own post. His mind collapsed under
the strain, and he resigned in 1949, committing suicide shortly
afterward. Although public-opinion polls showed that two-thirds of
Americans approved UMT and only a quarter or less opposed it, the air
force in 1948 was able to persuade the Congress that there was a
necessary choice between UMT and the 70-group air force; accordingly,
the air-force budget was raised $822 million and UMT was buried in
committee.
Forrestal
was replaced as
secretary of defense by Louis Johnson, onetime national commander of
the American Legion, who favored the air force, as Forrestal had
favored the navy, in these intramural battles. Although the
super-carrier had been authorized and appropriated for, and although
construction had begun under Forrestal, Johnson used a vote of two to
one in JCS against it (Admiral Louis Denfeld in the minority) as excuse
for canceling the contract. The subsequent "Admirals' Revolt" took the
form of anonymous letters to Congress charging corruption on the B-36
contract, as well as public charges, which were quite correct, that the
plane was already obsolete. The whole scandal received a full-scale
congressional investigation, the "B-36 affair," as a result of which
the B-36 was discredited, Admiral Denfeld was removed from the JCS, and
Johnson, having alienated everyone by his efforts to save money, was
replaced by General Marshall (1950).
The
Unification Act had
excluded retired officers from the post of secretary of defense, but
this clause was made un-applicable to General Marshall so that he could
succeed Johnson in 1950. Thus, the supporters of each of the three
services held the position successively in less than a two-year period.
Marshall said that he took the job to get UMT, but the act, as passed
in 1951, was in a form which allowed the Administration to prevent its
execution, and it never went into effect. In its place, troops were
raised for the services, chiefly the army, by successive extensions of
the wholly unsatisfactory Selective Service Acts.
The
inter-service battles of
1945-1950 were largely a victory for the air force, which got rid of
the super-carrier and UMT, and thus obtained the biggest bite from the
budget. Much of this bite went to SAC, which had been created in March
1946, and Noms taken over from General George Kenney by General Curtis
E. LeMay in October 1948. At the time, SAC was really SAD. Starting in
1946 with only a single group able to deliver the atom bomb, for most
of this period it struggled along with the 300-mph B-29. "It lacked
planes, bases, equipment, and trained men." Above all, it still
operated on the old premise that the outbreak of war would be preceded
by negotiations and mobilization. LeMay changed all that. He was not a
desk soldier, nor was he a paper pusher. Ruthless, efficient, and
single-minded, he flitted about from base to base in a self-piloted
plane, a big cigar clamped at a belligerent angle in his set jaw. He
gave SAC a single purpose ("mission"), isolated it from everything else
in the defense chaos by moving its headquarters from Washington to
Nebraska, and demanded immediate and efficient war readiness.
With
sufficient funds LeMay
would have kept a third of SAC in the air at all times, ready to go;
another third at "war readiness" for quick takeoff; and the final third
on call within a few hours. Until 1952, when he began to get the new
eight-jet intercontinental B-52's, he bridged the gap with modified
B-36's and medium-range, six-jet, B-47's. With the support of Air
Secretary Thomas K. Finletter, he established bases within range of the
Soviet Union, in Europe, Greenland, North Africa, and Okinawa. By 1955
he had a force of remarkable efficiency and high morale, a success
resulting from three factors which provide a lesson for all
organizational success: a clear-cut mission, leadership, and
continuity. The last quality was achieved by retaining LeMay in command
of SAC for eight years, in violation of the established armed services
practice of three- to four-year periods of rotation of duty.
In
all this turmoil of
controversy in 1947-1950, the army had not been idle. Its struggles for
promotions, pay increases, perquisites, and assignments were ensured
success to some extent by creating a new kind of army, an army
top-heavy with officers and paper pushers who worked from 8:00 A. M..
to 4:00 P. M., five days a week, and had very little fighting
effectiveness. This was done by setting up a structure of officers and
auxiliary activities which absorbed almost the total budget of the
department in non-combat lines and filled the combat units with a small
number of short-term draftees of very little combat value. In January
1952, for example, the Department of Defense had 5 million employees,
of which 3.7 million were in uniform and 1.3 million were civilians.
Those in uniform used up $37 billion for pay, food, housing, and
clothing—that is, $10,000 per head—in a total defense
budget of $46 billion. The 1.3 million civilians cost $5.2 billion, or
$4,000 a year each, leaving only $3 billion in the total defense budget
for equipment, research, and other costs which contribute directly to
defense. The army's share of the 3.7 million uniformed personnel was 2
million, but that provided only 12 divisions, at most 150,000 men, for
combat.
In
spite of these enormous
expenditures, the puny combat effectiveness of the "standing army" was
shown in the Korean War when nine-tenths of the officers in combat were
Reserves who had to be called from their peacetime activities to fight.
The army solution to the disappointments of Korea was more of the same;
in June 1951, the Selective Service Act of 1948 was amended to drop the
draft age from 19 to 18 and raise the authorized limit on the men in
active service from over 2 million to 5 million. That is, the
qualitative deficiencies of Korea were to be solved by quantitative
increases of the same inadequate quality, a step which might not
improve America's defense position but could justify increasingly rapid
promotion for officers.
The
last few months of 1949
include the major turning points in the whole period 1947-1963. Three
events which marked this were the well-publicized B-36 crisis, the loss
of China, and the secret H-bomb crisis which followed the explosion of
the Soviet Union's first A-bomb in August. Another significant event of
the period was the organization of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty
Organization) following the treaty of April 4, 1949, signed in
Washington. This mutual defense pact "to safeguard the freedom, common
heritage, and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles
of democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law," had, as
signers, the United States, Canada, and ten West European countries
(Iceland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg,
France, the United Kingdom, Portugal, and Italy). In February 1952,
Greece and Turkey joined the pact, and in May 1955 the West German
Federal Republic became a member. The agreement was largely anchored on
Germany: it flowed out of the threat provided by the Berlin blockade,
and directly implied the merging of West Germany into the Western camp.
As the chief step in this process, the three western zones of Germany
were merged into one, and, in September 1949, the military rule of
Germany was replaced by the Adenauer regime.
Throughout
this period, fear
of communism was growing within the United States.... The Soviet and
Communist hatred of the American way of life is well established, and
the existence of the American Communist Party as a willing tool of an
international Communist conspiracy directed from Moscow is also beyond
dispute. Such Communists were undoubtedly engaged in subversion and
espionage, and were assisted in these efforts by "fellow travelers" and
other sympathizers. Moreover, some Communists and fellow travelers were
undoubtedly present in government and, to a greater degree, in some
other areas, notably certain labor unions, higher education, and
especially in the more creative end of the entertainment field, such as
the theater, writing, and Hollywood scenario production. On the other
hand, the number of Communists in the United States, according to the
FBI, was only about 75,000 in 1945 and fell steadily to 50,000 in 1950
and to 3,000 in 1960.
...
The Communist Party of the
United States (CPUS), like others throughout the world, was always,
from its founding in 1919, a tightly disciplined body of conspirators
whose primary allegiance was to the Soviet Union and whose secondary
aim, after the preservation of the Soviet Union itself, was to
establish a similar regime in the United States. Tactics varied from
year to year, and the party line shifted with changing political and
world conditions without, however, ever abandoning these two goals. In
1935, with the threat of Fascism spreading through the world, the
Communist International (Comintern) adopted a "Popular Front" tactic
which was, essentially, a temporary alliance of all non-Fascist groups
to oppose Nazi aggression and to support the Soviet Union against
German attack. In this period the Communist Party of the United States
was a relatively open group, with openly available headquarters and
telephone numbers, and with a good deal of cooperation and free
exchange through a broad spectrum of political and social activities,
and cooperation from the political Center to the extreme political
Left. There was, at that time, widespread disillusionment with the
existing structure of society because of enormous unemployment,
pervasive poverty, and bourgeois paralysis in the face of economic
stagnation and Fascist aggression. Communist insistence that something
be done about these things won widespread sympathy, even in circles
which were totally non-Communist. The Communists themselves took full
advantage of this atmosphere by establishing Communist front and
fellow-traveler organizations of all kinds, and the distinction between
party members and fellow travelers became very free, confused, and
blurred. The Communist command system, however, remained fully aware of
who were devoted to their permanent goals and who were not, and
retained general control, under cover, of all organizations they
regarded as important. .
This
ambiguous situation of
Left-wing fellowship began to break down in 1938-1940 as the complete
dominance of Soviet national selfishness within Communist parties
everywhere became evident, at first in Spain, later in the Nazi-Soviet
Pact of August 1939, and in the Soviet-Finnish War the following winter.
For
the American Communist
Party the chief turning point here was the enactment of the Foreign
Agents Registration Act in 1940. The United States Communist Party
broke its affiliation with the Comintern and instead established a
secret link between the Comintern and the United States party, chiefly
through Gerhart Eisler (who was finally deported in 1949 and became an
official of the East German Communist regime). In 1943 the Comintern
itself was officially dissolved by the Soviet Government, althougl1
secretly it continued to exist. As part of this same process, in a sort
of wartime common front, the United States party itself was dissolved
in 1944 and reappeared at once as the Communist Political Association.
Earl Browder, who personified the Popular Front tactic of the 1930'5,
continued as the head of the Political Association and the common-front
tactic until July 1945, when he was removed as a traitor to the
Marxist-Leninist ideology and replaced by William Z. Foster. At the
same time, the Communist Party of the United States was reestablished
to pursue a more aggressive and narrower policy.
The
abandonment of the United
Front approach in 1945 was a gross tactical error which almost totally
destroyed the party in the next fifteen years. It had been ordered from
Moscow through the French Communist leader, Jacques Duclos, and was,
like other mistakes of the Kremlin at the same time, based on a totally
mistaken conception of what the postwar world would be like. This
misconception was firmly rooted in the greater misconceptions of
Marxist-Leninist doctrine, and assumed (1) that there would be a
postwar economic depression; (2) that the United States would relapse
into isolationism; and (3) that the United States and Europe,
especially Britain, would engage in an imperialist rivalry for markets
and economic advantages. Just as the new Soviet foreign policy prepared
to exploit this anticipated chaos, so the CPUS was reorganized to
profit from the same chaos. Instead, it committed suicide.
This
collapse of the CPUS from
75,000 members with ample funds in 1945 to less than 3,000 members with
hardly a dime fifteen years later was assisted by the actions of the
United States government, the attacks of party members who were leaving
it in droves, and the efforts of ex-members, political leaders, and
intellectual bellwethers to strike at the CPUS in substitute for their
inability to strike at the USSR. Many of these ... [individuals] were
fighting for their convictions, but at least an equally large number
were fighting for their personal profit or their personal partisan
advantage. In this effort to win personal advantage from a worthy
struggle, leadership was taken by some of the ex-Communists, the FBI,
and the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
These
anti-Communists, some of
them professionals, ... demonstrate[d] that the CPUS, by its
penetration into the Federal government under the New Deal, into labor
unions or education, and into entertainment, especially Hollywood, had
gravely endangered the nation....
Espionage
is another matter,
but this is more from the nature of espionage than the nature of
Communism, except for the very significant fact that the ideological
appeal of Communism to the half educated makes it possible for the
Soviet Union to obtain secrets without financial payments. In general,
the nature of espionage is totally ignored by most people, and this
ignorance was only increased by the activities of the anti-Communist
spy agitations of the 1949-1954 period. All past history shows that
espionage has been generally successful and intelligence has been
generally a failure. By this I mean that no country had much success in
keeping secrets, in the twentieth as in all earlier centuries, but
neither has any other country had much success in evaluating or in
interpreting the secrets it obtained. The so-called "surprises" of
history have emerged not because other countries did not have the
information but because they refused to believe it. The date of
Hitler's attack on the West in May 1940 had been given to the
Netherlands by the German Counterintelligence Office as soon as it was
decided; the Western countries refused to believe it. The same was true
of every one of Hitler's surprises. Stalin was given the date of the
German attack on the Soviet Union by a number of informants, including
the United States Department of State, but he refused to believe. Both
the Germans and the Russians had the date of D-Day, but ignored it. The
United States had available all the Japanese coded messages, knew that
war was about to begin, and that a Japanese fleet with at least four
large carriers was loose (and lost) in the Pacific, yet Pearl Harbor
was a total surprise. This last point was so hard to believe, once the
evidence was available, that the same groups who were [focusing on] ...
Soviet espionage in 1948-1955 were also claiming that President
Roosevelt expected and wanted Pearl Harbor.... [Actually this is true.
Roosevelt had been conspiring for some time to get the U. S. involved
in World War II. The President and others devised a plan by leaving
Pearl Harbor open to attack, knowing that this would arouse the
American people and he could declare war on Japan and thus enter the
war. The collusion of the President with Marshall and others has been
well documented today with irrefutable evidence.]
The
whole purpose of secrecy
in government should not be to keep information from other states (this
is almost impossible) but to make it as difficult as possible for other
states to get certain information, so that, when they do get such
restricted information, it wil1 be so intermingled with other
information and misinformation that it cannot be evaluated promptly
enough to do them much good. Any espionage system gets more information
than it can handle rapidly. Any country should assume that the enemy
has all its own secret information. The lessons of past history fully
support this assumption. Following every war the discovery is made that
the enemy, during the war, had every other state's most cherished
secrets. In fact, the most successful kind of counterespionage work is
achieved, not by preventing access to secrets, but by permitting access
to information which is not true. This was done most successfully in
1943 in preparing the American invasion of Sicily, which was a surprise
to the Germans because they had been provided, through their espionage
in Spain, with false information about an invasion of the Balkans. The
Germans had a somewhat similar success through their Operation North
Pole by which the Germans successfully took over and operated the
French Underground and the associated British espionage net in a large
part of France for about a year. Finally, it is not generally
recognized by outsiders that almost all the information gathered by any
espionage net is non-secret material fully available to anyone as
public information. Even in work against a super-secret area like the
Soviet Union or in nuclear "secrets" this is true. Allen Dulles said
that more than go percent of the information which the CIA gathers on
the Soviet Union is non-secret. Soviet espionage reports on the United
States must contain at least 97 percent non-secret material.
Many,
if not most, of the
"spies" and "atomic spies" apprehended, with high-powered publicity, by
the FBI and the Un-American Activities Committee in 1948-1954 (to the
great alarm of the American people) were not concerned with secrets,
while some of them were not engaged in espionage at all, and almost
none of them had anything to do with nuclear secrets (contrary to the
publicity releases of the agencies who accused them). There was nuclear
espionage, and it was successful, but almost nothing was achieved by
any spy chasers in the United States either to reveal the culprits or
to punish them. Fuchs and Nunn May were real nuclear spies for the
Soviet, but others at least equally important are hardly ever
mentioned. For example, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, the
greatest French nuclear physicist (Nobel Prize, 1935) and an admitted
member of the Communist Party, knew as much about our nuclear work as
anyone in Europe, Britain, or Canada. His chief associates fled from
France (he did not) in 1940 and worked on the nuclear project in
England and Canada until they returned to France after that country's
liberation. Some of these associates, notably Hans von Halban and Lew
Kowarski, certainly knew as much as Nunn May and may have known as much
as Fuchs, and unquestionably told all they knew to Joliot-Curie, a
Communist, in 1944. Or again, as an example of numerous unexplored
paths by which nuclear information went to Russia, an outstanding
Polish nuclear physicist who studied with Joliot-Curie was Ignace
Zlotowski. He was in the United States in the critical years during the
Soviet race to make the atom bomb as a member of the Polish Embassy
staff and Poland's representative on the UN Atomic Energy Commission.
He sent large quantities of nuclear information behind the Iron Curtain
and was present as an observer at the Bikini bomb tests in 1946.
Finally,
it is evident that a
great deal of nuclear information (whether secret or not is unknown),
as well as uranium metal, went to the Soviet Union as part of
Lend-Lease in 1943. Major George Racey Jordan, USAAF, tried in vain to
disrupt these shipments at the time. [The] ... shipment of uranium to
Russia is corroborated from other sources. The significance of such
shipments is still unknown, since the export license permitting them
was granted at the request of General Groves. Jordan's other evidence,
most of which was very discreditable to the New Deal (since he
testified that he, Groves, and others were under direct pressure from
Harry Hopkins and Vice-President Henry Wallace to allow export of
nuclear materials, radar, and other secrets to Russia) was subsequently
shown to be ... [true] ... [and] his statements were given nationwide
publicity by news commentators like Fulton Lewis, Jr., by Life
magazine, and by the House Un-American
Activities Committee, and are still widely believed.
Most
of the "atomic spy" cases
are similar to this. The earliest of these was the arrest of Soviet
naval Lieutenant Redin by the FBI on March 26, 1946, on charges that a
Seattle naval engineer, Herbert Kennedy, had sold Redin "secrets" about
the Bikini test ship Yellowstone for $250. This
case was a
forerunner of others in respect to two false assertions in news
releases: (1) claims by the FBI that information leading to the
apprehension of Redin had come from the Gouzenko "atomic spy" case in
Canada (February 1946) and (2) claims by the HUAC that it had unearthed
this significant case. Redin was eventually acquitted when his defense
showed that Kennedy had been paid for research he did for Redin in the
Seattle Public Library. Neither Gouzenko nor HUAC had anything to do
with it.
The
change in the climate of
American opinion (and thus in the attitudes of American juries) over
four years may be observed in the contrast between the acquittal of
Redin in 1946 and the conviction of Abraham Brothman in 1950. The FBI
publicity and the universal belief of the American press, both at
Brothman's arrest in July 1950 and at his trial in November 1950, was
that he was "part of a Soviet spy apparatus under a Russian trade
organization chief working to ferret out atomic secrets" (The
New York Times,
July 30, 1950) or that the trial was an "ATOMIC SPY CASE" (all New York
newspaper headlines, November 8-23, 1950). In fact, Brothman and his
secretary (Miss Moskowitz) were the only defendants in a trial for
conspiracy to persuade a third person, not on trial (Harry Gold), to
commit perjury in July 1947. Undoubtedly, Brothman and his secretary
had discussed together what they could do about the testimony to be
given by the semi-moronic Gold before a grand jury. Their purpose, in
which they clearly failed, was to keep Brothman from being involved in
any charges of giving secrets to Communists. Technically they were
guilty of conspiracy, were so found, and were sentenced to a total of
nine years' imprisonment. In spite of the fact that the trial clearly
showed that Brothman had nothing to do with espionage, secrets, or
atomic research, the mistaken impression that he did was never removed
by the press, and remained in the public mind as an established truth,
so that United States Attorney Irving Saypol, who prosecuted this case
in November 1950, referred to Brothman as convicted of "espionage" when
he prosecuted the Rosenberg case before the same judge in April 1951.
The true story, as far as Brothman was concerned, seems to be quite
different.
Brothman
was an industrial
chemist and chemical inventor who owned a number of chemical
laboratories and factories held as subsidiaries of his Pennsylvania
Sugar Company. His chief concern was in industrial solvents in which he
held patents on processes and equipment. In 1940, when Brothman was
seeking orders for his products, he was approached by a Russian, Jacob
Golos, then proprietor of World Tourists, a Communist-front travel
agency but previously employed by the Soviet Trade commission (AMTORG)
and its Purchasing Commission. Brothman offered Golos lo percent
commission on any orders he could place with either agency for
Brothman's products or processes. We now know that Golos was a high
official in the Soviet secret police, a major Soviet spy, and one of
the three-man Control Commission of the American Communist Party.
Brothman knew none of this and was not himself a Communist, although in
1940 he regarded the Soviet Union as the chief obstacle to world
Fascism.
For
several months in 1940,
Brothman gave to Golos, both directly and through Golos's mistress,
Elizabeth Bentley, blueprints and descriptions of the chemical
processes he had for sale. All of these were available to any
prospective purchaser and had been written up and advertised by
Brothman in the regular chemical journals, and many were his own
inventions. When Brothman objected to talking to Golos or Miss Bentley
on the ground that they knew no chemistry, Golos sent him another
agent, a chemist, Harry Gold, who had been doing industrial research
(which gradually developed into industrial espionage) for AMTORG for
several years. Although Brothman got little or no business from the
Russians, he hired Gold as a chemist in one of his laboratories in
1943. Four years later, after Gold, unknown to Brothman, had become an
atomic spy contact with Fuchs, Brothman discussed witl1 his secretary
how Gold's testimony before a grand jury might be given to prevent
unfavorable inferences regarding Brothman's contacts with Golos in
1940. In view of the changed American attitude toward such Russian
contacts from 1940 to 1947, this is not, perhaps, a surprising
reaction, but in the increasingly tense situation of 1950 it won
Brothman a seven-year prison sentence for conspiring with his secretary
to persuade Gold to commit perjury. (Gold was not tried either for the
conspiracy or for perjury.)
The
changed atmosphere of
American public opinion from 1947 on was greatly intensified by the
increasingly strained world conditions, and hy the growing public
knowledge of the nature of the Communist movement, its connections with
Soviet Russia, and their joint conspiracy against the West. Much of
this evidence came from ex-Communists, such as Elizabeth Bentley, Louis
Budenz, Whittaker Chambers, John Lautner, and others. All of these
undoubtedly were ex-Communists and, equally undoubtedly, revealed much
valuable information about the Communist conspiracy and properly roused
the American public to the danger of this conspiracy....
When
the wholesale revelations
of ex-Communists began in 1947, the New Deal and its successor had been
in the White House for more than fourteen years. The Republicans,
especially the congressional delegations, were prepared to ... [expose
the secret agreements at Yalta, the deliberate loss of American lives
at Pearl Harbor and the betrayal of the America and Chinese people by]
... President Truman and ... Franklin Roosevelt in order to win the
presidential election of 1948. They were offered a great opportunity to
do so when the Republicans won control of both Houses of Congress in
the congressional elections of 1946. This effort was spearheaded, in
1947 and 1948, by the House Committee on Un-American Activities....
The
HUAC in 1947-1948 had nine
members of which the chief were J. Parnell Thomas, of New Jersey
(Chairman); Karl E. Mundt, of South Dakota; and Richard M. Nixon, of
California, on the Republican side, and four southern democrats, led by
John S. Wood, of Georgia, and John E. Rankin, of Mississippi, on the
Democratic side. The value of the publicity gained by the committee in
these two years may be judged from the fact that it carried both Mundt
and Nixon to the Senate in 1948 and 1950 and the latter to the
N:ice-Presidency and close to the Presidency itself in 1952 and 1960.
There can be no doubt that the Republican members of the Committee
realized the value of the publicity to be gained by membership on it
and that their actions were consistently aimed more at partisan
advantage for themselves and the discrediting of previous Democratic
incumbents in the White House than they were directed to ascertaining
the nature and functioning of the Communist conspiracy in the United
States. Other legislative committees occasionally copied these tactics.
It was this partisan, rather than investigatory, bias in the behavior
of such committees which reduced so much of this investigation of
Communism into personal vendettas such as those between Hiss and
Chambers, between Remington and Bentley, and between Lattimore and
Budenz. In these battles of personalities, charges and countercharges
flew about so freely at hearings, in the press, over the airwaves, and
occasionally in judicial proceedings, that the truth cannot now be
ascertained. There can be no doubt that falsehood and even perjury were
to be found on both sides. What is equally regrettable is that numerous
other accused Communists, both in government and out, whose names were
given to these committees on the same basis. and sometimes in the same
breath, as Hiss, Remington, or Lattimore were almost totally ignored
and lost in the personal controversies aroused over these three,
largely because of the partisan handling of the investigatory
committees.
These
revelations began in
January and February 1947, when Budenz identified Gerhart Eisler as a
Communist leader in the United States. Within a few weeks President
Truman gave the investigators a prime weapon when he issued an order
(March 21, 1947) requiring a loyalty oath from all government workers.
The significance of this was that any Communists in the government
could be prosecuted for perjury unless they had admitted the fact.
In
the course of the summer
the FBI arrested a half-dozen individuals at various times and
announced that they "had stolen vital atomic bomb secrets from the
heart of the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos." This alarming news was
reinforced by a number of press releases from the HUAC. When the
accused were brought to trial, however, it developed that they had been
guilty of insignificant and technical infractions of the law, such as
taking snapshots of each other while serving as soldiers at Los Alamos
or pilfering of government property there. Eventually two were given
suspended sentences, one was sentenced to eighteen months, a fourth got
six months, and a fifth paid a fine of $250. The original charges of
atomic espionage were in headlines; the final disposition of the cases,
if recorded at all, appeared as insignificant items on a back page,
unconnected with "atomic espionage."
In
February 1948,
Representative Thomas, chairman of the HUAC, was seeking from the
Congress the largest appropriations his committee had ever obtained.
Apparently to bolster this request, on the last day of the month, from
his hospital bed he issued a six-page report on Dr. Edward U. Condon,
Director of the National Bureau of Standards. Condon, one of the
world's great authorities on quantum mechanics, had been attacked by
Thomas for about a year, chiefly in press releases and in two articles
in national magazines, apparently because of animosity over Condon's
opposition to the Johnson-Mays bill for atomic-energy control. The
report of February 1948 said flatly, "Dr. Condon is one of the weakest
links in our atomic security." This charge was based on a mishmash of
falsehoods, irrelevancies, and incorrect inferences. It was charged
that Condon had obtained his job from the favor of Henry Wallace, then
secretary of commerce, with the implication that Condon must be a
Left-winger if Wallace was. In fact, Wallace did not even know Condon,
and appointed him only for the administrative reason that the Bureau of
Standards was a part of the Commerce Department. Or again, the HUAC
report quoted from a letter of J. Edgar Hoover to W. Averell Harriman
when the latter was secretary of commerce in May 1947. This letter had
been stolen from the FBI loyalty report on Condon and was merely a
history of unevaluated reports of Condon's actions as reported to the
FBI. As published in the HUAC report it was edited to cut out (without
any indication) sentences favorable to Condon. It was charged that
Condon's passport was taken up by the State Department when he planned
to go to Russia in 1946. The fact was that this plan was a
government-sponsored project to fly about two dozen American scientists
to Russia in an army plane, and Condon's participation was canceled by
the army because it regarded him as too valuable a nuclear physicist to
be risked behind the Iron Curtain, where he might be kidnaped. The HUAC
report said that Condon recruited members to join an organization
listed as "subversive" by the attorney general, the American-Soviet
Science Society. It later developed that this organization, which
existed for the purpose of translating scientific reports from Russian
to English, using funds from the Rockefeller Foundation, had never been
listed as subversive by the attorney general, but on the contrary had
been encouraged by the United States government as a method of finding
out what the Russians were doing in science. The HUAC had simply
confused this society with an entirely different organization, which
the attorney general had listed.
On
this kind of evidence the
HUAC demanded Condon's removal from the government and ominously
reported that "the situation as regards Dr. Condon is not an isolated
one . . . there are other Government officials in strategic positions
who are playing Stalin's game to the detriment of the United
States.” Condon's repeated requests for an opportunity to appear
before the committee to refute its charges under oath were ignored. The
committee, especially its chairman, continued to harass Condon so that
it was impossible for him to do his work in the Bureau of Standards.
This was done by subjecting him to one loyalty investigation after
another (each takes a great deal of work, by the FBI and the accused,
and requires months). These investigations, one after another, cleared
Dr. Condon, but each clearance was followed by new charges and a new
investigation. After the fourth clearance, and the opening of a fifth
investigation, Condon resigned from the government in 1954. This fifth
investigation was demanded by Vice-President Nixon, who seems to have
felt that his original participation in the unjustified smearing of
Condon six years before had to be sustained by continued persecution.
By that time Chairman Thomas, who was the director of this persecution
in 1947-1949, had been sent to prison as a common criminal for making
the employees in his congressional office, paid from government funds,
secretly give back substantial parts of their salaries to him. Thomas
should have restricted his efforts for additional money to smearing
innocent scientists in paid articles in national magazines.
The
Condon case was still in
its early full publicity in July and August 1948, when the Thomas
committee hit the headlines for weeks, day after day, with the
testimony of Louis Budenz, Elizabeth Bentley, Whittaker Chambers, and
other "experts" on Communists. They listed several dozen names of
Communists in government in the 1930's, organized in formal groups or
cells, and generally paying dues and sending information through
"couriers" like Miss Bentley. Most of those named ignored the charges
or simply made a denial to the press, but a few, such as Hiss, who
sought to refute the charges, were met by new ones. Eventually, as we
have seen, Remington and Hiss were both jailed for perjury, the former
for denying he had been a Communist and the latter for denying he gave
government documents to Chambers. Both cases required two trials before
convictions were obtained.
Others
of these named were
called before the committee and refused to give evidence under the
Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which protects against
self-incrimination. Little was done about these, but it is clear that
many of them were in fact Communists and that Bentley and Chambers knew
them as such, by hearsay at least. Bentley's original evidence in 1948
gave a score of names of Communists she had "known" in the government.
More than two years passed before it became clear that she did not
"know" them at all, had never met them, and could not identify them by
sight, but had merely gathered their names from her contacts with the
few Communists who reported directly to her and whom she knew well.
Similarly, she indicated in her original evidence that she broke with
the Communists and went to the FBI, for patriotic reasons, in August
1945. Only in 1953, when the Eisenhower Administration was still trying
to make a major issue of the Communists in the New Deal, did Attorney
General Brownell, in publishing a letter of J. Edgar Hoover,
inadvertently reveal that Miss Bentley's revelations to it did not
begin until November 8, 1945, the day after the newspapers revealed
that Budenz had been giving names. Miss Bentley's earlier visit to the
FBI in New Haven in August 1945 had nothing to do with her desire to
give information or with Communists, but was simply her desire to find
out if a man who had dated her was an employee of the FBI.
The
most sensational evidence
from the HUAC was released in the late summer of 1948 just in time to
influence the presidential election in November. Apparently it did not
have the influence expected, since Truman was elected. The controversy
from its revelations continued for years, and the charges, both from
HUAC and from other sources, increased in violence. Few of the
revelations after 1948 were ever sustained in court. For example, two
separate "atomic espionage" cases involving Clarence F. Hiskey at
Argonne Laboratory in Chicago and Joseph W. Weinberg at Berkeley
Radiation Laboratory were played up by HUAC in 1949. Eventually Hiskey
refused to answer questions before HUAC, was prosecuted for contempt,
and was acquitted in 1951. Weinberg, accused by HUAC of giving "atomic
secrets" to a well-known Communist, Steven Nelson, eventually was
prosecuted for perjury at the committee's insistence, and was acquitted
in 1953. Both scientists found their careers injured by the committee's
charges. There were many similar cases.
The
revelation of Communist
influence in the United States was undoubtedly
valuable.... ...
Senator Joseph R.
McCarthy, Republican, of Wisconsin ... [documented] that the State
Department and the army were widely infiltrated with Communists and
[that] ... the efforts of the neo-isolationists and the "China lobby"
... [in support of ] Mao[‘s] conquest of China was entirely due
to the treasonable acts of Communists and fellow travelers in the State
Department and the White House.
For
a while, the new
Administration tried to outdo McCarthy, chiefly by demonstrating in
committee hearings that China had been "lost" to the Communists because
of the careful planning and intrigue of Communists in the State
Department. T1le chief effort in this direction was done by a
well-organized and well-financed "China Lobby" radiating from the
activities of Alfred Kohlberg, a wealthy exporter who had had business
interests in China. This group, with its allies, such as McCarthy,
mobilized a good deal of evidence that Communists had infiltrated into
various academic, journalistic, and research groups concerned with the
Far East. But they failed to prove their contention that a conspiracy
of these
Communists and
fellow travelers, acting through the State
Department, had given China to Mao. Mao won out in China because of the
incompetence and corruption of the Chiang Kai-shek regime, and he won
out in spite of any aid the United States gave, or could give, to
Chiang, because the latter's regime was incapable of holding out
against Mao, without drastic reforms, whatever the scale of American
aid (without American military intervention to make war on Mao, which
very few desired). The China Lobby's version was based on two
contentions: (1) that there were Communists in significant positions
close to the agencies which helped to form American academic and public
opinion on the Far East and (2) that there were frequent agreements
between known Communists and known formulators of American policy and
opinion on China. This whole subject is too complex for adequate
discussion here, but the situation must be outlined.
There
is considerable truth
in the China Lobby's contention that the American experts on China were
organized into a single interlocking group which had a general
consensus of a Leftish character. It is also true that this
group,
from its control of funds, academic recommendations, and research or
publication opportunities, could favor persons who accepted the
established consensus and could injure, financially or in professional
advancement, persons who did not accept it. It is also true that the
established group, by its influence on book reviewing in The
New York Times, the Herald Tribune, the
Saturday Review,
a few magazines, including the "liberal weeklies," and in the
professional journals, could advance or hamper any specialist's career.
It is also true that these things were done
in the United States in
regard to the Far East by the Institute of Pacific Relations, that this
organization had been infiltrated by Communists, and by Communist
sympathizers, and that much of this group's influence arose from its
access to and control over the flow of funds from financial foundations
to scholarly activities. All these things were true, but they
would
have been true of many other areas of American scholarly research and
academic administration in the United States, such as Near East studies
or anthropology or educational theory or political science. They
were more obvious in regard to the Far East because of the few persons
and the bigger issues involved in that area.
...
[C]harges of the China
Lobby ... that China was "lost" because of this group, or that the
members of this group were disloyal to the United States, or engaged in
espionage, or were participants in a conscious plot, or that the whole
group was controlled by Soviet agents or even by Communists, is ...
[true]. [The] ... whole subject is of major importance in understanding
the twentieth century.
In
the first place, because of
language barriers, the number of people who could be "experts" on the
Far East was limited. Most of these, like Pearl Buck, Professor
Fairbank of Harvard, or Professors Latourette and Rowe of Yale, and
many others, were children or relatives of people who originally became
concerned with China as missionaries. This gave them a double
character: they learned the language and they had a feeling of ...
mission about China. When we add to this that they were, until after
1950, few in numbers and had access, because of the commercial
importance of the Far East, to relatively large amounts of research,
travel, and publication funds on Far East matters, they almost
inevitably came to form a small group who knew each other personally,
met fairly regularly, had a fairly established consensus (based on
conversations and reading each other's books) on Far East questions,
and generally had certain characteristics of a clique.
Lattimore,
for example,
because he knew Mongolian and the others did not, tended to become
everybody's expert on Mongolia, was rarely challenged on Mongolia or
northwest interior China, and inevitably became rather opinionated, if
not conceited, on the subject. Moreover, many of these experts, and
those the ones which were favored by the Far East "establishment" in
the Institute of Pacific Relations, were captured by Communist
ideology. Under its influence they propagandized, as experts, erroneous
ideas and sought to influence policy in mistaken directions. For
example, they sought to establish, in 1943-1950, that the Chinese
Communists were simple agrarian reformers, rather like the third-party
groups of the American Mid-west; or that Japan was evil and must be
totally crushed, the monarchy removed, and (later) that American policy
in Japan, under General MacArthur, was a failure; they even accepted,
on occasion, the Stalinist line that Communist regimes were "democratic
and peace-loving," while capitalist ones were "warlike and aggressive."
For example, as late as 195 1 the John Day Company (Richard J. Walsh,
president) published an indictment of MacArthur's policies in Japan by
Robert Textor. The book, called Failure in Japan,
had an
introduction by Lattimore and sought to show that our occupation policy
led to "failure for democratic values in Japan and a situation of
strategic weakness for the West." This childish libel was propagated by
the IPR, which mailed out 2,300 postcards advertising the book.
The Eastern
Establishment in the U.S.
Behind
this unfortunate
situation lies another, more profound, relationship, which influences
matters much broader than Far Eastern policy. It involves the
organization of tax-exempt fortunes of international financiers into
foundations to be used for educational, scientific, "and other public
purposes." Sixty or more years ago, public life in the West was
dominated by the influence of "Wall Street." This term has nothing to
do with its use by the Communists to mean monopolistic industrialism,
but,
on the contrary, refers to international financial capitalism deeply
involved in the gold standard, foreign-exchange fluctuations, floating
of fixed-interest securities and, to a lesser extent, flotation of
industrial shares for stock-exchange markets. This group, which in the
United States, was completely dominated by J. P. Morgan and Company
from the 1880's to the 1930's was cosmopolitan, Anglophile,
internationalist, Ivy League, eastern seaboard, high Episcopalian, and
European-culture conscious. Their connection with the Ivy League
colleges rested on the fact that the large endowments of these
institutions required constant consultation with the financiers of Wall
Street (or its lesser branches on State Street, Boston, and elsewhere)
and was reflected in the fact that these endowments, even in 1930, were
largely in bonds rather than in real estate or common stocks. As a
consequence of these influences, as late as the 1930's, J. P. Morgan
and his associates were the most significant figures in policy making
at Harvard, Columbia, and to a lesser extent Yale, while the Whitneys
were significant at Yale, and the Prudential Insurance Company (through
Edward D. Duffield) dominated Princeton.
Presidents of
Harvard, Yale and Columbia Were
Beholden to
the Financial Powers
The
names of these Wall Street
luminaries still adorn these Ivy League campuses, with Harkness
colleges and a Payne Whitney gymnasium at Yale, a Pyne dormitory at
Princeton, a Dillon Field House and Lamont Library at Harvard. The
chief officials of these universities were beholden to these financial
powers and usually owed their jobs to them. Morgan himself helped make
Nicholas Murray Butler president of Columbia; his chief Boston agent,
Thomas Nelson Perkins of the First National Bank of that city, gave
Conant his boost from the chemical laboratory to University Hall at
Harvard; Duffield of Prudential, caught unprepared when the incumbent
president of Princeton was killed in an automobile in 1932, made
himself president for a year before he chose Harold Dodds for the post
in 1933. At Yale, Thomas Lamont, managing partner of the Morgan firm,
was able to swing Charles Seymour into the presidency of that
university in 1937.
The
Domination of the Ivy League and the National
Government by
Wall Street
The
significant influence of
"Wall Street" (meaning Morgan) both in the Ivy League and in
Washington, in the period of sixty or more years following 1880,
explains the constant interchange between the Ivy League and the
Federal government, an interchange which undoubtedly aroused a good
deal of resentment in less-favored circles, who were more than satiated
with the accents, tweeds, and High Episcopal Anglophilia of these
peoples. ... Dean Acheson ... took the full brunt of this resentment
from McCarthy and his allies in 1948-1954. The same feeling did no good
to pseudo-Ivy League figures like Alger Hiss.
The American
Establishment
Because
of its dominant
position in Wall Street, the Morgan firm came also to dominate other
Wal1 Street powers, such as Carnegie, Whitney, Vanderbilt,
Brown-Harriman, or Dillon-Reed. Close alliances were made with
Rockefeller, Mellon, and Duke interests but not nearly so intimate ones
with the great industrial powers like du Pont and Ford. [Because] ...
of the great influence of this "Wall Street" alignment, an influence
great enough to merit the name of the "American Establishment," this
group could ... control the Federal government and,
in
consequence, had to adjust to a good many government actions ... [which
they had secretly supported ]. The chief of these were in taxation law,
beginning with the graduated income tax in 1913, but culminating, above
all else, in the inheritance tax. These tax laws drove the great
private fortunes dominated by Wall Street into tax-exempt foundations,
which became a major link in the Establishment network between Wall
Street, the Ivy League, and the Federal government. Dean Rusk,
Secretary of State after 1961, formerly president of the Rockefeller
Foundation and Rhodes Scholar at Oxford (1931-1933), is as much a
member of this nexus as Alger Hiss, the Dulles brothers, Jerome Greene,
James T. Shotwell, John W. Davis, Elihu Root, or Philip Jessup.
The J. P.
Morgan Firms Infiltrate and Control Left-Wing
Political
Movements in U.S.
More
than fifty years ago the
Morgan firm decided to infiltrate the Left-wing political movements in
the United States. This was relatively easy to do, since these groups
were starved for funds and eager for a voice to reach the people. Wall
Street supplied both. The purpose was not to destroy ... or take over
but was really threefold: (1) to keep informed about the thinking of
Left-wing or liberal groups; (2) to provide them with a mouthpiece so
that they could "blow off steam," and (3) to have a final veto on their
publicity and possibly on their actions, if they ever went "radical."
There was nothing really new about this decision, since other
financiers had talked about it and even attempted it earlier. What made
it decisively important this time was the combination of its adoption
by the dominant Wall Street financier, at a time when tax policy was
driving all financiers to seek tax-exempt refuges for their fortunes,
and at a time when the ultimate in Left-wing radicalism was about to
appear under the banner of the Third International.
The New
Republic
The
best example of this alliance of Wall Street and Left-wing publication
was The New Republic, a
magazine founded by Willard Straight, using Payne Whitney money, in
1914. Straight, who had been assistant to Sir Robert Hart (Director of
the Chinese Imperial Customs Service and the head of the European
imperialist penetration of China) and had remained in the Far East from
1901 to r9l:, became a Morgan partner and the firm's chief expert on
the Far East. He married Dorothy Payne Whitney whose names indicate the
family alliance of two of America's greatest fortunes. She was the
daughter of William C. Whitney, New York utility millionaire and the
sister and co-heiress of Oliver Payne, of the Standard Oil "trust." One
of her brothers married Gertrude Vanderbilt, while the other, Payne
Whitney, married the daughter of Secretary of State John Hay, who
enunciated the American policy of the "Open Door" in China. In the next
generation, three first cousins, John Hay ("Jock") Whitney, Cornelius
Vanderbilt ("Sonny") Whitney, and Michael Whitney ("Mike") Straight,
were allied in numerous public policy enterprises of a propagandist
nature, and all three served in varied roles in the late New Deal and
Truman administrations. In these they were closely allied with other
"Wall Street liberals," such as Nelson Rockefeller.
Walter
Lippman Was a Member of the
Mysterious
Round Table Group
The
New Republic was
founded by Willard and Dorothy Straight, using her money, in 1914, and
continued to be supported by her financial contributions until March
23, 1953. The original purpose for establishing the paper was to
provide an outlet for the progressive Left and to guide it quietly in
an Anglophile direction. This latter task was entrusted to a young man,
only four years out of Harvard, but already a member of the mysterious
Round Table group, which has played a major role in directing England's
foreign policy since its formal establishment in 1909. This new
recruit, Walter Lippmann, has been, from 1914 to the present, the
authentic spokesman in American journalism for the Establishments on
both sides of the Atlantic in international affairs. His biweekly
columns, which appear in hundreds of American papers, are copyrighted
by the New York Herald Tribune which is now owned
by J. H.
Whitney. It was these connections, as a link between Wall Street and
the Round Table Group, which gave Lippmann the opportunity in 1918,
while still in his twenties, to be the official interpreter of the
meaning of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points to the British government.
Mike Straight
Appointed to State Department
Willard
Straight, like many
Morgan agents, was present at the Paris Peace Conference but died there
of pneumonia before it began. Six years later, in 1925, when his widow
married a second time and became Lady Elmhirst of Dartington Hall, she
took her three small children from America to England, where they were
brought up as English. She herself renounced her American citizenship
in 1935. Shortly afterward her younger son, "Mike," unsuccessfully
"stood" for Parliament on the Labour Party ticket for the constituency
of Cambridge University, an act which required, under the law, that he
be a British subject. This proved no obstacle, in 1938, when Mike, age
twenty-two, returned to the United States, after thirteen years in
England, and was at once appointed to the State Department as Adviser
on International Economic Affairs. In 1937, apparently in preparation
for her son's return to America, Lady Elmhirst, sole owner of The
New Republic, shifted
this ownership to Westrim, Ltd., a dummy corporation created for the
purpose in Montreal, Canada, and set up in New York, with a grant of
$1.5 million, the William C. Whitney Foundation of which Mike became
president. This helped finance the family's interest in modern art and
dramatic theater, including sister Beatrix's tours as a Shakespearean
actress.
Mike Straight
Takes Over The New Republic
Mike
Straight served in the
Air Force in 1943-1945, but this did not in any way hamper his career
with The New Republic. He became Washington
correspondent in
May 1941; editor in June 1943; and publisher in December 1946 (when he
made Henry Wallace editor). During these shifts he changed completely
the control of The New Republic, and its companion
magazine Asia, removing
known liberals (such as Robert Morss Lovett, Malcolm Cowley, and George
Soule), centralizing the control, and taking it into his own hands.
This control by Whitney money had, of course, always existed, but it
had been in abeyance for the twenty-five years following Willard
Straight's death.
The New
Republic Was a Vehicle for Advancing the
Designs of
International Bankers
The
first editor of The New Republic, the
well-known "liberal" Herbert Croly, was always aware of the situation.
After ten years in the job, he explained the relationship in the
"official" biography of Willard Straight which he wrote for a payment
of $25,000. "Of course they [the Straights] could always withdraw their
financial support if they ceased to approve of the policy of the paper;
and, in that event, it would go out of existence as a consequence of
their disapproval." Croly's biography of Straight, published in 1924,
makes perfectly clear that Straight was in no sense a liberal or a
progressive, but was, indeed, a typical international banker and that The
New Republic was
simply a medium for advancing certain designs of such international
bankers, notably to blunt the isolationism and anti-British sentiments
so prevalent among many America progressives, while providing them with
a vehicle for expression of their progressive views in literature, art,
music, social reform, and even domestic politics. In 1916, when the
editorial board wanted to support Wilson for a second term in the
Presidency, Willard Straight took two pages of the magazine to express
his own support for Hughes. The chief achievement of The New
Republic, however, in 1914-1918 and again in 1938-1948, was
for interventionism in Europe and support of Great Britain.
A New
Magazine Is Created to Support the United Nations
The
role of "Mike" Straight in
this situation in 1938-1948 is clear. He took charge of this family
fief, abolished the editorial board, and carried on his father's aims,
in close cooperation with labor and Left-wing groups in American
politics. In these efforts he was in close contact with his inherited
Wall Street connections, especially his Whitney cousins and certain
family agents like Bruce Bliven, Milton C. Rose, and Richard J. Walsh.
They handled a variety of enterprises, including publications,
corporations, and foundations, which operated out of the law office of
Baldwin, Todd, and Lefferts of 120 Broadway, New York City. In this
nexus were The New Republic, Asia, Theatre Arts. the
Museum of
Modern Art, and others, all supported by a handful of foundations,
including the William C. Whitney Foundation, the Gertrude Vanderbilt
Whitney Foundation, the J. H. Whitney Foundation, and others. An
interesting addition was made to these enterprises in 1947 when
Straight founded a new magazine, the United Nations World, to
be devoted to the support of the UN. Its owners of record were The
New Republic itself
(under its corporate name), Nelson Rockefeller, J. H. Whitney, Max
Ascoli (an anti-Fascist Italian who had married American wealth and
used it to support a magazine of his own, The Reporter), and
Beatrice S. Dolivet. The last lady, Mike Straight's sister, made her
husband, Louis Dolivet, "International Editor" of the new magazine.
The United
Nations World
An
important element in this nexus was Asia magazine,
which had been established by Morgan's associates as the journal of the
American Asiatic Society in 1898, had been closely associated with
Willard Straight during his lifetime, and was owned outright by him
from January 1917. In the 1930's it was operated for the Whitneys by
Richard J. Walsh and his wife, known to the world as Pearl Buck. Walsh,
who acted as editor of Asia, was also president of
the holding corporation of The New Republic for
several years and president of the John Day publishing company. In
1942, after Nelson Rockefeller and Jock Whitney joined the government
to take charge of American propaganda in Latin America in the Office of
the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, Asia magazine
changed its name to Asia and the Americas. In
1947, when Mike Straight began a drive to "sell" the United Nations, it
was completely reorganized into United Nations World.
The
Relationship of Mike Straight and Communists
Mike
Straight was deeply
anti-Communist, but he frequently was found associated with them,
sometimes as a collaborator, frequently as an opponent. The
opposition was seen most clearly in his efforts as one of the founders
of the American Veterans Committee (AVC) and its political sequel, the
Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). The collaboration may be seen in
Straight’s fundamental role in Henry Wallace’s third-party
campaign for the Presidency in 1948.
The
relationship between
Straight and the Communists in pushing Wallace into his 1948 adventure
may be misjudged very easily. The anti-Communist Right had a very
simple explanation of it: Wallace and Straight were Communists and
hoped to elect Wallace President. Nothing could be further from the
truth. All three—Straight, Wallace, and the Communists, joined in
the attempt merely as a means of defeating Truman. Straight was the
chief force in getting the campaign started in 1947 and was largely
instrumental in bringing some of the Communists into it, but when he
had them all aboard the Wallace train, he jumped off himself, leaving
both Wallace and the Communists gliding swiftly, without guidance or
hope, on the downhill track to oblivion. It was a brilliantly done
piece of work.
Communists
Oppose the Truman Doctrine
The
Communists wanted a third
party in 1948 because it seemed the only way to beat Truman and destroy
the Marshall Plan. They hated the President for the "Truman Doctrine"
and his general opposition to the Soviet Union, but, above all, because
he had prevented the postwar economic collapse and the American relapse
into isolationism, both of which the Communists had not only expected
but critically needed. It was obvious to everyone that a two-party
campaign in 1948 would give the vote of the Right to the Republicans
and the vote of the Left to the Democrats, with the victory decided by
where the division came in the Center. In such a situation neither
Straight nor the Communists could influence the outcome in any way. But
a third party on the Left, by taking labor and other Left-wing votes
from Truman, could reduce the Democratic totals in the major states
enough to throw those states and the election to the Republicans. Why
Straight wanted to do this in the critical months from September 1946
to April 1948 is unknown, but he clearly changed his mind in the spring
of 1948, abandoning poor, naive Henry Wallace to the Communists at that
time. A possible explanation of these actions will be given later.
Mike Straight
Supports Henry Wallace
What
is clear is that Mike
Straight had a great deal to do with Wallace in the autumn of 1946 when
the former Vice-President broke with Truman and was fired from the
Cabinet. The break came over a Wallace speech, very critical of
American policy toward Russia, given before a wildly biased pro-Soviet
audience in Madison Square Garden on September 12, 1946. At the time
Truman told reporters he had approved the speech before delivery (a
version which Wallace still upholds), but within a few days, Secretary
of State Byrnes forced the President to make a choice between him or
Wallace. and the latter was dismissed from the Cabinet.
Out
of the government, without
a platform from which to address the public, Wallace's political future
looked dim in the early autumn of 1946. Straight provided the platform,
by giving him his own editorial chair at The New Republic (announced
October 12, 1946). For the next fifteen months the Wallace campaign was
a Straight campaign. The latter supplied speech-writers, research
assistants, editorial writers, office space, money, and The
New Republic itself.
Technically Wallace was editor, but the magazine staff and expenditures
steadily increased in directions which had little to do with the
magazine and everything to do with Wallace's presidential campaign,
although this effort was not announced to the public until a year
later, in December 1947.
The Admission
of the Communists
In
the meantime, from the
spring of 1947 onward, the Communists came in. It would not be strictly
true to say that Straight ''brought them in," but I believe it is fair
to say that he "let them in." For example, one of the first to arrive
was Lew Frank, Jr., brought in hy Straight, who later insisted that he
did not realize that Frank was a Communist. As a matter of fact, there
was no evidence that Frank was a member of the Communist Party, but
Straight knew exactly where Frank stood politically since they had
engaged, on opposite sides, in a bitter struggle between Communists and
anti-Communists for control of AVC. In this, Frank had been a member of
the Communist caucus within AVC's national planning committee (as
Straight told David A. Shannon in 1956), and followed every twist of
the party line in this whole period. This party line became the pattern
for Wallace's formal speeches, since Frank was his most important
speech-writer over a period of eighteen months from early 1947 to
October 1948. More than this, Frank accompanied Wallace on his endless
travels during this period. In the autumn of 1947 these three, Wallace,
Frank, and Straight, made a trip to the Mediterranean and were given an
audience together by the Pope on November 4, 1947. On his return from
this journey, Wallace was a changed man; his mind was made up, to run
against Truman on a third-party ticket. The announcement was made
public in The New Republic in December.
The End of
Communism in the U.S. as a
Significant
Political Force
Straight
continued to work for Wallace for President, and The New
Republic remained
the center of the movement for almost four more months, but something
had changed. While he was still working for Wallace as President and
allowing the Communists into the project, he was simultaneously doing
two other things: working openly, and desperately, to prevent the new
third party from campaigning on any level other than the presidential,
by blocking everywhere he could Communist efforts to run third-party
candidates for state or congressional offices in competition with the
Democrats; much less publicly, he worked with his anti-Communist
friends in labor, veteran, and liberal groups to prevent endorsement of
the Wallace candidacy. As a consequence, the Communists were destroyed
and eventually driven out of such organizations, notably from the
CIO-PAC (the great political alignment of labor and progressive
groups). As David Shannon wrote in The Decline of American
Communism (1959),
"The Communists' support of Wallace shattered the 'left-center'
coalition in the CIO; for the Communist unions, the Wallace movement
was the beginning of the end. The coalition began to dissolve almost
immediately after Wallace's announcement." What this means is that
Wallace's campaign to defeat Truman destroyed completely the remaining
vestiges of the Popular Front movement of the 1930's, drove the
Communists out of the unions and all progressive political groups, and
drove the Communist unions out of the labor movement of the country.
This ended Communism as a significant political force in the United
States, and the end was reached by December 1948, long before McCarthy
or J. Edgar Hoover or HUAC did their work. The men who achieved this
feat were Wallace and Straight....
Communist
Research Group Publishes
Plans in The
New Republic
During
the winter of
1947-1948, Lew Frank recognized that he was incapable of handling the
complex issues raised in Wallace's many speeches. Accordingly, he
joined a "Communist research group" which met in the Manhattan home of
the wealthy "Wall Street Red," Frederick Vanderbilt Field. The chief
members of this group, probably all Communists, were Victor Perlo and
David Ramsay. This pair drew up for Wallace an attack on the Marshall
Plan and an alternative Communist plan for European reconstruction,
which was published in The New Republic on January
12, 1948,
was presented by Wallace to the Marshall Plan "Hearings" of the House
Foreign Affairs Committee on February 24th, but was subsequently
repudiated by Straight. In the three months following the Perlo
article, Straight was busy sawing off the limb on which Wallace now sat
with the Communists. He discharged from The New Republic payroll
all those who were working for the campaign rather than for the
magazine, and the office on East Forty-ninth Street once again settled
down to publishing a "liberal" weekly. In protest at this reversal, his
managing editor, Edd Johnson, resigned.
If
Mike Straight planned to do
what he did do to the Communists in 1946-1948, that is, to get them out
of progressive movements and unions, he pulled off the most skillful
political coup in twentieth century American politics. It is not clear
that he did plan it or intend it. But as a very able and informed man,
he must have had some motivation when he began, in 1947, the effort
which he knew might defeat Truman in 1948. While the evidence is not
conclusive, there are hints that another, more personal, motive might
have been involved, at least partly, in building up the Wallace threat
to Truman's political future. It concerns the Whitney family interest
in overseas airlines.
The Whitney
Family
The
Whitney family were deeply
involved in airlines. Sonny Whitney was a founder of Pan-American
Airlines and chairman of its board of directors from its establishment
in 1928 until he went to military service in 1941. Mike's brother, Air
Commodore Whitney Willard Straight, C.B.E., was even more deeply
involved on the British side. Big brother Whitney (born in 1912) had
been in civil aviation in England from the age of twenty-two, and by
1946-1949, was not only a director of the Midland Bank, one of the
world's greatest financial institutions, but was also a director of
Rolls-Royce and of BOAC, as well as chairman of the board of directors
of BEA (British European Airways). In the years following the end of
the war, a violent struggle was going on, within aviation circles and
the United States government, over the future of American trans-ocean
air services. Before the war, these had been a monopoly of Pan-Am; now,
at the end of the war, the struggle was over how the CAB would divide
up this monopoly and what disposition would be made of the enormous
air-force investment in overseas bases. Apparently the White House was
not cooperative in these matters at first, but late in 1947 C. V.
Whitney was made, by presidential interim appointment, Assistant
Secretary of the new Department of the Air Force and, eighteen months
later, after Truman's inauguration, was made Assistant Secretary of
Commerce for Aeronautics. This was the most important post concerned
with civil aviation in any Federal department. The connection, if any,
between these appointments and Mike Straight's original support and
later abandonment of Wallace has never been revealed.
J. P. Morgan
Felt that All Political Parties Were to Be Used
The
associations between Wall
Street and the Left, of which Mike Straight is a fair example, are
really survivals of the associations between the Morgan Bank and the
Left. To Morgan all political parties were simply organizations to be
used, and the firm always was careful to keep a foot in all camps.
Morgan himself, Dwight Morrow, and other partners were allied with
Republicans; Russell C. Leffingwell was allied with the Democrats;
Grayson Murphy was allied with the extreme Right; and Thomas W. Lamont
was allied with the Left. Like the Morgan interest in libraries,
museums, and art, its inability to distinguish between loyalty to the
United States and loyalty to England, its recognition of the need for
social work among the poor, the multi-partisan political views of the
Morgan firm in domestic politics went back to the original founder of
the firm, George Peabody (1795-1869). To this same seminal figure may
be attributed the use of tax-exempt foundations for controlling these
activities, as may be observed in many parts of America to this day, in
the use of Peabody foundations to support Peabody libraries and
museums. Unfortunately, we do not have space here for this great and
untold story, but it must be remembered that what we do say is part of
a much larger picture.
The Chief
Links Between Wall Street,
the Left and
Communists
Our
concern at the moment is
with the links between Wall Street and the Left, especially the
Communists. Here the chief link was the Thomas W. Lamont family. This
family was in many ways parallel to the Straight family. Tom Lamont had
been brought into the Morgan firm, as Straight was several years later,
by Henry P. Davison, a Morgan partner from 1909. Lamont became a
partner in 1910, as Straight did in 1913. Each had a wife who became a
patroness of Leftish causes, and two sons, of which the elder was a
conventional banker, and the younger was a Left-wing sympathizer and
sponsor. In fact, all the evidence would indicate that Tom Lamont was
simply Morgan's apostle to the Left in succession to Straight, a change
made necessary by the latter's premature death in 1918. Both were
financial supporters of liberal publications' in Lamont's case The
Saturday Review of Literature, which he supported throughout
the 1920's and 1930's, and the New York Post, which
he owned from 1918 to 1924.
The Files of
the House Un-American Activities Committee
The
chief evidence, however,
can be found in the files of the HUAC which show Tom Lamont, his wife
Flora, and his son Corliss as sponsors and financial angels to almost a
score of extreme Left organizations, including the Communist Party
itself. Among these we need mention only two. One of these was a
Communist-front organization, the Trade Union Services, Incorporated,
of New York City, which in 1947 published fifteen trade-union papers
for various CIO unions. Among its officers were Corliss Lamont and
Frederick Vanderbilt Field (another link between Wall Street and the
Communists). The latter was on the editorial boards of the official
Communist newspaper in New York, the Daily Worker, as
well as its magazine, The New Masses, and
was the chief link between the Communists and the Institute of Pacific
Relations in 1928-1947. Corliss Lamont was the leading light in another
Communist organization, which started life in the 1920's as the Friends
of the Soviet Union, but in 1943 was reorganized, with Lamont as
chairman of the board and chief incorporator, as the National Council
of American-Soviet Friendship.
Corliss
Lamont Was One of the Chief Spokesmen for the
Soviet Pint
of View in America
During
this whole period of
over two decades, Corliss Lamont, with the full support of his parents,
was one of the chief figures in "fellow traveler" circles and one of
the chief spokesmen for the Soviet point of view both in these
organizations and also in connections which came to him either as son
of the most influential man in Wall Street or as professor of
philosophy at Columbia University. His relationship with his parents
may be reflected in a few events of this period.
Lamont
Refuses to Testify Before Congress
In
January 1946, Corliss
Lamont was called before HUAC to give testimony on the National Council
of American-Soviet Friendship. He refused to produce records, was
subpoenaed, refused, was charged with contempt of Congress, and was so
cited by the House of Representatives on June 26, 1946. In the midst of
this controversy, in May, Corliss Lamont and his mother, Mrs. Thomas
Lamont, presented their valuable collection of the works of Spinoza to
Columbia University. The adverse publicity continued, yet when Thomas
Lamont rewrote his will, on January 6, 1948, Corliss Lamont remained in
it as co-heir to his father's fortune of scores of millions of dollars.
The McCarran
Committee Shows that China Was Lost to the Communists by the
Deliberate
Actions of the State Department and the Institute of Pacific Relations
In
1951 the Subcommittee on
Internal Security of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the so-called
McCarran Committee, sought to show that China had been lost to the
Communists by the deliberate actions of a group of academic experts on
the Far East and Communist fellow travelers whose work in that
direction was controlled and coordinated by the Institute of Pacific
Relations (IPR). The influence of the Communists in IPR is well
established, but the patronage of Wall Street is less well known.
The IPR Was
Financed by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations
The
IPR was a private
association of ten independent national councils in ten countries
concerned with affairs in the Pacific. The headquarters of the IPR and
of the American Council of IPR were both in New York and were closely
associated on an interlocking basis. Each spent about $2.5 million
dollars over the quarter-century from 1925 to 1950, of which about
half, in each case, came from the Carnegie Foundation and the
Rockefeller Foundation (which were themselves interlocking groups
controlled by an alliance of Morgan and Rockefeller interests in Wall
Street). Much of the rest, especially of the American Council, came
from firms closely allied to these two Wall Street interests, such as
Standard Oil, International Telephone and Telegraph, International
General Electric, the National City Bank, and the Chase National Bank.
In each case, about lo percent of income came from sales of
publications and, of course, a certain amount came from ordinary
members who paid $15 a year and received the periodicals of the IPR and
its American Council, Pacific Affairs and Far
Eastern Survey.
Large Funds
Were Given to IPR by Wall Street and the Large Foundations
The
financial deficits
which occurred each year were picked up by financial angels, almost all
with close Wall Street connections. The chief identifiable
contributions here were about $60,000 from Frederick Vanderbilt Field
over eighteen years, $14,700 from Thomas Lamont over fourteen years,
$800 from Corliss Lamont (only after 1947), and $18,000 from a member
of Lee, Higginson in Boston who seems to have been Jerome D. Greene. In
addition, large sums of money each year were directed to private
individuals for research and travel expenses from similar sources,
chiefly the great financial foundations.
The IPR Line
Was Parroted by the State Department, Ivy League Schools and
Scholars
Funded by Wall Street
Most
of these awards for work
in the Far Eastern area required approval or recommendation from
members of IPR. Moreover, access to publication and recommendations to
academic positions in the handful of great American universities
concerned with the Far East required similar sponsorship. And, finally,
there can be little doubt that consultant jobs on Far Eastern matters
in the State Department or other government agencies were largely
restricted to IPR-approved people. The individuals who published, who
had money, found jobs, were consulted, and who w ere appointed
intermittently to government missions were those who were tolerant of
the IPR line. The fact that all these lines of communication passed
through the Ivy League universities or their scattered equivalents west
of the Appalachians, such as Chicago, Stanford, or California,
unquestionably went back to Morgan's influence in handling large
academic endowments.
IPR Scholars,
the State Department and the Kremlin Promote the Same Viewpoint
There
can be little doubt that
the more active academic members of IPR, the professors and publicists
who became members of its governing board (such as Owen Lattimore,
Joseph P. Chamberlain, and Philip C. Jessup of Columbia, William W.
Lockwood of Princeton, John K. Fairbank of Harvard, and others) and the
administrative staff (which became, in time, the most significant
influence in its policies) developed an IPR party line. It is,
furthermore, fairly clear that this IPR line had many points in common
both with the Kremlin's party line on the Far East and with the State
Department's policy line in the same area. The interrelations among
these, or the influence of one on another, is highly disputed.
Certainly no final conclusions can be drawn.
There Was a
Great Deal of Intrigue Used to Influence U.S. Policy
Clearly
there were some
Communists, even party members, involved (such as Frederick Vanderbilt
Field).... Furthermore, there was a great deal of intrigue both to help
those who agreed with the IPR line and to influence United States
government policy in this direction., but there is no evidence of which
I am aware of any explicit plot or conspiracy to direct American policy
in a direction favorable either to the Soviet Union or to international
Communism. [The evidence alluded to here exists, however, the real aim
of these individuals and groups was to betray China into the hands of
the communists in order to build a new Imperial System. The Soviet
Union is a part of this secret Imperial Order and was set up by the
Money Power in 1917. They planned to support and build Communist China
into a new Super Power to rule Asia.]....
Many People
in the U.S. Accept the Communist Ideology
The
true explanation of what
happened is not yet completely known and, as far as it is known, is too
complicated to elucidate here. It is, however, clear that many persons
who were born in the period 1900-1920 and came to maturity in the
period 1928-1940 were so influenced by their experiences of war,
depression, and insecurity that they adopted, more or less
unconsciously, certain aspects of the Communist ideology (such as the
economic interpretation of history, the role of a dualistic class
struggle in human events, or the exploitative interpretation of the
role of capital in the productive system and of the possessing groups
in any society). Many of these ideas were nonsense, even in terms of
their own experiences, but they were facile interpretative guides for
people who, whatever their expert knowledge of their special areas,
were lacking in total perspective on society as a whole or human
experience as a whole.... This outlook was, for example, prevalent in
that ubiquitous intriguer, Lionel Curtis, who was the original guide
and parent of the IPR and of many similar organizations....
The Right’s
Fairy Tale
The
... Right[‘s]
version of these events as written up by John T. Flynn, Freda Utley,
and others ... had a tremendous impact on American opinion and American
relations with other countries in the years 1947-1955. This ... Right
fairy tale, which is now an accepted folk myth in many groups in
America, pictured the recent history of the United States, in regard to
domestic reform and in foreign affairs, as a well-organized plot by
extreme Left-wing elements, operating from the White House itself and
controlling all the chief avenues of publicity in the United States, to
destroy the American way of life, based on private enterprise, laissez
faire, and isolationism, in behalf of alien ideologies of Russian
Socialism and British cosmopolitanism (or internationalism). This plot,
if we are to believe the myth, worked through such avenues of publicity
as The New York Times and the Herald
Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor and
the Washington Post, the Atlantic
Monthly and Harper's Magazine and
had at its core the wild-eyed and bushy-haired theoreticians of
Socialist Harvard and the London School of Economics. It was determined
to bring the United States into World War II on the side of England
(Roosevelt's first love) and Soviet Russia (his second love) in order
to destroy every finer element of American life and, as part of this
consciously planned scheme, invited Japan to attack Pearl Harbor, and
destroyed Chiang Kai-shek, all the while undermining America's real
strength by excessive spending and unbalanced budgets.
The Right’s
Fairy Tale Does Have a Modicum of Truth
This
myth, like all fables, does in fact have a modicum of truth. There
does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international
Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the ...
Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network,
which we
may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating
with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I
know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for
twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960's, to
examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to
it or
to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and
to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and
recently, to a few of its policies (notably to its belief that England
was an Atlantic rather than a European Power and must be allied, or
even federated, with the United States and must remain isolated from
Europe), but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it
wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is
significant enough to be known.
The Round
Table Groups Have Played a Very Significant
Role in the
History of the U.S.
The
Round Table Groups have
already been mentioned in this book several times, notably in
connection with the formation of the British Commonwealth in chapter 4
and in the discussion of appeasement in chapter 12 ("the Cliveden
Set"). At the risk of some repetition, the story will be summarized
here, because the American branch of this organization (sometimes
called the "Eastern Establishment' ) has played a very significant role
in the history of the United States in the last generation.
The Original
Purpose of the Round Table Groups
The
Round Table Groups were
semi-secret discussion and lobbying groups organized by Lionel Curtis,
Philip H. Kerr (Lord Lothian), and (Sir) William S. Marris in
1908-1911. This was done on behalf of Lord Milner, the dominant Trustee
of the Rhodes Trust in the two decades 1905-1925. The original purpose
of these groups was to seek to federate the English-speaking world
along lines laid down by Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902) and William T. Stead
(1849-1912), and the money for the organizational work came originally
from the Rhodes Trust. By 1915 Round Table groups existed in seven
countries, including England, South Africa, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, India, and a rather loosely organized group in the United
States (George Louis Beer, Walter Lippmann, Frank Aydelotte, Whitney
Shepardson, Thomas W. Lamont, Jerome D. Greene, Erwin D. Canham of the Christian
Science Monitor, and
others). The attitudes of the various groups were coordinated by
frequent visits and discussions and by a well-informed and totally
anonymous quarterly magazine, The Round Table, whose
first issue, largely written by Philip Kerr, appeared in November 1910.
The Leaders
of the Round Table Groups
The
leaders of this group
were: Milner, until his death in 1925, followed by Curtis (1872-1955),
Robert H, (Lord) Brand (brother-in-law of Lady Astor) until his death
in 1963, and now Adam D. Marris, son of Sir William and Brand's
successor as managing director of Lazard Brothers bank. The original
intention had been to have collegial leadership, but Milner was too
secretive and headstrong to share the role. He did so only in the
period 1913-1919 when he held regular meetings with some of his closest
friends to coordinate their activities as a pressure group in the
struggle with Wilhelmine Germany. This they called their "Ginger
Group." After Milner's death in 1925, the leadership was largely shared
by the survivors of Milner's "Kindergarten," that is, the group of
young Oxford men whom he used as civil servants in his reconstruction
of South Africa in 1901-1910. Brand was the last survivor of the
"Kindergarten"; since his death, the greatly reduced activities of the
organization have been exercised largely through the Editorial
Committee of The Round Table magazine under Adam
Marris.
Financial
Backers of the Found Table Groups
Money
for the widely ramified
activities of this organization came originally from the associates and
followers of Cecil Rhodes, chiefly from the Rhodes Trust itself, and
from wealthy associates such as the Beit brothers, from Sir Abe Bailey,
and (after 1915) from the Astor family. Since 1925 there have been
substantial contributions from wealthy individuals and from foundations
and firms associated with the international banking fraternity,
especially the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, and other organizations
associated with J. P. Morgan, the Rockefeller and Whitney families, and
the associates of Lazard Brothers and of Morgan, Grenfell, and Company.
The Existing
Financial Network in New York and London
The
chief backbone of this
organization grew up along the already existing financial cooperation
running from the Morgan Bank in New York to a group of international
financiers in London led hy Lazard Brothers. Milner himself in 1901 had
refused a fabulous offer, worth up to $100,000 a year, to become one of
the three partners of the Morgan Bank in London, in succession to the
younger J. P. Morgan who moved from London to join his father in New
York (eventually the vacancy went to E. C. Grenfell, so that the London
affiliate of Morgan became known as Morgan, Grenfell, and Company).
Instead, Milner became director of a number of public banks, chiefly
the London Joint Stock Bank, corporate precursor of the Midland Bank.
He became one of the greatest political and financial powers in
England, with his disciples strategically placed throughout England in
significant places, such as the editorship of The Times, the
editorship of The Observer, the
managing directorship of Lazard Brothers, various administrative posts,
and even Cabinet positions. Ramifications were established in politics,
high finance, Oxford and London universities, periodicals, the civil
service, and tax-exempt foundations.
Front
Organizations Established in Key Countries
At
the end of the war of 1914,
it became clear that the organization of this system had to be greatly
extended. Once again the task was entrusted to Lionel Curtis who
established, in England and each dominion, a front organization to the
existing local Round Table Group. This front organization, called the
Royal Institute of International Affairs, had as its nucleus in each
area the existing submerged Round Table Group. In New York it was known
as the Council on Foreign Relations, and was a front for J. P. Morgan
and Company in association with the very small American Round Table
Group. The American organizers were dominated by the large number of
Morgan "experts," including Lamont and Beer, who had gone to the Paris
Peace Conference and there became close friends with the similar group
of English "experts" which had been recruited by the Milner group. In
fact, the original plans for the Royal Institute of International
Affairs and the Council on Foreign Relations were drawn up at Paris.
The Council of the RIIA (which, by Curtis's energy came to be housed in
Chatham House, across St. James's Square from the Astors, and was soon
known by the name of this headquarters) and the board of the Council on
Foreign Relations have carried ever since the marks of their origin.
Until 1960 the council at Chatham House was dominated by the dwindling
group of Milner's associates, while the paid staff members were largely
the agents of Lionel Curtis. The Round Table for
years (until
1961) was edited from the back door of Chatham House grounds in Ormond
Yard, and its telephone came through the Chatham House switchboard.
The Council
on Foreign Relations in New York Was Dominated by J. P. Morgan
The
New York branch was
dominated by the associates of the Morgan Bank. For example, in 1928
the Council on Foreign Relations had John W. Davis as president, Paul
Cravath as vice-president, and a council of thirteen others, which
included Owen D. Young, Russell C. Leffingwell, Norman Davis, Allen
Dulles, George W. Wickersham, Frank L. Polk, Whitney Shepardson, Isaiah
Bowman, Stephen P. Duggan, and Otto Kahn. Throughout its history the
council has been associated with the American Round Tablers, such as
Beer, Lippmann. Shepardson. and Jerome Greene.
Wall Street
Contacts
The
academic figures have been
those linked to Morgan, such as James T. Shotwell, Charles Seymour,
Joseph P. Chamberlain, Philip Jessup, Isaiah Bowman and, more recently,
Philip Moseley, Grayson L. Kirk, and Henry M. Wriston. The Wall Street
contacts with these were created originally from Morgan's influence in
handling large academic endowments. In the case of the largest of these
endowments, that at Harvard, the influence was usually exercised
indirectly through "State Street," Boston, which, for much of the
twentieth century, came through the Boston banker Thomas Nelson Perkins.
Wall Street
Law Firms
Closely
allied with this
Morgan influence were a small group of Wall Street law firms, whose
chief figures were Elihu Root, John W. Davis, Paul D. Cravath, Russell
Leffingwell, the Dulles brothers and, more recently, Arthur H. Dean,
Philip D. Reed, and John J. McCloy. Other nonlegal agents of Morgan
included men like Owen D. Young and Norman H. Davis.
J. P. Morgan
and Company Were the Center of the
Round Table
Group in America
On
this basis, which was
originally financial and goes back to George Peabody, there grew up in
the twentieth century a power structure between London and New York
which penetrated deeply into university life, the press, and the
practice of foreign policy. In England the center was the Round Table
Group, while in the United States it was J. P. Morgan and Company or
its local branches in Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland. Some rather
incidental examples of the operations of this structure are very
revealing, just because they are incidental. For example, it set up in
Princeton a reasonable copy of the Round Table Group's chief Oxford
headquarters, All Souls College. This copy, called the Institute for
Advanced Study, and best known, perhaps, as the refuge of Einstein,
Oppenheimer, John von Neumann, and George F. Kennan, was organized by
Abraham Flexner of the Carnegie Foundation and Rockefeller's General
Education Board after he had experienced the delights of All Souls
while serving as Rhodes Memorial Lecturer at Oxford. The plans were
largely drawn by Tom Jones, one of the Round Table's most active
intriguers and foundation administrators.
The American
Branch Exerted Its Influence Through
Five American
Newspapers
The
American branch of this
"English Establishment" exerted much of its influence through five
American newspapers (The New York Times, New York Herald
Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, the Washington
Post, and the lamented Boston Evening Transcript).
In fact, the editor of the Christian
Science Monitor was the chief American correspondent
(anonymously) of The Round Table, and Lord
Lothian, the original editor of The Round Table and
later secretary of the Rhodes Trust (1925-1939) and ambassador to
Washington, was a frequent writer in the Monitor. It
might be mentioned that the existence of this Wall Street,
Anglo-American axis is quite obvious once it is pointed out. It is
reflected in the fact that such Wall Street luminaries as John W.
Davis, Lewis Douglas, Jock Whitney, and Douglas Dillon were appointed
to he American ambassadors in London.
The Double
International Network Extended into New Countries through
Institute of
International Affairs
This
double international
network in which the Round Table groups formed the semi-secret or
secret nuclei of the Institutes of International Affairs was extended
into a third network in 1925, organized by the same people for the same
motives. Once again the mastermind was Lionel Curtis, and the earlier
Round Table Groups and Institutes of International Affairs were used as
nuclei for the new network. However, this new organization for Pacific
affairs was extended to ten countries, while the Round Table Groups
existed only in seven. The new additions, ultimately China, Japan,
France, the Netherlands, and Soviet Russia, had Pacific councils set up
from scratch. In Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, Pacific councils,
interlocked and dominated by the Institutes of International Affairs,
were set up. In England, Chatham House served as the English center for
both nets, while in the United States the two were parallel creations
(not subordinate) of the Wall Street allies of the Morgan Bank. The
financing came from the same international banking groups and their
subsidiary commercial and industrial firms. In England, Chatham House
was financed for both networks by the contributions of Sir Abe Bailey,
the Astor family, and additional funds largely acquired by the
persuasive powers of Lionel Curtis. The financial difficulties of the
IPR Councils in the British Dominions in the depression of 1929-1935
resulted in a very revealing effort to save money, when the local
Institute of International Affairs absorbed the local Pacific Council,
both of which were, in a way, expensive and needless fronts for the
local Round Table groups.
The Chief Aim
of the Elaborate and Semi-secret Organization
The
chief aims of this
elaborate, semi-secret organization were ... to coordinate the
international activities and outlooks of all the English-speaking world
into one (which would largely, it is true, be that of the London
group); to work to ... help backward, colonial, and underdeveloped
areas to advance toward stability, law and order, and prosperity along
lines somewhat similar to those taught at Oxford and the University of
London (especially the School of Economics and the Schools of African
and Oriental Studies). [Democratic socialism, finance capitalism,
monopoly capitalism, secularism, internationalism, ect.]
These
organizations and their
financial backers were in no sense reactionary or Fascistic persons, as
Communist propaganda would like to depict them. Quite the contrary.
They were gracious and cultured gentlemen of ... social experience who
were much concerned with the freedom of expression of minorities and
the rule of law for all, who constantly thought in terms of
Anglo-American solidarity, of political partition and federation, and
who were convinced that they could gracefully civilize the Boers of
South Africa, the Irish, the Arabs, and the Hindus, and who are largely
responsible for the partitions of Ireland, Palestine, and India, as
well as the federations of South Africa, Central Africa, and the West
Indies. Their desire to win over the opposition by cooperation worked
with Smuts but failed with Hertzog, worked with Gandhi but failed with
Menon, worked with Stresemann.... If their failures now loom larger
than their successes, this should not be allowed to conceal the high
motives with which they attempted both. [Contrary to published claims,
the real goal of these individuals and organizations is to further the
development of a New Imperial Order and World Empire.]
Round Table
Groups Jettison Communists When Congress
Discovers
Their Activities
It
was this group of people,
whose wealth and influence so exceeded their experience and
understanding, who provided much of the framework of influence which
the Communist sympathizers and fellow travelers took over in the United
States in the 1930's. It must be recognized that the power that these
energetic Left-wingers exercised was never their own power or Communist
power but was ultimately the power of the international financial
coterie, and, once the anger and suspicions of the American people were
aroused, a's they were by 1950, it was a fairly simple matter to get
rid of the Red sympathizers.
The Reece
Committee to Investigate Tax Exempt Foundations
Before
this could be done,
however, a congressional committee, following backward to their source
the threads which led from admitted Communists like Whittaker Chambers,
through Alger Hiss, and the Carnegie Endowment to Thomas Lamont and the
Morgan Bank, fell into the whole complicated network of the
interlocking tax-exempt foundations. The Eighty-third Congress in July
1953 set up a Special Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations
with Representative B. Carroll Reece, of Tennessee, as chairman. It
soon became clear that people of immense wealth would be unhappy if the
investigation went too far and that the "most respected" newspapers in
the country, closely allied with these men of wealth, would not get
excited enough about any revelations to make the publicity worth while,
in terms of votes or campaign contributions. An interesting report
showing the Left-wing associations of the interlocking nexus of
tax-exempt foundations was issued in 1954 rather quietly. Four years
later, the Reece committee's general counsel, René A. Wormser,
wrote a shocked, but not shocking, book on the subject called Foundations:
Their Power and Influence. [See the Staff Reports prepared
by the Committee under the direction of Norman Dodd.]
Jerome D.
Greene Is One of the Key Figures in the Establishment of the
Council on
Foreign Relations
One
of the most
interesting members of this Anglo-American power structure was Jerome
D. Greene (1874-1959). Born in Japan of missionary parents, Greene
graduated from Harvard's college and law school by 1899 and became
secretary to Harvard's president and corporation in 1901-1910. This
gave him contacts with Wall Street which made him general manager of
the Rockefeller Institute (1910-1912), assistant to John D. Rockefeller
in philanthropic work for two years, then trustee to the Rockefeller
Institute, to the Rockefeller Foundation, and to the Rockefeller
General Education Board until 1939. For fifteen years (1917-1932) he
was with the Boston investment banking firm of Lee, Higginson, and
Company, most of the period as its chief officer, as well as with its
London branch. As executive secretary of the American section of the
Allied Maritime Transport Council, stationed in London in 1918, he
lived in Toynbee Hall, the world's first settlement house, which had
been founded hy Alfred Milner and his friends in 1884. This brought him
in contact with the Round Table Group in England, a contact which was
strengthened in 1919 when he was secretary to the Reparations
Commission at the Paris Peace Conference. Accordingly, on his return to
the United States he was one of the early figures in the establishment
of the Council on Foreign Relations, which served as the New York
branch of Lionel Curtis's Institute of International Affairs.
Green Sells
Fraudulent Securities of Ivor Kreuger
As
an investment banker,
Greene is chiefly remembered for his sales of millions of dollars of
the fraudulent securities of the Swedish match king, Ivar Kreuger. That
Greene offered these to the American investing public in good faith is
evident from the fact that he put a substantial part of his own fortune
in the same investments. As a consequence, Kreuger's suicide in Paris
in April 1932 left Greene witl1 little money and no job. He wrote to
Lionel Curtis, asking for help, and was given, for two years, a
professorship of international relations at Aberystwyth, Wales. The
Round Table Group controlled that professorship from its founding by
David Davies in 1919, in spite of the fact that Davies, who was made a
peer in 1932, had broken with the Round Table because of its subversion
of the League of Nations and European collective security.
Greene
Returns to America
On
his return to America in
1934, Greene also returned to his secretaryship of the Harvard
Corporation and became, for the remainder of his life, practically a
symbol of Yankee Boston, as trustee and officer of the Boston Symphony
Orchestra, the Gardner Museum in Fenway Court, the New England
Conservatory of Music, the American Academy in Rome, the Brookings
Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the General Education
Board (only until 1939). He was also director of the Harvard
Tercentenary Celebration in 1934-1937.
Greene Was
Wall Street's Chief Conduct of Funds for the IPR
Greene
is of much greater
significance in indicating the real influences within the Institute of
Pacific Relations than any Communists or fellow travelers. He wrote the
constitution for the IPR in 1926, was for years the chief conduit for
Wall Street funds and influence into the organization, was treasurer of
the American Council for three years, and chairman for three more, as
well as chairman of the International Council for four years.
There Is a
Very Real Power Structure in Existence
Jerome
Greene is a symbol of
much more than the Wall Street influence in the IPR. He is also a
symbol of the relationship between the financial circles of London and
those of the eastern United States which reflects one of the
most powerful influences in twentieth-century American and world
history.
The two ends of this English-speaking axis have sometimes been called,
perhaps facetiously, the English and American Establishments. There is,
however, a considerable degree of truth behind the joke, a truth which
reflects a very real power structure. It is this
power
structure which the ... Right in the United States has been attacking
for years in the belief that they are attacking the Communists. This is
particularly true when these attacks are directed, as they so
frequently are at "Harvard Socialism," or at "Left-wing newspapers"
like The New York Times and the Washington
Post, or at foundations and their dependent establishments,
such as the Institute of International Education.
Misdirected
Attacks by the Right
These
misdirected attacks by
the ... Right did much to confuse the American people in the period
1948-1955, and left consequences which were still significant a decade
later. By the end of 1953, most of these attacks had run their course.
The American people, thoroughly bewildered at widespread charges of
twenty years of treason and subversion, had rejected the Democrats and
put into the White House the Republican Party's traditional favorite
... Dwight D. Eisenhower. At the time, two events, one public and one
secret, were still in process. The public one was the Korean War of
1950-1953; the secret one was the race for the thermonuclear bomb.
Part Eighteen—Nuclear Rivalry and the Cold
War: the Race for H-Bomb: 1950-1957
Chapter 66—"Joe I" and the American Nuclear
Debate, 1949-1954
In
May 1947, at one of the
earliest meetings of the Atomic Energy Commission, the members
discussed a suggestion made by one of the commissioners, the Wall
Street investment banker Lewis L. Strauss. Four months later, at the
request of the commission, the air force was ordered to begin a
continuous monitoring of the upper atmosphere to test for radioactive
particles which would indicate if a nuclear explosion had taken place
anywhere in the world. The monitoring service was tested on our own
nuclear explosions in the Marshall Islands early in 8, and continued
thereafter on funds from AEC.
Late
in August 1949, a B-29,
modified for this service, returned to its base in the Far East and
found that the photographic plates it had been carrying to a great
height were covered with streaks. As the local scientists examined
these, they became convinced that the plane had passed througl1 a
heavily radioactive cloud, which must have originated farther west on
the mainland of Asia. Code messages to Washington sent similar planes
over the United States to collect raindrops and high-flying dust
particles. These soon revealed the bad news: a highly efficient
plutonium bomb ("Joe I") had been exploded over Soviet Asia in August.
President Truman, on September 23, 1949, made a public announcement:
"Within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR."
The
news of "Joe I" brought to
crisis level, and merged together, two conflicts which had been going
on, more or less behind the scenes, in the American strategic
community. One of these conflicts was among the scientists over the
possibility of making a "super" bomb by fusing hydrogen; the other
conflict, involving billions of dollars in defense contracts and the
lives of millions of people, was the struggle among the armed services
over American strategic-defense policies.
Discussion
over "Super" had
been going on for years, but only intermittently and among a few
advanced scientists. In 1927 a young Austrian, Fritz Houtermans,
studying physics at Göttingen, took a walk with Lord Rutherford's
assistant, Geoffrey Atkinson. Houtermans suggested that the energy of
the sun came from the fusion of four hydrogen atoms to make a single
helium atom. They talked about the problem and told a Russian fellow
student, George Gamow, who returned to the Soviet Union shortly
afterward. In 1933 Houtermans fled from Hitler's anti-Semitic laws to
Russia. During Stalin's purges he was imprisoned as a foreign spy and
tortured to extract a confession. In 1940, when Stalin was allied with
Hitler, Houtermans's wrecked but still living body was turned over to
the Germans to receive new indignities from the Gestapo.
In
1933 Gamow fled from Russia
and was given a professorship at the George Washington University in
the American capital. In 1935 Gamow invited the Hungarian refugee
scientist Edward Teller to join him at George Washington. They worked
together and talked a good deal about the problem of hydrogen fusion.
After listening to them, another refugee, Hans Bethe, winner of the
Enrico Fermi award in 196', then at Cornell, worked out the now
accepted equations for nuclear fusion on the sun. Bethe's equations
assumed that Carbon-12, by the addition of hydrogen nuclei (protons),
one at a time, was raised through Nitrogen-13, N-14, Oxygen-15, and
N-15 which then added a final proton and split into C-12 and Helium-4.
The carbon thus acted as a catalyst for the fusion of hydrogen to form
helium.
Teller,
a restless man,
fertile with suggestions, but incapable of sustained cooperation with
others, went to Columbia University in 1941, to Chicago in 1942, to
Berkeley, California, in the summer of 1942, and to Los Alamos in the
spring of 1943. He was obsessed with the idea of a fusion bomb and was
greatly encouraged by Oppenheimer who obtained special security
clearance for him and invited him both to California in 1942 and to Los
Alamos in 1943. In both places he worked on the H-bomb, although it was
generally known (as suggested by Fermi) that no H-bomb was possible
until there was an A-bomb to ignite it.
Hydrogen
nuclei (protons),
carrying the same (positive) electrical charges, repel each other so
strongly that they cannot be pushed together to fuse into helium unless
they are raised to tremendous collision speeds by being heated to
hundreds of millions of degrees of temperature. Only an A-bomb could
produce such heat. In 1942 Fermi suggested that such fusion could be
achieved at a somewhat lower temperature by using heavy hydrogen
(deuterium). This is an isotope of hydrogen which is twice as heavy as
ordinary hydrogen, since its nucleus consists of two unit particles
instead of one. Its discovery, for which Harold Urey won the Nobel
Prize in 1934, showed that it existed in nature, chiefly in the form of
heavy water (D2O
compared to ordinary water H2O),
in the proportion of about one part of deuterium for every 5,000 of
ordinary hydrogen.
Shortly
afterward, it was
calculated that it might be possible to make an even heavier isotope of
hydrogen of triple weight (tritium) with a nucleus of three particles.
These could be fused to make helium at an even lower temperature.
However, it would be so expensive to make tritium that each bomb would
cost billions of dollars. By the end of 1942, it seemed clear that the
most feasible way to make a bomb would be to use both deuterium and
tritium. Collisions of these at over 100 million degrees of temperature
should give helium atoms and enormous energy. At that point the project
was put on the shelf, and work concentrated on making the A-bomb, which
had to be obtained first.
After
the war ended, the
outstanding scientists gradually returned to their peacetime teaching
and research, so that the AEC laboratories, including Los Alamos,
quieted down. The super-patriots subsequently criticized the scientists
for this, arguing that the latter should have stayed on the job with
AEC to develop better weapons than the Russians. This is nonsense, and
is most nonsensical when it is implied that the scientists' reluctance
for weapon development was based on Soviet sympathies. The fact is that
America's whole future depended on getting scientists back to the
universities to train new scientists, a job which had been neglected
for five years. Moreover, there was another and potent influence
working against weapons development in the nuclear area. This was the
air force.
The
air force could keep its
monopoly of atomic weapons only as long as these remained in the large,
ungainly shape they had first had in 1945. Accordingly, the air force,
through General Brereton's participation on an AEC committee at the end
of 1947, was able to block AEC development of smaller, tactical atom
bombs. Only three years later, when these were being developed in spite
of its opposition, did the air force try to recapture its privileged
nuclear monopoly by beginning to insist on development of the H-bomb.
This shift brought it into alliance with Teller who had been vainly
advocating the H-bomb all the time since 1942.
Ironically
enough, once this
alliance had been made, sympathizers and allies of both the air force
and of Teller conveniently forgot the former's earlier opposition to
nuclear weapons development and began to question the loyalty of others
who had opposed development of the H-bomb, including those "official
scientists" who had done so because they realized it would jeopardize
the development of tactical A-bombs. Because he cooperated in this
attack on Oppenheimer, Teller's prestige among scientists (but not
among congressmen and journalists) was almost irreparably damaged.
The
turn toward the H-bomb
began in 1949, even before "Joe I," largely because of the agitations
of Teller and his supporters in the California Radiation Laboratory led
by E. O. Lawrence and Luis Alvarez. At the same time, Soviet pressure,
especially in Berlin, made it increasingly clear that our nuclear
weapons system must be reviewed. Teller at once insisted, "H-bomb! "
but the official scientists, led by Oppenheimer, suggested development
of a wide panoply of nuclear weapons in all sizes and utilities. In
general, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS)
group were
reluctant to work for either change. Until 1950, however, the
development of smaller A-bombs was prevented by the air-force veto of
1947. As a result, the only testing of A-bombs in the five-year period
from Bikini in 1946 to April 1951 vv7as a test at Eniwetok in the
spring of 1948 which sought to secure larger bombs by more effective
use of nuclear material. At these 1948 tests four bombs were exploded,
reaching a size of over 100 kilotons, or almost six times the blast of
the 1945 bombs on Japan. This lack of testing from 1948 to 1951, for
which the air force was responsible, was later attributed by air-force
supporters to Oppenheimer's Communist sympathies!
"Joe
I" brought this stalemate
to a crisis. The question of proceeding toward an H-bomb was submitted
to the Advisory Committee (GAC) of the AEC in October, and this group,
including Oppenheimer, Conant, Fermi, Lee DuBridge (president of
California Institute of Technology), I. I. Rabi of Columbia (Nobel
Prize, 1944), and three businessmen, voted unanimously against a crash
program to make an H-bomb. Glenn Seaborg (Nobel Prize, 1951), who was
absent, was noncommittal. The most vigorous opposition came from
Conant. In general, the opposition felt that concentration on an
all-out effort to make an H-bomb, whose feasibility was very dubious,
would be a poor response to "Joe I" and that a
better response
would lie in: (1) complete reform of American ground forces, including
universal military training; (2) reorganization of the defenses of
Western Europe, including Germany; and (3) a drive to make a large and
varied assortment of A-bombs, especially by decreasing their size for
tactical use.
Teller
was chagrined at this
decision, a view which was shared by Senator Brien McMahon of the joint
congressional committee and by the air force. Teller had been visiting
about the country, in his impetuous way, even before this decision,
seeking to build up support for "Super" and to recruit scientists, with
special attention to Bethe (who opposed the effort to make an H-bomb
and finally joined the effort, the following year, because he hoped to
prove it was impossible).
The
GAC's unanimous vote
against a crash program for the H-bomb in October 1949 was based on a
number of considerations, which still seem valid: (I) The scientists
feared that the use of the Hanford reactors to make tritium from
lithium, instead of continuing to make plutoniun1 from uranium, would
jeopardize the development of tactical A-bombs, especially as the
manufacture of a pound of tritium would cost the loss of 80 pounds of
plutonium; (2) they felt that the threat of our nuclear retaliation was
not a sufficient guarantee against nibbling by Soviet ground forces and
wanted our ground forces and those of our European supporters
reorganized, expanded, and equipped with tactical atomic weapons; (3)
they felt that the atom bomb was sufficiently large for any possible
target in Soviet industrial plants or Russian cities and that for such
targets the hydrogen bomb was not really necessary; (4) they felt that
the advantages of adding the H-bomb to the world's arsenals, in terms
of cost, was so slight that the Russians would not try to make it if we
abstained from doing so; (5) they felt that the scientific manpower
needed to develop the H-bomb could be obtained only from the A-bomb
plants or from teaching, and was, for the immediate future, more
valuable in these two places; (6) they doubted if any H-bomb would be
made small enough to be carried in a plane, and, accordingly, thought
it unwise to sacrifice possible strengthening of our defense response
where it was urgently needed (on land) for a possibly unobtainable
increment of power to our defense response in an area (strategic
bombing) where it was not urgently needed, especially as it was not yet
established that we would make any nuclear response at all to a minor
or moderate Soviet aggression.
These
considerations, which so
deeply disturbed Conant, Oppenheimer, Lilienthal, and others, were
ignored by Teller and his allies, who continued to agitate for a crash
program for "Super." The strong support which Teller found in the air
force, from the joint congressional committee under Senator McMahon,
and from William Liscum Borden, executive director of the joint
committee, eventually led President Truman to reverse the GAC. On
January 31, 1950, the President gave a decision which has frequently
been misrepresented: he ordered the AEC to proceed with its efforts to
make the H-bomb and at the same time to continue its work for more
varied A-weapons, within the framework of a new over-all survey of
American strategic plans which was simultaneously ordered from the
National Security Council. This triple order, which is usually
misrepresented as the single order for a crash H-bomb, effort, required
new nuclear reactors.
The
order to make an H-bomb
was easier to issue than to carry out, because no one knew how to make
it. It must be clearly understood that the H-bomb, as tested in
November 1952 and subsequently developed, was not based on the lines
being followed by Teller in 1946-1951. The true sequence of events has
been concealed under enormous waves of ... propaganda which have tried
to show that Teller's development of the H-bomb was held up because the
Truman Administration was deeply infiltrated with Communists and fellow
travelers. This propaganda came fron1 neo-isolationist, Republican, and
air-force sources which formed a tacit alliance to discredit the
Democratic administrations of 1933-1953— "Twenty Years of
Treason," as they called it.
The
chronology here is of some
importance. Klaus Fuchs confessed to atomic espionage in England on
January 27th; President Truman ordered work on the H-bomb four days
later; and McCarthy made his first accusations at Wheeling nine days
after that.
One
of the reasons the GAC had
opposed working on the H-bomb was that such work would jeopardize the
production of plutonium and would not overcome the unbalance in our
defenses between strategic and tactical forces. On February 24th the
Joint Chiefs of Staff demanded that Truman's order to the AEC "to
continue" work on the H-bomb be changed into a "crash program." About
the same time, the White House ordered the reevaluation of our
strategic position by the National Security Council; this led
eventually to NSC 68. And, finally, the AEC initiated steps to obtain
new nuclear reactors. Work on these, begun in 1951, included a tritium
production plant on the Savannah River and two U-235 gaseous-diffusion
plants at Portsmouth, Ohio, and Paducah, Kentucky. This gave five great
nuclear centers, of which the three diffusion plants used 5.8 million
kilowatts of electricity, about half the total output of the TVA, and
sufficient for the ordinary needs of 32 million persons. In 1960 this
electricity cost over a quarter of a billion dollars, and the total
cost of nuclear explosives was running at $2 billion a year.
The
method pursued to achieve
a thermonuclear explosion up to June 1951, by fusing tritium and
deuterium into helium, was possible as a scientific experiment, and was
achieved at the beautiful atoll of Eniwetok in April 1951. But this
method could not be used for a bomb, since the whole mechanism had to
be enclosed in a complex refrigerator the size of a small house. The
problem of the bomb was to get the hydrogen isotope particles close
enough together so that they would fuse. This could be done at the
almost unobtainable temperatures over 400 million degrees. It could be
done at lower temperatures if the particles were already close
together, as they would be when very cold. As hydrogen gets colder, it
liquefies at—423° below zero Fahrenheit, but it is very
difficult to keep it that cold. It can be kept at the temperature of
liquid air,—414° F., by immersing it in this, but at that
temperature, 9° higher than its own vaporizing point, hydrogen will
stay liquid only if it is under pressure of about 2,700 pounds per
square inch..
The
successful hydrogen fusion
at Eniwetok in April, 195 1, was achieved with a very small quantity of
tritium and deuterium held at these fantastic conditions, then suddenly
exposed to the 100-million-degree blast of an exploding A-bomb. The
additional energy released by the fusing hydrogen was so small that it
was not noticeable to eyewitnesses, but could be inferred from the
electronic recording apparatus. Thus it would be a mistake to call this
explosion, known as Operation Greenhouse, an H-bomb. As the AEC would
say, it was "a thermonuclear device."
The
successful way to the
thermonuclear bomb emerged from a suggestion made to Teller in February
1951 by a brilliant young Polish mathematician, Stanislaw Ulam. Teller
presented the idea, as developed by himself and his assistant Frederic
de Hoffman, to a meeting of the GAC held at the Institute for Advanced
Study on June 19-20, 1951. Everyone present realized that the problem
was solved. As Oppenheimer said, "It was sweet." Briefly, the idea was
to merge the two separate operations of making tritium out of lithium
and fusing the tritium with deuterium into a single operation as a
bomb. The feasibility of this new plan was tested in a successful
thermonuclear explosion (called "Mike”) as part of the tests of
Operation Ivy at Eniwetok on November 1, 1952. This produced a blast
equal to about lo million tons of TNT, creating a fireball 3 ½
miles wide, whose heat was felt 30 miles away, and which completely
destroyed the small islet on which it occurred, leaving a hole in the
lagoon 175 feet deep and a mile wide. But this was not a bomb, since
the mechanism weighed 65 tons and filled a cubical box 25 feet on each
edge.
The
great significance of the
thermonuclear bomb was that, unlike the A-bomb, it could be made of
limitless power. An A-bomb explosion was measured in thousands of tons
of TNT (kilotons) and could be made up to a few hundred kilotons in
power. The thermonuclear bomb had to be measured in millions of tons of
TNT (megatons) and had no limit on its size.
The
world's third
thermonuclear explosion was a shocker, exploded by the Russians on
August 12, 1953, and revealed to the world by American
atmosphere-testing devices. It may have been dropped from a plane; if
so, the Russians were far in advance of us, since we did not achieve a
droppable bomb until May 21, 1956. In that interval we exploded, at
Bikini on March 1, 1954, our first real thermonuclear bomb. It was a
horrifying device, a triple-stage fission-fusion-fission bomb which
spread death-dealing radioactive contamination over more than 8,000
square miles of the Pacific and injurious radiation over much of the
world.
This
first American
thermonuclear bomb had a trigger of two A-bombs exploded simultaneously
to detonate a second stage consisting of Lithium-6 deuteride. This
latter was a compound of a lithium isotope of mass 6 (which makes up
about one-fifteenth of natural lithium and has a nucleus of three
protons with three neutrons) and of heavy Hydrogen-2. This compound, a
white crystalline substance, was surrounded with a shiny sphere of
almost a ton of metallic natural uranium. The neutrons from the A-bomb
trigger, blasting through the lithium deuterium crystals, split the
Lithium-6 into helium and tritium ( Hydrogen-3); in a tremendous
explosion, the latter then fused with the deuterium to make helium, at
the same time emitting a great shower of extra neutrons which split the
surrounding natural uranium in a super-atomic fission holocaust. The
whole process occurred almost instantaneously, with a shattering blast
equal to 18,000,000 tons of TNT. With the blast was released a vast
quantity of deadly radioactive isotopes, including the dangerous
Strontium-90, which, like calcium, is readily absorbed into human
bones, where its deadly radiations may easily engender cancer.
The
test of this inhuman
weapon (called "Bravo") was announced to the world by the AEC as the
test of an H-bomb (it was really a U-bomb, or a "fission-fusion-fission
bomb"), and for almost a year (until February 15, 1955) its real nature
was concealed by the AEC, apparently at the insistence of the new
Republican chairman, Lewis L. Strauss. Secrecy from Strauss left the
world with two mistaken ideas: (1) that the successful thermonuclear
bomb was simply an H-bomb and (2) that it was, accordingly, made on the
lines Teller had been following in 1945-1951. From these errors
partisan inference could conclude that our delay in achieving an H-bomb
resulted from the restraints placed on Teller's work during the Truman
Administration. This, of course, was not believed by the atomic
scientists, but seemed convincing to many well-informed persons from
the strange fact that William L. Laurence, science editor of The
New York Times, spread these two mistaken
ideas.
As
the best-known scientific
journalist in America, Laurence's stories were accepted as true by the
ordinary well-informed public (though not by scientists). Laurence, the
only newspaper reporter allowed to see the test at Alamagordo or the
nuclear explosion on Japan, wrote a book on the H-bomb, which he called
The Hell Bomb, in 1950. It was
full of misleading ideas,
forgivable at that date, but totally erroneous in following years, when
the book continued to be read. It stated that the H-bomb would be
exploded by direct fusion of deuterium and tritium, a method which it
attributed to Teller. Years later, in The New York Times, Laurence
still insisted that the test of March, 1954, was not a
fission-fusion-fission (F-F-F-bomb) but was simply a fission-fusion
H-bomb and not a U-bomb. This version of "Bravo" apparently originated
with Strauss, who denied that "Bravo" was a U-bomb, and explained the
surprisingly large noxious fallout as a consequence of irradiation of
the coral reef on which the bomb exploded. This story entrenched in the
public mind that Teller was the "Father of the H-bomb," that he had
been held back to the injury of American security by Soviet
sympathizers during the Truman Administration, and that there was some
basis for the AEC condemnation of Oppenheimer as a security risk in
June 1954. Behind much of this was the air force, allied to Teller,
Laurence, and Strauss, and very opposed to Oppenheimer. This opposition
arose because of Oppenheimer's work for diversification of weapons
(which was regarded by the air force as a treasonable diversion of both
money and nuclear materials from it to the other services) and for his
efforts to get smaller nuclear warheads. These latter paved the way for
long-range missiles, for tactical nuclear weapons, and for the Polaris
nuclear submarine which supplanted the air force manned bombers and, by
the middle 1960'S, threatened to shift America's primary deterrence of
Soviet aggression from SAC to the navy.
It
should be recorded that
Teller had little to do with the actual making of the successful
thermonuclear bomb. As usual, he was very restless and felt hampered at
Los Alamos in 1951 and spent most of his time lobbying with the air
force and the Radiation Laboratory trying to get a new second-weapons
laboratory of his own. To free himself for this activity, he left Los
Alamos in November 1951. When the AEC refused to establish a second
laboratory, Teller went to the air force and obtained its support for a
second-weapons laboratory, the so-called Livermore Laboratory attached
to E. O. Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, California. This
was established in July 1952. All the thermonuclear tests and the final
H-bomb which we have mentioned were achievements of Los Alamos, whose
operations, under Norris Bradbury, Teller disapproved. Teller himself
was present at none of the tests of the lithium bomb, and his Livermore
Laboratory did not participate in the tests.
None
of this was in fact as it
was built up in public opinion in the period 1951-1955. The public
record on these matters was rectified in 1955 by Teller, by Laurence,
and by the AEC, but by that time Oppenheimer had been condemned, the
Republicans were in office, and the story of subversion in the American
government had become an established American myth, along with the
thermonuclear bomb as a hydrogen bomb and Teller as its father.
These
myths were, of course,
not believed by the nuclear scientists, a fact that helped to intensify
the suspicion the ... Right held for them and for all educated people.
The truth about "Bravo" had been revealed to the nuclear scientists of
the world, including the Russians, almost immediately after the test
and in a most dramatic fashion.
Shortly
after the "Bravo" blast at Bikini, a small Japanese fishing boat,
The Lucky Dragon, was caught in the edge of the lethal
radiations from the test. It was, indeed a lucky Dragon
for only one of the crew subsequently died, although the rest were sick
for months. The vessel was ninety miles east of the blast, but, had it
been only ten miles farther south, all the crew would have died
horrible deaths. Two weeks after the blast, when the doomed vessel
reached Japan, Professor Kenjiro Kimura, the first discoverer of
Uranium-237, found this rare isotope in the fallout ash all over The
Lucky Dragon.
The U-237 could have come only from fission of U-239. This discovery,
published in Japanese in August 1954, revealed that "Bravo" had been a
gigantic U-bomb whose deadly nature resided more in its radioactive
fallout than in its heat and blast.
Under
the tight blanket of the
secrecy of Strauss, the scientists who knew asked themselves: Why did
the AEC make such a "dirty" bomb? Why was it all kept such a secret?
The answer now seems clear: the Soviet H-bomb explosion of August 1953
showed that the Russians were ahead of us in the H-bomb race. This the
AEC could not publicly admit. This disadvantage had to be overcome as
rapidly as possible, and the best way to do so was to shift from blast
warfare to radioactivity warfare. The movement in this direction, which
was fortunately only temporary (1953-1956), was intensified by the
early, and very secret, stages of the missile race. Late in 1952,
immediately following the test of "Mike," John von Neumann headed a
committee which recommended an intensified effort to develop a
long-range missile (ICBM). At that time the American effort in missiles
was restricted very largely to variations of the German V-2 weapon and
to lesser rockets such as Aerobee and Wac Corporal. The new effort soon
showed that longer range would be easier to achieve than greater
accuracy and that it would be very difficult to build a missile which
could be depended upon to hit within ten miles of target. At such a
distance, blast, even at ten megatons, would do little damage, and if
such targets were to be knocked out, this would have to be done by a
spreading cloud of radioactive fallout and not by the blast. Hence the
U-bomb.
The
U-bomb, concealed from
public view by secrecy and by misleading statements from AEC, usually
from Strauss, remained the weapon of last resort in the American
arsenal throughout the Dulles era. The launching of the first "Polaris"
submarine in January 1954, six weeks before "Bravo," did not change
this situation. The first American test of an airdrop lithium bomb in
May 1956 was a delayed fall from a B-52 jet bomber at 55,000 feet; it
exploded at 15,000 feet in a four-mile-wide fireball, but was almost an
equal distance off its target.
To
prepare public opinion to
accept use of the U-bomb, if it became necessary, Strauss sponsored a
study of radioactive fallout whose conclusion was prejudged by calling
it "Project Sunshine." By selective release of some evidence and strict
secrecy of other information, the Strauss group tried to establish in
public opinion that there was no real danger to anyone from nuclear
fallout even in all-out nuclear war. This gave rise to a controversy
between the scientists of the BAS group, led by Ralph E. Lapp, and the
Eisenhower Administration, led by Strauss, on the nature and danger of
fallout and of nuclear warfare in general.
As
we shall see in a moment,
the Eisenhower government through Dulles's doctrine of "massive
retaliation," enunciated in January 1954, was so deeply committed to
nuclear warfare that it could not permit the growth of a public opinion
which would refuse to accept the use of nuclear weapons because of
objections to the danger of fallout to neutrals and noncombatants. In
this struggle Strauss, Dulles, and Teller were supported by the air
force, which feared and resented the efforts of the Oppenheimer group
to shift the defense expenditures over a much wider range than that of
massive retaliation. They were particularly alarmed by the efforts of
Oppenheimer, Lee DuBridge, and others to spend money on anti-air
defenses. By 1953 this struggle became so intense that the supporters
of the air force and of massive retaliation decided they must destroy
the public image and public career of Oppenheimer, to influence public
opinion and to deter other scientists of his view from opposition to
the new Republican-air-force party line.
The
end of the American
nuclear monopoly in late 1950 made necessary a reopening of the
strategic debate which had been stabilized on the Truman doctrine of
"containment" in 1947. "Containment" strategy was based on a strategic
balance between Soviet mass armies and the American nuclear monopoly,
in which each of these would deter use of the other, thus establishing
an umbrella under which the United States could use its economic power
to win the Cold War. The strategic balance had been established as the
"Truman Doctrine" early in 1947 and had been followed by the
containment weapon, in aid to Greece and Turkey and, above all, by the
Marshall Plan. This policy in the years 1947-1950 won numerous
victories for the West, all along the Soviet-bloc periphery and
especially in West Germany and in Japan, both of which became solidly
attached to the West. The major failure, justified as inevitable in
terms of the magnitude of the problem and the resources available, was
the loss of China to the Soviet bloc, but this was generally accepted
by the supporters of containment on the double ground that the
available resources must go to Europe (as more important than China)
and that China would never be a strong or dependable satellite of
Russia.
This
doctrine of containment,
by depriving each side of its strongest weapon (the Soviet mass army
and the American SAC force) tended to neutralize these and forced each
side into supplementary strategic plans. On the Soviet side, these new
plans involved the use of nibbling tactics by its satellites. On the
American side, these new plans involved the development of a balanced
and flexible defensive posture based on all services and weapons.
The
new Soviet plans required
a diversion of American aims from the Soviet Union itself to its
periphery and to its satellites. They also involved keeping aggression
below the level which would trigger a SAC retaliation. This level was
much higher for a satellite state than for the Soviet Union itself. In
fact, while almost any military aggression by the USSR might trigger a
SAC nuclear strike in return, almost no aggression by a satellite
(especially a lesser satellite) would do so. The areas in which such
indirect adventures by the USSR might take place were obvious: the Near
East and the Far East. In both of these areas the ineptness of American
policy made the Soviet task fairly easy.
The
American response to this
shift in Soviet strategy appeared, not as a response to an overt
manifestation of Soviet policy, but as a response to "Joe 1." Moreover,
it was not a Defense Department or JCS response, but was sponsored and
pushed through by the policy planning staff of the State Department
under Paul Nitze. It arose from the needs of NATO as a defensive force
against Russia, and advocated a policy very similar to that desired by
Oppenheimer and the GAC (increased emphasis on a balanced defense with
strengthened ground forces, including those of our allies, and rapid
development of tactical nuclear weapons and a tactical air-force role).
This effort, which would have required an increase in the defense
budget from the 1950 figure of $13 billion to about $35 billion, was
accepted in April 1950 by the National Security Council as directive
NSC 68, but with a cost figure of only $18 billion a year. The dominant
thought of NSC 68 was the expectation of a strategic nuclear stalemate
between the United States and the USSR by 1954 and the necessity of
preparing for methods of defense, other than massive bombing, to resist
Soviet aggression. Naturally, this directive was abhorrent to the "Big
Bomber Boys." The extraordinary thing is that their resistance was
successful, and NSC 68 was replaced by "massive retaliation" and a new
directive, the so-called NSC 162, in October 1953, in spite of all the
lessons of the Korean War of 1950-1953, which the air force and the
Eisenhower Administration jointly ignored.
Chapter 67—The Korean War and Its Aftermath,
1950-1954
The
emphasis by the American
armed forces on nuclear retaliation as their chief response to
Communist aggression anywhere in the world made it necessary to draw a
defense perimeter over which such aggression would trigger retaliation
from us. Such a boundary had been established in Europe by the military
occupation forces and NATO, but, at the end of 1949, was still
unspecified in the Far East because of the recent victory of the
Communists in China. At the insistence of the military leaders,
especially General MacArthur, that perimeter was drawn to exclude
Korea, Formosa, and mainland China; accordingly, all American forces
had been evacuated from South Korea in June 1949. In March of that
year, MacArthur publicly stated, "Our defense line runs through the
chain of islands fringing the coast of Asia. It starts from the
Philippines and continues through the Ryukyu archipelago which includes
its broad main bastion, Okinawa. Then it bends back through Japan and
the Aleutian Island chain to Alaska."
The
MacArthur defense
perimeter in the Far East was accepted by Secretary of State Acheson in
a speech on January 12, 1950, but not at all in the sense in which
partisan Republicans attacked it later. Acheson specifically stated
that America's guarantee was given only to areas east of that line but
that American power might be used to the west of it where independent
nations must first seek their security on their own initiative and the
organized security system of the United Nations. To Acheson, therefore,
the boundary was not between areas we would defend and those we would
not defend, but between those we would defend unilaterally and those we
would defend collectively.
However,
it seems clear that
in private, by the end of 1949, all parts of the Administration in
Washington looked forward to the fall of Formosa, the complete
disappearance of Chiang Kai-shek, the recognition of Red China and its
admission to the United Nations, as preliminaries to an intensive
diplomatic effort to exploit the split between Soviet Russia and
Communist China which was regarded as inevitable. This vision of
Chinese "Titoism" never became public policy, but on October, 12, 1949,
after the JCS under Eisenhower voted that Formosa was not of sufficient
strategic importance to warrant its occupation by American troops, the
three defense departments and the Department of State agreed
unanimously that Formosa would be conquered by Red China by the end of
1950.
Whatever
merits there may have
been in our Far Eastern defense perimeter and its implications for
Formosa, it clearly left Korea in an ambiguous position. The Soviet
Union interpreted this ambiguity to mean that the United States would
allow South Korea to be conquered by North Korea, just as Red China,
about the same time, assumed that the United States would permit it to
conquer Formosa. Instead, when Russia, through its satellite, North
Korea, sought to take Korea before Red China had taken Formosa, this
gave rise to an American counteraction which prevented either aggressor
from getting its aim..
There
can be little doubt that
[key leaders of] the United States, along with the rest of the world,
underestimated the almost insanely aggressive nature of Red China. From
1949 onward, this newly established regime tried to trite every
friendly hand which tried to lead it into the community of established
nations. It made it perfectly clear to all its neighbors in Asia that
its policies would be based on hatred for any country which did not
break with the United States and line up with the Soviet Union. Even
India, which leaned over backward to be friendly, was upbraided almost
daily in extravagant insults of which one of the more moderate was a
charge that Nehru was "the running dog of British-American
imperialists." When Great Britain offered diplomatic recognition in
January 1950, it was rebuffed.
Nor
was this aggressive
behavior only verbal. In spite of the devastation and economic
dislocation of the Civil War, Red Chinese plans for aggression
continued. The general level of Chinese production in 1949 was about
half what it had been in 1942, and the country clearly needed an
interval to recuperate, but the budget for 1950 allotted 40 percent of
its funds for the armed services, imposed a tax of 20 percent on
peasant agricultural incomes, and anticipated a deficit of nearly 20
percent to be covered by printing paper money. Its declared immediate
plans included the conquest of Hainan Island, Formosa, and Tibet.
Hainan was conquered in April 1950, and the buildup against Formosa
continued for at least two months more. About 20,000 Koreans in the
Chinese forces were detached and returned to North Korea, where they
joined the armed forces of the People's Republic of Korea (PRK, that
is, North Korea Communist Republic). This may have been done at
Russia's request.
On
June 25, 1950, after a
two-hour artillery bombardment, 60,000 North Koreans, led by a hundred
Soviet tanks, crossed the 38th parallel and flung themselves on 90,000
lightly armed and already dis-spirited South Korean troops. The latter,
lacking tanks, planes, or heavy artillery, reeled backward to the south
and did not stop until August 6th, when they finally made a stand
before Pusan in the southeast corner of the Korean Peninsula. In this
retreat the ROK troops suffered 50,000 casualties in the first month..
For
forty-eight hours after
the Korean attack, the world hesitated, awaiting America's reaction. On
June 26, 1950, the fifth birthday of the United Nations, many feared a
"Munich," leading to the collapse of the whole United Nations security
system at its first major challenge. Truman's reaction, however, was
decisive. He immediately committed American air and sea forces in the
area south of 38°, and demanded a UN condemnation of the
aggression. Thus, for the first time in history, a world organization
voted to use collective force to stop armed aggression. This was
possible because the North Korean attack occurred at a time when the
Soviet delegation was absent from the United Nations Security Council,
boycotting it in protest at the presence of the delegation from
Nationalist China. Accordingly, the much-used Soviet veto was
unavailable. On June 27, 1950, the Security Council, with Yugoslavia
casting the only opposing vote, condemned the aggression and asked its
members to give assistance to South Korea. On the same day President
Truman ordered American forces into action and sent the United States
Seventh Fleet to neutralize the Formosa Strait, where the Red Chinese
armies were still poised for their invasion of Formosa. This rapid
response won general approval within the United States, even from those
who later condemned and opposed it. One of these was Senator Taft, who
prefaced his temporary approval by charging that all the troubles in
the far East arose from the Democrats' "sympathetic acceptance of
Communism" and that the North Korean attack was in response to the
invitation contained in Acheson's speech of January r 2th: "Is it any
wonder that the Korean Communists took us at the word given by the
Secretary of State?" He demanded Acheson's immediate resignation, a cry
which continued, almost uninterruptedly, over the next two and a half
years.
The
President's order for
ground forces to rescue the South Koreans w as not easy to carry out.
Air-force success in its budget struggles with the other services and
the general budget cutting by the Republican Eightieth Congress
(January 1947-January 1949) had left the ground forces with only ten
army and two Marine Corps divisions, all seriously undermanned. The
four occupation divisions in the Far East, which had to respond to the
Korean attack, had a total of only 25 infantry battalions, instead of
the 36 allotted. These, and other units, had to be brought up to
strength by calling up reservists. Nevertheless, one division from
Japan reached Korea by July 9th, a second by July 12th, and a third on
July 18th.
The
intervention of American
forces in Korea was undoubtedly a great shock to the Communists,
especially as the North Korean attack was a Soviet operation, while the
American landing directly threatened the security of Red China.
Coordination between the two Communist Powers was far from perfect and
was certainly slow. The Red Chinese had no desire to see American
forces reestablished on the Asiastic mainland or in occupation of all
Korea up to the Chinese boundary along the Yalu River; on the other
hand, they had no desire to get into a war with the United States to
prevent this undesired consequence of what was really a Moscow
operation, especially as Soviet support was very remote, at the farther
end of a long single-track railway across Siberia. Nevertheless, the
Red Chinese suspended their attack on Formosa and, in the course of
July, assembled several hundred thousand troops in northeast China,
considerably withdrawn from the Yalu.
For
weeks the successful
advance of the North Koreans gave the Chinese hope that they need do
nothing. The South Koreans were quickly hurled down to the southeastern
corner of the country at Pusan, and for several weeks were on the verge
of being pushed into the sea. Their line held, however, and American
forces began to assemble in the protected beachhead.
The
United States was as cager
as the Chinese to avoid a direct clash between the two countries,
because such a clash could easily build up into a major war in the Far
East, leaving Russia free to do its will in Europe. Washington was
fearful that Chiang Kai-shek, since he could not reconquer China
himself and hoped America would do it for him, might seek to
precipitate such a war by making an attack from Formosa on mainland
China. There was also a strong chance that MacArthur might encourage or
allow Chiang to do so because that haughty general agreed with Chiang
that Europe was of no importance and that the Far East should be the
primary, almost the only, area of operations for American foreign
policy. He had bitterly opposed the "Germany First" strategy throughout
World War II and had begrudged men or supplies sent there on the
grounds that these diversions delayed his triumphant return to the
Philippines. As the war drew to its close, he had said: "Europe is a
dying system. It is worn out and run down and will become an economic
and industrial hegemony of Soviet Russia.... The lands touching the
Pacific with their billions of inhabitants will determine the course of
history for the next ten thousand years."
These
views were shared by the
... isolationist groups of the Republican Party with whom MacArthur had
been in close touch for much of his life and to whom he owed some of
his success. In American politics these groups had power to do
considerable damage because of their influence on the Republican
congressional party and the fact that the bipartisan foreign policy
under Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, which operated elsewhere
in the world, did not exist in regard to the Far East. The danger of
any Chiang-MacArthur cooperation to build the Korean action up into a
major war was intensified by the fact that this would be opposed by the
United Nations and by our allies, neither of whom was considered
important by the neo-isolationists or by MacArthur, but whom the Truman
Administration refused to alienate unnecessarily because they were
essential, as bases, in the containment of Russia.
In
the first two weeks of
August, another American division and parts of other units, including a
Marine Corps brigade, landed at Pusan. By the middle of the month, that
enclave was entrenched, and a counteroffensive to drive the North
Korean forces back to the 38th parallel was being prepared. At that
point MacArthur made a brilliant suggestion: To avoid the hard push up
the peninsula, he proposed landing two American divisions at Inchon,
halfway up the west side of Korea, fifty miles south of the 38th
parallel and only 25 miles from Seoul, the capital. Everything was
adverse to the plan, unless there was complete tactical surprise.
Fortunately, this was achieved, a rather unexpected event in the East.
Marine units landed at Inchon from the sea on September Isth and found
little opposition. On September 22nd they captured Seoul and, six days
later, were joined by the main United Nations offensive driving up the
peninsula from Pusan. About half the PRK forces were captured in the
bag, while the rest fled northward across the 38th parallel into North
Korea. That frontier was reached by the UN forces as the month ended.
The
Red Chinese decision to
intervene in North Korea was made about the third week in August and
began on October 15th, nine days after American troops crossed the 38th
parallel into North Korea. Such an intervention was almost inevitable,
as Red China could hardly be expected to allow the buffer North Korean
state to be destroyed and American troops to occupy the line of the
Yalu without taking some steps to protect its own security. China would
have welcomed the restoration of the boundary along the 38th parallel,
which Russia had so carelessly destroyed by instigating the PRK attack
in June. By October they feared that the United States was about to use
the Korean area as a base for a general war on China. In such a war,
the Chinese expected to become the target of A-bombs, but believed that
they could survive if they could wipe out the United Nations Korean
base for ground operations. Accordingly, as soon as it became clear
that American forces would continue past the 38th parallel to the Yalu,
the Chinese intervened, not to restore the 38th parallel frontier, but
to clear the United Nations forces from Asia completely.
The
Chinese intervention in
Korea, which began on October 15, 1950, was a much greater surprise
than Inchon, and gave rise to one of the most bitter controversies in
American political history, the so-called Truman MacArthur controversy.
The dispute arose fron1 the fact that MacArthur did not accept his
government's strategic and political plans, and systematically sought
to undermine and redirect them, while in constant communication with
the press and with the leaders of the opposition party for this purpose.
The
Truman Administration,
after the victory at Inchon, did not intend to stop at the 38th
parallel, and hoped to reunite the country under the Seoul government.
It is probable that this alone triggered the Chinese intervention, but,
to reduce that possibility, Washington set certain restrictions on
MacArthur's actions which he soon sought to evade. Washington and Tokyo
both knew that the Chinese had about 300,000 troops ready for action in
Manchuria north of the Yalu and that neither Russia nor China was
attempting to reequip the shattered North Korean forces. To discourage
any Chinese intervention, the White House forbade any attack by Chiang
on the Chinese coast, any naval blockade of China itself (Korea, of
course, was blockaded), or any attack on China or Siberia north of the
Yalu, or the use of non-Korean troops in the immediate vicinity of the
Yalu as the conquest of North Korea was completed.
On
October 9, 1950, two of
MacArthur's planes attacked a Russian air base sixty-two miles inside
Russian territory and only eighteen miles from Vladivostok. To make
certain that MacArthur understood the reasons for these restrictions,
President Truman the next day instructed MacArthur to meet him at Wake
Island on October 15th. The two leaders had a lengthy discussion, in
which these restrictions were reiterated, but within two months of his
return to Japan, MacArthur recommenced his almost daily interviews and
letters agitating against these limits.
At
Wake Island, General
MacArthur assured President Truman that any Chinese intervention into
Korea would be most unlikely, and, in any case, would be on a scale
which could he handled. Even as he spoke, the first Chinese units were
already crossing the Yalu River from Manchuria into North Korea. These
engaged in combat on October 26th, and by October 30th some had been
captured. MacArthur continued to deny that any significant Chinese
intervention was present or likely, and tried to discourage it by a
vigorous attack northward against the North Korean remnants. Because of
lack of American troops for an attack across the width of the
peninsula, he divided his forces into two separate attacks on either
side of the peninsula with no direct liaison between the two where a
considerable gap was left. Moreover, MacArthur on October 24th canceled
the restrictions on use of non-Korean forces close to the Chinese and
Russian borders. His special communique of November 5th which opened
his northward offensive spoke of it as one which would for "all
practical purposes end the war" and bring the United Nations forces
"home by Christmas."
Until
November 26th the
MacArthur offensive rolled northward against only moderate resistance,
but, just as it reached the Yalu frontier at some points, a gigantic
Chinese offensive of 33 divisions counterattacked into the gap between
the two UN wings.
MacArthur's
communique of
November 28th spoke of the Chinese attack as a "new war," which "has
shattered the high hopes we entertained that the intervention of the
Chinese was only of a token nature on a volunteer and individual
basis...." At once he began an intensive propaganda campaign both to
obtain his earlier aims for direct attacks on coastal China and air
attacks on interior points and to rewrite the history of the preceding
month so that his own actions would seem to be premeditated and skilled
ripostes to Chinese plans. In fact, his public statement of November
28th was in sharp contrast with his private message to Washington
almost four weeks earlier which estimated the Chinese forces across the
Yalu as half a million men in 56 regular army divisions supported by
370,000 district security forces....
The
Chinese attack in
MacArthur's mind reduced the American situation in the Far East to a
simple choice between two extreme alternatives: either all-out war on
China, and possibly Russia, to destroy world Communism once for all or
the immediate evacuation of our forces from Korea. The former would
have given the Soviet Union a free hand in Europe; the latter would
have made it impossible for us to obtain resistance against Communist
nibbling from any small states or even from our greater allies
elsewhere in the world and would have destroyed our prestige in Asia
and Africa. [Neither of these two option are true. General Douglas
MacArthur was right. He was one of the three greatest military leaders
in American history. The other two great military leaders were General
George Washington and General George Patton. These two military
genius’ would have ended the war much earlier and they would have
eliminated communism on earth if the American people and members of
Congress has supported them.] A rapid visit by Generals J. Lawton
Collins and Hoyt S. Vandenberg to Korea in January 12-17, 1951,
convinced them that the middle alternative, which was still
Washington's policy, namely, to maintain the independence of South
Korea, was still possible.
Rather
than accept this
alternative, MacArthur intensified his press barrage against the
Administration, as well as his numerous messages to isolationist
Republican politicians in Washington. A directive of December which
ordered him to clear his public statements on foreign and military
policy with the respective departments was violated, for some months,
with impunity. The congressional elections of 1950 had been disastrous
to Administration supporters and had been successful for isolationists
of both parties, with the Administration's majority in both Houses cut
almost to nothing.
Senator
Taft, now unchallenged
leader of the isolationist bloc, argued that Governor Dewey's
"internationalist" approach had lost the presidential election of 1948
and that his own wholesale opposition to the Administration on an
isolationist basis had been victorious in 1950 and would win the
Presidency (apparently for himself) in 1952. On this basis a powerful
attack was built up against Secretary of State Acheson, against NATO
and other American commitments in Europe, and against foreign aid or
any efforts to extend America's ground forces. Truman's efforts to send
four divisions to Europe and to make General Eisenhower Supreme
Commander of NATO were violently opposed, by Taft (who had voted
against ratification of NATO) and by Senator Wherry, the Republican
floor leader. Every effort was made to reduce the defense of the United
States to a simple matter of control of the air and the oceans without
need for overseas forces or overseas allies. All this, of course, was
simply a refusal to face twentieth-century conditions by men with
nineteenth-century ideas, and gave great support to MacArthur's
insubordination..
This
insubordination and the
general's alliance with the Republican opposition in the Congress was
brought to a head on April 5, 1951, when the House Republican Leader,
Joseph Martin, read to the Congress a letter from MacArthur which was a
broad-gauged propagandist attack on the Truman Administration's
policies in the Far East. Truman used this as an excuse to remove
MacArthur, although his real reason was the general's sabotage of
American and British efforts to negotiate an end of the war along the
38th parallel.
Five
days after the
MacArthur-Martin letter had been read in Congress, Truman removed the
general from all his commands in the Far East. This was used by the
isolationist opposition for a great triumphal homecoming for MacArthur.
The Republican leaders spoke publicly of impeaching the President;
Senator Nixon wanted congressional censure of the President and
restoration of MacArthur to his commands, since his removal was
"appeasement of World Communism." McCarthy said the President had made
the decision while he was drunk, while Senator William Jenner said from
the Senate floor: "This country today is in the hands of a secret inner
coterie which is directed by agents of the Soviet Union. We must cut
this whole cancerous conspiracy out of our Government at once. Our only
choice is to impeach President Truman and find out who is the secret
invisible government which has so cleverly led our country down the
road to destruction." Sentiments similar to these were frequent, both
in public and in private, for the next few years.
MacArthur's
return to the
United States after an absence of almost fifteen years was built up
into an amazing display of popular hysteria. On landing at San
Francisco he was greeted by half a million people in one of the
greatest traffic jams in the city's history. At Washington's airport,
after midnight on April 19th, the crowds broke out of control. That
afternoon, before a joint session of Congress and over a nationwide
television broadcast, he made a speech which ranged from old-fashioned
eloquence to pure ham. It ended on pathos: "Old soldiers never die,
they just fade away. And like the old soldier of that ballad, I now
close my military career and just fade away—an old soldier who
tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty.
Good-by." This was followed by a parade in Washington before 250,000
spectators, but the real climax was reached in New York, the following
day, when, for six and a half hours, more than seven million people,
spread over a nineteen-mile parade route, cheered themselves hoarse
over the general. This was twice the crowd which had seen Eisenhower's
return from Europe after the defeat of Germany in 1945.
The
general did not fade away
immediately. By May he was back in Washington as star witness for the
prosecution in a congressional investigation into the country's Far
East policies. Only an infinitesimal fraction of those svl1o had
cheered the general so heartily two weeks before paid any attention to
the hearings. This was unfortunate. MacArthur seriously maintained that
his policies could lead to the total defeat of Communist China, without
any increase in ground forces, simply by naval and economic blockade of
China, by air attack on Chinese industry, and by "lifting the wraps"
off Chiang Kai-shek. On this basis he promised immediate victory with a
minimum of risk and casualties. The Administration's policy, he
insisted, was not victory but "to go on indecisively fighting with no
mission for the troops except to resist and fight . . . a continued and
indefinite extension of bloodshed."
Subsequent
testimony from
others, including the country's leading military experts and the Joint
Chiefs of Staff ... rejected MacArthur's ideas as unrealistic and
impossible: the bombing of Manchuria alone would take twice as many
bombers as SAC had available; bombing of Chinese industry would not
deprive the Chinese of military supplies, as their arsenals were in the
Soviet Union; an economic and naval blockade could not seriously injure
a country as self-sufficient as China, with an open land frontier, and
could not be effective at all unless active military combat on the
ground increased consumption rates; efforts to adopt these policies
would alienate the United States from its allies and the United Nations
and would jeopardize the whole anti-Soviet position in Europe. [Of
course, this is not true. The Administration was simply carrying out
the secret agreements made at Yalta by Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin.
Of course, these secret agreements were unknown to the American people
and most members of Congress.]
Few
Americans followed the
arguments to this point, but MacArthur had given the opposition a new
war cry: "In war there is no substitute for victory." This slogan, in
which neither war nor victory was defined, was used as a weapon by the
neo-isolationists, partisan Republicans, and ... Right for more than a
decade, although by 1960 it had been shortened to the charge that the
Democrats favored a "No-win policy." After a decade of reiteration,
many persons seriously believed that it was impossible to stop
Communism without all-out nuclear war and that continued survival,
instead of mutual destruction, could not possibly be regarded as
winning! Peace had become appeasement.
These
neo-isolationist
policies ... exerted great pressure on the last two years of the Truman
Administration, driving it toward an increasingly unrealistic course.
In 1951 Senator Taft was advocating a three-fold program of reduced
military preparedness, reduced government expenditures, and a more
aggressive foreign policy in the Far East. This combination could be
supported only by assuming a number of things which were not true. One
of these was that Chiang Kai-shek's regime on Formosa was still a great
Power and that Red China, on the other hand, was on the verge of
collapse and was, indeed, so weakened that Chiang would be
enthusiastically welcomed back if he merely landed on the mainland.
This unrealistic version of the present could be sustained only by an
equally unrealistic version of the past, that the Red victory
in
China was the inevitable consequence of opposition to Chiang by the
Democratic Administrations of Roosevelt and Truman and that this
opposition was caused by the existence within the Administrations of
Communists and Communist sympathizers from the top down. Since
almost all experts, including scientists, area and subject experts, and
military men, did not accept this version, either of the past or the
present, all experts were regarded as suspect and insulted or ignored.
In fact, educated or thoughtful men were generally rejected. Instead,
emphasis was placed on "practical men," defined as those who "had met a
payroll or carried a precinct." This admitted to the charmed circle
businessmen and politicians of local stature (like Senator Wherry). [Of
course subsequent history and publication of secret government
documents have substantiated that China was deliberately lost to the
communists.]
On
the whole, the
neo-isolationist discontent was a revolt of the ignorant [deliberately
uninformed] against the informed or educated, of the nineteenth century
against the insoluble problems of the twentieth, of the Midwest of Tom
Sawyer against the cosmopolitan East of J. P. Morgan and Company, of
old Siwash against Harvard, of the Chicago Tribune
against the Washington Post or The New
York Times,
of simple absolutes against complex relativisms, of immediate final
solutions against long-range partial alleviations, of frontier activism
against European thought, a rejection, out of hand, of all the
complexities of life which had arisen since 1915 in favor of a
nostalgic return to the simplicities of 1905, and above all a desire to
get back to the inexpensive, thoughtless, and irresponsible
international security of 1880.
This
... impulse swept over
the United States in a great wave in the years 1948-1955, supported by
hundreds of thousands of self-seeking individuals, especially peddlers
of publicity and propaganda, and financed no longer by the relatively
tied-up funds of ... Wall Street international finance, but by its
successors, the freely available winnings of self-financing industrial
profits from such new industrial activities as air power, electronics,
chemicals, light metals, or natural gas, which, although utterly
dependent on government spending or government-protected exploitation
of limited natural resources (such as uranium or oil), pretended to
themselves and their listeners that their affluence was entirely due to
their own cleverness. At the head of this list were the new
millionaires, led by the Texas and southwest oil and natural-gas
plungers, whose fortunes were based on tricky tax provisions and
government-subsidized transportation systems.
This
shift occurred on all
levels from changing tastes in newspaper comic strips (from "Mutt and
Jeff" or "Bringing Up Father" to "Steve Canyon" or "Little Orphan
Annie"), to profound changes in the power nexus of the "American
Establishment." lt was evident in the decline of J. P. Morgan itself,
from its deeply anonymous status as a partnership (founded in 1861) to
its transformation into an incorporated public company in 1940 and its
final disappearance by absorption into its chief banking subsidiary,
the Guaranty Trust Company, in 1959. Incorporation reflected the need
to escape the incidence of the inheritance tax, while its final
disappearance was based on the relative decrease in large security
flotations in contrast to the great increase in industrial
self-financing (best represented by du Pont and its long-time
subsidiary General Motors, or by Ford).
The
less obvious implications
of this shift were illustrated in a story which passed through Ivy
League circles in 1948 in connection with the choice of a new president
for Columbia University. This, of all universities, had been the one
closest to J. P. Morgan and Company, and its president, Nicholas Murray
Butler, was Morgan's chief spokesman from ivied halls. He had been
chosen under Morgan influence, but the events of 1930-1948 which so
weakened Morgan in the economic system also weakened his influence on
the board of trustees of Columbia, until it became evident that Morgan
did not have the votes to elect a successor. However, Morgan (that is,
Tom Lamont) did have the votes to preserve the status quo
and,
accordingly, President Butler was kept in his position until he was
long past his physical ability to carry on its functions. Finally, he
had to retire. Even then Lamont and his allies were able to prevent
choice of a successor, and postponed it, making the university
treasurer acting-president, in the hope that a favorable change in the
board of trustees might make it possible for Morgan, once again, to
name a Columbia president.
F
ate decreed otherwise, for
Lamont died in 1948 and, shortly afterward, a committee of trustees
under Thomas Watson of International Business Machines was empowered to
seek a new president. This was not an area in which the genius of IBM
was at his most effective. While on a business trip to Washington, he
confided his problem to a friend who helpfully suggested, "Have you
thought of Eisenhower?" By this he meant Milton Eisenhower, then
president of Penn State, later president of Johns Hopkins; Watson, who
apparently did not think immediately of this lesser-known member of the
Eisenhower family, thanked his friend, and began the steps which soon
made Dwight Eisenhower, for two unhappy years, president of Columbia.
In
the face of the public
opinion of 1950-1952, the Truman Administration had to make some
concessions to the power of neo-isolationism. The loyalty program to
ferret out subversives was established in the government; during the
MacArthur hearings of May 1951, Dean Acheson promised that, under no
circumstances, would Red China be accepted into the community of
nations; aid and support to Chiang was increased; and John Foster
Dulles was brought into the State Department. None of these changes
helped the Truman Administration's popularity, as was clearly shown in
the election of 1952, but they had major repercussions on history. One
of these was Dulles's success in obtaining a peace treaty for Japan
(September 8, 1951).
Dulles,
like the Columbia
presidency, was a former Morgan satellite wl1icll had been lost, about
the same time and for the same reasons. As a partner in Sullivan and
Cromwell, one of the Wall Street legal firms closely associated with
Morgan, Dulles operated very much in the Morgan vineyard until the late
1940's. An early advocate of bipartisanship in foreign affairs (a Wall
Street specialty), he was first brought into Democratic State
Department circles, largely under Morgan sponsorship, in 1945, as
adviser to Secretary of State Stettinius at the San Francisco
Conference. These associations continued, at various meetings and
conferences, mostly at the United Nations and at the four postwar
Foreign Ministers' conferences of 1945-1949.
But
in 1948 a change occurred
when Dulles's naturally exaggerated personal ambition got out of hand
at the same time that he drifted out of the Wall Street constellations
with which his whole career had been associated. Apparently he decided
he could get further on his own, especially by adapting himself to the
swelling tide of neo-isolationism. The marks of this change were his
appointment to the United States Senate by Governor Dewey of New York
in July 1949 and his resignation from Sullivan and Cromwell at that
time. In the election of November 1949, Dulles was defeated for the
full senatorial term by ax-Governor Herbert Lehman, also of a Wall
Street background. In the campaign Dulles tried to portray Lehman as
having Communist inclinations and went so far as to say that the
election of Lehman would permit the Communists to "chalk up another
victory in their struggle to get into office here." [It is important to
remember the old Morgan trick of infiltrating both parties in order to
guide policies down a preconceived path..]
In
retirement after this
electoral defeat, Dulles continued his movement toward isolationism and
unilateralism, a process which was completed by his article "A Policy
of Boldness" in Life magazine May 19, 1952, and in
his
subsequent efforts to keep President Eisenhower from standing up
against McCarthyism. This movement was marked by increasing neglect of
Europe and opposition to our chief allies there and increasing concern
with the Far East and the curative powers of strategic nuclear bombing..
The
Japanese peace treaty was
one of the last constructive achievements of Dulles and was reached
without support of the Soviet Union, which refused to sign it.
Communist China was also excluded. The treaty's chief aim was to end
the Pacific war within a larger security structure which bound the
previous enemies into a mutual security system. It had three parts: the
peace treaty with Japan, which accepted its loss of the already
detached areas and islands; the ANZUS Treaty, which allied Australia,
New Zealand, and the United States; and a bilateral mutual defense pact
between Japan and the United States.
The
neo-isolationist surge in
American public opinion so paralyzed the freedom of action of the
Truman Administration that it was unable to negotiate any settlement of
the war in Korea. Every effort at negotiation gave rise to howls of
"appeasement' or "treason." Moreover, the Communists, while willing to
negotiate, showed no eagerness to make an agreement, with the result
that negotiations crawled along for two years in the isolated military
quarters at Panmunjon in Korea. The Kremlin was quite willing to keep
America's men, money, and attention tied down in Korea, and could find
each day an additional argument to throw as an obstacle into the
negotiations. Most of these o1Jstacles were concerned with the
disposition of prisoners of war, thousands of whom did not want to
return to Communist territory, while only twenty-one captured Americans
were unwilling to return to the United States. Simply by insisting that
al1 prisoners must be forced to return, the Communists could extend the
negotiations indefinitely in time and thus postpone the day when the
United States might be free to turn its men and resources to other
areas closer to the Soviet Union and thus more dangerous to it, such as
Europe.
Only
the death of Stalin in
March 1953 broke this stalemate. As soon as the first confusion over
this issue had passed temporarily, it became possible to make a Korean
truce, an achievement helped by the accession of a new Republican
administration in Washington in January. The truce was signed on July
27, 1953, after 37 months of war in which the United States had lost
25,000 dead, 115,000 other casualties, and about $22 billion in costs.
The
Korean War had a totally
different impact on the scientists, the Democratic leaders, the army,
some of the navy, the new group of strategic intellectuals and
non-middle-class educated persons in general than it had on the
neo-isolationists, the Republican leaders, the air force, Big Business,
and the newly forming ... Right publicists. To the latter groups it was
a totally unnecessary and frustrating experience, resulting from the
incompetence, or treason, of their opponents, an aberration and
throwback to World War I which must never be permitted to reoccur. To
the former alignment, however, the limited war in Korea was an
inevitable consequence of nuclear stalemate, arising from the very
nature of Communist aggression and of the revolutionary discontents of
the buffer fringe, and would be a constantly threatening possibility in
the future, either in Korea itself or in a dozen other places along the
edges of the Communist bloc. Accordingly, this motley alignment, led by
its scientists and liberals, began to work to strengthen America's
ability to face any new challenge similar to Korea. In a military
sense, this inevitably led to efforts to increase the ability of Europe
and America to wage limited war, whatever the cost. The Right, as the
defenders of material comforts, were unwilling to engage in such an
effort, on the basis of cost alone, and soon convinced themselves that
it was unnecessary.
The
tactical experience of
Korea showed clearly that we had neither the weapons nor the training
for limited war and that the air force's claims for the effectiveness
of its strategic weapons were as unrealistic as they had been since
Douhet. Even the tactical air units had been ineffective, chiefly
because they were designed and used in a separate service dominated by
"Big Bomber" generals. Some of the most effective work had been done by
tools, such as helicopters, which the air force refused to study or
order..
To
remedy this weakness, the
army's specialist on airborne warfare, General James M. Gavin, was sent
with a team of scientists to Korea in the autumn of 1950. At the time
General Gavin, longtime officer of the heroic 82nd Airborne Division,
was much worried at the air force's efforts to monopolize all the air
and all nuclear weapons, at its resentment at possession of aviation by
the navy and marines, and at its refusal to provide effective tactical
support from the air for ground forces or to buy the equipment needed
to provide proper airborne mobility, both of men and supplies, for
ground troops. The team of scientists who went to the Far East with
General Gavin in September-November 1950, included C. C. Lauritsen,
professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, who had
developed the whole array of navy and air-force rockets in World War II
and had been Oppenheimer's assistant at Los Alamos during the last year
of the war; Dr. William B. Shockley of Bell Telephone Laboratories,
developer of the transistor, who won the Nobel Prize in 1956; and Dr.
Edward Bowles of MIT, our chief expert on military applications of
radar in World War II.
From
their discussions emerged
a series of scientific research projects in 1951-1952 which had a
profound effect on American defense capabilities. Project Vista, with
President Lee DuBridge of Caltech as chairman and Lauritsen as his
deputy, made an over-all study of defense problems for the Department
of Defense. In general it sought to reach a well-rounded, diverse
defense establishment which could respond effectively to any degree of
aggression and do it on land, sea, or air. One of its chief efforts was
to get tactical air power for the ground forces and to counteract the
massed Soviet Army in Europe by development of tactical nuclear
weapons, as well as nuclear warheads to be carried on rockets of 50- to
300-mile range, so that the forcible dispersion of Russian infantry to
avoid annihilation would sharply reduce its offensive impact. These
weapons could also be used to get "all-weather" tactical bombing
support under army control to replace the fair-weather air-force
tactical bombing which had proved so ineffective in Korea.
The
Vista Report, which
was submitted to the secretaries of the forces in February 195Z, made
at least a dozen suggestions of which at least ten were eventually
carried out, despite the fact that the report was never accepted. The
reason for its rejection was the violent opposition of the air force,
which disliked most of it but really exploded when they found, in
Chapter 5, that it recommended dividing nuclear materials among the
three services. The air force flatly refused to yield up any
fissionable materials to the other services. At first it insisted that
there was not enough. When months of argument proved there was plenty,
the air force simply tripled its requirements. When the air force
discovered that Oppenheimer had written the introductory section of
Chapter 5, his fate was sealed. Stories about his unreliability were
passed about, and eventually it was said that he had somehow rewritten
Chapter 5 and inserted it without the committee members knowing what he
was doing.
Project
Charles and its sequel
Project Lincoln were equally objectionable to the air force, although
they had been instigated by it. "Charles" suggested that a permanent
research laboratory should be established to study the technical
problems of air defense. Accordingly, in September 1951, the Lincoln
Laboratory was set up at MIT. This eventually had a staff of 1,600 on
an annual budget of $20 million. Its special summer Project Lincoln in
1951 included many of the scientists, such as DuBridge, Lauritsen,
Zacharias, and Oppenheimer of Project Vista; it estimated that American
defense against a Soviet air attack was woefully weak and could not
expect to knock down more than 20 percent of the attacking planes, a
rate far too low to be acceptable in nuclear warfare. Setting a 70
percent "kill-rate" as a minimum aspiration, Project 1,incoln
recommended establishment of a Distant Early Warning radar detection
net across Canada and Greenland (the so-called "DEW Line"), much
improved fighter and missile interception in deep air defense (DAD),
and the development of an elaborate, integrated, automatic air-defense
communications system.
The
cost of this program,
billions of dollars, made it less than welcome to the air force. To
combat it, air-force supporters spread rumors that a clique of
scientists which they called "ZORC" (Zacharias, Oppenheimer, Rabi, and
Charles Lauritsen) were out to destroy SAC by devising, or pretending
to devise, a near-perfect air defense for the United States. Thus DEW
DAD, according to SAC supporters, would be America's Maginot Line
behind which the country would lie helplessly bankrupt from its cost of
$100 billion. The air force, from its control over the Lincoln
Laboratory's budget, was successful in forcing MIT to suppress the DEW
DAD report; at least, it was never published. But part of the story,
including the horror story about ZORC, was published in the May issue
of Fortune magazine, and some of the rest came out
in the 1954 hearing on Oppenheimer's security.
The
third significant effort
in the scientists' campaign for American survival in the early 1950's
was known as Project East River. It was also instigated by the air
force, early in 195Z, and studied the problem of civil defense through
a scientific team headed by Lloyd Berkner of Associated Universities.
It advocated a fantastically expensive program of air-raid warnings,
civilian defense shelters, and radar decentralization, but little was
ever done about it. Since such a defensive system would undoubtedly
save scores of millions of lives in any all-out nuclear war, and would
permit the United States to withstand a Soviet "first strike," the
failure to follow up these recommendations is clearly attributable to
the cost, a sum which many felt we could not afford and which the air
force was convinced could be far better spent on building up the
offensive power of SAC. Some of it did go for this purpose.
The
air force, which had 48
wings (of which 18 were in SAC) in June 1950, when the Korean War
began, had 95 wings in July 1952, as the presidential campaign began,
and had 110 wings (of which 42 wings were in SAC) at the end of 1953 in
the last Truman budget. During these years, covering the last four
budgets of the Truman period, expenditures on national security
increased from $13 billion in 1949-1950 to over $50 billion in
1952-1953. A fair amount of this increase went for the changes
recommended by the scientists, such as the DEW Line, increase in army
ground forces from 10 to 20 divisions, and increased air
transportation. As a consequence, American power relative to Soviet
power reached its highest point in the postwar period about the end of
1953. It then lost ground until its recovery in the missile race of
1958-1963. The lines of the earlier buildup, as recommended by the
various scientific defense projects of 1950 1952, were summed up in a
general survey for the incoming Eisenhower Administration in NSC 141.
This document did not replace, but supplemented, more intensive efforts
in air defense, civil defense, and in military assistance in the Near
East and Far East.
Chapter
68—The Eisenhower Team, 1952-1956
The
last two years of the
Truman Administration were marked by waves of partisan propaganda which
quite concealed the major improvements being made in the American
defense posture. The American people were irritated and puzzled by the
stalemate in Korea exactly as the Soviets intended them to be.
Disruption of the lives of individuals in a war which was not a war, in
which nothing seemed to be achieved except unnecessary casualties, and
which disrupted the pleasures of the postwar economic boom with
military service, shortages, restrictions, and cost-of-living inflation
could not help but breed discontent. The Republican-Dixiecrat alliance
in the Congress made it impossible to deal with domestic problems in
any decisive way or with foreign problems outside the independent
authority of the presidential office. And through it all the mobilized
wealth of the country, in alliance with most of the press, kept up a
constant barrage of "Communists in Washington," "twenty years of
treason," or "corruption of the Missouri gang" in the Truman
Administration, and created a general picture of incompetence and
bungling shot through with subversion. In creating this picture the
leaders of the Republican Party totally committed themselves to the ...
[policies] of the neo-isolationists and of the ... Right.
In
June 1951, Senator McCarthy
delivered in the Senate a speech of 60,000 words attacking General
Marshall as a man "steeped in falsehood," who has "recourse to the lie
whenever it suits his convenience," one of the architects of America's
foreign policy made by "men high in this Government [who] are
concerting to deliver us to disaster . . . a conspiracy of infamy so
black that when it is finally exposed, its principals shall he forever
deserving of the maledictions of all honest men...."
When
Truman tried to defend
his subordinates, an action which Dulles resolutely refused to do when
he became Secretary of State in 1953, Senator Taft attacked the
President for this combination of human decency with the established
legal privileges of the English-speaking world: he was wrong, according
to Taft, to "assume the innocence of all the persons mentioned in the
State Department.... Whether Senator McCarthy has legal evidence,
whether he has overstated or understated his case, is of lesser
importance. The question is whether the communist influence in the
State Department still exists." Following the tendencies of the day,
Taft reversed his previous support of the Korean War, calling it an
"unnecessary war," an "utterly useless war," a war "begun by President
Truman without the slightest authority from Congress or the people."
A
semiofficial version of the
Republican position appeared in John Foster Dulles's article "A Policy
of Boldness," which was published in Life on May 19,
1952. This
advocated rejection of "containment" in favor of "liberation," to be
achieved on a smaller budget and with reduction of the armed forces
leading to a conclusive victory in the near future. All concessions to
reality were rejected out of hand: containment itself was damned as
fragmentary reactions to Soviet pressure, as negative, endless, and
partial, as "treadmill policies which, at best, might perhaps keep us
in the same place until we drop exhausted." In place of these, Dulles
offered liberation and massive retaliation. These two were not
expressly linked together since, apparently, the former (applied
chiefly to eastern Europe) would be achieved simply by making clear
that the United States wanted it. At least, Dulles believed it would
come when American policy made "it publicly known that it wants and
expects liberation to occur." The disastrous consequence of this ...
[policy] appeared in 1956 when East Germany and Hungary rose against
the Russians and were crushed by Soviet tanks without Dulles raising a
hand to help. The threat of instant massive retaliation as the sole
weapon by which the United States would get Russia to adopt more
acceptable policies was equally unrealistic. No one, not even Dulles,
dared to use it in the face of the Soviet Union's capability for
retaliation. Nuclear blackmail is bad, but nuclear blackmail in which
the blackmailer has no intention or opportunity to inflict his penalty
is pointless and dangerous—unless, perhaps, such threats help to
win elections.
It
helped win an election
for Eisenhower in 1952. The candidate had no particular assets except a
bland and amiable disposition combined with his reputation as a
victorious general. He also had a weakness, one which is frequently
found in his profession, the conviction that anyone who has become a
millionaire, even by inheritance, is an authoritative person on almost
any subject. With Eisenhower as candidate, combined with Richard Nixon,
the ruthless enemy of internal subversion, as a running mate, and using
a campaign in which the powers of Madison Avenue publicity mobilized
all the forces of American discontent behind the neo-isolationist
program, victory in November, 1952, was assured. The coup de
grâce
was given to the Democratic candidate, Governor Adlai Stevenson of
Illinois, darling of the academic intellectuals, when Eisenhower
adopted Emmet Hughes's suggestion that he promise, if elected, to go to
Korea to make peace.
Although
not himself a
neo-isolationist or a reactionary, Eisenhower had few deep personal
convictions, and was eager to be President. When his advisers told him
that he must collaborate with the ... Right, he went all the way, even
to the extent of condoning Senator McCarthy's attack on General
Marshall. This occurred when Eisenhower, under McCarthy's pressure,
removed from a Wisconsin speech a favorable reference to Marshall.
Once
elected, the new
President reintroduced the Republican conception of the Presidency
which had been used in 192 l-1933. This conception saw the President as
a kind of titular chairman of the board who neither acted himself
directly nor intervened indirectly in the actions of his delegated
assistants. Fully aware of his own limitations of both knowledge and
energy, Eisenhower allotted the functions of government to his Cabinet
members ("eight millionaires and a plumber,'' according to one writer)
and expected to be consulted himself only in unsettled disputes or
major policy changes.
Over-all
government operations
were divided into two parts, with John Foster Dulles, as secretary of
state, in charge of foreign affairs, and ex-Governor Sherman Adams of
New Hampshire (in place of Taft, who died in 1953) as assistant
President in charge of domestic matters. Apart from these, the real
tone of the Administration was provided by three businessmen: George
Humphrey, a Taft Republican and president of the great holding company
of M. A. Hanna and Company, was secretary of the treasury and the most
influential member of the Cabinet; Charles Wilson, president of General
Motors, was secretary of defense; and Joseph M. Dodge, a Detroit banker
with extensive government experience, was director of the budget, the
only man in the government who could, with impunity, do or undo Acts of
Congress. The chief aim of the Administration, and almost the sole aim
of these three, was to reduce government spending, and subsequently
business taxes, by the greatest amount that would not jeopardize
reelection in 1956. Dulles and Adams had to work within the financial
framework thus provided.
Within
this framework foreign
policy was boxed, even more narrowly, between the realities of the
country's world position and the constant hounding of the
neo-isolationist groups in Congress who had been roused to a pitch of
unholy expectation by the encouragement they had received from
Eisenhower and Nixon during the electoral campaign of 1952. In that
campaign they had discovered that Eisenhower could be pushed. They now
concluded that their pushing from without, combined with the pulling of
Dulles and Nixon from within, could overthrow the foreign-policy lines
established by the Truman Administration in the preceding six years and
create a new policy more in accord with their ... ideas of the nature
of the world. Opposed to this change were the old defenders of the
Atlantic System, the remnants of former Wall Street influence, the Ivy
League colleges, the foundations, the newspaper spokesmen of this point
of view (The New York Times and Herald
Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, and Washington
Post) led by Walter Lippmann, and the unrepentant scientists
and “eggheads” straggling behind Adlai Stevenson.
Eisenhower
as President can be
summed up in one word: amiability. He not only liked people; he was
also eager to be liked, and was, indeed, likable. If he gave the
impression that he had no firmly held convictions, that was because of
two other qualities: he was relaxed, fully willing to live and let
live, in an easy-going tolerance of anything which did not disturb his
own peace of mind. He was quick-tempered but not a fighter. He had
convictions, none of them very firm, but he was not prepared to
sacrifice his own rest and relaxation for them, except for brief
occasions. His span of attention was neither long nor intense. As a
consequence, he was a wonderful companion, but not a leader.
In
all this, the President was
the antithesis of his secretary of state. John Foster Dulles was a
tireless and energetic fighter, full of convictions, most of which he
saw in black-and-white terms. He rarely rested and had little time for
any relaxation because the world was full of evil forces with which he
must wage constant battle. Tolerance and the right to be neutral were
to him largely words which had little real meaning in his tightly wound
neurological system. To Dulles it was a real effort not to equate
opposition with evil. As he hurried throughout the world, traveling
226,645 miles in his first three years in office, in pursuit of
Communism, he was like John Wesley, two centuries earlier, racing
through England in pursuit of sin, both men fully convinced that they
were doing the work of God. Eisenhower, who saw the world as a place
almost without evil, once told an adviser, "You and I can argue issues
all day and it won't affect our friendship, but the minute I question
your motives you will never forgive me." This lesson would have been
lost on the secretary of state, for Dulles, almost alone in a world
full of sin, was always seeking the reason behind the event, the motive
behind the action, and was obligated by his own alignment with
righteousness to denounce the reason and the motive when he had
discovered them.
It
must be evident from this
that Eisenhower and Dulles, in spite of their close cooperation and
almost unruffled personal relations, were very dissimilar, both in
personality and in outlook. Dulles was considerably to the right of
Eisenhower, and the Republican congressional party was far to the right
of Dulles. As a result, the two were under constant pressure from the
party's isolationist leaders in Congress and from the party's big
financial supporters to go further toward neo-isolationism and the
Right than either Dulles or Eisenhower considered safe. To avoid this,
the Administration had to do two basically contradictory things: to
make verbal concessions to the Right and to find its congressional
legislative support among the Democrats. In 1953 alone, according to
the Congressional Quarterly Almanac, the "Democrats
saved the President . . . fifty-eight times" by their votes in Congress.
Some
examples of this
skirmishing, in what was locally known as the "Battle of the Potomac,"
form a necessary background to the development of international affairs
in Eisenhower's eight years.
The
Republican platform of
July 1952 had promised to "repudiate all commitments contained in
secret understandings such as those of Yalta which aid Communist
enslavements." In his first speech as secretary, Dulles spoke of the
liberation of satellite peoples, and told them, "You can count upon
us." The Republicans in Congress from then on kept demanding support of
these two promises, beginning with a resolution to repudiate Yalta and
Potsdam. The Administration ... oppose[d] this congressional desire to
take campaign talk seriously, since any repudiation of past agreements
could be done by Russia more easily than by us.... Eventually the
resolution was dropped.
A
somewhat similar struggle
arose over the Bricker and the substitute Dirksen Amendments to the
Constitution. These would have forbidden the Federal government to make
any foreign treaties which could not be carried out by powers granted
to the Federal government elsewhere in the Constitution. This would
have greatly hampered the State Department in making agreements, such
as those with Canada to protect migrating game birds, since power to do
so was not granted elsewhere in the Constitution. The Amendment was
finally defeated by the Administration after a bitter struggle with
Republicans in the Congress, and only by the support of Democrats.
The
Administration condoned or
suffered through all kinds of ... attacks, many of them supported by
members of the Cabinet. Some government employees were harassed for
years, even suspended without pay for months or years, before final
clearance of unfounded charges. Wolf Ladejinsky, the country's greatest
authority on East Asian agriculture and a known anti-Communist writer,
had been responsible for much of MacArthur's success in occupied Japan
as the author of a land-reform program which increased agricultural
production and largely eliminated agrarian discontent, so that
Communism in Japan, quite opposite to China, ceased to be a rural
phenomenon and was, indeed, largely restricted to student groups in
cities. Cleared by the State Department to return to Japan, he was
suddenly declared a security risk and suspended by Secretary of
Agriculture Benson.
Attorney
General Herbert
Brownell, Jr., confided to a businessmen's luncheon in Chicago that
President Truman, knowing that Harry Dexter White was a Russian spy,
had promoted him from assistant secretary of the treasury to executive
director of the United States Mission to the International Monetary
Fund in 1946. Chairman Harold Velde of the House Committee on
Un-American Activities at once issued a subpoena to the ex-President to
testify before the committee. The summons was ignored. In the resulting
controversy Senator McCarthy attacked the Administration over a
nationwide broadcast for its failure to force all nations, beginning
witl1 Britain, to cease their trade with Red China by threatening to
cut off our economic aid. We should say, "If you continue to ship to
Red China . . . you will not get one cent of American money."
The
fact that our allies
provided us ... with military bases on their own soil from which our
strategic pressure on the Soviet Union was maintained meant nothing to
the ... Right.... [The East-West conflict is a myth. That should be
obvious to the reader. However, a quick purview of the works of
professor Antony Sutton will confirm the reality of the myth.]
Such
harassments of the new
Administration were almost constant, especially from the Right, which
was confident it had won the election of 1952 and should be obeyed as a
consequence. On April 30th, in Cabinet, Taft blasted the Administration
for its inability to cut more than $5 billion or $6 billion out of the
defense budget. The foreign aid "mutual-security" budget of $7.6
billion left by Truman was cut by Chairman John Tabor of the House
Appropriations Committee to $4.4 billion in spite of Eisenhower's
request for $5.5 billion. Chairman C. W. Reed of the House Ways and
Means Committee, despite Eisenhower's appeal, knocked out the new
Truman taxes of 1951 on July I, 1953, six months before they would have
ended anyway.
Under
Right-wing attacks such
as these, Eisenhower was largely disillusioned with his job by the
summer of 1953 and spent much time over the next two years considering
how he might get rid of the dominant Republican Right and form a new,
middle-of-the-road Eisenhower Party. The impracticality of this became
apparent to him long before the election of 1956.
These
attacks from the Right
were much less disturbing to Dulles than they were to the President.
The Secretary of State was clear in his own mind on what his aims in
foreign policy should be. These aims were largely acceptable to the
neo-isolationists and congressional Republicans. Basic to these ideas
was his conception of "massive retaliation."
This
was publicly announced in
his speech of January 12, 1954, before the Council of Foreign
Relations, but had been forecast in his article in Life almost
two years earlier. "Massive retaliation" here meant nuclear reprisal by
strategic bombing. It w-as conceived as an alternative to limited war
and was intended to be a deterrent to Soviet instigation of such local
limited wars. The points at which it would be applied or the degree of
aggression necessary to trigger it were both left ambiguous, in the
hope that the threat would deter aggression in all areas and on all
levels. Dulles was really rejecting the whole idea of limited war, and
saw local defense only as a trigger mechanism for tripping massive
retaliation. In this view he was at one with most of the Eisenhower
Administration. Secretary Wilson, for example, said, "'We can no longer
afford to fight limited war." Of course, he was thinking in monetary
terms. General Gavin, who heard this statement, replied, "If we cannot
afford to fight limited wars, then we cannot afford co survive, for
that is the only kind of war we can afford to fight." He was thinking
of the cost in terms of human lives
As
a corollary to the idea of
massive retaliation as deterrence, Dulles had the additional idea of
local defense, and especially local alliances, as triggers. Combined
with this was his refusal to accept anything but a two-bloc world, by
his resolute refusal to recognize any right to anyone to be neutral. On
June 9, 1956, in a speech at Iowa State College, he said that America
had made bilateral treaties with forty-two countries and that these
agreements "abolish, as between the parties, the principle of
neutrality, which pretends that a nation can best gain safety for
itself by being indifferent to the fate of others. This has
increasingly become an obsolete conception, and, except under very
exceptional circumstances, it is an immoral and shortsighted
conception." Thus the Secretary of State indicated his readiness to
abandon the nonaligned countries to the Soviet bloc, and gave Stalin's
successors in the Kremlin a tactical opportunity they were already
exploiting. At the same time, as we shall see in a moment, Dulles's
treatment of our chief allies was generally so autocratic and even
contemptuous that they were soon alienated, especially France, which
did not have the "special relationship" with us which kept Great
Britain at our side through any slights.
The
reason for these actions
by Dulles was that he was really an isolationist, convinced that
American defense rested wholly on American strength, and, accordingly,
he did not regard his treaty partners as allies at al1, but rather as a
part of an elaborate network of triggers surrounding the Soviet Union.
The chief portions of this network were three regional pacts: NATO, the
Baghdad Pact (later called CENTRO, or Central Treaty Organization), and
SEATO (or Southeast Asian Treaty Organization). NATO included the
United States, Canada, and thirteen other states from Iceland to Turkey
(by May 1955).
The
Baghdad Pact of 1955 was
largely a Dulles creation but did not include the United States. Its
members were Britain, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan. It was renamed
Central Treaty Organization in 1959 when Iraq withdrew and the United
States signed bilateral alliances with all its members.
The
third pact, SEATO, signed
in 1954, had eight members (United States, Britain, France, New
Zealand, Australia, Philippines, Thailand, and Pakistan). With Turkey
acting as a link between NATO and CENTRO, and Pakistan in a similar
role between CENTRO and SEATO, the three pacts were intended to enclose
the Soviet bloc in an unbroken perimeter of paper barriers which would
deter a Communist movement outward anywhere, by serving as a trigger
for American retaliation. Otherwise, CENTRO and SEATO had little
military or political merit, and created more problems than they solved.
Dulles
was not primarily
concerned about the military strength of these pacts or about the
military contribution any of these countries could make to a war on the
Soviet Union. Above all, he was not concerned with any contribution of
a military character the United States could make to the defense of
these pacts or areas in any non-nuclear war. Moreover, as triggers,
Dulles was not much concerned with the character of the regimes
involved or with their military strength. Some mountainous country or
tropical jungle of Asia was, for his purposes, about as significant as
England or France.
Since
England and France were
already alienated by the whole idea of massive retaliation, which could
so easily, by some independent American act, deluge them with Soviet
nuclear bombs, they were even further alienated by Dulles's almost
total lack of concern for the fact that they were more cultured and
more civilized than other members of Dulles's pacts, that they shared
our common Western traditions (of which, indeed, they were the
creators), and could contribute more to their own defense with
conventional weapons than could some Moslem or pagan areas of Asia. It
is no wonder that Dulles, with his unilateralism, his lack of concern
for cultural kinship, his readiness to sacrifice all European states in
response to a trigger mechanism in some remote and backward jungle, his
almost total unconcern with the possible contribution of limited and
conventional warfare to save any areas from Communism, it is no wonder,
indeed, that Dulles alienated the United States from its natural
associates in Western Europe to a degree hitherto unknown in the
twentieth century.
At
the same time, Dulles
alienated himself domestically from all his older associations within
American life, and from the forces of rationalization and science which
were increasingly a force there. Like Eisenhower, Dulles had an unusual
conception of his office; indeed, it was much more unusual than was
Eisenhower's. Dulles refused to take any responsibility for the
internal functioning of the State Department. His concern was, he
thought, only with the high policy of international politics on a world
basis as the eyes, ears, and probably the mind of the President.
Accordingly, instead of the usual under secretary of state, Dulles
appointed two: General Walter Bedell Smith to the regular post, and
Donald B. Lourie, president of Quaker Oats Company, as a second one in
charge of all departmental administration. Under Lourie he named a
McCarthyite, R. W. Scott McLeod, as State Department security officer.
In this way the full disruptive force of McCarthyism was brought into
the inner fortress, that is, into the personnel security files of the
department against which McCarthy and his associates had directed their
most blasting assaults. Nor was that all. In his first week in office
Dulles announced his policies to the department, and informed its
employees that he expected "competence, discipline, and positive
loyalty." There is nothing objectionable in these three qualities
except that Senator McCarthy had temporarily made "positive loyalty"
his own criterion of condemnation.
This
beginning became worse.
Dulles made no effort to protect his subordinates from the attacks made
upon the department or on them individually. His justification for this
attitude soon destroyed the morale of much of the department and
especially of the Foreign Service. Dulles felt that once an employee
became the target of a public attack as unreliable, the question of his
guilt or innocence became definitely secondary to the question of
whether his value to the department had not been destroyed simply by
the fact that he had become a subject of controversy. If so, he should
be released from service, even if innocent. This point of view, which
was almost an invitation to the McCarthyites to increase their attacks,
was never, however, applied to Dulles himself when he became, in a
short time, a figure of controversy. The real damage to the Department
arose from the elimination of some of its most knowledgeable members.
The ... Right, having eliminated almost everyone who knew anything
about the Far East, especially those who knew the Chinese language,
now, under Dulles, shifted their target to those who knew anything
about Russia, especially the language. In this way, George Kennan was
eliminated, and Charles Bohlen narrowly escaped. Paul Nitze resigned in
disgust. Some of those eliminated found refuge in Ivy League academic
posts.
The
chief victim of these
purges was Robert Oppenheimer. The attack on the "father of the A-bomb"
began in the summer of 1953, as soon as Lewis Strauss succeeded Gordon
Dean as chairman of the AEC. On July 7th, at the request of Strauss,
the AEC ordered that classified documents in Oppenheimer's possession
in Princeton be taken from him. On November 7, 1953, W. L. Borden, who
had earlier left the Joint Congressional Committee for private
employment with Westinghouse Electric, wrote a letter to J. Edgar
Hoover of the FBI: "The purpose of this letter is to state my own
exhaustively considered opinion, based upon years of study of the
available classified evidence, that more probably than not J. Robert
Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union." This charge was supported
by a biased rehash of all the derogatory stories about Oppenheimer
which had been known when Oppenheimer was appointed to Los Alamos by
General Groves in 1943. Much of the letter was made up of wild charges
which no responsible person has ever been willing to defend: "He has
been instrumental in securing recruits for the Communist Party," and
"He was in frequent contact with Soviet espionage agents." According to
Borden, "The central problem is not whether J. Robert Oppenheimer was
ever a Communist; for the existing evidence makes abundantly clear that
he was.... The central problem is assessing the degree of likelihood
that he in fact did what a communist in his circumstances, at Berkeley,
would logically have done during the crucial 1939-1942
period—that is, whether he became an actual espionage and policy
instrument of the Soviets."
On
the basis of this letter
and at the direct order of President Eisenhower, Chairman Strauss
suspended Oppenheimer's security clearance and thus his access to
classified information without which scientific work for defense is
impossible. The news was given to Oppenheimer by Strauss on December
21, 1953, four days after he received an honorary degree from Oxford
University. As provided hy law, Oppenheimer appealed the AEC decision
to an ad hoc investigation committee of three men,
one of whom
was a scientist. The hearings, from April 12 to May 6, 1954, allowed
Oppenheimer to have counsel who were permitted to cross-examine
witnesses, but the conduct of the hearings was most unsatisfactory.
The
older assumption, which
had been practiced regularly in American history and continued, fairly
generally, in the Truman Administration, was that any person had a
right to be employed hy the government unless something adverse could
be proved against him. The chief adverse something, in scientific work,
would be disloyalty. In the course of the years 1951-1953, these
concepts were changing and were formally modified by President
Eisenhower's Security Order 10450 of April, 1 953. The first change was
that public employment no longer was a right but became a privilege;
the second was that disloyalty was no longer the chief criterion, but
security was; and the third change was that the government no longer
had to prove anything derogatory, hut merely needed to have a doubt
that a person's employment was consistent with the security of the
country.
Taken
together, these three
modifications placed the burden of proof on the employee rather than on
the accuser and made the area of proof so wide that it could hardly be
met. The government has to prove nothing; it merely must have a doubt,
and that doubt need have nothing to do with loyalty or with the
employee’s work, but may simply be about his discretion, his
drinking habits, his truthfulness, or any other personal
characteristics of an adverse kind whether these operate in the area of
his work or not. The task of an employee seeking to dispel the doubt
that he may drink one too many cocktails before dinner, or that he may
gossip, or even talk in his sleep is formidable. For example, one of
the AEC commissioners who sat in judgment on Oppenheimer fell asleep in
a railroad car on June Il, 1954, with the transcript of the case on his
lap, and awoke later to find it gone. This was why the transcript was
immediately printed and released on June 16th, in spite of the
assurances to its forty witnesses throughout its pages that it would be
kept secret. A case might be made that an AEC commissioner who lost
classified materials by falling asleep while reading them in public was
a "security risk." He would have some difficulty removing that doubt.
The
shifting of the burden of
proof from the board to the accused and the use of an investigatory
tribunal rather than the more familiar technique (to English-speaking
peoples) of an adversary trial made the hearings even less
satisfactory. For the accused, faced with the need to establish the
truth in order to dispel any doubts of the members of the tribunal,
could hardly establish the truth when he had access only to those
documents which had been selected by the counsel for the AEC. In this
case the AEC counsel, a one-time United States Attorney for the
District of Columbia, conducted the hearings as if he were the
prosecutor in an adversary trial. He was allowed to use secret data,
from which evidence was pulled at short or no notice, while
Oppenheimer's counsel was excluded from access to classified documents
for security reasons.
After
hearing forty witnesses
through 3,000 pages of typed testimony and perusing an equal quantity
of file documents, the board voted 2 to 1 (the scientist member
dissenting) to recommend continued suspension of Oppenheimer's
clearance. They concluded that Oppenheimer was loyal and that he was
discreet. It would seem, on the face of it, that a person who filled
these two qualifications must be secure, but two members of the board
had doubts.
These
hearings have endless
interest to the historian of recent American history because they
provide one of the few glimpses we have behind the scenes into the
decision-making processes of our recent government. As far as
Oppenheimer is concerned, they show that the animosity against him
largely originated with the air force and its close or recent
associates. The attack on Oppenheimer came chiefly from the former
air-force pilot Borden, from a long-term air-force employee, David T.
Griggs, and from Edward Teller and his close associates L. W. Alvarez
and W. M. Latimer. There was obvious personal resentment against
Oppenheimer by this group, and cross-examination showed that the
majority of them had no personal knowledge of Oppenheimer's work in the
matter under discussion. This appeared most clearly when they tried to
maintain that Oppenheimer opposed or obstructed the H-bomb effort after
Truman's directive to make it had been issued or that he tried to
persuade other scientists not to work on the project. The evidence from
persons in a position to have personal knowledge of this matter showed
that this charge was not true, and the board rejected it. It is clear
from the testimony that the real basis for these men's resentment
against Oppenheimer was air-force resentment of Project Vista and its
sequels, especially at Oppenheimer's efforts to provide the American
defense forces with a full arsenal of diverse weapons, including
tactical nuclear weapons, so that the country would not be forced to
rely solely or mainly on strategic nuclear bombing to play its role in
world politics.
This
point was put very well
by Professor Walter G. Whitman of MIT, who was a member of GAC from
1950—and had been chairman of the Research and Development Board
of the Department of Defense in 1951-1953. He said: "Dr. Oppenheimer
was trying to point out the wide variety of military uses of the bomb,
the small bomb as well as the large bomb. He was doing it in a climate
where many folks felt that only strategic bombing was a field for the
atomic weapon.... I should say he, more than any other man, served to
educate the military to the potentialities of the atomic weapon for
other than strategic bombing purposes, its use possibly in tactical
situations or in bombing 500 miles back. He was constantly emphasizing
that the bomb would be more available and that one of the problems was
going to be its deliverability, meaning that the smaller you could make
your bomb in size perhaps you would not have to have a great big
strategic bomber to carry it, you could carry it in a medium bomber or
you could carry it even in a fighter plane. In my judgment, his advice
and his arguments for a gamut of atomic weapons, extending even over to
the use of the atomic weapon in air defense of the United States, has
been more productive than any other one individual. You see, he had the
opportunity to not only advise in the Atomic Energy Commission, but
advise in the military services of the Department of Defense. The idea
of a range of weapons suitable for a multiplicity of military purposes
was a key to the campaign which he felt should be pressed and with
which I agreed.... The Strategic Air Command had thought of the atomic
weapon as solely restricted to its own use. I think that there was some
definite resentment at the implication that this was not just the
Strategic Air Command's weapon."
On
the basis of the
recommendation of the Hearing Board, the AEC voted 4 to 1 (with the
scientist Henry D. Smyth dissenting) not to restore Oppenheimer's
clearance. On June 29, 1955, the great scientist's career in government
was ended. But his work had been a success. In the interval before the
achievement of the thermonuclear bomb in 1955, atomic weapons had been
made so plentiful and diverse that they were available for tactical
weapons to defend Europe and in sizes small enough to serve as warheads
on American missiles of limited boosting power.
The
motivations of the
Eisenhower Administration were emotional and complex, and represent a
sharp reaction against the forces of rationalization and science which
we have discussed. They seem to have been based on three narrowing
circles of outlook. Broadest of all was a violent neurotic rebellion of
harassed middle-class persons against a longtime challenge to
middle-class values arising from depression, war, insecurity, science,
foreigners, and minority groups of all kinds. This broad problem will
be discussed elsewhere. A second, and narrower, circle of outlook was
the basic Republican opposition to all kinds of collective action,
including collective security, social welfare, and national security.
The third was the obsession of business wealth in the country with the
wickedness of unbalanced budgets and high taxes.
The
Republican opposition to
collective action was, of course, of long standing. It is not generally
recognized that it appears frequently as an opposition to national
security expenditures, especially to defense expenditures for men
rather than for equipment, but often for both. Such opposition by
Republicans was generally true in the whole period following 1945, and
is clearly shown in their votes in Congress. These votes, however, can
be understood only in terms of the whole situation.
This
situation involves at
least three levels: public opinion, Congress, and the Administration
and, in each of these, the two parties. In studying these we have
available the information of public-opinion polls, voting records, and
formal statements. From these records it is clear that public opinion
always supported large defense forces and did not object to higher
taxes or government spending to sustain them. Moreover, this support
was stronger from persons of lower educational and income levels,
although generally found on all levels. In sharp contrast to this,
public opinion gave much less support to foreign aid, and such support
was less on low-er educational or income levels and was reflected in
far greater opposition to taxation or government spending for economic
foreign aid than for defense forces. These statements are based on the
file of public-opinion polls at the Public Opinion Research Center at
Williams College, as studied by Professor Samuel P. Huntington of
Harvard University. This study shows that public-opinion support for
stronger armed forces for the whole period 1945-1960 was usually of the
order of two to one, and reflected changes in international tensions to
a surprisingly limited degree.
In
Congress, over the same
fifteen years, there was quite a different situation. There we find,
just as existed in the decade before Pearl Harbor, strong Democratic
support for armed strength and a strong world role for the United
States, and fairly consistent Republican opposition both to defense
expenditures and to American involvement in world affairs. On the
contrary, the congressional Republican Party members, in troth periods,
were more concerned with what they called "fiscal responsibility"
(meaning balanced budgets, reduced government spending, and reduced
taxes) than it was with defense or world affairs. Thus the Democratic
Party in Congress was much closer in behavior to public opinion than
the Republican congressional party was.
Professor
Huntington has
illuminated this difference by an analysis of congressional voting
records over the period 1945-1960. He has examined votes on 79
controversial defense issues in Congress over the 15-year period and
found that a majority of Democrats voted pro-defense on 74 of the 79
issues, while a majority of Republicans voted pro-defense on only 39 of
the 79 issues. On all these issues, Democratic senators voted 78.8
percent pro-defense and Republican senators voted only 43 percent
pro-defense, while Democratic representatives voted 78.4 percent
pro-defense and Republican representatives voted 53.8 percent
pro-defense. Moreover, the Republican votes in both Houses were less
pro-defense in the Eisenhower period than in the Truman period, the
Senate Republican pro-defense votes falling from 47.1 to 33 percent
with the change in Administration, and the House Republican pro-defense
votes falling from 54.8 to 50.4 percent. Moreover, analysis of these
votes, on a sectional basis, shows that the Republican pro-defense
votes were concentrated in the Northeast and on the Pacific Coast,
while the Democratic pro-defense votes were spaced relatively evenly
around the country.
When
we shift from the
Congress to the Administration, we see that the Democratic
Administration, while still pro-defense, was less so than Democratic
congressmen, but that the Republican Administration, while not
pro-defense, was somewhat more favorable to defense than Republican
congressmen.
This
situation can be
explained in terms of three forces acting upon politicians: (1) the
need for votes, (2) the need for campaign contributions, and (3)
awareness of world conditions. On the Democratic side, public opinion,
which means votes, works from the people to congressmen, while
awareness of world conditions works from outside upon the
Administration and through it to Congress. The lobbying of
special-interest groups and the need for campaign contributions is less
significant than the other two forces, but do make the Administration
somewhat less pro-defense (because more pro-balanced budget) than
Congress..
On
the Republican side the
influence of special interests is much greater simply because the
Republican Party is the party of middle-class and business interests.
In fact, the influence of lobbying by special interests is so great
that it makes both the Republican Congress and the Republican
Administration relatively immune to the need for defense, with the
immunity less general in the Administration than in the Congress
because the former is compelled, by its position, to pay some attention
to world conditions. The Republican congressmen, on the other hand, are
relatively immune both to public opinion and the pressure of world
conditions, being shielded from the former by the influence of
special-interest lobbyists and shielded from the latter by the
Administration.
The
history of the Eisenhower
Administration in defense and strategic matters is largely the story of
how its sincere efforts to respond to Big Business demands for balanced
budgets and tax reductions were frustrated by the constant challenge of
world conditions demanding an intensified defense effort. A significant
element in this story is the efforts of the Administration to conceal
these frustrations by the manipulation of public opinion by propaganda,
especially by propaganda which tried to make it appear much more
aggressive against Communism than it actually was. It really reversed
Theodore Roosevelt's dictum into "Speak roughly and carry a small
stick." The rough speaking was done by Dulles; the small stick was the
Republican defense effort; when the smallness of the stick made it
necessary to suspend Dulles's bluster briefly, Eisenhower charmed the
country, if not the world, with a few words of sweet reasonableness.
The
characteristics of the
Eisenhower Administration were set immediately after the election. His
hurried visit to Korea was little more than a propaganda stunt,
required by his campaign promise, and contributed little if anything to
the eventual truce in Korea. En route home he had a conference with
Dulles, Charles Wilson, General Bradley of JCS, and Admiral Arthur W.
Radford (Commander in Chief, Pacific) on the cruiser Helena
at
Wake Island. There, a month before inauguration, he set the pattern of
his Administration—fiscal conservatism: "A prodigal outlay of
borrowed money on military equipment could in the end, by generating
inflation, disastrously weaken the economy and thus defeat the purpose
it was meant to serve." Subsequently this point of view was often
supported by a favorite quotation of the ... Right—a quotation
attributed to Lenin, although he never said it, that capitalist states
could be destroyed by making them spend themselves bankrupt. (The ...
Right had a great love for ambiguous Lenin quotations; another favorite
was, "For world communism the road to Paris lies through Peking and
Calcutta.")
Another
example of the tone of
the Eisenhower Administration was given on January 20,1953, 1953. In
his inaugural speech the new President announced that he was unleashing
Chiang Kai-shek against Red China. Although "unleashing" was not the
word used, this was the chief implication of the statement. All the
implications were wrong: (a) that the Seventh Fleet
was patrolling the Formosa Straits to protect Red China against Chiang,
(b) that Chiang had the strength seriously to
threaten China, and (c)
that the previous situation reflected the "soft" sympathies of Truman's
State Department. The validity of the latter's policy in the area was
fully supported over the next eight years, as Chinese threats to
Formosa again and again required American support to protect Chiang
and, eventually in 1955, fear that Chiang might try to recover China by
precipitating a general war between China and the United States led the
Eisenhower Administration to "re-leash" him, quietly, once again.
This
is very much the whole
story of Dulles's foreign policy: eventual quiet adoption of the Truman
line under cover of loud verbal denunciations of it. The chief real
change appeared in a slight reduction in America's defense
capabilities, especially in coping with local war by means of
conventional weapons, at a time when the Soviet Union's capabilities
for waging all types of wars were increasing.
When
Eisenhower came to office
he found the budget already set by Truman for Fiscal Year 1954 (FY
1954) at $78.6 billion, of which $46.3 billion was military. The latter
item was a slight cut from military FY 1553 of over $50 billion. On
March 4, 1953, the NSC cut Eisenhower's new FY 1954 budget by $5.1
billion. When the Joint Chiefs (JCS) protested that any cuts would
seriously endanger national security, they were ignored. The chief
reduction was made in the air force, from $16.8 to $11.7
billion—this at the very time when Dulles was establishing
"massive retaliation." The Truman air-force target of 143 wings by 1956
was reduced to 120 wings. An Eisenhower supporter, Admiral Arthur
Radford, was made chairman of the reorganized JCS, and the defense
changes were given the ambiguous name of the "New Look." The NSC was
ordered to prepare a new strategic survey, which ultimately emerged as
NSC 162. The pressure they were under may be gathered from the fact
that Humphrey and Dodge wanted the FY 1954 defense expenditures cut to
$36 billion.
In
the meantime, the new JCS, meeting on the secretary of the navy's yacht
Sequoia,
in August, came up with its own suggestions: increased reliance on SAC
in retaliatory power, withdrawal of some American forces from overseas
positions, increased reliance upon local forces for local defense, with
America's contribution restricted to sea and air power; a strengthened
reserve pool at home, and improved continental air defense. These views
were incorporated in NSC 162 in October 1953, and accepted by the
President on October 30th. The chief modification was abandonment of
the hope that any significant future war would be fought without
nuclear weapons. Shortly afterward, military expenditures were set on a
"long-haul" basis at not over $34 billion for FY 1957 and subsequent
years. This compares with an average of $43 billion a year over the
last four Truman budgets. As a matter of fact, defense spending did
decrease fairly steadily, averaging $37.4 billion over the six years
1955-1960. One consequence of this was that there was no general tax
increase passed by Congress in the 1950's after January 1951, but this
expenditure represented a considerable reduction in real defense
expenditures, since the six-year period, covering the Soviet missile
challenge, was also a period of rising prices in which money bought
less.
The
"New Look," like "massive
retaliation," was based on a series of erroneous conceptions of which
two were paramount: (1) that nuclear weapons were cheaper than
conventional weapons and would require less manpower and ( 2 ) that
strategic weapons could deter all kinds of Communist aggression.
Even
on the strategic level
nuclear weapons were not cheaper than conventional weapons nor did they
use less manpower, and, once they were introduced into tactical levels
of combat as well, costs rose astronomically. Really, costs were
irrelevant, as long as they were essential, as they indeed were and
would continue to be until there was either (1) relaxation between the
United States and Russia or (2) one or more substantial new Powers grew
up on the land mass of Eurasia.
The
costs of modern weapons
arose from their intrinsic costs to some extent but also from their
rapid rate of obsolescence and the gigantic costs of development. Each
of the strategic B-52 bombers cost $8 million, almost ten times the
cost of the B-29's of 1945. Bases and costs of skilled manpower rose
proportionately, especially w hen the rise of Soviet retaliatory power
made necessary drastic dispersal of SAC bases and a great increase in
the constant airborne alert. Moreover, whatever the cost, deliveries of
B-52's were slow, only 41 by New Year's 1956, with a production rate of
about one a week (with about 25 percent rejected by the air force)
after that. This compared with Soviet production of their equivalent
planes, the "Bison" and the "Bear" (TU-95) of over five a week in 1956.
The display of at least ten "Bisons" in the Red Square "fly-over" on
May Day 1955 was a considerable shock to the "New Look," but a year
later Eisenhower was ready to take it in stride: "It is vital that we
get what we believe we need; that does not necessarily mean more than
somebody else." Five days later, he introduced a new concept: "Enough
is certainly aplenty."
The
gradual obsolescence of
the manned bomber and the use of nuclear missiles, especially ICBM's,
raised the cost of nuclear retaliation. The Minute Man ICBM, of which
we needed hundreds, cost over a million dollars each, with tens of
millions more for manning and maintenance, while the nuclear submarine
with its 16 Polaris missiles ran over $120 million each. Moreover, all
these strategic weapons were obsolescent almost as soon as they were
operational.
The
costs of conventional
forces, armed as they must be with nuclear tactical weapons, also soar.
The "New Look's" assumption that introduction of the latter types would
reduce the need for manpower was quite mistaken. The necessary manpower
increases, and, because of a higher degree of training and skill, is
more expensive. The introduction of nuclear tactical weapons, which the
Russians obtained almost as soon as we did, required that ground forces
be widely dispersed and provided with great mobility in small groups
(both by air and ground vehicles). This required more men and more
money.
The
"New Look" curtailment of
money was also reflected in men. All services except the air force were
cut, so that the total figure for military manpower, at 3.7 million in
December 1952, was almost z.5 million six years later. The army was cut
by one-third, from 1,481,000 representing 20 divisions to below a
million in 14 divisions. In this way, army expenditures were cut almost
in half, from $16,242 million in FY 1953 to $8,702 million in FY 1956.
Protests against this by men like Army Chief of Staff General Matthew
Ridgway were answered with the bland assertion that these smaller
forces had greater fighting power, "a bigger bang for a buck." In 1955,
however, when Eisenhower returned from the first, relatively
successful, "Summit Conference" with Khrushchev in Geneva, filled with
determination to achieve his $33 billion defense-expenditure level in
FY 1956 instead of FY 1957 as originally planned, even Dulles and
Wilson objected. One reason for the objection was that price inflation
of several percent a year had already reduced the amount of defensive
strength being obtained without getting within several billions of the
budgeting goal.
This
dispute over the primacy
of fiscal or defense considerations reached a turning point in
1955-1956 in a series of controversies and minor shifts of position by
the Administration. These shifts of position were concessions to
aroused public opinion and were not a consequence of any real change of
ideas within the Administration, as can be seen from the fact that
other budget-cutting drives occurred in 1957 and, to a lesser extent,
in 1959, both in the face of growing evidence of Soviet capabilities,
growing evidence of Soviet unfriendly intentions, increasingly
irritated relationships with our European allies, a steady attrition of
support from the Administration to the opposition, and an increasingly
restive American public opinion..
The
Administration's new
strategy found relatively little support in military circles except in
the air force and in Admiral Radford, who had been made chairman of
JCS, in succession to General Bradley, in August 1953, chiefly because
he was an Asia First supporter. General Ridgway opposed the
Administration's military policies, from his position as army chief of
staff, hy his testimony before congressional committees. After his
retirement in June 1955, he declared in his memoirs that the military
budget "was not based so much on military requirements, or on what the
economy of the country could stand, as on political considerations."
Six
months later, Trevor
Gardner resigned as civilian head of Research and Development for the
air force with blasts at Secretary W:ilson for hampering research on
guided missiles and for general obstructionism, even in strategic
retaliation, with the single exception of the B-47 medium-range jet
bomber (whose use was completely dependent on air bases in allied
countries). Gardner's colleague, the well-known scientist and Assistant
Secretary of Defense for Research and Development Dr. Clifford C.
Furnas also resigned in disgust in February 1957. He was followed by
others, notably by General Gavin in 1958..
Most
of these later protests
arose from Secretary Wilson's opposition to the development of missile
weapons and will be mentioned later, but the obstructionism was fairly
general. In 1951, as a consequence of Korea, the army demanded tactical
airlift equipment for at least two divisions and strategic airlift for
one division. More than five years later, Secretary Wilson stated that
airlift capacity was adequate when there was still none for even a
single division. When his military adviser tried to point out the
underrating of our ground forces in view of our obligations to NATO,
the secretary replied that we had no commitment to NATO. In November
1954, three years before "Sputnik," a journalist asked Wilson for
comment on the possibility that the Russians might beat the United
States in the satellite race; the secretary replied, "I wouldn't care
if they did." Two years later, in 1956, Furnas made the same warning,
and received the secretary's reply, "So what?" The culmination of all
this was Wilson's orders of November and December 1956, which crippled
the army's ability to use contemporary tactics by restricting it to
missiles of less than 200 miles' range, and forbidding it to use planes
of over five thousand pounds or helicopters of over ten thousand
pounds' weight. As one chief staff said of Wilson, "He was the most
uninformed man, and the most determined to remain so, that has ever
been secretary."
Unfortunately,
President
Eisenhower, who prided himself on ceasing to be a military man when he
became a politician, invariably supported Wilson even in his most
mistaken decisions.
Chapter
69—The Rise of Khrushchev, 1953-1958
The
United States was saved
from the consequences of this shortsighted and ignorant policy by two
factors: (a) the Soviet Union had no intention of
risking any direct clash with the United States, and (b)
the Soviet Union during most of this period was in the midst of an
intense internal struggle which made it impossible for it to follow any
course of sustained aggression.
At
the end of the war,
Stalin's rule in Russia was as firmly established as it had ever been.
He was head of the government as well as leader of the Communist Party,
with the army completely subordinate to his will. The army played only
a small role in the domestic politics of the country, but Stalin had
shown his power over it in the Great Purge of 1937 when he had
destroyed at least 5,000 of its officers on falsified charges of
disloyalty. The survivors were under close scrutiny both from secret
police units established, for security reasons, throughout its
organization and from the party commissars attached to its major units.
The secret police, under the Ministry of State Security, was a state
within a state, with its own armed forces, including armored divisions
and completely autonomous air units. It controlled millions of
prisoners and slave laborers, large industrial enterprises, and wide
territories (chiefly in northern Asia). Stalin was exempt from the
authority of these secret police and, at the same time, had his own
secret police powers within the party organization, because the party
statutes of 1934 (prepared by Lazar Kaganovich) had given him an
independent police apparatus for use within the party; this was
controlled from his personal secretariat under Lieutenant General A. N.
Poskrebyshev.
The
party, like the police,
had units (originally called "cells") in almost every industrial
enterprise, in many collective farms, in residential neighborhoods, and
rose thence, in a hierarchy of cities, regions, provinces, and nations,
parallel to the governmental system.
Stalin
nullified possible
opposition by encouraging division and rivalry not only among the
diverse hierarchies of power radiating downward from his own position
in government, in party, army, police, and economic life, but also
within each hierarchy, by encouraging the ambitious to seek to rise,
step by step, through vacancies created by his periodic purges. These
purges not only opened the way upward for younger and more ruthless
men, but served as justifications for Stalin's growing paranoia.
Within
the party the purges of
1924-1929 had eliminated, usually by death, most of the "Old
Bolsheviks" (those who had been party members before the 1917
Revolution). In 1929-1934, using a new and younger group, Stalin had
killed 10,000,000 Russians (his own estimate) in the drive to establish
collective farms. The second great purge of 1934-1939 had killed off a
large part of the Stalinists who had assisted Stalin's rise to power
and about 5,000 officers of the armed forces. The third great purge,
which was shaping up at the end of 1952, was intended to eliminate the
rest of the Stalinists who had come to positions of power, in
succession to the Old Bolsheviks, in 1929-1935. They were already a
dwindling group, from Stalin's insatiable thirst for blood, as can be
seen by examining the fate of the members of the Seventeenth Party
Congress of 1934, the congress which first raised Khrushchev and
Lavrenti Beria to the Central Committee. Of the 1,966 delegates to that
Seventeenth Congress, 1,108 were arrested for "anti-revolutionary
crimes" in sequel to the assassination of S. M. Kirov (party leader in
Leningrad), which Stalin himself had arranged in December 1934. Of the
139 members and alternates elected to the Central Committee by that
congress of 1934, 98 (or 70 percent) were arrested and shot. Among the
survivors were Kaganovich, Vyacheslav Molotov, Georgi Malenkov, Beria,
Anastas Mikoyan, K. Voroshilov, and Khrushchev. The new purge of 1953
was apparently aimed at some or most of these survivors.
This
terror was made worse by
the fact that it did not originate only from Stalin, although it
undoubtedly required his acquiescence to proceed very far. Such
acquiescence could often be obtained by his top subordinates, for the
autocrat undoubtedly appreciated those w-ho were prepared to
demonstrate their complete ruthlessness in his service. At the end of
the war, Khrushchev, although not yet near the top of the pile, had
shown more bloodthirsty ruthlessness combined with more groveling
obsequiousness to Stalin than anyone else in Russia.
At
the war's end the top trio
in the gang were Stalin, Malenkov, and Andrei Zhdanov. The last pair
hated each other. Malenkov in 1945-1946 was the most active figure in
the government, especially as chairman of the Committee for the
Rehabilitation of Liberated Areas, and chairman of the committee in
charge of dismantling German industry for reparations. Large-scale
bungling in the administration of reparations gave Zhdanov the
opportunity he wished. Through Mikoyan, he instigated an attack on
Malenkov's handling of reparations, and recommended that dismantling be
replaced by the setting up of Soviet-owned corporations to take over
German industry in Germany to make goods for the Soviet Union. As a
consequence of this failure, Malenkov (with his associates) was demoted
from several of his posts for about a year (June 1947-June 1948).
Immediately after his rehabilitation, Zhdanov died mysteriously, and
his chief supporters were arrested and shot (the so-called "Leningrad
Case").
In
the meantime, Khrushchev
was deeply involved in the effort to restore the collective farms,
which had suffered great attrition during the war, and the more
difficult task of bringing them under party control. In view of the
ruthless way in which the collective farms had been established in
1928-1934, it was not surprising that neither the farms nor the party
were popular with the peasants. Both were quietly sabotaged in ways
which could neither be observed nor prevented, especially as party
members and the secret police were both rare in rural districts.
Evidence for such sabotage could be seen in the constant failure of the
agricultural section of the economy to fulfill quotas or expectations,
in the fact that the peasants produced four times as much (in yield per
unit areas) on their small personal plots of ground as they did on the
wide acreage of the collective farms, and in the fact that farm animals
in 1953 were well below the figures for 1928 (while cows were 13
percent fewer than in 1916), despite a population increase of 25
percent from 1928 to 1953. Moreover, in the confusion of the war, at
least 15 million acres of land belonging to the collective farms had
been diverted to peasants' private plots, while millions of peasants on
the collective farms were living in inefficient semi-idleness.
Early
in 1950 Khrushchev
returned from twelve years of party butchery in the Ukraine and took
over the agricultural problem. His solution, totally unworkable, was to
move more vigorously in the Stalinist direction of increased
centralization. He wished to merge the collective farms into
increasingly large units and to work the peasants in increasingly large
"work brigades," in order to bring them under the control of the few
Communist Party members to be found in the countryside. A party cell
required three members as a minimum, and in 1950 a substantial fraction
of the existing collective farms had no party cells at all, while the
majority had cells of less than six members each.
In
two years, by merging
collective farms, Khrushchev reduced the total number of such units
from 252,000 to 94,800, but 18,000 still had no party cells, while only
5,000 had cells with over 25 members. Khrushchev wanted to carry the
process of concentration even further by destroying the existing
villages and centralizing the peasants in large urban settlements
(so-called "agro-towns"). In such towns they would be remote from their
small private plots, would not spend so much time on them, and would be
escorted in large gangs out to work each day on the collective fields.
This fantastic scheme was blocked by Beria and Molotov in 1951.
Another
scheme, which may have
been associated with Khrushchev, was vetoed by Stalin in 1952. This
would have distributed the personnel and machinery of the rural Machine
Tractor Stations (MTS) among the collective farms, thus, at one strike,
increasing the locally available party members from their personnel to
build up rural party cells and making available, at short notice,
necessary farm machinery. This suggestion was blocked by Stalin as a
step backward from Socialism. In its place, he suggested that the
peasant's incentive to work on his private plot to produce for sale in
the private market be destroyed at one blow by forbidding the peasant
access to any market, or even to money, by forcing him to dispose of
all his surplus produce, on a barter basis, to the state.
On
the whole, Khrushchev's
achievements as agricultural leader were far from successful, but this
did not injure his reputation with Stalin, who recognized his personal
devotion and energy and saw that his efforts were directed toward
increasing party control in the countryside rather than the desirable,
but clearly less important, goal of increased production. As a mark of
this favor, at the Nineteenth Party Congress in October 1952,
Khrushchev presented the report on the new party rules and saw one of
his supporters, A. B. Aristov, take over charge of all personnel
appointments in the wide-spaced party network. Both of these
developments were at the expense of Malenkov, the nominal head for
party matters, but the latter was more than compensated by the
privilege of taking Stalin's place as the chief party speaker (in an
eight-hour speech) at the congress.
As
this congress of October
1952 assembled and dispersed, Stalin was already laying the groundwork
for his third great purge of the party. No one, except perhaps Beria,
could guess who was a target for elimination, but the rumors and hints
from Stalin's personal secretariat made it appear that every one of the
Old Guard of Stalinists should fear the worst. From October 1952
onward, these chief associates of Stalin lived in mounting terror. Like
gangsters of the Capone era, they did not dare go to their homes at
night, ventured nowhere without personal bodyguards, and carried
weapons on their persons. Beria remained dominant until November 1952,
because Moscow was garrisoned by secret police divisions, the Kremlin
guard was entirely in his control, and no one else was allowed to bring
weapons into that enclave.
Stalin
moved with his
customary skill, steadily dispersing and diluting the authority of the
Old Guard: the number of ministries was increased, the Politburo ceased
to meet, its ten members were dissolved into a large Presidium of
thirty-six, and the Old Guard were shifted from operating ministries to
posts without portfolios: Molotov from Foreign Affairs, Kaganovich from
Heavy Industry, Nikolai Bulganin from Defense, Mikoyan from Trade. The
last of these shifts, in November 1952, was the replacement of Beria as
minister of state security by S. D. Ignatiev. By that time,
Poskrebyshev and his assistant, Mikhail Ryumin, were already preparing
the frame-up of Beria. This was the so-called "doctor's plot," a
fabrication which pretended that Zhdanov and other leaders had been
poisoned by a group of Kremlin doctors, mostly Jewish, who were, with
Beria’s knowledge, about to carry out a similar elimination of
other leaders, including high military officers. Under
torture so severe that two of the nine doctors died, the rest gave
confessions.
At
this point, just when
the purge was to begin, Stalin died, possibly from a series of strokes,
on March 5, 1953. Within six hours, the physician in charge of Stalin's
last few days; Stalin's son, Vasily, who commanded the air force of the
Moscow Military District; Poskrebyshev; and the commanders of the
Kremlin, the city, and the local military district all disappeared.
Beria was recalled from semi-exile to lead the merged ministries of
Interior and State Security, and the administrative changes since
October 1952 were undone: the large Presidium was replaced by the
previous smaller Politburo of ten men; the number of ministers was
reduced from 55 to 25; and the inner Cabinet was cut from fourteen to
five. Most significantly, the Old Guard, which Stalin had been slowly
moving away from the levers of power, were, at his death, quickly moved
back to the center. Malenkov was made secretary of the party and
premier of the government with five deputy premiers: Beria, Molotov,
Bulganin, Kaganovich, and Mikoyan. Each of these was restored to his
previous ministry, while Voroshilov became chairman of the Presidium of
the Supreme Soviet. Marshal Zhukov was recalled from rural exile to be
first deputy to Bulganin in the Defense Ministry, and Khrushchev, with
no major post, was made chairman of Stalin's funeral obsequies. Under
his care, the deceased autocrat's body was placed, with the reverence
becoming a demigod, alongside that of Lenin, in the shrine overlooking
Red Square. Then, "at Premier Malenkov's request," Khrushchev took over
one of his two posts, that of secretary of the party. It was a fateful
change.
During
Stalin's rule, the
autocrat had held both chief positions, in the state and in the party.
Now, a week after the despot's death, the universal distaste for any
revival of his power compelled Malenkov to yield up one of the
positions to Khrushchev. We do not know why he decided to keep the
premiership and give up the secretaryship of the party. Indeed, we do
not know if he had any choice, but it may have seemed from the evidence
of Stalin's later years that the premiership was a more significant
post than the secretary's. It was not; certainly it was not in the
hands of a tactician such as Khrushchev. During the next five years, in
a struggle for power whose details are still concealed, Khrushchev rose
from the secretary's post to be supreme autocrat, eliminating in the
process all other possible claimants to power. The process by which he
succeeded Stalin was almost a repetition of that by which Stalin had
succeeded Lenin. In each case, the ultimately successful contender was
the least prominent of a group of contenders; in each case this victor
used the post of secretary of the party as the chief weapon in his
upward rise; in each case, this rise was achieved by a series of chess
moves in which the most powerful rival contenders were eliminated, one
by one, in a series of shifts, beginning with the most dangerous (in
one case Trotsky, in the later case Beria). And in both, this whole
process was done under a pretense of "collective leadership."
Immediately
after Stalin's
death, the "collective leadership" was headed by a triumvirate of
Malenkov, Beria, and Molotov. Malenkov supported a policy of
relaxation, with increased emphasis on production of consumers' goods
and rising standards of living, as well as increased efforts to avoid
any international crisis which might lead to war; Beria supported a
"thaw" in internal matters, with large-scale amnesties for political
prisoners as well as rehabilitation of those already liquidated, at
home and in the satellite states; Molotov continued to insist on the
"hard" policies associated with Stalin, full emphasis on heavy
industry, no relaxation of the domestic tyranny, and continued pressure
in the Cold War with the West.
Wild
rumors, especially among
the satellites, and some relaxation, at Beria's behest, in East Germany
gave rise to false hopes among the workers there. On June 16, '953,
these workers rose up against the Communist government in East Berlin.
After a day of hesitation, these uprisings were crushed with the full
power of the Soviet occupation armored divisions. Using this event as
an excuse, the leaders in the Kremlin suddenly arrested Beria and shot
him with six of his aides (either immediately or in December, depending
on the version of these events).
The
overthrow of the master of
terror was supported by the regular army, whose chief leaders were
present in the next room, armed with smuggled machine guns, when the
showdown between Beria and his colleagues occurred in the Kremlin
conference room. Beria apparently suspected nothing, and set down his
briefcase, in which he had a pistol hidden. During the conference,
while one leader distracted his attention another removed the pistol
from the briefcase. Beria was then told he was under arrest. He dived
for his briefcase, found his pistol gone, and looked up into the muzzle
of his own gun. He was at once turned over to the army officers in the
next room. These had already moved four divisions of their forces into
Moscow to replace the usual secret police forces guarding the city.
This use of the army to settle the personal struggle in the Kremlin is
the chief factor which was different in Khrushchev's rise to power from
the earlier rise to power of Stalin in 1924-1929. There can be little
doubt that the introduction of this new factor was due to Khrushchev
and that his secret speech denouncing Stalin in February 1956 was part
of his payoff to the armed forces for their role in the process.
The
overthrow of Beria was
followed by an extensive curtailment of the secret police and its
powers. Most of the latter went to the Interior Ministry, while its
forces were subjected to separate control, and its system of secret
courts was abolished. Many of its prisoners were released, and there
was considerable relaxation of the censorship, especially in
literature. Some of the powers of the police were taken over by the
party.
In
February 1954, a large
conference of agricultural leaders in Moscow was thunderstruck by a
suggestion from Khrushchev for a radical new approach to the chronic
agricultural shortages. This "virgin-lands" scheme advocated opening
for cultivation in Asia large areas of grassland which had never been
cultivated before. Khrushchev's plan was detailed and dazzlingly
attractive. It entailed use of over 100,000 tractors and great hordes
of manpower to cultivate grain on 6 million new acres in 1954 and an
additional 25 million acres in 1955. The scheme, carried out in an
atmosphere of heated discussion, was not supervised by Khrushchev. Its
requirements in machinery and equipment were so great that it
represented a sharp restriction on Malenkov’s shift of emphasis
from heavy industry to consumer goods, while Khrushchev’s refusal
to supervise it placed the responsibility for its success at
Malenkov’s door. At the same time, Malenkov’s public
advocacy of a “thaw” in Soviet-American relations was
equally weakened by the secret Soviet drive to perfect the H-bomb.
While
the undermining of
Malenkov was thus in process in 1954, Khrushchev began to undermine
Molotov in the foreign field by organizing a series of spectacular
foreign visits without the foreign secretary. One of the first of
these, in September r954, took Bulganin, Khrushchev, Mikoyan, and
others to Peking to celebrate the fifth birthday of Red China. During
the visit Khrushchev apparently made a personal alliance with Mao
Tse-tung as well as a complicated commercial treaty which offered
Soviet finance, equipment, and specialized skills for an all-out
industrialization of China (the so-called "great leap forward").
These
events made it possible
for Khrushchev to organize a campaign against Malenkov during the
winter of 1954-1955. Ostensibly this was based on Malenkov's desire to
relax the intense emphasis on heavy industrialization, but, in fact,
Malenkov's lack of aggressiveness in foreign policy was equally
significant. In combination the two issues created pressure which
Malenkov could not resist. On February 8, rg5s, his resignation was
read to the Supreme Soviet. He assumed responsibility for the
unsatisfactory state of Soviet agriculture, and relinquished the post
of premier, although remaining on in the Central Committee in the new
post of minister of power stations. The new premier was Bulganin, who
released his previous post of defense minister to his deputy, Marshal
Zhukov, hero of World War II.
These
struggles within the
Kremlin are based on persons, not on issues, since the latter are used
chiefly as weapons in the struggle. In the shift from Malenkov to
Bulganin, the critical issues were the chronic agricultural problem and
the choice between Stalin's policy of relentless industrialization,
regardless of the cost to peasants and workers, and a new policy of
increased consumers' goods. In this last issue the needs of defense
brought Khrushchev support from Marshal Zhukov, the armed forces, and
the "Stalinists," such as Molotov and Kaganovich. Zhukov was rewarded
with a ministry and a seat in the Presidium, the only army officer ever
to have the latter.
The
gradual elimination of
Molotov found Khrushchev on the opposite side of the Stalinist versus
anti-Stalinist debate, as champion of a "thaw" in the Cold War. This
involved a rejection of Stalin's doctrine of the inevitable enmity of
non-satellite countries and the inevitable onset of imperialist war
from capitalist aggression. In this struggle Khrushchev found support
in Bulganin, Mikoyan, and probably Zhukov. The new policy was
established while Molotov was still foreign minister through a series
of elaborate state visits by Bulganin and Khrushchev ("B and K," as
they were called) to foreign countries. The most significant of these
visits, because it marked a sharp reversal troth of Stalin and of
Molotov, was a six-day visit to Tito in Yugoslavia in May 1955. This
acceptance of Titoism is of great importance because it showed Russia
in an apologetic role for a major past error and because it reversed
Stalin's rule that all Communist parties everywhere must follow the
Kremlin's leadership.
The
"Belgrade Declaration"
admitted that different countries could "walk different roads to
Socialism" and that such "differences in the concrete application of
Socialism are the exclusive concern of individual countries."
Khrushchev and Tito both knew that this statement was playing with
fire. The former's motives are obscure; it was probably done simply as
a challenge to Molotov's whole past record; Tito unquestionably hoped
the dynamite would explode sufficiently to blow the East European
satellites out of Soviet control. With his customary shrewdness
Khrushchev did not sign the Belgrade Declaration himself, but had
Bulganin, the new premier, do it, thus protecting himself from direct
responsibility if anything went wrong.
This
declaration was not the
only stick of dynamite which Khrushchev was juggling as he returned
from Yugoslavia. En route home he stopped off in Bucharest and Sofia.
In the latter capital he placed the fuse in another, even larger, stick
of dynamite, by a secret denunciation of Stalin personally as a
bloodthirsty tyrant.
Back
in Moscow in early July,
Molotov made an uncompromising attack on the Belgrade Declaration,
denouncing it as encouragement to the satellites to pursue independent
policies, a consequence which all agreed would be totally unacceptable
to anyone in the Kremlin, but Khrushchev w-on over the majority by
arguing that the loyalty of the satellites, and especially their vital
economic cooperation, could be ensured better by a loose leash than by
a club. He scorned Molotov's opposition to an agreement with Tito by
contrasting it with Molotov's agreement of August 1939 with Ribbentrop.
The solidity of the satellites was to be preserved by the Warsaw Pact
of May 14, 1955, which established a twenty-year alliance of the Soviet
Union, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and
East Germany. This was the Communist riposte to NATO, which the newly
sovereign West German state had joined, as a fifteenth member, five
days earlier (May 9, 1955)
Straight
from his arguments
with Molotov in the Central Committee, Khrushchev dashed off with
Bulganin, Molotov, and Zhukov to the 1955 "Summit Meeting" in Geneva.
There he kept quietly in the background, while his companions discussed
the fate of Germany with President Eisenhower, Dulles, Eden, and
Premier Faure of France.
The
1955 Summit Conference at
Geneva on July 18-24 was Anthony Eden's contribution to the "thaw."
Dulles participated most reluctantly, but there had been increasingly
unfavorable comment on his inflexible attitude toward the Russians, and
he felt compelled to yield to Eden's insistence in order to help Eden's
Conservative Party in the British General Elections of May, 1955. Once
these were successfully passed, the meeting had to be carried out, but
Dulles had no hopes of its success. He contributed little in this
direction himself when he insisted that disarmament must be discussed
before German reunion. Outsiders, trying to interpret the Russian
attitude toward the "thaw" on the basis of no reliable information,
placed much greater hopes in the Summit Meeting than Dulles did,
chiefly because of the surprising Soviet shift which had produced the
Austrian Peace Treaty of May 15, 1955, with its subsequent evacuation
of Austria by Russian troops. The Austrian treaty restored the
country's frontiers of January 1938 and promised free navigation of the
Danube, while prohibiting any union with Germany and binding Austria to
neutrality.
The
neutralization of Austria
gave rise, in 1955, to a good deal of vague talk about "disengagement"
in Europe. The idea, however defined, had considerable attraction in
Europe, even for experienced diplomats like Eden. Nothing very definite
could be agreed upon as making up "disengagement," but everyone was
eager for anything which would reduce the threat of war, and the
Germans especially had longing thoughts of a neutralized and united
country. France, which was deeply involved at the time in Indochina and
in the Muslim countries, particularly Algeria, was eager for any
relaxation in Europe which would allow a breathing spell to devote to
its colonial problems. To help the discussion along, the Russians spoke
favorably about disarmament, Europe for the Europeans, and German
reunion. When details of these suggestions appeared, however, they
usually justified completely Dulles's skepticism. Disarmament, for
example, meant to the Russians total renunciation of nuclear weapons
and drastic cuts in ground forces, a combination which would make the
United States very weak against Russia while leaving Russia still
dominant in Europe. Sometimes this result was sought more directly:
withdrawal of both the United States and the Soviet Union from Europe,
the former to North America, thousands of miles away, and the latter
merely to the Russian frontiers. Another Russian suggestion was to
replace NATO with a European security pact which would include only
European states.
The
Soviet suggestions for
Germany were equally tricky and show clearly their fear to subject
their East German satellite to a popular election and their real
reluctance to see Germany united. They demanded unification first and
elections later, while the United States reversed the order. The
merging of the two existing German governments, followed by a peace
treaty along the lines of the Austrian treaty, would have given the
Russians what they wanted in Europe, a Germany freed from Western
troops ruled by a coalition government, which would allow elections
when it judged best.
The
Americans wanted elections
first to establish an acceptable central German government with which a
final peace could be made. The creation of two sovereign German states
in 1954 made any settlement remote because the Kremlin insisted that
its East German satellite regime, which was not recognized by the
United States, must be a party to any settlement and thus be recognized
by the United States. This same point became a permanent obstacle also
to any agreement to unify Berlin, since the United States was willing
to negotiate with Russia but not with East Germany. Eden's own
contribution to these discussions was that a demilitarized zone be
established along the line of physical contact between East and West in
Europe with international inspection of armed forces in Germany.
Suddenly,
on the fourth day of
the conference, President Eisenhower made a speech which jolted the
delegates, and even more the world, out of their casual attention. This
was his "open-skies" plan, which never came to anything but which gave
the United States a propaganda advantage the Soviet Union could not
overcome. It had two parts: the two super-Powers "to give to each other
a complete blueprint of our military establishments, from beginning to
end, from one end of our countries to the other"; and "Next, to provide
within our countries facilities for aerial photography to the other
country." Nothing could be more repugnant to the ingrained Soviet love
of secrecy except full inspection of the country on the ground, but
nothing could more clearly show the world that the United States was as
frank and honest as its President's own face: neither had anything to
hide.
Nothing
significant was
achieved at the Geneva Conference, but the discussions were conducted
in an unprecedented atmosphere of friendly cooperation which came to be
known as the "Geneva spirit," and continued for several years. In fact,
it was never completely overcome even when matters were at their worst
in the weeks following the U-2 incident of May 1960 and the Cuban
crisis of October 1962. This was because the Soviet Union, having
emerged from the isolation imposed on it by Stalin's mania, never
returned to it completely but continued to cooperate with non-Communist
countries in scientific interchange, athletic events, and social
intercourse. From 1955 onward, speakers of Russian and of English were
in cooperation somewhere on some project. The most amazing of these
projects was the International Geophysical Year of 1957-1958, in which
scientists of sixty-six countries cooperated over eighteen months to
wring from the physical universe of earth, sea, and sun some of its
secrets.
Returned
to Moscow from
Geneva, Khrushchev abandoned his unwonted quiet and resumed his
stalking of Molotov. In September 1955, the harassed foreign minister
had to make a public confession of error, admitting that he did not
know what point the Soviet Union had reached in its progress along the
road to Socialism. In February he had told the Supreme Soviet that the
foundations of the Socialist society had been built. It now appeared
that the society itself was built. Such a mistake, regarded as picayune
in the outside world, could inflict almost irreparable damage on a
Soviet leader if publicly confessed, as this was. It was a clear
indication to other such leaders that Molotov was on the way out.
During
all this, Khrushchev
had held no office in the Soviet government, and had functioned only as
party leader, but what he did in that capacity was of vital
significance. Systematically he replaced party functionaries on all
levels, moving upward those he could depend on and eliminating those he
could not trust to support him personally. The other rival leaders in
the government knew what was going on, but ignored it, since they made
the one basic error which could not be remedied: they believed that the
government was the ruling structure in the Soviet Union, while
Khrushchev, quietly at his work within the party structure, looked
forward to the day on which he would demonstrate their error.
In
February 1956, in what is
unquestionably one of the most significant events in the history of
Communism, Khrushchev lighted one of his sticks of dynamite. The
subsequent explosion is still echoing, and the resulting wound to
international Communism still bleeds freely.
Khrushchev's
preparation-for a
Party congress was as careful as Stalin's had ever been: it was to be a
sounding board for coordinating party policy by speeches to his
hand-picked subordinates. In July 1955 the congress was called for
February 14, 1956. At the same time, two Khrushchev agents were added
to the Presidium, Mikhail Suslov and Igor Kirichenko, and three
Khrushchev agents were added to the party secretariat: Averky Aristov,
Ivan Belyaev, and Dmitri Shepilov. The last, who was editor of Pravda,
the party newspaper, gave the speech on foreign policy at the congress,
although Molotov was still foreign minister and was not replaced by
Shepilov until August. Aristov soon took over the role Poskrebyshev had
previously played for Stalin, in charge of loyalty purges within the
party.
The
Twentieth Party Congress
met for eleven days, February 14-25, 1956, within the Kremlin walls.
Its 1,436 hand-picked delegates formed the oldest congress which had
ever assembled, with 24 percent over fifty years of age, compared to
15.3 percent over fifty at the Nineteenth Congress, and only 1.8
percent over fifty at the Eighteenth Congress of February 1941. These
men were fully prepared to support whatever was told them, but none
could have anticipated the shocking revelations they would hear..
It
all began in a rather
routine fashion. The first speech, of 50,000 words, delivered by
Khrushchev over seven hours (one hour less than Malenkov's parallel
speech in October 1952), was full of factual details. It was notable
only for its frequent reference to the urgent need for coexistence with
the West and its infrequent use of the name "Stalin." The emphasis on
co-existence was part of the campaign against Molotov, and, as is usual
in Communist speeches, was filled with references, by volume and page,
to the writings of Lenin. Most of these references proved, on
examination, to be embedded in a context expounding the inevitable
clash between Communism and Capitalism. The delegates, fully trained in
such dialectic, had no difficulty in seeing the point: coexistence was
merely a temporary tactic in the larger framework of inevitable
struggle. Similar references were made to the possibility of peaceful,
rather than revolutionary, change from capitalism to Socialism in
single countries. In this case, examples were given: the Baltic States,
the East European satellites, and China! The reference to Lenin (Volume
XXXIII, pages 57-58) made perfectly clear that the "peaceful road to
"Socialism" could be followed only where a small capitalist state was
overrun by a powerful Communist neighbor.
The
chief surprise of the
general sessions of the party congress was the speech from that old
party chameleon, Anastas Mikoyan. It openly criticized Stalin for his
disregard of party democracy and his "cult of personality" which
insisted on personal adulation and on the constant rewriting of party
records and Russian history so that Stalin would always appear as the
infallible and clairvoyant leader.
The
real explosion came at a
secret all-night session on February 24-25 from which all foreign
delegates were excluded; those who listened were warned to take no
notes or records. In a speech of 30,000 words Khrushchev made a
horrifying attack on Stalin as a bloodthirsty and demented tyrant who
had destroyed tens of thousands of loyal party members on falsified
evidence, or no evidence at all, merely to satisfy his own insatiable
thirst for power. All the charges which had been made by
anti-Communists and anti-Stalinists in the 1930's were repeated and
driven home with specific details, dates, and names. The full nightmare
of the Soviet system was revealed, not as an attribute of the system
(which it was), but as a personal idiosyncrasy of Stalin himself; not
as the chief feature of Communism from 1917 (which it was), but only as
its chief feature since 1934; and nothing was said of the full
collaboration in the process of terror provided to Stalin by the
surviving members of the Politburo led by Khrushchev himself.
But
all the rest, which the
fellow travelers throughout the world had been denying for a
generation, poured out: the enormous slave-labor camps, the murder of
innocent persons by tens of thousands, the wholesale violation of law,
the use of fiendishly planned torture to exact confessions for acts
never done or to involve persons who were completely innocent, the
ruthless elimination of whole classes and of whole nations (such as the
army officers, the kulaks, and the Kalmuck, Chechen, Ingush, and Balkar
minority groups). The servility of writers, artists, and everyone else,
including all party members, to the tyrant was revealed, along with the
total failure of his agricultural schemes, his cowardice and
incompetence in the war, his insignificance in the early history of the
party, and his constant rewriting of history to conceal these things.
A
few passages from this speech will indicate its tone:
"Stalin's
negative
characteristics, which in Lenin's time, were only beginning, changed in
his last years in a grave abuse of power which caused untold harm to
the Party.... Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation, and
patient cooperation with people, but by imposing his ideas and by
demanding complete submission to his opinion. Whoever opposed this or
tried to argue his own point of view was doomed to be purged and to
subsequent moral and physical annihilation.... Stalin originated the
concept 'enemy of the people,' a term which made it unnecessary to
prove the ideological errors of the victim; it made it possible to use
the cruelest repression and utmost illegality against anyone who
disagreed in any way with Stalin, against those who were only suspected
or had been subjects of rumors. This concept 'enemy of the people'
eliminated any possibility of ideological fight or of rebuttal. Usually
the only evidence used, against all the rules of modern legal science,
was the confession of the accused, and, as subsequent investigation
showed, such 'confessions' were obtained by physical pressure on the
accused.... The formula 'enemy of the people' was specifically
introduced for the purpose of physically annihilating these persons....
He abandoned the method of ideological struggle for administrative
violence, mass repressions, and terror.... Lenin used such methods only
against actual class enemies and not against those who blunder or err
and whom it is possible to lead through theory and even retain as
leaders.... Stalin so elevated himself above the party and above the
state that he ceased to consider either the Central Committee or the
party.... The number of arrests based on charges of
counterrevolutionary crimes increased tenfold from 1936 to 1937....
When the cases of some of these so-called 'spies' and 'saboteurs' were
examined, it was found that all their cases were fabricated.
Confessions of guilt of many were gained by cruel and inhuman
tortures.... Comrade Rudzutak, candidate member of the Politburo, party
member from 1905, who spent ten years in a czarist hard-labor camp,
completely retracted in court the confession which had been forced from
him.... This retraction was ignored, in spite of the fact that Rudzutak
had been chief of the party Central Control Commission established by
Lenin to ensure party unity.... He was not even called before the
Central Committee's Politburo because Stalin refused to talk to him.
Sentence was pronounced in a trial of twenty minutes, and he was shot.
After careful reexamination of the case in 1955, it was established
that the accusation against Rudzutak was false and based on falsified
evidence.... The way in which the NKVD manufactured fictitious
'anti-Soviet centers and blocs' can be seen in the case of Comrade
Rozenblum, party member from 1906, who was arrested in 1937 by the
Leningrad NKVD.... He was subjected to terrible torture during which he
was ordered to confess false information about himself and other
persons. He was then brought to the office of Zakovsky, who offered him
freedom on condition that he make before the court a false confession
fabricated in 1937 by the NKVD concerning 'sabotage, espionage, and
subversion in a terroristic center in Leningrad.' With unbelievable
cynicism, Zakovsky told about the method for the creation of
fabricated, 'anti-Soviet plots.' . . . 'You yourself,' said Zakovsky,
'will not need to invent anything. The NKVD will prepare for you an
outline for every branch of the center; you will have to study it
carefully and to remember well all questions and answers which the
court may ask. . . . Your future will depend on how the trial goes and
on its results. If you manage to endure it, you will save your head,
and we will feed and clothe you at the government's expense until your
death.' . . . The NKVD prepared lists of persons whose cases were
before the Military Tribunal and whose sentences were prepared in
advance. Yezhov would send these lists to Stalin personally for his
approval of the punishments. In 1937-1938 such lists of many thousands
of party, government, Communist Youth, army, and economic workers were
sent to Stalin. He approved those lists.... Stalin was a very
distrustful man, morbidly suspicious; we knew this from our work with
him. He would look at a man and say, 'Why are your eyes so shifty
today?' or, 'Why are you turning so much today and why do you avoid
looking at me directly?' This sickly suspicion created in him distrust
of eminent party workers he had known for years. Everywhere and in
everything he saw 'enemies,' 'two-facers,' and 'spies.' . . . How is it
possible that a person confesses to crimes which he has not committed?
Only in one way—by application of physical pressure, tortures,
bringing him to a state of unconsciousness, deprivation of his
judgment, taking away of his human dignity. In this way were
'confessions' obtained.... Only a few days before the present congress
we called to the Central Committee Presidium and interrogated the
investigative judge Rodos, who in his time investigated and
interrogated Kossior, Chubar, and Kosaryev. He is a vile person, with
the brain of a bird, and morally completely degenerate. And it was this
man who was deciding the fate of prominent party workers.... He told
us, 'I was told that Kossior and Chubar were people's enemies and for
that reason, I, as investigative judge, had to make them confess that
they are enemies.... I thought that I was executing the orders of the
party."
The
"secret speech" also destroyed Stalin's reputation as a military genius:
"During
the war and afterward,
Stalin said that the tragedy experienced by the nation in the early
days of the war resulted from the unexpected attack by the Germans.
But, Comrades, this is completely untrue.... By April 3, 1941,
Churchill through his ambassador to the USSR, Cripps, personally warned
Stalin that the Germans were regrouping their armed units to attack the
Soviet Union.... Churchill stressed this repeatedly in his dispatches
of April 18 and in the following days. Stalin took no heed of these
warnings. Moreover, he warned that no credence he given to information
of this sort in order not to provoke the beginning of military
operations. Information of this kind on German invasion of Soviet
territory was coming in from our own military and diplomatic
sources.... Despite these particularly grave warnings, the necessary
steps were not taken to prepare the country properly for defense and to
prevent it from being caught unawares. Did we have time and resources
for such preparation? Yes, we did. Our industry was fully capable of
supplying everything the Soviet Army needed.... Had our industry been
mobilized properly and in time to supply the Army, our wartime losses
would have been decidedly smaller.... On the eve of the invasion, a
German citizen crossed our border and stated that the German armies had
orders to start their offensive on the night of June 22 at 3:00 A. M.
Stalin was informed of this immediately, but even this was ignored. As
you see, everything was ignored.... The result was that in the first
hours and days the enemy destroyed in our border regions a large part
of our air force, artillery, and other equipment; he annihilated large
numbers of our soldiers and disorganized our military leadership;
consequently we could not prevent the enemy from marching deep into the
country. Very grievous consequences, especially at the beginning of the
war, followed Stalin's destruction of many military commanders and
political workers during 1937-1941, because of his suspiciousness and
false accusations.... During that time the leaders who had gained
military experience in Spain and in the Far East were almost completely
liquidated.... After the first severe disaster and defeats at the
front, Stalin thought that this was the end. He said, 'All that which
Lenin created we have lost forever.' After this, Stalin for a long time
actually did not direct the military operations and ceased to do
anything whatever.... Therefore, the danger which hung over our
Fatherland in the first period of the war was largely due to the faulty
methods of directing the nation and the party by Stalin himself. Later
the nervousness and hysteria which Stalin showed, interfering with
actual military operations, caused our army serious damage. He was very
far from any understanding of the real situation which was developing
on the front. This was natural, for, in the whole war, he never visited
any section of the front or any liberated city.... When a very serious
situation developed for our army in the Kharkov region in 1942, we
decided to give up an operation seeking to encircle Kharkov to avoid
fatal consequences if the operation continued.... Contrary to sense,
Stalin rejected our suggestion and issued orders to continue the
operation.... I telephoned to Stalin at his villa, but he refused to
answer the phone, and Malenkov was on the receiver.... I stated for a
second time that I wanted to speak to Stalin personally about the grave
situation at the front. But Stalin did not consider it convenient to
raise the phone and insisted that I must speak to him through Malenkov,
although he was only a few steps away. After listening in this fashion
to our plea, Stalin said, 'Let everything remain as it is!' What was
the result of this? The worst that we had expected. The Germans
surrounded our army concentrations and we lost hundreds of thousands of
our soldiers. This is Stalin's military genius and what it cost us....
After this party congress we shall have to reevaluate our military
operations and present them in their true light.... After our great
victory which cost us so much, Stalin began to belittle many of the
commanders who contributed to the victory, because Stalin excluded
every possibility that victories at the front should be credited to
anyone but himself.... He began to tell all kinds of nonsense about
Zhukov.... He popularized himself as a great leader and tried to
inculcate in the people the idea that all victories won in the war were
due to the courage, daring, and genius of Stalin and no one else....
Let us take, for instance, our historical and military films and some
written works; they make us feel sick. Their real purpose is the
propagation of the theme of Stalin as a military genius. Remember the
film The Fall of Berlin. Here only Stalin acts; he
issues
orders in a hall in which there are many empty chairs, and only one man
approaches him and reports to him—that is Poskrebyshev, ills
loyal shield-bearer. Where is the military command? Where is the
Politburo? Where is the government? What are they doing? There is
nothing about them in the film. Stalin acts for everybody; he pays no
attention to them; he asks no one for advice. Where are the military
who bear the burden of the war? They are not in the film; with Stalin
in, there is no room for them.... You see to what Stalin's delusions of
grandeur led. He had completely lost consciousness of reality.... One
characteristic example of Stalin's self-glorification and of his lack
of elementary modesty was his Short Biography
published in
1948. It is an expression of most dissolute flattery, making a man into
a god, transforming him into an infallible sage, 'the greatest leader
and most sublime strategist of all times and nations.' No other words
could be found to raise Stalin to the heavens. We need not give
examples of the loathsome adulation filling this book. They were all
approved and edited by Stalin personally, and some of them were added
in his own handwriting to the draft of the book.... He added, 'Although
he performed his task of leader of the party and the people with
consummate skill and enjoyed the unreserved support of the whole Soviet
people, Stalin never allowed his work to be marred by the slightest
hint of vanity, conceit, or self-adulation.' . . . I'll cite one more
insertion made by Stalin: 'The advanced Soviet science of war received
further development at Comrade Stalin's hands. He elaborated the theory
of the permanently operating factors that decided the issue of wars....
Comrade Stalin's genius enabled him to divine the enemy's plans and
defeat them. The battles in which Comrade Stalin directed the Soviet
armies are brilliant examples of operational military skill.'
"All
those who interested
themselves even a little in the national situation saw the difficult
situation in agriculture, but Stalin never even noticed it. Did we tell
Stalin about this? Yes, we told him, but he did not support us. Why?
Because Stalin never traveled anywhere, did not meet city or farm
workers; he did not know the actual situation in the provinces. He knew
the country and agriculture only from films. And these films had
dressed up and beautified the existing situation in agriculture. They
so pictured collective farm life that the tables were bending from the
weight of turkeys and geese. Stalin thought it was actually so....
Stalin proposed that the taxes paid by the collective farms and by
their workers should be raised by 4o billion rubles; according to him
the peasants are well off, and the collective farm worker would need
sell only one more chicken to pay his tax in full. Imagine what this
meant. Certainly, 4o billion rubles is a sum greater than everything
the collective farmers obtained for all the products they sold to the
state. In 1952, for instance, the collective farms and their workers
received 26,280 million rubles for all their products sold to the
government.... The proposal w-as not based on an actual assessment of
the situation but on the fantastic ideas of a person divorced from
reality."
It
was inconceivable that this
extraordinary speech could be kept a secret, in spite of all the
warnings at its delivery that it must be. Versions of it, some of them
softened, were sent out by the Kremlin to foreign party leaders. One of
these found its way to the United States government and was published
on June 2, 1956. There is not the slightest doubt that the speech is
authentic and that almost everything it says is true. But the mystery
remains: Why did the Kremlin leaders decide to speak thus of a
situation which every student of the subject knew, at least partially,
but which could still be denied so long as it was not admitted? One
factor in the making of the speech was undoubtedly the determination of
the army to clear itself of the unjust accusations made against its
officers in 1937-1941 and against the effort to attribute the disasters
of 1941-1942 to professional incompetence. Just as the German generals
after 1945 wanted to blame their defeats on Hitler, so the Russian
generals, with much greater justification, wanted to blame their early
defeats on Stalin. But there undoubtedly must have been other causes of
which we are not yet aware.
The
anti-Stalin speech, like the admission of error in the alienation from
Tito, inevitably had an injurious influence on Communism throughout the
world, especially in the satellite Powers, and ultimately became the
ideological basis for the splitting of these Powers into Stalinist and
anti-Stalinist groupings led by Red China and the Soviet Union.
Certain
points about this
speech are noteworthy. In the first place, all the criticism of Stalin
is directed at his actions subsequent to 1934; these are criticized,
not because they were vile in themselves, but because they were
injurious to the party and to loyal party members. Throughout this
speech, as in everything else he did in this period, Khrushchev was
working to strengthen the party. Moreover, by directing his criticism
at Stalin personally, he exculpated himself and the other Bolshevik
survivors who were fully as guilty as Stalin was—guilty not
merely because they acquiesced in Stalin's atrocities from fear, as
Khrushchev admitted in the speech, but because they fully cooperated
with him.
A
study of Khrushchev's own
life shows that he supported Stalin's atrocities fully at the time,
often anticipated them, benefitted personally from them, and egged
Stalin on to greater ones. In fact, even as Khrushchev in his speech
condemned Stalin's acts which caused the deaths of thousands in the
party, he defended Stalin's acts which caused the deaths of millions in
the country. The fault was not merely with Stalin; it was with the
system; and, even wider than that, it was with Russia. Any system of
human life which is based on autocracy and authority, as Russian life
has always been, will turn up sadistic monsters, as Russia has
throughout its history, again and again. And the more completely total
and irresponsible power is concentrated in one man's hands, the more
frequently will a monster of sadism be produced.
The
very structure of Russian
life on the authoritarian lines it had always possessed drove
Khrushchev, as it had driven Stalin thirty years before, to concentrate
all power in his own hands. Neither man could relax halfway to power
for fear that someone else would continue on, seeking the peak of
power. The basis of the whole system was fear and, like all neurotic
drives in a neurotic system, such fear could not he overcome even by
achievement of total power. That is why it grows into paranoia as it
did with Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Paul I, Stalin, and others.
During
all the struggle for
power within the Kremlin, foreign affairs were still actively pursued
hy the Soviet leaders. The chief event was a change in direction from
Europe to Asia which took place in the spring of 1955. The Austrian
treaty, the reconciliation with Tito, the stalemate over the German
problem, the Warsaw Pact, and the "Geneva spirit" were all parts of a
plan to put Europe "on ice" in order to shift attention to Southeast
Asia, to India, and to the Near East. This new direction was opened by
beginning arms shipments to Colonel Gamal Nasser of Egypt in the spring
of 1955 and reached its peak in the so-called Suez Crisis of October
1956. A similar effort in India, seeking to win its support for the
Soviet bloc, began with the state visit to India and Burma by Bulganin
and Khrushchev in November 1955. This new direction and its
consequences will be described in a moment, but it must be recognized
that the continuing struggle for control within the Kremlin and the
satellite states ran parallel with the growing crisis in the Near East
and that both reached the critical stage at the same time in October
956.
The
struggle between the
Stalinists and the anti-Stalinists within the satellite states and the
discontent of the inhabitants with both groups kept public affairs
agitated along the whole zone of satellite areas from the Baltic to the
Balkans. Khrushchev's "secret speech" increased this agitation.
Pressure on Khrushchev inside the Kremlin to reverse his professed
policy of de-Stalinization grew. Khrushchev struck back. On June 2,
1956, the same day that Tito arrived for a state visit to Moscow,
Molotov was removed as foreign minister and replaced by Khrushchev's
agent, Shepilov, the editor of Pravda. But the
satellite turmoil continued.
This
turmoil, which agitated
eastern Europe for many years, may be regarded as a series of clashes
between Stalinism and Titoism. Neither of these is an extreme pole of
dualistic opposition but rather two positions on a number of scales,
concerned rather with methods than with goals. Both have as a goal the
creation of powerful and prosperous Communist systems, but they do not
agree on methods, or rather on the relative mixture of methods to be
used to reach their goal. Each sees industrialization as necessary to
such a goal, but Tito is, perhaps necessarily, more willing to use
foreign investment and foreign technical guidance, if these are free
from any political control.
Stalinism
in general distrusts
all foreign help as spying. Relying on domestic capital accumulation,
and determined to raise it speedily, Stalinism puts severe pressures on
the peasantry and thus emphasizes collective farms under political
pressure, while Titoism is prepared to make much more use of private
agriculture and of economic incentives for food production. This
entails a slower rate of industrialization and more emphasis on
improved standards of living. There are also other, more pervasive,
differences. Stalinism insists on uniformity and centralized authority,
while Titoism is more willing to allow diversity and collegial control.
This, in their terms, is the distinction between a "monolithic block"
and "collective leadership"; when the "monolithic bloc" is subject to
criticism, it is called the "cult of personality."
In
the satellites, for
historical reasons, there are other sharp distinctions between
Stalinism and Titoism. The former favors Russian domination, while the
latter favors local nationalism. As a consequence, in 1945-1960, the
former favored those local leaders who had spent the prewar and war
periods in exile in the Soviet Union, while the latter favored the
underground fighters who had stayed at home in the Left-wing resistance
groups. And, finally, the Stalinists upheld their road to Socialism as
the only road, while the Titoists contended there were many roads to
Socialism. As might be expected, political oppression and the rule of
the monolithic party was associated with the one point of view, while a
greater readiness to allow diversity of outlook and coalition regimes
marked the other.
There
is no doubt that Stalin
intended to establish a fully Stalinist system as just described in
eastern Europe, "the Zone," as Seton-Watson calls it. But this could
not be done immediately in the chaos of war's ending. Accordingly, a
period of real coalition regimes was established, based on the
association of all groups and parties which had resisted Nazism. Most
of these groups were made up of peasants, workers, and intellectuals
led by a combination of exiles back from Russia and hardened resistance
fighters. One of the chief acts of these coalition regimes, in most
countries, was agrarian reform, that is, the division of former large
estates into the hands of peasant owners.
Within
a few years, and in
most cases by 1948, this coalition was broken down and replaced by
narrow Stalinist control, governed by a typical Stalinist tyranny. This
was achieved by getting the significant government posts into the hands
of hard-core Stalinists, usually the former Moscow exiles, and forcing
other groups out of the coalition. In this process, the presence of
Soviet troops was often the vital factor. Along with this went a
social, economic, and propagandist campaign to split the farmers by
calling the more affluent, better educated, or more obstinate ones
"agrarian reactionaries" and "enemies of the people." These were
liquidated, frequently by death. The chief index showing that this
stage had been reached was usually a reversal of the agricultural
policy from agrarian reform to collectivization similar to that
achieved in Russia in 1930-1934.
As
one consequence of this
change, each satellite found its welfare, especially in economics,
subordinated to that of the Soviet Union. This was reflected in
numerous economic and commercial agreements which set up conditions of
commercial exchange and joint-owned public corporations able to milk
the satellite countries for Russia's benefit. Some of this was based on
reparations. As examples of this exploitation, we might mention that
the joint corporations in East Germany drained from that area goods
worth a billion Reichsmarks a year in terms of 1936 prices in the
1946-1948 period. The Soviet-Polish coal agreement of 1945 bound Poland
to sell coal to Russia at one-tenth the price obtainable elsewhere. In
all, it has been estimated that the Soviet Union extracted goods worth
$20 billion out of eastern Europe in 1945-1946.
By
1952, eastern Europe, with
the notable exception of Yugoslavia, was being organized, as a colony
of the Soviet Union, along Stalinist lines. The bitter attacks on Tito
arose from Tito's refusal to accept this and from the challenge which
the existence of his different system offered to Stalin's control. Tito
was able to resist because he was outside the zone of Soviet military
occupation and had built up a military and bureaucratic hierarchy loyal
to him, while inside that zone these hierarchies had been constructed
under Soviet guidance and were loyal to Stalin rather than to the local
leaders. The one exception, Albania, sided with Stalin because it
feared Yugoslavia, just as Tito feared the Soviet Union, as a too
powerful neighbor. In
1951-1952 the
incipient purge in the Soviet Union was extended to the satellites
where its anti-Semitic overtones were even more evident. Rudolf
Slansky, leader of the Czech Communist Party, was tried and executed in
spite of his abject subservience to Stalin, while Anna Pauker was
removed from her offices in Romania. This drove Tito closer to the
Western camp and led Tito's friend Milovan Djilas to recognize that the
problem of Stalinism was not personal but institutional, caused by the
structure of the system, a disease fatal to any real social welfare; he
called this disease "bureaucratic degeneration." When Djilas went
further, at the end of 1953, and recognized that the real issue was
between freedom and absolutism, a choice for all the Zone between the
West and the East, he broke with Tito because his criticism clearly
applied to Tito's authoritarian bureaucracy as well. Many persons in
the satellites, even the young who had lifelong indoctrination in the
authoritarian outlook, reached similar conclusions and were like tinder
to any anti-Soviet spark.
The
sparks were provided by
Khrushchev, with his continued curtailment of the secret police, his
acceptance of Titoism, and, above all, his "secret speech." Few
recognized that Khrushchev was basically an ultra-Stalinist himself,
fully committed to foreign aggression, to ultra-industrialization, and
to ruthless discipline of the working masses, especially the peasants.
His tactical shifts were taken as indicators of a moderate personality,
while, in fact, Khrushchev was as extreme as Stalin and more reckless.
As
part of the thaw in eastern
Europe there was a considerable shift from Stalinism. Hundreds of
thousands of political prisoners were either released or given reduced
sentences, and party leaders who had been purged were restored to the
party. Some who had been executed were posthumously rehabilitated. That
key indicator, pressure to build up collective farms, was reversed. In
Hungary in a single year (May 1953 to May 1954) the acreage under
collective farming decreased one-third, while the number of peasants on
such farms fell 45 percent. This was fairly typical of the Zone as a
whole.
This
general shift undoubtedly
encouraged resistance to Soviet domination, a feeling which was greatly
increased in 1956 by three other factors: (1) the growing
impoverishment of the Zone from Soviet exploitation, from the poor
crops and food shortages of 1956, and from the equally grave fuel
shortages (both coal and petroleum); (2) the shift of Soviet attention
from Europe to Asia; (3) the unexpected reaction to the "secret
speech." The consequences of these disturbing influences were general
in the Zone, but the specific cases of Poland and Hungary hold great
interest, because they worked in such totally different ways.
The
chief difference, of
course, was the great strength of the Polish leaders and people, going
back to their terrible experiences at the hands of troth Russians and
Germans and their memories of the extraordinary feats of the
underground resistance. Soviet reactions to Polish demands for
liberalizing the regime were undoubtedly influenced by a reluctance to
meet that resistance again. However, the chief difference lay in the
related fact that the leaders of the Polish Communist Party led the
demand for liberalization and maintained a united front while doing so,
while the Hungary movement was resisted by the party leaders and could
be split by personal ambitions.
The
crisis began in both
countries in the last week of June 1956. A stoppage of work at the
Polish railway factory in Poznan grew into a mass demonstration against
the Communist regime. Shots were fired, and eventually over so were
killed and 323 arrested. Polish Party Secretary Ochab made concessions
to the opposition and attributed the episode to "social roots . . . the
existence of serious disturbances between the party and the various
sections of the working class." This was rejected three days later by
Bulganin during a sudden and unexpected visit of the Kremlin leaders to
Warsaw; their version attributed the troubles to foreign capitalist
agitators. Ochab continued his concessions and, on August 4th,
readmitted to the party the popular Vladislov Gomulka, a strong
nationalist Communist who had been removed and imprisoned at Stalin's
orders in 1951.
Because
the continued
worsening of economic conditions in the late summer of 1956 made it
impossible for the Polish Communists to offer the people any
substantial economic concessions, they continued the political
relaxation, which alarmed the Kremlin. The trials of those arrested in
the June disturbances were fair and punishments lenient, amid growing
nationalist enthusiasm. On October 15th Moscow learned of a Polish
decision to convene the Polish Central Committee on October 18th to
elect a new Politburo which would not include Soviet Marshal K. K.
Rokossovsky, defense minister of Poland since the days of Stalin, and
would make Gomulka party secretary. After a hurried meeting of the
Soviet Presidium on October 18th, Soviet troops and naval contingents
began to converge on Poland, and Khrushchev, Molotov, Kaganovich, and
Mikoyan burst into the Polish Central Committee session of October 19th
just as it began. The presence of that rigid Stalinist Molotov, who had
been dismissed as foreign secretary in June, was significant of the
precarious decline of Khrushchev's position in the Kremlin.
Khrushchev, however,
acted as Soviet
spokesman at the session in the Belvedere Palace. He was violent and
bellicose, calling Gomulka a "traitor" and threatening dire
consequences if the old Politburo, including Rokossovsky, was not
reinstated. Ochab, still Polish secretary, was firm, and ordered the
immediate halt of Soviet troop advances, or all negotiations would be
ended and the Poles would take the consequences. This meant resistance
to the Russians by the tough, well-armed Polish Security Corps.
Khrushchev stopped his troop movements, the Russians withdrew, and the
session of the Polish Central Committee finished its work, electing a
new non-Soviet Politburo which excluded Rokossovsky and made Gomulka
secretary. The latter in the course of the discussions with Khrushchev
had indicated that his liberalization would extend only to domestic
affairs and would not injure Polish-Soviet "friendship" or the Warsaw
Pact. In his speech to the committee, Gomulka sought to reconcile
nationalist Communism with Polish-Soviet friendship, and made a severe
attack on the "cult of personality" with its hideous atrocities under
the Stalinist regime. Rokossovsky resigned as defense minister and
returned to Russia with more than thirty other Soviet high military
officers in November.
Khrushchev
publicly yielded in
the Polish crisis on October 23rd when he issued a statement that he
saw no obstacles to relations between the two countries from the
committee's actions and that the Soviet troops would be withdrawn to
their bases. On the same day, he was taking steps to crush the parallel
crisis in Hungary.
The
troubles in the Magyar
state in the summer of 1956 took the same forms as in Poland, but
instead of being directed by the Communist party secretary, they were
directed against him. They appeared as agitations against the
indefatigable Stalinist Mátyás Rákosi and in favor
of the mild Imre Nagy, who had been premier in 1953-1955 as Malenkov's
choice and had been removed at Khrushchev's order. On July 18th
Khrushchev tried to deflate these agitations by ordering some minor
reforms and replacing Rákosi as party secretary by his deputy,
the uncouth and obstinate Stalinist Erno Gero. This simply intensified
the agitations, which rose to a crescendo in September, chiefly from
the meetings and resolutions of students, workers, and literary groups.
Some of their demands were successful, including, on October 19th,
abolition of the compulsory study of the Russian language.
On
October 22nd a meeting of
about 4,000 students discussing changes in university life became
diverted to political agitations and drew up "Sixteen Points" which
they tried to force Radio Budapest to broadcast. Omission of some of
the points, demanding a new economic policy, the withdrawal of Soviet
troops, free elections, freedom of the press, and reform of the
Communist Party, led to a mass demonstration on October 23rd. When Gero
refused their demands, the students began to riot, smashing to pieces
the huge statue of Stalin in the center of the city. The security
police killed several demonstrators, but when the regular Hungarian
troops were called to restore order they joined the agitators.
By
that time Soviet troops
began to move from fifty miles away, and arrived in the capital by 2:00
A.M. on October 24th; Mikoyan had preceded them. It soon became clear
that the Soviet tanks could not control the situation, because they
could be blocked by overturned streetcars or other obstacles and could
not subdue rioters in strong buildings: Mikoyan dismissed Gero and put
in, as party secretary, János Kádár, until then a
known opponent of the Stalinist group. By that time, October 25th, the
revolt had spread through Hungary under the passive eyes of the Soviet
troops. On the following day, Nagy, still in touch with Mikoyan, formed
a new government and negotiated a cease-fire. The Russian forces
withdrew from Budapest, and negotiations were opened between their
officers and the Nagy government for their withdrawal from the country.
By that time the whole Communist system in Hungary had collapsed;
unofficial elected groups had seized power throughout the country; the
secret police and the party had disintegrated; a revolutionary council
had taken control of the Hungarian Army, and Colonel Pál
Maleter, a leader of the revolt, had been made a major general and
minister of defense. Most significant of all, the one-party system had
been ended, and members of the revived non-Communist parties had joined
the Cabinet. On October 31st the official Soviet news agency, Tass,
announced that the Kremlin was ready to recognize the new government
and negotiate withdrawal of all Soviet troops from the country.
However,
as October ended,
large Soviet forces had begun to invade Hungary, crossing into the
country on numerous temporary combat bridges. On November 1st
Kádár, who had pretended to be one of Nagy's closest
supporters, fled from Budapest to the Soviet headquarters at Szolnok.
There he set up a new government under Soviet control. The same day
Nagy called to the United Nations, appealing for help and announcing
Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and its resumption of
neutrality.
In
the meantime, the Soviet
invasion was in full operation, overrunning the country and smashing
into Budapest before dawn on November 4th. Most of the resistance was
overwhelmed that day. As it collapsed, the Nagy government and their
families took refuge in the Yugoslav Embassy. The Yugoslavs, including
Tito, were obviously confused by Kádár's change of sides,
and accepted his promise of safe-conduct to their homes for Nagy and
his associates. However, when these people left the security of the
embassy on November 22nd, they were seized by Soviet forces and
deported to prisons outside Hungary. By that date the flight of
refugees from Hungary was in flood, despite efforts by the
Kádár government to prevent it. Many were killed as they
tried to pass the frontiers, but thousands escaped to the West, where
many of them were able to continue their studies in a new way of life.
The costs of the uprising were catastrophic. On the Hungarian side
there were about 2,800 killed, 13,000 wounded, and 4,000 buildings
destroyed, but tens of thousands were in exile or in hiding, the
country was shattered, and lay, as a conquered country, under the armed
forces of its oppressor.
The
unanticipated consequences
of Khrushchev's de-Stalinization efforts in eastern Europe were bound
to injure Khrushchev in the Kremlin power struggle. Indeed, they
brought him to the brink of final disaster early in 1957. As usual, the
shifts of power were indicated by changes in personnel. Kaganovich, who
had been removed from the government on June 5, 1956, was restored as
minister of building materials on September 22nd; Shepilov, who had
been Khrushchev's appointee as foreign minister in June, lost his other
post as secretary to the Central Committee on Christmas Day 1956. Above
all, on November 22nd, Molotov was made minister of state control, a
post which had budgetary functions in all parts of the state-controlled
economy and could have been built up into a state power, in opposition
to Khrushchev's party power, in the economic system. Moreover,
de-Stalinization ceased after July 1956, and even Khrushchev found it
necessary to praise the old ogre. On December 2 3rd Pravda
denied that there had ever been any Stalinism in the Soviet Union.
Eight days later, Khrushchev said, "We can state with contrition that
we are all Stalinists in fact." On January 17, 1957, at the Chinese
Embassy in Moscow, he said, "Stalinism, like Stalin himself, is
inseparable from Communism.... In the fight against the enemies of our
class, Stalin defended the cause of Marxism-Leninism."
For
Khrushchev, as for all the
Soviet leaders, the great issue was to prevent Titoism from spreading
into the Soviet Union and, if possible, to curtail its spread among the
satellites. Every effort was made to prevent knowledge of the "Polish
October" and the Hungarian revolt from reaching the Soviet people, and
the attacks on Tito and Yugoslavia were resumed. Tito struck back on
November 11th with the charge that Stalin had taken the domestic and
foreign policies of the Soviet Union to dead ends and that his errors
were not personal ones but intrinsic in the Soviet system of monolithic
authoritarianism. He was refuted in Pravda, a week later.
The
Hungarian invasion
destroyed much of the appeal of Communism to the Leftists of Western
Europe and the world; this had already been left in shreds by the
"secret speech." Even in the Soviet Union, university students and
intellectuals disapproved of the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Many
literary works written during the de-Stalinization phase in the spring
were published the following winter, when the tide had turned again.
Khrushchev struck hard at these groups and continued to do so for
several years, with the result that the alienation of Russian
intellectuals from Khrushchev became established. This was reflected in
the expulsion from the universities later in 1956 of hundreds of
students who refused to applaud the Soviet attack on Hungary. The
official Soviet line was that most disturbances of this kind arose from
the activities of foreign agitators of capitalist aggressors.
Simultaneously
with the Soviet
political and intellectual reaction after June 1956, came a series of
efforts to alienate the economic stringency: wages were raised, taxes
reduced on the poorest payers, social benefits were extended, and the
labor unions were urged to protect them; numerous projects in heavy
industry under the Five-Year Plan were slowed up and their resources
diverted to consumer goods. Most significant of all, there was a sharp
increase in the influence of state officials and a corresponding
decrease in that of party officials.
This
reversal was fully
evident in the Central Committee session of late December 1956, but the
following meeting, in February 1957, showed Khrushchev in an aggressive
counterattack. This took the form of suggestions for a drastic
reorganization of Soviet economic life toward a more decentralized
system. Undoubtedly this plan had considerable merit, but in
Khrushchev's eyes it had an additional advantage, since it would remove
much of economic life from the influence of the central state
ministries and leave it open to increased influence from local party
groups. He proposed the division of the Soviet Union into several dozen
economic regions, each under an economic council, or sovnarkhozy,
of diverse groups, and the devolution to these groups of the economic
functions of the majority of the economic ministries in Moscow. These
ministries would be abolished, along with the State Commission for
Current Planning (GEK) and Molotov's Ministry of State Control. This
would leave only the long-range economic planning agency (Gosplan) and
a few economic ministries at the center, with annual planning and most
execution left to the regional or lower groupings.
This
plan had real merits
which can hardly be covered here. Clearly, the growing complexity of
the Soviet economy, over a widely diverse terrain and people, could not
be operated efficiently by uniform regulations from the center.
Moreover, each economic ministry, because of the constant shortages of
resources, materials, and labor, sought to build up, within itself, its
own sources of supply and also had a constant urge to hoard equipment
and parts, even when they were not needed by it and were urgently
needed by enterprises of a different ministry in the next street or
district. This hampered expansion and also resulted in very expensive
cross-hauling of the freight of one ministry from remote areas at the
very time that a different ministry might be hauling similar resources
in the opposite direction. The serious overworking of the Soviet
railway system, a constant weakness in the economy, was intensified by
such needless hauling..
In
spite of its merits, the
anti-K group in the Presidium was unwilling to adopt this reform
because it would drastically weaken centralized state control and
strengthen localized party control in the Soviet economy. The state
hierarchy of Soviets had fallen into decay, partly because of Stalin's
use of the party and secret police, partly as a means to avoid use of
the fraudulently democratic Soviet constitution and of its federalist
features. As a consequence, the state hierarchy lacked effective or
flexible control down through its levels, while the party hierarchy had
these well developed. Much of the state's power locally was exercised
through the economic ministries, which Khrushchev now wished to
abolish. And because of his control of the party and through it of the
party press, headed by Pravda, Khrushchev could
keep up a
steady drum of propaganda for his economic reorganization. Every local
figure was for it, and it appeared to other rival leaders as an
anti-state move. Khrushchev, on the other hand, could make the
opposition seem "anti-party," with all the treasonable overtones Stalin
had given to that expression.
The
economic reorganization
law was passed on May 10, 1957, abolishing twenty-five economic
ministries (retaining nineteen) and devolving their functions to
twenty-nine regional sovnarkhozy; the State
Economic Commission
(GEK) was also abolished, leaving, as the only central economic
control, the State Committee for Long-Term Planning under Yosif Kuzmin
(a Khrushchev party official), who simultaneously became first deputy
prime minister of the Soviet Union. Shepilov was restored to the
secretaryship of the Central Committee, which he had lost in December.
These changes were pushed through by an alliance of the party, the
army, and all the forces of localism, both economic and state.
Khrushchev had won a great victory, which could make the party dominant
in economic life.
Having
failed to block
Khrushchev's economic plans, his rivals in the Presidium were reduced
to a last resort: they had to get rid of the man himself. On June 18th,
at a meeting of the Presidium, the motion was made to remove Khrushchev
as first party secretary. The discussion grew violent, with Malenkov
and Molotov attacking and Khrushchev defending himself. He was accused
of practicing a "cult of personality" of his own, of ideological
aberrations which threatened the solidarity of Communism, and of
economic mismanagement. It soon became clear that the vote was 7-4
against him, with Mikoyan, Kirichenko, and Suslov his only supporters.
He was offered the reduced position of minister of agriculture.
Khrushchev
refused to accept
the result, denying that the Presidium had authority to remove a first
secretary and appealing to the Central Committee. The members of this
larger group joined in the discussion as they arrived, while
Khrushchev's supporters sought to delay a final vote until his men
could come in from their party posts in the provinces. Marshal Zhukov
provided army planes to bring in the more distant and more reliable
ones. The discussion became bitter, especially when Zhukov threatened
to produce documentary evidence that Malenkov, Molotov, and Kaganovich
had been deeply involved in the bloody purges of 1937. Madame Furtseva,
who was, like Zhukov, an alternate member of the Presidium,
filibustered with a speech of six hours. Surprisingly, Khrushchev's
agent Shepilov spoke against him, but M. A. Suslov, the head of the
security police and the most cold-blooded killer left in the Soviet
Union, shifted to Khrushchev's side. Eventually there were 309 members
present, with 215 wanting the floor, over 60 actually making speeches.
When
the vote was finally
taken, Khrushchev's loyal supporters in the party hierarchy voted for
him solidly, and his removal, already voted by the Presidium, was
reversed. Khrushchev at once counterattacked. He moved and carried the
expulsion from the Presidium of Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich, and
Shepilov for "anti-party activities." Then came the election of a new
Presidium, from which Pervukhim and Saburov, the two strongest
supporters of a centralized, state-controlled economy, were also
removed. Pervukhim became an alternate member, but Saburov was dropped
completely. The new Presidium had fifteen full members instead of the
previous eleven, and nine alternate members instead of six. The old
alternate members, Zhukov, Furtseva, L. I. Brezhnyov, and N. M.
Shvernik, who had supported Khrushchev, were moved up to be full
members, joining the holdovers Khrushchev, Bulganin, Kirichenko,
Mikoyan, Suslov, and Voroshilov, while five loyal agents of Khrushchev,
led by Aristov and F. R. Kozlov, were added.
This
change of July 23, 1957,
was Khrushchev's most smashing personal victory and the most
significant event in Russia's internal history after the death of
Stalin. It led Khrushchev to a position of political power more
complete (except for the ambiguous position of the army) than Stalin's
had been, although it was clear that Khrushchev would never be allowed
to abuse his power the way Stalin had done..
Khrushchev
did not rest on his
oars. During the summer of 1957 he made notable concessions to the
peasants (especially the ending of compulsory deliveries from the
products of their personal plots), slammed down the lid on freedom of
writers and artists with a strict cultural directive of August z 8th,
pushed vigorously both the "virgin lands" scheme and the
decentralization of industry, and worked to curtail the growing
autonomy of the armed forces. On October 27th, while Zhukov was in
Albania, he was removed from the Ministry of Defense and, at the same
time, was dropped from the Central Committee because of unsatisfactory
cooperation with the party's political work in the army. The next few
months saw a twofold advance of party influence, on a lesser scale into
the army and on a greater scale, both directly and through the
intermediary of the revived trade unions, into the new regional
economic councils.
The
final cap of Khrushchev's
rise to power came in the spring of 1958. Following the elections and
assembly of the new Supreme Soviet on March 28th, Bulganin resigned as
premier and was replaced by Khrushchev. In the autumn, Bulganin, who
had cooperated so well with the new autocrat's rise to power, was
expelled from the Presidium and condemned as an enemy of the party.
This left Khrushchev as complete ruler of the Soviet Union, head of
both state and party, as Stalin had been, but resting his power more on
the latter than on the former.
In
the five years following
Stalin's death, military strategy in the Soviet Union underwent a major
debate almost as confused as the simultaneous debate going on in the
United States during Eisenhower's Presidency. On the whole, the range
of theories of war, both strategic and tactical, was much less in the
Soviet Union than in the United States, and changes have been much
slower. But the basic issues were the same.
The
orthodox military ideas of
the Russians, like everything else, had been stated by Stalin and were
not allowed to change, under the impact of new ideas or of new weapons,
until after his death. Thus Stalin orthodoxy regarded war as a struggle
between whole societies, each with its distinctive way of life, and
judged that the outcome would be determined by what was called the
"permanently operating factors." These factors emphasized the
characteristics of the society, such as industrial strength, morale,
level of training, and reserve forces. Other, "accidental," factors,
such as weather, surprise, ability of individual commanders (even
Napoleon), or the outcome of single battles, were regarded as of little
significance. Accordingly, the Russians had no faith in lightning wars
or strategic bombing or in new or, above all, "absolute" weapons. To
them, victory was achieved by destruction of the enemy's armed forces
by a series of blows and conflicts over a long time, during which the
permanent factors, especially the forces of industrial strength and
national morale, would be decisive. They regarded attacks on the
enemy's population, cities, or industry as wasted effort, except where
these could be directly linked to a battle. And each battle would be
determined by a balance of forces from all branches of the defense
services persistently concentrating on the enemy forces over extensive
time and space.
In
this outlook there was no
place for the nuclear bomb, for strategic air attack, or for
twenty-four-hour wars, and, accordingly, the American possession of the
A-bomb was largely ignored. Protests against its use, and the desire to
outlaw it, were undoubtedly based on the fact that it was an American
monopoly, but the Russian objection to city-bombing or to strategic
terror of the V-2 kind as ineffective and a waste of resources was
undoubtedly sincere.
Soviet
efforts to get the
A-bomb and the H-bomb and to build up a fleet of TU-4's were partly a
desire to possess what the enemy had, partly based on a desire to deter
our use of SAC against Russia, and partly derived from Stalin's
astonishment at the damage our strategic bombers had inflicted on
Berlin. ...
A
change in strategic thinking
arose in 1954 as a consequence of a debate among Soviet military
leaders over the role of surprise in military victory. The possibility
of a sudden American nuclear attack on Russia from the air had to be
examined. As a consequence of this dispute, the role of surprise was
considerably increased, although there was no general feeling that it
could be decisive or even that wars might be shortened as a result of
nuclear weapons. To this day the Soviet leaders still believe that
victory will go to their country after a long war of mass forces using
a balance of all arms and weapons. But they now include in this balance
of weapons nuclear arms at all stages and ranges. However, they do not
believe, as many Americans do, that strategic bombing can be decisive.
It is simply an additional arm added on to the older arsenal, and will
be used in war against military objectives primarily because wars are
fought with the military sectors of a society.
As
a consequence of these
views, the Soviet Union has no idea of being able to achieve military
victory over the United States, simply because they have no method of
occupying the territory of the United States at any stage in a war.
They hope to defeat the United States as a society by nonviolent means:
propaganda, subversion, economic collapse, and diplomatic isolation. If
the rivalry with the United States comes to the violent stage, they
have every hope that the Soviet Union itself will not be directly
involved, but can wear the United States down by fighting through third
parties, as in Korea. The Russians generally reject the idea of mutual
annihilation or the total destruction of all Civilization in war, and
insist that any war, however severe, will leave some remnant of the
Soviet Union surviving as victor on the field. They accept the
possibility of limited war, in a geographical sense, but have little
hope of any war limited to non-nuclear weapons, because this would be,
they feel, to their advantage and, accordingly, not acceptable to us.
Thus they are unlikely to use nuclear weapons first, although fully
prepared to resort to them once they are used by an enemy.
One
confusing consequence of
the Soviet discussion of the role of surprise in war was an effort to
distinguish between "preventive" and "preemptive" war. Because the
generals, planners, and staff theorists were convinced that the West
must be aggressive because of the "contradictions" of the capitalist
economic system, they were convinced that they were in danger of a
surprise attack by SAC. Their weakness in this aspect of war made it
unlikely that their retaliatory strike would be of decisive
significance, so they developed a theory of preemptive strike; this
said that they would counter-surprise our surprise attack by beating us
to the punch with a nuclear attack of their own. Such a "preemptive
strike" would be justified only on the basis of conclusive evidence
that we were about to launch a surprise attack, since our retaliatory
strike after their preemptive strike would still be very damaging to
them. The problem arises, however, as to how they can ever be sure that
we are about to attack them, and, failing that, how does such a
"preemptive" war differ from a "preventive" war, which the Soviet
abjures because it is unnecessary to them?
Soviet
military thinkers have
been very reluctant to accept any theories of nuclear deterrence or of
limited war under an umbrella of nuclear deterrence. Since war is a
struggle to the death by antipathetical societies, such societies will,
in war, use any weapons they have. Accordingly, the Soviet Union
believes that any general war involving the United States and
themselves would be a nuclear war in which their ground forces, with
tactical air support and nuclear weapons of all sizes and ranges, would
fight its way overland, against nuclear armed enemies, to occupy most
of Europe and possibly Asia.
They
believe that there are
three defenses against tactical nuclear weapons: (1) dispersal of their
own forces as widely as possible until the last moment before assault;
(2) contact as rapidly and as closely as possible with the enemy in
order to deter the enemy from use of nuclear weapons which would also
destroy its own forces; and (3) protection of as many of their troops
as possible under cover, usually in tanks. The first two of these place
great emphasis on rapid mobility of troops, and the third helps to
provide this. Accordingly, the Russians anticipate the use of many if
not entirely armored forces in overrunning Europe and very extensive
use of air transport of troops (with conventional planes, gliders, and
helicopters). Such mobility will allow Europe to be overrun rapidly,
creating a situation which, they feel, will make a victory for the West
impossible, while our strategic attack on the Soviet Union itself will
be reduced and eventually ended by strong defensive measures and
retaliation.
However,
such a war, which
would jeopardize the Communist way of life by threatening the Soviet
Union, its only accurate embodiment, is regarded by the Soviet leaders
as highly undesirable, and to be avoided at almost any cost, while
they, in a period of almost endless Cold War, can seek to destroy
"capitalist society" by nonviolent means or by local violence of third
parties. This theory of "nibbling" the capitalist world to death is
combined with a tactic which would resist "capitalist imperialism" by
encouraging "anti-colonialism." Such a change called forth, on the part
of the United States, a defensive tactic which shifted from Dulles's
insistence that the "uncommitted nations" must join the West to the
more moderate aim of keeping them from becoming Communist.
This
shift in aims, in
reference to the "uncommitted nations," occurred both in the Soviet
Union and in the United States and is of major importance in creating
the contemporary world. Stalin and Dulles saw the world largely in
black-and-white terms: who vv-as not with them was obviously against
them. Accordingly, the world must be either slave or free, each man
applying the former adjective to his opponent's side and the more
favorable, latter term, to his own group. They were enemies, but they
agreed basically that the world must be a two-Power system. This meant
that each was aggressive in terms of the "uncommitted nations" because
each insisted these must either join his own side or be regarded (and
treated) as an enemy.
The
great change which
occurred in the middle 1950'S was that both of the super-Powers had to
recognize that most of the "uncommitted nations" were too weak, too
backward, and too independent to be forced to be either capitalist or
Communist. They had to be something different, something of their own.
This view was forced upon the super-Powers, with perhaps greater
difficulty in Washington than in the Kremlin, but it was an aspect of
reality which had to be recognized. From it came the acceptance of
neutralism and the rise of the Buffer Fringe.
This
shift was a double one.
On the one hand it meant that the super-Powers' attitudes toward the
Buffer Fringe shifted from a basically offensive one to a basically
defensive one, shifted from an effort to get them to join one's own
side to an effort to keep them from joining the opponent's side. And at
the same time, it marked the first beginnings of ... recognition that
there are more than two alternative fashions for organizing a
functioning economic, social, and political system.... The acceptance
of diversity and of pluralism, by the inevitable failure of both
capitalism and Communism in the Buffer Fringe, has forced the West to
accept and apply its own, often-unrecognized, traditions. [Of course,
convergence of finance and monopoly capitalism with monopoly communism
was always the long-range goal of the Money Power, as William Gladstone
called them.]
Moreover,
the forcing of this
recognition upon both the Soviet Union and the West, in respect to the
Buffer Fringe, may have the consequence, in time, of forcing each of
these to accept it in respect to their internal systems. Here again
this would mark a great victory for the West, because the acceptance of
diversity and pluralism is part of the tradition of the West and is not
acceptable to Russia (whose traditions have always been basically
dualistic, seeing reality as a contrast between an unattainable ideal
of perfection and a horrible, sinful morass of ordinary
living—the imperfections of the latter being acceptable as a
necessary consequence of the unattainability of the former, with both
extremes being uniform and one). Such an acceptance will reduce the
tension of the Cold War by allowing each polar super-Power to develop
features of a mixed system which will make them approach each other in
their characteristics of organization, a development which is, of
course, already apparent to any unbiased observer. [It is important to
remember that the Cold War was in reality a myth. The soviet Union had
no intention of attacking the West and the West had no intention of
attacking the East. In the interim period billions and billions were
spend on armaments and the armament industries around the world grew
richer and richer through a contrived conflict that was not real, at
least at the top level of the power structures. The conflict between
the East and West was designed to scare the people of the world into
accepting a convergence of these two monopoly systems of authoritarian
power. The end result was to be a new Imperial Order and a New World
Empire run by an elite self-perpetuating oligarchies from the leading
nations of the earth.]
The
shift from dualism to
pluralism and from uniformity to diversity was forced upon the Soviet
Union in its most critical form by the rise of Titoism. This, of
course, was chiefly evident in Europe, where conditions of industrial
development make it more reasonable for the Kremlin leaders to expect
the Soviet example to be followed slavishly by non-capitalist states.
The same lesson should, however, have been learned, even earlier, in
Asia, because there it became evident to many observers that most
nations were neither able nor willing to follow either the Soviet Union
or the United States. This observation, however, was impossible under
Stalin because his ... theories of the nature of both capitalism and
imperialism made him regard the two as identical and thus to regard
colonial areas as being parts of the capitalist system.
[In
reality this was true.
Stalin was referring to finance and monopoly capitalism. These differ
greatly from free market capitalism. But it was also true of the
communist countries. They too had their captive colonies. An empire
cannot exist without colonies and people to plunder and exploit. The
Roman Empire was not the people of Rome. It was an authoritarian system
to rule and reign over people in a tyrannical way. Is the German
empire, the French Empire, the Spanish Empire, the American Empire any
different? The people in these nations and the colonies which the
governments preside over are being exploited through rigid tax
structures and regulations designed to create and maintain monopolies
and cartels.]
As
a consequence of these
intellectual errors, the Kremlin under Stalin was prepared to see the
fringes of Asia either continuing as colonial areas or breaking away
from European domination to become Communist zones, but it did not see
the possibility of them becoming non-Communist and non-colonial
independent states. This meant that where Stalin intervened in certain
areas of Asia he intervened on behalf of the microscopic Communist
parties and rebuffed the local native, nationalist, anti-colonialist
groups. Khrushchev, as we shall see, did the opposite.
Stalin's
policy was quite
bankrupt even before his death, and it was thus fairly easy for his
successors to abandon it and to adopt a more feasible policy of
Communist cooperation with local anti-colonial (and thus largely
anti-Western) forces to detach them, as new, independent, but still
non-Communist, nations from the West. The Soviet assistance such new
nations was largely economic, although the limited productivity of the
Soviet Union's own economic system, especially in food, made any
substantial foreign aid to neutral nations a considerable burden on the
Soviet Union itself. For this reason much of the burden of such foreign
aid was pushed onto the Soviet satellite states, especially
Czechoslovakia.
This
shift in the Soviet
attitude toward neutralism was helped by Dulles's refusal to accept the
existence of neutralism. His rebuffs tended to drive those areas which
wanted to be neutral into the arms of Russia, because the new nations
of the developing Buffer Fringe valued their independence above all
else. The Russian acceptance of neutralism may be dated about 1954,
while Dulles still felt strongly adverse to neutralism four or even
five years later. This gave the Soviet Union a chronological advantage
which served in some small degree to compensate for its many
disadvantages in the basic struggle to win the favor of the neutrals.
While
these changes were
occurring, the strategic debate in the Soviet Union continued. In this
subject also, the fact that the Soviet Union was straining its economic
resources was of great importance. The demands of the unsuccessful
Soviet agricultural program made it necessary to put more and more
manpower into agriculture at the very time that the demands of the
defense effort and the civilian economy (and the rampant waste and
inefficiency in the Soviet system) were increasing the demands for
manpower in industry. Moreover, the heavy casualties of the period
1928-1945 from purges and warfare had reduced the population figures
and the birthrate to such a degree that the Soviet population figures,
even in 1970, would be tens of millions below normal. The only source
from which such demands for manpower could be met was in the
conventionally armed units of the Soviet defense forces.
As
a consequence of these
conditions, the Soviet defense strategy debate from 1955 onward took a
form somewhat parallel to that going on in the United States; that is,
some of the political leaders, including Khrushchev, began to force
upon the Soviet military leaders a shift in emphasis from mass
conventional forces toward greater reliance upon strategic bombers and
missiles. Khrushchev's version of the Eisenhower "New Look," in which
the latter's "Bigger bang for a buck" was played by a Soviet version of
"More rubble for a ruble," was adopted by Soviet Chief of Staff Marshal
Sokolovsky and, less vigorously, by Defense Minister Marshal
Malinovsky. The former's view was stated in a widely read book,
Military Strategy, published in Moscow in September 1962 [Edited by V.
D. Sokolovsky and published by Frederick A. Praeger, New York, 1963.]
but it is quite clear that the military leaders were prepared to yield,
slowly, to Khrushchev and other political leaders. The net result seems
likely to be a mixed one, somewhat similar to the similar struggle in
the United States. The chief difference is that Soviet production and
wealth is so much less than that of the United States that all such
critical decisions must be made within much narrower parameters.
In
spite of these limitations
of resources and demonstrations of inexperience and lack of competence
parallel to that of the United States, the impact of the super-Powers
was tremendous, especially in eastern and southern Asia and in the Near
East.
Chapter 70—The Cold War in Eastern and
Southern Asia, 1950-1957
In
the Far East, as a
consequence of the Yalta Conference, the Soviet government decided that
the chief feature of its policy in the postwar period would be public
collaboration with the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. This
non-Communist area was to be held within limits by Soviet control,
through local Communist groups, of various peripheral areas of which
the chief would be Korea, Outer Mongolia, Sinkiang, possibly Manchuria,
and some portions of Southeast Asia. Soviet control of Korea was
envisaged as a threat to Japan as much as a buffer on Nationalist
China. [The secret agreements at Yalta which created the Great
Power’s spheres of influence stated that Mao would be allowed to
take over China.]
This
Soviet attitude toward
China was reflected in the Sino-Soviet Treaty of August 14, 1945, which
obtained Chiang's consent to the concessions which had been made, on
his behalf, by Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta. The most significant
section of the agreement was in Molotov's note of the same day which
promised that the Soviet Union's moral and material support "be
entirely given to the National government as the central government of
China" and promised to end any Soviet support of the Chinese Communists
in Sinkiang, since it "has no intention of interfering in the internal
affairs of China." As implementation of this agreement, Stalin summoned
the Chinese Communists to Moscow, told them that "the uprising in China
had no prospects and that the Chinese comrades should seek a modus
vivendi
with Chiang Kai-shek, that they should join the Chiang government and
dissolve their army." The Chinese Communists agreed, but returned to
China to continue their struggle against the Nationalist government.
Only when that struggle was achieving its final success, four years
later, did Stalin accept a Communist regime in China and seek to bring
it under his influence by means of the Red Chinese-Soviet treaty of
February 14, 1950. [Of course this is the standard U. S. State
Department propaganda line. The exact opposite is true. That is why
Chiang Kai-shek was not invited to Yalta. The documents he was given
were falsified to pretend that Russia would support him. The exact
opposite was true. Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin had devised an
elaborate scheme to defeat Chiang Kai-shek and his forces and create a
communist government to rule China.]
The
lack of Soviet support for
the Chinese Communists in the period of their final victory does not
mean that the Russians were completely loyal to their commitments with
Chiang Kai-shek. They fully expected him to remain the ruler of China,
but they wished to hem him in so that he would find it difficult to
cooperate with the United States in any anti-Soviet policy in eastern
Asia. Accordingly, they not only expected the Communists to remain
dominant in Sinkiang; they were also eager to see them take over an
additional zone or buffer belt in northwestern China and in Manchuria.
For this reason, the Soviet forces, in violation of the treaty of 1945,
yielded parts of Manchuria to Communist rather than to Nationalist
Chinese forces as they withdrew from that province. [This indicated the
true designs of Soviet Union and the true nature of the secret
agreements that were reached at Yalta. In addition, Stalin was secretly
helping the communist forces of Mao solidify their control over China.]
Stalin's
real concern in the
Far East was with Japan, which he feared might become an aggressive and
militarized agent of the United States. He wished to participate in the
military administration of Japan but was excluded by ... MacArthur.
There can be little doubt that the Kremlin under Stalin was much more
concerned with getting a Communist Japan than a Communist China, and
hoped to see the former reduced to economic and social chaos as a step
on the way to a Communist Party victory there. All these hopes were
frustrated. The growing prosperity of Japan, and especially the success
of Ladejinsky's agrarian reforms, steadily reduced the influence of
Communism, with the result that the Communist Party of Japan obtained
less than 3 percent of the vote in the parliamentary elections of
October 1952 and lost all of its twenty-two seats in the Diet. [This is
not true. Stalin knew that Japan was not in his future sphere of
influence, while China had been given to the Communist Empire.]
As
protection against such an
eventuality, Stalin insisted on the total demilitarization of Japan,
the breakup of the industrial complexes like Mitsui, and possession or
domination of surrounding areas such as south Sakhalin Island, the
Kuriles, and Korea. The decartelization of Japan was never seriously
considered by the MacArthur regime, and the demilitarization, although
guaranteed by the new Japanese constitution, was abandoned by MacArthur
in the name of Japanese defense needs, beginning in December 1950.
These
defeats in Japan made it
all the more urgent that Stalin get control of all of Korea, but here
again he met a resounding defeat which largely destroyed Soviet
prestige in the Far East. The vital event in this process was the need
for Soviet-dominated North Korea to call for Red Chinese help to bail
it out of the dangerous situation to which the Moscow-encouraged attack
on South Korea had brought it.
Southeast Asia
Stalin's
disappointments in
the Far East were also extended to Southeast Asia. This area forms the
triangle between the great land masses of India, China, and Australia.
It is a jumble of islands and peninsulas occupied by a jumble of
peoples of diverse origins and cultures. The indigenous peoples with
their animistic religions have been subjected to cultural, religious,
and political intrusions of very diverse characteristics. The chief of
these intrusions have been those from India and China, a somewhat later
Muslim influence from the West, and finally, in recent centuries, the
political and commercial influence of Europe and America. For
generations there has been persistent Chinese immigration from the
north.
By
1939 there was only one
independent state in southeast Asia: Siam (Thailand), left as a buffer
between the British areas of Burma and the Malay States to the west and
French Indochina in the eastern portion of the Malay Peninsula.
Southward of the peninsula, in a great sweep eastward to New Guinea,
were the multitudinous islands of Indonesia, ruled by the Netherlands
from Batavia on the island of Java. To the north of these islands were
the Philippines, still under American administration in 1939. Between
Java and the Philippines, the great mass of the island of Borneo had a
fringe of British dependencies (Sarawak, Brunei, and North Borneo)
along its northern coast, while, far to the east, the eastern half of
Timor was under Portuguese administration. Thus all Southeast Asia,
except Thailand, was under the colonial domination of five Western
states in 1939.
The
interest of these imperial
Powers in Southeast Asia was chiefly strategic and economic.
Strategically, these lands lay athwart the waters joining the Pacific
with the Indian Ocean, a situation symbolized by the great British
naval base of Singapore, at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula,
between Sumatra and Borneo. Economically these areas produced
substantial qualities of tin, rubber, petroleum, bauxite, and other
products. More significant, perhaps, from the Chinese point of view,
many parts of the Malay Peninsula were fertile, were substantially
underpopulated, and exported great quantities of rice (especially from
Burma).
Western
prestige in Malaysia
was irretrievably damaged by the Japanese conquests of the Philippines,
the Dutch Indies, and Malaya in 1942, so that the reestablishment of
the colonial Powers after the Japanese collapse in 1945 was very
difficult. Burma and the Philippines were granted their independence by
Great Britain and the United States, respectively, soon after the war's
end. French Indochina emerged from the Japanese occupation as the three
states of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, each claiming independence,
while Java claimed sovereignty over the whole Netherlands East Indies
as a newly independent state of Indonesia. Efforts by the European
Powers to restore their prewar rule led to violent clashes with the
supporters or independence. These struggles were brief and successful
in Burma and Indonesia, but were very protracted in Indochina. Burma
became an independent state in 1948, followed by Indochina in 1949, by
Malaya in 1957, and by Singapore (under a special relationship) in
1959. Controversy and intermittent fighting between Indonesia and the
Dutch over western New Guinea continued until 1962, when American
pressure persuaded the Netherlands to yield, but left Indonesia, led by
Achmed Sukarno, unfriendly to the West.
In
all these areas, native
nationalists were inclined to the political Left, if for no other
reason than the fact that the difficulties of capital accumulation and
investment to finance economic improvements could be achieved only
under state control. But such independent Socialism merged into other
points of view which were clearly Communist. In some cases, such
Communism may have been ideological, but in most cases it involved
little more than the desire to play off the Soviet Union or Red China
against the Western imperialist Powers.
The
Communists of Southeast
Asia were thus Communists of convenience and tactical maneuver, and
originally received little support from the Soviet Union because of
Stalin's well-known reluctance to engage in political adventures in
areas where he could not dominate the armed forces. But in February
1948, the new Cominform sponsored a Southeast Asia youth conference at
Calcutta where armed resistance to colonialism was demanded. A
Communist revolt in the Philippines had already begun and was joined,
in the course of 1948, by similar uprisings in Burma, Indonesia, and
Malaya. Most of these revolts took the form of agrarian agitations and
armed raids by Communist guerrilla jungle fighters. Since these
guerrillas operated on a hit-and-run basis and had to live off the
local peasantry, their exploitation of peasant life eventually made
them decreasingly welcome to this very group for whom they pretended to
be fighting. In the Philippines the Hukbalahap rebels were smashed in
1953 by the energetic and efficient government of President Ramon
Magsaysay. In Indonesia, Sukarno repressed the insurrection and
executed its leaders. In Malaya, where the Communists were almost
entirely from the Chinese minority, these rebels were systematically
hunted down and destroyed by British troops in long-drawn jungle
combat. In Burma, the long Chinese frontier provided a refuge for the
rebels, and they were not eliminated until 1960.
The
real problem was
Indochina. There the situation was complex, the French Army was
uncompromising, and Communist leadership was skillful. As a result, the
struggle there became part of the Cold War and contributed to a vv7orld
crisis. The Malay Peninsula as a whole is dominated by a series of
mountain ranges, with their intervening rivers, running southward from
Chinese Yunnan. These rivers fan out, in the south, into fertile
alluvial deltas which have attracted invaders of Mongolian type from
the less-hospitable north throughout history. Even today they produce
surplus food for undemanding peoples. From west to east the chief
rivers are the Irrawaddy, the Salween, the Menam, the Mekong, and the
Red River. Following this geographical pattern, political units have
tended to fall into similar north-south strips with Burma and
south-thrusting Malaya in the west, Thailand in the center, Laos and
Cambodia in the Mekong drainage, and Tonkin with Annam in the east.
Indochina
brought considerable
wealth to France, so that in the late 1930'5 the Banque de l'Indochine
spawned in France an influential political group, who played a major
role in the defeatism of 1940 and the subsequent collaboration. After
the Japanese withdrawal in 1945, the Paris government was reluctant to
see this wealth, chiefly from the tin mines, fall into the hands of
Japanese-sponsored native groups, and, by 1949, decided to use force to
recover the area.
Opposed
to the French effort
was Ho Chi Minh, a member of the French Communist Party since its
founding in 1920, who had subsequently studied in Moscow and had been
leader of the anti-colonial agitations of the Indochinese Communist
Party since 1931. Ho had set up a coalition government under his Viet
Minh Party and proclaimed independence for Vietnam (chiefly Tonkin and
Annam) in 1945, while French troops, in a surprise coup, seized Saigon
in the south. Unfortunately for Ho, he obtained no support from the
Kremlin. The French Communist Party was at that time a major element in
the French coalition government, with its leader, Maurice Thorez,
holding the office of vice-premier. Stalin had no wish to jeopardize
the Communist chances to take over France by his support for a remote
and minor Communist like Ho Chi Minh. In fact, Thorez signed the order
for military action against Ho's Republic of Vietnam. At first Ho
sought support from the United States and from Chiang Kai-shek, but,
after the establishment of Red China in 1949, he turned to that new
Communist state for help. Mao's government was the first state to give
Vietnam diplomatic recognition (January 1950), and at once began to
send military supplies and guidance to Ho Chi Minh. Since the United
States was granting extensive aid to France, the struggle in Vietnam
thus became a struggle, through surrogates, between the United States
and Red China. In world opinion this made the United States a defender
of European imperialism against anti-colonial native nationalism.
During
this turmoil,
independent neutralist governments came into existence in the interior,
with Laos to the north and Cambodia to the south. Both states accepted
aid from whoever would give it, and both were ruled by an unstable
balance of pro-Communists, neutralists, and pro-Westerners. The balance
was doubly unstable because all three groups had armed supporters. On
the whole, the neutralist group was the largest, and the pro-Western
was the smallest, but the latter could obtain support from America's
wealth. The decisive influence in the 1950's, however, was that the
Communists, following the death of Stalin, were prepared to accept and
support neutralism years before Dulles could get himself to condone it,
a situation which gave considerable advantages to the extreme Left.
The
intensity of the struggle
in Vietnam increased fairly steadily in , a situation which gave
considerable the years following 1947. The creation of the Cominform
and the subsequent Communist withdrawal from the coalition governments
of Europe, including France, freed the Kremlin to support anti-colonial
movements in Europe's overseas territories. At the same time, the
reestablished French Army was left with a wounded pride which became,
in some cases, a neurotic drive to wipe out the stains of 1940 1942 by
subsequent victories in colonial wars. The growing aggression of
Communist China and Dulles's fantasies about liberation all contributed
to build the Indochina confusion into a flaming crisis. The final step
came from the Korean truce of 1953 which freed Red China's hands for
more vigorous action in the southeast. The defeat of the Communist
risings of 1948 elsewhere in Malaysia turned the new Chinese activities
full into Indochina, which had an open frontier for passage of Chinese
Communist supplies and advisers.
This
intensification of
Chinese-supported Communist activities in Vietnam in 1953-1954 was ...
just entering the post-Stalin "thaw" and already moving toward the
"Geneva spirit" of 1955. At the same time, the readiness of Dulles and
the French Army to force a showdown in Vietnam was equally unacceptable
to the British and to many persons in divided France. Out of these
confusions came, on February 18, 1954, a Soviet suggestion for a
conference on Indochina to be held at Geneva in April.
By
the early months of 1954,
the Communist guerrillas were in control of most of northern Indochina,
were threatening Laos, and were plaguing the villages of Cochin-China
as far south as Saigon. About 200,000 French troops and 300,000
Vietnamese militia were tied in knots by about 335,000 Viet Minh
soldiers and guerrillas. France was being bled to death, both literally
and financially, with little to show for it, but the French Army was
obstinate in its refusal to accept another defeat.
The
French strong point at
Dien Bien Phu w as invested by Viet Minh on March 13, 1954, and by the
end of the month its outer defenses were crumbling. The French chief of
staff, General Ely, flew to Washington and found Dulles willing to risk
an all-out war with Red China by authorizing direct American
intervention in Indochina. As usual, Dulles thought that wonders could
be achieved by an air strike alone against the besiegers of Dien Bien
Phu, where the conflict increased in intensity daily. For a few days
the United States, at Dulles's prodding, tottered "on the brink of
war." Dulles proposed "a united action policy" which he described in
these terms: "If Britain would join the U.S. and France would agree to
stand firm,... the three Western states could combine with friendly
Asian nations to oppose Communist forces on the ground just as the U.N.
stepped in against the North Korean aggression in 1950 . . . and if the
Chinese Communists intervene openly, their staging bases in south China
[will] be destroyed by U.S. air power...."
President
Eisenhower agreed,
but his calls to Churchill and Eden found the British government
opposed to the adventure. The foreign secretary hastened to point out
that the Sino-Soviet Treaty of 1950 bound Russia to come to the
assistance of China if it were attacked by the United States as Dulles
contemplated. Discussion at Geneva, said Eden, must precede any such
drastic action.
Few
international conferences
have taken place amid such external turmoil as the Far Eastern Geneva
Conference of April 25-July 20, 1954. During it, two American aircraft
carriers, loaded with atomic weapons, were cruising the South China
Sea, awaiting orders from Washington to hurl their deadly bombs at the
Communist forces besieging the 15,000 exhausted troops trapped in Dien
Bien Phu. In Washington, Admiral Radford was vigorously advocating such
aggressive action on a generally reluctant government. In Paris, public
outrage was rising over Indochina where the French had expended 19,000
lives and $8 billion without improving matters a particle. At Geneva,
delegates from nineteen nations were talking and stalling to gain as
much as possible without open warfare. The fall of Dien Bien Phu on May
7th opened a vigorous debate in the French Assembly and led to the fall
of Premier Joseph Laniel's government, the eighteenth time a Cabinet
had been overturned since the end of World War II in 1945. The new
prime minister, Pierre Mendes-France, promised a cease-fire in
Indochina or his own retirement within thirty days. He barely made the
deadline.
The
Indochinese settlement of
July 20, 1954 was basically a compromise, some of whose elements did
not appear in the agreement itself. A Communist North Vietnam state,
with its capital at Hanoi (Tonkin), was recognized north of the 17th
parallel of latitude, and the rest of Indochina was left in three
states which remained associated with the French Union (Laos, Cambodia,
and South Vietnam).
The
new state system of
Southeast Asia was brought within the Dulles network of trip-wire pacts
on September 8, 1954, when eight nations of the area signed an
agreement at Manila establishing a Southeast Asia Treaty Organization
(SEATO). The eight (United States, Britain, France, Australia, New
Zealand, Pakistan, Thailand, and the Philippines) made no specific
commitments, but set up a council, to meet at Bangkok and operate on a
unanimous basis for economic, social, and military cooperation in the
area. By special protocol they extended their protection to Laos, South
Vietnam, and Cambodia.
The
Geneva agreement, in
effect, was to neutralize the states of Indochina, but neutrality was
apparently not acceptable to the Dulles brothers, and any possible
stability in the area was soon destroyed by their activities,
especially through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) seeking to
subvert the neutrality of Laos and South Vietnam. This was done by
channeling millions in American funds to Right-wing army officers,
building up large (and totally unreliable) military forces led by these
Rightist generals, rigging elections, and, when it seemed necessary,
backing reactionary coups d’état. These techniques
might have been justified, in the eyes of the CIA, if they had been
successful, but, on the contrary, they alienated the mass of the
natives in the area, brought numerous recruits to the Left, gave
justification for Communist intervention from North Vietnam, disgusted
our allies in Britain and France, as well as many of our friends in
Burma, India, and elsewhere, and by 1962 had almost destroyed the
American image and the American position in the area.
In
Laos the chief political
figure was Prince Souvanna Phouma, leader of the neutralist group, who
tried to keep a balance between the Communist-supported Pathet Lao on
his Left and the American-subsidized politicians and militarists led by
General Phoumi Nosavan on his Right. American aid was about $40 million
a year, of which about $36 million went to the army. This was used,
under American influence, as an anti-neutralist rather than an
anti-Leftist influence culminating in a bungled army attack on two
Pathet Lao battalions in May 1959, and openly rigged elections in which
all the Assembly seats were won by Right-wing candidates in April 1960.
In August 1960, an open revolt in behalf of the neutralist Souvanna
Phouma by Captain Kong Le gave rise to a Right-wing revolution led by
General Phoumi Nosavan. This drove the neutralists into the arms of the
Pathet Lao and to seek direct Soviet intervention. The SEATO Council
refused to support the American position, the Laotian Army was
reluctant to fight, and the America military mission w as soon involved
in the confused fighting directly. The American bungle in Laos was
repeated, with variations, elsewhere in southern and southeastern Asia.
In South Vietnam, American aid, largely military, amounted to about
two-thirds of the country's budget, and by 1962, when it was running at
about $400 million a year, it had reached a total of $2 billion. Such
aid, which provided little benefit for the people, corrupted the
government, weakened the swollen defense forces, and set up a chasm
between rulers and people which drove the best of the latter Leftward,
in spite of the exploitative violence of the Communist guerrillas. A
plebiscite in 1955 was so rigged that the American-supported Right-wing
candidate won over 98 percent of the vote. The election of 1960 was
similarly managed, except in Saigon, the capital, where many people
refused to vote. As might have been expected, denial of a fair ballot
led to efforts to assassinate the American-supported President, Ngo
Dinh Diem, and gave rise to widespread discontent which made it
possible for the Communist guerrillas to operate throughout the
country. The American-sponsored military response drove casualties to a
high sustained figure by 1962 and was uprooting the peasantry
throughout the country in an effort to establish fortified villages
which the British had introduced, with success, in Malaya.
These
errors of American
policy, which were repeated in other places, arose very largely from
two factors: (1) American ignorance of local conditions which were
passed over in the American animosity against Russia and China, and (2)
American insistence on using military force to overcome local
neutralism which the mass of Asiatic peoples wanted. The ignorance of
local conditions was well shown in the American bungling in Cambodia
and in Pakistan.
In
Cambodia a neutralist
regime was primarily concerned with maintaining its independence
between its two hereditary enemies, the Thai to the west and the
Vietnamese to the east. The American militarization of both Thailand
and South Vietnam was used by these countries to increase pressure on
Cambodia, which, in spite of its pro-Western desires, was driven to
seek support for its independence from China and Russia. This opened a
wedge by which Communist pressure from North Vietnam could move across
Laos and southward into Cambodia, between Thailand and South Vietnam, a
possibility which would never have arisen if United States aid had not
been used to corrupt and to militarize the two exterior states in the
trio. At the same time, North Vietnam, with a greater population than
South Vietnam (16 million to 14 million in 1960), has a deficiency of
food, while South Vietnam, like all the delta areas, is a zone of rice
surplus and thus a shining target for North Vietnamese aggression,
especially when the agricultural collapse of Communist China made any
food supply from the north almost hopeless.
In
the west, where Burma is
also an area of rice surplus, with much of the population dependent
upon the export of this commodity at a remunerative price, this factor
alone was sufficient to tie Burma into the Communist bloc. The collapse
of the world price of rice at the end of the Korean War left Burma with
an unsellable surplus of almost two million tons. Within the next three
years (1954-1957) Burma signed barter agreements with Red China and
Soviet Europe by which Burma got rid of over a third of its surplus
each year in return for Communist goods and technical assistance. These
returns were so poor in quality, high in price, and poorly shipped and
handled that Burma refused to renew the agreements in 1958.
Southern Asia
Farther
west, in southern Asia
(the correctly called Middle East, extending from the Persian Gulf to
Burma) American bungling also opened many opportunities for Soviet
penetration which the Communists generally failed to exploit with
sufficient skill to earn any significant rewards.
American
error in southern
Asia can be expressed very simply the key to that area was India; the
United States acted as if it were Pakistan. The reason for this was
equally simple, but should have been sternly resisted, and might have
been except for Dulles. India was determined to be neutral; Pakistan
was willing to be an ally of the United States. Dulles tried to make
Pakistan the key because he preferred any kind of ally, even a weak
one, to a neutral, however strong. But the choice undermined any
possible stability in the area and opened it to Soviet penetration.
From
the broadest point of
view the situation was this: The rivalry between the two super-Powers
could be balanced and its tensions reduced only by the coming into
existence of another Great Power on the land mass of Eurasia. There
were three possibilities of this: a federated and prosperous western
Europe, India, or China. The first was essential; one of the others was
highly desirable; and possibly all three might be achievable, but in no
case was it essential, or even desirable, for the new Great Power to be
allied with the United States. A strong and prosperous neutral in at
least two of the three positions would box in the Soviet Union and
force it to seek its needs in an intensive rather than extensive
expansion, and in an economic rather than a military direction. A
Soviet Union which was not boxed in would expand outward extensively,
and by military means as much as any others. It would seek its needs,
as it had done in eastern Europe in 1945-1948, by bringing more
resources, including manpower, under its control as satellite areas..
If
the Soviet Union were boxed
in by allies of the United States, it would feel threatened by the
United States, and would seek security by more intensive exploitation
of its resources in a military direction, with a natural increase in
world tension. If, on the other hand, the Soviet Union were boxed in by
at least two great neutral Powers, it could be kept from extensive
expansion by (1) the initial strength of such great Powers and (2) the
possibility that these Powers would ally with the United States if the
Soviet Union put pressure on them. On the other hand, in such a
situation, the Soviet Union would be likely to turn to intensive
expansion within these boundaries in economic and social directions,
not only from the demand within the Soviet Union but also because of
its own increased feeling of security from the existence of buffer
Powers between the United States and itself.
Some
solution such as this had
been directly seen by Marshall and Acheson in regard to China in
1948-1950 but had been destroyed by the aggressive Stalinism of Mao's
China and the errors leading to the Korean War. In the west the
possibility had been destroyed by the immediacy of Soviet pressure
which had shifted American emphasis from European Union to American
alliance with Europe and from economic revival there to NATO. And in
southern Asia the possibility had been lost by Stalin's early pressure
on Iran which led Dulles to regard Pakistan instead of India as the key
to the area.
The
necessity for choice
between these two arose from the partition of India before independence
in 1947. In India, as in Palestine and earlier in Ireland, partition
before independence received a strong impetus from the Round Table
Group, and in all three cases it led to horrors of violence. The cause,
in all, was the same: lines which seem to divide different peoples on
the map often do not do so on the ground, because peoples are
intermingled with each other, there are always third or even fourth
groups which belong to neither, and their positions are often marked by
separation in levels in a social hierarchy rather than by separation
side by side in geography.
In
India's case, the partition
was a butchery rather than a surgical process. Imposed by the British,
it cut off two areas in northwestern and northeastern India to form a
new Muslim state of Pakistan (cutting right through the Sikhs in the
process). The founders of the two states, Gandhi in India and Jinnah in
Pakistan, both died in 1948, the former assassinated by a Hindu
religious fanatic, so that the two new nations began under new leaders.
In the post-partition confusion, minorities on the wrong side of the
lines sought to flee, as refugees, to India or Pakistan, while the
Sikhs sought to establish a new homeland for themselves by
exterminating the Muslims in East Punjab. In a few weeks, at least
200,000 were killed and twelve million were forced to flee as refugees,
in most cases with almost no possessions. An additional problem arose
from the Indian princely states. Most of these joined the dominion
enclosing their territory, but two acute problems arose: in Hyderabad,
where a Muslim prince ruled over a Hindu majority, and in Kashmir,
where a Hindu prince ruled over a Muslim majority. Hyderabad was
settled when Indian troops invaded and took over the area, but Kashmir,
on the border of Pakistan itself, could not be settled in such a
summary fashion without precipitating war between the two dominions.
Fighting broke out, but was eventually suppressed by a United Nations
cease-fire team. At this writing, Kashmir still remains a cause of
enmity and controversy un-joined to either state.
The
death of Jinnah in 1948
left Pakistan, which was so largely his creation, in confusion. Its two
sections were separated from each other by 1,100 miles of India
territory, its boundaries were irrational, its economic foundations
were torn to shreds by the partition, raw materials were left separated
from their processing plants in India, irrigation canals separated from
their reservoirs, herds separated from their pasturage, ports cut off
from hinterland, and traders from their markets. Pakistan looked with
yearning on Kashmir, but at the same time feared the greater size and
population of India; forced by its insecurity to regard the army as the
chief representation of the state, it built its unifying ideology on
Islam at a time when belief in Muhammad's teachings was dwindling
everywhere. It had no recognized capital city, but began administration
from Karachi, and could not agree on a constitution until February
1956. By that time Pakistan was filled with corruption and unrest. Its
first Five-Year Plan for economic development was breaking down,
foreign exchange was lacking, and inflation with food-hoarding
threatened. The Five-Year Plan (1955-1960) failed to make any
improvement in living conditions, since its disappointing
2-percent-a-year increase in production was absorbed by an increase of
similar size in population. In October 1958, martial law was
established and the commander in chief, General Muhammad Ayub Khan,
became president and quasi-dictator as martial-law administrator.
In
the next four years
(October 1958-June 1962), under military rule, Pakistan was put on a
more hopeful course. A sweeping land-ref`7,rm program restricted owners
to 500 acres of irrigated, or l,000 acres of non-irrigated, land, with
the surplus distributed to existing tenants or other peasants. Former
landlords received compensation for lost lands in long-term bonds.
Extensive efforts were made to establish cooperative villages copied
from those of Yugoslavia, and to reduce the birthrate. The second
Five-Year Plan (1960 1965) got off to a good start with extensive
foreign aid, including that of the World Bank, the United States, a
European consortium, and increasing help from the Soviet Union. In
March 1962 a new constitution with a strong presidency (reserved for
three years to Ayub Khan) was announced, martial law ended, and
elections were held. But the precarious international position of the
country, going back to its original rejection of neutrality, continued.
This
rejection of neutrality
was based on a mixture of resentment toward India and Afghanistan, a
vague feeling of fellowship with other Muslim states of the Near East,
and a basic instability of political life. These impelled Pakistan
toward a more dynamic foreign policy than India and led it to
involvement in the Dulles network of treaties, including SEATO and
CENTRO.
This
network of treaties in
Dulles's eyes was aimed at the Soviet Union, but in Karachi it was much
more likely to be viewed in terms of Pakistan's enmities with
Afghanistan and India. This, in turn, tended to increase Soviet
influence in Kabul and in Delhi. The Kremlin made vigorous protests
against the Pakistan-Turkish Treaty of Cooperation of April 1954, the
Pakistan-Iraqi alliance of January 1955, the United States-Pakistan
negotiations for military cooperation of 1954-1955, and, above all,
against the Baghdad Pact of November 1955. The growing militarization
of Pakistan, not only from its domestic instability but from the advent
of American arms, led to a growing Indian concentration of its military
forces in the west. This in turn was interpreted in Pakistan as a
threat to Kashmir, and drove tension upward. At the same time,
Afghanistan, whose independence of Russian influence had been
guaranteed by the British position in India for over a century, found
itself, at the British withdrawal, exposed to increasing pressure both
from the Soviet Union and from Pakistan. The nature of these pressures
may be seen in the fact that a concession to France to explore
Afghanistan for oil in 1952 had to be canceled because of Russian
protests. On the other hand, American military aid to Pakistan was
protested by Kabul, and led it to accept Soviet aid agreements in 1954.
Afghanistan
was a
multinational, or rather multi-tribal, state in which the chief group
was the Pushtu. The creation of Pakistan in 1948 left almost half of
this language group in Pakistan, and Afghanistan at once began to
agitate for self-determination for the Pushtu. Success in this endeavor
would create a new Pushtunistan state which would absorb much of
western Pakistan and would extend from Soviet Central Asia to the
Arabian Sea. The Russians naturally supported these claims, to
retaliate against Pakistan cooperation with the United States and to
open a Russian outlet to the southern ocean. In counter-retaliation, in
1955, Pakistan tightened its control over its Pushtu areas and closed
the Afghan border, stopping all Afghan commerce to the south and
leaving Afghanistan almost completely dependent on Soviet outlets. This
opened the way to a great increase in Communist influence, including
that of Soviet satellites, in Afghanistan. These relations were sealed
by a state visit of Khrushchev and Bulganin to Kabul in November 1955.
From this came a Soviet loan of $100 million (of which $40 million for
arms) at 2 percent interest over thirty years. Large amounts of Soviet
arms and hundreds of Czech technicians began to move into Afghanistan.
For
the Soviet Union the
critical area in Asia was that on either side of the Caspian Sea. That
was the only frontier where no buffer state stood between the Western
bloc and the Soviet Union itself. This was a consequence of Stalin's
aggressive threats to Iran and Turkey in 1946, which had driven them
into alliance with the West, but it went far back in history to the old
Russian ambitions to reach the Persian Gulf and the Aegean Sea. Because
of the danger to the Soviet Union in that area, especially to the
Soviet oil fields of the Caucasus, the Kremlin was for a long time
reluctant to bypass the Turkish-Iran-Pakistan barrier to seek to
intervene in the troubled conditions of the Arab Near East. Those
conditions obviously provided ample opportunities for Soviet economic,
ideological, and political disturbances which could he injurious to the
West, especially to western Europe, which was so dependent upon Middle
East petroleum supplies. Stalin never was willing to intervene in any
area which could not be directly accessible to Soviet troops, and, once
his territorial ambitions in northeast Turkey and north\vest Iran were
defeated in 1946-1947, he left the whole Near East relatively alone.
This
condition continued
almost unchanged, in spite of domestic disturbances of a major
character in Iran and among the Arab States particularly Egypt. It was
not until the summer of 1955 that the new Khrushchev effort to exploit
the troubles of the Near East in order to build up local nationalism
against the West was made possible by the growing instability of
conditions in the area and was called forth by Dulles's persistent
efforts to organize the area on an anti-Soviet basis. Thus in this
area, as in southeastern and southern Asia earlier, the American
insistence on the non-committed nations adopting anti-Soviet lines
opened the way for the Soviet to pose as the friend of such nations by
supporting their neutralism.
In
Iran and Turkey, already
burned by Soviet fire, this effort was a failure, but south of this
barrier the situation in the Arab world was from Moscow's point of
view, far more promising. There is little doubt that the Soviet
decision to upset the apple cart in the Near East by selling arms to
the Arab States was a reprisal for Dulles's long-drawn efforts to get
the northern tier of Near Eastern states (Turkey, Iran and Pakistan)
into the Western bloc.
These
efforts began as far
back as May 25, 1950, when the Western Powers offered to sell arms to
the Near Eastern states themselves, if the recipients would guarantee
not to use such arms for aggression. Fortunately, nothing came from
this foolish offer, because the Arab states refused to promise not to
use any arms against Israel. In fact, they were very definite that they
would do just that as soon as they could untangle their own intra-Arab
squabbles. In the interval, Iran and Egypt had domestic disturbances
which created severe international repercussions.
Until
recent years Iran
remained a fairly typical underdeveloped Muslim country, but with
distinctive features of its own from the fact that it was not an Arab
but an Indo-European country and had an ancient heroic cultural
tradition of Persian origin which was distinctly different from the
Arab traditions of the Near East. It shared, however, the tribal,
patriarchal, pastoral, and poverty-stricken nature of the Near East,
and was included in a common geographic pattern by semi-aridity,
emphasis on animal husbandry, survival of nomadic life, and the fact
that its chief natural resource was oil.
Although
most of Iran's
inhabitants are Muslim, only about one in ten speaks Arabic as his
primary language, while over half speak Persian. The rest speak a
variety of dialects of which about a fifth are Turkic. Only about one
person in seven is literate, usually in Persian, using Arabic script.
Most persons know more than one language, and it is not uncommon to
speak one language in the family, write a different language, and pray
in a third.
At
the end of World War II
about 80 percent of the population were peasants, in spite of the fact
that geographic and social conditions made agriculture a most difficult
way of life. Only about one-tenth of the land was tilled (and only half
of that at any one time), while another tenth was used for grazing. The
rest, amounting to four-fifths, was almost entirely useless, being
either mountainous or arid. Moreover, the peasants who tilled the land
were much oppressed by heavy rents to absentee landlords who also
controlled, as separate rights, essential access to water. Only about a
seventh of the land was owned by the peasants who worked it, and that
was either more remote or of poorer quality. These burdens on the land
were often so heavy that peasants retained little more than a fifth of
what they produced. In consequence many peasants had to supplement
their incomes by work as laborers, as small traders, or by village
handicrafts. Generally the rigid categories of economic activities in
which we think did not exist in Iran, so that most people had a variety
of activities as peasants, herdsmen, traders, government employees,
laborers, and soldiers moving seasonally or intermittently from one
activity to another. Even the landlords were, as often as not,
government emplo;7ees, moneylenders, traders, or all combined.
This
fluidity of economic
functions was more than canceled out by social rigidity. Family and
personal relationships were rigid and hierarchical, and the former were
often tribal in nature. The whole of Iranian life was imprinted with
leader-follower characteristics of a very personal character, with
loyalty and honor two of the outstanding features of all human
relationships. Where these did not operate, human relationships were
precarious and filled with suspicion, so that many of the patterns of
life which form the modern world, such as political or public
relationships and impersonal business relationships, were very weak,
and, without stable principles, fell readily into nepotism and
corruption.
This
"leadership" principle in
Iranian social life supported a privileged ruling group, or elite,
which dominated the country. Made up of landowners and gentry, with
substantial interests in business (especially government contracts), it
was also the chief source of high government officials and of army
officers. The members of this elite, mostly resident in Tehran, have,
in most cases, powerful local interests of an economic, family, and
social kind in various provinces and are usually the leaders of these
districts. Between this elite and the peasantry is a small middle class
of businessmen, professional persons, bureaucrats, and educated people
who generally differ from the elite because they are less wealthy, have
few if any personal followers, and, lacking personal support in land or
family, are much less likely to be associated with local districts.
This middle class is the principal source of nationalist feeling; one
of the chief features of recent Persian life has been the way in which
the shah has shifted the basis of his support from the elite landed
group to this growing middle class and to those whose social position
is based on know-how and training rather than on wealth and family.
Chief roles in this shift have been played by the army and the agrarian
question.
A
century ago, political power
in Iran was concentrated in the hands of the autocratic shah supported
by the interlocking elite of landlords and army officers. At that time
the shah, in fact, was not Persian, but Turkic, the Qajar dynasty of
1796-1925. It was a period in which Persia was a zone of political
conflict between the imperialism of czarist Russia and that of
Victorian Britain. On two occasions, in 1907 and again in 1942, these
two Powers made agreements setting up spheres of influence in Iran.
Since these agreements were reached because of their common enmity
toward Germany, it was almost inevitable that these agreements would
break down and rivalry be resumed on the defeat of Germany in 1918 and
again in 1945. It was almost equally inevitable that Iran should seek
support from some outside Power against the joint or parallel
Anglo-Russian pressure, as it did from Germany before , before 1941,
and from the United States since 1946.
Iran's
ability to resist any
outside pressure was reduced by the general weakness and confusion of
its own governmental system. This was a personal royal autocracy
resting upon a feudalized substructure of tribal chiefs, great
landlords, and religious leaders, even after the establishment of a
constitutional government and a National Assembly (the Majlis) in 1906.
The strong role played by personal influence, especially that of the
shah, prevents the formation of real political parties or the
functioning of the governmental structure as a system of principles,
laws, conventions, and established relationships.
In
the days of his autocratic
power, before 1914, the shah sought to raise funds for his personal use
by selling concessions and monopolies to foreign groups. Most of these,
such as those on tobacco or sugar, were exploitative of the Iranian
peoples and were very unpopular. Of these concessions the most
significant was one granted in 1901 to William Knox D'Arcy for the
exclusive right to exploit all stages of the petroleum business in all
Iran except the five provinces bordering on Russia. The control of this
concession shuffled from one corporate entity to another until, in
1909, it came into possession of the new Anglo-Persian Oil Company.
This company established the world's largest refinery at Abadan on the
Persian Gulf and, by 1914, signed an agreement with the British
government which made it the chief source of fuel for the British Navy.
It gradually extended its activities, through a myriad of subsidiary
corporations, throughout the world and simultaneously came to he
controlled, through secret stock ownership, by the Britisi1 government.
At
the end of World War I,
Iran was a battleground between Russian and British armed forces. By
1920 the withdrawal of British forces and the Bolshevization of Russia
left the anti-Bolshevik Russian Cossack Brigade as the only significant
military force in the country. The chief Iranian officer in that force,
Reza Pahlavi, in the course of 1921-1925, gradually took over control
of the government and eventually deposed the incompetent,
twenty-eight-year-old Shah Ahmad.
Reza
Shah Pahlavi followed the
pattern of modernization established hy Kemal Atatürk in Turkey
but was constantly hampered by inadequate financial resources, by the
underdeveloped economic system, and by the backward social development
of the area. Nevertheless, he did a great deal of uncoordinated
modernization, especially in education, law, and communications. His
chief aim was to break down tribalism and localism and to establish
national loyalty to a unified Iran. To this end he defeated the
autonomous tribes, settled nomadic groups in villages, shifted
provincial boundaries to break up local loyalties, created a national
civil service and police force, established a national registration
with identity cards for all, and used universal conscription to mingle
various groups in a national army. One of his chief efforts, to improve
communications and transportation, culminated in the Trans-Iranian
Railway from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea, built in eleven years
(1929-1940) at a cost of about $150 million. Roads were constructed
where only local paths had existed before, and some effort was made to
establish industries to provide work for a new urban class.
All
these projects required
money, which was very difficult to find in a country of limited natural
resources. The chief resource, oil, was tied up completely in the
concession held by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later called
Anglo-Iranian or AIOC), with the inevitable result that it became the
target of the Iranian nationalist desire for additional development
funds. In this struggle the older elite of Iranian life, including the
shah, the army, and the landlords would have been satisfied with a
renegotiated deal with AIOC yielding additional funds to Iran, but the
newer urban groups of professional and commercial origin combined with
the religious agitators to demand the complete removal of foreign
economic influence by nationalization of the petroleum industry.
In
this division within Iran,
control of the situation gradually moved from the older elite to the
newer nationalist groups for a variety of reasons. The years of the
world depression, the financial crisis, and the Second World War
greatly intensified all the objectionable features of the AIOC system
and, at the same time, seemed to show that no new agreement with the
company could remedy these objections. Such a new agreement had been
made in 1933, but the situation became worse (from the Iranian
nationalist point of view). Accordingly, when the government in 1950
tried to obtain a new supplemental agreement, nationalist feeling rose
quickly against it and demanded complete nationalization of the oil
business instead. In June 1950, the shah put in as prime minister his
man, General Ali Razmara, formerly chief of the General Staff:, to
force through the supplemental agreement. Opposing groups introduced
nationalization bills in opposition to the government.
Gradually
the nationalization
forces began to coalesce about 3 strange figure, Dr. Muhammad Mossadegh
of an old, wealthy, landed family which had served the Qajar dynasty as
ministers of finance since the eighteenth century. Mossadegh was a
Westernizer with an earned doctorate in economics from a Swiss
university, a man of great personal courage and few personal ambitions
or desires, who was convinced that national independence could be
established and the obvious corruption of Iranian political life
eliminated only by the recovery of Iranian control of its own economic
life by nationalization of AIOC. Politically he was a moderate, but his
strong emotional appeal to Iranian nationalism encouraged extremist
reactions among his followers.
Long
and fruitless discussions
between AIOC and the Iranian government, with constant interference by
the British government led to stalemate. The company insisted that its
status was based on a contractual agreement which could not be modified
without its consent, while the British government maintained that the
agreement was a matter of international public law, like a treaty,
which it had a right to enforce. The Iranian government declared that
it had the right as a sovereign state to nationalize an Iranian
corporation operating under its law on its territory, subject only to
adequate compensation and assumption of its contractual obligations.
The
Iranian nationalist arguments against the company were numerous and
detailed:
1.
It had promised to train
Iranians for all positions possible, but instead had used these only in
menial tasks, trained few natives, and employed many foreigners.
2.
It had reduced its payments
to Iran, which were based on its profits, by reducing the amount of its
profits by bookkeeping tricks. For example, it sold oil at very low
prices to wholly owned subsidiaries outside Iran or to the British
Navy, allowing the former to resell at world prices so that AIOC made
small profits, while the subsidiaries made very large profits not
subject to Iranian royalty obligations. Iran believed that the profits
of such wholly owned subsidiaries were really part of AIOC and should
fall under the consolidated balance sheet of AIOC and thus make
payments to Iran, but as late as 1950 AIOC admitted that the accounts
of 59 such dummy corporations were not included in the AIOC accounts.
3.
AIOC generally refused to
pay Iranian taxes, especially income tax, but paid such taxes to
Britain; at the same time, it calculated the Iranian profit royalties
after such taxes, so that the higher British taxes went, the less the
Iranian payment became. In effect, thus, Iran paid income tax to
Britain. In r933 AIOC paid £305,418 in British taxation and
£274,412 in Iranian taxes; in 1948 the two figures were
£28,310,353 and £1,369,328.
4.
The payment to Iran was
also reduced by putting profits into reserves or into company
investments outside Iran, often in subsidiaries, and calculating the
Iranian share only on the profits distributed as dividends. Thus in
1947, when profits were really £40.5 million, almost £14.9
million went to British income tax, £11.5 million went to
reserves, over £7.l million went to stockholders (of which
£3.3 million to the British government), and only £7.1
million to Iran. If the payment to Iran had been calculated before
taxes and reserves, it would have been at least £6 million more
that year.
5.
Moreover, AIOC was exempt
from Iranian customs tariffs on goods necessary to its operation
brought into the country. Since it considered everything it brought in,
whatever it was, to be necessary, it deprived Iran of about £6
million a year by this.
6.
The company paid only a
very small portion of the social costs of its operations in Persia,
drawing many persons to arid and uninhabited portions of the country
and then providing very little of the costs of housing, education, or
health.
7.
The AIOC, as a member of
the international petroleum cartel, reduced its oil production in Iran
and thus reduced Iran's royalties.
8.
The AIOC continued to
calculate its payments to Iran in gold at £8.10s. per ounce for
years after the world gold price had risen to £l3 an ounce, while
the American corporation, Aramco, in Saudi Arabia raised its gold price
on demand.
9.
The AIOC's monopoly on oil
export from Iran prevented development of other Iranian oil fields in
areas outside the AIOC concession.
As
a consequence of all these
activities, the Iranian nationalists of 1952 felt angered to think that
Iran had given up 300 million tons of oil over fifty years and received
£105 million, while Britain had invested only £20 million
and obtained about £800 million in profits.
The
Iranian opposition to
nationalization was broken in March 1951, when the prime minister, Ali
Razmara, and his minister of education were assassinated within a space
of two weeks. The nationalization law was passed the following month
and, at the same time, at the request of the Majlis, the shah appointed
Mossadegh prime minister to carry it out. This was done with
considerable turmoil, which included strikes by AIOC workers against
mistimed British wage cuts, anti-British street riots, and the arrival
of British gunboats at the head of the Persian Gulf. Rather than give
up the enterprise or operate it for the Iranian government, AIOC began
to curtail operations and ship home its engineers. On May 25, 1951, it
appealed to the International Court of Justice in spite of Iranian
protests that the case was a domestic one, not international. Only on
July 22, 1952, did the court's decision uphold Iran’s contention
by refusing jurisdiction.
At
first the United States,
and especially its ambassador in Tehran, supported the Iranian
position. It feared that British recalcitrance would drive Iran toward
Russia, and was especially alarmed at the possibility of any landing of
British forces, since this would allow the Soviet Union to invade the
North Iranian provinces as provided in the Soviet-Iran Treaty of 1921.
However, it soon became evident that the Soviet Union, while supporting
Iran's position, was not going to interfere. The American position then
became increasingly pro-British and anti-Mossadegh. This was
intensified by the shift in administration from Truman to Eisenhower
early in 1953, and by the pressures on the American government by the
international petroleum cartel. At the same time, the American oil
companies, which had briefly hoped that they might replace AIOC in the
Persian area, decided that their united front with AIOC in the world
cartel was more valuable to them.
This
world oil cartel had
developed from a tripartite agreement signed on September 17, 1928 by
Royal Dutch-Shell, Anglo-Iranian, and Standard Oil. The three signers
were Sir Henri Deterding of Shell, Sir John (later Lord) Cadman of
AIOC, and Walter C. Teagle of Esso. These agreed to manage oil prices
on the world market by charging an agreed fixed price plus freight
costs, and to store surplus oil which might weaken the fixed price
level. By 1949 the cartel had as members the seven greatest oil
companies of the world Anglo-Iranian, Royal Dutch-Shell, Esso, Calso,
Socony-Vacuum, Gulf, and Texaco). Excluding the United States domestic
market, the Soviet Union, and Mexico, it controlled 92 percent of the
world's reserves of oil, 88 percent of the world's production, 77
percent of the world's refining capacity, and 7o percent of the world's
tonnage in ocean tankers.
As
soon as Britain lost its
case in the International Court of Justice and it became clear that
Iran would go ahead with its nationalization, Britain put into effect a
series of reprisals against Iran which rapidly crippled the country.
Iranian funds in Britain were blocked; its purchases in
British-controlled markets were interrupted; and its efforts to sell
oil abroad were frustrated by a combination of the British Navy and the
world oil cartel (which closed its sales and distribution facilities to
Iranian oil). These cut off a substantial portion of the Iranian
government's revenues and forced a drastic curtailment of government
expenditures..
To
deal with this situation,
especially to cut the military budget, Mossadegh, in July 195z, asked
for full powers from the Assembly. He was refused and resigned, but the
Ahmad Ghavam government which replaced him lasted only six days,
resigning under pressure of pro-Mossadegh street riots. Back in office,
Mossadegh obtained dictatorial power for six months. He broke off
diplomatic relations with the British, closed down nine British
consular offices, deported various British economic and cultural
groups, and dismissed both the Senate and the Iranian Supreme Court,
which were beginning to question his actions.
By
that time (summer, 1953)
almost irresistible forces were building up against Mossadegh, since
lack of Soviet interference gave the West full freedom of action. The
British, the AIOC, the world petroleum cartel, the American government,
and the older Iranian elite led by the shah combined to crush
Mossadegh. The chief effort came from the American super-secret
intelligence agency (CIA) under the personal direction of its director,
Allen W. Dulles, brother of the secretary of state. Dulles, as a former
director of the Schroeder Bank in New York, was an old associate of
Frank C. Tiarks, a partner in the Schroeder Bank in London since 1902,
and a director of the Bank of England in 19121945, as well as Lazard
Brothers Bank, and the AIOC. It will be recalled that the Schroeder
Bank in Cologne helped to arrange Hitler's accession to power as
chancellor in January 1933.
Managing
Mossadegh's fall in
August, 1953, was considerably easier, since he left his defense wide
open by an attack on the prerogatives of the Iranian Army, apparently
in the belief that the army would be prevented from moving against him
by his influence over the mobs in the streets of Tehran. But throughout
the Near East, street mobs are easily roused and directed by those who
are willing to pay, and Dulles had the unlimited secret funds of the
CIA. From these he gave $10 million to Colonel H. Norman Schwartzkopf,
former head of the New Jersey State Police, who was in charge of
training the Imperial Iranian Gendarmerie, and this was judiciously
applied in ways which changed the mobs' tune considerably from July to
August 1953. The whole operation was directed by Dulles himself from
Switzerland where he was visited by Schwartzkopf, the American
ambassador to Tehran, Loy Henderson, and messengers from the shah in
the second week of August 953.
Mossadegh
purged the army of
opposition elements without complete success in the spring of 1953,
going so far as to arrest the chief of staff on March 1st. In July he
sought to bypass the Assembly and demonstrate his irresistible popular
support by having all his supporters resign from the Majlis (thus
paralyzing its operations), and held a plebiscite in August to approve
his policies. The official vote in the plebiscite was about two million
approvals against twelve hundred disapprovals, but Mossadegh's days
were numbered. On August 13th the shah precipitated the planned
anti-Mossadegh coup by naming General Fazlollal1 Zahedi as prime
minister. and sent a messenger dismissing Mossadegh. The latter refused
to yield, and called his supporters into the streets, where they rioted
against the shah, who fled with his family to Rome. Two days later,
anti-Mossadegh mobs, supported by the army, defeated Mossadegh's
supporters in Tehran, killing several hundred. Mossadegh was forced out
of office and replaced by General Zahedi. The shah returned from Italy
on August 22nd.
The
fall of Mossadegh ended
the period of confusions which had ensued since the forced abdication
of Reza Shah in 1941. From 1953 on, the shah and the army, backed by
the conservative elite, controlled the country and the docile Majlis.
Two weeks after the shah's counter-coup, the United States gave Iran an
emergency grant of $45 million, increased its annual economic aid
payment to $23 million, and began to pay $5 million a month in Mutual
Security Funds. These payments reached a total of a quarter of a
billion dollars over five years. In return Iran became a firm member of
the Western bloc, joined the Baghdad Pact (Central Treaty Organization)
in 1955, and provided a close base for surreptitious actions (such as
U-2 overflights) against the Soviet Union. The Communist-controlled
Tudeh Party, the only political party in Iran with the established
doctrine and organized structure of such a party in the Western sense,
had been officially banned in 1949 but had supported Mossadegh from
underground, w here it was relentlessly pursued after 1953.
By
1960 the shah felt his
position sufficiently strong to try to pursue a policy of his own, and
began to shift his alignment from the older elite group of landlords
and army toward the more progressive groups of urban middle-class
professional peoples which had supported Mossadegh. The chief evidence
of this was an effort to adopt, more or less as his personal policy, a
program of agrarian reform which sought to restrict each landlord's
holdings to a single village, taking all excess lands over for
government payments spread over ten years and granting the lands to the
peasants who worked them in return for payments spread over fifteen
years. The shah's own estates were among the first to be distributed,
but by the end of 1962 over five thousand other villages had also been
granted to their peasants.
In
the meantime the oil
dispute was settled by a compromise in October 1954. The exploitation
and marketing of Iran's oil was taken over by a consortium of existing
petroleum companies from the world cartel and some American
"independents," with a 40 percent interest held by AIOC itself. The
previous disputes were compromised without too much difficulty once it
was recognized that both sides had a common interest in preserving the
world structure of managed oil prices in order to ensure substantial
incomes to both. The incomes to Iran were considerably increased,
averaging about $250 million or more a year.
The
oil crisis in Iran was
limited in scope and duration. Neither of these can be said of the
great and continuing crisis experienced by the Arabic Near East in the
twentieth century. The crisis of these countries was a crisis of the
system itself, the collapse of Islamic civilization culminating in the
disappearance of the Ottoman Empire which ruled over it in its later
stages. The Near East today is the wreckage of that civilization, and
as such presents problems far greater than the simple one of inadequate
natural resources. Rather, the problem is a triple one of resources, of
creating a workable and viable social organization, and of developing
patterns of belief, outlook, and feelings which have some constructive
value for human survival.
In
this colossal problem the
influence of the Soviet Union, or of the Western Powers, or even of the
Cold War conflict itself are relatively minor matters which could be
reduced to much less significance if the peoples of the area could get
themselves organized, both externally and internally, into some viable
arrangement of living patterns. The same problem is being faced
throughout the broad band of countries from Indonesia and Japan, across
China and India, throughout Africa, to Latin America; but almost
nowhere is the problem more acute, and apparently more hopeless, than
in the Near East. This arises from the area's strategic importance
between Asia, Africa, and Europe, its nearness to the Soviet Union, its
central position in the air routes and the water communications of the
world (symbolized by the Suez Canal), and its great significance in the
world's petroleum supplies.
The
broadest aspects of the
Near East's problems must be reserved to a later discussion dealing
with the general problems of the Buffer Fringe and the underdeveloped
areas. At the moment we must concentrate on the two most acute and
immediate problems of the area. These are Israel and Egypt.
These
two problems are working
within a background of five significant factors. First is the
continuing Soviet-American rivalry, which benefits no one in the Near
East. Second is the sordid and grinding poverty of Near Eastern life, a
poverty made up, in almost equal parts, of poor natural resources
(especially water shortages), wasteful and irrational social
organization, and hopelessly uncooperative and spiteful personality
patterns. Third is the shifting but perpetual dynastic and political
rivalries of the area among the Arab countries themselves. Fourth is
the almost incredibly misdirected interferences from the Western
Powers, especially the United States. And fifth is the dominant role
played by the armed forces in Near Eastern life.
Of
these five background
factors, only the last requires any amplification here. Wherever a
modern state structure appears in an impoverished environment, the
possession of arms is restricted to a small group and tends to bring
control of the whole society under the influence of those who possess
the arms. This problem becomes particularly acute in areas where other
countervailing factors, such as religion, family influence, or
traditional organizations are weak and where the social values of the
society place a high esteem on military prowess or violence. The Arabs
had always been warlike; by adopting Islam in the seventh century, they
acquired a religion which intensified this tendency. This was clearly
shown in the Saracen conquests of the Near East, North Africa, and
southwestern Europe within a century of Muhammad's death. Certain
restraints, however, were placed upon this militarism by other factors,
such as the religious elements in Islam and the powerful influence of
family and tribal loyalties. By the twentieth century the steady
dwindling of these alternative influences and finally the total
disintegration of Islamic society left militarism in a much more
dominant position. This situation is evident wherever Arabic influence
spread, including North Africa, Spain, and Latin America, so that today
the army is the chief political force all the way from the Persian Gulf
to Peru. We have already seen the chief example of this in Spain.
The
situation is roughly the
same throughout the Arabic Near East. This dominance by the armed
forces would not be so objectionable were it not that their leaders are
(1) ignorant, (2) selfish, (3) outstanding obstacles to any progressive
reorganization of the community, especially by their diversion of the
limited wealth available for social or economic investment, and (4) are
so lacking in military morale or competence that they provide almost no
protection for the areas which they are presumably supposed to defend.
Certainly any area needs some organized force of arms-bearing persons
to maintain public order and to protect the area from external
interference, but the incompetence of the existing armed forces from
Kuwait to Bolivia is so great that a superior degree of public order
and defense could have been achieved with a greater degree of stability
from a simple gendarmerie equipped with motorcars and hand guns than
from the expensive arrays of complicated and misused equipment which
have been provided for, or forced upon, the armies of this great area
from the United States, the West European Powers, or, (since 1955) the
Communist bloc.
Although
parliamentary
regimes, in imitation of Britain and France, had been established
throughout the Near East, as in much of the world, they never
functioned as democratic or even constitutional systems because of the
lack of organized political parties and of any traditions of civil and
personal rights. Political parties remained largely personal followings
or blocs, and political power, based on the arbitrary autocracy of
Semitic patriarchal family life, was also personal, and never took on
the impersonal characteristics associated with Western rule of law and
constitutional practices. The weakness of any conception of rules, and
of the material benefits which help rules to survive, made it
impossible for the Near East to grasp the conventions associated with
cooperation in opposition found in the Western two-party system,
parliamentary practices, and sports.
The
whole range of human and
universal relations of the Arabs was monistic, personal, and
extralegal, in contrast to that of the West, which was pluralistic,
impersonal, and subject to rules. As a result, constitutional and
two-party politics were incomprehensible to the Near East, and the
parliamentary system, where it existed, was only a facade for an
autocratic system of personal intrigues. It is no accident that
two-party politics functioned in the Near East only briefly and in two
non-Arabic, if Muslim, countries: Turkey and the Sudan. It is also no
accident that in most of the Near East, the chief method for changing a
government was by assassination and that such actions usually took
place in the most cowardly fashion (to Western eyes) such as shooting
in the back.
The
growth of militarism in
the Near East modified these political practices to some extent but
without changing them in any fundamental way. The parliament was
ignored or abolished, political groups and blocs were eliminated or
outlawed, often being replaced by a single amorphous and meaningless
party whose sole purpose was propaganda; and military administration
generally replaced civil parliamentary government. Most obviously,
perhaps, changes of regime now take place by military coups instead of
by rigged elections or by assassinations. Even the Sudan and Turkey had
their two-party parliamentary regimes overturned by military coups
d'état in
1958 and in 1960. Elsewhere factions within the officers' corps have
replaced parliamentary political parties as the significant units of
political conflict. Thus Iraq had military coups in
1936, 1941, 1958, and 1963. Similar events were frequent in Syria,
notably in 1949, 1951, 1961, and 1962.
That
the poverty, chaos, and
disunity of the Arab world was a consequence of organizational and
morale factors rather than of such objective obstacles as limited
natural resources is clear from the case of Israel. There, in less than
eight thousand square miles with no significant resources and hampered
by endless external obstacles, the Zionist movement has constructed the
strongest, most stable, most progressive, most democratic, and most
hopeful state in the Near East. This was possible because of the morale
of the Israeli, which was based on outlooks antithetical to the
attitudes of the Arabs. The Israeli were full of self-sacrifice,
self-discipline, social solidarity, readiness to work, cooperation, and
hopes for the future. Their ideology was largely Western, with a
devotion to science, democracy, individual respect, technology, and the
future which could match or exceed the best periods of the Western
past. All these things made them anathema to the Arabs, whose
hysterical hatred was not really aimed at the loss of Palestine as a
land but at the presence of the Israeli, whose qualities were a
refutation of generations of Arab self-deceptions and pretenses.
The
precarious balance the
British had tried to keep in Palestine between their promises to the
Zionists and their efforts to placate the Arabs were destroyed by
Hitler's determination to annihilate the Jews of Europe and the
conditions of World War II which made it seem that he would be
successful. The Jews, their supporters, and allies tried to smuggle in
any Jews who could be saved from Europe. Since there was nowhere else
they could go, many were smuggled into Palestine. British efforts to
prevent this, in fulfillment of their obligations to the Arabs under
the League of Nations Mandate, led to a kind of guerrilla warfare
between Jews and British, with the Arabs attacking the former
intermittently. This problem reached acute form when the conquest of
Germany opened the doors for surviving Jews to escape from the horrors
of Nazism. In August 1945, President Truman asked British permission to
admit 100,000 European Jews into Palestine, but his repeated requests
were refused. Ignoring such permission, large-scale efforts were made
to smuggle Jewish refugees into Palestine, where they could be cared
for by Jewish groups. Many of these were transported under frightful
conditions in overcrowded, leaky ships, which were often intercepted by
the British, who took their passengers to concentration camps in
Cyprus. From such actions came reprisals and counter-reprisals.
The
Zionist settlement in
Palestine was largely agricultural, the immigrants being settled in
close-knit village communities on lands, often semiarid lands,
purchased by funds raised by the World Zionist conference or its
friends and administered under the Jewish Agency for Palestine. These
organizations gave the Zionist groups, over several decades, the
political and administrative experience and the patterns of
self-sacrifice for a common cause which provided the functioning
political structure for the state of Israel as the British mandate for
Palestine was ended in 1948. The Zionist communal villages, under
constant danger of attack by Arab raiders, developed a mentality
somewhat like that of early American frontier settlements amid hostile
Indians. Each village developed a force of trained defense fighters,
its Haganah, with arms hidden in the village, or in a regional center,
for the day in which they must fight for their continued existence.
This Haganah organization subsequently became the Army of Israel.
British
raids on Zionist
centers to arrest illegal immigrants or to seize hidden arms, and Arab
attacks upon incautious Zionist settlements, soon led to reprisals and
counter-reprisals and to the creation of violent and bitter splinter
groups within the Zionist effort. The Jewish Agency did not have
absolute control over the Haganah and had decreasingly less over a
number of minute reprisal groups of which the chief were the extremist
Irgun Zvai Le'umi, with several thousand members, or the terrorist
"Stern Gang" of less than two hundred. The latter group had murdered
the British high commissioner, Lord Moyne, in November 1944, and later
assassinated the United Nations mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte of
Sweden, in September 1948.
During
the years 1945-1948,
the Jewish Agency sought to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, to
remove the rigid British restrictions on Jewish immigration and Jewish
land purchases, and to obtain an international loan to finance its
Jewish settlement policies. These were resisted, not only because of
Britain's desires to remain on amicable relations with the Arab states,
but also from the obvious lack of sympathy for the Zionist cause within
the British government, especially after Churchill's National
government was replaced by a Labour Party regime in 1945. The immediate
demand for admission of 100,000 Jewish refugees from Europe was
rejected by the British, and efforts to smuggle some of these in gave
rise to conditions of quasi-warfare between Britain and the Zionist
groups. A League of the neighboring Arab states which had been formed
under British sponsorship in March 1945 took as its chief aim the
destruction of the Zionist plans, and sought to block Jewish
immigration or use up Haganah arms by sneak raids on Zionist frontier
settlements.
When
the Labour government in
June 1946 refused the Zionist request for admission of the 100,000
refugees, and, instead, sought to arrest the members of the Jewish
Agency, the Irgun Zvai Le'umi in reprisal exploded 500 pounds of TNT
under the British headquarters in the east wing of the luxurious King
David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing almost a hundred persons. The World
Zionist Congress elections of December showed decreasing support for
more moderate figures like Dr. Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion. The
former won reelection as president of the World Zionist Movement by a
bare majority, and refused to offer his name for reelection as
president of the Jewish Agency. This increase in the extremist
influence within the Zionist movement made it clear to Britain that
peace in Palestine could be maintained only at a great cost which the
Labour government was unable and unwilling to pay. Support for the
mandate from the United States was unobtainable, since Washington
generally tended to favor the Jewish side, while the British, in spite
of their valiant efforts to appear impartial, clearly favored the
Arabs. Death sentences on Jewish terrorists, first carried out by the
British in 1947, merely intensified the violence, with the British
armed forces suffering about three casualties a week, one-third fatal.
In
April 1947, the British
sought to escape from the situation by appealing to the United Nations,
which voted in November to partition Palestine into two intertwining
Jewish and Arab zones, with an international zone in Jerusalem. The
Arab League rejected partition, and its members swore to resist it by
force, hy a "relentless war," according to a Cairo newspaper. This war
opened with Arab riots in Palestine against the UN vote at the very
time that the Jews were welcoming it. Arab irregulars began to enter
Palestine from Syria and Egypt as the British began to withdraw from
their long effort to administer the country.
This
British withdrawal from
Palestine was but one aspect of the general withdrawal of Britain from
its prewar world and imperial position. It was a consequence of the
general political weakening of Great Britain, its acute economic and
financial position in the postwar period and, above all, by the growing
preference of the ordinary British voter for social welfare and higher
living standards at home over the remote and impersonal glories of
imperial prestige abroad.
On
September 26, 1947, the
British announced they would withdraw from Palestine and that failure
to obtain a United Nations administration or any accepted Arab-Zionist
partition would not delay this process. However, the British were
determined not to hand over the administration to the only organization
available which was capable of handling the job, the Jewish Agency, and
as a result simply abandoned or closed down many public services and
destroyed or left many essential administrative records. This created a
chaotic situation in which the Arab League was unable to rule, the
United Nations and Britain were unwilling to rule, and the Jewish
Agency was prevented from taking over hy the retiring British forces.
At
the beginning of April
1948, small forces from Syria, Iraq, and Egypt entered Palestine to
support the local Arabs' efforts to prevent the Jewish Agency taking
control of the country. They were followed by the Arab Legion of
Transjordan, under British officers, which came in as soon as the
British mandate ended on May 14, 1948. Although the Zionists were
outnumbered and had inferior equipment, their courage, tenacity, and
persistence, combined with the mutual rivalries and divisions among the
five Arab groups, allowed the Israeli to establish and consolidate a
Zionist government in several areas of Palestine. During the interval,
financial support from American sympathizers allowed the Zionists to
rectify the arms disequilibrium, chiefly by purchases from
Czechoslovakia, which had-just joined the Iron Curtain bloc in March.
As
early as January, many Arab
families had begun to flee from Palestine, and by June this became a
flood. Many left voluntarily, encouraged by the unrealistic promises of
the Arab League to return them as conquerors after the total defeat of
Zionism, but a substantial number were uprooted and expelled by Zionist
retaliatory actions. Eventually, in spite of the Jewish Agency's
promise that Arabs would be welcome to continue to live in Israel if
they did not act to subvert the new state, the number of refugees
reached an estimated 652,000 persons. Most of these were settled in
camps along the frontiers in Jordan and in Egypt and were maintained by
international charity administered under the United Nations.
Efforts
to resettle these
unfortunates within the Arab States of the Near East were blocked by
these states, which refused to cooperate in any such recognition of the
changed situation in Palestine and which welcomed refugee discontent as
an instrument for stirring up hatred of Israel and the West among their
own citizens. Large numbers of the refugees eventually left these camps
and integrated themselves by their own efforts into the life of the
Arab States of the Near East, but birthrates in the camps were so high
that the total number in the camps decreased very slowly. In Jordan the
refugees who became assimilated were so numerous and so bitter that
they came to dominate that precarious state, were a constant threat to
the stability of its government, forced it to destroy its friendly
relations with Britain, which had founded it, and remained as an
explosive threat against Israel.
The
new state of Israel was
proclaimed by Ben-Gurion on May 14, 1948, and was recognized by
President Truman sixteen minutes later, in a race to beat the Soviet
Union (whose recognition came on l\lay 17th). Efforts by both to use
the United Nations machinery to stop the Israeli-Arab war in Palestine
were frustrated by conflicting opinions and especially by British
efforts to restrict Israeli acquisition of arms and immigration without
placing comparable restrictions on the surrounding Arab States.
A
truce imposed by the UN on
June 11th was violated hy both sides and broke down with a resumption
of fighting in July, but by that time the Arab states were squabbling
bitterly among themselves, and were increasingly involved in
embarrassment because their propaganda falsehoods to their own peoples
about their glorious victories over Zionism could not be sustained in
the face of the precipitous retreats of their forces under Israeli
attacks. Some of the Arab states tried to excuse their defeats as
resulting from Transjordanian "treason." Ten days of renewed fighting
from July 8-18, 1948, mostly favorable to Israel, were ended by a
three-day UN ultimatum threatening sanctions against any state which
continued fighting. This curtailment of Israeli successes by United
Nations actions and the UN mediator's suggestion that Jerusalem be
given to the Arabs led directly to his assassination by Israeli
extremists in September.
On
September 20th the Grand
Mufti of Jerusalem, chief Muslim religious leader of the Levant and a
wartime collaborator with the Nazis, proclaimed an "Arab Government of
All Palestine," which was at once recognized by all the Arab states
except Jordan and w-as set up at Gaza on Palestine territory occupied
by Egypt. Israel in return launched successful and successive week-long
attacks on Egypt and Lebanon which were stopped by UN truces on October
31, 1948. Belated recognition of the truth about Egypt's weakness, if
not its corruption, led to street riots in Cairo and assassination of
the Egyptian prime minister.
British
efforts to invoke its
1936 alliance witl1 Egypt to justify British military action against
Israel were blocked by Egypt's refusal to allow such a public display
of Egypt's helplessness. Five British planes which "attacked" Israel
were promptly shot down (January 7, 1949). This led to Britain's de
facto recognition of Israel on January 28th and the gradual release of
Jewish immigrants imprisoned on Cyprus. A series of armistice
agreements w ere negotiated in the spring of 1949. These left various
forces in approximately the positions they held, but were accompanied
by explicit refusals by the Arab states to make peace with Israel, to
recognize its existence, or to allow any steps to be taken to remedy
the plight of Arab refugees outside Palestine. To this day these
problems remain, with the Arab states still at war with Israel and
publicly sworn to exterminate it.
Egypt's
defeat in the Israeli
war brought to a head persistent Egyptian discontent, especially its
hatred for the corrupt and lecherous King Farouk. Egypt's plight,
however, was far deeper and more ancient than Israel, and Farouk's
blame, in spite of his total failure as a ruler, was less than that of
his great-great-grandfather, Muhammad Ali, who had been Khedive of
Egypt under the Ottoman sultan in 1811-1848. Until Muhammad Ali's time,
Egypt continued its ancient practice of raising a single crop of food
from each annual flooding of the Nile Valley. Muhammad Ali, in order to
finance his plans to conquer the whole Near East, took over state
ownership of all the land and built a great network of irrigation
canals which permitted perennial cultivation of the land with two to
four crops a year. He also established state monopolies of industrial
enterprises to equip his armed forces.
Muhammad
Ali's successors,
especially his grandson, Ismail, ended state ownership of land and
industry, allowing both to fall into private hands where they retained
much of their monopolistic character. At the same time, they burdened
the country with enormous debts to European bankers for public-works
projects of irrigation, railroads, and the Suez Canal. In the same
period, the demand for Egyptian long-lint cotton became so great during
the world cotton shortage caused by the American Civil War that it
became the favorite crop of the landlord class and the chief source of
foreign exchange to pay off Egypt's debts. But this meant that Egypt's
prosperity became linked to the uncontrolled fluctuations of prices on
the Liverpool cotton market.
The
results of all this were
to create the Egypt of 1936, the first year of Farouk's reign.
Irrigation, with its perpetual-motion farming, greatly increased the
output of food, and allowed an increase in population from 3.2 million
in 1821 to 6.8 million in 1892 to 12.5 million in 1914. At the same
time European science, by its control of epidemic diseases, reduced the
infant mortality rate. The rise in population began to outstrip the
increase in food supply by a wide margin, especially when the small
group of large landowners insisted that the land be used for exported
cotton rather than for home-consumed food..
In
1914, production of cereals
was 3.5 million tons for 12.5 million Egyptians; by 1940 there was only
4 million tons for 17 million persons. The output of food continued to
crawl upward, following the great leaps in population. By 1960 the
population was increasing at the rate of one person a minute, over half
a million a year, and had already passed 26 million. Moreover, as a
result of perennial irrigation, the population of 1940 was much less
healthy than that of 1840, since it was infected with debilitating,
chronic, water-borne, infectious diseases like malaria, bilharzia,
ancylostomiasis, and irritating eye infections.
Moreover,
unlike the ancient
cultivation based on annual flooding which replaced the fertility of
the soil, the perennial irrigation of today requires artificial
fertilizers (which the harassed peasant cannot afford) to retain the
productivity of the soil. Thus by 1950 an enormously increased
population, worn down by anemia and malnutrition, was crowded in a
narrow valley under the greatest population density in the world, with
neither land nor work for idle millions, their miserable fates entirely
in the hands of the small ruling elite of landlords, commercial
monopolists, and political exploiters of world economic changes.
Until
1952 monopolization of
land, although less complete than in other Near Eastern countries, was
nevertheless extreme, since 3 percent of the landowners held 55 percent
of the agricultural land and 28 percent of the owners held 87 percent
of the land. The remaining 72 percent of landowners with 13 percent of
the land were too poor to exploit their plots effectively since they
could not afford fertilizer, choice seed, or adequate tools, and in
most cases had to supplement their work on the land by other activities
or by renting plots from other owners.
Since
the great owners did not
work their lands themselves, most Egyptian soil was worked by renters
and sharecroppers, often removed from the real owner by a series of
intermediaries and sub-leasers. In addition, of course, millions
without land of their own had to work for about five American cents an
hour on the lands of others, and a third group eked out an existence
entirely from rented land in which the rents were equal to about
three-quarters of the net yield. The burden of population on the land
(about 1,500 persons per square mile compared to about 200 in France)
left everyone drastically underemployed, with at least half the rural
population merely sitting around in the dust or napping all day.
Because children were more healthy than their diseased-sapped parents,
they were more energetic and often were skillful and could be obtained
for wages less than half that of men (about twenty American cents for a
day of ten or twelve hours in 1956), much of the agricultural work,
especially in cotton, was done by children.
The
pressure of population,
the productivity of the land from multiple cropping (average annual
yields about twice those in Europe), and monopolized landownership
drove land prices and rents upward just as they drove wages downward.
This gave rise to a steady increase of renting and sharecropping before
1952. By 1948 the cash rental of land per acre was about 30 percent
higher than the average net income per acre. Thus the situation in the
rural economy was explosive.
These
problems reached this
critical level under the shield of the artificial prosperity of Egypt
during the war. As the chief base for the Allied war effort in the Near
East and the center of the British resistance to Rommel's Afrika Korps,
Allied supplies and money had poured into Egypt and provided wages and
a higher standard of living for all. Moreover, high wartime prices for
cotton had created a temporary boom. By 1947 all this collapsed, and
hundreds of thousands who had been supported by British spending during
the war were wandering the alleys of Cairo without money, work, or hope.
In
sharp contrast with the
poverty of millions, about 400 families had made immense fortunes from
the land since 1850. In 1952, when 250 acres brought its owner an
income of about $20,000 a year, the royal family had close to 200,000
acres, and the few hundred landlord families held over a million acres.
Little of these incomes was devoted to any constructive purpose,
although few of their possessors lived such dissolute and wasteful
existences as Farouk.
These
economic discontents
were capped by political unrest. Egypt had been granted its
independence by Great Britain in 1922, but the latter continued to
interfere in the governing of the country by peremptory notes or even
ultimatums (as in 1924 and 1938). Submission by the monarchy or the
government to such pressure roused great animosity in the Assembly,
which was generally dominated by the irresponsible nationalist party,
the Wafd (led successively by Saad Zaghlul and Mustafa Nahas).
Relations with Britain were finally regulated by a treaty in 1936 which
established a twenty-year alliance, granted Britain continued
possession of the naval base at Alexandria until 1944, and allowed it
to keep a force of 10,000 men in the Canal Zone. Other British forces
were withdrawn, and the disputed question of conflicting British and
Egyptian rights in the Sudan were compromised to allow limited Egyptian
migration and limited use of Egyptian troops in that area.
The
most significant result of
the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 was a double one. By providing for
withdrawal of British troops from Egypt proper, it made it necessary
for Egypt to establish its own army; at the same time, it established
two political issues (British troops in the Suez Canal Zone and
incomplete Egyptian control of the Sudan) on whicl1 that new army could
agitate. Most significant of all, Mustafa Nahas's decree of 1936
establishing the Military Academy to train officers for the new army
opened this career to any Egyptian, independent of class or economic
status. This created the opening by which ambitious and relatively poor
young men could work their way upward in power and wealth. It was the
first essential step toward the Nasser government of the 1960's and,
for the first time in thousands of years, made it possible for Egypt to
be ruled by Egyptians (the Muhammad Ali dynasty of 1811-1952 was of
Albanian origin). The first class of the Military Academy to graduate
after the Treaty of 1936 was the class of 1938, whose members, led by
Nasser, made the revolution of 1952. Most of the leaders of that revolt
were either the sons or grandsons of poor peasants. The chief aims of
their revolt were agrarian reform, elimination of waste, inefficiency,
and corruption from the Egyptian government, and the completion of
independence by the withdrawal of British influence from the Canal Zone
and, if possible, the Sudan.
The
revolt moved forward under
the impetus of increasing shame and hatred for the Farouk monarchy. In
this process two chief steps were the British ultimatum of 1942 and the
defeat by Israel in 1948, since these opened an unbridgeable gap
between the dynasty and the officers' group.
The
conspiracies of the class
of 1938 began almost immediately upon their graduation from the
Military Academy, when Gamal Abdel Nasser joined a group which
exchanged secret oaths to reform Egypt by expelling the British. By
1939 most of this group were in contact with the "Muslim Brotherhood,"
a secret band of fanatics founded in 1929 to establish (by
assassination and violence, if necessary) a political regime founded on
purely Muslim principles. Many of both groups were involved in the
anti-British and pro-Nazi agitations throughout the Near East of
1938-1942. These centered around the fanatical Mufti of Jerusalem and
culminated in the pro-Nazi revolt of Rashid Ali al-Kilani in Iraq,
during Hitler's conquest of Crete in April 1941. Britain used force to
overthrow the new pro-Hitler government in Iraq, but the anti-British
agitations continued throughout the Arab world. M7hen they became acute
in Egypt in February 1942, the British ambassador, accompanied by
British tanks, visited King Farouk in the Abdin Palace and gave him a
choice between cooperation with Britain or deposition. The king yielded
at once, but many of the younger officers were outraged at this affront
to Egyptian dignity, and Lieutenant Colonel Muhammad Naguib resigned
his commission in protest at an army which was "unable to protect its
king."
Ten
years later, when Farouk's
disgraceful behavior had alienated most of the army and disquieted much
of the world, this same Naguib, by then a heroic general who had been
wounded three times in the war of 1948 with Israel, was the nominal
head of the revolt.
This
revolt was engineered by
a small group of five officers whose real leader was Nasser, although
the latter, who had been conspiring against one thing or another since
his schooldays, was virtually unknown to the police until the revolt
had already started.
Like
most revolts, that of
1952 started from an event which had little to do with the
conspirators' plans. In October 1951, Mustafa Nahas, who had signed the
Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, enacted a law to abrogate it. Shortly
afterward, guerrilla attacks on the British military installations in
the Canal Zone drove the British forces to seek to disarm the Egyptian
police nearby. In the resulting fight about fifty Egyptians were killed
and a hundred wounded. The next day (January 26, 1952) riots in Cairo
burned down about four hundred buildings, including the famous
Shepheard's Hotel, the center of British tourist life in Egypt. Damage
ran to over $60 million, but the real destruction was to the Egyptian
political system.
Police
and army both refused
to fire upon the incendiaries of January 26th. Farouk, who had no wish
to alienate the British, dismissed Prime Minister Nahas for the
Cabinet's inadequate efforts to suppress the disturbances. But no
successor could be found capable of winning the confidence of the
diverse groups who sought to exploit the miseries of Egypt.
On
the night of July 22nd,
eight young officers seized control of the army headquarters, the radio
stations, and the government, and forced Farouk to make General Naguib
head of the army. Only two soldiers were killed in the process. Four
days later, with tanks surrounding the palace, Farouk was forced to
abdicate and was sent into exile.
The
new revolution had neither
doctrine nor program, and continued to improvise year after year. A
civilian prime minister was replaced by General Naguib on September
7th, and he was replaced by Nasser on February 25, 1954. Most decrees,
with the exception of the Agrarian Law of 1952 and its subsequent
revisions, were concerned with the officers' junta's efforts to
consolidate itself in power. Opposition groups from all parts of the
political spectrum were arrested, usually imprisoned without trial, and
sometimes tortured. Some were tried and executed. All political parties
were dissolved and their assets confiscated "for the people." A rather
vague pro-junta party, called the National Liberation Rally, was
established to support the new regime, but without any real program.
The Communists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and striking labor unions were
persecuted, and most of the wealthy elite were cut down in wealth and
influence.
The
source of these
authoritarian moves was Nasser, even in the period when Naguib was both
president of the republic (June 1953 to November 1954) and prime
minister (September 1952 to February 1954). Nasser, who replaced Naguib
as prime minister in February 1954, replaced him as president as well
in November of that year. The general issue on which they broke was
Nasser's autocracy, but the specific issue was his outlawing of the
Muslim Brotherhood. Nasser won out in the struggle because he was
concerned only with the reality of power and was prepared to cooperate
with any group, to adopt any program, or to sacrifice any friend if
doing so would strengthen his control of Egypt. Originally his personal
sympathies were with the peasant masses and with the West, and there is
no evidence that he was possessed of the pleasure-loving indolent
characteristics which weaken so many ambitious Arabs. He continued to
regard himself as a man of the people, but his insatiable thirst was
for personal power.
The
Agrarian Law of September
1952 determined much of the subsequent political and economic policy of
the regime. It sought to alleviate the plight of the peasant and to
force the landlord group, the center of Egyptian wealth, to shift their
holdings from land to investment in industry and commerce. This was
expected to create jobs for the numerous unemployed of the cities and
to increase the Egyptian sector in trade, which was still largely in
foreign hands. The original law set a maximum of landownership of 315
acres for each family, with 210 for the head of the family and a
quarter as much for each of the first two children. Land beyond this
amount had to be sold to the peasants who were actually working it, at
a price seventy times the annual land tax, in plots of 2 to 5 acres. If
not sold thus in six weeks, the surplus was taken by the state in
return for thirty-year 3 percent bonds and was then sold to the
peasants on long-term payments by the state. Since the peasants'
cultivation, whether as laborer, renter, or sharecropper, had
previously been strictly regulated by the owner, this regulatory
function was, under the new law, taken over by cooperative societies
which were made compulsory in each district. These societies also act
as purchasing, marketing, and training cooperatives. The law also
enacted a reduction in rents for peasants who rented land. Several
years later the maximum limit for landownership was reduced to 52.5
acres per person.
The
agrarian reform
undoubtedly helped the peasants who obtained ownership of plots or
those whose rents were reduced, but it did nothing about the landless
laborers or the growing mass of persons with no economic role who were
multiplying so rapidly from the population explosion. The older
landlord class, even on a fifty-acre maximum, was adequately provided
for, but the method of compensation for their confiscated lands did not
give them the free capital which it had been hoped would expand
industry and trade. Moreover, few had sufficient confidence in the
economic future of Egypt or the regime itself to put much of their
current incomes into such activities, especially as the Nasser
government took over many of the largest and most prosperous industrial
enterprises. As a result, the government itself had increasingly to
create new enterprises from government funds, and the system, although
committed to a "mixed economy," increasingly had to move toward
Socialism.
It
was clear from the
beginning that the only remedy for the population explosion was
additional land, and it was equally clear that this could be achieved
only if the waters of the Nile were spread widely and more effectively
over the uncultivated periphery of the Nile Valley. For this purpose
the Nasser government proposed a High Dam three miles south of Aswan
between the First Cataract of the Nile and the Sudan frontier. The
project was technically feasible but enormously expensive, and involved
complex political problems.
The
proposed dam, three miles
long and 120 yards high, would back up a reservoir of about 130 billion
cubic meters of water, much of it in Sudan territory, and displacing
60,000 inhabitants as well as submerging many archaeological treasures.
The project, originally estimated to cost over a billion dollars, would
increase Egypt's farm lands by about 30 percent, or two million acres,
and, by equalizing the flow of the Nile throughout the year, would
steady the country's whole system of agricultural production. If the
flow of water from the reservoir were harnessed to generate
electricity, it could yield 10,000 million kilowatt-hours, but this
would drive the total cost up to about $4 billion over fifteen years.
Such a project could not possibly be financed by Egypt itself, and
could not be built without previous agreement with the Sudan. Such an
agreement must modify an earlier compromise of 1929 which gave Egypt
48,000 million cubic meters of water and the Sudan only 4,000 million
cubic meters out of the total Nile flow of 84,000 million cubic meters,
leaving 32,000 million cubic meters which previously flowed to the sea
to be divided from the new High Dam reservoir.
From
the beginning it should
have been clear to Nasser that his regime would be a success only if he
found a solution to Egypt's economic plight and that the most
substantial contribution to such a solution would come from the High
Dam. Such a dam could be built only with the financial assistance of
the West, since the Soviet bloc lacked the free resources or the
psychological outlook to do the job, and a dam of that size, seventeen
times the mass of the pyramid of Cheops, could not be built by Egypt's
own resources soon enough to alleviate Egypt's economy. If Nasser had
concentrated on this problem and determined to retain relations with
the United States sufficiently amicable to obtain the necessary
American aid, some progressive solution of the problems of Egypt and
the Near East might have been possible.
However,
Nasser allowed
himself to be distracted by all kinds of emotional upheavals of an
unconstructive kind. He maintained a constant state of hatred and
tension toward Israel; he insisted on heavy armaments Egypt neither
needed nor could afford and which Egyptians lacked the skill and the
morale to use; he kept Egyptians and the whole Arab world in an uproar
by his incendiary speeches and actions and his continual political
intrigues and interventions in a fantastic and needless effort to make
himself the leader of Arab political movements all the way from Morocco
and Lake Chad to the Persian Gulf and Alexandretta; and he insisted on
demonstrating his independence of the West by constant attacks and
insults directed at the United States.
The
United States, in the
Dulles era, contributed to this confusion by its mistaken idea that the
Soviet Union was actively engaging in efforts to take over the Near
East and by Dulles's efforts to force all the countries of the area
into a single defensive pact, like the Baghdad Pact. Dulles's
contribution to the confusions of the Near East, as elsewhere, was that
he refused to see that the problems of primary concern to the local
peoples were local problems and that these were merely worsened by his
insistence that the only problem in any area was the Cold War between
the West and the Soviet Union.
When
the United States
rejected Nasser's tentative requests for heavy weapons, Nasser went to
the Soviet bloc with his demands and obtained a large part of his
requests (far beyond his real needs) but on a barter arrangement which
tied up the Egyptian cotton crop for years in the future and removed
this major prop of Egypt's economy out of the economic picture. Without
cotton to sell for foreign exchange, Nasser could not hope to
ameliorate Egypt's immediate economic problems. At the same time, while
filling the air with denunciations of the United States and threats to
Israel, Nasser opened his discussions for the financial assistance
necessary to construct the High Dam. When the International Bank, as
well as the American government, agreed to contribute to the project in
principle but insisted on certain necessary precautions, such as the
right to scrutinize the accounts, Nasser tried to blackmail them by
playing off the United States against Soviet Russia by circulating
stories of Soviet offers to build the project.
In
the meantime, Nasser was
engaged in intensive intrigues against the three Arab dynasties of
Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, all of whom were linked with the West.
To increase their local popular support these dynasties had to adopt
policies more independent of the West, or even anti-Western, in order
to avoid the subversive influence on their subjects of Nasser's wild
talk about independence from the West. Most of these anti-Western
actions took the form of anti-British actions. One of the chief of
these was the dismissal by King Hussein of Jordan of General Sir John
Glubb (so-called "Glubb Pasha"), who had trained and commanded the
Jordanian "Arab Legion" for many years. This dismissal, in March 1956,
left Jordan in a state of semi-dissolution and in grave danger of being
partitioned by its Arab neighbors (Iraq, Egypt, Arabia), since the Arab
Legion was one of the chief supports of the dynasty. It also gravely
jeopardized British influence in Jordan.
To
counteract this, the
British tried to shift Iraqi troops from Iraq, where the government of
Nuri al Said was still friendly to Britain, to Jordan where they could
be used to support King Hussein and perhaps be used to prevent the
anticipated pro-Nasser and anti-British outcome of the Jordan election
of October 1956. For the same reason, the British prime minister, Sir
Anthony Eden, adopted an increasingly anti-Israeli attitude, which
culminated late in Igj5 when he suggested that the Israeli frontier be
redrawn to give some disputed areas to Jordan. Since Israel was already
under great threat from both Egypt and Jordan, it continued to rearm in
1956, and made perfectly clear that it would oppose in any way it could
any union of the Arab states and especially any move to unite the Iraq
and Jordan armed forces or to put them under Egyptian command.
In
this tense situation Dulles
suddenly upset the balance by withdrawing the United States offer of
financial aid for the Aswan Dam. This decision of July 19, 1956, was
answered on July 26th, fourth anniversary of the expulsion of King
Farouk, by Nasser with the sudden nationalization of the Suez Canal
Company so that its profits could be used by Egypt to finance the High
Dam.
July
to October 1956 was a
period of mounting crisis in the Near East as all the principal states
concerned mishandled the difficult situation with gross incompetence.
There
can be no doubt that
Egypt had the right to nationalize an Egyptian corporation such as the
Suez Canal Company, and the only concern of the outside world was the
twofold on that the owners of record be adequately compensated and that
the transl. operations through the Canal be efficiently conducted for
all shipping. From the beginning the British took their stand on other
grounds, maintaining, incorrectly, that the company was not an Egyptian
corporation but an international organization, that the Egyptians could
not operate it at all, and that Britain would use force, if necessary,
to prevent Nasser from obtaining control of the Canal. France supported
Britain, chiefly because it wished to strike at Nasser for his
assistance to the anti-French rebels (the FLN) in Algeria. Israel
supported these two, while following a completely independent policy,
because it was increasingly convinced that its survival as a state
depended on its ability to break out of the growing encirclement of the
Arab states.
Dulles,
having precipitated
the crisis, sought to placate both sides, refusing to support Britain's
arguments yet unwilling to abandon it in public. Accordingly, as usual,
Dulles spent most of his efforts trying to find some verbal formula
which would gloss over the differences. Though he refused to support
Britain and France for fear this would drive Nasser toward Moscow, he
was unable to support the Arab states because he needed France and
Britain in the American struggle with the Soviet Union. As a result,
his ambivalent and changeable actions and statements alienated both
sides.
While
the controversy raged,
in public, in secret conferences, and at the United Nations, the Canal
continued to operate with about a third of the dues (including those of
American ships) being paid to the new Egyptian Canal authority and the
rest going to the old company. The British insisted that the Egyptians
were incapable of operating the Canal, and to prove the point recalled
all British-controlled pilots and technical operators on September 15,
1956, and at the same time challenged the effectiveness of the new
administration by presenting a large number of English and French ships
for passage. This attempt was based on biased information accepted by
Whitehall from the old Suez Company. It proved, in fact, to be wide of
the mark, for the remaining "Egyptian" pilots successfully conducted
fifty ships through the Canal in one day. Substitute pilots were
obtained at very high wages by advertising throughout the world.
The
solution of this technical
problem left only the second problem— compensation to the former
owners. Because Egypt had the funds to make payment, the practical and
legal crisis should have been ended. But Britain and France were still
determined to force Egypt to accept some type of international control
of the Canal, and many in both countries were determined to humiliate
Nasser and bring about his downfall in order to end his intriguing
against the two former imperial Powers in the Arab world, especially in
the oil-rich Near East and in Algeria. For this reason the two old
allies continued to press for an international Canal authority and to
prepare their own armed forces in the Near East to compel
internationalization. While conferences were still going on, in the
United Nations and elsewhere, the showdown was precipitated, somewhat
earlier than London and perhaps Paris had expected, by Israel..
During
the Suez crisis, the
quite separate problem of Israel had become more intense, with
increasingly frequent Arab raids on Israel and more violent Israeli
reprisals. The situation was made more complex by French support and
rearmament for Israel, in the face of continued British support for
Jordan and Iraq. Israel felt certain that a complete victory for Nasser
in the Canal crisis would encourage him to organize a general Arab
attack on Israel. Nasser's trouble-making proclivities, even during the
Canal crisis, were revealed when the French captured an Egyptian ship
smuggling seventy tons of arms to the Algerian rebels on October 18th.
Two days before, a secret Anglo-French conference in Paris discussed
the situation and probably decided that the two Great Powers would
intervene by an attack on Egypt, under the pretext of restoring order,
if an Arab-Israeli war began. They probably expected this movement some
time in November, and were not fully ready when it began on October
28th.
The
Jordan election of October
21, 1956, was a victory for the anti-Western, pro-Nasser activist
parties pledged to revise the Anglo-Jordan alliance. Two days later,
Egyptian and Syrian military missions arrived in Jordan and at once set
up a joint Egyptian-Jordanian-Syrian military command with an Egyptian
designated as commander in chief for any future hostilities with
Israel. On the same day began the Soviet armed intervention in Hungary
to repress the Budapest insurrection. On the following day Egyptian
raiders began to penetrate into Israel, and Israel's mobilization
began. Four days later, on the 29th, Israel attacked Egypt, and at once
began a spectacular advance across the Sinai Desert toward the Suez
Canal and Cairo..
The
nine-day Israeli Sinai
campaign was a brilliant military success. Individual Egyptians and
small units often fought fiercely, but the command was incompetent,
morale was almost totally absent, and training was equally bad. Whole
units fled like sheep, and much of the newly acquired heavy equipment
was abandoned unused. On October 30th a joint Anglo-French ultimatum
was sent to Israel and Egypt, ordering them to stop all warlike action,
to withdraw their forces at least ten miles from the Canal, and to
permit a temporary occupation of three Canal points, Port Said,
Ismailia, and Suez, by Anglo-French forces. Israel accepted the
ultimatum until it was clear that Egypt would not. The latter was
attacked by British planes shortly after the ultimatum expired on
October 31st, but Allied paratroops did not drop before November 5th,
and the seaborne Anglo-Frencl1 invasion of Egypt did not begin until
November 6th.
The
United States Department
of State was wild with rage at what it regarded as British perfidy and
Anglo-Israeli collusion to engage in war outside the Western alliance
and collective security system (actions which had always seemed
acceptable to Dulles if applied by the United States to the Formosa
Strait or other areas of primary American concern). On October 30th
Dulles tried to force through the Security Council of the United
Nations a resolution condemning Israel and asking all United Nations
members to cut off military, economic, or financial assistance to
Israel. This was killed by Anglo-French vetoes, 7-2. Britain, the
Commonwealth, and the London Cabinet itself were badly split, while
world opinion was strongly against the use of force by any state. In
London two ministers resigned, and others threatened to do so.
On
November 2nd the Assembly
of the United Nations, by its largest majority to date, accepted, by a
vote of 64-5, a Dulles resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire
in the Near East. Egypt and Israel accepted on November 5th, while the
Anglo-French forces stopped their advance the following day,
twenty-three miles south of Port Said. The Israel forces were already
across Sinai. Of more permanent significance, the petroleum pipelines
and pumping stations bringing oil to Levantine seaports across Syria
were destroyed, and a number of block-ships sunk by Egypt in the Canal
had cut off all Near Eastern oil supplies to western Europe by the
direct routes. Most important of all, the parallel American-Soviet
threats to France and England and the simultaneous Soviet attack on
Hungary had made permanent splits in the two great super-Power blocs
and had given a greatly increased impetus to the growth of an
independent third bloc between them. This development of an
increasingly independent Buffer Fringe between the two disintegrating
super-Power blocs became the outstanding feature of the next seven
years of world history under the awesome canopy of the Soviet-American
missile and space race (1956-1963).
Liquidation
of the Suez crisis
was not completed until the end of 1958, but in the interval the
continued confusions of the whole Near East almost totally concealed
the process of liquidation. Much of this confusion arose from inept
handling by the Western Powers of the very real problems of the area.
These problems w ere four in number: (1) the economic poverty of the
area, especially the food crisis in Egypt; (2) the Israel issue; (3)
the decline of British power leading to political instability; and (4)
the challenge to the French position in Muslim North Africa, especially
in Algeria. The decline in British and French influence was a
consequence of World War II and especially of the decisions of the
British and French peoples to devote their wealth to social welfare
rather than to efforts to retain their imperial positions. This left a
power vacuum, as the Arab states were obviously unable to maintain
order in the area or even to govern themselves, and neither the United
States nor the Soviet Union was willing to move into the almost
insoluble problem of maintaining political stability in the area or to
allow the other super-Power to make the effort to do so. Britain made
feeble efforts to retain its influence in Jordan, Iraq, southern
Arabia, and the Persian Gulf. In the case of Jordan and Iraq, at least,
this was not worth the effort, and was doomed to failure, as became
clear with the expulsion of Glubb Pasha in March 1956, and the
overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy and of Nuri al Said in July r958.
American
policy in the Near
East was based on a series of assumptions which were so remote from the
truth that no successful policy could be based on them. These were: (1)
that the Near East was an area in which the Soviet Union had plans for
immediate penetration and subversion in order to communize it; (2) that
the Arab world was a unified bloc, with significant intrinsic power of
its own, which would join the Soviet bloc (or at least contribute to
increase its strength) if not constantly placated by concessions; (3)
that no policy of neutralism of the Near East was feasible or
acceptable to the West; (4) that the public opinion of the masses of
Arab peoples was of some significance in the formulation of policy in
the Arab states; and (5) that the arming of the Arab states would
contribute to their ability to resist Soviet penetration and to the
political stability of the area.
All
five of these assumptions
were untrue. The Soviet Union had no significant plans to communize, to
subvert, or to penetrate the Near East after 1948, and was eager to see
it become a stable and neutral area in order to deprive the United
States of any excuse to intervene there. Moreover, the Arab states were
neither united nor strong, but were diverse, filled with mutual hatreds
and petty jealousies, and almost totally incapable of acting as a bloc
even when their primary interests were threatened. In fact, their only
common interests were hatred of Israel, desire to be independent and
neutral, and the desire for economic handouts (without any accompanying
political commitments) from anyone who would give them. The public
opinion of the Arab peoples, described in the previous sentence, was of
little influence in the face of the concentration of local political
power in the hands of the local armed forces, which were, with perhaps
the exception of Nasser himself, corruptible. Efforts to arm these
forces against a nonexistent Soviet armed threat contributed nothing to
their ability to defend the area itself, and merely increased their
corruption, their economic burden on the people, and the political
instability of the area by increasing their abilities to threaten each
other or Israel.
Dulles's
policies in the Near
East were consistently the opposite of what they should have been. No
possible alliance or rearming of the Arab states could have contributed
anything to the area's ability to resist Communism, nor could the Arab
states have contributed anything but headaches to the Kremlin if
Washington's policies had "driven them into the arms of Russia."
Over-all defense of the area should have been based on Ethiopia,
Israel, and Turkey; the Arab states should have been given the
independence, neutrality, and economic aid they wanted. The latter
should have concentrated on the Aswan Dam and a Jordan Valley Authority
(similar to TVA) for the mutual benefit of Jordan, Israel, and Syria,
in return for the Arab states' acceptance of (1) a peace treaty with
Israel and (2) resettlement of the Arab refugees from the Israeli war
on the new agricultural lands provided by the Jordan Valley project.
And, finally, the United States should have declared unilaterally that
it would use any force necessary to prevent any Soviet intrusion into
the Near East or any attack on the independence of Israel. As a
supplementary, but probably unachievable, project the United States
should have sought a pooling of the enormous oil revenues of the whole
Near East to provide funds for the economic reconstruction of the area
as a whole within the framework of an Arab economic community based on
trade and free immigration within the Arab world.
Instead
of some such
progressive solution of the Near East problem and the Suez crisis, the
United States, acting through the United Nations, sought to restore the
basically precarious status quo ante bellum without
any
guarantees. The real difficulty was Israel, which refused for several
months to yield up the areas it had occupied without obtaining in
return some solution of its grievances. These grievances were: (1) the
refusal of the Arab states to make a peace treaty or to accept the
existence of Israel by ending the 1948 war, (2) the Arab economic,
social, and political blockade of Israel, which included boycotts of
all world business firms which did business with Israel, (3) the denial
of the Suez Canal to Israeli ships or identifiable Israeli goods since
1948, (4) constant harassment of Israeli shipping or fishing on the
Gulf of Aqaba and the Jordan River, and (5) the use of the Gaza Strip,
non-Egyptian territory occupied by Egypt under the 1948 armistice, as a
basis for guerrilla raids on Israel.
Eventually
American pressure
and world public opinion acting through the United Nations forced
Israel to give up the territory it had captured, including the Gaza
Strip and the Gulf of Aqaba shores, without any significant guarantees.
A UN Emergency Force (UNEF) was sent to supervise the evacuation of
Egyptian territory and the Gaza Strip, under pressure of severe
economic and financial threats of an unofficial nature from Washington.
The effectiveness of such threats rested on the fact that the whole
Israeli economy was dependent on the flow of private funds from the
United States, while the British attack on Egypt had been abandoned
very largely as a consequence of the drain on British dollar and gold
reserves, which fell $420 million in September-November 1956.
The
American threats of
sanctions against its own friends and allies over Egypt at the very
time when it was doing nothing to impose sanctions for the Soviet
attack on Hungary, and its refusal to cooperate with the Soviet Union
in stabilizing the Near East because of Hungary, presented a strange
picture of political fantasy as 1956 ended. One of the methods of
pressure used by the United States against the Western Powers was
support of Egypt's refusal to allow any clearance of the Suez Canal
until the withdrawal of troops from Egypt. This, of course, intensified
the shortage of Near Eastern fuel oil in Europe as winter deepened. The
evacuation of Anglo-French forces on December 22, 1956, and of Israeli
forces on March 8, 1957, permitted clearing of the Canal and the
reimposition of Egyptian blockade pressures on Israel. In the interval
the American position, ignoring all the real problems of the area, was
stated in the form of the so-called Eisenhower Doctrine in January
1957. Regarding the problem solely in terms of military opposition to
Communism, this doctrine attacked the Soviet Union and threatened to
use the armed forces of the United States to defend any "freedom-loving
nations of the area . . . requesting such aid against overt armed
aggression from any nation controlled by international communism...."
In
reply to this
unconstructive promise the Soviet Union, in February 1957, suggested a
joint effort by four Powers (Russia, the United States, Britain, and
France) to reorganize the Near East on the basis of six principles: (1)
peaceful settlement of all disputes there, (2) noninterference in
internal affairs, (3) renunciation of all efforts to incorporate Near
Eastern countries into military blocs of the Great Powers, (4) removal
of foreign military bases from the area and the troops based on them,
(5) a reciprocal ban on arms deliveries, and (6) promotion of economic
development without political or military entanglements.
This
promising Soviet offer,
which might have been negotiated into some settlement of the Near
East's real problems, was rebuffed by the United States; instead, the
Eisenhower Doctrine, in spite of the clear lack of any overt Communist
threat, was used against Egypt and Syria in regard to Jordan and
Lebanon.
The
Jordan monarchy was
completely dependent upon the army, which was, in turn, completely
dependent upon the financial subsidy from Britain. This subsidy
(amounting to £12 million a year) was ended by the new Parliament
elected in October 1956. Syria and Saudi Arabia, which already had
troops on Jordanian soil, joined with Egypt to continue the subsidy. To
escape from growing Egyptian and Soviet influence, King Hussein
dismissed his prime minister and sought aid from Washington. Rioting
from opposition groups led to martial law, a $10 million grant under
the Eisenhower Doctrine, and movement of the American Sixth Fleet to
the Levant to support Hussein (April 1957).
The
rivalry between Saudi
Arabia and Egypt for influence in the other Arab countries was marked
by an Egypt-Syria economic union in September r9S7, a $112 million loan
to Syria from the Soviet bloc, and (in February 1958) the union of
these two countries into a United Arab Republic. Iraq and Jordan
responded to this with a very ephemeral Arab Federation. By the spring
of 1958, Nasser was engaged in controversies with all his neighboring
states except Syria. A military coup by pro-Nasser officers in Iraq in
July abolished the monarchy and assassinated Nuri al Said and his chief
supporters and threatened to overthrow the insecure government of
President Chemoun of Lebanon. To prevent this, American forces were
landed in Lebanon in the same week (July 15-17) in which a United
Nations commission on the spot reported a total lack of evidence of any
outside forces trying to subvert Lebanon. On the following day, Hussein
of Jordan asked, and obtained, a British parachute brigade to protect
his position.
Once
again Khrushchev appealed
for a Great Power conference (this time to include India) on the Near
East, but was met by a series of evasions and legalistic obstacles from
Washington. The United States refused to act outside the United
Nations, and the suggestion finally ended in a series of recriminatory
letters in August. A special session of the United Nations Assembly
sent Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld on a mission to the Near
East which was able to evacuate the troops from Lebanon and Jordan by
November 1958.
This
turmoil in the Muslim
states continued during the subsequent period of Soviet-American
missile rivalry (1956-1963). The United Arab Republic of Egypt and
Syria, established in February 1958, was broken by Syria after a
military coup had overturned the Syrian government in September 1961.
Another Syrian military revolt early in 1963 announced its
re-establishment, but internal opposition, chiefly from the Ba'ath
Party, prevented this. In Iraq the military revolt of July 1958, led by
General Abdul Karim Qassim, remained in po\ver on a relatively
pro-Communist and anti-Nasser basis until it was overthrown in a bloody
military upheaval on February 8-9, 1963.
Part
Nineteen—The New Era: 1957-1964
Chapter
71—The Growth of Nuclear Stalemate
The
decade from 1953 to 1963
was the most critical in modern history. Man's ability to get through
it successfully was a tribute to his good luck and good sense. The
avoidance of nuclear war and the extraordinary burst of economic
prosperity in the advanced industrial nations during that decade were
balanced by the continued growth of acute social disorganization and
the even more acute growth of ideological confusions. Nevertheless, man
survived, and, by 1963, was at the opening of a new era, based very
largely on the relaxation of the Cold War between the United States and
the Soviet Union and on the opportunities to do something about the
lagging social and intellectual problems provided by the combination of
political relaxation and economic prosperity.
The
decade as a whole fell
into two parts, divided about 1956. The first three years were marked
by the continued "Race for the H-Bomb," and covered the period from the
early thermonuclear explosions in 1953 to the achievement of a fusion
bomb that could be dropped from an airplane in 1956. The next seven
years were filled with the missile race, and reached their culmination
and denouement in the year from the Cuban missile crisis of
October-November 1962 to the death of President Kennedy in November
1963.
Closely
related to this
division based on weapons development was the somewhat delayed division
of the decade into two parts by a change in American strategic policy.
Here the dividing point was about 1960, and is marked by the shift from
the strategy of "massive retaliation," associated with the name of John
Foster Dulles, to the strategy of "graduated deterrence," associated
with the new Democratic Administration of President Kennedy. The shift
in 1960, however, was only incidentally associated with the
presidential election of that year and the subsequent shift of
Administration in the White House. The real change in 1960 was brought
about, as we shall see, by the full achievement, at that time, of
intercontinental thermonuclear striking ability by the two great
Superpowers. The "balance of terror" thus achieved by 1960 led directly
to the missile crisis of 1962 and the thermonuclear stalemate of 1963.
And these developments led to major changes in the political and
ideological structures of all areas of the world, changes that are
still going on.
The Shifting
Power Balance
As
we have seen, the whole
period of 1953 to 1960, in the area of defense, was dominated by the
so-called "New Look," the Republican effort to reduce the cost of the
American defense effort by shifting from "containment" to massive
retaliation. This involved a reduction in the American defense budget
from an average of $43 billion a year over the last four Truman budgets
(1949-1953) to an average of S37.4 a year over the six Eisenhower
budgets of 1954-1960. In this process American military manpower was
reduced from 3.7 million men to '.5 million over the six years January,
1953-January, 1959. Foreign economic aid was decreasingly emphasized.
In
this fashion, the effort to
deter Soviet aggression was based more completely on the threat of
American nuclear attack by SAC bombers on the Soviet homeland and less
on American readiness to meet Soviet forces on the ground or to win
third Powers to our side by economic or other aid. Dulles, who saw the
world in black-and-white terms, refused to recognize the right of
anyone to be neutral, and tried to force all states to join the
American side in the Cold War or be condemned to exterior darkness.
Having
thus divided the world
into two blocs, he sought to set up between them a continuous circuit
of paper barriers along the land frontiers of the Soviet bloc from the
Baltic Sea, across Europe and Asia, to the Far East. The chief portions
in the barrier were the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in
Europe (1949), the Central Treaty Organization (1955) in the Near and
Middle East (CENTRO), and the South-East Asia Treaty Organization
(SEATO) in the Far East (1954). In theory, the paper barrier was made
continuous by the presence of Turkey in both NATO and CENTRO and of
Pakistan in both CENTRO and SEATO.
Dulles
cared little about the
military strength, economic prosperity, or political democracy of the
states forming this paper ring around the Soviet bloc, since their
chief function was to form a paper barrier so that any movement outward
by Russia or its satellites, by breaking the paper, would trigger the
trip-wire circuit that hurled America's nuclear retaliatory power on
the Soviet homeland. In theory this strategic policy meant that any
outward movement by the Soviet Union, or by one of its satellite
states, in some remote jungle or on some barren mountaintop of central
Asia, might lead to all-out nuclear war, initiated by the United
States, which would totally destroy European civilization as we know
it. For, until 1960, the ability of either of the Superpowers to strike
directly at the other from its own soil was very limited, and,
accordingly, the two Superpowers had to strike f rom or strike at bases
in Europe or the Far East.
This
change, which took place
over the period 1956-1962, is of major significance, since it meant
that the Soviet Union and the United States became capable of striking
directly at each other and did not have to involve third Powers in
their disputes immediately. From the weapons point of view, it
represented, on the American side, three changes: (1) the shift in
manned bombing planes from the long-range B-47's to the
intercontinental-range B-52's and B-58's; (2) the shift in missiles
from the intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBM's), such as Thor
or Jupiter, which had to be based in Turkey, Italy, or Britain in order
to reach the Soviet Union, to intercontinental ballistic missiles
(ICBM's), such as the Minuteman or Atlas, which could hit the Soviet
Union from launching sites in the United States; and (3) the advent,
about 1960, of the nuclear-propelled Polaris submarines, whose sixteen
nuclear-armed missiles could strike the Soviet Union from submerged
positions in the seas bordering the Eurasian land mass.
This
American capability to
strike the Soviet homeland from North America was not achieved so
quickly or so completely on the Russian side, even by the time the
nuclear stalemate had been reached in 1963. As a result, the Soviet
Union could strike at the United States only by striking at its bases
or its allies in NATO or in the Far East. At first, in the 1950's, such
a Soviet counterstrike would have been largely by the Soviet ground
forces invading westward across central Europe, but by the late 1950's,
as the Soviet strategic striking forces were strengthened by its
acquisition of strategic bombing planes like the Tu-16 and of IRBM's,
this Soviet counterstrike to America's massive retaliation would have
resulted in the nuclear destruction and radioactive pollution of much
of Europe. The gradual shift of American retaliatory power from
intermediate range to intercontinental range (in 1962) reduced the
Soviet pressure on Europe by reducing the importance of America's
European bases. This had many significant implications for all the
nations of Europe, both Communist and Western.
The
key to the missile race
rested on the fact that the United States and the Soviet Union took
opposite routes in their efforts to obtain nuclear-armed rockets. One
basic problem was how to combine the American A-bomb of 1945 with the
German V-2 rocket. Since the A-bomb was an egg-shaped object 5 feet
wide and 10 feet long, which weighed 9,000 pounds, and the V-2 could
carry a warhead of only 1,700 pounds 200 miles, the problem was not
easy. The Soviet government sought to close the gap between rocket
power and nuclear payload by working toward a more powerful rocket,
while the American scientists, over the opposition of the Air Force and
the aviation industry, sought to close the gap by getting smaller
bombs. The result of the race was that the Soviet Union in 1957-1962
had very large boosters which gave it a lead in the race to propel
objects into space or into ballistic orbits around the earth, but these
were very expensive could not be made in large numbers, and were very
awkward to install or to move. The United States, on the other hand,
soon found it had bombs in all sizes down to small ones capable of
being used as tactical weapons by troops in ground combat and able to
be moved about on jeeps.
As
a consequence of the
American decision to reduce the size of the bomb (a decision for which
the great scientist Robert Oppenheimer was largely responsible), by the
early 1960's the United States was producing large numbers of warheads
in a great variety of sizes, capable of being delivered by all kinds of
vehicles from tactical rockets and cannons, up through Polaris
missiles, airplanes of all sizes, and rockets of all ranges, up to
city-destroying bombs carried by gigantic SAC bombers or ICBM's.
Apparently
the Soviet success
in obtaining the A-bomb in 1949, in dropping an H-bomb in 1953, and in
startling the world with its powerful rocket boosters in 1957 not only
alarmed the United States but also lulled the Kremlin itself into the
mistaken idea that it was ahead of the United States in the development
of missile nuclear weapons. This so-called "missile gap" was a mistaken
idea, for the vast expansion of American production of nuclear
materials begun in 1950, combined with the simultaneous reduction in
the sizes of nuclear warheads, by 1959 was bringing the United States
into a condition of "nuclear plenty" and of "overkill capacity" that
posed a grim problem for the Soviet Union. It was, strangely enough,
just at that time (end of 1957) that two American studies (the Gaither
Report and the Special Studies Project of the Rockefeller Brothers
Fund) suggested the existence of a missile gap or inferiority in
missile capacity of the United States compared to the Soviet Union.
This judgment, apparently based on overemphasis on the size of Soviet
rocket boosters, played a chief role in the American presidential
campaign of 1960 and in the ebullient self-confidence of Khrushchev and
his associates in 1957-1961.
The
reality of the situation
apparently was not recognized in Moscow until 1961, when it penetrated
with a cold shock of fear through the deceptive festivities of
self-congratulations that had begun with the success of Sputnik I
(October 1957) and the successful moon shot, Lunik II (of September
1959).
In
this pleasant period of
self-deception, intensified by the American presidential campaign's
unrealistic discussion of the missile gap in 1960, the Kremlin entered
upon an unofficial international suspension of nuclear-bomb testing
(the Test Moratorium) from October 31, 1958 to October 23, 1961.
Suddenly, in 1961, the Soviet authorities recognized that they had
fallen far behind the United States, both in number and in variety of
nuclear weapons, because their existing nuclear bombs were too large
for many purposes, especially for accurate and numerous long-range
ICBM's. Accordingly, in October 1961, the Soviet Union broke the test
moratorium of three years by resuming nuclear testing, but, to conceal
the purpose of the tests in seeking smaller bombs, they aimed their
publicity on the tests at the fact that they exploded the largest bomb
ever used, a 58-megaton fusion thermonuclear monstrosity.
After
these tests, it soon
became clear to the Soviet Union that the American lead in ICBM's could
not be overcome by the Soviet Union, in view of its limited industrial
capacity and the other urgent demands on that capacity, in any period
of time that had strategic meaning. Accordingly, Moscow, probably at
the instigation of the Red Army itself, decided to remedy its weakness
in ICBM's by seeking to move some of its numerous ICBM's within range
of the United States by secretly installing them in Castro's Cuba..
This
decision, if we have
analyzed it correctly, showed once again the way in which the Soviet
defense strategy moved in a direction opposite to that which was
influencing American defense decisions. Just at the time (summer 1962)
that the Soviet Union was deciding to remedy its weakness in ICBM's by
trying to install IRBM's in a third Power close to the United States,
the latter was deciding that its supply of ICBM's was increasing so
rapidly that it would close down its IRBM bases in third countries
close to the Soviet Union (such as Turkey). This American decision was
already beginning to be carried out when the Cuban missile crisis broke
in October 1962.
The
Cuban missile crisis was a
turning point in Soviet-American relations, similar in some ways to the
Fashoda crisis of r898 between France and England. It showed both sides
that neither wanted a war and that their interests were not
antithetical on all points. Thus it signaled the suspension of the Cold
War and of the all-out insane armaments race between them. It showed
that the United States had missile superiority sufficient to veto any
major Soviet aggression, while the Soviet Union had sufficient missile
power, in combination with the generally nonaggressive American
attitude, to discourage the United States from using its missile
superiority to make any aggression on the Soviet Union. Thus was
established a nuclear or power stalemate of nuclear vetoes between the
United States and the Soviet Union that secured each against the other.
This
American-Soviet
stalemate, by inhibiting the use of the power of each, permitted third
Powers to escape, to a considerable extent, from the need to have power
sufficient to hack up their actions. This meant that third states could
undertake actions which their own power could not in itself justify or
enforce. That is to say that the Superpower stalemate allowed third
states a freedom of action beyond their own intrinsic powers. Thus
Indonesia could attack Malaya; China could attack India; Pakistan,
although allied to the United States, could be cozy with Red China;
Cyprus could defy Turkey; Egypt could attack Yemen; France could defy
the United States; Romania could flirt with Peking; and Britain or
Spain could trade with Castro's Cuba, without the Superpowers feeling
free to use their own real strengths to obtain what they wanted, since
most of these strengths were neutralized opposing each other.
One
significant consequence of
this situation was the almost total collapse of the system of
international law that had been formulated in the seventeenth century
by the work of writers like Grotius. That system of international law
had regarded the state as the embodiment of sovereignty, an
organization of political power on a territorial basis. The criteria
for the existence of such a sovereign state had been its ability to
defend its boundaries against external aggression and to maintain la\v
and public order among its inhabitants inside those boundaries. By
1964, as a consequence of the power stalemate of the Cold War, dozens
of "states" (such as the Congo) which could perform neither of these
actions were recognized as states by the Superpowers and their allies,
and achieved this recognition in international law by being admitted to
the United Nations. This development culminated over fifty years of
destruction of the old established distinctions of international law
such as the distinctions between war and peace (destroyed by the Cold
War, which was neither), between belligerents and neutrals (destroyed
by British economic warfare in World War I), or between civilians and
combatants (destroyed by submarine warfare and city bombing). Nuclear
stalemate in the Cold War context made it possible for political
organizations with almost none of the traditional characteristics of a
state not only to be recognized as states but to act in irresponsible
ways and to survive on economic subsidies won from one bloc by
threatening to join (or merely to accept subsidies from) the other bloc.
As
a consequence of this
situation, all the realities of international affairs by 1964 had
become covered with thick layers of law, theories, practices, and
agreements that had no relationship to reality at all. Today, the
pressure of the realities beneath that layer to break through it and
emerge into the daylight where they can be generally recognized has
reached a critical point. As part of that process of increasing sanity
(which the recognition of reality always is), the future of disarmament
became more hopeful than it had been in decades, although the chances
of reaching any substantial disarmament agreements remain slight. This
means that disarmament is more likely to appear in the form of nuclear
disengagement and tacit adoption of parallel actions than in the form
of explicit agreements or signed documents.
The
amount of myth and false
theories that must be pushed aside to permit even the highest peaks of
reality to emerge is very large. In the United Nations alone, it
involves such points as the recognition of the Congo as a "state," the
belief that Taiwan is a Great Power worthy of one of the four
permanent, veto-wielding seats on the Security Council, or the pretense
that Red China, in spite of its possession of all the traditional
attributes of statehood, does not exist.
Part
of this return to reality
is embodied in the growing recognition that there are more situations
in which the United States and the Soviet Union have parallel interests
than there are in which their interests are antithetical. Certainly
they have a common interest in avoiding nuclear war, in preventing the
spread of nuclear weapons to additional states, in not poisoning the
atmosphere with radioactive fallout from nuclear testing, in slowing up
weapons development, technological rivalry, and the space race in order
to direct more resources to domestic problems of poverty, social
disorganization, and education; or in refraining from outbidding each
other in grants of arms and aid to unreliable, ungrateful, unstable,
and inefficient neutralist regimes.
One
first clear evidence of
recognition of this common interest was the peaceful settlement of the
Cuban missile crisis, but the first formal agreement based on it was
the official Test Ban Treaty of August 1963. This treaty not only aimed
to maintain the stalemate between the two Superpowers to the degree
that it might be jeopardized by their future testing; it also sought to
hamper the spread of nuclear weapons to additional powers by this
restriction. Both Superpowers and many neutrals feared that nuclear
explosives would get into the control of Red China or other
irresponsible hands.
By
the late 1960's,
considerations such as these revealed that there were considerable
areas of common interests among the states of the world covering all
three groups of the so-called Free World, the Communist bloc, and the
neutrals. The net result was the almost total disappearance of the
world as seen by John Foster Dulles only a decade before. The two-power
world of Dulles was being replaced by a multi-bloc world in which the
two Superpowers, instead of being antithetical on all points, were
finding large areas in which their interests were closer to each other
than they were to those of some of the other, newer blocs, especially
that growing up around Red China. Moreover, as we shall see, in some
ways the aims, methods, and structures of the two Superpowers were
converging on increasingly parallel courses. Most obviously repugnant
to Dulles would have been the rise of neutralism, evident not only in
the increasing numbers and independence of the neutral states, but in
the disintegration of both the old Superpower blocs as these weakened
and dissolved, and former members of these, such as France in the West
and Romania in the East, adopted increasingly neutralist policies.
As
one obvious consequence of
this, the paper groupings and barriers Dulles had so painfully
constructed in the 1950's were under liquidation as one of the chief
tasks of the 1960's. This was evident, with increasing obviousness, in
NATO, the Organization of American States (OAS), CENTRO, and SEATO.
Less obviously, except in the Far East, the same disintegrative process
has been going on within the Soviet bloc, at first with Yugoslavia in
1948 and then with Red China (1960), Albania, Romania, and others. This
whole process of growing neutralism, diversity, and the disintegration
of the Super-blocs, followed by the increasing emphasis of all groups
on the problems of poverty, social disorganization. and spiritual
nihilism, was possible only because of the growth of nuclear stalemate,
and must, throughout, I.,e recognized as occurring under the umbrella
of thermonuclear terror and the danger from new, equally horrible
biological weapons.
The
Denouement of the Cold War, 1957-1963
Two
revealing events in the
late summer of 1957 offer conflicting evidence on the nature of the
Soviet system. On August 26th the Kremlin claimed its first successful
test of an ICBM. A month later it announced that the sixth Five-Year
Plan had been scrapped and would be replaced by a new Seven-Year Plan
for 1959-1965.
The
meaning of this second
announcement was difficult to evaluate, but it showed the regime's
increasing difficulty in carrying out its grandiose economic projects,
a difficulty that arose from the failures of the Soviet agricultural
system. The state and collective farms used such quantities of
equipment and manpower, and gave such limited production in return,
that they became the chief limiting factor in the Soviet efforts to
raise standards of living, to maintain the size and power of the
defense forces, to win over third states by economic and technical
assistance, and to lead the United States in the conquest of outer
space. The output of food from the small private plots of the Soviet
peasantry, which were presumably worked only in their owners' spare
time, produced four or five times the output per acre of the state and
collective farms. This was, of course, an indication of the success of
private enterprise as a spur in the productive process, a fact which
was specifically recognized by Khrushchev in a series of speeches early
in 1964.
But
in 1957-1959 this meaning
of the change in the Soviet economic plan was unrecognized, or at least
disputable, and the world's attention became riveted instead on the
Soviet success with its rocket boosters. From October 1957, over a
period of five years, the Russians showed the way in outer space to the
United States. In the newspapers and consequent world opinion, the
margin of the Soviet superiority seemed much greater than it was in
fact. On October 4th Sputnik I, weighing 184 pounds, was shot into an
orbit around our earth; a month later, Sputnik II, weighing 1,120
pounds and containing a living dog, also went into successful orbit.
But on December 6th a much publicized effort hy the United States, in
Project Vanguard, failed in its attempt to place a small sphere of 3
1/4 pounds into orbit. On the last day of January 1958, the first
American spacecraft, Explorer I, weighing 31 pounds, successfully was
shot into orbit around our earth, but it was followed by another
failure of Vanguard and a failure of Explorer II in the next two months.
In
the spring of 1958, our
success with Explorer III (31 pounds) and another failure with Vanguard
were followed by the successful Sputnik III (2,925 pounds). The two
years 1958 and 1959 saw many American failures in space (20 in all)
mingled with 16 successful efforts (mostly in 1959). In January 1959,
the Soviet government put Lunik I (3,245 pounds) in orbit around the
sun five months after our first lunar probe had failed. In September
1959, Lunik II hit the surface of the moon, and a month later Lunik III
passed around the moon, photographing its hidden side. In 1960 and 1961
the United States launched numerous successful space vehicles that
gathered valuable scientific information. One of these, in January
1959, made the first broadcast from space, relaying messages from
American ground stations, but in April and August 1961 Soviet vehicles
successfully sent the first human beings into space: Vostok I was
recovered after a single orbit, and Vostok II, after 18 successful
trips around the globe, was recovered the next day. These first space
travelers, Major Yuri Gagarin and Major Gherman S. Titov, returned
safely to Soviet soil, descending to earth in remarkable demonstrations
of the Soviet success in controlling their space vehicles. The first
American astronauts, Captain Alan B. Shepard, Jr., who made a
suborbital flight of 117 miles in May 1961, and Colonel John H. Glenn,
who orbited the earth three times in February 1962, were recovered by
landing in the ocean. In October, United States Navy Commander Walter
M. Schirra made a similar landing after a smooth countdown and
blast-off at Cape Canaveral (now called Cape Kennedy) and six orbits
around the earth. These American achievements were seen on television
by millions of viewers and roused considerable praise throughout the
world at the courage of the American government in permitting live
broadcasts of what could have turned into humiliating fiascos.
The
Soviet fiascos in space
developments, if any occurred, were well concealed, while their
successes continued to astound the world at the end of 1962. In August
of that year, the Russians in less than twenty-four hours blasted off
Vostok III and Vostok IV, each with a human passenger, brought them
within four miles of each other in space, and landed them together, six
minutes and 124 miles apart, after several days in space, most of it in
a weightless condition. This achievement was remarkable for its
exhibition of control of the whole process, since the two vehicles were
in almost identical orbits, almost came together in space, and broke
all previous records for time and distance in space. Major A. G.
Nikolayev circled the earth 64 times, covered 1,625,000 miles, and was
weightless for almost four days, during which he worked, ate, slept,
and moved about in his capsule. His companion cosmonaut, Lieutenant
Colonel P. R. Popovich, made 48 orbits around the earth and was
weightless for almost three days. These achievements in the Soviet
space program were repeated in June 1963 by similar dual flights of
Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, who made 48 orbits, and
Lieutenant Colonel Valery Bykovsky, who completed 81 orbits.
The
impact of these Soviet
"space spectaculars" on world opinion was tremendous. To many neutrals,
and even to some in the Western nations, their exploits seemed to
indicate that the Soviet Union had moved to first place in ability to
apply science to technological development. Only gradually, and never
completely, did realization spread that the Soviet Union, by announcing
only its successes and concealing its failures, gave a misleading
appearance of success. In time, it also began to appear that, while the
Soviet Union unquestionably had tremendous boosters and an almost
unbelievable accuracy in firing them, the United States space effort
included a greater number of attempts, in much greater variety and
size, and yielded immensely larger amounts of scientific information.
By 1963-1964, when the space rivalry had entered upon a race to place
men on the moon, and both sides were beginning to have doubts about the
wisdom of this (or at least the wisdom of racing to it), it became
clearer that the American space effort was larger, sounder, and more
fruitful to science than the amazing and earlier exploits of the Soviet
Union. But no such process of revaluation could change the fact that
the first men in space were Russians, Yuri Gagarin and Gherman S.
Titov, in 1961.
The
Soviet successes in space
had a triple impact on the United States, with the final result that
the whole movement of American life was turned in a new direction. The
psychological impact was the least important in spite of its force.
More significant was the influence on American education and economic
development.
The
economic impact of Sputnik
and Vostok was such as to direct immense resources, through government
spending, toward research in science and technology. By 1964, after six
years of its existence, the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA) had settled down to an annual budget of over five
billion dollars a year. Sums as large were directed by government
sources into research and development in science, medicine, and
technology. As a consequence, the whole pattern of American education
was changed and so was the relationship between government and
education, as well as between the public and education. The educational
system was brought into the tempestuous atmosphere of the frantic
American marketplace and was being ransacked from the highest levels
down to high school and even below for talented, trained, or merely
eager people. As the demands for such people grew and their
remunerations and opportunities increased, the substantial minority who
were not talented, trained, or eager found fewer and fewer
opportunities to make a living and began to sink downward toward a
steadily growing lower class of social outcasts and underprivileged,
the socially self-perpetuating group of the impoverished.
At
the same time, within the
Soviet Union, similar revolutionary changes were taking place, as
millions were called from rural and depressed urban areas to
educational opportunities and upward advancement in technological
skills and social rewards. The Socialist pretenses of equal rewards
were gradually abandoned, with increased emphasis on individual
enterprise, advancing hierarchies of wealth and power, and disparate
compensations for ambition, application, talent, and adaptability. On
the whole, as we shall see, there was a development of Soviet and
American ways of life not only in convergence toward each other, but,
in a sense, away from life in most other nations.
During
this period of
convergence of the Soviet and American ways toward more highly
developed scientific and technological systems, there was,
simultaneously, a superficial sharpening of their political struggle
and a less obvious opening of numerous bridges of cooperation between
them. Such bridges appeared first in those areas of scientific and
educational life where they were developing away from the majority of
other nations. It appeared in such a remarkable example of
international cooperation as the International Geophysical Year (July
1957 to the end of 1958) and, more specifically, in the Soviet-American
agreements on cultural and educational changes, such as that for
1958-1959 signed in January 1958. These brought scientists, teachers,
musical performers, industrialists, and even tourists from one country
to the other.
In
November 1958, two
unconnected events began the process that led in four years to the
Cuban missile crisis and the relaxation of the Cold War. On November
27th, Khrushchev, filled with self-confidence and truculence, sent a
note to the Western Powers demanding settlement of the Berlin problem,
under threat that the Soviet Union, at the end of six months, would
itself sign a peace treaty with the East German government, would
withdraw its own forces from the area, and hand over its rights in
Berlin (including control of the Allied access routes into the city) to
the East German government. Because the Western Powers did not
recognize the East German regime, this action would not only force such
recognition but would force them to negotiate with East Germany over
rights, based on victory and agreement with the Soviet Union, which
were not negotiable, particularly with it.
When
Khrushchev sent this
"ultimatum" on November 27, 1958, NATO had only twenty-one divisions,
one-third of them West German, to defend its position in Europe. But
the next day, America's Atlas ICBM, for the first time, shot full range
of 6,325 miles.
While
the six months of
Khrushchev's "ultimatum" were ticking off, the two hostile camps began
to disintegrate internally, in western Europe and in the Far East.
In
the Far East, the first
year of Red China's Five-Year Plan, the so-called "Great Leap Forward,"
began to collapse within six months of its beginning. Apparently to
cover this up, the Chinese government began to adopt a very aggressive
attitude toward the Nationalist Chinese government on Formosa (Taiwan),
and prepared to mount an all-out assault on its forces on the Chinese
territorial islands of Matsu and Quemoy, which were still under Chiang
Kai-shek's control. The strong support Dulles gave to Chiang, including
reinforcement by an American naval carrier task force, and his
psychological readiness to go to "the brink of war," spread down to all
parts of the world. The Red Chinese threat gradually petered out, and
they made extensive demands on Moscow for military, technical, and
financial assistance. About the same time, France made demands on the
United States to prevent any possibility of Europe becoming involved in
a nuclear war arising from unilateral American actions in the Far East,
or elsewhere, in which France had not been consulted. These two
demands, from Peking and Paris, soon showed the disintegrative features
developing within the two Super-blocs.
Red
China's demands for
assistance from Moscow could not be met, for the simple reason that the
Kremlin could not fill the demands of the Soviet Union itself, caught
as it was in a three-way vise of a faltering agricultural system, the
increasing demands of the Russians themselves for improved standards of
living, and the needs of the missile and space races with the United
States. Accordingly, the Chinese-Soviet technical assistance agreement
of February 1959 offered only five billion rubles over the next six
years, approximately half the amount that had been provided during the
previous six years. Within six months, Red China began aggressions
against its inaccessible borders with India and was making unfavorable
comments about Khrushchev's doctrines of "peaceful coexistence with
capitalism" and the "inevitable victory of Socialism without war."
In
this same six months, the
United States was having growing difficulties with France within NATO.
In September 1958, De Gaulle asked that a tripartite directorate be
established of the United States, Britain, and France to provide
consultation on a global basis wider than the European limited control
exercised through NATO. This demand was very well founded, since
America's actions in Quemoy or in the landing of American marines in
Lebanon (in July 1958) might have led to war with the Soviet Union and
a Soviet attack on western Europe over an area and issue in which
France had not been involved or consulted.
De
Gaulle's request was
rejected. As soon as the imperious general had been inaugurated as the
first President of the Fifth French Republic (January, 1959), he took
steps to extricate France from some of the French commitments to NATO:
The French Mediterranean fleet was removed from NATO control, the use
of France as a base for nuclear weapons, either from planes or
missiles, was refused, and French participation in a unified European
air defense system was denied.
In
two-day talks in Paris,
December 19-20, 1959, the two Presidents, Eisenhower and De Gaulle,
went over the ground again and reached a stalemate: Eisenhower rejected
De Gaulle's suggestion for a three-Power global policy directorate, and
De Gaulle rejected Eisenhower's desire for an integrated air and naval
defense system for Europe.
While
these positions were
developing, a significant turning point in Soviet-American relations
appeared during Khrushchev's visit to the United States, September
15-17, 1959. The Kremlin leader was full of his usual talk of the
inevitable future victory of Socialism and the need for peaceful
co-existence until that time. He welcomed competition in economic or
technological affairs, in athletic or cultural matters, but he ruled
out the need for war or the legitimacy of aggression by either side. At
first he refused to be impressed with the wealth and power of America,
implying that it was not surprising to him and that the Soviet Union
could do it better at some future date. But gradually a very important
change occurred. In spite of himself, he was impressed. He ceased to
pretend to himself that the things he saw were some special exhibits
set up, regardless of cost, to delude him. Gradually the incredible
truth dawned in his mind: many Americans actually lived like this, in
what the ordinary Russian would regard as unbelievable luxury. The real
revelation came when he visited farms in Iowa, saw the equipment and
way of life of these successful American farmers, and found out the
economic statistics of American agriculture at its best. For years
afterward he talked of these matters, and, as recently as April 1964,
he told the Hungarians about it and advised them to emulate the
American farmers.
Khrushchev's
journey was
notable in other ways. At Camp David with President Eisenhower, he
revoked his six-month time limit for settling the German question, on
the ground that the consideration of the problem by the Foreign
Ministers Conference of the summer of 1959 had suspended the urgency of
the problem. At the meeting of the General Assembly of the United
Nations in September, Khrushchev won considerable support for his
suggestion that the Soviet Union was willing to reach complete
disarmament supervised by mutual controls, including aerial photography.
During
his visit, Soviet
Foreign Minister Gromyko provided a curious glimpse into the
intricacies of the Soviet system. At Camp David he tried to make a deal
binding each party to limit its propaganda radio broad casts to the
other to three hours a day, with the unstated implication that Moscow
might stop jamming the Voice of America if this agreement was reached.
Although our broadcasts in Russian, at that time, were only three hours
a day, we refused the offer by saying that we wished to increase, not
reduce, the flow of information. Gromyko left the impression that the
jamming was an expense and burden on the Soviet system. At any rate, in
June 1963, with the relaxation of the Cold War, jamming was stopped by
the Russians without any agreement.
The
weakening of the Soviet
position, which the Kremlin recognized in regard to missiles in 1961,
also appeared to them in other fields, and was fully apparent to anyone
who wished to look at the comparative prosperity of the two
Super-blocs. Nowhere did this comparison stand out more clearly than in
divided Germany, and nowhere could the Kremlin accept it less readily.
In
the 1950's and early
1960's, the contrast between the (East) German Democratic Republic and
the (West) German Federal Republic were as between night and day. The
West, with about 55 million persons, was booming, while the East, with
less than 17 million, was grim and depressed. The West German economic
miracle was based, as we have said, on low wages, hard work, and
vigorous pursuit of profits by private enterprises little hampered by
the government or labor unions. It was, in fact, the closest example of
traditional nineteenth-century laissez faire that the mid-twentieth
century had to offer. The government, under the influence of Minister
of Economics (later Chancellor) Ludwig Erhard, operated in terms of
what they called "a socially conscious free market economy" (soziale
Marktwirtschaft),
but the play of free economic forces was to be found in lack of
interference by the government and competitive wage rates rather than
in price competition among industrial producers. The fluctuations of
the business cycle were dampered down by the government's fiscal
policy, and it was said that possible inequities in the distribution of
the national product could be remedied by a progressive income tax mild
enough not to interfere with incentives. Otherwise, taxes were drawn to
encourage industry to plow its profits back into the business rather
than to raise wages. This policy and the national tendencies of the
German outlook favored production of capital goods over consumer goods
and for the export market rather than for domestic use. After 1945,
labor unions, which had been closely associated with political
activities and with agitations for drastic economic and social reforms
before the Nazi regime enslaved them, sought to avoid politics and to
concentrate on wages and work conditions (as do unions in the United
States); but these activities in Germany had traditionally been the
concern of other agencies (such as works councils), and they could
hardly be much influenced by unions in a period of surplus labor and
low prices such as prevailed in Germany in the 1950's.
This
surplus of labor in West
Germany came from the influx of 13 million refugees into the area,
chiefly from East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Once the boom started,
the demand for labor was so great that refugees continued to be
welcomed, and at least two-thirds of a million non-German, unskilled
workers were imported from Italy, Greece, Spain, and elsewhere in
southern Europe. The docility and eagerness to work of these peoples
kept wages low, profits high, and the boom going through the 1950's and
into the 1960's. As late as 1960 only 38,000 man-days of labor were
lost by strikes and lockouts in West Germany, compared to almost half a
million in the Netherlands, 3 million in the United Kingdom, and 19
million in the United States in that year.
Some
of the consequences of
this system, besides the most obvious one of booming prosperity, were
that the structure of monopolized industry with great rewards for the
upper classes, with lesser rewards and little social mobility for
workers, continued in the 1950'5 as it had been in Germany since its
industrialization began. In 1958 eight great "trusts" still controlled
75 percent of crude steel production, 80 percent of raw iron, 60
percent of rolled steel, and 36 percent of coal output. The number of
millionaires (in marks) more than doubled in four years in the middle
1950's. Yet less than half of the eligible workers were in unions,
union membership went up only 20 percent, while the working force
increased 67 percent after 1949, and only an insignificant part (5
percent) of university students came from the working class compared to
a rate five times as high in Great Britain.
To
the outside world, and to
most Germans, especially East Germans, the inner nature and structure
of the West German "economic miracle" was of little significance. What
did matter was that the average West German had steady work at adequate
wages and limitless hope for the future. The lo percent increase each
year in the West German gross national product was something that could
not be denied or belittled..
Among
those who had no desire
to ignore it or to belittle it, but, on the contrary, were eager to
participate in it, were the East Germans. They continued to flee
westward from poverty and despotism to plenty and freedom. Every effort
made by the Communist regime to stem that flow merely served to
increase it. The more police who were sent to guard the frontier
between East and West Germany, the more police there were to flee
westward with the others.
The
reasons for these flights
to the West were clear enough. East Germany has been a Stalinized
regime under an unpopular tyrant who is sustained by twenty-two Russian
divisions because he is willing to administer East Germany as an
economic colony of the Soviet Empire. In spite of Khrushchev's
denunciations of Stalinism, he supported a Stalinist regime under
Walter Ulbricht, the Communist dictator of East Germany, because that
type of regime extracted the largest booty from its territory for the
Kremlin..
This
pressure became worse on
East Germany just after 1959, when the attractions of West Germany
became greater, and the endless demands on Soviet resources for
missiles, space spectaculars, improved standards of living, and a
disintegrating agricultural system were increasing. To fulfill these
demands, East Germany scrapped its unfinished second Five-Year Plan in
1959 and switched to a Seven-Year Plan synchronized to the Soviet
Union's new Seven-Year Plan for 1959-1965. As part of that plan, came a
forced collectivization of the half of East German agriculture that
still remained in private hands. In three months, February-April 1960,
almost a million farmers were forced into less than 20,000 collective
farms by methods of violence and social pressure similar to those
Stalin had used thirty years earlier in Russia. And the consequences
were, in an economic sense, very similar: agricultural production
collapsed. Shortages of food were soon followed by other shortages,
especially of coal. As might be imagined, the East German winters of
1961-1963 became grim nightmares. The Seven-Year Plan of 1959 proved
almost at once to be unfulfillable, and was replaced by a new and more
modest one for 1964-1970. But the area's subordination to Russia was
hardly eased at all.
East
Germany, like the rest of
Moscow's European satellites, is organized into a unified system of
industrial specialization and economic exploitation, the Comecon
(Council of Mutual Economic Assistance), the Soviet's version of a
common market, set up in opposition to the Marshall Plan in 1949. As a
consequence, 80 percent of East Germany's exports go to Communist
countries, and it became the Soviet Union's largest customer, supplying
20 percent of its total imports. Generally, this exchange took the form
of Russian raw materials exchanged for German industrial goods,
especially machinery, chemicals, optical products, and scientific
instruments. But the failure of the whole system may he seen in the
fact that East Germany, whose prewar industrial capacity was about as
large as West Germany's, by 1960 was producing only one-fourth the
industrial output of West Germany.
The
Communist solution to
these difficulties was to increase the tyranny, but this simply forced
more East Germans to flee westward. To prevent this, and to prevent, if
possible, Communist knowledge of the great successes of the capitalist
system to the west of them, the East German authorities on August 13,
196r, clamped down a rigid "death strip" along the East German-West
German frontier, and hastily built a wall along the line dividing East
Berlin from West Berlin. For months this wall was strengthened and
heightened, surrounded and surmounted by barbed wire and watchtowers,
with the buildings and concealing places along its length cleared away.
Nevertheless, 20,000 persons risked death, injury, and prison and
successfully escaped over the wal1 in its first twelve months. Since
then the figure has fallen to 10,000 to 13,000 a year with about 8 to
10 percent made up of those who were supposed to be guarding it.
In
contrast witl1 this, the
West German economic miracle that made that country the third largest
importer and the second largest exporter in the world, witl1 freedom
and prosperity, was more than Khrushchev could stand. West Berlin,
which shared in the freedom and prosperity of the West, in spite of the
fact that it was surrounded by the grim penury of East Germany, was
even more objectionable to Khrushchev, because it was a glaring
exhibition of the success of the West and the failure of the East. As
Khrushchev himself said, West Berlin was "a bone stuck in my throat."
There
can be little doubt that
Khrushchev's talk about "peaceful coexistence" and "the inevitable
triumph of Socialism by competition without war" was sincere. He was
convinced that the Soviet Union, as the sole earthly representative of
a Communist regime, must be preserved at any cost. He, with his
associates, since the testing of the first successful Soviet
thermonuclear explosion in August, 1953, have recognized that a
thermonuclear war would destroy all civilized living, including the
victor's. The Red Army at times, and Red China always, objected to
this, with the argument that enough would survive to permit
reconstruction of a socialistic way of life, but Khrushchev was not
persuaded. On this basis, he sincerely wished to divert the
Communist-capitalist struggle into nonviolent areas. Thus he was
sincere in his disarmament suggestions and negotiations, but since he
distrusted the Western Powers just as thoroughly as they distrusted
him, any advance along the road to disarmament was almost hopeless. The
Soviet position sought limitation of nuclear arms and long-range
vehicles, and was much less willing to accept limits on conventional
arms or ground forces. This is equivalent to saying that he wished to
limit the United States and was reluctant to limit the Soviet Union.
Only after 1959, with the increased strain on the Soviet Union's
economic manpower, was there any readiness to curtail infantry forces.
At the same time, the almost insane secrecy of the Russian system made
the Kremlin reluctant to accept any effective kind of inspection of
disarmament, which was almost automatically regarded by them as
espionage. The United States was even less eager than the Kremlin to
reach any effective disarmament agreement, since, unlike the Soviet
Union, most of the pressures from American economic and business
circles were in favor of the continuation of large defense spending,
the source of a major segment of America's employment opportunities and
industrial profits. Only at the beginning of 1964, when President
Johnson astutely sought to combine reduced military expenditures with
reduced taxes and a large-scale attack on American domestic poverty to
expand demands in the consumers' markets, did it become possible to
dissipate some of the opposition to reduced arms expenditures from the
military-industrial complex.
Accordingly,
the Soviet
disarmament proposals of April 30, 1957 were discussed month after
month, and year after year, with minimal progress. By 1959 it was quite
clear that the Kremlin's chief aim was to prevent Germany and Red China
from getting nuclear weapons. Accordingly, they concentrated on efforts
to direct the disarmament discussions toward restrictions on nuclear
testing and on nuclear-free zones in central Europe and in Asia. The
nuclear-free zone in central Europe, which fitted in well with a
British-favored policy of "disengagement" in that area, was known as
the Repacki Plan, after its nominal proponent, but reappeared, in
various versions, for many years.
There
can be little doubt that
a central role in Soviet foreign policy was played by the Kremlin's not
unjustified fear of Germany, and its almost neurotic opposition to a
unification of Germany that was not under Soviet control, or to the
acquisition by West Germany of nuclear weapons. A stalemate on this
subject was ensured by America's refusal to accept the status
quo
of a divided Germany because of our devotion to the Adenauer regime,
and our fear that West Germany, rebuffed by us on the issue of
reunification, might prefer reunify to prosperity or democracy and make
a deal with the Soviet Union to achieve such unity. This we could not
accept because of our conviction that German infantry forces were
necessary to the West European defense system if there was to be any
hope of defending Europe against Soviet ground forces on any level of
combat below all-out thermonuclear warfare.
For
these reasons, the United
States committed itself repeatedly to the Adenauer regime to work for
the unification of Germany on democratic lines. Moreover, in 1957, an
Eisenhower commitment to Adenauer, subsequently expanded into a formal
Declaration of Berlin by the three Western Powers (July 29, 1957),
stated that any comprehensive disarmament agreement with the Soviet
Union "must necessarily presuppose a prior solution of the problem of
German re-unification."
A
series of bitter
disappointments during the four years 1958-196: led the Kremlin to the
desperate decision to move part of its IRBM's to
Cuba. Three
factors may have played significant roles in this reckless decision. In
the first place, the inability of the Soviet Union in 1961 to overtake
the American lead in ICBM's made it seem necessary for the Kremlin to
seek to remedy some of its deficiency in these long-range weapons by
deployment closer to the United States of some of its larger supply of
IRBM's. Moreover, increasing evidence that the Soviet Union could not
compete successfully with the United States in such nonviolent areas as
agricultural production, raising standards of living, or aid and
technical assistance to neutral nations made it seem necessary that the
Soviet Union seek some method of increasing its military and political
pressure on the United States that would, at the same time, give a
boost to its prestige throughout the world among neutral or sympathetic
states. Finally, the growing recognition that the Soviet chances were
dwindling for reaching the kind of settlement it wanted in West Germany
or West Berlin undoubtedly led many in the Kremlin to conclude that a
successful emplacement of Soviet missiles in Cuba, even if there were
no real intention of using them, could lead to a compromise settlement
under which these missiles would be removed from Cuba in return for a
Berlin settlement more favorable to the Soviet desires..
Whatever
the reason for the
Soviet missile buildup in Cuba, once begun, in August 1962, it
proceeded with amazing speed. The White House was suspicious by the
beginning of September, and on the 24th of that month President Kennedy
obtained from the Congress permission to call up 150,000 reservists,
but aerial photography did not show missile placements until October
15th. Soviet high altitude AA rockets (SA-2's) had been identified in
Cuba in August, and Ilyushin-28 jet bombers in September..
The
week of October 14-21 was
one of steadily increasing crisis within the United States government,
although no public announcement was made before the President's speech
of Monday, October 22, 1962. This speech established a "quarantine on
all offensive equipment under shipment to Cuba," demanded dismantling
of the missile sites, and withdrawal of Soviet forces under threat of
stronger action by the United States, and announced that "any missile
launched from Cuba against any nation shall be regarded as an attack by
the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring full retaliation."
The
effects of this speech
were explosive. To the world it began six days of crisis in which the
two Superpowers hung on the brink of nuclear war. In reality the
situation was quite different. The crisis, in fact, was an almost
perfect example of a diplomatic crisis and of how such a crisis should
be handled.
The
pattern for a classic
diplomatic crisis has three stages: (1) confrontation; (2) recognition;
and (3) settlement. The confrontation consists of a dispute, that is, a
power challenge in some area of conflict; Stage 2 is recognition by
both sides of the realities of the power relationship between them
(always much easier when only two states are involved); and Stage 3 is
a yielding by the weaker of the two accompanied by an effort by the
stronger to cover that retreat by refusing to inflict a humiliation or
obvious triumph over the weaker. As Metternich said, "A diplomat is a
man who never allows himself the pleasure of a triumph," and does so
simply because it is to the interest of the stronger that an opponent
who recognizes the victor's strength and is reasonable in yielding to
it not be overthrown or replaced by another ruler who is too ignorant
or too unreasonable to do so. The crisis of October 1962 was conducted
along these lines in a masterly fashion by President Kennedy, except
for a few minor blemishes caused by some of his subordinates.
The
power situation throughout
the missile crisis was overwhelmingly in favor of the United States (by
at least a 4 to 1 ratio). The Kremlin could do nothing to defend Cuba
if we attacked it, since its missiles and jet bombers there were not
yet ready. Moreover, the Kremlin could expect devastation of the Soviet
Union itself, if it pushed the Cuban project. It was a mark of
Kennedy's masterful analN7sis here that he ignored Cuba and made the
crisis a simple USSR-USA confrontation. In doing so, he placed the
issue on a pure power basis, and made rubbisl1 of the clutter of
unrealities accumulated on the American foreign policy scene since
1945: NATO, our allies elsewhere, the United Nations, and the
Organization of American States were not consulted before decision and
action; they were informed afterward (chiefly on October :3 ). When
informed and asked to back the White House, they could neither decide
nor act.
The
dominant fact in the whole
situation was the overwhelming character of America's power and the
fact that this was known both to the White House and to the Kremlin,
but was largely unknown, and certainly unpublicized, to the world.
Around the Soviet Union's border were 144 Polaris, 103 Atlas, 159 Thor,
Jupiter, and Titan missiles; 1,600 long-range bombers, many of them
constantly in the air with nuclear bombs. When the President's speech
began the public crisis, five divisions of the United States Army
Strategic Reserve, totaling about 100,000 men, plus 100,000 air force
and an equal number of naval and marine personnel had been mobilized or
alerted, the First Armored Division had been flown from Texas to the
east coast, 9o naval vessels, including 8 carriers, were on patrol to
blockade, a Cuban invasion command had been assembled in Florida, and
2,700 relatives of military personnel had been evacuated from
Guantanamo.
Under
such pressure Khrushchev
wilted (it might almost be said that he panicked) on Friday, October
26th. Only eight days before, on October 18th, Soviet Foreign Minister
Gromyko had made a personal visit to the White House and, without
mentioning the Soviet activities in Cuba, had threatened Mr. Kennedy:
The Soviet Union was unable to postpone any longer the conclusion of a
peace treaty with the (East) German Democratic Republic, yielding to it
control over the access routes to Berlin. The President had listened
and dismissed the foreign minister without saying anything about the
missile buildup in Cuba, which was already under discussion within his
government. But a week later the world could think of nothing else
except the missile buildup and the American response.
As
Washington waited for the
Kremlin's reaction to the President's speech, work on the missile sites
continued, Soviet vessels were approaching the American naval patrol
around Cuba, and the American government was approaching its allies,
the UN, and the OAS. Before the public crisis began on Monday, the
Administration recognized that its blockade was illegal, that the
United States itself had once fought a war for free navigation of the
seas, and that we recognized blockade only in connection with a
declared war. As a concession to this, the American action was called a
"quarantine" not a "blockade." The chief point of concern was: Would
the Soviet accept it or would their vessels precipitate war by trying
to break through? The test came on Thursday, October 25th, at the end
of three days of confused activity in other corners of the stage.
On
Tuesday, October 23rd, as
the United States took its case to the UN and the OAS, reactions came
from its allies and world opinion. Both reactions were adverse, but
most states made it clear that they would not oppose the American
action. Although the British govern meet, like the rest of our allies,
supported the American action, public opinion in England, including The
Guardian, The Times,
and the leaders of the Labour Party, flung back at us the criticism the
Eisenhower Administration had made of the British attack on Suez six
years earlier: ignoring the United Nations, deceiving and bypassing
one's allies, resorting to violent rather than peaceful procedures in
international disputes, and risking nuclear war before negotiations
have been exhausted. Pakistan and India, unable to agree on anything
else, were united in their criticism of Kennedy's irresponsible
exposure of the world to the risk of war. Sweden flatly rejected the
blockade.
In
these same days, the twenty
other Latin American states voted to support the American blockade of
Cuba, and Argentina offered to provide ships to participate in it, but
several states indicated that they would not support an American
invasion of Cuba if the blockade failed to enforce removal of the
missiles.
The
United Nations, as might
be expected, was not so successful in reaching any agreement. Three
resolutions were introduced, submitted by the United States, the Soviet
Union, and the forty neutrals (out of 105 member states), but it was
impossible to obtain the necessary two-thirds vote for any one of them,
and none came to a vote.
In
the meantime, for two days
the important question hung unanswered: What would the Soviet ships do
when they reached the blockade; The first, a tanker, was challenged by
an American destroyer on Thursday, was acknowledged, and gave the
necessary information that it was carrying no arms to Cuba. Within a
few hours, it became clear that twelve of twenty-five Soviet ships en
route to Cuba were turning back. The Kremlin had backed down.
The
following night (Friday,
October 26, 1962) the White House received a long and confused letter
from Khrushchev. Its tone clearly showed his personal panic, and, to
save his reputation, it was not released to the public. The next
morning the Soviet Foreign Office published a quite different text,
suggesting that a deal be made dismantling both the American missile
sites in Turkey and the Soviet missile sites in Cuba. To those inside
both governments, this was recognized as a Soviet surrender, since they
knew that the Turkish sites were obsolete and were already scheduled to
be dismantled within a few months. Although this would have amounted to
giving something for nothing on the Russian side, it was rejected by
the White House because it would have represented to the world a
surrender of Turkey, our ally on the Soviet border, because the Kremlin
had succeeded in establishing a direct threat on our border. Instead,
the White House replied to Khrushchev's unpublished first note,
extracting from it an offer to remove the Russian missiles if we would
lift the blockade and promise not to invade Cuba.
This
acceptance was sent off
to Moscow on Saturday night, while our mobilization for an attack on
the Soviet missile sites if their construction continued went on. On
Sunday morning, by radio from Moscow, Khrushchev's acceptance was
announced: the work on the missile sites was ordered stopped and they
would be dismantled, with UN observation to verify the fact; in return
the President would promise not to attack Cuba or allow our allies to
do so. This led directly to the removal and deportation of the missiles
and Ilyushin bombers over the next few weeks. The Soviet soldiers and
technicians left much more slowly and never completely. Inspection of
the sites was prevented by Castro, who was wild with anger at the way
he had been brushed aside and finally sold out by the Kremlin. As a
result of this failure, the American promise not to invade Cuba was
also not given.
The
missile crisis, by
stripping the Soviet-American rivalry down to its essential feature as
a crude power rivalry, cleared up a number of ambiguities and opened a
new era in twentieth-century history. It showed (1) that the power
balance between the two Superpowers was clearly in America's favor; (2)
that the United States government, in spite of Khrushchev's doubts, had
the will power to face and begin atomic war if necessary; (3) that no
one really wanted thermonuclear war and that Khrushchev was prepared to
go to any reasonable point to avoid it; and (4) that deterrence
actually does deter and, accordingly, that a modus vivendi might
ultimately be achieved between the two Superpowers.
Chapter
72—The Disintegrating Super-blocs
The
chief consequence of the
nuclear stalemate was that it made possible a greatly increased
diversity in the world. The mutual cancellation of the strength of the
two Superpowers made a situation in which states with little or no
power were able to play significant roles on the world stage. At the
same time, the Superpowers w ere not even in a position to press their
desires on the members of their own blocs, and the neutrals could act
witl1 growing neutrality or even growing irresponsibility. Examples of
such behavior could be seen in France, Pakistan, or Red China among the
members of the two blocs, or in the Congo or the Arab states among the
neutrals. Accordingly, the next divisions of our subject must be
concerned with the disintegration of the Super-blocs and the growth of
neutralism.
Latin
America: A Race between Disaster and Reform
As
time remorselessly moves
forward through the second half of the twentieth century, a major
problem for the United States is the fate of Latin America, that
gigantic portion of the Western Hemisphere that is south of the Rio
Grande. It is not an area that can continue to be ignored, because it
is neither small nor remote, and its problems are both urgent and
explosive. Yet, until 1960, it was ignored.
The
Latin America that
demanded attention in 1960 was twice the size of the United States (7.5
million square miles compared to 3.6 million square miles), with a
population about lo percent larger (200 million persons compared to our
180 million in 1960). Brazil, which spoke Portuguese rather than
Spanish, had almost half the total area with more than a third the
total population (75 million in 1960). In 1960 Brazil reached the end
of a decade of economic and population expansion during which its
economy was growing at about 7 percent a year while its population was
growing over 2.5 percent a year, both close to the fastest rates in the
world. (The population increase of Asia was about 1.8 percent a year,
Russia and the United States were less, while Europe was only 0.7
percent a year.) Brazil's rate of economic growth fell to about 3
percent a year after 1960, while its population explosion became worse,
apparently trying to catch up with the Brazilian cost of living, which
rose 40 percent in 1961, 50 percent in 1962, and 70 percent in 1963.
Except
for its fantastic price
inflation, Brazil's problems were fairly typical of those faced by all
of Latin America. These problems might be boiled down to four basic
issues: (1) falling death rates, combined with continued high
birthrates, are producing a population explosion unaccompanied by any
comparable increase in the food supply; (2) the social disorganization
resulting from such population increase, combined with a flooding of
people from rural areas into urban slums, is reflected in disruption of
family life, spreading crime and immorality, totally inadequate
education and other social services, and growing despair; (3) the
ideological patterns of Latin America, which were always
unconstructive, are being replaced by newer, equally unconstructive but
explosively violent, doctrines; and (4) there is simultaneously an
unnecessary spreading of modern weapons and a growing disequilibrium
between the control of such arms and the disintegrating social
structure and the increasing social and political pressures just
mentioned.
Some
of the more obvious consequences of these four problems might be
mentioned here.
Latin
America is not only
poverty-ridden, but the distribution of wealth and income is so unequal
that the most ostentatious luxury exists for a small group side by side
with the most degrading poverty for the overwhelming majority, with a
growing but very small group in between. The average yearly per capita
income for all of Latin America was about $253 in 1960, ranging from
$800 in Venezuela to $95 in Paraguay and $70 in Haiti. The distribution
is so unequal, however, that four-fifths of the population of Latin
America get about $5 3 a year, while a mere 100 families own 9/10 of
the native-owned wealth of the whole area and only 30 families own 72
percent of that wealth. This disequilibrium is seen most clearly in
landholding, on which more than half the population, because of the
area's economic backwardness, is dependent. Agrarian reform (land
redistribution), which seems attractive to many but is really no
solution so long as the peasants lack capital and technical know-how,
has been carried out, to some extent, in a few countries (such as
Mexico or Bolivia), but, in Latin America generally, landholding is
still very unequal. In Brazil, for example, half of all land is owned
by 2.6 percent of the landowners, while 22.5 percent of all the land is
held by only ½ percent of the owners. In Latin America as a
whole, at least two-thirds of the land is owned hy lo percent of the
families. Such inequality attracts a good deal of criticism, especially
by North American "reformers," but in itself it would be good and not
bad if the wealthy owners felt any desire or obligation to make the
land produce more, but the greatest bane of Latin American life, as it
is in Spain also, is the self-indulgence of the rich that allows them
to waste their large incomes in luxury and extravagances without any
feeling of obligation to improve (or even to utilize fully) the
resources they control. We shall return in a moment to the disastrous
ideological patterns that lie behind this attitude.
Almost
equally indicative of
an unhealthy society is the age distribution within that society and
the failure to provide education and healtl1 protection. About half of
Latin America's population is unproductive and a social burden on the
other half because it falls into the two groups of the young (below 15
years) or the old (over 65 years). This compares with only 26 percent
of the population in these dependent groups in the United States. Such
a distribution, in a healthy society, would require very considerable
direction of resources into such social services as education, health
protection, and retirement security. All such services in Latin America
are painfully inadequate. About two-thirds of Latin Americans are
illiterate, and those who may be classified as literate have very
inadequate schooling. The average Latin American has had less than two
years of schooling, but, like all averages, this one is misleading,
since it covers both Paraguay (where very few children ever get near a
school) and Castro's Cuba (where, we are told, illiteracy has been
wiped out and all children of school age up to 15 are supposed to be in
school). Leaving out these two countries, we find that in 1961 in 18
other Latin American countries only 38 percent of the population had
finished two years of school, while only 7 percent had finished primary
school, and one out of a hundred had attended a university.
The
inadequacy of health
protection in Latin America is as startling as the inadequacy of
education, hut may not, in a wider frame, be so objectionable. For if
health were better protected, more people would survive, and the
problems of scarce food and scarce jobs would have reached the
explosive point long ago. Unfortunately, this problem of health and
death rates has a very great impact on humanitarian North American
observers, with the consequence that a considerable portion of the
funds for development provided by the Alliance for Progress since 1961
are aimed at reducing these evils of disease and death. Since this
effort is bound to be more successful than the much smaller funds aimed
at increasing the food supply, the net consequence of these efforts
will be to give Latin America more and hungrier people.
As
things stood in 1960,
infant mortality varied between 20 and 35 percent in different
countries. Even in the Latin American country with the lowest death
rate for the first year of life (Uruguay with 25 deaths per thousand
births), the rate is ten times as high as in the United States (2.6 per
thousand), while in Latin America as a whole it was 56 per thousand,
rising to about 90 per thousand in Guatemala. The expectation of life
for a new baby in all Latin America is only two-thirds that in the
United States (44 years compared to 66 years), but in some areas, such
as northeast Brazil, men are worn out from malnutrition and disease at
age 30.
While
such conditions may
rouse North Americans to outrage or humanitarian sympathy, no solution
of Latin America's problems can be found by emotion or sentimentality.
The problems of Latin America are not based on lack of anything, but on
structural weaknesses. Solutions will not rest on anything that can be
done to or for individual people but on the arrangements of peoples.
Even the greatest evil of the area, the selfish and mistaken outlook of
the dominant social groups, cannot be changed by persuading individuals
but must be changed hy modifying the patterns of social relationships
that are creating such outlooks. The key to the salvation of Latin
America, and much of the rest of the world, rests on that word:
"patterns." Latin America has the resources, the manpower, the capital
accumulation, even perhaps the know-how to provide a viable and
progressive society. What it lacks are constructive
patterns—patterns of power, of social life, and, above all, of
outlook—that will mobilize its resources in constructive rather
than destructive directions.
Failure
to recognize that
Latin America's weaknesses are not based on lack of substance but on
lack of constructive patterns is one of the two chief reasons why the
future of Latin America looks so discouraging. The other reason is
failure to recognize that the chief problem in planning Latin America's
future is that of establishing a constructive sequence of priorities.
In fact, these two problems: obtaining constructive patterns and
obtaining a constructive sequence of priorities, are the keys to
salvation of all the underdeveloped and backward areas of the globe. We
might sum up this general situation by saying that the salvation of our
poor, harassed globe depends on structure and sequence (or on patterns
and priorities)..
In
applying these two
paradigms to Latin American development, we shall find that the problem
of priorities is much easier to solve than the problem of patterns.
Obviously, the ... food supply must be increased faster than the
population. And some provision must be made to provide peasants with
capital and know-how before the great landed estates are divided up
among them. Equally urgent is the caution that some provision for
capital accumulation and its investment in better methods of production
must be made before the present accumulation of excess incomes in the
hands of the existing oligarchies is destroyed by redistribution of the
incomes of the rich (who could invest it) to the poor (who could only
consume it). It should be obvious (but unfortunately is not) that a
more productive organization of resources should have priority over any
effort to raise standards of living. And it should be equally obvious
that Latin America's own resources (including its own capital
accumulation and its own know-how) should be devoted to this effort
before the responsibility for Latin American economic development is
placed on the resources of North Americans or other outsiders.
This
last point might be
amplified. We hear a great deal about Latin America's need for American
capital and American know-how, when in fact the need for these is much
less than the need for utilization of Latin America's own capital and
know-how. The wealth and income of Latin America, in absolute
quantities, is so great and it is so inequitably controlled and
distributed that there is an enormous accumulation of incomes, far
beyond their consumption needs, in the hands of a small percentage of
Latin Americans. Much of these excess incomes are wasted, hoarded, or
merely used for wasteful competition in ostentatious social display.
This, as we shall see, is largely due to the deficiencies of Latin
American personalities and character. The contrast, from this point of
view, between England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and
Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is very
instructive. In both cases there was such a drastic inequity in the
distribution of national incomes that the masses of the people were in
abject poverty and probably getting poorer. But in England there were
groups benefitting from this inequality who eschewed all
self-indulgence, luxury, or ostentatious display of wealth, and
systematically invested their growing incomes in creating new and more
efficient patterns of utilization of resources. This is in sharp
contrast to the situation in Latin America where such excess wealth, in
the aggregate, is much greater than that being accumulated, a century
or more ago, in England, but is very largely wasted and surely is not
being used to create more productive patterns for utilization of
resources, except in rare cases..
The
solution to this problem
is not, as we have said, to redistribute incomes in Latin America, but
to change the patterns of character and of personality formation so
that excess incomes will be used constructively and not wasted (nor
simply redistributed and consumed).
A
similar situation exists in
regard to foreign exchange. Alternately our compassion is stirred and
our anger aroused by American reformers and Latin agitators at the
iniquities of the colonial character of Latin America's position in the
world economy. This simply means that Latin America exports raw
materials, minerals, and agricultural products (generally unprocessed
goods), and imports processed, manufactured goods. Since the prices of
unprocessed goods are generally more competitive, and therefore more
fluctuating, than those of manufactured goods, the so-called "terms of
trade" tend to run either favorably for or very unfavorably against
Latin America. In the latter case, which has been generally prevalent
for the last few years, the prices Latin America has to pay on the
world's markets have tended to rise, while the prices that it gets for
its own goods have tended to fall. As European economists would say,
"The blades of the scissors have opened." American farmers, who speak
of the "terms of parity," have been suffering the same way in the
American domestic market.
Now,
this is perfectly true.
The Latin American economy is largely a colonial one (like Australia,
New Zealand, West Africa, or Montana). In fact, in Latin America, in
recent years, at least half the value of American aid has been wiped
away by the worsening of Latin America's terms of trade, which made it
necessary for it to pay more and more foreign moneys for its imports at
the same time that it got less and less foreign moneys for its exports.
But the fact remains that this reduction in the supply of foreign
exchange available for Latin America's purchases of advanced equipment
overseas has been made much worse by the fact that wealthy Latin
Americans buy up much of the available supply of such foreign exchange
for self-indulgent and nonconstructive spending abroad or simply to
hoard their incomes in politically safer areas in New York, London, or
Switzerland. Estimates of the total of such Latin American hoards
abroad range between one billion and two billion dollars.
The
solution to this problem
must be found in more responsible, more public-spirited, and more
constructive patterns of outlook, of money flows, and of political and
social security.
A
similar solution must be
found for some of the social deficiencies of Latin America, such as
inadequate education, housing, and social stability. Widespread tax
evasion by the rich; bribery and corruption in public life; and
brutality and selfishness in social life can be reduced and largely
eliminated in Latin America by changing patterns in Latin American life
and utilization of resources without much need for funds, sermons, or
demonstrations from foreigners (least of all Americans).
This
is not an argument for a
reduction in American aid or in American concern for Latin America. It
is a plea for recognition, by all concerned, that the problems of Latin
America, and the possible solutions to these problems, rest on
questions of structure and sequence and not on questions of resources,
wealth, or even know-how.
The
connection of that last
word "know-how" to the whole problem may not be sufficiently clear. We
Americans have such pride in our technological achievements that we
often seem to feel that we "know how" to do almost everything, but this
know-how really exists on two levels. One level is concerned with
general attitudes such as objectivity, rationality, recognition of the
value of social consensus, and such, while the other level is concerned
with technological achievement in any specific situation. The former
level has a great deal to contribute to the Latin American situation,
while the latter level (the engineering level, so to speak) has much
less to contribute to Latin America than most people believe. For
example, American agricultural techniques, which are so fantastically
successful in the temperate seasonal climate and well-watered and
alluvial soils of North America, are frequently quite unadapted to the
tropical, less seasonal climate, and semiarid, leached soils of South
America. The solution to the Latin American problem of food production
is not necessarily to apply North American techniques to the problem,
but to discover techniques, different from our own, that will work
under Latin American conditions. This situation, applied here to
agriculture, is even more true of social and ideological problems.
The
problem of finding
constructive patterns for Latin America is much more difficult than the
problem of finding constructive priorities. One reason for this is that
the unconstructive patterns that now prevail in Latin America are
deeply entrenched as a result of centuries and even millennia of
persistent background. In fact, the Latin American patterns that must
be changed because today they are leading to social and cultural
disruption are not really Latin American in origin, or even Iberian for
that matter, but are Near Eastern, and go back, for some of their
aspects, for two thousand or more years. As a general statement, we
might say that the Latin American cultural pattern (including
personality patterns and general outlook) is Arabic, while its social
pattern is that of Asiatic despotism. The pattern as a whole is so
prevalent today, not only in Latin America, but in Spain, Sicily,
southern Italy, the Near East, and in various other areas of the
Mediterranean world (such as Egypt), that we might well call it the
"Pakistani-Peruvian axis." For convenience of analysis we shall divide
it into "Asiatic despotism" and the "Arabic outlook."
We
have already indicated the
nature of Asiatic despotism in connection with traditional China, the
old Ottoman Empire, and czarist Russia. It goes back to the archaic ...
empires, which first appeared in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley,
and northern China before 1000 B.C. Basically such an Asiatic despotism
is a two-class society in which a lower class, consisting of at least
nine-tenths of the population, supports an upper, ruling class
consisting of several interlocking groups. These ruling groups are a
governing bureaucracy of scribes and priests associated with army
leaders, landlords, and moneylenders. Such an upper class accumulated
great quantities of wealth as taxes, rents, interest on loans, fees for
services, or simply as financial extortions. The social consequences
were either progressive or reactionary, depending on whether this
accumulated wealth in the possession of the ruling class was invested
in more productive utilization of resources or was simply hoarded and
wasted. The essential character of such an Asiatic despotisn1 rests on
the fact that the ruling class has legal claims on the working masses,
and possesses the power (from its control of arms and the political
structure) to enforce these claims. A modified Asiatic despotism is one
aspect of the social structures all along the Pakistani-Peruvian axis.
The
other aspect of the
Pakistani-Peruvian axis rests on its Arabic outlook. The Arabs, like
other Semites who emerged from the Arabian desert at various times to
infiltrate the neighboring Asiatic despotic cultures of urban
civilizations, were, originally, nomadic, tribal peoples. Their
political structure was practically identical with their social
structure and was based on blood relationships and not on territorial
jurisdiction. They were warlike, patriarchal, extremist, violent,
intolerant, and xenophobic. Like most tribal peoples, their political
structure was totalitarian in the sense that all values, all needs, and
all meaningful human experience was contained within the tribe. Persons
outside the tribal structure had no value or significance, and there
were no obligations or meaning associated in contacts with them. In
fact, they were hardly regarded as human beings at all. Moreover,
within the tribe, social significance became more intense as blood
relationships became closer, moving inward from the tribes through
clans to the patriarchal extended family. The sharp contrast between
such a point of view and that associated with Christian society as we
know it can be seen in the fact that such Semitic tribalism was
endogamous, while the rule of Christian marriage is exogamous. The
rules, in fact, were directly antithetical, since Arabic marriage
favors unions of first cousins, while Christian marriage has
consistently opposed marriage of first (or even second) cousins. In
traditional Arabic society any girl was bound to marry her father's
brother's son if he and his father wanted her, and she was usually not
free to marry someone else until he had rejected her (sometimes after
years of waiting).
In
such traditional Arabic
society, the extended family, not the individual, was the basic social
unit; all property was controlled by the patriarchal head of such a
family and, accordingly, most decisions were in his hands. His control
of the marriage of his male descendants was ensured by the fact that a
price had to be paid for a bride to her family, and this would require
the patriarch's consent.
Such
a patriarchal family
arose from the fact that marriage was patrilocal, the young couple
residing with the groom's father so long as he lived, while he
continued to live with the groom's paternal grandfather until the
latter's death. Such a death of the head of an extended family freed
his sons to become heads of similar extended families that would remain
intact, frequently for three or more generations, until the head of the
family dies in his turn. Within such a family each male remains subject
to the indulgent, if erratic, control of his father and the indulgent,
and subservient care of his mother and unmarried sisters, while his
wife is under the despotic control of her mother-in-law until her
production of sons and the elimination of her elders by death will make
her a despot, in turn, over her daughters-in-law.
This
Arabic emphasis on the
extended family as the basic social reality meant that larger social
units came into existence simply by linking a number of related
extended families together under the nominal leadership of the
patriarch who, hy general consensus, had the best qualities of
leadership, dignity, and social prestige. But such unions, being
personal and essentially temporary, could be severed at any time. The
personal character of such unions and the patriarchal nature of the
basic family units tended to make all political relationships personal
and temporary, reflections of the desires or whims of the leader and
not the consequence or reflection of any basic social relationships.
This tended to prevent the development of any advanced conception of
the state, law, and the community (as achieved, for example, by the
once tribal Greeks and Romans). Within the family, rules were personal,
patriarchal, and often arbitrary and changeable, arising from the will
and often from the whims of the patriarch. This prevented the
development of any advanced ideas of reciprocal common interests whose
interrelationships, hy establishing a higher social structure, created,
at the same time, rules superior to the individual, rules of an
impersonal and permanent character in which law created authority and
not, as in the Arabic system, authority created law (or at least
temporary rules). To this day the shattered cultures along the whole
Pakistani-Peruvian axis have a very weak grasp of the nature of a
community or of any obligation to such a community, and regard law and
politics as simply personal relationships whose chief justification is
the power and position of the individual who issues the orders. The
state, as a structure of force more remote and therefore less personal
than the immediate family, is regarded as an alien and exploitative
personal system to be avoided and evaded simply because it is more
remote (even if of similar character) than the individual's immediate
family
This
biological and
patriarchal character of all significant social relationships in Arab
life is reflected in the familiar feature of male dominance. Only the
male is important. The female is inferior, even sub-human, and becomes
significant only by producing males (the one thing, apparently, that
the dominant male cannot do for himself). Because of the strong
patrilocal character of Arab marriage, a new wife is not only subjected
sexually to her husband; she is also subjected socially and personally
to his family, including his brothers, and, above all, his mother (who
has gained this position of domination over other females in the house
by having produced male children). Sex is regarded almost solely as
simply a physiological relationship with little emphasis on the
religious, emotional, or even social aspects. Love, meaning concern for
the personality or developing potentialities of the sexual partner,
plays little role in Arabic sexual relationships. The purpose of such
relationships in the eyes of the average Arab is to relieve his own
sexual desire or to generate sons.
Such
sons are brought up in an
atmosphere of whimsical, arbitrary, personal rules where they are
regarded as superior beings by their mother and sisters and,
inevitably, by their father and themselves, simply on the basis of
their maleness. Usually they are spoiled, undisciplined,
self-indulgent, and unprincipled. Their whims are commands, their urges
are laws. They are exposed to a dual standard of sexual morality in
which any female is a legitimate target of their sexual desires, but
the girl they marry is expected to be a paragon of chaste virginity.
The original basis for this emphasis on a bride's virginity rested on
the emphasis on blood descent and was intended to be a guarantee of the
paternity of children. The wife, as a child-producing mechanism, had to
produce the children of one known genetic line and no other.
This
emphasis on the virginity
of any girl who could be regarded as acceptable as a wife was carried
to extremes. The loss of a girl's virginity was regarded as an
unbearable dishonor by the girl's family, and any girl who brought such
dishonor on a family was regarded as worthy of death at the hands of
her father and brothers. Once she is married, the right to punish such
a transgression is transferred to her husband.
To
any well-bred girl, her
premarital virginity and the reservation of sexual access to her
husband's control after marriage ("her honor") have pecuniary value.
Since she has no value in herself as a person, apart from "her honor,"
and has little value as a worker of any sort, her virginity before
marriage has a value in money equal to the expense of keeping her for
much of her life since, indeed, this is exactly what it was worth in
money. As a virgin she could expect the man who obtained her in
marriage to regard that asset as equivalent to his reciprocal
obligation to support her as a wife. As a matter of fact, her virginity
was worth much less than that, for in traditional Arabic society, if
she displeased her husband, even if she merely crossed one of his
whims, he could set her aside by divorce, a process very easy for him,
with little delay or obligation, but impossible to achieve on her part,
no matter how eagerly she might desire it. Moreover, once her virginity
was gone, she had little value as a wife or a person, unless she had
mothered a son, and could be passed along from man to man, either in
marriage or otherwise, with little social obligation on anyone's part.
As a result of such easy divorce, and the narrow physiological basis on
which sexual relationships are based, plus the lack of value of a woman
once her virginity is gone, Arab marriage is very fragile, with divorce
and broken marriage about twice as frequent as in the United States.
Even the production of sons does not ensure the permanence of the
marriage, since the sons belong to the father whatever the cause of the
marriage disruption. As a result of these conditions, marriage of
several wives in sequence, a phenomenon we associate with Hollywood, is
much more typical of the Arabic world and is very much more frequent
than the polygamous marriage, which, while permitted under Islam, is
quite rare. Not more than 5 percent of married men in the Near East
today have more than one wife at the same time, because of the expense,
but the number who remain in monogamous union till death is almost
equally small.
As
might be expected in such a
society, Arabic boys grow up egocentric, self-indulgent, undisciplined,
immature, spoiled, subject to waves of emotionalism, whims, passion,
and pettiness. The consequence of this for the whole Pakistani-Peruvian
axis will be seen in a moment.
Another
aspect of Arabic
society is its scorn of honest, steady manual work, especially
agricultural work. This is a consequence of the fusion of at least
three ancient influences. First, the archaic bureaucratic structure of
Asiatic despotism, in which peasants supported warriors and scribes,
regarded manual workers, especially tillers of the soil, as the lowest
layer of society, and regarded the acquisition of literacy and military
prowess as the chief roads to escape from physical drudgery. Second,
the fact that Classical Antiquity, whose influence on the subsequent
Islamic Civilization was very great, was based on slavery, and came to
regard agricultural (or other manual) work as fit for slaves, also
contributed to this idea. Third, the Bedouin tradition of pastoral,
warlike nomads scorned tillers of the soil as weak and routine persons
of no real spirit or character, fit to be conquered or walked on but
not to be respected. The combination of these three formed the lack of
respect for manual work that is so characteristic of the
Pakistani-Peruvian axis.
Somewhat
similar to this lack
of respect for manual work are a number of other characteristics of
tradition! Arab life that have also spread the length of the
Pakistani-Peruvian axis. The chief source of many of these is the
Bedouin outlook, which originally reflected the attitudes of a
relatively small group of the Islamic culture but which, because they
were a superior, conquering group, came to be copied by others in the
society, even by the despised agricultural workers. These attitudes
include lack of respect for the soil, for vegetation, for most animals,
and for outsiders. These attitudes, which are singularly ill-fitted for
the geographic and climatic conditions of the whole Pakistani-Peruvian
area, are to be seen constantly in the everyday life of that area as
erosion, destruction of vegetation and wild life, personal cruelty and
callousness to most living things, including one's fellow men, and a
general harshness and indifference to God's creation. This final
attitude, which well reflects the geographic conditions of the area,
which seem as harsh and indifferent as man himself, is met by those men
who must face it in their daily life as a resigned submission to fate
and to the inhumanity of man to man.
Interestingly
enough, these
attitudes have successfully survived the efforts of the three great
religions of ethical monotheism, native to the area, to change these
attitudes. The ethical sides of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam sought
to counteract harshness, egocentricity, tribalism, cruelty, scorn of
work and of one's fellow creatures, but these efforts, on the whole,
have met with little success throughout the length of the
Pakistani-Peruvian axis. Of the three, Christianity, possibly because
it set the highest standards of the three, has fallen furthest from
achieving its aims. Love, humility, brotherhood, cooperation, the
sanctity of work, the fellowship of the community, the image of man as
a fellow creature made in the image of God, respect for women as
personalities and partners of men, mutual helpmates on the road to
spiritual salvation, and the vision of our universe, with all its
diversity, complexity, and multitude of creatures, as a reflection of
the power and goodness of God—these basic aspects of Christ's
teachings are almost totally lacking throughout the Pakistani-Peruvian
axis and most notably absent on the "Christian" portion of that axis
from Sicily, or even the Aegean Sea, westward to Baja California and
Tierra del Fuego. Throughout the whole axis, human actions are not
motivated by these "Christian virtues" but by the more ancient Arabic
personality traits, which became vices and sins in the Christian
outlook: harshness, envy, lust, greed, selfishness, cruelty, and hatred.
Islam,
the third in historical
sequence of the ethical monotheistic religions of the Near East, was
very successful in establishing its monotheism, but had only very
moderate success in spreading its version of Jewish and Christian
ethics to the Arabs. These moderate successes were counterbalanced by
other, incidental consequences of Muhammad's personal life and of the
way in which Islam spread to make the Muslim religion more rigid,
absolute, uncompromising, self-centered, and dogmatic.
The
failure of Christianity in
the areas west from Sicily was even greater, and was increased by the
spread of Arab outlooks and influence to that area, and especially to
Spain. The old French proverb which says that "Africa begins at the
Pyrenees" does not, of course, mean by "Africa" that Black Africa which
exists south of the deserts, but means the world of the Arabs w hicl1
spread, in the eighth century, across Africa from Sinai to Morocco.
To
this day the Arab influence
is evident in southern Italy, northern Africa and, above all, in Spain.
It appears in the obvious things such as architecture, music, the
dance, and literature, but most prominently it appears in outlook,
attitudes, motivations, and value systems. Spain and Latin America,
despite centuries of nominal Christianity, are Arabic areas.
No
statement is more hateful
to Spaniards and Latin Americans than that. But once it is made, and
once the evidence on which it was based is examined in an objective
way, it becomes almost irrefutable. In Spain, the Arab conquest of 711,
which was not finally ejected until 1492, served to spread Arab
personality traits, in spite of the obvious antagonism between Muslim
and Christian. In fact, the antagonism helped to build up those very
traits that I have called Arabic: intolerance, self-esteem, hatred,
militarization, cruelty, dogmatism, rigidity, harshness, suspicion of
outsiders, and the rest of it. The Arab traits that w ere not
engendered by this antagonism were built up by emulation—the
tendency of a conquered people to copy their conquerors, no matter how
much they profess to hate them, simply because they are a superior
social class. From this emulation came the Spanish and Latin American
attitudes toward sex, family structure, and child-rearing that are the
distinctive features of Spanish speaking life today and that make
Spanish-speaking areas so ambiguously part of Western Civilization in
spite of their nominal allegiance to such an essential Western trait as
Christianity. For the West, even as it nominally ceases to be
Christian, and most obviously in those areas which have, at least
nominally, drifted furthest from Christianity, still has many of the
basic Christian traits of love, humility, social concern,
humanitarianism, brotherly care, and future preference, however
detached these traits may have become from tile Christian idea of deity
or of individual salvation in a spiritual eternity.
In
Latin America the
Mediterranean version of Arabized life again found its traits
preserved, and sometimes reinforced, by the historical process. In
Latin America non-Spanish influences, chiefly Indian, Negro, and North
American, can he observed in such things as music, dances,
superstitions, agricultural crops and diet (largely Indian), or in
transportation, communications, and weapons (largely European); but the
basic structures of family and social life, of ideological patterns and
values are, to this day, largely those of the Arabic end of the
Pakistani-Peruvian axis.
The
Iberian conquest of Latin
America, not as an area of settlement but as an area of exploitation,
and the Spanish attitude toward the Indians and Negro slaves as
instruments in that exploitative process, the development of plantation
colonialism, and of mineral extraction, intensified the exploitative,
ransacking, extensive attitude toward resources and peoples which the
Mediterranean area had obtained from the Romans and the Saracens. None
of these activities became permanent community traits for those
involved in them, even for the underlings who operated as part of the
exploitative way of life, but remained temporary, get-rich-quick
methods of mercenary gain for persons who regarded themselves as
strangers whose roots were elsewhere, or nowhere. The Spanish oligarchy
in the colonial period saw its roots in Spain itself, and this
attitude, widened somewhat to include Paris, London, the Riviera, or
New York, has remained the attitude of the ruling oligarchy after the
wars of liberation broke the formal links with Spain or Portugal. In
the same way, and for these reasons, the colonial economy, and
colonialism in financial, educational, cultural, and commercial life,
has continued after it ceased in the narrowly political sphere. To this
day, the characteristics we have listed as Arabic dominate Latin
America: no real concern for the soil, the area, for workers, one's
fellow men, or the community as a whole; the dominance of family
connection and of masculine dominance with its dual standard of sexual
morality, its cult of virility, its selfishness, self-indulgence, lack
of self-discipline or of concern for others; and the whole
Mediterranean view of politics as a system of exploitative, personal
relationships of an arbitrary and corrupt character combining
extortion, bribery, tax evasion, and total divorce from community
spirit or personal responsibility for the welfare of others or of the
nation.
This
picture of Latin America
and its problems will be resented and criticized by many as
exaggerated, one-sided, or even as mistaken. Naturally, in view of its
brevity, it is oversimplified, as all brief expositions must be. And
equally naturally all its statements do not apply to all groups, all
areas, all classes, or all individuals. There are numerous exceptions
to large portions of this picture, but they are exceptions and are
explicable as such. And there are obviously different degrees of
emphasis among various groups, backgrounds, and periods. These again
are explicable. Those Latin Americans who are close to the Negro
traditions of Africa and of slavery put more emphasis on present
preference and sociability than they do on domination, harshness, and
cruelty. Again those Latin Americans who are close to the Indian
tradition put more emphasis on resignation to fate and indigenous
superstitions than they do on male dominance and proving their sexual
virility (called machismo, a key concept in Latin American outlook and
behavior). Above all, the scores of millions of Latin Americans who are
on a poverty level at, or even below, subsistence have many of the
characteristics of social and psychological disintegration that we
associate with extreme poverty everywhere, even in the United States,
and are to that degree unable to carry on the traditions of Latin
American life— or any traditions. As such, they emphasize,
interestingly enough, the traits of male dominance and egocentric
selfishness rather than the companion traits, in the Arab tradition, of
female chastity or family solidarity.
In
general, we might say that
the Latin American tradition we have identified as a modified Arabic
tradition with Asiatic despotic overtones is more typical of the
oligarchic, Spanish upper classes than it is of the Negro, Indian, or
poverty-racked urban poor. And this is of the greatest significance.
For this shows that the means and the method for the reform of Latin
American society rest in the same group of that society. Such reform
can come about only when the surpluses that accumulate in the hands of
the Latin American oligarchy are used to establish more progressive
utilization of Latin American resources. By the word "reform" we mean
that the power pattern, the economic and social pattern, and the
ideological pattern be reorganized in more constructive configurations
rather than on the destructive patterns in which they now exist. And of
these three, the patterns of ideology—that is, of outlook and
value systems—are most in need of change. Of course, in any
society it is precisely this pattern of outlook and values that is most
difficult to modify. In most societies this remains
unchanged—repeated in slogans, war cries, and religious
incantations long after the behavioral and structural patterns have
changed completely. But in Latin America there is this ray of hope. A
more constructive ideological pattern is already familiar, at least in
words, to Latin America: Christianity.
The
whole system is full of
paradox and contradiction. The real obstacle to progress and hope in
Latin America rests in the oligarchy, not so much because it controls
the levers of power and wealth but because it is absorbed in the
destructive Latin American ideology. But the real hope in the area
rests in the same oligarchy, because it controls wealth and power, and
also because there is no hope at all unless it changes its ideology.
The ideology it could adopt is one that places emphasis on
self-discipline, service to others, love, and equality, but these
virtues, almost wholly lacking in practice in Latin America, are the
very ones that are, in words, embodied in the Christian religion to
which the oligarchy of Latin America nominally belongs. In a word,
Latin America would be on the road to reform if it practiced what it
preached, that is, if it tried to be Christian. Of course, we cannot
really say that the solution lies in practice of what one preaches, the
Christian virtues, because Latin American religion, like everything
else, is largely corrupt and, as a consequence, no longer preaches the
Christian virtues. The upper clergy have been generally allied to the
oligarchy; the lower clergy are as poverty-stricken and almost as
ignorant as their fellow poor in lay society. Moreover, both levels of
clergy have come to accept the outlook and values of the society in
which they live. The message of Christ itself, a positive message of
action, has been lost in the negative messages of the Catholic clergy
reacting within a corrupt society drenched in the non-Christian outlook
that dominates the oligarchy as a whole.
Only
in recent years has there
been much change in this situation. In most of Latin America, the
Church's failure is recorded in the fact that the great mass of Latin
American people, especially those below the level of the oligarchy
itself, ignore it or reject it, just as they do in Spain. And
especially the dominant males have rejected it, except as a social
necessity, or an anti-revolutionary force, or as a refuge for their
martyr-obsessed women. But the advent of Pope John XXIII has had a
profound influence on the Church by recalling it from its interests and
crass power relationships to the content of Christ's message. The
degree to which this can change the clergy's negative injunctions
against adultery, Communism, and criminal acts into positive
exhortations to acts of social benefit, help, and love is
problematical. And even more dubious is the question if it is not going
to be too little and too late. This is, indeed, the great question with
which all talk of reform in Latin America must cud: "Is there still
time-"
There
was time enough in 1940,
when the demands of war in Europe began to push away the acute problems
and controversies that had arisen from the world depression, the rise
of Fascism; and the Spanish Civil War of the 1930's. World War II, by
increasing the demand for Latin America's mineral and agricultural
products, pushed starvation and controversy away from the immediate
present and into the more remote future. Unfortunately, nothing
constructive was done with the time thus gained, and, almost equally
tragic, little constructive use was made of the wealth brought to Latin
America by the demands of \var elsewhere on the globe. Latin America
boomed: the rich became richer; the poor had more children. A few poor,
or at least not rich, became rich, or at least richer. But nothing was
done to modify the basic pattern of Latin American power, wealth, and
outlook.
The
wars of independence that
ended Latin America's political connection with Spain and Portugal did
not destroy the power of the upperclass oligarchies or change their
outlooks, except to make them somewhat more local. It was about a
century, say from 1830 to 1930, before the oligarchic alliance of army,
landlords, bankers, and upper clergy was seriously challenged in their
exploitation of their peasant subjects or the natural resources of
their local areas.
This
challenge, which first
appeared in Mexico in 1910, was a consequence of the commercialization
and, much later, the incipient industrialization of Latin American
society. The same influences, reinforced by other developments, such as
growing literacy, population increase, and the introduction of new
ideas of European and North American origin, served to weaken the union
of the older oligarchic groups so that the solidarity of the military
with the other three groups was much reduced.
This
process of
commercialization and incipient industrialization of Latin American
society was largely a consequence of foreign investments, which
introduced railroads, tram lines, faster communications, large-scale
mining, some processing of raw materials, the introduction of
electricity, waterworks, telephones, and other public utilities, and
the beginnings of efforts to produce supplies for these new activities.
These efforts served to create two new and quite divergent social
classes which began to fill the gap between the older rural dichotomy
of oligarchy and peasantry. The new classes, both largely urban, were
labor and bourgeoisie. Both were infected by the class-struggle
ideologies of European Socialist groups, so that the new laboring
masses sought to be unionized and radical. Both groups were much more
political than the old peasant class had ever been. A chief consequence
of the whole development Noms the urbanization and radicalization of
Latin American society.
From
the political point of
view, these developments made the power relationships of Latin America
much more complex and unpredictable. For one thing, the army was no
longer completely dependent on the landlord groups for support, but
found, on the contrary, that its urban bases were under pressure of
local labor-union controls of its supplies, while its relations with
the bourgeois groups were much more ambiguous than its relations with
the landlord group had been previously. At the same time, the influence
of the clergy was generally weakened by the influx of anti-clerical
ideas of European origin into both the new urban groups and, to a much
smaller extent, to the peasants.
These
changes have not
occurred in all areas of Latin America. Indeed, many areas remain much
as they were in 1880. But in Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil the process
has gone far enough to modify the whole social pattern, while in some
lesser areas like Bolivia, Uruguay, Costa Rica and, above all, Cuba,
drastic changes have been occurring.
In
Mexico the revolution has
continued for more than half a century. During at least half of that
period, the chief problem was the control of militarism, a task that
must be done in all of Latin America. In its early days, the Mexican
Revolution was distracted from constructive change by a number of
destructive efforts. For example, its attacks on foreign capital led to
more damage than good by curtailing foreign investment and foreign
technological skills. At the same time, its emphasis on agrarian reform
distracted attention from the real agricultural problem to the
pseudo-problem of landownership; the real problem is that of increasing
agricultural production, regardless of agrarian arrangements. These
three early problems have been to some extent overcome. The Mexican
Army is now largely professionalized and relatively nonpolitical and
responsive to civilian controls. For more than a generation now, the
army has not overthrown a government. At the same time, political
stability has been increased by the depersonalization of political
life, by circulation of leadership within one dominant party, by the
establishment of some political principles, including the very
significant one of no reelection of the president, and by the use of
political power to encourage some progressive tendencies, such as more
public funds for education than for defense, encouragement of improved
communications and transport, of foreign investment, and of balanced
economic development. Many acute problems remain, such as an exploding
population, acute poverty, and a very low level of social welfare, but
things have been moving, and in a hopeful direction. During the two
decades before 1962, the gross national product rose over 6 percent a
year, while industrial production rose more than 400 percent in that
period. The political system itself is corrupt, with most elections
jobbed by the dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party, but at least
the outlook for the average Mexican today is more hopeful than it was
for his father a generation ago or than it is for his contemporaries in
much of the rest of Latin America. The problems of life have not been
solved in Mexico, but valuable time has been won.
Efforts
of other countries to
follow in Mexico's footsteps have been less successful and even
disastrous. In Argentina patterns of life have become less constructive
during the last generation, despite the fact that Argentina has been
less burdened with population and more endowed with resources than
other countries in Latin America. But lack of moral principles and
excess self-indulgence has betrayed all efforts to obtain better
patterns of life. This was evident in the career of Juan D.
Perón, an army officer who came to power by a coup d'état
in 1943 and sought to base that control on an alliance of the military
with the workers. He built up a strong labor movement, but his concern
with maintaining his own power, his lack of any over-all plan, and his
basically unprincipled outlook led to a disintegration of his movement
and his overthrow by his own military forces in 1955. The waste of
resources by inefficiency and corruption under Perón has left
Argentina disorganized and divided, with real power increasingly in the
hands of the armed forces (if they could agree on anything) and with
many people looking backward with regret to the more affluent days of
Perón.
The
disintegration of
Argentina, which lacked the basic problems that have haunted most Latin
American countries, helps to demonstrate the significant role played in
Latin American backwardness by unconstructive patterns, especially
patterns of outlook. Argentina did not have such problems as excess
population, lack of capital, poor and unbalanced resources, extreme
poverty, social disorganization, or illiteracy (which is below lo
percent), but the argumentative and divisive nature of social attitudes
is as prevalent in Argentina as elsewhere on the Pakistani-Peruvian
axis, and is the consequence along the whole length of that axis of the
egocentric and undisciplined way in which sons are brought up by their
mothers. In all societies, individuals have traits in which they differ
from other individuals and traits in which they share. A highly
civilized people like the English, by training of the young of all
classes (until very recently) have tended to produce adults who
emphasize the qualities they share, and play down the qualities in
which they differ, even in activities such as games, politics, or
competitive business where opposition is part of the rules. In Latin
America the opposite is true, as each person tries to emphasize his
individuality by finding more and more features of his life (often
artificial ones) that distinguish or oppose him to others.
In
Argentina, as elsewhere
along the Pakistani-Peruvian axis (especially in Spain), this tendency
has fragmented social life and led to extremism. Even groups that seem
to have the most obvious common interests in Argentina, such as the
armed forces or the urban middle classes, are hopelessly split, and
fluctuate from position to position. It is the splitting of these
groups, especially of the middle classes, that has given such influence
in Argentina to the labor unions on the Left or the landlord group on
the Right. The middle classes in Argentina have been split into two
political parties that refuse to cooperate. Together they could poll at
least half the total vote in any election, but instead each obtains a
quarter or less of the total vote and, refusing to join each other,
must seek a majority by coalition with smaller, extremist parties.
The
failure of Latin America
to find solutions to its most urgent real problems are, thus, much more
fundamental than the cliches of political controversy, the complexion
of governments, or the presence or absence of "revolutionaries." The
words Left, Center, or Right mean little in terms of solutions to Latin
America's problems, since disorganization, corruption, violence, and
fraud are endemic in all. Bolivia, which has had a revolutionary
government of peasants and tin miners since 1952, is in a mess, and
Nicaragua, which has been under control of a military-dominated
oligarchy for almost thirty years, is in a similar mess. So long as any
real solutions of Latin America's problems depend upon the slow
building up of constructive patterns, including ideological patterns,
no solution will be found in shifting power or property from one group
to another, even if the beneficent group in such transfers is much
larger. This failure of social and economic revolutions to achieve more
constructive patterns is evident in Bolivia, Guatemala, and Cuba.
Bolivia's
problems always
seemed hopeless. In three unsuccessful wars with Chile, Brazil, and
Paraguay from 1879 to 1935, it lost territory to its neighbors,
including its only outlet to the sea. Its population of less than three
million in 1950 (3.6 million a decade later) was crowded on its bleak
western plateau, over 12,000 feet up, while its subtropical eastern
lowlands were inhabited by only a few wild Indians. These lowlands and
its mineral resources, source of 95 percent of its foreign exchange
(mostly from tin), were Bolivia's chief assets before the revolution of
1952, but the former were unused, while the tin earnings went chiefly
to swell the foreign holdings of three greedy groups, Patiño and
Aramayo (both Bolivian) and Hochschild (Argentine). Until the
revolution, the Bolivians, mostly of Indian descent, who were treated
as second-class persons working as semi-slaves in the mines or as serfs
on the large estates, had a per capita annual income of about $100,
one-fifth that of Argentina. and the lowest but two of the twenty-one
Latin American countries. As might be expected, the majority were
illiterate, sullen, and discouraged.
The
poor Bolivian performance
in the Chaco War with Paraguay in 1932-1935 gave rise to national
feeling even among the Indians, and inspired a group of academic
intellectuals, led by Victor Paz Estenssoro, to found a new political
party, the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR). Many of the younger
officers and the Indian enlisted men sympathized with the movement, and
it won the largest vote of any party (45 percent) in the election of
1951. The older officers prevented the MNR from participating in the
new government, but their junta split and was overthrown by an uprising
in April 1952. Paz Estenssoro returned from exile to become president,
with Juan Lechin, leader of the revolutionary tin miners' union, as his
chief aid.
Within
a year, pressure from the tin miners and from the peasants (campesinos)
forced the new regime to nationalize the mines and to break up many of
the large estates into small peasant holdings. Production of metals and
of food both collapsed, the miners demanding more pay and shorter hours
for less and less work, driving Bolivian costs of production above the
world market price for tin, thus wiping out a major part of the
country's foreign-exchange earnings. These fell from $150,770,700 (96
percent from metals) in 1951 to $63,240,000 (86 percent from metals) in
1958. To make matters worse, as Bolivian costs of tin rose, the world
price of tin collapsed in 1957 when the Soviet Union, for the first
time, came into the world markets with low-priced tin. In these same
years, Bolivia's production of food for the market, which had never
been sufficient, was reduced by the transformation of large estates
producing for market into small farms producing for subsistence. The
nationalization of the railways used to export Bolivia's metals proved
as disastrous as the nationalization of the mines, and hy 1961 only
eighteen of sixty main-line locomotives were still functioning. As
might he expected under such a regime, price inflation drove the value
of Bolivia's monetary unit down from an official rate of 190 to the
dollar in 1954 to an open market rate of 12,000 to the dollar in 1958.
These
problems could hardly be
handled, even by a government that knew better, because of the popular
pressures in a democratic country to live beyond the country's income.
Fortunately, the final collapse did not occur, despite continued
troubles from Juan Lechin's miners, because of the courageous efforts
of Hernán Siles (President in 1956-1960, but unable to succeed
himself constitutionally) and assistance from the United States (this
increased from $4,853,000 in 1953 to $32,120,000 in 1958). Siles sought
to encourage both workers and peasants to seek production increases as
a preliminary to increased consumption, a monetary stabilization plan,
freezing of wages even while prices were still rising, encouragement of
peasants to join in larger groupings with increased emphasis on
production for market rather than for subsistence, efforts to bring
some of the fertile eastern lowlands into agricultural production, and
largely unsuccessful efforts to stop the drastic fall in industrial
productivity in order to obtain some goods that could be offered to the
peasants in return for their increased production of food. To reduce
political pressures from the miners, 10,000 of their total working
force of 36,000 were relocated in a new sugar industry in Santa Cruz.
But the problem remained critical. Manufactured goods fell from $55.7
million in 1955 to about $40 million in value in 1962, while
agricultural goods for sale fell from $132.6 million to $118.7 million
in 1959-1961.
The
struggle still goes on,
showing, if any proof were needed, that radical reforms for sharing the
wealth of the few among the many poor is not an easy, or
feasible,-method for settling Latin America's material problems.
However, one asset from this Bolivian experiment does not appear in the
statistics or on the balance sheets. Bolivia's intelligent and
hard-working Indians, once hopelessly dull, morose, and sullen, are now
bright, hopeful, and self-reliant. Even their clothing is gradually
shifting from the older funereal black to brighter colors and variety.
Few
contrasts could be more
dramatic than that between the Bolivian revolutionary government (in
which a moderate regime was pushed toward radicalism by popular
pressures, and survived, year after year, with American assistance) and
the Guatemala revolution where a Communist-inspired regime tried to
lead a rather inert population in the direction of increasing
radicalism but was overthrown by direct American action within three
years (1951-1954).
Guatemala
is one of the
"banana republics." This perishable fruit, with a world production of
26 billion pounds a year, forms 40 percent of the world's trade in
fresh fruit, with almost 70 percent of the world's total produced in
Latin America and almost 57 percent of all the world's banana exports
going to North America. The retail value of Latin America's part of the
world's trade in bananas is several billion dollars a year, but Latin
America gets less than 7 percent of that value. One reason for this is
the existence of the United Fruit Company, which ov. ns two million
acres of plantations in six Latin American countries, with l,500 miles
of railroad, 60 ships, seaports, and communications networks. This
corporation handles about a third of the world's banana sales and about
two-thirds of the American sales. It controls 60 percent of the banana
exports of the six banana republics (Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica,
Ecuador, Colombia, Panama) and accounts for over 40 percent of the
foreign-exchange earnings in three of the six countries. It pays about
$145 million a year into the six countries, and claims to earn about
$26 million profits on its $159 million investment each year, but this
profit figure of about 16.6 percent a year is undoubtedly far below the
true figure. A United States suit against United Fruit in 1954-1958
claimed that the latter controlled 85 percent of the land suitable for
banana cultivation in five countries, and ordered it to get rid of most
of its subsidiary transportation, distribution, and land operations by
1970. At the time, about 95 percent of the land held by United Fruit
was uncultivated. The antitrust consent decree, even if carried out,
will not materially reduce United Fruit influence in Central America,
since its relations with its subsidiaries can merely be shifted from
ownership to contractual arrangements.
Guatemala,
like Bolivia, has a
population that consists largely of impoverished Indians and mixed
bloods (mestizos). From 1931 to 1944 these were ruled by the dictator
Jorge Ubico, the last of a long line of corrupt and ruthless tyrants.
When he retired to die in New Orleans in 1944, free elections chose
Juan José Arevalo (1945-1950) and Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán
(1950-954) as presidents. Reform was long overdue, and these two
administrations tried to provide it, becoming increasingly
anti-American and pro-Communist over their nine-year rule. When they
began, civil or political rights were almost totally unknown, and 142
persons (including corporations) owned 98 percent of the arable land.
Free speech and press, legalized unions, and free elections preceded
the work of reform, but opposition from the United States began as soon
as it became clear that the Land Reform Act of June 1952 would be
applied to the United Fruit Company. This act called for redistribution
of uncultivated holdings above a fixed acreage or lands of absentee
owners, with compensation from twenty-year, 3 percent bonds, equal to
the declared tax value of the lands. About 400,000 acres of United
Fruit lands fell under this law and were distributed by the Arbenz
Guzmán government to 180,000 peasants. This and other evidence
vv-as declared to be Communist penetration of the Americas, and John
Foster Dulles, in a brief visit to the OAS meeting at Caracas in 1954,
forced through a declaration condemning Guatemala. The Secretary of
State left the execution of this condemnation to his brother, Allen
Dulles, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, which soon found
an American-trained and American-financed Guatemalan Colonel, Carlos
Castillo Armas, who was prepared to lead a revolt against Arbenz. With
American money and equipment, and even some American "volunteers" to
fly "surplus" American planes, Armas mounted an attack of Guatemalan
exiles from bases in two adjacent dictatorships, Honduras and
Nicaragua. Both these countries are horrible examples of everything a
Latin American government should not be, corrupt, tyrannical, cruel,
and reactionary, but they won the favor of the United States Department
of State by echoing American foreign policy at every turn. Nicaragua,
often a target of American intervention in the past, was decayed,
dirty, and diseased under the twenty-year tyranny of Anastasio Somoza
(1936-1956). His assassination in 1956 handed the country over to be
looted by his two sons, one of whom became President while the other
served as Commander of the oversized National Guard. In 1963 the
presidency was transferred to a Somoza stooge, Rene Schick.
From
these despotic bases, the
CIA-directed assault of Colonel Armas overthrew Arbenz Guzmán in
1954 and established in Guatemala a regime similar to that of the
Somozas. All civil and political freedoms were overthrown, the land
reforms were undone, and corruption reigned. When Armas was
assassinated in 1957 and a moderate elected as his successor, the army
annulled those elections and held new ones in which one of their own,
General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, was "elected." He liquidated
what remained of Guatemala's Socialist experiments by granting these
enterprises, at very reasonable prices, to his friends, while
collecting his own pay of $1,094,000 a year. Discontent from his
associates led to a conservative army revolt against Ydígoras in
November 1960, but American pressure secured his position. The United
States at the time could not afford a change of regime in Guatemala,
since that country was already deeply involved, as the chief aggressive
base for the Cuban exiles' attack on Cuba, at the Bay of Pigs, in April
1962.
As
we all know, the CIA
success in attacking "Communist" Guatemala from dictatorial Nicaragua
in 1954 was not repeated in its more elaborate attack on "Communist"
Cuba from dictatorial Guatemala in 1962. In fact, the Bay of Pigs must
stand as the most shameful event in United States history since the end
of World War II. But before we tell that story we must examine its
background in Cuba's recent history, a story that well exemplifies the
tragedy of Cuba.
The
causes of the Cuban
disaster are as complex as most historical events, but, if we
oversimplify, we may organize them in terms of two intersecting
factors: (1) the personality deficiencies of the Cubans themselves,
such as their lack of rationality and self-discipline, their
emotionalism and corruptibility' and (2) the ignorance and ineptitude
of the American State Department, which seems incapable of dealing with
Latin America in terms of the real problems of the area, but instead
insists on treating it in terms of America's vision of the world, which
is to say in terms of American political preconceptions and economic
interests.
Cuba
is more Spanish than much
of Latin America, and obtained its independence from Spain only in
1898, two generations later than the rest of Latin America. Then, for
over thirty years, until the abrogation of the Platt amendment in 1934,
Cuba was under American occupation (1898-1902) or the threat of direct
American intervention. During that period the island fell under
American economic domination by American investments on the island and
by becoming deeply involved in the American market, especially for its
sugar crop. In the same period, a local oligarchy of Cubans was built
up, including an exploitative landlord group that had not existed
previously.
With
the establishment of the
Good Neighbor Policy in 1933 and the ending of the threat of American
direct intervention, it became possible for the Cubans to overthrow the
tyrannical and bloody rule of General Gerardo Machado which had lasted
for eight years (1925-1933). The opportunity to begin a series of
urgently needed and widely demanded social reforms under Machado's
successor, Ramón Grau San Martin, was lost when the United
States refused to recognize or to assist the new regime. As a result, a
ruthless Cuban army sergeant, Fulgencio Batista, was able to overthrow
Grau San Martín and begin a ten-year rule of the island
(1934-1944) through civilian puppets, chosen in fraudulent elections,
and then directly as president himself. When Grau San Martín was
elected president in 1944, he abandoned his earlier reformist ideas and
became the first of a series of increasingly corrupt elected regimes
over the next eight years. The fourth such election, scheduled for
1953, was prevented when Batista seized power once again, in March 1952.
The
next seven years were
filled by Batista's efforts to hold his position by violence and
corruption against the rising tide of discontent against his rule. One
of the earliest episodes in that tide was an attempted revolt by a
handful of youths, led by twenty-six-year-old Fidel Castro, in eastern
Cuba on July 26, 1953.
The
failure of the rising of
July 26th gave Castro two years of imprisonment and more than a year of
exile, hut at the end of 1956 he landed with a handful of men on the
coast of Cuba to begin guerrilla operations against the government.
Batista's regime was so corrupt and violent that many of the local
powers of Cuba, including segments of the army and much of the middle
class, were either neutral or favorable to Castro's operations. The
necessary arms and financial support came from these groups, although
the core of the movement was made up of peasants and workers led by
young, middle-class university graduates.
This
Castro uprising was not
typical of the revolutionary coups that had been familiar in Cuba and
throughout Latin America in an earlier day, because of Castro's
fanatical thirst for power, his ruthless willingness to destroy
property or lives in order to weaken the Batista regime, and his double
method of operation, from within Cuba rather than from abroad and from
a rural base, the peasants, rather than the usual urban base, the army,
used by most Latin American rebels.
By
destroying sugar
plantations and utilities, Castro's rebels weakened the economic and
communications basis of the Batista government. The steady attrition of
the regime's popular and military support made it possible for Castro's
forces to advance across Cuba, and, on New Year's Day of 1959, he
marched into Havana. Within two weeks, an additional and very ominous
difference in this revolution appeared: the supporters of the Batista
regime and dissident elements in Castro's movement began to be executed
by firing squads.
For
a year Castro's government
carried on a reformist policy administered by his original supporters,
the July 26th group of young, middle-class, university graduates. These
reforms were aimed at satisfying the more obvious demands of the
dispossessed groups who had provided the mass basis for Castro's
movement. Military barracks were converted into schools; the militia
was permanently established to replace the regular army; rural health
centers were set up; a full-scale attack was made on illiteracy; new
schools were constructed; urban rents were cut by half; utility rates
were slashed; taxes were imposed on the upper classes; the beaches,
once reserved for the rich, were opened to all; and a drastic land
reform was launched. These actions were not integrated into any viable
economic program, but they did spread a sense of well-being in the
countryside, although they curtailed the building boom in the cities
(especially Havana), largely rooted in American investment, and they
instigated a flight of the rich from the island to refuge in the United
States.
Beneath
this early and
temporary bloom of well-being, many ominous signs appeared. Castro soon
showed that he was a tactician of revolution, not a strategist of
reconstruction. He not only proclaimed permanent revolution in Cuba,
but at once sought to export it to the rest of Latin America. Arms and
guerrilla fighters were sent, and lost, in unsuccessful efforts to
invade Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. Failure of
these turned him to methods of more subtle penetration, largely worked
by propaganda and the arming and training of small subversive
underground groups, especially in areas where democratic or progressive
regimes seemed to be developing (as in Venezuela under Betancourt or
Colombia under Alberto Lleras Camargo). At the same time, an
unsuccessful effort was made to persuade all Latin America to form an
anti-Yankee front.
Although
the United States, in
October 1959, had promised to follow a policy of nonintervention toward
Cuba, these changes within the island, and especially the long visit
there of Soviet Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan in February 1960, forced
a reconsideration of this policy. The Mikoyan agreement promised Cuba
petroleum, arms, and other needs for its sugar, although the price
equivalent allowed for the sugar w as only 4 cents a pound at a time
when the American price was 6 cents; by June 1963, when world sugar
prices reached 13 cents, the USSR raised its price for Cuban sugar to 6
cents. This trade agreement was followed by establishment of diplomatic
relations with the Soviet Union in May and with Red China later in the
year. The Soviet embassy in Havana became a source of Communist
subversion for all of Latin America almost at once, while in September
Khrushchev and Castro jointly dominated the annual session of the
General Assembly of the United Nations in New York.
As
part of the trade agreement
with Russia, Castro obtained Soviet crude petroleum for Cuban sugar.
When he insisted that American-owned refineries in Cuba process this
oil, they refused and were at once seized by Castro. The United States
struck back by reducing the Cuban sugar quota in the American market,
which led, step by step, to Castro's sweeping nationalization of
foreign-owned factories on the island. The United States retaliated by
establishing a series of embargoes on Cuban exports to the United
States. These controversies led Castro into an economic trap similar to
that into which Nasser had fallen with Egypt’s cotton. Each
nationalist revolutionary leader committed his chief
foreign-exchange-earning product (sugar or cotton) to the Soviet Union
as payment for Communist (often Czech) arms. This tied these countries
to the Soviet Union and deprived them of the chance to use their one
source of foreign money for equipment so urgently needed for economic
.improvement. By December 1960, when American diplomatic relations with
Cuba were broken off, the Cuban economic decline had begun, and soon
reached a point where standards of living were at least a third below
the Batista level, except for some previously submerged groups.
At
the end of 1960, the
Eisenhower Administration decided to use force to remove Castro. This
decision was a major error and led to a totally shameful fiasco. The
error apparently arose in the Central Intelligence Agency and was based
on a complete misjudgment of the apparent ease with which that agency
had overthrown the Arbenz regime in Guatemala in 1954 by organizing a
raid of exiles, armed and financed by the CIA, into Guatemala from
Nicaragua. The CIA analyzed this apparently successful coup quite
incorrectly, since it assumed that Arbenz had been overthrown by the
raiding exiles, when he had really been destroyed by his own army,
which used the raid as an excuse and occasion to get rid of him. But on
this mistaken basis, the CIA in 1960 decided to get rid of Castro by a
similar raid of Cuban exiles from Guatemala.
This
decision was worse than a
crime; it was stupid. A unilateral, violent attack on a neighboring
state with which we were not at war, in an area where we were committed
to multilateral and peaceful procedures for settling disputes, was a
repudiation of all our idealistic talk about the rights of small
nations and our devotion to peaceful procedures that we had been
pontificating around the world since 1914. It was a violation of our
commitment to nonintervention in the Americas and specifically in Cuba.
In sequence to our CIA intervention in Guatemala, it strengthened the
Latin American picture of the United States as indifferent to Latin
America's growing demand for social reform and national independence
and as hostile to these when they conflicted with its own drives for
wealth and power. Moreover, the attack on Cuba was ill-advised at a
time when Castro's prestige at home was rapidly dwindling and when
opposition was rising to his chaotic rule throughout the island. And,
finally, the whole operation, patterned on Hitler's operations to
subvert Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938, was bungled as Hitler could
never have bungled anything. The project was very much of a Dulles
brothers' job, and its execution was largely in the hands of the
Central Intelligence Agency, which organized the expeditionary force
from Cuban exiles, financed and armed them, and supervised their
training in Guatemala and elsewhere.
The
plan of the invasion of
Cuba seems to have been drawn on typical Hitler lines: the
expeditionary force was to establish a beachhead in Cuba, set up a
government on the island, be recognized by the United States as the
actual government of Cuba, and ask Washington for aid to restore order
in the rest of the island which it did not yet control. The Joint
Chiefs of Staff approved of the plan, and President Kennedy was
persuaded to accept it, after his inauguration, because of the CIA's
argument that something must be done to remove Castro before his newly
acquired Soviet armaments became operational. The President was assured
that if matters were allowed to go on as they were, Castro would be
strengthened in power ... and that the invasion would be a success
because the Cuban people, led by the anti-Castro underground, would
rise against him as soon as they heard of the landing.
Whatever
truth there Noms in
this last contention, the CIA handling of the invasion made it
impossible, because the CIA refused to use either the anti-Castro
underground in Cuba or the Cuban refugees in the United States (except
as volunteers to be targets in the invasion attempt), and kept all
planning and control of the invasion in its own hands. The executive
committee of Cuban refugees in the United States, mostly
representatives of the older ruling groups in Cuba, were eager to
restore the inequitable economic and social system that had existed
before Castro. They were alienated from the most vigorous anti-Castro
groups in the Cuban underground, who had no desire to turn back the
clock to the Machado-Batista era but wanted to free the social and
economic reform movement from Castro, the Communists, and the
anti-democratic and totalitarian forces that had taken control of it.
The CIA would not cooperate with the anti-Castro underground because it
was opposed to their wish for social and economic reform, and it would
not use the Miami refugee committee because it doubted either their
discretion or fighting spirit. Accordingly, the CIA launched the
invasion without notifying the Cuban underground and kept the refugee
committee locked up without communication for the week of the attack.
Then the attack itself was bungled, since it was aimed at an
inappropriate spot, without eliminating Castro's air power, and without
provision for fighting it, and with the logistics for the whole
tactical operation of the invasion at an unbelievable level of
incompetence.
As
a result of these errors,
the 1,500 men landed at the Bay of Pigs in southern Cuba on April 17,
1961 were destroyed in seventy-two hours by Castro's speedily mobilized
and well-armed militia. At the same time, Castro's police destroyed any
possible simultaneous rising of the underground by arresting thousands
of suspects. To do the wrong thing is bad, but. to do it incompetently
is unforgivable.
The
blow to American prestige
from the Bay of Pigs was almost irretrievable. On the other hand, it
greatly strengthened Castro s prestige, in Latin America more than in
Cuba itself, and made it possible for him to bind the Kremlin to his
cause so tightly that it could neither reduce its support nor control
his policies. This in turn permitted him to survive a deepening wave of
passive resistance and sabotage within Cuba itself, chiefly from the
peasants. And, finally, as we shall see, this made it possible for him
to recapture control of the Cuban revolutionary movement for himself
and the Fidelistas from the Cuban Communists. This last point was in
March, 1962, but the others began in 1961.
Until
the Bay of Pigs fiasco,
the Soviet commitment to Castro had been considerable but not
irretrievable. Soviet armaments began to arrive as early as July 1960,
and in the first year exceeded 30,000 tons valued at 50 million
dollars. As payment, the Communist bloc's portion of Cuba's export
trade rose from 2 percent to 75 percent. Within a year of the failure
at the Bay of Pigs, Sino-Soviet military support for Castro doubled. It
also changed its quality to late model antiaircraft missiles,
long-range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, and even
Soviet combat troops. By the time these changes became evident to
Washington in October 1962, the Soviet military buildup in Cuba had
cost over 700 million dollars.
Before
this Soviet military
buildup in Cuba reached its stage of most rapid acceleration in
July-October 1962, a number of significant changes occurred in Cuba
itself. Two of these were the growth of Cuban resistance to the Castro
regime and Castro's acceptance and sudden reversal of a Communist
usurpation of his power within Cuba.
Castro's
efforts to take Cuba
into the Communist bloc began almost as soon as he took Havana in
January 1959. His refusal to allow post-revolutionary elections to
confirm his victory, a traditional Latin American tactic, and his
outlawing of the traditional political parties (but not the Communists,
PSP, which had secretly cooperated with Batista for years) left him in
an ideological and political vacuum. Soon the closing down of all
opposition newspapers, but the continued publication of the Communist
paper, Hoy, showed that only this group would fill
that vacuum.
And finally the small group of Old Communists in Cuba were allowed to
take over control of the administrative system and, within months, had
a reasonable facsimile of the Kremlin's arrangements operating from
Havana. They took control of the Rebel Militia, especially G-2, its
Intelligence branch; President Manuel Urrutia was removed for an
anti-Communist speech and replaced by a fellow-traveler, Osvaldo
Dorticós Torrado. A struggle between the Communists and the
Fidelistas of the 26th of July Movement for control of the
Confederation of Cuban Labor Unions was settled by Castro himself in
favor of the Communists. A chief Communist leader; Carlos Rafael
Rodríguez, professor of economics at the University of Havana,
led a student revolt that gave the Communists control of the
university. All political movements were merged into the Integrated
Revolutionary Organizations (ORI), whose leadership was practically
identical with the Old Communist leadership. This group set up
Communist-type cells in farms, factories, and government offices.
Anibal Escalante, secretary of the Communist Party, became
organizational secretary to ORI. The Military Secret Police, G-2, was
transformed into a Ministry of the Interior, based on the Kremlin's
MVD, with a Communist, Ramiro Valdes, at its head. The lands that had
been distributed or seized by peasants were "nationalized" by local
Communist groups, and many of the cooperative farms that had risen from
these became collective farms. In all significant governmental posts,
Fidelistas were replaced, or circumvented, by Communists. Control of
the economy was taken from Major Ernesto "she" Guevara and given to
Professor Rodriguez, who became president of the Agrarian Reform
Institute, and drew up the economic development plans for the years
following 1961. Thus within a few months, the ORI became a real
government, making most of the significant daily decisions, and
Escalante was exercising more power than Castro. The latter, still the
darling of the masses, spent much of his time rousing them to frenzy
with his speech-making and marching.
The
chief resistance to this
Communization of Cuba came from the peasants, by curtailing production
and by sabotage. Smaller farmers produced enough for their families but
no more, in resistance to government-fixed prices and the compulsion to
sell all their marketable produce to the National Institute of Agrarian
Reform. Farmers refused to labor on the collective or state farms and
occasionally set fire to the canebrakes on these. A good part of the
coffee crop of 1961 was lost because the workers refused to harvest it.
Similar resistance arose with the sugar and other crops. Drastic food
rationing had to be established in March r962. The 196z coffee crop was
sabotaged, and coffee rationing had to be established in February 1963.
Most critical was the sugar crop, source of four-fifths of Cuba's
foreign exchange. Efforts to harvest the crop with the militia,
students, or city workers failed, and by 1962 the crop harvested had
fallen to about half of the pre-Castro figure. At the same time, the
ending of almost all trade ties with the United States, which had been
a principal source of Cuban food, left Cuba dependent on countries like
the Communist bloc, which had difficulties feeding themselves. The food
ration fell to 3/4 pound of meat a week per person, and 5 eggs with 2
ounces of butter a month. The food shortage was soon followed by
shortages of manufactured goods, as the exodus of technicians, lack of
spare parts, and bureaucratic confusions disorganized industrial
production.
The
economic collapse in no
way discouraged Castro's efforts to establish a socialist regime, but
the Communist Party's curtailment of his personal power led to a strong
counteraction in March 1962. On May Day 1961, Castro had proclaimed
that Cuba would be a socialist state and, in a two-day speech on
December 1-2, 1961, he had announced his own "Marxist-Leninist"
beliefs. This ended the earlier arguments, disseminated by American
Establishment circles led by The New York Times,
that Castro
was simply a progressive reformer. But despite his statements, he was
not in any way a convinced Communist or a convinced anything else, but
was a power-hungry and emotionally unstable individual, filled with
hatred of authority himself, and restless unless he had constant change
and megalomaniac satisfactions. His tactical skill, especially in
foreign affairs, is remarkable, and shows similarity to Hitler's. His
allegiance to Communism had nothing to do with ideological conviction
or devotion to the Kremlin, but arose from his recognition that Russia
was the only Power in a position to counterbalance the United States
and was, to him, preferable to the United States both because of its
greater distance and because its ideological pretenses would never
allow it to permit an admitted Communist state like Cuba to be attacked
by the United States. Thus Castro sought to get the Soviet Union more
deeply committed to Cuba so that it could not disentangle itself
whatever Castro did but must protect him from the United States, even
when he openly disregarded its advice. In the same way, Castro was
willing to build up his indebtedness to the Soviet Union because the
Communist commitment would not allow the Kremlin to do anything drastic
to collect such a debt. For these reasons, Castro wished to join the
Warsaw Pact, but this at least Moscow was able to prevent. At the same
time, Castro recognized that his own adoption of the Communist ideology
would not weaken him in Latin America, where the impoverished masses
care nothing about ideologies, and the middle classes, especially the
youth and university students, like Communism as an ideology, although
it has little influence on their own actions or political behavior.
Although
the Communist
takeover in Cuba began in 1960, it was not until February 196 z that
Castro began to realize what had happened. Within a month, particularly
during the week of March 16-22, he eliminated the Communists from most
positions of significant power. The Rodríguez economic plan of
November 1961 was denounced; the ORI system was purged; his brother,
Raúl Castro, was made vice-premier; Escalante was forced into
exile; the militia and bureaucracy were recaptured by the Fidelistas;
and on March 26th Fidel himself gave a five-hour speech narrating what
had happened. Pravda did not accept the change until April 11th.
This
acceptance of the
reestablishment of Fidelism by both the Kremlin and the Cuban Communist
Party, largely because they had no alternative, was followed by their
full-scale support of the Castro regime in political and economic
policies. On May 31st it was announced that Moscow would provide
600,000 tons of food in the balance of 1962 to stave off the Cuban
economic collapse, and later Moscow released claims on some Cuban sugar
so that it could be sold in the world market for hard currencies Above
all, the Soviet Union appeared to accept Castro's argument that another
American military assault on Cuba was in preparation.
The
United States, Castro, and
Moscow all must have known that no effort was likely to be made to
repeat the American invasion of Cuba, but Castro made the charge
because he wanted Soviet weapons, and the Kremlin pretended to believe
it for reasons that are still doubtful. It is possible that the
Russians hoped that the Soviet IRBM's in Cuba would help to slow up the
increasing American lead over the Soviet Union in the missile race. It
is also possible that they hoped that such missiles, once established,
might be bargained away in return for a Soviet-favored solution to the
Berlin question.
The
increasing American aerial
patrols over Cuba, which detected the Russian missile buildup on the
island, were used by Cuba and the Soviet Union as evidence of the
approaching American attack. By September, still unknown to the public,
the crisis began to form, and in October it was in full progress, with
the consequences already described.
The
ending of the Cuban
missile crisis at the end of 1962 may have opened a new era in the
world's history, but it left Latin America still floundering in the
same old problems, which became more complicated and insoluble with
each passing day. As we have said, these problems can be solved only by
obtaining more constructive patterns in the proper priority sequence.
On the whole, the role of the United States in Latin America has not
been such as to help either patterns or priorities, largely because our
concern has been with what seems to be useful or better for us rather
than with what would be most helpful to them.
From
the point of view of
Latin America's real interests, basic priorities might include...: (1)
more constructive psychological patterns; ( 2 ) increased political
stability; ... (3) a large increase in the food supply and in the most
fundamental needs of human life, such as housing; (4) increased
emphasis on light industry, especially processing and semi-processing
of local raw materials; and (5) continued improvements in
transportation and communications. This combination of advances could
provide rising standards of living and jobs for everyone. In moving in
this direction much greater use should be made of local resources,
including local capital and local skills, especially those of the
present upper classes. This last point will become feasible only if the
first two points begin to develop: a better outlook, especially in the
upper classes, and a sufficiently stabilized political system so that
duress can be put upon those classes to force them to use both their
lives and their resources in a more constructive way. This will he
possible only if the armed forces of Latin America (and of the whole
Pakistani-Peruvian axis) move much more rapidly in a direction their
have been moving in already, but too slowly: the direction of increased
concern for stronger, more honest, more constructive, and more widely
distributed improvements in conditions of living among their own people.
This
point of view has already
shown itself along the Pakistani-Peruvian axis, in military circles in
Pakistan, Egypt, Argentina, and elsewhere; in the royal entourage in
Iran; among university voutl1 in much of Latin America. But in all
these circles, despite the enthusiasm and energy that make it possible
for them to overthrow corrupt and tyrannical regimes, it soon becomes
clear that they have little idea what to do once they get into power.
As a result, they fall under the personal influence of unstable and
ignorant men, the Nassers, the Peróns, and the Castros, who fall
hack on emotionally charged programs of hatreds and spectacular
displays of unconstructive nationalism that waste time and use up
resources while the real problems of the whole enormous area go
unsolved.
A
heavy responsibility rests
on the United States for this widespread failure to find solutions to
problems all the way from Pakistan to Peru. The basic reason for this
is that our policies in this great area have been based on efforts to
find solutions to our own problems rather than theirs: to make profits,
to increase supplies of necessary raw materials, to fight Hitler, to
keep out Communism, and in recent years to fight the Cold War and
prevent the spread of neutralism. The net result of our actions has
been that we are now more hated than the Soviet Union, and neutralism
reveals itself as clearly as it dares through the whole area. [This
hatred is due to the imperialistic actions of the Eastern Establishment
and their policies around the world, not the American people. The
United States possesses the key to prosperity around the world. It is
the free market system. However, powerful monopolies and cartels now
encircle the globe and will combine to fight the re-emergence of the
free market system and basic competition among corporations.]
This
is, perhaps, more obvious
on the Pakistan end of the axis than on the Peruvian end, but is true
from one end to the other. Dulles's insistence on arming the Middle and
Near East and seeking to line the area up into a military bulwark
against the Soviet Union destroyed the precarious political stability
of the area, intensified local rivalries and animosities (as between
India and Pakistan or between Egypt and Israel), led to large-scale
waste of resources and energies on armament rivalries divided the armed
forces into cliques whose rivalries increased the frequency of military
coupe, and often entrenched in power reactionary and unprogressive
minorities.
The
sad thing about all this
is that it was so unnecessary. There never was a moment in which the
arms of this axis (excluding Turkey and Israel) contributed anything
significant to keeping the Soviet Union out of it. Even less so in
Latin America. On the contrary, the Dulles efforts to bring both areas
into the Cold War in a military way by treaties and armaments have
succeeded only in bringing Soviet influences and Communism in by
methods of subversion, propaganda, and economic penetration that cannot
be excluded by military agreements and armaments.
And
at no time did these
military agreements and armaments provide any real strength to keep
Russia out as a military threat, for at all times that task rested on
the deterrent power of the United States and the Western alliance. The
sole consequence of the Dulles efforts to do the wrong thing along the
Pakistani-Peruvian axis has been to increase what he was seeking to
reduce: local political instability, increased Communist and Soviet
influence, neutralism, and hatred of the United States.
Although
the Dulles period,
because it was a crucial period, shows most clearly the failures of
American foreign policy in Latin America, the situation was the same,
both before and since Dulles, with a possible brief e:;ception in the
first administration of Franklin Roosevelt. Otherwise, American policy
in Latin America has been determined by American needs and desires and
not by the problems of Latin Americans. A brief survey of these
policies will show this clearly.
There
are four chief periods
in United States policy toward Latin America in the twentietl1 century.
The first, a period of investment and interventionism, lasted until
1933 and was basically a period of commercial imperialism. American
money came to Latin America as investments, seeking profits out of the
exploitation of the area's most obvious local resources, mineral or
agricultural, such as copper, bananas, and petroleum, or as markets for
American goods. There was little respect for the people themselves or
for their way of life, and intervention by American military and
diplomatic forces was always close at hand as a protection for American
profits and investments.
The
Good Neighbor Policy,
announced by President Roosevelt in 1933, reduced intervention while
retaining investment. It was partly a consequence of the idealism and
progressive nature of the New Deal itself, but was equally based on the
fact that the need of Latin America for American investment funds and
for the American market, especially in the depressed conditions of
1933, made it so amenable to our economic and commercial influence that
there was little need for our use of diplomatic intimidation or the
Marines.
The
third and fourth stages in
America's Latin American policy, from 1940 to the present, have been
concerned with our efforts to involve the area in our foreign policy
(not theirs), that is, in the effort to get them as deeply involved as
possible in the struggle against Hitler and Japan and, since 1947, in
the struggle against the Soviet Union. Both of these efforts have been
mistakes (with the possible exception of our relations with Brazil and
Mexico in the period following 1940) because the states of Latin
America, however dutifully they may have lined up in the Hot War
against Hitler or the Cold War against Soviet Russia, contributed
little more to victory in these struggles than they would have
contributed if they had not been pressured by us to line up at all.
This
four-stage chronology of
American policy toward Latin America ignores completely the significant
change that has occurred in the history of Latin America itself during
the twentieth century, chiefly in the 1950's. This is the shift in
emphasis in Latin American history, especially in the history of
political disturbances and governmental changes from the superficial coups
d'état
that were prevalent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to
the profound economic and social upheavals that first appeared in
Mexico in 1910 and were followed in the 1950's by the revolutions in
Bolivia, Cuba, and elsewhere. The failure in coincidence between the
stages of the history of American policy and the stages of the history
of Latin America itself is a fair measure of the irrelevance and
futility of our policy. That this failure continued into the 1960's was
clear in Washington's joy at the military coup that ejected the
left-of-center João Goulart government from Brazil in April
1964, for that government, however misdirected and incompetent, at
least recognized that there were urgent social and economic problems in
Brazil demanding treatment.
No
real recognition that such
problems existed was achieved in Washington until Castro's revolution
in Cuba forced the realization. As a consequence the Alliance for
Progress should be regarded as the North American reaction to Castro
rather than its reaction to Latin America's real problems. This helps
to explain why the achievement of the Alliance for Progress has been so
limited.
In
its early announcement, by
President Kennedy during his second month in office, the projected
Alliance for Progress seemed more hopeful than any earlier United
States reaction to Latin America's problems had been. It accepted the
idea of central economic planning for the Latin American nations and
the role of state intervention in investment and economic life, both of
which had been rejected by the Eisenhower Administration. To these it
added two other basic assumptions: that Latin America he required to
take steps to help itself and not merely expect grants from the United
States and, also, that social improvements, such as better housing,
increased literacy, and improved social amenities, be regarded as
intrinsic parts of, or even prerequisites to, purely economic
expansion, and not he considered, as hitherto, to be incidental
consequences of such expansion.
The
formal agreement for the
Alliance for Progress was signed by all members of the Organization of
American States except Cuba, at Punta del Este, Uruguay, on August 17,
1961. Its aims and attitudes were admirable, but required
implementation and organizational features that were not covered in the
Charter itself and have largely remained deficient since. Its preamble
said, in part, "We, the American Republics, hereby proclaim. our
decision to unite in a common effort to bring our people accelerated
economic progress and broader social justice within the framework of
personal dignity and personal liberty. Almost two hundred years ago we
began in this Hemisphere the long struggle for freedom which now
inspires people in all parts of the world. . . . Now we must give a new
meaning to that revolutionary heritage. For America stands at a turning
point in history. The men and women of our Hemisphere are reaching for
the better life which today’s skills have placed within their
grasp. They are determined for themselves and their children to have
decent and ever more abundant lives, to gain access to knowledge and
equal opportunity for all, to end those conditions which benefit the
few at the expense of the needs and dignity of the many.”
These
were fine words, and the
specific detail to fulfill them was generally recognized. The latter
included "a substantial and sustained growth of per capita incomes at a
rate designed to attain, at the earliest possible date, levels of
income capable of assuring self-sustaining development, and sufficient
to make Latin American income levels constantly larger in relation to
the levels of the more industrialized nations.... In evaluating the
degree of relative development, account will be taken not only of
average levels of real income and gross product per capita, but also of
indices of infant mortality, illiteracy, and per capita daily caloric
intake." The minimum desirable rate of economic growth was stated to be
2.5 percent per capita per year. It was, perhaps unrealistically,
stated that economic progress should be made "available to all citizens
of all economic and social groups through a more equitable distribution
of national income, raising more rapidly the income and standard of
living of the needier sectors of the population, at the same time that
a higher proportion of the national product is devoted to investment."
This aim to redistribute income and achieve simultaneously higher
consumption and higher investment is, of course, impossible except in
the most advanced industrial societies that have already reached such
levels of consumption of material goods that further increases in
consumption increase problems rather than solve them. To add to this
rather confused idea of the process of economic development, the
Charter immediately added, "Special attention should be given to the
establishment and development of capital-goods industries."
Other
desirable goals listed
in the Charter included "replacing latifundia and dwarf-holdings by an
equitable system of land tenure," "to maintain stable price levels,
avoiding inflation or deflation and the consequent social hardships and
mal-distribution of resources," "to strengthen existing agreements on
economic integration," and "to develop cooperative programs designed to
prevent the harmful effects of excessive fluctuations in the foreign
exchange earnings derived from exports of primary products...." Among
the social goals were "to eliminate adult illiteracy and by 1970 to
assure, as a minimum, access to six wears of primary education for each
school age child in Latin America," "to increase life expectancy at
birth hy a minimum of five years, and to increase the ability to learn
and produce, by improving individual and public health . . . to provide
adequate potable water supply and drainage to not less than 70 percent
of the urban and so percent of the rural population; to reduce the
mortality rate of children less than five years of age to at least
one-half of the present rate; to control the more serious transmittable
diseases, according to their importance as a cause of sickness and
death . . . ," and so on.
The
methods of achieving these
desirable goals were only incidentally established in the Charter. The
participating Latin American countries were required to formulate,
within eighteen months, long-term development programs that would
include improved human resources through education and training, a
reform of tax structures (including adequate taxation of large incomes
and real estate), laws to encourage investment both foreign and
domestic, and improved methods of distribution to provide more
competitive markets. The drawing of such programs in areas that lacked
adequate statistical information and had few trained economists was a
considerable obstacle to carrying out the Charter, and only a handful
of programs were approved in the first three years of the Alliance.
As
part of the Charter the
United States offered "to provide assistance under the Alliance"
amounting to $20 billion, of which half was to come from the government
and half from private sources, over a ten-year period. Nothing was said
in the Charter as to the nature of this assistance, but the
government's share has been generally in the form of credits, the least
helpful type of such foreign assistance, and the amount of such
assistance has not, as might appear at first glance, amounted to $2
billion a year in new moneys, since private American investments in
Latin America already amounted to many hundreds of millions a year and
aid from the United States government was almost equally large, so that
the total of additional assistance promised by the Alliance was roughly
about two-thirds of a billion dollars or less each year.
It
would be possible to state
the achievement of the Alliance for Progress in terms of hundreds of
thousands of housing units, schools, new hospitals, roads, additional
drinking water, and experimental or demonstration farms, but such
lists, however large the numbers, indicate little about the success of
the Alliance. On the whole, it cannot be said that the Alliance has
failed; but, even more emphatically, it cannot be said that it has been
a success. Its achievement has been ameliorative rather than
structural, and this alone indicates that it has not been a success.
For unless there are structural reforms in Latin American society, its
economic development will not become self-sustaining or even manage to
keep up with the growth of population on the basis of income per capita.
The
failure of the Alliance
for Progress to achieve what it was touted to achieve has many causes,
but the chief is undoubtedly that it was not intended primarily to be a
method for achieving a better life for Latin Americans but was intended
to be a means of implementing American policy in the Cold War. This
became clearly evident at the second Punta del Este Conference of
January 22-31, 1962, where Washington's exclusive control over the
granting of funds for the Alliance vv-as used as a club to`force the
Latin American stares to exclude Cuba from the Organization of American
States. The original plan was to cut off Cuba's trade with all Western
Hemisphere countries and to break off diplomatic relations as well. A
two-thirds vote by countries was needed to make the recommendations
official; it was obtained only by the minimum margin (14 votes out of
the 21 members) and only after the most intense American "diplomatic"
pressure and bribery involving the granting and withholding of American
aid to the Alliance. Even at that, six countries, representing 75
percent of Latin America's area and 70 percent of its population,
refused to vote for the American motions. These six were Brazil,
Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, and Ecuador.
Much
of the weakness of the
Alliance for Progress arises from its failure to work for structural
reforms that will change the patterns of Latin American life in more
constructive directions. The aid, as we have said, is entirely under
the control of the United States; it generally takes the form, not of
money which can be used to buy the best goods in the cheapest market,
but as credits which can be used only in the United States. Much of
these credits goes either to fill gaps in the budgets or the
foreign-exchange balances of Latin American countries, which provides a
maximum of leverage in getting these governments to follow America's
lead in world affairs but provides little or no benefit to the
impoverished peoples of the hemisphere. Moreover, the grants, which
provide dollars to these countries, are often counterbalanced by
contrary influences, such as increased tariffs or other restrictions on
the flow of Latin American goods to the United States, or decreases in
the prices of Latin American primary products, or (what leads to the
same results) increases in the export prices of American industrial
goods.
A
decrease of a cent or two in
the price that the United States pays for coffee can wipe out all the
funds that it provides for the coffee-producing countries under the
Alliance for Progress. For example, from 1959 to 1960 the price that
the United States paid for its coffee fell from an average of 39¢
a pound to 34¢ a pound. This decrease of a nickel a pound would
represent a decrease in the total amount the United States paid for
coffee, from one year to the next, of more than $150 million for the 30
billion pounds bought in 1960. Similarly, a decrease of one cent per
pound on Chile's copper means a loss of about $11,000,000 a y ear. On
the other hand, an increase in the prices of American television sets
of one dollar each costs Latin American buyers about $15,000,000.
When
both occur together, so
that the prices of what Latin America sells are falling while the
prices that it has to pay for American goods are increasing, as has
been generally true during recent years, it means that most of the
funds that Washington extends to Latin America under the Alliance for
Progress are evaporating before they can be used, in terms of the total
amount of dollars available for Latin American purchases of goods and
equipment needed to modernize the Latin American production system.
There
are many other aspects
of this situation that help to explain the weak achievement of the
Alliance for Progress. The tax-reform projects designed to force the
rich to pay a fair share of taxes and to encourage them to invest
rather than simply to hoard their surplus funds have come to almost
nothing. But the possibility that something of this nature might he
done has caused large volumes of funds to flee from Latin America to
seek shelter abroad. It is possible that the total of such Latin
American funds hiding abroad may amount to as much as $20 billion, the
same amount the United States promised to provide over the whole ten
years of the Alliance's projected life. While we have no accurate
figures on these sums, an official report gives $4 billion as the
amount of Latin American money on deposit in the United States at the
end of 1961.
All
of these considerations
make it clear that problems of our neighbors in the Western Hemisphere
are still rising more rapidly than they are being solved, a condition
equally true in southern Asia, southeast Asia, and the Near East. In
all of these, failure to find some answers to the problems that are
rising can only lead to neutralism, eventual hatred of the Western
world, and violent explosions by disappointed peoples that achieve
nothing constructive either for them or for us. There are those who say
that all these disappointments are inevitable because the problems of
the backward areas are basically insoluble. To these skeptics we need
only say: Look at the Far East, where, in vivid contrast, we can see
the outstanding case where the problem of development has been solved
and the most frightening example of what may happen when it is not
solved.
The Far East
From
the opening of the Far
East to Western trade and influence, largely at the insistence of
American traders, China was the recipient of American favor and
protection, while Japan was regarded with suspicion and rivalry. The
culmination of this process was in World War II, when China was an ally
and Japan was our enemy. In fact, as Pearl Harbor showed, American
intervention in the war arose over its efforts to protect China from
Japanese aggression. Yet, in the postwar period, this relationship was
reversed. Japan now represents the greatest success and China the
greatest failure of America's postwar foreign policy. Our policies are
often praised or blamed for these discordant results.... This almost
certainly is correct in China, but the amazing success story that is to
he seen in contemporary Japan may well be attributed to successful
American policies in combination with the peculiar social and
personality patterns of the Japanese people. [Japan is a socialist
country which has adopted the American system of tariffs to prevent
certain goods from being imported into their country. The restricted
import policy coupled with a vigorous export policy in combination with
the secret alliance of government and business is what led to the
so-called Japanese miracle.]
The Japanese
Miracle
The
word "miracle" has been
applied to a number of postwar events, such as the economic upsurge in
West Germany, but it is nowhere more applicable than in Japan. For
Japan is the only major area outside Europe, except the United States
itself, which has reached that stage in economic development which W.
W. Rostow called "takeoff." That is, it has reached a point in
development where the process continues by its own momentum,
accumulating and investing its own capital, with increasing production
of food from a constantly dwindling farm population, a shift in diet
from emphasis on "energy foods" to emphasis on "protective foods," and
a shift in industrial activity from products requiring unskilled labor
in a low capital-to-labor ratio toward products requiring highly
skilled labor in a high capital-to-labor ratio. The Soviet Union itself
has not yet reached this point in development, so that Japan is now the
only fully advanced industrial nation in Asia and has, as a
consequence, taken on characteristics that are familiar to us from
Western European and American experience but are totally unknown
elsewhere in Asia, Latin America, or Africa. As a consequence, Japan
is, for these still backward areas, a more helpful model of economic
development than either the United States or Western Europe, since
these two earlier examples of development did not have to face some of
the problems, such as lack of resources and heavy population pressure
on the land, which Japan was able to overcome. Thus a Peace Corps of
missionaries for development techniques would be more helpful from
Japan than the present American Peace Corps of recently graduated
college students, on the ground of technical experience if not on the
ground of humanitarian motivation.
The
key to the Japanese
"takeoff" rests, as it must, on the relationship between population
growth and food supply.
Japan,
whose population growth
from 44 million in 1900 to 93 million in 1960 once made it a prime
example of an "overpopulated" country, now has the demographic pattern
of a Western industrial society. It has one of the world's lowest birth
and death rates and a life expectancy of sixty-five years for males and
seventy for females, witl1 an increasing percentage of older persons.
The birthrate and death rate per 1.000 were both cut in half from 1946
to 3961, the former from 34.6 to 16.9 and the latter from 15.3 to 7.4.
By 1963 Japan had the lowest death rate in the world (about 7 per
1,000). As a result of these factors, the population increase of Japan,
which was once over 1,700,000 a year, is now about 900,000 yearly and
in 1959 fell to 780,000. It is expected that Japan's population may
reach a peak of about 107 million by 1990 and then begin to decrease,
falling below 100 million again by 2010.
This
changing population
picture in Japan owes nothing to the American military occupation and
rests, very largely, on the strong, self-disciplined, "inscrutable"
Japanese character. Of this we know very little. There have been a
number of studies of the Japanese personality, the best known of which,
by Ruth Benedict and Geoffrey Gorer, are based on no real personal
knowledge and on impressionistic evidence. The truth is that the
Japanese personality seems to have an "achieving" pattern, but at
present we know very little about it. At any rate, the Japanese
solution of their population explosion rests very largely on aspects of
their personality structure. Abortion plays a much greater role in
their population control than would be acceptable to many persons in
our Western culture.
Unlike
their population
control, the recent Japanese success in producing food owes a great
deal to the American occupation. This Japanese agrarian reform is one
of the remarkable economic transformations of this century.
With
650 persons per square
mile, compared to so in the United States and 25 in the Soviet Union,
Japan has only two-tenths of an acre of arable land per person, and
most farms are merely gardens of less than two acres. By 1940 about 70
percent of Japanese farmers were paying rent for tend and almost 3o
percent were landless. Rents were high, and agrarian discontent became
one of the chief pressures behind Japanese aggression in the 1930'5. At
that time, the land was extensively exploited in the Asiatic fashion,
by applying larger amounts of hand labor to it. Much of it was
terraced; more than half of it was irrigated; there was intensive
application of fertilizers, including human waste, and the chief
emphasis was on energy-yielding food, mostly rice.
The
reorganization of Japanese
agriculture was largely due to the American Military Occupation (SCAP),
and was so successful that the index of agricultural production
increased 40 percent in the decade 1951-1961. This revolution rested on
two supports: the agrarian reform and technological advances.
The
agrarian reform
redistributed the ownership of land by the government taking all
individual land holdings beyond 7.5 acres, all rented land over 2.5
acres, and the land of absentee owners. The former holders were paid
for these lands with long-term bonds. In turn, peasants without land or
with less than the maximum permitted amount of 7.5 acres were allowed
to buy land from the state on a long-term, low-interest-rate basis.
Cash rents for land were also lowered.
As
a result of this program,
Japan became a land of peasant owners with about go percent of the
cultivated soil worked by its owners. The peasants w ere helped in
making the transfer because the early period of the Occupation was one
of food shortages, inflation, and an active black market with high
prices. These profits also helped finance the beginnings of the new
revolution in agricultural technology.
This
drastic change in farming
methods in Japan was toward the American method of farm development,
using less and less hand labor and greater amounts of capital,
especially in farm machinery and fertilizers. Today all kinds of power
and mechanical equipment, such as threshers, pumps, lifts, sprayers,
and such, are common in Japan. Most spectacular has been the spreading
of hand tractors or power cultivators of 3 to 7 horsepower, something
like American rototillers. These have increased from 7,000 in use in
1947 to 85,000 in 1955, and to almost a million by 1962. These can be
used with special attachments as plows cultivators, pumps, sprayers,
saws, and draft vehicles, and have helped to eliminate draft farm
animals and to reduce heavy human labor. Since a farmer can do as much
work, especially plowing, with this piece of equipment, in one day as
used to require ten days' work using animal power, he has a longer
growing season, can extend the practice of double cropping, and has
much more time for other work.
Two
aspects of this
agricultural revolution deserve special mention. Japan, like the United
States, is now shifting its diet from energy foods, like rice, toward
protective foods, like meat, milk, fruit, and green vegetables. And
Japan, also like the United States, has now broken free from the older
alternative of eit1'er high output per acre or high output per unit of
labor, and has now reached the stage where both are rising together. In
the ten years of this agricultural revolution (1951-1961) rice
production went up 3o percent, but dairy cattle increased ten times,
meat products about three times, fruit production almost doubled, and
the number of persons engaged in farming has fallen rapidly, by better
than 10 percent, or more than 1.5 million persons, in the five years
1956-1961. As a result, the percentage of the working population
engaged in farming is now about 28 percent, and has a steadily
increasing portion of older persons and of females, as the younger
males stream steadily to the city, seeking jobs in industry.
Of
course, this transformation
in agriculture could never have occurred if there had not been taking
place equally drastic changes in industry. These industrial changes,
including a high rate of investment, rapid technological change, and
excellent demand for industrial products, provided a plentiful supply
of jobs and an increased demand for food and other agricultural
products by city dwellers. These conditions acted like a magnet to
attract a growing flood of farm products and energetic young peasants
to the cities.
The
contrast between the
structure and distribution of Japan's population and that of other
Asiatic nations shows clearly that Japan is no longer a backward,
underdeveloped, or colonial area from any point of view. The marks of
such a backward society are usually a high birthrate and death rate, a
largely young, rural population, with the great majority in
agriculture, and mostly illiterate. In Japan, all of these
characteristics are untrue. Birth and death rates are very low; the
population is aging rapidly, is almost totally literate, has below 29
percent in agriculture, and has over 60 percent resident in areas
classified as urban. Moreover, the revolution in Japanese industrial
development has shifted the country out of its previous colonial
orientation in economic organization and commerce.
Before
the war, Japan lived by
exporting labor, largely unskilled labor. It did this by importing raw
materials, working them up by largely unskilled labor into products of
light industry, chiefly textiles, and exporting these products for more
raw materials and food. Today the Japanese need for imported food is
decreasing and is shifting away from its previous food needs, notably
rice, to foods of more protective character, such as proteins. At the
same time, its raw material imports are slowly shifting from those used
in light industry, such as raw cotton, to those used in highly skilled
industrial lines, such as electronics, where few other nations can
compete. This inevitably means that Japan's trade has been shifting
from Asia and other backward areas, where it exchanged cotton textiles
for rice, to the United States and Europe where it exchanges cameras,
radios, tape recorders, and optical supplies for metals, manufactured
goods, or materials for advanced industry. Its needs for petroleum,
iron ore, and other bulk raw materials are tending to shift to colonial
areas, so that its petroleum now comes from the Persian Gulf instead of
the United States, and its iron ore comes increasingly from India.
The
social impact of economic
changes such as these is far-reaching. The cities are growing rapidly,
while many rural areas are losing population as their peoples flock to
urban areas. By 1961, 44 percent of the total population was clustered
in 1 percent of the country's total area. Tokyo, with 7 million people
in 1940, was down to 3 million in 1945, and passed 10 million in 1961.
Other cities grew steadily but at a slower rate, and by the present day
are agglomerating into four megalopolitan areas. Tens of millions of
commuters swarm into these to work each day, and the traffic problem,
especially in Tokyo, has become almost insoluble.
As
might be expected, such
rapid material advance and profound social change has given rise to all
kinds of social problems. Family discipline has weakened, and the older
Japanese morality and outlooks are now widely rejected. Marxism and
existentialism vie for the allegiance of the educated, while the less
esoterically informed are satisfied with the pursuit of material
success and personal pleasures. The gap between these two groups is
considerable, and much of the stability, both political and social, in
Japanese society today seems to rise from the self-satisfaction of the
ne\v middle class and the eagerness of many peasants and workers to get
into that class and enjoy its benefits. These benefits increasingly
provide a life like that in American suburbia, with television,
baseball, bulldozers, picture windows, neon-lighted department stores,
mass advertising, instant foods, and weekly slick magazines. The speed
with which this has come about is almost beyond belief. Commercial
television began in Japan in 1953; five years later, 16 percent of
urban houses had a set, but by 1961, 72 percent had sets; electric
washing machines increased from 29 percent of urban houses in 1958 to
55 percent three years later. This salaried middle class is the key to
the rapid achievement and political stability of Japan. Ambitious,
hard-working, loyal, reliable, very adaptable to bureaucratic
organization, scientific training, and rationalizing processes, they
are suspicious of ideologies or extremist doctrines of any kind, and
form one of the world's most amazing peoples.
These
general attitudes have
given Japan the appearance of successful adaptation to democratic
political life as determined by the SCAP-imposed constitution of 1947.
As a matter of fact, the Japanese are basically uneasy about
individualism, democracy, mass society, and the speed of their economic
change, but few have much of an urge to rock the boat, and those old
enough to remember the years of tension and war from 1931 to 1944 have
no preference for them. There are discontented groups, including the
ultra-nationalists on the extreme Right and the various Socialist,
Communist, and student groups on the Left. Both of these extremes,
especially the former, operate in an atmosphere of considerable
unreality. The really notable feature of Japanese political ideology is
the way in which SCAP's agrarian reform has driven Communism out of the
rural areas and restricted it to the cities, chiefly to student groups.
The
foundations of the present
political system in Japan were established by SCAP in the early years
of the Occupation. In the early months of peace, 5,000,000 Japanese
military were demobilized and 3,000,000 civilians were repatriated from
overseas areas. When Japanese prisoners of war were eventually
returned, about 375,000 in the hands of the Russians were never
accounted for. More than 4,200 Japanese were convicted of war crimes,
over 700 were executed, and about 2,500 were sentenced to life
imprisonment. An additional 220,000 persons were permanently excluded
from public life, and about I,3oo nationalist and extremist
organizations were banned. The Shinto religion was separated from the
state, forbidden to propagate militaristic or ultra-nationalist
doctrines, and Emperor Hirohito was forced to issue a public statement
denying that he was divine.
A
Japanese "Bill of Rights"
protecting the rights of individuals and political freedoms, on a much
more extensive basis than we have in the United States, was issued in
1945. The centralized police control in the Home Ministry was
abolished, and police powers were curbed. A new civil code established
freedom from family domination for all and equality for females.
The
Constitution itself,
issued by SCAP in 1946, provided that a prime minister be chosen by the
467 members of the House of Representatives, who themselves were chosen
by universal adult suffrage. These were elected from 118 electoral
constituencies, each represented by from three to five members,
although the voter could cast his ballot for only one candidate. This
ensured representation for minority views and made it difficult to
obtain a majority in the House without coalitions of parties. However,
the parties have tended to coalesce into two wings around the
conservative Liberal Democrats and the Socialist Party. Except for the
period April 1947-October 1948, when the Socialists controlled the
government during a period of extreme labor unrest and violence,
control has been in the hands of the Liberal Democratic Party and its
allied groups. These have generally won almost two-thirds of the seats
in elections over the last ten years (since 1955), while the Socialists
have had difficulty in obtaining one-third of the seats.
The
chief differences between
the two parliamentary groups revolve around foreign affairs, with the
Liberal Democrats committed to a pro-Western policy in strong alliance
with the United States and rather isolated from Asia. The Socialist
group wishes to weaken the American connection and resume Japan's
traditional position as a leading Asiatic Power. The economic
orientation of Japan and its booming prosperity have made the task of
the Socialists a difficult one.
The
different views of the two
parties in domestic politics are reflected in a controversy over the
Constitution. This document, in Article Nine, renounces war and forbids
maintaining an army, navy, or air force. Despite this, in July 1950,
General .MacArthur ordered formation of a defense force, and the United
States insisted on this at the time of the Peace Treaty with Japan, the
following year. The Mutual Defense Alliance with the United States,
signed in March 1954, bound Japan to maintain a defense force of
275,000 men. Since this force is unconstitutional, the Socialists have
sought vigorously to keep their parliamentary representation at over
one-third of the seats, to prevent an amendment removing Article Nine.
All amendments require a two-thirds vote of the Parliament plus a
majority in a national referendum.
However,
even in 1963, when
the Socialists made a desperate effort to obtain one-third of the seats
(156), they fell 12 seats short of the necessary number. They have
received little help from the Communists whose parliamentary
representatives rose to a peak of 35 seats in the disturbed period of
1949, but they alienated the Japanese by their addiction to violence
and have elected only a handful of members since 1950 (none in October
1952, following the May Day riots of that year and only 3 in 1960,
increased to 5 in 1963).
On
the whole, Japan in the
twentieth century has been an extraordinary country, and this
characterization does not decrease with the passing years. It is a
bulwark of strength to the Western bloc, not because of its military
power, which is insignificant, or even as an American military base in
the Far East, but because it, like West Germany, is an example of the
... prosperity associated with being an American "satellite," in sharp
contrast with the unhappy plight of the Soviet satellite states....
Communist
China
Nothing
could be more
different from the experience of Japan than that of Japan's greatest
neighbor, mainland China. On Taiwan, the Nationalist Government of
China has combined ... an economic program, including agrarian reform,
somewhat similar to Japan's, but Red China, as far as we can discern,
has passed through one great crisis after another in a desperate and
tyrannical effort to follow the Stalinist model of Soviet Russia's
experience. Like the Soviet Union, Red China may be able to organize
itself into a powerful and expanding society, but the problems in China
are much greater and more intractable than they were in Russia.
For
one thing, China's huge
population has been placing heavy pressure on limited resources, while
Russia has always been an underpopulated country with enormous untapped
resources capable of extensive exploitation. Under the czar, Russia
produced great surpluses, especially of food, which were exported
abroad. In a sense the Communist problem in Russia was to reestablish
these surpluses (which had been destroyed in the Civil War period of
1917-192l) and divert them, along with surplus peasants, to the city to
provide capital and labor for the industrialization process. In China
there was no surplus food, so that the problem, from the beginning, was
how to increase the production of food, not ho\v to reestablish it and
re-channel it. Moreover, in Russia, a centralized despotic state
capable of enforcing these changes was part of the country's past
experience; the direct authority of the state in the form of the
recruiting officer, the tax collector and the priest had impinged on
the lowest peasant, at least since the abolition of serfdom, and on
most of the society for over a thousand years. In China, as we have
seen, the state's authority was remote and separated from the peasants
by many layers of semi-autonomous gentry. In China the authority that
impinged on the peasant was social rather than political; the
enveloping influence of his family and clan formed the real social unit
of the society, which was structured on these units and not on the
individual, as in Russia or the West.
Moreover,
in China, the
authority that impinged on the ordinary individual was not only social;
it was static. Based on custom and tradition rather than on law or
political power, its whole tendency was to resist change. In Russia, on
the other hand, the absence of such a binding social nexus, the fact
that the basic social and metaphysical reality there was the
individual, the fact that the state's power impinged on that individual
and that that power, for centuries, had been seeking change (as it had
under Peter or Catherine, under Alexander I and II), all these things
assisted the establishment of a Communist dictatorship in the Soviet
Union. Moreover, almost constant internal migration in Russia from its
earliest days, and the constant threat and reality of war and invasion,
gave Russia an ability to accept changing personal conditions. This was
in the sharpest possible contrast with Chinese conditions, where the
heaviest obligation on each family was to maintain its fixed ancestral
shrines, an obligation that tied the family to its traditional village.
Nowhere
was the contrast
between Russian and Chinese conditions more emphatic than in religion
and general outlook. The Chinese were pragmatic, while the Russians
were dualistic, and the West was pluralistic. In both the West and in
Russia, belief in personal salvation in the hereafter and the need to
work or to suffer for such future reward had given the prevailing
outlooks a powerful impression of "future preference." Moreover, in
Russia the close association of Church and State, and the teaching of
the former that the latter was an essential element in reality and that
submission to the czar's authority was part of the process of future
salvation, prepared the way for the future Communist system. The
dualistic and messianic outlook of Russia prepared Russian minds to
accept any kind of uncompromising, intolerant, and painful authority as
the only mechanism by which man could be shifted from this level of
materialistic deprivation to the other level of salvationist future
reward, since man, by his own power, could not cross the metaphysical
gap, the no-man's land of almost unbridgeable distance, between the two
levels of Russian dualism. In the West, man could, by his own activity,
contribute to his rise to a high level of value and reward be cause, to
the West, reality was not dualistic but pluralistic, with an infinite
variety of steps and paths formed by the mutual inter-penetration of
spirit and matter in all the intermediate levels between their two
extremes.
China
had none of this. There
all reality was on the same mundane level; human activity sought to
survive, that is, to retain the existing situation, by pragmatic
adaptation and flexible response to shifting pressures. In China both
philosophy and religion were largely ethics, and this ethics was both
pragmatic and conservative. In such an environment the messianic,
salvationist, dynamic, future-oriented, state-dominated, abstract, and
doctrinaire nature of Marxist-Leninism was utterly alien.
Nevertheless,
Marxist-Leninism
came to China and took control of it. This could not have occurred if
the Old China had not been almost totally destroyed by the intrusion of
the West, by the destruction of Chinese confidence in their way of life
in the face of Western power, wealth, and ideology, and by the sixty
years of turmoil and war extending from the Japanese attack on China of
1894 to the final Communist pacification in 1954.
Of
course, no people lose
their culture completely, no matter how it may disintegrate, and many
of the fragments of Chinese cultural patterns continue to persist. One
obvious example of this is in foreign policy, where China's patterns
were remote from those of the traditional sovereign states, equals in
international law, found in modern Europe. The Chinese system was
always very ethnocentric in that they not only saw themselves as the
center of the world, but saw themselves as the only civilized unit in
their world picture in a planetary arrangement in which lesser peoples
encircled them and lived in increasingly dark barbarism, depending on
their distance from Peking. In the traditional view of China by the
Chinese, there was, outside the three planetary rings of China itself
(the imperial system, the provincial gentry' and the Chinese
peasantry), increasingly remote peoples who were dependent upon China
for cultural guidance, civilized example, and economic stimulation and
were, in many cases (such as Indochina, Tibet, Mongolia, or Korea), in
a tribute-paying relationship. This whole relationship, which was quite
alien to Europe's idea in the nineteenth century of the balanced powers
of equally sovereign states, was, on the contrary, very similar to the
modern Communist idea of satellite states.
It
seems likely that the
Chinese, in spite of the many good reasons they had to be resentful of
the Russians, were willing to be a satellite to the Russian sun until
about 1955, when they became increasingly impatient with Khrushchev's
efforts to relax the Cold War.
These
relationships can be
seen most clearly in military assistance and economic add. The Chinese
Communists triumphed over Chiang Kai-shek in the civil war with ...
Soviet assistance.... Stalin wanted China weak ... and all his actions
seem to have been consistent with this aim. The Russians allowed some
of the captured Japanese military equipment to go to the Communists in
1945, but this was small in amount compared to that which the
Communists obtained by capture or purchase from the Nationalist forces,
and the Soviet Union gave no military aid to the Communists during the
last four years of the civil war (1945-1949). [Secret military aid was
supplied.]
The
Sino-Soviet Alliance of
February 1950 was accompanied by an economic development loan of $300
million and was followed by the arrival in China of a Soviet military
mission of about 3,000 men, but all military aid was sold to China, and
at high prices. These arms, which were entirely of obsolescent types,
cost about two 70 billion dollars over seven years, 1950-1957. No
effort was made toward coordination of military exercises or training,
in spite of the alliance of 1950; there was no coordination of air or
sea defenses, and China was not brought into the Warsaw Pact. Moreover,
the Soviet Union, by its exclusive control of the North Korean Army,
built it up, launched it into the Korean War, and thus eventually
dragged Red China into a war on which they had not been consulted and
had no wish to be involved, but were compelled, in defense of their own
security, to intervene. Early in 1955, the Soviet Union gave China some
moderate help in starting a Chinese military industrial base, chiefly
in the assemblage of light planes, tanks, and naval vessels, but the
development of American and Soviet thermonuclear capacity and missiles
left China even further behind. In November 1957, Mao Tse-tung took a
delegation to Moscow and made a formal request for nuclear warheads,
but was rebuffed. As a result, by 1958 Red China was embarked on the
long and difficult task of seeking to make an atomic bomb of its own.
This seemed such an impossible job that, almost at once, Mao began to
issue public statements belittling nuclear weapons and promising that
the enormous numbers of China's militia would be able to survive any
nuclear attack. The Quemoy crisis of August-September 1958 showed how
little support the Soviet Union would give Red China on that issue and
showed equally how divided the two countries were and how averse the
Soviet Union was to China's approach "to the brink of war" in the Far
East.
The
defensive power of Red
China remains very great, chiefly because of its large population and
the great distances in which it can maneuver, but its offensive power,
except over the minor states on its borders, is small. Military
strength in the Far East is still in the hands of the Soviet Union,
which has no intention of allowing it to be used in that part of the
world, except in the unlikely event that the United States made an
all-out assault on Red China. Even in that remote case, the Soviet
Union's contribution would be limited, and its real strength would
continue to be aimed at Europe, to be used there rather than in the Far
East. Nonetheless, China's power in world politics does not rest on its
own military strength but on the nuclear stalemate of the Soviet Union
and the United States, both of whom are immensely more powerful in a
strategic sense than anyone else in the Far East.
Under
cover of that nuclear
stalemate and the high restraint of both Superpowers in the use of
nuclear weapons, Red China is in a position to engage in local wars,
"national liberation movements," and "anti-imperialist" guerrilla
activities all around its own borders, except along the frontier it has
with the Soviet Union itself. These guerrilla adventures by Red China
are correlated with domestic policy rather than with foreign policy, as
the Quemoy crisis of summer 1958 was related to the "Great Leap
Forward" of that year..
In
this correlation of China's
domestic and foreign policies, a major role will be played by China's
most critical problem: the population-food-production balance.
This
problem is probably more
acute in China than in any similarly large area in the world. The
Communist census of 1953 showed a Chinese population of almost 583
million, considerably more than had been expected. By 1962 this figure
may have reached 700 million. With a birthrate of 17 per 1,000, China's
natural increase was about 2 percent, and gave the country about
one-quarter of the world's total population. Only about one-tenth of
the land was arable, providing about 270 million acres, or less than an
acre of cultivated land for every two persons. There has been some
small success in increasing the area of cultivated lands, but obviously
the problem can be solved only by slowing up the increase in population
and by increasing the yields of crops per unit area of land. There
seems to have been little success in either of these over the past
decade or so. However, the centralized control of the Peking government
over the Chinese people is so strong that it could probably bring the
population explosion under control fairly quickly if a decision was
made to do so. This would probably be achieved by supplying every woman
with a birth-control pill at the noon meal each day, since that meal,
for the majority of Chinese, is usually taken in a communal eating
place where the process could be controlled as the authorities wished.
The exclusive control of the state over information and public opinion,
and its ability to mobilize local social pressures, increase its
ability to carry out this policy.
This
steadily growing crisis
was brought abruptly to the acute stage by the "Great Leap Forward" in
1958, the first year of the Second Five-Year Plan. The earlier
Five-Year Plan of 1953-1957 was based on the similar plan of the Soviet
Union. It concentrated on investment in heavy industry, with little
attention to consumers' goods or agriculture. About $3.5 billion a
year, probably 20 percent of national income, was allotted to
investment, with another 16 percent assigned to the armed forces. If we
can believe China's own figures, the plan was a success, with output of
coal, electricity, cement, and machine tools doubled and production of-
steel tripled. Total production of these commodities still left China
largely unindustrialized, but by 1957 the government controlled 70
percent of all industry, 85 percent of retail trade, and almost all
banking, foreign, and wholesale trade.
In
the First Five-Year Plan,
China was almost totally lacking in trained personnel, and was
dependent for these, as well as for necessary equipment, on foreign
sources. These could be found only within the Soviet bloc, but were not
provided freely and had to be paid for, with settlement of accounts and
new yearly agreements on an annual basis. The severity of the Soviet's
terms on aid to China were in sharp contrast to its more generous
behavior toward some of China's lesser neighbors and must have had an
adverse influence on China's attitude toward Moscow even from the
beginning. However, the necessary help could not be obtained elsewhere,
and the achievement of the First Chinese Five-Year Plan rested on this
assistance. In addition to the loan of $300 million in 1950, the Soviet
Union in 1953-1956 agreed to sell China $2 billion in equipment, and
sent several thousand technical advisers to help build 211 major
industrial projects.
On
this basis, the First
Five-Year Plan achieved an annual rate of increase in production of at
least 6 percent. The effort was financed very largely by accumulation
of surplus agricultural commodities from China's hard-pressed peasantry
and exchange of these for petroleum, machinery, and other commodities
needed for the industrialization of China. Since these came largely
from the Soviet Union and the European Communist satellites, 80 percent
of China's trade was with the Communist bloc at the end of this First
Five-Year Plan.
It
is possible that this
process could have continued, but it is even more likely that the
faster rate of increase of population in comparison with the rise in
food production may have indicated that the process could not continue.
In any case, the powers in Peking decided to do something about it.
Although it is not completely clear what they decided to do, and even
less clear why they decided to do it, the consequence was a disaster.
The "Great Leap Forward" of 1958 became a great stumble. This was the
third stage in the agrarian reorganization of China.
The
first stage in agrarian
reform had been the "elimination of landlordism" in 1950-1952. Previous
to the Land Reform Law of June 1950, 10 percent of families owned 53
percent of the farm land, while 32 percent owned 78 percent of the
land. This left over two-thirds of such families (58 percent) with only
22 percent of the land. The landlords were eliminated with great
brutality in a series of spectacular public trials in which landlords
were accused of every crime in the book. At least three million were
executed and several times that number were imprisoned, according to
the official figures, but the total of both groups may have been much
higher. The land thus obtained was distributed to poor peasant
families, with each obtaining about one-third of an acre.
The
second stage in the
agrarian reform (1955) sought to establish cooperative farming. In
effect it took away from the peasants the lands they had just obtained.
The argument for forming collectives was ... [that] most peasant
holdings were too small to work effectively, since abundant
fertilizers, new crops and methods, specialized tools, and efficient
land management could not be used on the average peasant farm of half
an acre. To permit such improvements in farm practices, the peasants
were forced into cooperatives. By the end of 1956, 83 percent of the
peasants, or 125 million families, had joined into 750 thousand
cooperatives.
The
third stage of agrarian
reform, constituting the basic feature of the "Great Leap Forward,"
merged the 750 thousand collective farms into about 26,000 agrarian
communes of about 5,000 families each. This was a social rather than
simply an agrarian revolution, since its aims included the destruction
of the family household and the peasant village. All activities of the
members, including child rearing, education, entertainment, social
life, the militia, and all economic and intellectual life came under
the control of the commune. In some areas the previous villages were
destroyed and the peasants were housed in dormitories, with communal
kitchens and mess halls, nurseries for the children, and separation of
these children under the communes' control in isolation from their
parents at an early age. One purpose of this drastic change was to
release large numbers of women from domestic activities so that they
could labor in fields or factories. In the first year of the "Great
Leap Forward," go million peasant women were relieved of their domestic
duties and became available to work for the state. In many cases,
factories and craft centers were established in the communes to use
this labor, manufacturing goods not only for the commune but for sale
in the outside market.
One
of the chief aims of this
total reorganization of rural life was to make available, for savings
and investment, surpluses of agricultural income from the rural sector
of Chinese society in order to build up the industrial sector. The
regime estimated that it could reverse the previous division of
agricultural incomes, under which 70 percent was consumed by the
agricultural population and only 30 percent was available to the
nonagricultural sectors of Chinese society. At the same time, it was
expected that the communes would totally shatter the resistant social
structure of Chinese society, leaving isolated individuals to face the
power of the state. Finally, it was expected that these isolated
individuals could be mobilized along military lines to carry out
agricultural duties in squads and platoons assigned to specific fields
and tasks.
This
last expectation, at
least, was mistaken. "The Great Leap Forward" did not increase
agricultural output but on the contrary reduced it drastically, despite
the extravagant estimates of increases in production that were issued
by officials toward the end of the first year. Officially, the
agricultural disasters of 1958-1962 were attributed to unfavorable
climate conditions, including unprecedented droughts, floods, storms,
and insect pests, but the reversal of the "Great Leap's" plans and
priorities in 1960-1961 shows that the Chinese themselves recognized
the organizational element as contributing to their farming problems.
It is undoubtedly true that adverse climate also contributed to the
difficulties, and it may well be true that such climate conditions in
the nineteenth century might have resulted in far greater want and
famine than did actually occur in 1958-1962, for the Communist
government was ... involved in corruption, self-enrichment, and
calculated inefficiency as earlier Chinese governments were, and had
both greater power ... to operate a fair rationing system, but the fact
remains that in China, as in other Communist states, including the
Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the inability of a communized agricultural
system to produce sufficient food surpluses to support a thoroughly
communized industrial system at a high rate of expansion is now
confirmed. On the other hand, the need for all these Communist regimes
to purchase grain from the bulging agricultural surpluses of the
Western countries, including Australia, Canada, the United States, and
even Europe, confirms the fact that there is something in the Western
pattern of living ... which does provide a bountiful agricultural
system. [The key is the free market system with private property and
natural rights.]
The
details of the Chinese
agricultural fiasco are not yet clear. It would appear that the Chinese
diet (in which at least three-quarters of food is carbohydrates, and
statistically recorded as "grain" even when it may be potatoes)
requires a basic survival diet of at least 2,000 calories a day, with
at least 1,500 calories from "grain." For a population of 700 million
this requires a minimum crop of 180 million metric tons of "grain" a
year, a figure that leaves nothing for reserves or for the inevitable
inefficiencies of mal-distribution through the inadequate Chinese
transportation system. Moreover, this crop must increase each year to
provide for the annual population increase of 2 percent (which gave 14
million more mouths in 1962).
The
official estimates for the
1958 grain crop were originally set at over 300 million tons, but in
1959 and later, this was revised to less than 250 million tons. It was
probably less than 200 million. The crop for 1959 was even less
(perhaps 190 million tons), while that for 1960 may have been 150
million tons. These three adverse years undoubtedly used up all China's
grain reserves, and the Chinese purchases of grain in the world's
markets, beginning with about 10 million tons in 1961, may have been to
rebuild some reserves rather than to provide a minimal increase for the
average hungry Chinaman. It seems clear that the "average diet" of
urban Chinese over these three harsh years may have fallen as low as
1,400 calories a day, at least 600 below the level that permits steady
effective work.
The
impact of the Chinese food
crisis of 1958-196: extended into all aspects of Chinese life and
policy, including foreign affairs. This process was intensified from
the fact that the "Great Leap Forward," from the beginning, involved
much more than the reorganization of China's agriculture. It also
included a considerable decentralization of economic management of
China as a whole, from centralized technical experts to local party and
working leaders; there was a considerable increase in the influence of
the Communist Party in contrast to the state bureaucracy, and there was
the general shift from emphasis on heavy industrial investment to more
short-range economic objectives. It seems likely that there was also a
change in economic accounting from emphasis on output to emphasis on
the profits accumulation of individual enterprises.
Some
of these changes were
undoubtedly steps in the right direction, but they were lost to view
under the general failure of agricultural production in 1958-1961. This
failure reacted on industrial production by curtailing both investment
and labor, so that output from this sector of the economy may have
fallen by half. At the same time, China's reduced ability to export raw
materials and agricultural products (simply because they could not be
spared) and the need to make bulk purchases of food, especially grain,
in Australia, Canada, or elsewhere, brought China face to face with a
great shortage of foreign exchange and made it almost impossible for
China to purchase necessary equipment abroad. China received little
help from the Soviet Union during these difficult years. The repayment
of loans to Russia continued and was, if anything, speeded up in spite
of the terrible burden they placed on the Chinese economy. Soviet
imports from China were 793 million rubles in 1958 and ago million in
1959, but fell to 496 million in 1961; Soviet exports to China, which
were 859 million rubles in 1959, were down to 331 million in 1961. As a
result, Sino-Soviet trade as a whole had a total balance favorable to
China (in the sense that China received more than it gave to Russia) of
984 million rubles over six years, 1950 1955, but had a total balance
unfavorable to China of —750 million rubles over six years,
1956-1961. The Soviet Union advanced no development credits to China in
these difficult years (as it was doing to Mongolia, North Korea, and
North Vietnam at the time), but collected payment on China's debts to
it exactly as if no Chinese food crisis were occurring. The Soviet
Union exported 6.8 million tons of grain to other countries in 1960 and
7.5 million tons in 1961, but none to China. On the contrary, China's
debt obligations made it necessary for it to ship over $250 million in
agricultural exports to Russia in 1960 at the same time that it was
paying out over $300 million of hard-earned foreign exchange for grain
from Western countries. The Soviet attitude was: Business is business;
an agreement is an agreement; and the economic development of the
Soviet Union itself cannot be sacrificed for the sake of a heretical
member of the Communist bloc. In 1961 the Soviet Union made some minor
concessions to China's difficulties, including release of 500,000 tons
of Cuban sugar to China from the total due to Russia, to be repaid in
sugar later, and the sale of 300,000 tons of Soviet grain to China
(only about 5 percent of China's foreign grain purchases that year).
The withdrawal of almost all Soviet technical and military advisers in
China during the summer of 1960 could not be defended solely on the
basis of "good business practice," and marked one of the major steps on
the continued deterioration of Sino-Soviet relations. It also
established the almost complete dependence of China on its own
resources, supplemented by whatever it could get wherever it could get
it, for building up its economic system. As one symbol of that changed
situation, it might be noted that trade with the Communist bloc had, at
its peak, accounted for over 80 percent of China's total foreign trade,
but by 1962 it had fallen below so percent..
The
food crisis in Red China
is, apparently, chronic, as it is, to a lesser degree, in all Communist
countries. For example, in May 1962, not a year in which the crisis was
generally acute, 70,000 hungry Chinese pushed across the barricaded
border of China into the booming British colony of Hong Kong during the
month. This intrusion was apparently caused by some local food
mal-distribution within China. It is not clear why the Chinese border
guards permitted this worldwide revelation of its agricultural failure,
although it might have been part of an effort to overwhelm and
suffocate Hong Kong's booming prosperity, which must be as unacceptable
on China's border as the prosperity of West Germany or West Berlin is
to Communist East Germany.
Although
the Soviet Union did
not take advantage of China's food crisis in 1958-1962 to wage direct
economic warfare on its fellow Communist regime, its businesslike
indifference to all appeals of fellowship or even humanitarian
considerations undoubtedly intensified the alienation of the two
countries, which had begun much earlier and on quite different grounds.
This
alienation of the world's
two greatest areas of Communist rule began in the earliest days of the
Red Chinese regime and was bound to become an open schism sooner or
later. From the simple fact of balance of power, the one political
event the Soviet Union had to fear was the appearance of a new
Superpower adjacent to the Soviet Union on the land mass of Eurasia.
The only possibilities for such a development would be a unified
western Europe or a powerful China, with India as a much more remote
and unlikely possibility.
In
the second place, Communist
China's needs for technical and economic assistance were inevitably so
great that they directly compete with the Soviet Union's need for its
own resources for its own development. Whatever China obtained of this
nature from Russia could hardly fail, in the long run, to become a
source of bitter feelings.
In
the third place, from the
beginning, a fissure between the two was inevitable, because, to the
Soviet Union, Europe was the primary area of concern, while to China
the Far East was primary. Each Power inevitably felt that the other
should support it in its primary area and ease off pressures in the
area of its own primary concern, an assumption about as unrealistic as
any could be. Thus Red China resented the Soviet Union's attempts to
work up crises over Berlin as deeply as Moscow resented Peking's
efforts to work up crises over Taiwan. As we shall see in a moment,
China's aggressive foreign policy in the Far East extended far beyond
Taiwan, to all of the border areas that had once been tributary to
Peking.
A
fourth source of discord
arose from the fact that the two Communist Powers were at quite
different stages on the road to Socialism. The basic question in the
allotment of economic resources in any state is concerned with the
division of such resources among the three sectors of (1) governmental,
especially defense; (2) investment in capital equipment; and ( 3 )
consumers' goods for rising standards of living. In Stalin's day the
Soviet Union placed major emphasis on (1) and (2) at the expense of
(3), but under Khrushchev there have been increasing pressures to shift
the allotment of resources toward (3). Red China, which is at least
forty years behind the Soviet Union in the development process, must
emphasize the first two sectors, and can obtain the resources to do
this only from curtailed consumption. Thus it must look at its problems
from a point of view much closer to Stalin than to Khrushchev, a
difference that led to alienation when Khrushchev began to attack
Stalinism in 1956.
Closely
related to this fourth
source of friction was a fifth, the monolithic quality of the
Marxist-Leninist states. By 1960 the Soviet Union's experiences in
Europe, especially with Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Poland, clearly
demonstrated that Communist states had their individual characteristics
and rhythms of development and could not all be ruled from one center.
This necessity by 1960 was being hailed in Moscow under the name
"Socialist polycentrism," but was unacceptable in Peking under any
name. At first Peking wanted the monolithic solidarity for which it
yearned to be operated from Moscow after discussion by all Communist
states, but by 1960 it was clear that if a Communist monolith were to
be created it would have to be done by Peking itself.
A
sixth source of alienation
between Moscow and Peking is rather difficult to document but may well
be more important than the others. It is concerned with a growing
recognition, by China if not by the Soviet Union, that the Kremlin was
being driven, under a multitude of pressures, toward a policy of
peaceful co-existence with the United States, not as a temporary
tactical maneuver (which would have been acceptable to China) but as a
semipermanent policy. Part of this policy involved the Soviet attitude
toward the fundamental theories of Marxist-Leninism, especially on the
Leninist side. These theories had envisioned the advanced capitalist
states as approaching a condition of economic collapse from "the
internal contradictions of capitalism itself." According to the theory,
this crisis would be reflected in two aspects: the continued
impoverishment of the working class in advanced industrial countries,
with consequent growth of the violence of the class struggle in such
countries and increasing violence of the imperialist aggressions of
such countries toward each other in struggles to control more backward
areas as markets for the industrial products that the continued
impoverishment of their own workers made impossible to sell in the
domestic market. The falseness of these theories was fully evident in
the rising standards of living of the advanced industrial countries,
and especially in the ones, such as West Germany or the United States,
which were most capitalistic in their orientation; it was also evident
in the willingness of Britain, the United States, and others to [allow]
... the end of colonialism in Asia and Africa.
This
evidence of the errors of
Marxist-Leninist theories was increasingly clear to the Kremlin,
although it could not be admitted, but it was quite unclear to Peking,
whose leaders were almost totally ignorant of the conditions of the
non-Communist world. None of the chief Chinese leaders had any
firsthand knowledge of the outside world and, indeed, had in most cases
never been outside China at all, except for a couple of quick visits to
the Soviet Union late in life. As a consequence, the Chinese Communist
leaders were ignorant, dogmatic, doctrinaire, and rigid.
These
attitudes appeared
clearly within China in the fading of the "Hundred Flowers Campaign" of
1957. In theory the Communist system, after the elimination of Trotsky,
accepted free discussion of goals and means until a decision on these
had been reached by the party machinery, when discussion must stop and
the decision be carried out with full loyalty. This procedure had never
been observed under the tyrannical rule of the Kremlin and was even
less likely to be followed in Peking. In 1956, however, Mao Tse-tung
announced a new policy of free criticism of the regime: as he said, "I
et a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend."
This was a period of ideological confusion in the world Communist
movement, which looked back on the struggle in the Kremlin to establish
Stalin's successor, was still reeling from Khrushchev's anti-Stalin
speech at the Twentieth Party Congress, and late in 1956 was called
upon to face revolts against the Kremlin in Budapest and Warsaw.
Although Chou En-lai, the foreign minister of Red China, rushed to
Europe to extend his country's support to Khrushchev in this power
struggle, ideological confusion was everywhere within the Communist
world, and Mao was undoubtedly concerned about the solid basis for his
own power and the problem of establishing a rule of succession in
Peking.
In
February 1957, Mao gave a
speech to a large conference on the subject of "The Correct Handling of
Contradictions Among the People." It was not published until June, but
in the interval gave rise to the "Hundred Flowers" controversy. In his
speech Mao invited criticism and free discussion within the structure
of true existing Communist state system. He promised immunity to the
critics, so long as their criticism contributed to the unity of Red
China. These restrictive phrases were widely ignored and, in a few
weeks, widespread and often fundamental criticisms of the regime were
being voiced in meetings, the press, and especially in educational
institutions. Three evils that Mao had mentioned—"bureaucracy,
dogmatism, and sectarianism"—were being freely denounced, with
the Communist Party cadres the chief targets. Some critics suggested
that the proper solution to these problems was to permit the
establishment of a legal opposition party within some kind of
parliamentary system. The general consensus of the complaints was aimed
at the lack of freedom to speak out, to move about, to disagree, or to
publish.
On
June 8th the government's
counterattack began, at first relatively moderately but with increasing
insistence. The principle of free criticism was not revoked, but the
publication of Mao's February speech on June 17th set the limits that
had presumably always been in effect. Within a year there had been a
considerable shake-up of party and state personnel, many discontented
persons (revealed by their criticism) had been removed or disciplined
in various ways, and "all Rightists had been eliminated." The chief
punishment was public denunciation and personal criticism of these
discontented, but undoubtedly punishment, in many cases, went much
further than that.
One
sequel to the "Hundred
Flowers" criticism was a reorganization of the upper ranks of the party
and government and the provision of a succession to Mao.
Mao
Tse-tung, son of a peasant who became wealthy on speculation and
money-lending, was born in 1893 in Hunan Province.
His father, a domestic tyrant and local miser, had less than four
acres, but used the labor of his three sons and a hired hand to work
them. He gave his sons a basic education, but his personal despotism
drove his whole family into alliance against him. Young Mao's early
life thus was one of severe discipline, constant domestic strife, and
secret dreams of rebellion. By paying for a substitute worker in his
own stead on the family land, he was able to get away to study for five
years in Hunan Normal School (finished 1918). There he read deeply in
Chinese history, especially military history, and formed a discussion
group on large social questions. Becoming an employee of the library of
Peking National University, he continued his reading, discussion, and
self-education, and in 1920 was one of the eleven original founders of
the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Until
1935, Mao's position in
the CCP was that of a dissident, and he was, more than once,
reprimanded and demoted, or removed from party positions. His chief
difficulty was that he refused to accept the party's official view,
insisted on by Russian-trained Communist leaders, that the revolution
must be based on urban industrial workers, the "real proletariat."
Instead Mao envisioned the party as a tightly disciplined group that
could be raised to power on the revolutionary activities of the great
mass of impoverished and discontented peasantry. Closely related to
this idea were two others that were equally unorthodox: (1) the role of
rural guerrilla warfare in wearing down and ultimately defeating a
"reactionary government" and (2) a fundamental emphasis on the
distinction between "imperialist" and "colonial" nations. This last
point made it possible for Mao to regard the backward and undeveloped
colonial areas as possible areas of revolutionary activity, where, as
in China, the exploited peasants could provide the revolutionary
impetus and could defend their revolutionary achievements by guerrilla
warfare. The more orthodox Communist line was that a revolution could
be carried out only by an urban proletariat that could be found only in
an advanced industrial area, and that such an industrial base was
essential to provide the modern military equipment needed to defend the
revolutionary achievement against the counterattacks of aggressive,
capitalist countries. In a sense Mao was much closer to the realities
of modern politics and to the experience of Soviet Russia itself, since
it is perfectly clear that no advanced industrial nation will go
Communist and that the movement must make its advances in
underdeveloped areas if it is to be successful anywhere. Since the
objections to Mao's position came from the center of world Communist
theory in Moscow, Mao distinguished between the Russian and the Chinese
experience by calling Russia an "ex-imperialist" country and China an
"ex-colonial country." In fact, however, they both became Communist
while still backward countries, and did so as a consequence of invasion
and defeat of the established government in a foreign war. Thus Mao's
...belief that the revolutionary regime comes to power by guerrilla
warfare supported by discontented peasantry, may well be correct, based
on the Russian precedent, that Communist regimes are more likely to
come to power in backward states and will survive there if they are
able to use the state's despotic power to direct the utilization of
economic resources toward investment to provide a high rate of economic
development, as Soviet Russia has done.
Red
China, like Soviet Russia,
is governed under a parallel structure of the party and the government
in which successive layers of assemblies and committees build up from
the local level to the central authority. Until 1959, Mao held the
chairmanship at the peak of both party and government. As a first step
toward establishing a succession that would not repeat the desperate
intrigue and violence that had occurred in the Kremlin following
Stalin's death, he resigned from the chairmanship ... in favor of Liu
Shao-chi, but retained his position as chairman of the Central
Committee of the party. The third man in the system Chou En-lai, is a
member of the seven-man Standing Committee that controls the party, has
been premier of the government since 1949, and was also foreign
minister in 1949-1958.
While
the structure of the
governmental system of Red China is very similar to that of Soviet
Russia, its spirit seems quite different. This is reflected in two
ways. In Russia the Old Bolsheviks of the early days of the party were
all eliminated, mostly by violent death, in the internecine power
struggles which went on behind the grim walls of the Kremlin, while the
Politburo throughout maintained a monolithic, impassive face to the
outside world. In Red China most of the party leaders of today are
still those who came together to engage in the earliest revolutionary
struggles of the party in the 1920'S. Moreover, they have, over the
past forty years, often differed and even engaged in violent struggles
and controversies with each other, but always were able to continue to
work together, and to patch up their differences. The real distinction
here is that the Kremlin has always insisted on presenting to the
outside world a picture of itself as united and infallible. This is why
Khrushchev's speech at the Twentieth Party Congress, attacking Stalin,
was such a shock to the world....
The
key to this rather
significant difference in the tone of Communist government in Moscow
and Peking may be found in two basic distinctions: a difference of
outlook and a difference of procedure. In Russia the ancient
doctrinaire and rigidly ideologistic tone associated with the
traditional Russian outlook and the traditional Russian religious
system, both going back to their roots in Greek rationalism and
Zoroastrian religion, established patterns of ideology that have
continued under materialistic and atheistic Communism. Such attitudes
are foreign to the traditions of Chinese pragmatism. Moreover, the
origins of Chinese Communist organization in discussion groups in which
all those present recognized their own ignorance and the inadequacy of
their information on social facts, as well as on Marxist dogma, has
continued in the practice of almost endless party meetings on all
levels, filled with discussion, debate, and individual examination of
one's own position and attitudes. As one remarkable consequence of
these differences between China and the Soviet Union, there are at
least half a dozen legal, minor political parties in Red China today.
These not only exist and are permitted to participate in the governing
process in a very minor way, but they are subject to no real efforts at
forcible suppression, although they are subject to persistent, rather
gentle, efforts at conversion. Such efforts would, of course, change to
ruthless reprisal, if these tamed minor parties made any real effort to
change or destroy the position of the Communist Party itself.
These
differences between
Communism in China and the Soviet Union may be explained most readily
in terms of the different traditions of the two countries. The same
applies to their different foreign policies, to which we have already
referred.
The
foreign policy of Red
China has a number of diverse aims that hold quite distinct status on
any list of Chinese priorities. Naturally, in first place is to avoid
any foreign-policy action that might jeopardize the Communist regime in
China. In second place is the desire to restore the traditional
international position of old imperial China as a self-sufficient,
isolated giant surrounded by subordinate tributary states; in this case
the tribute consists of ideological loyalty to the Chinese Communist
position. In third place is the Chinese desire to restore a unified
ideological bloc on a world-wide basis supporting the true (Chinese)
version of Marxist-Leninism. This version is not completely orthodox in
traditional Marxist-Leninist terms, since it expects Communist regimes
to rise in backward and ex-colonial countries rather than in advanced
industrial countries, and expects these events to be precipitated and
carried through by discontented peasants under intellectual leaders
rather than by the industrial proletariat. On the other hand, this
version is certainly closer to the facts of present-day politics, and
on many points, such as the inevitability of revolution, the necessary
imperialist aggression of advanced capitalist states, and the role of
war as the midwife of Communism, is closer to Leninism than the ideas
actually held in the Kremlin.
The
argument as to which
version of Communist ideology, the Chinese or the Russian, is closer to
Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy is singularly unrewarding, since both sides
claim the advantage here, and the ideology itself, however interpreted,
is so remote from the facts of economic-social development in advanced
countries that no real virtue can exist in being orthodox. The chief
fact is that the Chinese version is potentially a much greater source
of trouble to the outside world than Khrushchev’s ideas of
peaceful competition and non-inevitable war. The Chinese version is
dangerous simply because it threatens the West in an area where it is
particularly vulnerable and where it has shown no great competence,
that is, among the underdeveloped nations.
However,
Chinese aggression in
the period since 1954 has not been based on this third priority in its
foreign-policy schedule but on its second priority, which seeks to
create a belt of satellite subordinate states around the Chinese
borders. The year 1954 may be taken as the initial date in this effort,
because at that time the Peking government published a map of China
that showed the Chinese border pushed deeply into Tibet, India, and
southeast Asia. As early as the end of 1949, the Red Chinese had
commenced a moderate intervention in Vietnam, but their most successful
effort to restore the traditional Chinese satellite system was in Tibet.
China's
suzerainty in Tibet
has been generally recognized by the outside world, even in the years
when China was rent by civil wars and banditry. By the treaty of May
23, 1957, Tibet itself accepted this status without recognizing that
the status of "suzerainty" could become one of direct subordination,
under Chinese pressure. This pressure began at once, and reached an
acute stage in March 1959, when the Chinese authorities sought to
arrest the Dalai Lama, head of the theocratic Tibetan government. The
anti-Chinese revolt that resulted was crushed in two weeks, and the
Dalai Lama fled to India.
During
this period Chinese
pressure continued into southeastern Asia, in Burma, which desperately
tried to maintain a neutralist course, and especially in the successor
states of former Indochina. The subsequent division of Vietnam, the
struggle for Laos, and the valiant efforts of Cambodia to follow
Burma's path to neutralism have already been mentioned. For years,
guerrilla operations in South Vietnam and Laos have permitted an
increased Chinese intervention in the area and have made increasing
demands on American wealth and power to oppose it.
No
solution to the problem of
southeast Asia can be based on the belief that its troubles arise
wholly ... from Communism or from Chinese aggression. For centuries,
the central portion of the Malaysian peninsula, consisting of Laos and
Cambodia along the Mekong River, has been under pressure from the Thai
peoples to the west and the Vietnamese to the east. From at least the
seventeenth century, the area we regard as Laos was divided into three
or more petty kingdoms that were unable to unite in resistance to their
more imperialist neighbors. The French hegemony in all of Indochina,
from the nineteenth century to the Japanese invasion in 1942, suspended
this process, but it would have been resumed in any case with the
collapse of the French colonial system there in 1954. So too, the
southward movement of the Chinese, attracted by the rich rice lands of
the Malayan river deltas, would have occurred in any case, even if
Communism had never been invented. The Communist issue simply added
another, very acute, issue to a complex situation.
As
we have seen, French
expenditure of $7 billion and about 100,000 lives during an eight-year
struggle ended at Geneva in 1954. The Geneva agreements opened the way
to a succession of troubles in Laos by recognizing the Leftist Pathet
Lao as the government of two provinces, and recommending that it be
admitted to a coalition government after a proved cease-fire and free
elections. The most vital clause provided that all foreign military
forces, except a French training group, be withdrawn from Laos. An
International Control Commission representing India, Poland, and Canada
was to supervise these provisions.
These
agreements settled
nothing. The elections of December 1955 brought the premiership to
Prince Souvanna Phouma; he was a neutralist and brother of
Souphannouvong, a Communist fellow traveler and founder of Pathet Lao.
The two brothers brought Pathet Lao into the government, but it did not
give up its military bases in the two provinces it dominated. The
withdrawal of other military forces greatly increased the potential
power of Pathet Lao. When the latter showed increased strength in
subsequent elections in May 1958, the anti-Communist group combined in
August to oust Souvanna Phouma and put in as premier the pro-Western
Phoui Sananikone. This government in turn was ejected and replaced by a
Right-wing military junta led by General Phoumi Nosavan in January
1960; but within seven months a new coup, this time from the Left, and
led by Kong Le, changed the regime and brought Souvanna Phouma back to
office. Four months later, in December 1960, Nosavan once again
replaced Phouma by military force. The Communist countries refused to
recognize this change, continued to recognize Souvanna Phouma, and
increased their supplies to the guerrilla Pathet Lao by Soviet airlift.
In March 1961, England and France, acting through the SEATO conference
in Bangkok, vetoed any direct American or SEATO intervention in Laos.
At
the suggestion of Soviet
Russia, the Geneva Conference was reassembled in 1962 and drew up two
complicated agreements whose chief consequence was to revive the
agreements of 1954 within a more neutralized frame: coalition
government, elimination of all foreign military forces, neutrality, and
a reactivation of the International Control Commission. The resulting
troika coalition of Leftists, Neutrals, and Rightists served to
paralyze the country, while the Pathet Lao guerrillas, using Communist
North Vietnam as a base, threatened to secure control of the whole
country. This effort broke out into open warfare in the Plaine des
Jarres in April 1963. The growing success of these attacks over the
next few years greatly agitated Washington, where officials generally
felt that the fall of Laos, because of its central position, might well
lead to a succession of Communist take-overs, in Cambodia, South
Vietnam, Thailand, and Burma, leaving India wide open to a Red Chinese
intrusion directly across these collaborating areas into the Indian
plains. Some substance was lent to this fear from the fact that Red
China spent the years 1955-1958 constructing a number of military roads
that linked Sinkiang to Tibet, with offshoots southward toward the
Malay Peninsula. This fear became intensified in 1962-1964 as a
consequence of the Communist take-over in Burma, the American fiascoes
in Vietnam, and the direct Chinese attack on India.
The
strange thing about Burma
was that the increase in Communist power was brought about by the army,
which was increasingly dissatisfied by the ineffectual and corrupt
government of the democratic U Nu. The latter, who was personally
sincere, idealistic, and honest, represented the Burmese desire for
peace, democracy, and unity from World War II on. By October 1958,
however, his subordinates in the government had paralyzed the
government with bickering and corruption. When the ruling Anti-Fascist
Party split, U Nu judged it impossible to carry out the approaching
elections, and yielded control of the country to a caretaker military
government that promised to restore unity, honesty, and adequate
administration, and supervise the elections.
By
February 1960, the military
leaders judged their task to be achieved, and held the new elections. U
Nu's section of the Anti-Fascist Party won a sweeping victory, and he
returned to office. The restored premier made valiant efforts to
establish national unity, to raise the level of public spirit and
cooperation, and to placate the various groups that divided the
country, but was no more successful in restraining partisan conflict
and corruption in 1960-1962 than he had been in the period before
October 1958. Accordingly, in March 1962, another military coup, led by
General Ne Win, ousted U Nu, suspended the constitution, and ruled
through a junta of seventeen officers. Soon an effort was made to merge
all political groups into a single national political party with a
socialist program. The Communists were treated with increasing
leniency, while leaders of democratic groups continued to languish in
prison. Students and other dissident groups were violently suppressed,
and civil liberties were generally curtailed. Suddenly, in February
1963, a completely socialist regime was established by the
nationalization of most property rights under increasing Communist
influence.
Although
Burma has sought to
hold a neutralist course in foreign affairs, it has been drifting
toward the Red Chinese camp. Late in 1960 a protracted frontier dispute
between the two nations was ended by an agreement that was generally
favorable to Burma, and a few months later, in 1961, the two countries
signed an economic agreement that brought Burma a loan of 584 million
and technical cooperation from China. Like everything in Burma, this
was implemented in a lackadaisical fashion, and the Burmese economic
situation has deteriorated steadily since World War II. Part of this
has been due to increased difficulty in marketing Burma's chief
exports, rice and lumber, but the chief problem has been the steady
increase in population, which has reduced the per capita income by
about a third, although national income as a w hole has increased about
a seventh since independence was won in1948.
While
Burma on the western
edge of the Malay Peninsula thus drifted toward Communism, Vietnam on
the eastern edge moved in the same direction with violent struggles.
The Geneva agreement of 1954 had recognized the Communist government of
North Vietnam, dividing the country at the 17th parallel, but this
imaginary line across jungle terrain could not keep discontent or
Communist guerrillas out of South Vietnam so long as the
American-supported southern government carried on its tasks With
corruption, favoritism, and arbitrary despotism. These growing
characteristics of the Vietnam government centered around the antics of
the Diem family. The nominal leader of the family was President Ngo
Dinh Diem, although the fanatical spirit of it w as his brother's wife,
Madame Nhu. The brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, was the actual power in the
government, residing in the palace, and heading up a semi-secret
political organization that controlled all military and civil
appointments. Madame Nhu's father, Tran Van Chuong, who resigned from
his post as Vietnam Ambassador to the United States as a protest
against the arbitrary nature of the Diem family government, summed up
his daughter's career as "a very sad case of power madness." The same
authority spoke of President Diem as "a devoted Roman Catholic with the
mind of a medieval inquisitor." On the Diem family team were three
other brothers, including the Catholic Archbishop of Vietnam, the
country's ambassador in London, and the political boss of central
Vietnam, who had his own police force.
The
Diem family tyranny came
to grief from its inability to keep in touch with reality and to
establish some sensible conception of what was important. While the
country was in its relentless struggle with the Vietcong Communist
guerrillas who lurked in jungle areas, striking without warning at
peasant villages that submitted to the established government or did
not cooperate with the rebels, the Diem family was engaged in such
pointless tasks as crushing Saigon high school agitations by secret
police raids or efforts to persecute the overwhelming Buddhist majority
and to extend favors to the Roman Catholics who were less than lo
percent of the population.
When
Diem became president in
1955, after the deposition of the pro-French Emperor Bao Dai, the
country had just received 800,000 refugees from North Vietnam which the
Geneva Conference of 1954 had yielded
Ho
Chi Minh's Communists. The
overwhelming majority of these refugees were Roman Catholics, and their
arrival raised the Catholic population of South Vietnam to over a
million in a total population of about 14 million. Nevertheless,
President Diem made these Catholics the chief basis of his power,
chiefly by recruiting the refugees into various police forces dominated
by the Diem family. By 1955 these were already beginning to persecute
the Buddhist majority, at first by harassing their religious festivals
and parades but later with brutal assaults on their meetings. An
attempted coup d'état by army units which attacked
the
Royal Palace in November 1960 was crushed. From that date on, the Diem
rule became increasingly arbitrary.
In
the middle of all this
disturbance, American aid tried to revive the country's economy, and
American military assistance tried to curtail the depredations of the
Communist guerrillas. The two together amounted to about $200 million a
year, although economic aid alone was originally twice this figure. The
intensity of the guerrilla attacks steadily increased, following
President Diem's reelection, with 88 percent of the vote, in April
1961. As these attacks slowly increased, the American intervention was
also stepped up, and gradually began to shift from a purely advisory
and training role to increasingly direct participation in the conflict.
From 1961 onward, American casualties averaged about one dead a week,
year after year. The Communist guerrilla casualties were reported to be
about 500 per week, but this did not seem to diminish their total
numbers or relax their attacks, even in periods when their casualties
were heavy.
These
guerrilla attacks
consisted of rather purposeless destruction of peasant homes and
villages, apparently designed to convince the natives of the impotence
of the government and the advisability of cooperating with the rebels.
To stop these depredations, the government undertook the gigantic task
of organizing the peasants into "agrovilles," or "strategic hamlets,"
which were to be strongly defended residential centers entirely
enclosed behind barricades. The process, it was said, would also
improve the economic and social welfare of the people to give them a
greater incentive to resist the rebels. There was considerable doubt
about the effectiveness of the reform aspect of this process and some
doubt about the defense possibilities of the scheme as a whole. The
American advisers preferred stalking-patrols to seek out the guerrillas
rather than static defenses, stressed the need for night rather than
only daytime counteractions, and the use of the rifle instead of
large-scale reliance on air power and artillery. Moreover, most
observers felt that very little of America's economic aid ever reached
the village level but, instead, was lost on much higher levels,
beginning with the royal palace itself. By the summer of 1963,
guerrillas were staging successful attacks on the strategic hamlets,
and the need for a more active policy became acute. Unfortunately, just
at that time, the domestic crisis in Vietnam also was becoming acute.
This
final crisis in the story
of the Diem family and its henchmen arose from religious persecution of
the Buddhists under the guise of maintaining political order.
Restrictions on Buddhist ceremonies led to Buddhist protests, and these
in turn led to violent police action. The Buddhists struck back in a
typically Asiatic fashion, which because it was Asiatic proved to be
very effective in the Asiatic context: individuals or small groups of
Buddhists committed suicide in some crowded public place near a
governmental center. The favorite mode of suicide was to drench the
victim's long yellow robes with gasoline and ignite these with a match
as he knelt in a public square or street. The calloused reaction of the
Diem family, especially of Madame Nhu, shocked the world, and outraged
feeling rose rapidly in the summer of 1963. When thirty-five university
professors and a number of public officials (including the father of
Madame Nhu) resigned, the police attacked Buddhist shrines, arresting
hundreds of their priests. Student agitations led to the closing of
Saigon University and of all public and private schools, with the
arrest of many students. A United Nations fact-finding commission was
isolated by Diem police. On November 1, 1963, an American-encouraged
military coup, led by General Duong Van Minh, overthrew the Diem
family, killing several of its members. A new government, with a
Buddhist premier, calmed down the domestic crisis, but by 1964 showed
itself no more able to suppress guerrilla activities than its
predecessor had been.
The
Red Chinese intervention
in southeast Asia, except perhaps in Burma, was generally indirect and
through intermediaries. Elsewhere in southern and eastern Asia, this
was not true. But in all areas, from 1960 onward, it was evident that
the increase in Chinese influence was not so much at the expense of the
United States as it was at the expense of the Soviet Union. In North
Vietnam and Burma, the Chinese influence was direct before 1960, hut
after that date it grew stronger in Laos, South Vietnam, and Siam,
while Cambodia vainly sought to obtain a guarantee of its neutrality
from all concerned. In North Korea the change was dramatic, since the
dominant Soviet influence there was replaced hy open Chinese influence
in 1961. A similar process could be observed in southern Asia,
especially in Pakistan, and even in India..
The
Chinese invasion and
crushing of Tibet in March 1959 revealed that they had constructed a
military road from Sinkiang to Lhasa. The Dalai Lama, in exile in
India, accused the Chinese of genocide, and it seemed clear that a
third of a million Chinese had moved into southern Tibet after
resistance was crushed. Many Tibetans were compelled to work on a
l,500-mile railroad from China to Lhasa and on a road system toward the
borders of India, Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan. Thousands of Tibetan
refugees crowded into these countries, while others were machine-gunned
hy the Chinese as they fled. Many Buddhist shrines and lamasaries were
destroyed.
By
October 1962,
Chinese-Indian border incidents, on territory claimed by both, erupted
into open war. The consequences were startling: Indian forces collapsed
almost at once and were revealed to be almost wholly lacking in
supplies, training, and fighting spirit. As the responsible official
concerned, the minister of defense and vice-premier, Krishna Menon, a
close adviser of Nehru, an open sympathizer witl1 the Soviet Union, and
a skilled and sardonic baiter of the West, was removed from power.
India's appeal for aid was answered by the United States with five
million dollars' worth of weapons by November loth, but the Soviet
Union found itself in the cruel dilemma of either abandoning its long
efforts to win over India or contributing to a war on its nominal ally,
China. It abandoned the former by suspending arms shipments already
committed. Most ominous of all, by the end of November 1962, the Indian
military collapse was so complete that it became clear that China could
achieve in three months what Japan had sought to achieve without
success, throughout World War II: a breakthrough with ground forces
onto the Indian plain.
Such
a breakthrough was,
apparently, not China's aim. Its chief concern seems to have been to
secure control of the Aksai Chin area, where the territories of China,
India, and the Soviet Union converge. Chinese domination of this
inaccessible area and improvements of Chinese communications there is a
threat to the Soviet Union rather than to India, whicl1 has generally
ignored the area. The Chinese desire to hold the region may be part of
a scheme to relieve Soviet pressure on the Chinese borders farther
east, near Mongolia.
In
any case, the Chinese
resort to war on India must have been a consequence of very complex
motivations, and surely gave rise to complicated consequences. It was
aimed at the Soviet Union and at the United States rather than at
India, but did serve to discredit all concerned, to demonstrate the
power and vigor of the new China, and to cut down drastically the
Indian way (as contrasted with the Chinese way) as a model for other
underdeveloped Asiatic nations.
One
notable consequence of the
Chinese attack on India was that it served to pull Pakistan further out
of the Western camp toward the Communist side of neutralism. Pakistan
as a member both of CENTRO and SEATO had a vital position in John
Foster Dulles's line of paper barriers surrounding the Soviet
heartland, but in Pakistani eyes the controversy with India over
Kashmir was of more immediate and more intense appeal. The Chinese
humiliation of India was received with ill-concealed pleasure in
Pakistan, although the Chinese were also intruding on some areas
claimed hy Pakistan. These disputes were settled by a frontier treaty
with China in May 1962, and the Muslim state showed increased
confidence that its claims against India over Kashmir would obtain
Chinese support.
During
all these events the
divisions between the Soviet Union and Red China became increasingly
public and increasingly bitter. As usual in Communist controversies,
they were enveloped in complicated ideological disputes. By 1962 the
Chinese had reached the point where they were accusing Khrushchev of
betraying the revolution and the whole Communist movement from a
combination of increasingly bourgeois obsession with Russian standards
of living and a cowardly fear of American missile power. Thus they
accused the Soviet Union of betraying international Communism in
accepting "polycentrism" (especially in Yugoslavia) and of weakness in
accepting "peaceful co-existence" (as in the Cuban missile crisis).
Khrushchev alternated between striking back at the Chinese criticism
and seeking to stifle them in order to avoid a complete ideological
split of the world Communist movement. The Chinese were adamant, and
continued to work toward such a split, seeking to win over to their
side the Communist movement and Communist parties throughout the world,
especially in the more backward countries where the Chinese experience
often seemed more relevant. By 1964 the split within the Communist
movement seemed unbridgeable.
Chapter
73—The Eclipse of Colonialism
One
of the most profound and
most rapid changes of the postwar period has been the disintegration of
the prewar colonial empires, beginning with the Dutch in the
Netherlands Indies and ending with the Portuguese in Africa and
elsewhere. We have no need to go into any detailed narration of the
events that accompanied this process in specific areas, but the
movement as a whole is of such great importance that it must be
analyzed.
When
World War II began in
1939, a quarter of the human race, six hundred million people, mostly
with nonwhite skins, were colonial subjects of European states. Almost
all of these, with the exception of those under Portuguese rule, won
independence in the twenty years following the Japanese surrender in
1945.
Except
in a few areas, such as
the Dutch Indies, French Indochina, and British Malaya, which had been
under Japanese occupation during the war, the anti-colonial movement
was not significant until a decade or more after the war's end. In many
places, especially in Africa, the movement toward independence was of
little importance until 19j6. Nevertheless, the war may be regarded as
the trigger for the whole process, since the early defeats suffered by
the Netherlands, France, and Britain, especially when they were
inflicted by an Asiatic people, the Japanese, gave a deadly blow to the
prestige of European rulers. The war also mobilized many natives into
military activities, during which they learned to use arms and were
often moved to unfamiliar areas where they discovered that the
subordination of natives to Europeans, and especially the subjection of
dark-skinned peoples to whites, was not an immutable law of nature.
These
events also showed many
native peoples that their tribal divisions were but local and parochial
concerns and that they could, and must, learn to cooperate with other
persons of different tribes, different languages, and even different
religions, to face common problems that could be overcome only by
cooperative efforts. In many cases, the great demand and high prices
for native products during the war gave native peoples, for the first
time, a realization that the contrast of European affluence and native
poverty was not an eternal and unchangeable dichotomy. Accordingly,
such peoples were unwilling to accept the decreasing demand, falling
prices, and declining standards of living of the postwar period, and
determined to take political action to obtain independent control of
their own economic situations. Moreover, just at that time, the
Communist argument that colonial impoverishment and European affluence
arose from the exploitation of colonial peoples by imperialist Powers
began to spread in Asia and Africa, brought back from imperial cities
like London and Paris where small groups of natives, in search of
education, had come in contact with Communist propagandists.
Except
for this last point,
these factors were closely associated with the war and its outcome. But
there were other influences of a much longer duration. The acquisition
of European languages that permitted native peoples to surmount the
linguistic isolation of their tribal differences had begun in the
nineteenth century, but by the 1950's had become a more widespread
phenomenon, especially among those natives who were most unwilling to
fall back into tribal apathy and an inferior status. Many natives, in
one way or another, had acquired a smattering or more of European
education, and with this, even when it entailed a respect and affection
for European culture, they had picked up much of the basic libertarian
outlook endemic in European politics. In fact, in British colonial
areas, educated natives had been systematically inculcated with English
theories of political resistance and self-rule which went back to Magna
Carta and the Glorious Revolution. Thus the ... [basic tenets] of
English history became part of the solvent of the British imperial
structure.
Another
factor, which had been
going on for a considerable time in 19j6, was the process of
detribalization associated with the growth of cities and the
development of commercial and craft activities that brought many
diverse subjects of colonialism together in urban districts or trade
unions outside the stabilizing nexus of their previous tribal
associations or of their peasant communities. Better educated and more
energetic individuals among these natives took advantage of this
situation to organize groups and parties to agitate for a larger share
in the political control of their own affairs and eventual
independence..
In
spite of the pressure and
even the power of these changes in the colonial situation on the side
of the subject peoples, there were at least equally significant, and
largely unrecognized, changes on the side of their imperial rulers. For
it must be recognized that in very few cases did native peoples achieve
independence as a consequence of a successful revolt by force. On the
contrary, in case after case, independence was granted, after a
relatively moderate agitation, hy a former ruling power which showed a
certain relief to be rid of its colonial burden. This indicates a
profound change in attitudes toward colonies within the imperialist
countries. The significance of this change can hardly be denied; the
real question is concerned with its causes.
Before
1940 the possession of
colonial territories was of little direct concern to most persons in
the imperial homeland. They knew that their country had colonies and
ruled over peoples quite different from themselves, and this was
regarded, rather generally, as probably a good thing, a source of pride
to most citizens and probably of some material advantage to the country
as a whole. The costs of holding colonial areas were not generally
recognized and were usually felt to be minor and incidental. But in the
postwar period these costs very rapidly became major and direct
charges, quite unacceptable to the ordinary citizen, when the postwar
period and increased anti-colonial agitations required heavy taxation
and compulsory military service to regain or to retain such colonial
areas. Once this was recognized, the former rather vague satisfaction
with colonial possessions soon disappeared, and there was a rapidly
spreading conviction that colonies were not worth it. The burden of
taxes and military service in remote areas was regarded as part of the
war, to be ended, as completely as possible, with the war itself, not
to be continued indefinitely into the postwar period.
Another
closely related change
occurred in economic aspirations. The citizens of the European colonial
Powers had survived six years of hardships in the war itself and, in
most cases, a decade or more of economic hardships in the pre-war
depression. The war demonstrated that such economic hardships had been
needless. The massive economic mobilization for the war should clearly
that there could be an equally massive postwar mobilization of
resources for prosperity. T he ordinary European was determined to
obtain the rising standards of living and welfare security that he had
been denied in the depression and war, and he had no stomach to be
denied these any longer in order to hold in subjection native peoples
who wanted independence. Thus the former beneficiaries and upholders of
empire, usually restricted to an upper-class minority or specialized
interest groups, found that these interests no longer would be
supported by the majority of their own citizens.
In
some cases independence was
achieved after a period of violence, rioting, and guerrilla warfare,
although in no case did these actions, however extensive, become a
matching of force between the colonial area and the imperial Power. In
no case could these powers be matched, since the latter was
overwhelmingly larger. In most cases, a more or less token display of
force by the colonial peoples showed that they could be subdued only by
an expenditure of resources and inconveniences which the ruling Power
decided it did not care to make. The existence of the Soviet bloc and
the appearance of the Cold War, with its almost irresistible demands
for expenditures of resources, helped to tip the decision toward
independence. Moreover, the opinion of the United States was favorable
to independence for subject peoples in a rather doctrinaire and ...
anti-colonialism, rooted in the American revolutionary tradition....
Resistance
to the decolonizing
process was strong only in exceptional cases, such as in the French
Army and in the Portuguese ruling groups. In Portugal the despotic
character of the regime made it possible for the adherents of the
colonial system to sustain the policy of resistance to independence,
but the role of the French Army, especially in Indochina and Algeria,
was almost unique.
This
unique quality in the
Algerian crisis rested on three factors: (1) Algeria, which had been
held by France since 1830, was constitutionally part of France, and its
problem was part of the domestic history of the metropolitan country,
since 30 of the 626 members of the French Assembly represented Algeria;
(2) in Algeria there was a large group of European settlers (about 12
percent of the total population) who could not be turned over to an
independent Arab majority, whom they had treated as inferiors for
years; and (3) the French Army, after a series of defeats from 1940 to
Indochina in 1954, resolved not to be defeated in Algeria and was
prepared to overthrow by civil war any French cabinet that wished to
grant independence to that area. Bitterness in Algeria was intensified
by many other issues, including drastic religious, economic, social,
and intellectual contrasts between the European settlers and the
Algerian majority. The latter, for example, as a result of French
medical skills, had one of the world's major population explosions,
while the settlers owned most of the land and almost all the local
economic activities.
The
bitterness of the Algerian
struggle almost exceeded belief, as the extremists on each side adopted
intransigent positions and sought to eliminate by assassination the
more moderate of their own groups. Both sides resorted to strikes and
riots in the cities, guerrilla operations and farm burnings in rural
areas, and assassination in France itself. By 1960 indiscriminate
bombings and reprisals against innocent peoples were alienating
increasing numbers of persons from the extremes toward more moderate
positions nearer the center, although the extremists as they decreased
in numbers became more violent in action. In 1958 the crisis brought
General de Gaulle back to office in France from retirement, largely
because his supreme self-confidence and ambiguous position on the chief
issues of controversy gave grounds for belief that he could find some
solution to the crisis, or at least could maintain domestic order. This
change ended the Fourth French Republic and brought into existence a
new regime, the Fifth Republic, whose constitutional provisions were
custom made to De Gaulle's type of despotic ambiguity (October 1958).
It
took almost four years more
before agreement was reached between the Algerian rebels and the De
Gaulle regime on a settlement of the Algerian dispute (March 18, 1962).
Even then, sporadic violence continued for months. The final cost of
the Algerian crisis, over seven years, has been estimated at 250,000
lives and 520 billion.
The
intensity of this conflict
and the socialistic policies of the new Algerian government of Muhammad
Ben Bella provided an unattractive future to the previously superior
European settlers, and many of these left the country to seek residence
elsewhere, chiefly in France although only a small portion of them were
of French origin. The erratic instability and demagogy associated with
so many newly independent states was displayed by Ben Bella during his
visit to the Western Hemisphere in October 1962. Although he came to
seek economic concessions and was given an especially warm welcome by
President Kennedy, a few days later he visited Castro in Cuba and made
a scathing attack on United States policy, demanding American
evacuation of the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. The following month, on
his return home, Ben Bella nationalized mines, power, foreign trade,
and much of the lands of European settlers. At the same time, the
Communist Party was outlawed and hundreds of "enemies" of the regime
were arrested.
A
number of newly independent
states followed what we might call the Nasser pattern of post-colonial
policy. This involved a large amount of verbal attack on the United
States and the European ex-colonial powers, a rather ambivalent but
generally favorable attitude toward the Soviet bloc, and a less public
effort to obtain Western aid or economic concessions to compensate for
the basic inability of the Soviet bloc to provide such aid. With this
double policy, there frequently went a rather aggressive attitude
toward neighbors with which the new state had real or fancied
grievances, which were played up at critical moments as a cover for the
inability of the new regimes to cope with the post-liberation economic
and social problems of their own peoples. In many cases, such as
Sukarno of Indonesia, Nasser, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and Castro, these
leaders sought to exercise the qualities of personal popularity and
superhuman personification of popular aspirations that we call
"charismatic leadership."
None
of these policies or
attitudes was much help in coping with the very real problems that have
faced the newly independent nations with growing urgency. The
enthusiasm that greeted independence and the acceptance by the world of
that status through admission to the United Nations was followed, in
most cases, by a post-independence reaction as the scope and almost
insoluble nature of each country's problems had to be recognized.
The
nature of these problems
must be evident from what has already been said. At a minimum they
could be divided into three or four groupings concerned with the
patterns of power, of wealth, of social relationships, and of outlook.
In
the European tradition,
power has tended to rest on some kind of synthesis of military (force),
economic (material rewards), and ideological elements and on some kind
of political structure (such as the parliamentary system) in which the
opposition was incorporated into the constitutional system. In most
colonial or backward areas, power has tended to rest on other aspects
of the total social structure, notably on religion or on social
pressures derived from kinship and tribal groupings or from stable
social patterns in villages or residential patterns. There has been a
tendency toward conformity and even uniformity; opposition groups and
diversity have tended to be encapsulated into exogamous social
groupings like the castes of India.
In
these traditional
societies, except where the English tradition was successfully
established, there has been a reluctance to accept majority rule or the
organized oppositional structure of the parliamentary system because of
the native desire for a unified social context. Instead of decision by
majority rule, which was often unacceptable to native peoples because
it seemed to force an alienated situation on the minority, native
peoples in many areas preferred to reach decisions by what could be
called "reaching a consensus." This method, exemplified in the American
Indian "powwow" or in American business conferences, achieved agreement
and decision, usually unanimously, by comment from each person present
in sequence until consensus was reached. The difficulty of using this
method in the large assemblies of newly independent governments often
led to other mechanisms for achieving unanimity, such as a
constitutional provision that any political party that captured a
majority of the vote should have all the seats. To the Western European
such a rule seems to be a scandalous refusal to listen to minority
opinion; to natives it often seems a most necessary mechanism for
preserving solidarity. Really it is a mechanism for keeping diverse
opinions behind the scene, out of public view, and force the
reconciliation of differences to take place in some concealed area of
backstage intrigue and discussion rather than out in the public arena
of the national assembly. The latter body becomes a mechanism for
publicly demonstrating national solidarity or for proclaiming public
policy, rather than an area of conflict as it had become in the western
European parliamentary system.
This
tendency to seek a public
display of uniformity and national solidarity through political and
constitutional processes was evident in Hitler's Third Reich, as it has
been in other recent European authoritarian states, including the
Soviet Union, and has also appeared in the more traditionally free
governments of western Europe and the United States.
The
European tradition to seek
a settlement of disputes or differences by force or in battle was
evident in the feudal tradition, in the electoral and parliamentary
systems, in the contentious (rather than investigatory) nature of
English legal procedure, and in the European, and especially English,
obsession with sports and athletic contests. It is part of the warlike
tradition of Europe that gave it the weapons development and political
power to dominate the world.
Such
an emphasis on force as a
prime factor in human life is rarer in colonial areas, especially in
those where peasant traditions are strong and pastoral traditions are
weak (such as India, southeast Asia, China, and much of Negro Africa).
In these areas force often appeared in a ritual or symbolic way, so
that the outcome of a battle was settled by the infliction of a single
casualty, which was taken to indicate a religious or magical settlement
of the dispute, making further conflict unnecessary.
This
reluctance to the use of
force in social life in many colonial areas has raised the problem of
how the areas claimed by these new nations can be defended, either
against their more aggressive neighbors or against more militant tribes
or groups within their own population. In many areas, notably in
Africa, the existing boundaries of the new nations have no relationship
to any power structure or to any existing factual realities at all. As
colonies these areas' boundaries reflected, to some extent, the power
relationships of their imperial countries in Europe, but now that
independence has been achieved, the boundaries reflect nothing. In many
cases the existing boundary, drawn as a straight line on the map, cuts
through the center of tribal areas, the only existing local political
reality.
The
lack of a military
tradition in many ex-colonial areas makes defense a difficult problem,
as was shown in the Indian defensive weakness during the Red Chinese
attack of 1962. In many areas, natives arc eager to become soldiers,
because of the salaries and benefits associated with the role, but they
do not regard fighting as part of that role. In many cases, they become
pressure groups seeking additional benefits and may become a
considerable burden on the new nation's budget and a threat to the
stability of the state itself while providing little or no protection
to the state against possible outside enemies.
The
economic problems of the
new nations are already clear. Tn most cases they center upon the
imbalance between a rapidly growing population and a limited food
supply, with the accessory problem of finding employment for such
additional population in their underdeveloped economic status.
Technical knowledge is limited, and large-scale illiteracy hampers the
spread of such knowledge, if it exists. But in most cases it does not
exist, for it must be emphasized that the technical knowledge built up
in Europe and America under quite different geographic and social
conditions is often not applicable to colonial areas. This was made
brutally clear in the so-called "ground-nut scheme" in British East
Africa in the early postwar period, which sought to grow peanuts over a
vast acreage, using American methods of tractor cultivation; it led to
disastrous results, with monetary losses of many hundreds of millions
of dollars. Any technology must fit into the natural and social ecology
of the situation. The conditions of most ex-colonial areas are so
different from those of western Europe and North America that our
methods should be applied only with the greatest caution. American
methods in particular are usually based on scarce and nigh-cost labor
combined with plentiful and cheap material costs to provide
labor-saving ut material-wasteful methods of production requiring large
savings and heavy investment of capital. Almost all ex-colonial areas
have an oversupply of cheap and unskilled labor with limited material
and land resources and are in no position to raise or utilize heavy
capital investments. As a consequence, quite different technological
organizations must be devised for these areas.
The
social consequences of
decolonization are, in some ways, similar to those that have appeared
recently in the poorer areas of Western cities. This has been called
"anomie" (the shattering of stable social relationships), and arises
from rapid social change rather than from decolonization. It gives rise
to isolation of individuals, destruction of established social values
and of stability, personal irresponsibility, shattered family
relationships, irresponsible sexual and parental relationships, crime,
juvenile delinquency, a greatly increased incidence of al1 social
diseases (including alcoholism, use of narcotics, and neuroses), and
personal isolation, loneliness, and susceptibility to mass hysterias.
The crowding of large numbers of recently detribalized individuals into
rapidly growing African cities has shown these consequences, as,
indeed, they have been shown in many American cities, such as New York
or Chicago, where recently deruralized peoples are exposed to somewhat
similar conditions of anomie.
Some
of the more intractable
difficulties of newly decolonized areas are psychological, especially
as these difficulties are hard to identify and often provide almost
insuperable obstacles to development programs, especially to those
directed along Western lines. It is, for example, not usually
recognized that the whole economic expansion of Western society rests
upon a number of psychological attitudes that are prerequisites to the
system as we have it but are not often stated explicitly. Two of these
may be identified as (1) future preference and (2) infinitely
expandable material demand. In a sense these are contradictory, since
the former implies that Western economic man will make almost any
sacrifice in the present for the sake of some hypothetical benefit in
the future, while the latter implies almost insatiable material demand
in the present. Nonetheless, both are essential features of the
overwhelming Western economic system.
Future
preference came out of
the Christian outlook of the West and especially from the Puritan
tradition, which was prepared to accept almost any kind of sacrifice
and self-discipline in the temporal world for the sake of future
eternal salvation. The process of secularization of Western society
since the seventeenth century shifted that future benefit from eternity
to this temporal world but did not otherwise disturb the pattern of
future preference and self-discipline. In fact, these became the chief
psychological attributes of the middle class that made the Industrial
Revolution and the great economic expansion of the West. They made
people willing to undergo long periods of sacrifice for personal
training and to restrict their enjoyment of income for the sake of
higher training and for capital accumulation. This made it possible to
develop an advanced technology with massive shifting of economic
resources from consumption to forming capital equipment. On this basis
Quakers, Puritans, and Jews built the early railroad systems, and
English Non-Conformists combined with Scottish Presbyterians to build
the early iron industry and steam-engine factories. Other advances were
based on these.
The
mass production of this
new industrial system was able to continue and to accelerate to the
fantastic rate of the twentieth century because Western man placed no
limits on his ambition to create a secularized earthly paradise. Today
the average middle-class family of suburbia has a schedule of future
material demands which is limitless: a second car is essential, often
followed by a third; an elaborate reconstruction of the basement
provides a recreation room, which must be followed in short order by an
elaborate patio with outdoor cooking equipment and a swimming pool;
almost immediately comes the need for an outboard motorboat and trailer
to carry it, followed by the need for a summer residence by the water
and a larger boat. And so it goes, in an endless expansion of
insatiable demands spurred on by skilled advertising, the whole keeping
the wheels of industry turning, and the purchasing power of the
community racing around in an accelerating cycle.
Without
these two
psychological assumptions, the Western economy would break down or
would never have started. At present, future preference may be breaking
down, and infinitely expanding material demand may soon follow it in
the weakening process. If so, the American economy will collapse,
unless it finds new psychological foundations.
The
connection of all this
with ax-colonial areas lies in the fact that without these two
attitudes it will be very difficult for underdeveloped nations to
follow along the Western path of development. This does not mean that
no "achieving" society can be constructed without these two attitudes.
Not at all. Many different attitudes, in proper arrangement, might be
made the basis for an "achieving" society, but it would probably not be
along the Western lines of individual initiative and private
enterprise. Religious feeling or national pride or many other attitudes
could become the basis for achievement and economic expansion, as they
were in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt or in medieval Europe, but such
other bases for achievement would be unlikely to provide a system using
private savings as its method of capital accumulation or personal
ambition as its motivation for acquisition of highly developed
technological training and skills, as in our economy.
The
ordinary African is very
remote from either future preference or infinitely expandable material
demands. He generally has preference for the present, and his demands
are often nonmaterial and even non-economic, such as his desire for
leisure or for social approval. The African has a fair recognition of
the immediate past, a dominant concern for the present, and little
concern for the future. Accordingly, his conception of time is totally
different from that of the average Western man. The latter sees the
present only as a moving point of no dimension that separates the past
from the future. The African sees time as a wide gamut of the present
with a moderate dimensioned past and almost no future. This outlook is
reflected in the structure of the Bantu languages, which do not
emphasize the tense distinctions of past, present, and future, as we
do, but instead emphasize categories of condition, including a basic
distinction in the verb between completed and incompleted actions that
places the present and the future (both concerned with unfinished
actions) in the same category. We do this occasionally in English when
we use the present tense in a future sense by saying, "He is coming
tomorrow," but this rare use of the present to indicate the future does
not blur our conception of the future the way constant use of such a
construction does in Bantu.
In
addition to his present
preference, the Bantu has a list of priorities, in his conception of a
higher standard of living, which contains many non-economic goals. A
fairly typical list of such priorities might run thus: food, sex
dalliance, joking with one's friends, a bicycle, music and dancing, a
radio, leisure to go fishing. Any list such as this, with its high
priority for non-economic and basically leisure activities, does not
provide the constantly expanding material demands that are the
motivating force in the West's economic expansion. Nor is the African's
strongly socialized personality, which shares all its successes and
wants with others and constantly yearns for the social approval
obtained by sharing income with kinfolk and friends, capable of
supporting any economy of private selfishness and individual capital
accumulation that became the basis for the industrial expansion of the
West.
These
remarks about the
differences in African outlooks and our own could be applied also to
differences in the material bases for economic expansion, as we have
already indicated. It is perfectly true that the obstacles we have
mentioned do not apply to all Africans or to all parts of Africa, but
in general it can be said that most Western methods and organizations
do not fit the non-Western context of the newly independent countries
and that these differ so greatly from one another, or even in some
cases (such as India) within a single nation, that the direct
application of Western methods to these new areas is inadvisable [until
certain principles of government and economics have been adopted]. Such
Western methods might work if native peoples could acquire some of the
more basic attitudes that have been the foundation of Western progress.
For example, the victory of the West in World War II was attributed to
our capacity for rationalization and for scientific method. These in
turn rest on the most basic features of the Western outlook and
traditions, on the way in which our cognitive system categorizes the
world, and the value system we apply to this structure of categories.
But our cognitive system is derived from our past heritage, such as our
Hebrew ethical system, the Christian heritage (which strangely enough
made us accept the reality and the value of the temporal world at the
same time that it placed our final goal, achievable through behavior in
the world of the flesh, in the eternal world of the spirit), and the
lessons of Greek rationalism with its insistence on dealing with the
world in a quite artificial system of two-valued logic based on the
principle of identity and the law of contradiction. Non-Western peoples
who do not find in their own system of cognition any acceptance of the
rules of identity or of contradiction do not see reality in terms of
two-valued logic, and must make an almost impossible effort to adopt
the West's natural tendency to rationalize problems. On this basis,
they find it difficult either to rationalize their own emotional
positions and thus to control or direct them, or to rationalize (which
is to isolate and analyze) their problems and thus to seek solutions
for them. Africans, for example, unless they have been thoroughly
Westernized, do not make the sharp distinctions we do between the
living and the dead, between animate and non-animate objects, between
deity and man, and many other distinctions which our long submission to
Greek logic have made almost inevitable to us.
In
view of the similarity of
the problem faced by the newly independent nations, it may seem curious
that they have not shown a greater tendency to cooperate with each
other or to attempt to form some kind of common front toward the world.
The chief effort to do this has been in the form of a number of
meetings of so-called "uncommitted nations" of which the chief was held
at Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, and a number of efforts to move toward
some kind of Pan-African system. On the whole, however, this effort
toward cooperation has been blocked by three influences: (1) the
sensitivity of newly independent nations to preserve this independence
intact as long as possible, even to the degree that particularist local
interests and rivalries are dominant over common interests; (2) the
fact that all these nations need economic aid and technical assistance
from the advanced countries, and are, on the whole, in competition with
each other to get it; and (3) the tendency of many of the newly
independent areas (such as Indonesia or Egypt) to adopt pro-Soviet
attitudes in the Cold War leading to efforts by the Soviet Union to
infringe upon their basically neutralist policies to persuade them to
make a commitment to the Communist side in the Cold War.
In
many ways the problems of
independence have a distinctly different character in Africa from Asia.
In Asia, as is traditional along the Pakistani-Peruvian axis, the
structure of societies has been one in which a coalition of army,
bureaucracy, landlords, and moneylenders have exploited a great mass of
peasants by extortion of taxes, rents, low wages, and high interest
rates in a system of such persistence that its basic structure goes
back to the ... empires before l000 B.C.
In
Africa the situation has
been quite different, and has generally been in constant flux. This
results from a number of influences, of which one is that Africa has
been underpopulated and has not developed the kind of land
monopolization that supported Asiatic despotism. The dominant social
units of African society have been kinship groups: extended families,
lineages, clans, and tribes with landownership (generally of little
importance) vested in these and often with a fairly wide division
between ownership and rights of usufruct. Moreover, land use in Africa
has generally been a fallow system, often of the "slash-and-burn" type,
in which land is cropped for a few years and then abandoned for an
extended period to recover its fertility. Thus agriculture has been on
a shifting basis, and peasant life in Africa has been almost as mobile
as pastoral activities are, without the permanent localism that is
associated with rural villages in Eurasia. Moreover, in Africa tillage
of the soil, usually by digging stick rather than by plow, has tended
to be carried on by women, usually wives, and the relationship of the
agricultural worker to any exploiter has been a matrimonial or family
relationship rather than a relationship that was basically economic, as
in Eurasia's serfdom, hired laborer, or plantation slavery.
All
these features of the
basic relationships between men and the land in Africa have restricted
the growth of the kind of agrarian superstructure associated with
Asiatic despotisms, and left instead a very amorphous and fluctuating
system in which no complex exploitative system could be screwed down on
the masses of the people because these people were too free to move
elsewhere. As a result of this, the kinship groups that are the chief
feature of rural Africa are constantly mobile, and even today can tell
how their common ancestor, a few generations back, arrived in their
residence from some other vague place..
This
mobile and transitory
character of native African life has been increased by two other
historical features of Africa's past: the pastoral intrusions and slave
raiding.
The
pastoral intrusions arose
from the movement into and across Africa of warlike peoples who lived
from herds of cattle or horses and imposed their loose rule upon the
more peaceful peasant natives. These pastoral intruders have been of
two kinds. The first were Bantu cattle herders who derived their way of
life from other peoples in northeastern Africa and moved generally
south and southwest toward Natal and Angola. These include such savage
fighting peoples as the Zulus or the Matabeles of Rhodesia.
The
second pastoral group has
been made up of Arabic or at least Islamized intruders, also from
northeastern Africa, who have moved, generally westward across Africa,
with horses. These generally followed the grasslands of the Sudan,
between the desert and the tropical forest, and are found today as
dominant and warlike upper classes in many areas such as northern
Nigeria. Both groups of pastoral intruders brought in distinctive
social and cultural contributions, including new religious ideas, and
have enserfed numbers of the African peasants, as groups of villages or
tribes rather than as individuals.
The
second major force that
has traditionally disrupted African life and prevented it from
developing any elaborate social hierarchies or long residence linked to
specific areas has been the practice of slave raiding, which goes back
to ancient Egypt, was carried on by both kinds of pastoral intruders,
and culminated in the devastation of much of Africa in the massive
slave-trade raids of the middle nineteenth century, such as were
witnessed by Dr. Livingston.
The
establishment of European
colonial rule over Africa, chiefly after 1880, eventually abolished the
slave trade and greatly reduced the influence of the pastoral
intruders. But this did not decrease the mobility and transistory
characteristic of African life, since any increase in rural stability
was more than overbalanced by the extension of commerce and of craft
manufactures which led to a drastic growth of towns and the shattering
of many of the kinship structures such as lineages and tribes. In fact,
one of the most obvious problems brought to Africa by European
influence has been the detachment of atomized individuals from the
social nexus, based on blood and marriage, that previously guided their
lives and determined their systems of values and obligations.
Each
imperial power imposed
its own patterns on the people under its colonial domination, most
obviously in the introduction of its own language. These different
patterns and languages remain as dominant forces after independence is
achieved, serving to link together the areas with the same colonial
past and to separate those with a different colonial experience. In
fact, the division of Africa into separate French-speaking,
English-speaking, and Portuguese-speaking areas (with all that these
differences imply) is now one of the chief obstacles to the creation of
any major Pan-African unity.
In
very general terms we might
say that the British impact on its African territories was largely
political, the French was cultural, the Belgian was economic, and the
Portuguese was religious.
The
obsession of the upper
classes of Britain with government and politics was reflected in their
colonial policies, which emphasized the introduction of law and order,
introduced political and legal systems based on English models, and
educated the minority of native peoples who obtained education in the
politically dominated training provided for the English upper classes
(most educated natives studied political science and law). To this day
ax-British colonial areas show this pattern.
The
French in Africa talked of
their "mission civilisatrice," by which they meant, at a minimum, to
offer native peoples the French language with a smattering of French
culture. Many natives fell in love with this culture, and with Paris,
so that when liberation came they did not, as did the British-trained
natives, become obsessed with the spirit of political opposition, but
rather showed a desire to continue the extension of French cultural
life, especially literature, along with political independence. Today
some of the best poetry written in the French language comes from
Africans.
The
Belgians in the Congo
rejected any effort to extend political or cultural life to their
native peoples, but instead sought to provide them with skills as
trained laborers and to build up a prosperous economic basis for a high
native standard of living while at the same time allowing them to get
no glimpse of European life, the outside world, political training, or
cultural and intellectual ideas. As a result, when independence came to
the Congo in 1960, that vast area had one of the highest native
standards of living in tropical Africa but had fewer natives who had
attended a university or had even traveled abroad than any French or
British territory.
The
Portuguese were concerned
with conversion of natives to Christianity and with little else,
believing that their control of their areas could be maintained best if
all other kinds of change were kept minimal. They practiced racial
equality and were willing to admit to Portuguese citizenship any native
who was individually successful in obtaining a Portuguese education,
but on the whole they did not encourage even this kind of development.
The
background of the whole
process of African decolonization was built up in the wartime and early
postwar periods, but the trigger on the chain reaction of the
decolonization process was the defeat of the Anglo-French effort at
Suez because of America and Soviet pressure in October 1956. As might,
perhaps, be expected, the process began in a British colony, the Gold
Coast, now called Ghana.
The
independence of Ghana was
a personal achievement of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, who returned to Accra from
an educational process in Pennsylvania and the London School of
Economics. The year before, in 1946, the Gold Coast obtained the first
British African Legislative Assembly that was allowed a majority of
Africans. Nkrumah's agitations, including the founding of a new
political party, the Convention People's Party, under his own control,
earned him a two-year jail sentence. While he was still in jail, his
party won 34 of the 38 seats in the Assembly in the election of 1951;
therefore he was released from confinement to take control of the
administration. With good will on both sides, a transition period of
six years gave Ghana its independence, under Nkrumah's rule, in March
1957.
Within
a year of independence,
Nkrumah faced the typical problems of post-colonialism that we have
mentioned: a rapid fall in cocoa prices upon which Ghana's
international trade position depended; disease in the cocoa trees,
which required destruction of thousands of trees over the violent
protests of their peasant owners; dissension between the pagan,
commercial, coastal area, in which the Convention People's Party was
based, and the more pastoral, Islamic, remote interior.
Nkrumah
soon showed his
readiness to handle all problems with ruthless decision. The "sick"
cocoa trees were cut down; political opponents were silenced in one way
or another; Nkrumah was ballyhooed as the father of all Africans, the
unique genius of the African revolution, the mystic symbol of all black
men's hopes. A Five-Year Plan for economic development (1959-1964)
promised to spend over 92 million dollars. In 1960 the previous
British-granted constitution was replaced by a new republican
constitution that was amended almost at once by a clause allowing
Nkrumah to rule without parliament whenever necessary. The leader's
Pan-African hopes were reflected in a clause that permitted "the
surrender of the whole or part of the sovereignty of Ghana" to a union
of African states. By the end of the same year, political party
designations were abolished in Parliament, and the Preventive Detention
Act (which allowed Nkrumah to imprison his enemies without charge) was
used to arrest the chief members of the political opposition. Ghana
embarked on an economic war witl1 the Union of South Africa in protest
against the latter's extreme segregation of the races and on a somewhat
weaker system of economic reprisals against France in retaliation for
its nuclear-explosion tests in the Sahara. Vigorous activities at the
United Nations, in African affairs (chiefly in opposition to any
Pan-African movement that would not be dominated by Nkrumah), in
balancing the two sides of the Cold War while seeking economic aid from
both, in establishing a Ghana shipping line defiantly called the "Black
Star 1,ine," and in constructing a gigantic hydroelectric and aluminum
manufacturing complex on the Volta River, kept Nkrumah's name in the
world's press.
Nigeria,
the largest territory
in the British colonial empire, larger than any European state and four
times the size of the United Kingdom, with 35 million inhabitants, did
not become free until 1960. The delay was caused by the internal
divisions within the territory. These were not unexpected, for the
territory was an artificial creation, cut out of the African wild by
Lord Lugard just before World War I. It consisted of three
regions—North, West, and East—which had no central assembly
until 1946, and continued to have diverse interests and attitudes. Each
region had a separate government with a joint federal government at
Lagos. The Northern Region is Muhammadan, patriarchal, underdeveloped,
poor, ignorant, and feudal, ruled by an aristocratic upper group of
emirs descended from pastoral conquerors. The Western Region is small
but rich and thickly populated with progressive agriculturalists,
chiefly Yoruba. The Eastern Region, dominated by the Ibo peoples, tends
to dominate the whole federation. There are tribal and religious
differences between the three, since the south is pagan, and government
of the federation must be by coalition of two regions against the
third. American-educated Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe (known as "Zik") was the
first governor-general, functioning as president and the dominant
political figure from the Eastern Region, while the prime minister was
Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, a Muslim from the Northern Region. The
Opposition was led by Chief Obafemi Awolowo of the Western Region. This
rather precarious balance of forces was stabilized by the strength of
the English-speaking tradition of moderation and rule of law, both much
more securely established in Nigeria than in Ghana, and by the
industrious, alert, and balanced character of Nigeria's chief tribal
groups. The economy was also better balanced than that of many African
states, with a productive agriculture as well as varied mineral
resources.
The
key to Africa's future may
rest with the success of former French Africa, since this group seems
to provide a nucleus on which the more moderate forces on the continent
may congregate. The chief difficulty from which they suffer is that
most are arid and all are poor (compared to the Congo or Nigeria)..
The
impact of war was much
more significant in French Africa than in British Africa, because of
the defeat of France and the fact that the supporters of De Gaulle's
resistance, rather than of Pétain's pseudo-Fascism, controlled
these territories during much of the war. Such control could be
sustained only with the support of the African population, which was
loyally given, although few rewards came in return for more than a
decade after the war. Then freedom came swiftly, in sequence to the
military disasters in Indochina in 1954 and the rising disaster in
Algeria, rather than from the events or struggles in Black Africa
itself.
The
first effort was not
toward independence but toward closer union with France, by
incorporating the African territories in an elaborate federal
structure, the French Union, which gave the Africans representation and
even cabinet posts in Paris. One of the incidental consequences of this
largely transitory structure was that the neutralism of the African end
of the structure tended to spread to the metropolitan end in Paris. At
the same time, American support of independence for colonial areas, at
a time when Paris was seeking to strengthen its African connections,
was one more in a series of American actions that drove France, and
especially De Gaulle, toward a neutral position for Paris itself.
The
French Union was still in
process of being established in 1958, after having lost Indochina in
1954, Morocco and Tunis in 1956, when the Fourth French Republic
disintegrated beneath the strain of the Algerian crisis, and De Gaulle
came in with his constitution for the Fifth Republic. This provided a
federal system by which essential powers were reserved to the central
authority and other powers devolved upon the "autonomous" member
states. The key "Community" functions reserved to France included
foreign affairs, defense, currency, common economic and financial
policy, control of strategic materials, and (with certain exceptions)
higher education, justice, external transportation and communications.
The
new constitution was
presented to the overseas areas of France with the opportunity to
accept or reject it, but with little expectation that any area would
reject it because of their need for French economic air and other
expenditures of federal funds. Sékou Touré, of Guinea,
however, persuaded his area to vote against ratification and was, in
retaliation by De Gaulle, instantly ejected from the French Community,
and its political and financial support (about $20 million a year) was
stopped. The newly independent and outcast area sought support in
Moscow, spreading panic in other capitals at this opening of the
African scene to Soviet penetration. For about five years, Guinea
sought an alternative to the French system, established an
authoritarian one-party Leftish regime, signed an act of "union" with
Ghana (a meaningless agreement that brought Touré a $28 million
loan from Nkrumah), and welcomed Soviet aid and Communist technicians
to Conakry. Guinea recognized East Germany, welcomed influences from
Red China, accepted American offers of counter-aid, and nationalized
all schools, churches, and many French-owned business enterprises. For
a while, a possible union of Ghana, Guinea, and the Mali Republic
(former French Sudan), signed in 1961, threatened to form a "Union of
African States," but this hope faded, along with the anticipation of
any substantial Soviet aid or assistance, and Guinea, by 1963, was in
process of working its way back into the French African system.
The
Guinea exodus from the
French Community in 1958, regretted by both sides within a few years,
opened the way to independence for all French Africa. Senegal and the
Sudanese Republic, linked together briefly as the Mali Republic,
obtained freedom in April 1960, and started a flood of declarations of
independence led by Madagascar (Malgache Republic). This political
disintegration of the French areas in Africa raised at once two acute
problems: (1) What would be their relationship with France, a
connection that had brought French Africa over two billion dollars in
French development funds in the 1947-1958 period? and (2) What
arrangements could be made between the newly independent states to
prevent the Balkanization of Africa, with its resulting inability to
handle problems of transportation, communications, public health, river
development, and such, which transcend small local areas'
To
answer the first question,
a French constitutional law of June 1960 changed the French Community
to a contractual association. Fourteen French African states signed a
multitude of individual agreements with France that recognized their
full sovereignty on the international scene but established
"cooperation" with France over a wide range of economic, financial,
cultural, and political relationships. Thus by voluntary agreement,
French control along the general lines of the existing status
quo was preserved.
The
effort to prevent
Balkanization by some sort of federal arrangement for the French
African areas was prevented by the objections of Ivory Coast and of
Gabon. The former was the wealthiest of the eight French Western
African states, while Gabon was the richest of the four French
Equatorial African states. This opposition broke up the Mali union of
Senegal and Soudan in 1960, and the latter, taking the name Mali to
itself, drifted off toward cooperation with Guinea. This disintegration
of French Africa was stopped only because of growing anxiety at the
efforts of Ghana's Nkrumah to form an opposed Pan-African bloc of a
Leftish tinge. This effort gave rise to the "Union of Independent
African States" and the "All-African Peoples' Conferences."
The
Union of Independent
African States arose from the Pan-African dreams of the late George
Padmore and was organized by him for Nkrumah. Its first meeting, at
Accra in April 1958, had representatives of the eight states then
independent in Africa (Ethiopia, Ghana, Liberia, Libya, Morocco, Sudan,
Tunisia, and the United Arab Republic). They demanded an end to French
military operations in Algeria and immediate independence for all
African territories. Three subsequent meetings in 1959-1960 advanced no
further, except to attack the establishment of racial segregation
("apartheid") in South Africa, and Nigeria blocked efforts to take
immediate steps toward a United States of Africa in June 1960.
The
All-African People's
Conferences, also sponsored by Nkrumah, were great mass conventions of
labor unions, youth groups, political parties, and other organizations
from all Africa, including non-independent areas. They achieved little
beyond the usual denunciations of colonialism apartheid, and the
Algerian war. Three of these conferences were held at Accra, Tunis, and
Conakry in 1958-1960.
In
opposition to these
Ghana-inspired movements, in late 1960, Dr. Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the
political leader of Ivory Coast, one-time French cabinet minister and
French spokesman at the United Nations, took steps to organize a
French-centered union of African states. Called the "Brazzaville
Twelve," after their second meeting at Brazzaville, French Congo, in
December 1960, these formed a loose organization for cooperation and
parallel action in Africa, the United Nations, and the world. In the
United Nations they established a bloc to vote as a unit from October
1960. At the same time, they began to work closely as a group with a
number of technical, economic, educational, and research organizations
that had grown up under the United Nations, or with international
sponsorship to deal with African problems. Of the large number of
these, we need mention only the Commission for Technical Cooperation in
Africa South of the Sahara (head office in London) and its advisory
council, the Scientific Council for Africa South of the Sahara (head
office in Belgian Congo), the Foundation for Mutual Assistance in
Africa South of the Sahara (office in Accra).
As
we have said, the
Ghana-Guinea Union of May 1959 was expanded, with the accession of Mali
in July 1961, into the pompously named Union of African States (UAS).
At Brazzaville, in December 1960, six French territories of West Africa
and four of Equatorial Africa joined with the Cameroons Federation and
the Malgache Republic to form the "Brazzaville Twelve" (officially
entitled Union of African and Malagasy States, or UAMS). At a
conference at Casablanca in January 1961, the UAS moved a step further
by forming rather tenuous links with Morocco, the United Arab Republic,
and the provisional government of Algeria. Four months later, at
Monrovia, the UAMS formed a more stable and homogeneous grouping of
twenty, by adding to the Brazzaville group Liberia, Nigeria, Togo,
Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Somalia, Libya (which had previously been at
Casablanca), and Tunisia. This represented a considerable victory over
the UAS group, and was the result of several influences: a number of
African leaders, led by President Tubman of Liberia, objected to
Nkrumah's efforts to introduce the Cold War into Africa and to his
extravagant propaganda, controversy, and cult of personality within the
African context; moreover, the Casablanca grouping was paralyzed by the
rivalry between Nkrumah and Nasser and by the non-African orientation
of the Muslim North Africa members, who constantly sought to drag the
African states into non-African issues, such as the Arab hatred of
Israel.
The
UAMS group has eschewed
these issues, has sought to avoid controversy and propaganda, and has
played down the anti-imperialist, anti-Portuguese, anti-South African
issues which rouse such enthusiasn1 but achieve so little in mass
assemblies of Africans. The UAMS also, unlike the UAS group, has
rejected any efforts to interfere in the domestic affairs of its
African members and neighbors. Instead it has tended to work quietly on
rather technical questions and has been satisfied with moderate
agreements. Its chief meetings, usually twice a year, have assembled
the chiefs of the member states, with a different host city on each
occasion. Agreements reached at these high level conferences are then
generally implemented hy subsequent meetings of specialized or
technical experts. The Union's concerns have been economic and social
rather than political or ideological, and its approach to its problems
has been generally conciliatory, tolerant, empirical, relatively
democratic, pro-Western, and, above all, tentative. Most of its
achievements have resulted from months of careful testing of the ground
and have usually been considered at several of its "summit"
conferences. Its charter of Union, for example, was not signed until
the fourth conference, at Tananarive, in September 1961. Its mechanisms
of operation, beyond the semiannual meetings of chiefs of state,
consists of a secretariat and secretary-general at Cotonou, Dahomey; a
Defense Union consisting of a council of the twelve defense ministers
and a general staff and military secretariat at Ouagadougou, Volta; the
Organization of African-Malgache Economic Cooperation stationed at
Yaounde, Cameroon; an African-Malgache Union of Posts and
Telecommunications consisting of the twelve ministers concerned with
these and a central office at Brazzaville; a joint "Air Afrique"
airline, associated with "Air France"; and other, similar,
organizations concerned witl1 development, shipping, research, and
other activities. Several agreements have been signed establishing
judicial, financial, and commercial cooperation. The whole system has
an independent budget financed by a fixed percentage grant from each
state's budget to the common fund. The whole relationship has formed
the chief element of stability in African problems, has retained its
close contacts with France, and has formed the core of a moderate group
among the growing multitude of neutrals at the United Nations. Its
possible implications for the future political organization of Africa,
if not for a wider area, will be considered in the next chapter.
Part Twenty—Tragedy and Hope: the Future in
Perspective
In
an age of change and
competing doubts, there is one thing of which we can be certain: the
world is changing and will continue to change. But there is no
consensus on the direction of such change. Human beings are basically
conservative, in the sense that they expect and wish to continue to jog
along in the same old patterns. Accordingly, they tend to regard most
changes as regrettable, although one might get the impression, in a
bustling and dynamic place like the United States, that men preferred
change to stability..
It
is perfectly true that
Americans now have change built into the pattern of their lives, so
that saving and investment and, in general, the flows of claims on
wealth (what most of us call "money") now go in directions that make
constant change almost inevitable. Summer has hardly arrived before
summer dresses have been sold out, autumn clothing is beginning to
arrive on the dealers' racks, and extensive plans are already in
process to make next summer's clothing (which goes on sale in the
southern resorts in winter) quite different. This year's cars are not
yet available for sale when the manufacturers are planning changed
versions for next year's models. And urban commercial buildings are
still new when plans for remodeling, or even total replacement, are
already stirring in someone's mind.
In
such an age the sensible
man can only reconcile himself to the fact: change is inevitable. But
few men—average or exceptional—feel any competency in
deciding the direction that change will take. Forecasting can he
attempted only hy extrapolating recent changes into the future, but
this is a risky business, since there is never any certainty that
present directions will be maintained.
In
attempting this risky
procedure, we shall continued to divide society into six aspects,
falling into the three major areas of the patterns of power, rewards,
and outlooks. The area of power is largely, but not exclusively,
concerned with military and political arrangements; the area of rewards
is similarly concerned with economic and social arrangements; and the
area of outlooks is concerned with patterns that might be termed
religious and intellectual. Naturally, all these are different, and
even drastically different, from one society to another, and even, to a
lesser extent, between countries, and areas within countries. For the
sake of simplicity, we shall be concerned, in this chapter, with these
patterns in Europe and the United States, although, as usual, we shall
not hesitate to make comparisons with other cultures, especially with
the Soviet Union.
Chapter
74—The Unfolding of Time
The
political conditions of
the latter half of the twentieth century will continue to be dominated
by the weapons situation, for, while politics consists of much more
than weapons, the nature, organization, and control of weapons is the
most significant of the numerous factors that determine what happens in
political life. Surely weapons will continue to be expensive and
complex. This means that they will increasingly be the tools of
professionalized, if not mercenary, forces. All of past history shows
that the shift from a mass army of citizen-soldiers to a smaller army
of professional fighters leads, in the long run, to a decline of
democracy. When weapons are cheap and easy to obtain and to use, almost
any man may obtain them, and the organized structure of the society,
such as the state, can obtain no better weapons than the ordinary,
industrious, private citizen. This very rare historical condition
existed about 1880, but is now only a dim memory, since the weapons
obtainable by the state today are far beyond the pocketbook,
understanding, or competence of the ordinary citizen.
When
weapons are of the
"amateur" type of 1880, as they were in Greece in the fifth century
B.C., they are widely possessed hy citizens, power is similarly
dispersed, and no minority can compel the majority to yield to its
will. With such an "amateur weapons system" (if other conditions are
not totally unfavorable), we are likely to find majority rule and a
relatively democratic political system. But, on the contrary, when a
period can be dominated by complex and expensive weapons that only a
few persons can afford to possess or can learn to use, we have a
situation where the minority who control such "specialist" weapons can
dominate the majority who lack them. In such a society, sooner or
later, an authoritarian political system that reflects the inequality
in control of weapons will he established.
At
the present time, there
seems to be little reason to doubt that the specialist weapons of today
w ill continue to dominate the military picture into the foreseeable
future. If so, there is little reason to doubt that authoritarian
rather than democratic political regimes will dominate the world into
the same foreseeable future. To be sure, traditions and other factors
may keep democratic systems, or at least democratic forms, in many
areas, such as the United States or England. To us, brought up as we
were on a democratic ideology, this may seem very tragic, but a number
of perhaps redeeming features in this situation may well be considered.
For
one, our society, Western
Civilization, is almost fifteen hundred years old, and was democratic
in political action for less than two hundred of these years (or even
half of that, in strict truth).... Of equal significance is the fact
that a period with a professionalized army may well be, as it was in
the eighteenth century, a period of limited warfare seeking limited
political aims, if for no other reason than that professionalized
forces are less willing to kill and be killed for remote and total
objectives.
The
amateur weapons of the
late nineteenth century made possible the mass citizen armies that
fought the American Civil War and both of this century's world wars.
Such mass armies could not be offered financial rewards for risking
their lives, but they could be offered idealistic, extreme, and total
goals that would inspire them to a willingness to die, and to kill:
ending slavery, making a world safe for democracy, ending tyranny,
spreading, or at least saving, "the American way of life," offered such
goals. But they led to a total warfare, seeking total victory and
unconditional surrender. As a result, each combatant country came to
feel that its way of life, or at least its regime, was at stake in the
conflict, and could hardly be expected to survive defeat. Thus they
felt compulsion to fight yet more tenaciously. The result was ruthless
wars of extermination such as World War II.
With
a continued
professionalization of the armed services, caused by the increasing
complexity of weapons, we may look forward with some assurance to less
and less demand for total wars using total weapons of mass destruction
to achieve unconditional surrender and unlimited goals. The rather
naive American idea that war aims involve the destruction of the
enemy's regime and the imposition on the defeated people of a
democratic system with a prosperous economy (such as they have never
previously known) will undoubtedly be replaced by the idea that the
enemy regime must be maintained, perhaps in a modified form, so that we
have some government with whom we can negotiate in order to obtain our
more limited aims (which caused the conflict) and thus to lower the
level of conflict as rapidly as possible consistent with the
achievement of our aims. The nature of such "controlled conflict" will
be described in a moment.
The
movement toward
professionalization of the armed forces and the resulting lowering of
the intensity of conflict is part of a much larger process deriving
from the nuclear and Superpower stalemate between the Soviet Union and
the United States. The danger of nuclear destruction will continue and
become, if anything, more horrifying, but will, for this very reason,
become a more remote and less likely probability. In the late 1960's
the United States will have about 1,700 vehicles (missiles and SAC
planes) targeted on the Soviet bloc; but the 1970's this will rise to
about 2,400. Moreover, by 1970, 650 of these will be Polaris missiles
on our 41 nuclear submarines, which cannot be found and eliminated by
any Soviet missile counterstrike, once they are submerged at sea. The
great value of the Polaris over its land-based rivals, such as
Minuteman, is that the Soviet Union knows where the latter are and can
counter-target on them. This means that the MM’s must be fired
out of their silos before the Soviet warheads, seeking them out to
destroy them, can arrive fifteen minutes after takeoff. Such a
precarious position encourages nervous anticipation and possibility of
precipitate action, capable of beginning a war no one really wants.
Thus, on an enormously greater scale, we have something like the von
Schlieffen Plan that made it necessary for Germany to attack France in
1914 when there was no real issue justifying resort to war between
them. The Polaris missiles at sea, since they cannot be found and
counter-forced, can be delayed, without need to strike first or even to
strike second in immediate retaliation, but can be held off for hours,
days, and weeks, compelling the Soviet to negotiate even after the
original Soviet strike has devastated America's cities. Thus the Soviet
Union cannot win in a nuclear exchange, even if they make the first
strike.
The
reverse is also true. In
the mid-1960's the Soviet Union has vehicles able to deliver up to six
hundred or seven hundred nuclear warheads on the United States and
perhaps seven hundred or eight hundred on our European allies. Their
warheads are larger than ours (with up to 100-megaton ICBM's, while our
largest are 9 MT). In spite of the fact that their missile sites arc
poorly organized, with missiles, fuel, crews, and warheads widely
scattered, so that they arc at least twelve hours from takeoff even in
their fourtl1 stage of readiness, the inaccuracy of our counter-force
missiles is so great that we could not eliminate all their missiles,
even if we made a first strike with no warning. It would require only
about 200 Soviet warheads to devastate our cities totally, and an
American strike at Soviet missile bases delivered without warning would
leave almost that number not eliminated; these would be free to make a
retaliatory strike at us. Moreover, the Soviets have several dozen
Polaris-type submarines that can fire four missiles each from surfaced
positions. Many of these would survive an American unannounced first
strike.
All
this means that we are as
much deterred hy the Soviet missile threat as they must be by our much
greater threat. Such deterrence has nothing to do with the relative
size of the numbers of missiles possessed by two countries. It rests on
whether an unannounced first strike would leave surviving enough
missiles for a retaliatory strike capable of inflicting unacceptable
damage. This is now the situation on both sides, and the existence of
Polaris-type missiles makes it impossible to avoid this by striving for
greater numbers of missiles, for larger warheads able to obliterate
wide areas, or for greater accuracy that would increase the statistical
possibility of eliminating enemy missiles on first strike. Thus no one
will wish to make such a strike. Possibly for this reason, about a year
after the Cuban missile crisis, the Soviet Union ceased to work on new
missile bases and accepted its permanent inferiority to the United
States. But the mutual veto on the use of missiles, the nuclear
stalemate, remained.
This
stalemate between the two
Superpowers on the use of nuclear weapons also extended to their use of
lesser, non-nuclear, weapons, so that the nuclear stalemate became a
Superpower stalemate. This meant that much of the power of the Soviet
Union and the United States, and not merely their nuclear po\ver, was
neutralized to a considerable degree, since each feared to use its
non-nuclear powers for fear they might escalate into nuclear conflict.
This meant that the use of nuclear tactical weapons and the use even of
conventional tactical weapons were inhibited to an undetermined degree
by the presence of nuclear strategic weapons no one wanted to see used.
The costs of using nuclear tactical weapons are so great that it is
very doubtful if they are worth the cost. For example, the Western
Powers lack the conventional forces to stop any intrusion of the great
masses of Soviet ground forces if these began to drive westward in an
attempt to conquer Germany. The West is committed to oppose such an
effort. Since it is very doubtful that the NATO forces could oppose
this successfully by using only conventional weapons, there would be
great pressure to use the nuclear tactical weapons that NATO forces in
Europe possess. It has been estimated that the chief targets of such
nuclear tactical weapons would be bridges and similar narrow passages,
in an effort to close these to Soviet advances. But it seems clear that
if these passages were closed and the bridges destroyed, the advance of
the Soviet armies (in armored and mechanized divisions) would be held
up only a few weeks at most, and up to so million Germans would be
killed from the blast and side effects of the use of nuclear weapons.
At such a cost, the Germans would probably prefer not to be defended.
In
fact, it appears
increasingly likely that fewer and fewer advanced people will regard
large-scale war as an effective method of getting anything. What could
a people obtain through war that they could not obtain with greater
certainty and less effort in some other way? Indeed, the very idea of
winning a general war is now almost unimaginable. We do not even know
what we mean by “win.” Whatever Germany, Japan, and Italy
sought from World War II, they would surely not have obtained by
winning; yet they obtained the most significant parts of it by losing.
Glory, power, and wealth may all be obtained with less effort and
greater certainty by non-warlike methods. As science and technology
advance, making war more horrible, they also make it possible to
achieve any aims at which war might be directed by other, nonviolent,
methods.
The
relationships between
political organizations (to us, states) are chiefly political
relations, based on power and concerned with influencing the policies
of other such entities. We have tended to see such relationships in
dichotomies, especially the sharp contrast between violent and
nonviolent methods of war and peace. In fact, however, methods of
influencing policy form a spectrum without any significant real
discontinuities, and range from all-out nuclear warfare at the upper
end, down through tactical nuclear weapons and conventional weapons,
then through various levels of nonviolent political, social, and
economic pressures, to levels of peaceful persuasion and reciprocal
favors, to economic grants and even gifts.
When
Khrushchev renounced the
use of both nuclear war and conventional violence, and promised to
defeat the West by peaceful competition, he was dividing the spectrum
into three levels, but in fact it is a continuous spectrum with
100-megaton bombs at the upper end and Olympic Games, International
Geophysical Years, and foreign economic aid at the other end. When
Khrushchev made his statement, he was convinced that the Soviet Union
could outperform the United States on the level of peaceful competition
because it could, in his opinion, overcome the American lead in the
race for economic development and that, as a result, the Socialist way
of life would become the model for emulation by the uncommitted
nations. The failures of Socialist agricultural production in Russia,
Cuba, China, and elsewhere, and the great triumphs of ... Socialist ...
[and mixed] economies in Japan, Europe, and the United States, soon
revealed, even to Khrushchev's supporters, that the Soviet chances of
triumphing over the West by peaceful competition were very small.
Conceivably this might force the Kremlin to raise its anti-American
activities to a higher level of conflict, even to the level of
violence, although probably through surrogates and satellites and in
third-party areas (such as southeast Asia, Africa, or Latin America).
To
prevent such a raising of
the level of Soviet-American conflict, it might be worth while for the
West to consider the possibility of yielding the Kremlin some victories
on the lower, nonviolent, levels, especially if this could be achieved
at little cost to us. It might also be worth while for us to consider
what must be Russia's real goals. Obviously preservation of the
Communist regime must have a higher level of desirability to Moscow
than Castro's success in Cuba or the Kremlin's control of Budapest.
Thus to the Politburo, now as earlier under Stalin, continued control
in the Kremlin has a higher priority than world revolution. The West
can help Russia's rulers get what they really want (their own domestic
power), and at small cost, in return for what they can want only
secondarily (the expansion of Communism). Thus, like Stalin, they can
be forced back to "Socialism in one country." With rising domestic
demand for higher standards of living in Russia, and growing evidence
that these are more likely to be obtained under a non-Socialist or
mixed economy, they could be forced back to "non-Socialism in one
country," if this strengthened their own control in the Kremlin, as it
well might do.
[This
is a call for
appeasement and support for a system of tyranny that has oppressed,
enslaved and murdered over 180 million people in the 20th
century. The communist system should be eliminated from the earth, not
built up as the professor is seeking in the above strategy. The
American people and freedom-loving people everywhere should vigorously
oppose such policy.]
In
fact, some such process is
already under way. The Soviet Union has always been more conservative
and less extremist in international matters than it appeared or
sounded. Much of Khrushchev's truculence, even abroad, was for domestic
rather than for foreign consumption. A recent study of 29 crisis
situations in foreign affairs involving the Soviet Union in the
1945-1963 period shows that they were aggressive in only four, were
cautious in eleven, and were more cautious than aggressive in fourteen.
The four aggressive ones were concerned with Berlin, Hungary, the U-2
incident, and Cuba. The study showed that only 8 of the 29 crises were
initiated by the Soviet Union, while 11 were initiated by the United
States. The general conclusion of the study was that Soviet policy
would grow increasingly conservative, since they were primarily
concerned with state building and retaining what they have already
achieved.
The
chief uncertainty of
continuing this process arises from the problem of political succession
in the Kremlin, a major unpredictable factor. Here the chances are two
out of three that the trend would continue in Soviet policy, since the
one case of a successor who would reverse the more conservative policy
is outbalanced by the two cases of a successor who would retain it or
of a disputed succession that would make an active Soviet foreign
policy difficult. The fact remains that there are in the Soviet Union
no institutional safeguards for any policy, just as there are none for
the succession. But it is clear that pressures to continue a more
moderate foreign policy will be strong, under any successor, now that
the Russians are increasingly convinced that their present achievements
are worth keeping, as the pressures for domestic improvements continue,
and as their future hopes and expectations along these lines become
more clearly envisaged.
In
this way the Superpower
neutralization (and the included nuclear stalemate) will continue into
the future. From this flow three consequences:
1.
Movement of Soviet-Western
rivalry down to lower, less violent, levels of conflict and competition.
2.
Continued disintegration of
the two Super-blocs, from the inability of the chief Power in each to
bring force against its allies because of the need to accept growing
diversity within each bloc in order to retain as much as possible the
appearance of unity within the bloc. This process is well illustrated
by Moscow's difficulties with China, Albania, and now Romania, or by
Washington's troubles with De Gaulle or with its Latin American allies.
3.
A growing independence of
the neutrals and uncommitted nations because of their ability to act
freely in the troubled waters stirred up by the Soviet-American
confrontation.
These
changes, rooted in
weapon developments and technological changes, have less obvious
political implications. Policy and politics are concerned with methods
of influencing the behavior of others to obtain cooperation, consent
or, at least, acquiescence. In our Western world, power has been based
to a significant extent on force (that is, weapons), and to a lesser
degree on economic rewards and ideological appeal. In other cultures,
such as in Africa, politics has been based to a considerable extent on
other considerations, such as kinship, social reciprocity, and
religion. Changes in weapons within the Western states system have
brought about changes in political patterns and organization that
threaten to cause profound changes in political life and probably in
the Western states system.
For
many centuries, from the
ninth century to the twentieth, the increasing offensive power of
Western weapons systems has made it possible to compel obedience over
wider and wider areas and over larger numbers of peoples. Accordingly,
political organizations (such as the state) have been able to rule over
larger areas, and thus have become larger in size and fewer in numbers
in our Western world. In this way, the political development of Europe
over the last millennium has seen thousands of feudal areas coalesce
into hundreds of principalities, and these into scores of dynastic
monarchies, and, finally, into a dozen or more national states. The
national state, its size measured in hundreds of miles, was based, to a
considerable extent, on the fact that the weapons system of the
nineteenth century, founded on citizen soldiers with handguns and moved
(or supplied) by railroads and wagons, could apply force over hundreds
of miles. This, in many cases, proved to be approximately the same size
as the European linguistic and cultural groupings of peoples; and,
accordingly, it became easy to base the popular appeal for allegiance
to the state structure upon nationalism (that is, upon this common
language and cultural tradition). Languages and cultures covering
lesser areas than those that could be ruled over by the existing
nineteenth-century system of weapons and transport, such as the Welsh,
the Bretons, the Provençals, the Basques, Catalonians,
Sicilians, Ukrainians, and others, by failing to become centers for one
of these dominant weapons-organized structures, went into political
eclipse.
As
the technology of weapons,
transportation, communications, and propaganda continued to develop, it
became possible to compel obedience over areas measured in thousands
(rather than hundreds) of miles and thus over distances greater than
those occupied by existing linguistic and cultural groups. It thus
became necessary to appeal for allegiance to the state on grounds wider
than nationalism. This gave rise, in the 1930's and 1940's, to the idea
of continental blocs and the ideological state (replacing the national
state). Embraced hy Hitler and the Japanese, and (much less
consciously) by the United States and Britain, this growing pattern of
political organization and appeal to allegiance was smashed in World
War II. But during that war technological developments increased the
area over which obedience could be compelled and consent obtained. By
1950, Dulles and others talked of a two-Power world, as if consent
could be obtained by only two Powers, and as if each were hemispherical
in scope. They were not. For, while the area of power organizations had
expanded, they had not become hemispherical, and new counterbalancing
factors had appeared that threatened to reverse the whole process.
Instead
of power in the 1950's
being concentrated in two centers, each hemispherical in scope and able
to compel obedience over distances of 10,000 miles, the Superpowers
could compel obedience over distances in the range of 6,000 to 8,000
miles, leaving a considerable zone between them. In addition the
neutralization of their real power in their Superpower confrontation
made this zone between more obvious, and weakened their ability to
obtain obedience to extreme demands even within 6,000 miles of their
power centers (which were situated, let us say, in Omaha and
Kuibyshev). In this power gap between the less than hemispherical
Superpowers appeared the neutrals of the Buffer Fringe.
But
there was more to the
situation than this geographical limitation. The nature of power was
also changing, although few noticed this. The role of force in politics
had been effective to the degree that it was able to influence the
minds and wills of men. But the new weapons, in seeking increased
range, had become weapons of mass destruction rather than instruments
of persuasion. If the victims of such weapons are killed, they can
neither obey nor consent. Thus the new weapons have become instruments,
not of political power, but of destruction of all power organizations.
This explains the growing reluctance by all concerned to use them.
Furthermore their range and areas of impact make them most ineffective
against individual men and especially against the minds of individual
men. And, finally, in an ideological state it is the minds of men that
must be the principal targets. Any organization is coordinated both by
patterned relationships and by ideology and morale. If the former
become increasingly threatened by weapons of destruction, the
organization can survive by becoming decentralized, with less emphasis
on organizational relationships and more emphasis on morale and
outlook. They thus become increasingly amorphous and invulnerable to
modern weapons of destruction. The peoples of Africa are, for this
reason among others, not susceptible to compulsion by megaton bombs.
And Western peoples or Soviet peoples can become less susceptible by
becoming Africanized.
This
process has not gone very
far yet, but it is already observable, especially among the younger
generation of the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union. To the
young in all three of these areas there is a growing, if quiet,
skepticism of any general abstract appeal to allegiance and loyalty,
and a growing concern with concrete, interpersonal relationships with
local groups of friends and intimates.
There
is still another element
in this complex picture. This is also related to weapons. The past
history of weapons over thousands of years shows that the reason
political units have grown larger in certain periods has been because
of the increased power of the offensive in the dominant weapons
systems, and that periods in which defensive weapons became dominant
have been those in which political units remained small in area or even
became smaller. The growing power of castles in the period about 1100
B.C. or about A.D. 900 made political power so decentralized and made
power units so small that all power became private power, and the state
disappeared as a common form of political organization. Thus arose the
so-called "Dark Ages" about 1000 B.C. or A.D. 1000.
We
do not expect any such
extreme growth of defensive power in the future, but any increase in
defensive weapon power would stop the growth in size of power areas and
would, in time, reverse this tendency. There would be thus a
proliferation in numbers and a decrease in size of such power units, a
tendency already evident, in the past twenty years, in the great
increase in the number of United Nations member states. No drastic
increase in the defensive power of existing weapons can yet be
demonstrated in any conclusive way, but the rising ability of guerrilla
forces to maintain their functional autonomy shows definite limits on
the offensive power of contemporary weapons. Any drastic increase in
the ability of guerrilla forces to function would indicate such an
increase in tile defensive power of existing weapons, and this, in
turn, would indicate an ability to resist centralized authorities and
thus an ability to maintain and defend small-group freedoms.
Such
a rise in the strength of
defensive weapons, with a consequent decentralization of political
power, would require a number of other changes, such as a
decentralization of economic production. This probably seems very
unlikely to us who live in the frantic economic expansion of the
electronic revolution and the space race, but it is at least
conceivable. Such a change would require a plentiful, dispersed source
of industrial energy and the use of plentiful and widely scattered
materials for industrial fabrication. These do not seem to be
completely unlikely possibilities. For example, a shift from our
present use of fossil fuels as a chief energy source to the use of the
sun's energy directly in many small local energy accumulators might
provide a plentiful supply of decentralized energy. More remote might
be use of the tides, or of differential ocean temperatures, or even of
the winds. Possibly some development in the use of nuclear energy, or,
above all, some method for cheap separation of the oxygen and hydrogen
in ordinary water that could release energy, perhaps through fuel
cells, as they recombine.
Such
a decentralized energy
source, if developed, could be used to build up a decentralized
industrial system using cellulose or silicon as raw materials to
produce an economy of plastics and glass products (including fiber
glass). These two raw materials found in vegetation and sand are among
the most common substances in the world. On such a basis, with the
proper development of guerrilla weapon tactics, the costs of enforcing
centralized orders in local areas might rise so high that a
considerable process of political decentralization and local autonomies
(including local liberties) could arise, thus reversing the process of
political centralization that has continued in the Western tradition
for about a thousand years..
In
this process, a significant
role might be played by the appearance of a major, non-nuclear,
deterrence. This already exists, but is not publicly discussed because
it presents such a threat to the existing world political structure. It
rests in the existence of biological and chemical weapons (BCW) that
can be just as devastating as nuclear weapons and do not require a rich
or elaborate industrial system for their manufacture or use. Thus they
might be more readily available or usable hy the less advanced
industrial nations, but are not being researched by such nations to any
considerable degree because they might also be more effective as
weapons against such backward nations. At the same time, the more
advanced nations also hesitate to publicize the existence of such
weapons because there is no assurance that they might not, while being
readily available to backward nations, still be relatively effective
against advanced nations.
Much
of the significance of
this relationship can be seen in regard to Red China. This ... enemy
has already exploded some kind of a nuclear device and will have a
nuclear weapon in the next few years, but this offers little potential
danger to us since they will have no effective long-range delivery
vehicle. On the other hand, their threat with this against our allies,
such as Japan or the Philippines, or their ability even now with their
mass armies to threaten our interests in India, Southeast Asia, or
Korea, is potentially high. Against such a threat, our nuclear missiles
are relatively weak, because China is too dispersed and decentralized
to offer vital targets. On the other hand, China's vulnerability to the
threat of biological warfare is very large. This explains their
hysterical attacks on American "germ warfare" during the Korean War.
The word puts them into a panic, and rightly so, since they are
critically vulnerable to such weapons used by us. The virus for wheat
rust and rice blast, in varieties especially virulent on Chinese-type
plants, can be produced in large amounts relatively easily at costs
well below $40 a pound. Spread on the fields at the proper time in the
annual growing cycle, these would destroy up to 75 percent of these
crops. And there is no effective defense. In consequence the Chinese
food intake would be cut from about 2,200 calories per person a day,
not much above the subsistence level, to about 1,300 calories a day. If
the Chinese permitted this, they would have few people strong enough to
work at the defense effort, either in the combat areas or in industrial
plants. If they tried to keep the food intake of more indispensable
defenders up by strict rationing, leaving nothing for many children,
old people, and women, they would suffer about 50 million deaths from
malnutrition within a year. The armed forces, still largely of peasant
origin, would not allow a rationing system that doomed their families
in the villages, and would turn against the regime, especially if an
American offer to feed the Chinese on American surplus food after a
Chinese surrender were broadcast to the Chinese people.
The
danger of such weapons
becoming common, or even becoming commonly known, among the people of
the world, including the less developed nations, is very great, opening
an opportunity to all kinds of political blackmail or even to merely
irresponsible threats. The parallel danger from new weapons of chemical
warfare are even more horrifying. One of the nerve gases now currently
available in the United States is so potent that a small drop of it on
an individual's unbroken skin can cause death in a few seconds.
Moreover, many of these BCW weapons are cheap to make, and easier to
make than to control. Most can be made in any well-equipped kitchen or
ordinary laboratory, witl1 the chief restriction arising from the
difficult safety precautions. But if the latter could be handled, and
if delivery systems (which in some cases need be no more than men
walking by fields or urban reservoirs) could be obtained, the deterrent
effect of BCW weapons might be much greater than that of nuclear
weapons now is, and would be much less predictable and foreseeable,
since they would not be restricted, as the nuclear threat is, to
heavily industrialized nations. This might well contribute toward the
decentralization of power already mentioned..
Another
significant element in
this complex picture is the convergence toward parallel paths of the
United States and the Soviet Union. This is, of course, something that
rabid partisans of either side will refuse to recognize. It arises from
three directions: (1) there is an absolute convergence of interests
between the two states, as will be indicated in a moment; (2) the
structures of the two countries are, to some extent, changing in
similar ways; and (3) as the only Superpowers able to inflict or
receive instant annihilation, these two countries, to some extent,
stand apart from other states and in a class together. The last point
is almost obvious, since it must be clear that only these two are
prepared to engage in a race to the moon or have an almost insatiable
demand for mathematicians or space scientists, or are looked to by
impoverished neutrals as obligated to provide economic assistance to
the latters' ambitions.
The
converging of interests of
the two Superpowers arises largely from the other two factors. These
common interests include a wide variety of items, such as restricting
the proliferation of nuclear weapons to additional states, establishing
restrictions on the economic demands of neutral nations, especially by
refusing to allow one Superpower to be bid against the other; the
ending of nuclear testing, the slowing up of the space race, the
approaching domination of the United Nations by the growing majority of
small and backward countries, the increasing aggressiveness of Red
China, the unification of Germany, the acceleration of the population
explosion in backward areas, and many others.
Along
with this convergence of
interests is the growing parallelism of structure: (1) In spite of the
great difference in the theories and the appearances of political life
in the two countries, each is increasingly reaching its most
fundamental decisions, not through party politics or hy decision in a
political assembly, but hy the shifting pressures of great lobbying
blocs acting upon each other by largely hidden contacts carried on
behind the scenes. (2) These pressures are chiefly concerned with the
allotment of economic resources, through fiscal and budgetary
mechanisms, among three competing sectors of the economy concerned with
consumption, governmental expenditures (chiefly defense), and capital
investment. (3)Socially, troth societies are undergoing a similar
circulation of elites in which education is the chief doorway to social
advancement and is crowded with applicants from the lower (but not
lowest) stratum of society (equivalent to the petty bourgeoisie or
lower middle classes) but is receiving relatively fewer successful
applicants from the upper (but not uppermost) group whose parents are
already established in the prevalent structure. (4) In both countries
trained experts and technicians, as a consequence of this educational
process, are replacing political figures or other social groups,
especially political specialists. In both, the military leaders,
although qualified for supreme influence by their possession of power,
are held at secondary levels by personal manipulations. (5) In both
countries there is a growing intellectual skepticism toward authority,
accepted ideologies, and established slogans, replaced by a rising
emphasis upon the need for satisfactory small-group, interpersonal
relations.
As
a result of all the complex
interrelationships of weapons and politics that we have mentioned up to
this point, it seems very likely that the international relations of
the future will shift from the world we have known, in which war was
epidemic and total, to one in which conflict is endemic and controlled.
The ending of total warfare means the ending of war for unlimited aims
(unconditional surrender, total victory, destruction of the opponent's
regime and social system), fought with weapons of total destruction and
a total mobilization of resources, including men, to a condition of
constant, flexible, controlled conflict with limited, specific, and
shifting aims, sought by limited application of diverse pressures
applied against any other state whose behavior we wish to influence.
Such
controlled conflict would involve a number of changes in our attitudes
and behavior:
1.
No declarations of war and
no breaking off of diplomatic relations with the adversary, but,
instead, continuous communication with him, whatever level of intensity
the conflict may reach.
2.
Acceptance of the idea that
conflict with an adversary in respect to some areas, activities, units,
or weapons does not necessarily involve conflict with him in other
areas, activities, units, or weapons.
3.
Military considerations,
and the use of force generally, will always be subordinate to political
considerations, and will operate as part of policy in the whole policy
context.
4.
Armed forces must be fully
professionalized, trained and psychologically prepared to do any task
to the degree and level they are ordered by the established political
authorities, without desire or independent effort to carry combat to a
level of intensity not in keeping with existing policy and political
considerations.
5.
There must be full ability
at all times to escalate or to de-escalate the level of warfare as
seems necessary in terms of the policy context, and to signal the
decision to do either to the adversary as a guide to his responses.
6.
Ability to de-escalate to
the level of termination of violence and warfare must be possible, both
in psychological and procedural terms, even with continuance of
conflict on lower, non-force, levels such as economic or ideological
conflict.
7.
There must exist a full
panoply of weapons and of economic, political, social, and intellectual
pressures that can be used in conflict with any diverse states to
secure the specific and limited goals that would become the real aims
of international policy in a period of controlled conflict.
8.
Among the methods we must
be prepared to use in such a period must be diplomatic or tacit
agreement with any other state, including the Soviet Union or Red
China, to seek parallel or joint aims in the world. This will be
possible if all aims are limited to specific goals, which each state
will recognize are not fatal to his general position and regime, and by
which one specific aim can be traded against another, even tacitly.
This will become possible for the double reason that
professionalization of the fighting forces and the growing
productiveness of the Superpower economies will not require either the
total psychological mobilization or the almost total economic
mobilization necessary in World War II.
9.
All this means a blurring
of the distinction between war and peace, with the situation at all
times one of closely controlled conflict. In this way endemic conflict
is accepted in order to avoid, if possible, epidemic total war. The
change will become possible because the ultimate policy of all states
will become the preservation of their way of life and existing regime,
with the largest possible freedom of action. These aims can be retained
under controlled conflict but will be lost by all concerned in total
war.
In
spite of this shift in the
whole pattern of international power relations, the Soviet Union will
remain for a long time the chief adversary of the United States, a
situation for which there is no real solution until a new, and
independent, Superpower rises on the land mass of Eurasia, preferably
in a unified Western Europe. The fundamental differences between the
United States and the Soviet Union will remain for a long time. They
are critical, and include the following: (1) a basic difference in
outlook in which the outlook of the West is based on diversity,
relativism, pluralism, and social consensus, while the Russian outlook
is based on a narrow range of competing opinions and little diversity
of knowledge, and is monolithic, intolerant, rigid, unified, absolute,
and authoritarian; (2) the difference in stages of economic
development, in which they are looking forward, with eager
anticipation, to an affluent future, while we have already experienced
an affluent society and are increasingly disillusioned with it; (3) the
fact that the American economy is unique, because it is the only
economy that no longer operates in terms of scarce resources. It may be
inside a framework of scarce resources, but this framework is so much
wider than the other limiting features of the system (notably its
fiscal and financial arrangements) that the system itself does not
operate within any limits established by that wider framework.
The
third distinction may be
seen in the fact that, in other economies, when additional demands are
presented to the economy, less resources are available for alternative
uses. But in the American system, as it now stands, additional new
demands usually lead to increased resources becoming available for
alternative purposes, notable consumption. Thus, if the Soviet Union
embraced a substantial increase in space activity, the resources
available for raising Russian levels of consumption would be reduced,
while in America, any increases in the space budget makes levels of
consumption also rise. It does this, in the latter case, because
increased space expenditures provide purchasing power for consumption
that makes available previously unused resources out of the unused
American productive capacity.
This
unused productive
capacity exists in the American economy because the structure of our
economic system is such that it channels flows of funds into the
production of additional capacity (investment) without any conscious
planning process or any real desire by anyone to increase our
productive capacity. It does this because certain institutions in our
system (such as insurance, retirement funds, social security payments,
undistributed corporate profits, and such) and certain individuals who
personally profit by the flow of funds not theirs into investment
continue to operate to increase investment even when they have no real
desire to increase productive capacity (and, indeed, many decry it). In
the Soviet Union, on the contrary, resources are allotted to the
increase of productive capacity by a conscious planning process and at
the cost of reducing the resources available in their system for
consumption or for the government (largely defense).
Thus
the meaning of the word
"costs" and the limitations on ability to mobilize economic resources
are entirely different in our system from the Soviet system and most
others. In the Soviet economy "costs" are real costs, measurable in
terms of the allotment of scarce resources that could have been used
otherwise. In the American system "costs" are fiscal or financial
limitations that have little connection with the use of scarce
resources or even with the use of available (and therefore not scarce)
resources. The reason for this is that in the American economy, the
fiscal or financial limit is lower than the limit established by real
resources and, therefore, since the financial limits act as the
restraint on our economic activities, we do not get to the point where
our activities encounter the restraints imposed by the limits of real
resources (except rarely and briefly in terms of technically trained
manpower, which is our most limited resource).
These
differences between the
Soviet and the American economies are: (1) the latter has built-in,
involuntary, institutionalized investment, which the former lacks, and
(2) the latter has fiscal restraints at a much lower level of economic
activity, which the Soviet system also lacks. Thus greater activity in
defense in the USSR entails real costs since it puts pressure on the
ceiling established by limited real resources, while greater activity
in the American defense or space effort releases money into the system,
which presses upward on the artificial financial ceiling, pressing it
upward closer to the higher, and remote, ceiling established by the
real resources limit of the American economy. This makes available the
unused productive capacity that exists in our system between the
financial ceiling and the real resources ceiling; it not only makes
these unused resources available for the governmental sector of the
economy from which the expenditure was directly made but also makes
available portions of these released resources for consumption and
additional capital investment. For this reason, government expenditures
in the United States for things like defense or space may entail no
real costs at all in terms of the economy as a w-hole. In fact, if the
volume of unused capacity brought into use by expenditure for these
things (that is, defense, and so on) is greater than the resources
necessary to satisfy the need for which the expenditure was made, the
volume of unused resources made available for consumption or investment
will be greater than the volume of resources used in the governmental
expenditure, and this additional government effort will cost nothing at
all in real terms, but will entail negative real costs. (Our wealth
will be increased by making the effort.)
The
basis for this strange,
and virtually unique, situation is to be found in the large amount of
unused productive capacity in the United States, even in our most
productive years. In the second quarter of 1962, our productive system
was running at a very high level of prosperity, yet it was functioning
about 12 percent below capacity, which represented a loss of $73
billion annually. In this way, in the whole period from the beginning
of 1953 to the middle of 1962, our productive system operated at $387
billion below capacity. Thus, if the system had operated near capacity,
our defense effort over the nine years would have cost us almost
nothing, in terms of loss of goods or capacity.
This
unique character in the
American economy rests on the fact that the utilization of resources
follows flow lines in the economy that are not everywhere reflected by
corresponding flow lines of claims on wealth (that is, money). In
general, in our economy the lines of flow of claims on wealth are such
that they provide a very large volume of savings and a rather large
volume of investment, even when no one really wants new productive
capacity; they also provide an inadequate flow of consumer purchasing
power, in terms of the flows, or potential flows, of consumers' goods;
but they provide very limited, sharply scrutinized, and often
misdirected flows of funds for the use of resources to fulfill the
needs of the governmental sector of our tri-sectored economy. As a
result, we have our economy of distorted resource-utilization patterns,
with overinvestment in many areas, overstuffed consumers in one place
and impoverished consumers in another place, a drastic under-supply of
social services, and widespread social needs for which public funds are
lacking. In the Soviet Union, money flows follow fairly well the flows
of real goods and resources, but, as a result, pressures are directly
on resources. These pressures mean that saving and investment conflict
directly with consumption and government services (including defense),
putting the government under severe direct strains, as the demands for
higher standards of living cannot be satisfied except by curtailing
investment, defense, space, or other government expenditures.
Many
countries of the world,
especially the backward ones, are worse off than the Soviet Union,
because their efforts to increase consumers' goods may well require
investment based on savings that must be accumulated at the expense of
consumption. In many areas, as we have seen in Asia, the Mediterranean,
and Latin America, savings are accumulated by structural monetary
flows, but there are no institutional flows toward investment, little
incentive or motivation for investment, and the economy lags in all
three sectors.
As
a chief consequence of
these conditions, the contrast between the "have" nations and the
"have-not" nations will become even wider. This would be of little
great importance to the rest of the world w-ere it not that the peoples
of the backward areas, riding the "crisis of rising expectations," are
increasingly unwilling to be ground down in poverty as their
predecessors were. At the same time, the Superpower stalemate increases
the abilities of these nations to be neutral, to exercise influence out
of all relationship to their actual powers, and to act, sometimes, in
an irresponsible fashion. These areas will be the chief sources of real
trouble in the future, for clashes between the United States and the
Soviet Union (or even Red China) are unlikely to arise from direct
conflicts of interests, but may well arise from conflicts over neutrals.
These
neutrals and other
peoples of backward areas have acute problems. Solutions of these
problems do exist, but the underdeveloped nations are unlikely to find
them. As we have indicated elsewhere, their ,chief problems are three :
(1) ... limited food supplies; (2) problems of political stability,
especially the relationship between political aims and quite diverse
weapons-control patterns; and ( 3 ) the problem of obtaining
constructive rather than destructive patterns of outlook. The United
States ... [has an ] ... interest in seeing that these problems find
solutions. In general, these underdeveloped nations cannot follow
American patterns, and are attracted to the Soviet system despite its
heavy costs in loss of personal freedoms. We do not have either the
knowledge or influence that would make it possible for us to direct
their steps along more desirable routes such as that followed by Japan.
One
development in political
life during the next generation or so that will be difficult to
document is concerned with the very nature of the modern sovereign
state. Like so much of our cultural heritage from the seventeenth
century, such as international law and puritanism, this may now be in
the process of a change so profound as to modify its very nature. As
understood in western Europe over the last three centuries, the state
was the organization of sovereign power on a territorial basis.
"Sovereign" meant that the state (or ruler) had supreme legal authority
to do just about anything regarded as public, and this authority
impinged directly on the subject (or citizen) without any
intermediaries or buffer corporations, and did this in a dualistic
power antithesis typical of the Greek two-valued logic that was applied
to almost everything in the seventeenth century. As part of this
sovereign system, it was assumed that rights of property and of
permanent association were not natural or eternal, but flowed from
grants of sovereign power. Thus property in land required the state's
recognition in the form of a document or deed, and no corporation could
exist except at the charter of the sovereign or with his tacit consent.
Moreover, all citizens on the territory were subject to the same
sovereign power. The latter consisted, as it still largely does in our
tradition, of a mixture of force (military), economic rewards, and
ideological uniformity. This view of public authority is by no means
universal in the world, and shows strong indications that it may be
changing in the West. Corporations exist and have the earliest mark of
divinity (immortality), and have become, as they were in the
nonsovereign Middle Ages, refuges where individuals may function
shielded from the reach of the sovereign state. The once almost
universal equivalence between residence and citizenship may be
weakening. If the ideological state continues to develop its likely
characteristics, persons of different ideologies and thus of different
allegiances may become intermingled on the same territory. The number
of refugees and resident aliens is now increasing in most countries.
Moreover,
the incorporation of
such a wide variety of peoples with such diverse traditions into the
United Nations is also contributing to this process. We have seen that
traditional China did not exercise power on the vast majority of its
subjects (the peasants) in terms of force, rewards, or even ideology,
but did so by social pressures through the intermediary of the family
and the gentry. Similarly in Africa, power has been quite different in
its character than it was in the traditional European state, and was
based rather on kinship, social reciprocity, and religion. When African
natives met to settle political disputes in battle, this was not, as in
Europe, a clash of military force to settle the issue; rather it was an
opportunity for spiritual entities to indicate their decisions in the
case. As soon as a few casualties appeared on one side, this was taken
as an indication that the spirits concerned had made a decision adverse
to that side, and, accordingly, the victims' associates broke and ran,
leaving the field to the other side. Like the medieval judicial trial
hy battle or by ordeal, this was not an effort to settle a dispute by
force, but the attempt to give a spiritual entity an opportunity to
reveal its decision.
It
may seem farfetched to
expect our state to succumb to the introduction of religious, magical,
or spiritual influences such as this, but there can be little doubt
that social pressures such as used to exercise influence in China will
become more influential in our power structures in the future.
It
seems likely also that
there will be a certain revival of the use of intermediaries in
removing or weakening the impact of sovereign power on ordinary
individuals. This implies a growth of federalism in the structure of
political power. On the whole, the history of federalism has not been a
happy one. Even in the United States, the most significant example of a
successful federalist structure in modern history, the federalist
principle has yielded ground to unitary government for 150 years or so.
Moreover, in our own time a number of efforts, chiefly British, to set
up federal unions have failed. Thus the Central African Federation of
the Rhodesias and Nyasaland broke up after a few years, and the West
Indies Federation was even less viable. Recently the Malaysian
Federation of the Malay States, Singapore, North Borneo, and Sarawak
has been threatened with destruction by Indonesia, itself once a
federal system that has now largely yielded to unitary developments.
Nevertheless,
the federal
principle seems likely to grow as a method by which certain functions
of government are allotted to one structure while other functions go to
a narrower or wider structure. This tendency seems likely to arise from
a number of influences of which the chief might be: (1) the inability
of many of the new, small states to carry on all the functions of
government independently and alone, and their consequent efforts to
carry out some of them cooperatively; (2) the tendency for these new
states to look to the United Nations to perform some of the most
significant functions of government, such as defense of frontiers or
maintaining public order; for example, Tanganyika recently disbanded
its armed forces and entrusted its defense and public order to a
Nigerian force under United Nations control; (3) the need for economic
cooperation over wider areas than the boundaries of most states in
order to obtain the necessary diversity of resources within a single
economic system, a need that will continue to encourage the
establishment of customs unions and economic blocs, of which the
European Common Market is the outstanding example; similar unions are
projected for Central America and other areas.
The
most interesting example
of this process may be seen in the slow growth of some kind of
multilevel federal structure covering much of tropical Africa. This
arose from the disintegration of the French colonial system in Black
Africa in 1956-1960 and was known as the Brazzaville Twelve at first
(from December in 1960), but is now much expanded to include non-French
areas under the name Union of African and Malagasy States. This Union
shows a tendency to become one of the middle layers in a multilevel
political hierarchy. In this hierarchy, the top level is held by the
United Nations and its associated functional bodies, such as the World
Health Organization, UNESCO, the Food and Agricultural Organization,
the ILO, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the
International Court of Justice, and others. On the second level are
various organizations that have Pan-European or Third Bloc overtones
such as the European Common Market or its now stalemated political
counterpart, along with Euratom, the European Coal and Iron Community,
and some others. The De Gaulle veto on the continued development of
these has suspended their growth and also any tendency for them to
coalesce with a number of older French Community organizations.
On
the third, fourth, and
fifth levels is a rather confused mass of organizations of which the
third consists of those which are Pan-African in scope, the fourth are
those allied with the UAMS, and the fifth are the relatively viable
Brazzaville Twelve projects. On the third level are such organizations
as the Economic Commission for Africa South of the Sahara, the
Technical Cooperation Commission for Africa, the Scientific Council for
Africa, two African commissions of the World Conference of
Organizations of the Teaching Professions, the African Trade Union
Confederation (set up at Dakar in 1962), and a number of others. On the
fifth level are a whole series of organizations associated with the
Brazzaville Twelve, its semiannual "summit conferences" of heads of
state, its Secretary General and Secretariat, its Defense Union, its
Organization for Economic Cooperation, and others. On the fourth level
are similar organizations, including an Assembly of Heads of States, a
Council of Members, and a Secretariat-General set up for the UAMS at
Lagos in January 1962. Possibly these third, fourth, and fifth levels
will coalesce and eliminate some reduplication as memberships become
firmer.
On
the sixth level are a
number of local unions of states, such as those for local river
controls, customs unions, and such. And on the seventh level are the
individual states which in theory (like the states of the United
States) will continue to hold full sovereignty. But when two-third
votes on higher levels can make binding decisions on member states, or
when states intend to vote as a bloc in the United Nations, or when
states have reduced their military and police forces so that they are
dependent on forces from higher levels to defend their territories or
to maintain order, or when states fool; to higher levels for funds for
investment or to restore their annual foreign-exchange imbalances, the
realities of sovereign power become dispersed and some areas
of the
world begin to look more like the Germanies of the late medieval period
than like the nationalist sovereign states of the nineteenth century.
How far this process will go we cannot foretell, but the possibility of
such developments should not be excluded by us just because they have
not been experienced by us in recent generations.
This
is more than enough on
the power patterns in our near future. we must now turn to a much
briefer discussion of the patterns of economic and social life. There
we see a most extraordinary contrast. While the economic life of
Western society has been increasingly successful in satisfying our
material needs, the social aspect has become increasingly frustrating.
There was a time, not long ago, when the chief aims of most Western men
was for greater material goods and for rising standards of living. This
was achieved at great social costs, by the attrition or even
destruction of much of social life, including the sense of community
fellowship, leisure, and social amenities. Looking backward, we are
fully aware of these costs in the original factory towns and urban
slums, but looking about us today we are often not aware of the great,
often intangible, costs of middle-class living in suburbia or in the
dormitory environs that surround European cities: the destruction of
social companionship and solidarity, the narrowing influence of
exposure to persons from a restricted age group or from a narrow
segment of social class, the horrors of commuting, the incessant need
for constant driving about to satisfy the ordinary needs of the family
for groceries, medical care, entertainment, religion, or social
experience, the prohibitive cost and inconvenience of upkeep and
repairs and, in general, the whole way of life of the suburban "rat
race," including the large-scale need for providing artificial
activities for children.
Rebellion
against this rat
race has already begun, not from the lower middle class who are just
entering it and still aspire to it, but from the established middle
class who have, as they say, "had it." On the whole, the efforts to
find a way out while still retaining a high standard of material living
have not been successful, and the real rebellion is coming, as we shall
see later, from their children. These have expanded the usual
adolescent revolt against parental dominance and authority into a
large-scale rejection of parental values. One form that this revolt has
taken has been to modify the meaning of the expression "high standard
of living" to include a whole series of desires and values that are not
material and thus were excluded from the nineteenth-century bourgeois
understanding of the expression "standard of living." Among these are
two we have already listed as disconcerting elements in the Africans'
understanding of standard of living: small group interpersonal
relationships and sex play. These changes, as we shall see, have come
to represent a challenge to the whole middle-class outlook.
The
social costs of the
contemporary economic system are staggering. On the whole, they have
been widely discussed and are generally recognized. As economic
enterprises have become larger and more tightly integrated into one
another, the freedom, individualism, and initiative traditionally
associated with the modern economy (in contrast with the medieval rural
economy) have ... [been] be sacrificed. The self-reliant individual has
gradually changed into the conformist "organization man." Routine has
displaced risk, and subordination to abstractions has replaced the
struggle with diverse concrete problems. The constantly narrowing range
of possibilities for self-expression has given rise to deep
frustrations with their concomitant growth of irrational compensating
customs, such as the obsession with speed; vicarious combativeness,
especially in sports; the use of alcohol, tobacco, narcotics, and sex
as stimulants, diversions, and sedatives; and the rapid appearance and
disappearance of fads in dress, social customs, and leisure activities.
Most
crucial have been the
demands of the modern industrial and business system, because of
advancing technology, for more highly trained manpower. Such training
requires a degree of ambition, self-discipline, and future-preference
that many persons lack or refuse to provide, with the result that a
growing lowest social class of the social outcasts (the Lumpenproletariat)
has reappeared. This group of rejects from our bourgeois industrial
society provide one of our most intractable future problems, because
they are gathered in urban slums, have political influence, and are
socially dangerous.
In
the United States, where
these people congregate in the largest cities and are often Negroes or
Latin Americans, they are regarded as a racial or economic problem, but
they are really an educational and social problem for which economic or
racial solutions would help little. This group is most numerous in the
more advanced industrial areas and now forms more than twenty percent
of the American population. Since they are a self-perpetuating group
and have many children, they are increasing in numbers faster than the
rest of the population. Their self-perpetuating characteristic as a
group is not based on biological differences but on sociological
factors, chiefly on the fact that disorganized, undisciplined,
present-preference parents living under chaotic economic and social
conditions are most unlikely to train their children in the organized,
disciplined, future-preference and orderly habits the modern economic
system requires in its workers, so that the children, like their
parents, grow up as unemployables. This is not a condition that can be
cured by providing more jobs, even if the jobs are in the proper areas,
because the jobs require characteristics these victims of anomie do not
possess and are unlikely to acquire.
All
this leads to one of the
most significant of current changes, the changes in attitudes and
outlooks. At this point we shall not discuss the middle-class outlook
and its challenges, which are the central aspect of this subject in the
United States, but shall restrict ourselves to an equally large
subject, the changes in the outlook of Western society as a whole,
especially in Europe.
The
intellectual and religious
aspects of any society, including all those things I call "pattern of
outlook," change at least as rapidly as the more material aspects of
the society, and are generally less noticed. Among these the most
significant, and the least noticed, are the categories into which any
society divides its experiences in order to think about them or to talk
about them and the values the society, often in unconscious consensus,
places upon these categories. In every society there are certain
groups, perhaps an intellectual elite, who think new thoughts, new at
least in comparison with what went just before. In time, some of these
thoughts spread and become familiar, until it may seem that everybody
is thinking them. Of course, everybody is not, because in every society
there are three other groups: the large group who do not think at all,
the substantial group who a;-e not aware of anything new and who retain
the same outlook for years and even generations and the small group who
are always opposed to the consensus simply because opposition has
become an end in itself.
In
spite of these
complexities, we can still look at the past and see a sequence of
prevalent outlooks, often with rather confused periods of transition in
between. Over the past two centuries, there have been five such stages:
the Enlightenment in 1730-l790, the Romantic Movement in 1790-1850, the
Age of Scientific Materialism in 1850-1895:, the Period of Irrational
Activism of 1895-1945, and our new Age of Inclusive Diversity since
1945.
These
changing patterns of
outlooks arise because men are complicated creatures trying to operate
in a complex universe. Both man and universe are dynamic, or changeable
in time, and the chief additional complexity is that both are changing
in a continuum of abstraction, as well as in the more familiar
continuum of space-time. The continuum of abstraction simply means that
the reality in which man and the universe function exists in five
dimensions; of these the dimension of abstraction covers a range from
the most concrete and material end of reality to, at the opposite
extreme, the most abstract and spiritual end of reality, with every
possible gradation between these two ends along the intervening
dimensions that determine reality, including the three dimensions of
space, the fourth of time, and this fifth dimension of abstraction.
This means that man is concrete and material at one end of his person,
is abstract and spiritual at the other end, and covers all the
gradations between, with a large central zone concerned with his chaos
of emotional experiences and feelings.
In
order to think about
himself or the universe with the more abstract and rational end of his
being, man has to categorize and to conceptualize both his own nature
and the nature of reality, while, in order to act and to feel on the
less abstract end of his being, he must function more directly, outside
the limits of categories, without the buffer of concepts. Thus man
might look at his own being as divided into three levels of body,
emotions, and reason. The body, functioning directly in
space-time-abstraction, is much concerned with concrete situations,
individual and unique events, at a specific time and place. The middle
levels of his being are concerned with himself and his reactions to
reality in terms of feelings and emotions as determined by endocrine
and neurological reactions. The upper levels of his being are concerned
with his neurological analysis and manipulation of conceptualized
abstractions. The three corresponding operations of his being are
sensual, emotional or intuitive, and rational. The sequence of
intellectual history is concerned with the sequence of styles or fads
that have been prevalent, one after another, as to what emphasis or
combinations of man's three levels of operations would be used in his
efforts to experience life and to cope with the universe.
In
the most general terms, we
might say that primitive man emphasized an empirical approach to these
problems with use of man's sensual equipment and chief emphasis on
specific concrete situations; archaic man (say from 5000 B.C. to about
500 B.C. in Eurasia) emphasized man's emotional and intuitive equipment
with emphasis on symbols, ritual, myth, and magical actions; Classical
man (say from 500 B.C. to A.D.500) emphasized man's rational equipment
and regarded man's concepts as the major portion of reality. But
Western man, since A.D. 500, has sought to find some combination of all
three parts of his equipment that will provide satisfactory explanation
and successful operation in terms both of man's nature and of the
universe. The combinations he has tried provide the changing sequence
of intellectual history..
The
Age of Enlightenment,
following on the successes of the Age of Newton (which had discovered a
rational and mechanical explanation of the material universe), tried to
apply the same techniques to man and society, and came up with a
static, mechanical, and rationalist conception of both. The inadequacy
of this view of man, already rejected by poets and literary figures in
the mid-eighteenth century, led to its general rejection as inadequate
because of the excesses of the French Revolution. The following
Romantic period, accordingly, adopted a much more irrational picture of
man, of society, and of the universe. As a consequence, emphasis
shifted from the earlier rational, mechanical, and static views to
irrational and dynamic views of man and society.
This
period of Romanticism
(about 1790-1850) was marked by poets of "storm and stress," the Gothic
revival, and a growing emphasis on history as the correct key to
understanding man and society. The period, associated with Hegel, Hugo,
and Heine, culminated in Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto
(1848), which found the key to man's social position in past struggles.
The
third generation of the
nineteenth century (1850-1895) was in an age of science and rationalism
whose typical figures were Darwin and Bismarck. While emphasizing the
empirical and rational aspects of science, it tried to apply these to
biology and to history in terms of a scientific materialism that could
explain biology and change as Newton's science had explained mechanics.
By the end of the century, man was frustrated and disillusioned with
scientific method and materialism and with emphasis on the nonhuman
world and was turning once again to the problems of man and society
with a conviction that these problems could be handled only by
nonrational methods and by the clash of contending forces, since the
problems themselves were too complex, too dynamic, too irrational to be
settled by science or even by human thought.
The
result was a new period,
the Age of Irrational Activism. It began with men, like Henri Bergson
and Sigmund Freud, who emphasized the nonrational nature of the
universe and of man, quickly shifted Darwin's doctrines of struggle and
survival from nonhuman nature to human society, and rejected
rationalism as slow, superficial, and an inhibition on both action and
survival. As Bergson said in his Creative Evolution
(1907):
"The intellect is characterized by a natural inability to comprehend
life. Instinct, on the contrary, is molded on the very form of life."
This
period felt that man, and
nature, and human society were all basically irrational. Reason,
regarded as a late and rather superficial accretion in the process of
human evolution, was considered inadequate to plumb the real nature of
man's problems, and was regarded as an inhibitor on the full intensity
of his actions, an obstacle to the survival of himself as an individual
and of his group (the nation). Any effort to apply reason or science,
based on rational analysis and evaluation, would be a slow and
frustrating effort: slow because the process of human rationality is
always slow, frustrating because it cannot plumb into the real depths
and nature of man's experience, and because it can always turn up as
many and as good reasons for any course of action as it can for the
opposite course of action. The effort to do this was dangerous, because
as the thinker poised in indecision, the man of action struck,
eliminated the thinker from the scene, and survived to determine the
future on the basis of continued action. To the theorist of these
views, the thinker would always be divided, hesitant, and weak, while
the man of action would be unified, decisive, and strong.
This
point of view, nourished
on Marx and Heinrich von Treitschke, justified class conflicts and
national warfare, and formed the background for the cult of violence
that was reflected in the political assassinations of 1898-1914 and the
imperialist aggressions that began with Japan, Italy, and Britain in
China, Ethiopia, and South Africa in 1894-1899. The explicit
justification of this view could be found in Georges Sorel Réflexions
sur la Violence
(1908) or in the political events of the summer of 1914. From that
fateful summer, for more than forty years, higher levels of violence
became the solution of all problems, whether it was the question of
winning a war, Stalin's efforts to industrialize Russia, Hitler's
efforts to settle the "Jewish problem," Rupert Brooke's effort to find
meaning in life, Japan's desire to find a solution to economic
depression, the English-speaking nations' search for security, Italy's
search for glory, or Franco's desire to preserve the status
quo in Spain. The culmination of the process in total
irrationalism and total violence was Nazism, "The Revolution of
Nihilism."
Expressed
explicitly this cult
of Irrational Activism was based on the belief that the universe was
dynamic and largely nonrational. As such, any effort to deal with it by
rational means will be futile and superficial. Moreover, rationalism,
by paralyzing man's ability to act decisively, will expose him to
destruction in a world whose chief features include struggle and
conflict. Men came to believe that only violence had survival value.
The resulting cult of violence permeated all human life. By
mid-century, the popular press, literature, the cinema, sports, and all
major human concerns had embraced this cult of violence. The books of
Mickey Spillane or Raymond Chandler sold millions to satisfy this need.
Humphrey Bogart became the most popular film hero because he courted
women with a blow to the jaw.
On
a somewhat more profound
level, the Nazi Party mobilized popular support with a program of
"Blood and Soil" (Blut und Boden), while the
Fascists in Italy
covered every wall with their slogan, "Believe! Obey! Fight!" In
neither was there any expectation that men should think or analyze.
On
the highest philosophic levels, the new attitude was justified.
Bergson appealed to intuition, and Hitler used it. Other philosophers
vied with one another to demonstrate that the old mechanism of
abstract, rational thought must be rejected as irrelevant, superficial,
or meaningless. The semanticists rejected logic by rejecting the idea
of general categories or even of definition of terms. According to
them, because everything is constantly changing, no term can remain
fixed without at once becoming irrelevant. The meaning of any word
depended on the context in which it was used; since this was different
every time it was used, the meaning, consisting of a series of
connotations based on all previous uses of the term, is different at
each use. Every individual who uses a term is simply the culmination of
all his past experiences that make him what he is; since experience
never stops, he is a different person every time he uses a term, and it
has a different meaning for him. On this basis the Italian playwright
Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) wrote a series of works to show the
constantly changing nature of personality, which is also a reflection
of the context in which it operates, so that each person who meets
someone knows him as a different personality.
The
most widely read of
twentieth-century philosophers, the existentialists, reflected this
same attitude, although they could agree on almost nothing. In general
they were skeptical of any general principles about reality, but
recognized that reality did exist for each individual as the concrete
instant of time, place, and context in which he acted. Thus-he must
act. In order to act he must make a decision, a commitment, to
something that would give him a basis from which to act. By acting he
experiences reality, and to that extent knows and demonstrates, at
least to himself, that there is a reality.
All
these ideas, reflecting
the disjointed malaise of the century, permeated the outlook of the
period and left it hungry for meaning, for identity, for some structure
or purpose in human experience. Insanity, neurosis, suicide, and all
kinds of irrational obsessions and reactions filled increasing roles in
human life. Most of these were not even recognized as being irrational
or obsessive. Speed, alcohol, sex, coffee, and tobacco screened man off
from living, injuring his health, stultifying his capacity to think, to
observe, or to enjoy life, without his realizing that these were the
shields he adopted to conceal from himself the fact that he was no
longer really capable of living, because he no longer knew what life
was and could see no meaning or purpose in it. As his capacity to live
or to experience life dwindled, he sought to reach it by seeking more
vigorous experiences that might penetrate the barriers surrounding him.
The result was mounting sensationalism. In time, nothing made much
impression unless it was concerned with shocking violence, perversion,
or distortion.
Along
with this, ability to
communicate dwindled. The old idea of communication as an exchange of
concepts represented by symbols was junked. Instead, symbols had quite
different connotations for everyone concerned simply because everyone
had a different past experience. A symbol might have meaning for two
persons but it did not have the same meaning. Soon it was regarded as
proper that words represent only the writer's meaning and need have no
meaning at all for the reader. Thus appeared private poetry, personal
prose, and meaningless art in which the symbols used have ceased to be
symbols because they do not reflect any common background of experience
that could indicate their meaning as shared communication or
experience. These productions, the fads of the day, were acclaimed by
many as works of genius. Those who questioned them and asked their
meaning were airily waved aside as unforgivable philistines; they were
told that no one any longer sought "meaning" in literature or art but
rather sought "experiences." Thus to look at a meaningless painting
became an experience. These fads followed one another, reflecting the
same old pretenses, but under different names. Thus "Dada" following
World War I eventually led to the "Absurd" following World War II.
But
even as this process
continued, twenty years after Hiroshima, deep within the social context
of the day, new outlooks were rising that made the views associated
with Irrational Activism increasingly irrelevant. One of these we have
already mentioned. The victory of rational analysis, operational
research, and organized scientific attitudes over irrationality, will,
intuition, and violence in World War II reversed the trend. Nothing
succeeds like success, and no success is greater than ability to
survive and find solutions to critical problems involving existence
itself. The West in World War II and in the postwar period, in spite of
the hysterical protests of the extremists, showed once again that it
was able to overcome aggression, narrow intolerance, hatred, tribalism,
totalitarianism, selfishness, arrogance, imposed uniformity, and all
the evils the West had recognized as evils throughout its history. It
not only won the war: it solved the great economic crisis, prevented
the extension of tyranny while still avoiding World War III, and did
all this in a typical Western way by fumbling cooperatively down a road
paved with good intentions. The final result was a triumph of
incalculable magnitude for the Outlook of the West.
The
Outlook of the West is
that broad middle way about which the fads and foibles of the West
oscillate. It is what is implied by what the West says it believes, not
at one moment but over the long succession of moments that form the
history of the West. From that succession of moments it is clear that
the West believes in diversity rather than in uniformity, in pluralism
rather than in monism or dualism, in inclusion rather than exclusion,
in liberty rather than in authority, in truth rather than in power, in
conversion rather than in annihilation, in the individual rather than
in the organization, in reconciliation rather than in triumph, in
heterogeneity rather than in homogeneity, in relativisms rather than in
absolutes, and in approximations rather than in final answers. The West
believes that man and the universe are both complex and that the
apparently discordant parts of each can be put into a reasonably
workable arrangement with a little good will, patience, and
experimentation. In man the West sees body, emotions, and reason as all
equally real and necessary, and is prepared to entertain discussion
about their relative interrelationships but is not prepared to listen
for long to any intolerant insistence that any one of these has a final
answer.
The
West has no faith in final
answers today. It believes that all answers are un-final because
everything is imperfect, although possibly getting better and thus
advancing toward a perfection the West is prepared to admit may be
present in some remote and almost unattainable future. Similarly in the
universe, the West is prepared to recognize that there are material
aspects, less material aspects, immaterial aspects, and spiritual
aspects, although it is not prepared to admit that anyone yet has a
final answer on the relationships of these. Similarly the West is
prepared to admit that society and groups are necessary, while the
individual is important, but it is not prepared to admit that either
can stand alone or be made the ultimate value to the sacrifice of the
other.
Where
rationalists insist on
polarizing the continua of human experience into antithetical pairs of
opposing categories, the West has constantly rejected the implied need
for rejection of one or the other, by embracing "Both." This catholic
attitude goes back to the earliest days of Western society when its
outlook was being created in the religious controversies of the
preceding Classical Civilization. Among these controversies were the
following: (1) Was [Jesus] Christ ... [a] Man or [a] God? (2) Was
salvation to be secured by God's grace or by man's good works? (3) Was
the material world real and good or was spirituality real and good? (4)
Was the body worthy of salvation or was the soul only to be saved? (5)
Was the truth found only by God's revelation or was it to be found by
man's experience (history)? (6) Should man work to save himself or to
save others? (7) Does man owe allegiance to God or to Caesar? (8)
Should man's behavior be guided by reason or by observation? (9) Can
man be saved inside the Church or outside it? In each case, with
vigorous partisans clamoring on both sides (and in many cases still
clamoring), the answer, reached as a consensus built up by long
discussion, was Both. In fact a correct definition of the Christian
tradition might well be expressed in that one word "Both." Throughout
its long history, controversy over religion in Western society has been
based on a disturbance of the arrangement or balance within that "Both."
From
this religious basis
established on "Both" as early as the Councils of Nicaea (325) and
Chalcedon (451), the outlook of the West developed and spread with the
growth of the new Christian Civilization of the West to replace the
dying Classical Civilization. And today, when the Civilization of the
West seems as if it too may be dying, we may reassure ourselves by
recalling that our civilization has saved itself before by turning back
to its tradition of Inclusive Diversity. This apparently is what has
been happening since 1940. It was Inclusive Diversity that created the
nuclear bomb in World War II, and it may well be Inclusive Diversity
that will save the West in the postwar world.
Any
outlook or society that
finds its truth in Inclusive Diversity or in "Both" obviously faces a
problem of relationships. If man finds the truth by using body,
emotions, and reason, these diverse talents must be placed in some
workable arrangement with one another. So too must service to God and
to Caesar or to self and to fellow man.
In
an age like ours, in which
all these relationships have become disrupted and discordant, such
relationships can be reestablished by discussion and testing, but in
this process each discussant must rely on his experience. The great
body of such experience, however, will not be found among living
discussants, whose whole lives have been passed in a culture in which
these relationships were discordant, but in the experiences of those
whose lives were lived in earlier ages before the relationship in
question became discordant. This gives rise to the typical Western
solution of relying on experience and, at the same time, helps the
society to link up with its traditions (the most therapeutic action in
which any society can engage)..
From
this examination of the
tradition of the West, we can formulate the pattern of outlook on which
this tradition is based....
1.
There is a truth, a reality. (Thus the West rejects skepticism,
solipsism, and nihilism.)....
This
methodology of the West
is basic to the success, power, and wealth of Western Civilization. It
is reflected in all successful aspects of Western life, from the
earliest beginnings to the present. It has been attacked and challenged
by all kinds of conflicting methods and outlooks, by all kinds of
alternative attitudes based on narrowness and rigidity, but it has
reappeared, again and again, as the chief source of strength of that
amazing cultural growth of which we are a part.
This
method has basically been
the method of operation in Western religious history, despite the many
lapses of Western religion into authoritarian, absolute, rigid, and
partial affirmations. The many problems, previously listed, that faced
the Church at the time of the Council of Nicaea were settled by this
Western method. Throughout Western religious history ... [various
groups have insisted] that the truth was available—total,
explicit, final, and authoritative—in God's revelation....
The
method of the West, even
in religion, has been this: ... In the Christian tradition the stages
in this ... process ... include: (1) man's intuitive sense of natural
law and morality, [conscience, a gift of God], (2) the Old Testament,
(3) the New Testament....
This
version of the religious
tradition of the West as an example of the Western outlook as a whole
may seem to many to be contradicted by the narrow intolerance, rigid
bigotry, and relentless persecutions that have disfigured so much of
the religious history of the West. This is true, and is a clear
indication that individuals and groups can fall far short of their own
traditions, can lose these for long periods, and can even devote their
lives to fighting against them. But the traditions of the West,
certainly the most remarkable any civilization has had, always seem to
come back and march on to other victories. Even in our day, in Vatican
Council II we can see what outsiders may regard as surprising efforts
to apply Western traditions to an organization which, to most
outsiders, and even, perhaps, to most insiders, must appear as one of
the most authoritarian organizations ever created. But the tradition is
there, however buried or forgotten, and the realization of this has
made Vatican Council II a symbol of hope, even to non-Catholics and
even to those who realize it will not do half the things that are
crying urgently to be done.
...
The rigidity of Western
religious thought that often seems to be unappreciative of the Western
tradition (although fundamentally it is not) is often explained by the
role divine revelation plays in Western religion. The Word of God may
seem to many a rigid and inflexible element repugnant to the flexible
and tentative outlook I have identified as the tradition of the West....
To
the West, in spite of all
its aberrations, the greatest sin, from Lucifer to Hitler, has been
pride, especially in the form of intellectual arrogance; and the
greatest virtue has been humility, especially in the intellectual form
which concedes that opinions are always subject to modification by new
experiences, new evidence, and the opinions of our fellow men.
These
procedures that I have
identified as Western, and have illustrated from the rather unpromising
field of religion, are to be found in all aspects of Western life. The
most triumphant of these aspects is science, whose method is a perfect
example of the Western tradition. The scientist goes eagerly to work
each day because he has the humility to know that he does not have any
final answers and must work to modify and improve the answers he has.
He publishes his opinions and research reports, or exposes these in
scientific gatherings, so that they may be subjected to the criticism
of his colleagues and thus gradually play a role in formulating the
constantly unfolding consensus that is science. That is what science
is, "a consensus unfolding in time by a cooperative effort, in which
each works diligently seeking the truth and submits his work to the
discussion and critique of his fellows to make a new, slightly
improved, temporary consensus."
Because
this is the tradition
of the West, the West is liberal. Most historians see liberalism as a
political outlook and practice found in the nineteenth century. But
nineteenth-century liberalism was simply a temporary organizational
manifestation of what has always been the underlying Western outlook.
That organizational manifestation is now largely dead, killed as much
by twentieth-century liberals as by conservatives or reactionaries. It
was killed because liberals took applications of that manifestation of
the Western outlook and made these applications rigid, ultimate, and
inflexible goals. The liberal of 1880 was anti-clerical,
anti-militarist, and anti-state because these were, to his immediate
experience, authoritarian forces that sought to prevent the operation
of the Western way. The same liberal was for freedom of assembly, of
speech, and of the press because these were necessary to form the
consensus that is so much a part of the Western process of operation.
But
by 1900 or so, these
dislikes and likes became ends in themselves. The liberal was prepared
to force people to associate with those they could not bear, in the
name of freedom of assembly, or he was, in the name of freedom of
speech, prepared to force people to listen. His anti-clericalism became
an effort to prevent people from getting religion, and his
anti-militarism took the form of opposing funds for legitimate defense.
Most amazing, his earlier opposition to the use of private economic
power to restrict individual freedoms took the form of an effort to
increase the authority of the state against private economic power and
wealth in themselves. Thus the liberal of 1880 and the liberal of 1940
had reversed themselves on the role and power of the state, the earlier
seeking to curtail it, the latter seeking to increase it. In the
process, the upholder of the former liberal idea that the power of the
state should be curtailed came to be called a conservative. This simply
added to the intellectual confusion of the mid-twentieth century, which
arose from the Irrational Activist reluctance to define any terms, a
disinclination that has now penetrated deeply into all intellectual and
academic life.
In
this connection we might
say that the whole recent controversy between conservatism and
liberalism is utterly wrongheaded and ignorant. Since the true role of
conservatism must be to conserve the tradition of our society, and
since that tradition is a liberal tradition, the two should be closely
allied in their aim at common goals. So long as liberals and
conservatives have as their primary goals to defend interests and to
belabor each other for partisan reasons, they cannot do this. When they
decide to look at the realities beneath the controversies, they might
begin with a little book that appeared many years ago (1902) from the
hand of a member of the chief family in the English Conservative Party
over the past century. The book is Conservatism by
Lord Hugh
Cecil. This volume defines conservatism very much as I have defined
liberalism and the Outlook of the West as tentative, flexible,
undogmatic, communal, and moderate. Its fundamental assumption is that
men are imperfect creatures, will probably get further by working
together than by blind opposition, and that, since undoubtedly each is
wrong to some extent, any extreme or drastic action is inadvisable.
Conservatism of this type was, indeed, closer to what I have called
liberalism than the liberals of 1880 were, since the conservatives of
this type were perfectly willing to use the Church or the army or the
state to carry out their moderate and tentative projects, and were
prepared to use the state to curtail arbitrary private economic power,
which the liberals of the day were unwilling to do (since they embraced
a doctrinaire belief in the limitation of state power) .
All
this is of significance
because it is concerned with the fact that there is an age-old Western
tradition, much battered and destroyed in recent generations, that has
sent up new, living shoots of vigorous growth since 1945. These new
shoots have appeared even in those areas where the orthodox
nineteenth-century liberals looked to find only enemies—in the
Church and in the armed forces. The operation of what I have called the
liberal tradition of the West is evident in all religious thought of
recent years, even in that of Roman Catholicism. It is almost equally
evident in military life, where the practice of consulting diverse, and
even outside, opinion to reach tentative decisions is increasingly
obvious. Recently I attended a conference of the United States Navy
Special Projects Office where a diverse group tried to reach some
consensus about the form of naval weapons systems twelve years in the
future. The agenda, as set up for seven weeks, provided for
thirty-three successive approximations narrowing in on the desired
consensus. This was listed on the agenda as "Final Approximation and
Crystallization of Dissent." The recognition that the final goal was
still approximate, and the equal role provided for disagreement within
this consensus, show clearly how the tradition of the West operates
today within the armed forces of the West.
This
return to the tradition
of the West is evident in many aspects of life beyond those mentioned
here. Strangely enough, the return of which we speak is much more
evident in the United States than it is in Europe, and, accordingly,
some of the most significant examples of it will be mentioned in the
following section, which is concerned with the United States.
The
reason for this,
apparently, is that Europeans, after their very difficult experiences
of depression and war, are now overly eager for the mundane benefits
made possible by advancing technology and are, as a result,
increasingly selfish and materialistic, while Americans, having tasted
the fleshpots of affluence, are increasingly unselfish,
community-conscious, and nonmaterial in their attitudes. A careful
look, however, will show that the movement is present on both sides of
the Atlantic, and appears perhaps most obviously in a growing concern
with one's fellow men, a kind of practical Christianity, and a
spreading evidence of charity and love in the old Christian meaning of
these terms. There seems to be, especially among the younger
generation, a growing emphasis on fellowship and interpersonal
relations and an increasing skepticism toward abstract power,
high-blown slogans, old war cries, and authority. There is a reaching
out to one another, seeking to understand, to help, to comfort. There
is a growing tolerance of differences, an amused attitude of live and
let live; and, above all, there is an avid discussion of values and
priorities that include more spiritual items than a generation ago.
There is an almost universal rejection of authority, of rigid formulas,
and of final or total answers. In a word, there is a fumbling effort to
rediscover the tradition of the West by a generation that has been
largely cut off from that tradition.
We
have said that this
tradition is one of Inclusive Diversity in which one of the chief
problems is how elements that seem discordant, but are recognized as
real and necessary, may be fitted together. The solution to this
problem, which rests in the tradition itself, is to be found in the
idea of hierarchy: diverse elements are discordant only because they
are out of place. Once the proper arrangement is found, discord is
replaced by concord. Once, long ago, a young person said to me, "Dirt
is only misplaced matter"—a typically Western attitude. Today
young persons spend increasing time in argument and thought on how
diverse things, all of which seem necessary, can be arranged in a
hierarchy of importance or priority: military service, preparation for
a vocation, love and marriage, personal development, desire to help
others—all these compete for energy, time, and attention. In what
order should they be arranged? This is quite different from the
successful young man of yesteryear who had one clearly perceived
goal—to prepare for a career in moneymaking. The road to that
career was marked by materialism, selfishness, and pride, all attitudes
of low favor in the outlook of the West, not because they are
absolutely wrong but because they indicate a failure to see the place
of things in the general structure of the universe. Even pride, either
in Lucifer or in Soames Forsyte, is a failure to realize one's own
position in the whole picture. And today, especially in America,
increasing numbers of people are trying to see the whole picture.
Chapter 75—The United States and the
Middle-Class Crisis
The
character of any society
is determined less by what it is actually like than by the picture it
has of itself and of what it aspires to be. From this point of view,
American society of the 1920's was largely middle class. Its values and
aspirations were middle class, and power or influence within it was in
the hands of middle-class people. On the whole, this was regarded as
proper, except by iconoclastic writers who gained fortune and
reputation simply by satirizing or criticizing middle-class customs.
To
be sure, even the most
vigorous defenders of bourgeois America did not pretend that all
Americans were middle class: only the more important ones were. But
they did see the country as organized in middle-class terms, and they
looked forward to a not remote future in which everyone would be middle
class, except for a small, shiftless minority of no importance. To
these defenders, and probably also to the shiftless minority, American
society was regarded as a ladder of opportunity up which anyone could
work his way, on rungs of increased affluence, to the supreme positions
of wealth and power near the top. Wealth, power, prestige, and respect
were all obtained by the same standard, based on money. This in turn
was based on a pervasive emotional insecurity that sought relief in the
ownership and control of material possessions. The basis for this may
be seen most clearly in the origins of this bourgeois middle class.
A
thousand years ago, Europe
had a two-class society in which a smal1 upper class of nobles and
upper clergy were supported by a great mass of peasants. The nobles
defended this world, and the clergy opened the way to the next world,
while the peasants provided the food and other material needs for the
whole society. All three had security in their social relationships in
that they occupied positions of social status that satisfied their
psychic needs for companionship, economic security, a foreseeable
future, and purpose of their efforts. Members of both classes had
little anxiety about loss of these things by any likely outcome of
events, and all thus had emotional security.
In
the course of the medieval
period, chiefly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this simple
two-class society was modified by the intrusion of a small, but
distinctly different, new class between them. Because this new class
was between, we call it middle class, just as we call it "bourgeois"
(after bourg meaning town) from the fact that it
resided in
towns, a new kind of social aggregate. The two older, established,
classes were almost completely rural and intimately associated with the
land, economically, socially, and spiritually. The permanence of the
land and the intimate connection of the land with the most basic of
human needs, especially food, amplified the emotional security
associated with the older classes..
The
new middle class of
bourgeoisie who grew up between the two older classes had none of these
things. They were commercial peoples concerned with exchange of goods,
mostly luxury goods, in a society where all their prospective customers
already had the basic necessities of life provided by their status. The
new middle class had no status in a society based on status; they had
no security or permanence in a society that placed the highest value on
these qualities. They had no law (since medieval law was largely past
customs, and their activities were not customary ones) in a society
that highly valued law. The flow of the necessities of life, notably
food, to the new town dwellers was precarious, so that some of their
earliest and most emphatic actions were taken to ensure the flow of
such goods from the surrounding country to the town. All the things the
bourgeois did were new things; all were precarious, and insecure; and
their whole lives were lived without the status, permanence, and
security the society of the day most highly valued. The risks (and
rewards) of commercial enterprise, well reflected in the fluctuating
fortunes of figures such as Antonio in The Merchant of Venice,
were extreme. A single venture could ruin a merchant or make him rich.
This insecurity was increased by the fact that the prevalent religion
of the day disapproved of what he was doing, seeking profits or taking
interest, and could see no way of providing religious services to town
dwellers because of the intimate association of the ecclesiastical
system with the existing arrangement of rural landholding.
For
these and other reasons
psychic insecurity became the keynote of the new middle-class outlook.
It still is. I he only remedy for this insecurity of the middle class
seemed to it to be the accumulation of more possessions that could be a
demonstration to the world of the individual's importance and power. In
this way, for the middle class, the general goal of medieval man to
seek future salvation in the hereafter was secularized to an effort to
seek future security in this world by acquisition of wealth and its
accompanying power and social prestige. But the social prestige from
wealth was most available among fellow bourgeoisie, rather than among
nobles or peasants. Thus the opinions of one's fellow bourgeoisie, by
wealth and by conformity to bourgeois values, became the motivating
drives of the middle classes, creating what has been called the
"acquisitive society."
In
that society prudence,
discretion, conformity, moderation (except in acquisition), decorum,
frugality, became the marks of a sound man. Credit became more
important than intrinsic personal qualities, and credit was based on
the appearances of things, especially the appearances of the external
material accessories of life. The facts of a man's personal
qualities—such as kindness, affection, thoughtfulness,
generosity, personal insight, and such, were increasingly irrelevant or
even adverse to the middle-class evaluation of a man. Instead, the
middle-class evaluation rested rather on nonpersonal attributes and on
external accessories. Where personal qualities were admired, they were
those that contributed to acquisition (often qualities opposed to the
established values of the Christian outlook, such as love, charity,
generosity, gentleness, or unselfishness). These middle-class qualities
included decisiveness, selfishness, impersonality, ruthless energy, and
insatiable ambition.
As
the middle classes and
their commercialization of all human relationships spread through
Western society in the centuries from the twelfth to the twentieth,
they largely modified and, to some extent, reversed the values of
Western society earlier. In some cases, the old values, such as future
preference or self-discipline, remained, but were redirected. Future
preference ceased to be transcendental in its aim, and became
secularized. Self-discipline ceased to seek spirituality by restraining
sensuality, and instead sought material acquisition. In general, the
new middle-class outlook had a considerable religious basis, but it was
the religion of the medieval heresies and of puritanism rather than the
religion of Roman Christianity.
This
complex outlook that we
call middle class or bourgeois is, of course, the chief basis of our
world today. Western society is the richest and most powerful society
that has ever existed largely because it has been impelled forward
along these lines, beyond the rational degree necessary to satisfy
human needs, by the irrational drive for achievement in terms of
material ambitions. To be sure, Western society always had other kinds
of people, and the majority of the people in Western society probably
had other outlooks and values, but it was middle-class urgency that
pushed modern developments in the direction they took. There were
always in our society dreamers and truth-seekers and tinkerers. They,
as poets, scientists, and engineers, thought up innovations which the
middle classes adopted and exploited if they seemed likely to be
profit-producing. Middle-class self-discipline and future preference
provided the savings and investment without which any
innovation—no matter how appealing in theory—would be set
aside and neglected. But the innovations that could attract
middle-class approval (and exploitation) were the ones that made our
world today so different from the world of our grandparents and
ancestors.
This
middle-class character
was imposed most strongly on the United States. In order to identify it
and to discuss a very complex pattern of outlooks and values, we shall
try to summarize it. At its basis is psychic insecurity founded on lack
of secure social status. The cure for such insecurity became insatiable
material acquisition. From this flowed a large number of attributes of
which we shall list only five: future preference, self-discipline,
social conformity, infinitely expandable material demand, and a general
emphasis on externalized, impersonal values.
Those
who have this outlook
are middle class; those who lack it are something else. Thus
middle-class status is a matter of outlook and not a matter of
occupation or status. There can be middle-class clergy or teachers or
scientists. Indeed, in the United States, most of these three groups
are middle class, although their theoretical devotion to truth rather
than to profit, or to others rather than to self, might seem to imply
that they should not be middle class. And, indeed, they should not be;
for the urge to seek truth or to help others are not really compatible
with the middle-class values. But in our culture the latter have been
so influential and pervasive, and the economic power of middle-class
leaders has been so great, that many people whose occupations, on the
face of it, should make them other than middle class, none the less
have adopted major parts of the middle-class outlook and seek material
success in religion or teaching or science.
The
middle-class outlook, born
in the Netherlands and northern Italy and other places in the medieval
period, has been passed on by being inculcated to children as the
proper attitude for them to emulate. It could pass on from generation
to generation, and from century to century, as long as parents
continued to believe it themselves and disciplined their children to
accept it. The minority of children who did not accept it were
"disowned" and fell out of the middle classes. What is even more
important, they were, until recently, pitied and rejected by their
families. In this way, those who accepted the outlook marched on in the
steadily swelling ranks of the triumphant middle classes. Until the
twentieth century..
For
more than half a century,
from before World War I, the middle class outlook has been under
relentless attack, often by its most ardent members, who heedlessly,
and unknowingly, have undermined and destroyed many of the basic social
customs that preserved it through earlier generations. Many of these
changes occurred from changes in child-rearing practices, and many
arose from the very success of the middle-class way of life, which
achieved material affluence that tended to weaken the older emphasis on
self-discipline, saving, future preference, and the rest of it.
One
of the chief changes,
fundamental to the survival of the middle-class outlook, was a change
in our society's basic conception of human nature. This had two parts
to it. The traditional Christian attitude toward human personality was
that human nature was essentially good and that it was formed and
modified by social pressures and training. The "goodness" of human
nature was based on the belief that it was a kind of weaker copy of
God's nature, lacking many of God's qualities (in degree rather than in
kind), but none the less perfectible, and perfectible largely by its
own efforts with God's guidance. The Christian view of the universe as
a hierarchy of beings, with man about two-thirds of the way up, saw
these beings, especially man, as fundamentally free creatures able to
move, at their own volition toward God or away from him, and guided or
attracted in the correct direction for realization of their
potentialities by God's presence at the top of the Universe, a presence
which, like the north magnetic pole, attracted men, as compasses,
upward toward fuller realization and knowledge of God who was the
fulfillment of all good. Thus the effort came from free men, the
guidance came from God's grace, and ultimately the motive power came
from God's attractiveness....
In
this view the devil,
Lucifer, was ... the epitome of positive wickedness, ... was one of the
highest of the angels, close to God ... who fell because he failed to
keep his perspective and believed that he was as good as God.
In
this Christian outlook, the
chief task was to train men so that they would use their intrinsic
freedom to do the right thing by following God's guidance.
Opposed
to this Western view
of the world and the nature of man, there was, from the beginning,
another opposed view of both which received its most explicit
formulation by the Persian Zoroaster in the seventh century B.C. and
came into the Western tradition as a minor, heretical, theme. It came
in through the Persian influence on the Hebrews, especially during the
Babylonian Captivity of the Jews, in the sixth century B.C., and it
came in, more fully, through the Greek rationalist tradition from
Pythagoras to Plato. This latter tradition encircled the early
Christian religion, giving rise to many of the controversies that were
settled in the early Church councils and continuing on in the many
heresies that extended through history from the Arians, the
Manichaeans, Luther, Calvin, and the Jansenists.
The
chief avenue by which
these ideas, which were constantly rejected by the endless discussions
formulating the doctrine of the West, continued to survive was through
the influence of St. Augustine. From this dissident minority point of
view came seventeenth-century Puritanism. The general distinction of
this point of view from Zoroaster to William Golding (in Lord
of the Flies)
is that the world and the flesh are positive evils and that man, in at
least this physical part of his nature, is essentially evil. As a
consequence he must be disciplined totally to prevent him from
destroying himself and the world. In this view the devil is a force, or
being, of positive malevolence, and man, by himself, is incapable of
any good and is, accordingly, not free. He can be saved in eternity by
God's grace alone, and he can get through this temporal world only by
being subjected to a regime of total despotism. The direction and
nature of the despotism is not regarded as important, since the really
important thing is that man's innate destructiveness be controlled.
Nothing
could be more sharply
contrasted than these two points of view, the orthodox and the
puritanical. The contrasts can be summed up thus:
Orthodox
Evil
is absence of Good.
Man
is basically good.
Man
is free.
Man
can contribute to his salvation by good works.
Self-discipline
is necessary to guide or direct.
Truth
is found from experience and revelation, interpreted by tradition.
Puritan
Evil
is positive entity.
Man
is basically evil.
Man
is a slave of his nature.
Man
can be saved only by God.
Discipline
must be external and total.
Truth
is found by rational deduction from revelation.
The
puritan point of view,
which had been struggling to take over Western Civilization for its
first thousand years or more, almost did so in the seventeenth century.
It was represented to varying degrees in the work and agitations of
Luther, Calvin, Thomas Hobbes, Cornelius Jansen (Augustinus,
1640), Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694), Blaise Pascal, and others. In
general this point of view believed that the truth was to be found by
rational deduction from a few basic revealed truths, in the way that
Euclid's geometry and Descartes's analytical geometry were based on
rational deduction from a few self-evident axioms. The result was a
largely deterministic human situation, in sharp contrast with the
orthodox point of view, still represented in the Anglican and Roman
churches, which saw man as largely free in a universe whose rules were
to be found most readily by tradition and the general consensus. The
Puritan point of view tended to support political despotism and to seek
a one-class uniform society, while the older view put much greater
emphasis on traditional pluralism and saw society as a unity of
diversities. The newer idea led directly to mercantilism, which
regarded political-economic life as a struggle to the death in a world
where there was not sufficient wealth or space for different groups. To
them wealth was limited to a fixed amount in the world as a whole, and
one man's gain was someone else's loss. That meant that the basic
struggles of this world were irreconcilable and must be fought to a
finish. This was part of the Puritan belief that nature was evil and
that a state of nature was a jungle of violent conflicts.
Some
of these ideas changed,
others were retained, and a few were rearranged and modified in the
following periods of the Enlightenment, the Romantic movement, and
scientific materialism. All three of these returned to the older idea
that man and nature were essentially good, and to this restored belief
in the Garden of Eden they joined a basically optimistic belief in
man's ability to deal with his problems and to guide his own destiny.
Society and its conventions came to be regarded as evil, and the
guidance of traditions was generally rejected by the late Enlightenment
and the early Romantics, although the excesses of the French Revolution
drove many of the later Romantics back to rely on history and
traditions because of their growing feeling of the inadequacy of human
reason. One large change in all three periods was the Community of
Interests, which rejected mercantilism's insistence on limited wealth
and the basic incompatibility of interests for the more optimistic
belief that all parties could somehow adjust their interests within a
community in which all would benefit mutually. The application of
Darwinism to human society changed this idea again, toward the end of
the nineteenth century, and provided the ideological justification for
the wars of extermination of Nazism and Fascism. Only after the middle
of the twentieth century did a gradual reappearance of the old
Christian ideas of love and charity modify this view, replacing it with
the older idea that diverse human interests are basically reconcilable.
All
this shifting of ideas,
many of them unstated, or even unconscious, assumptions, and the
gradual growth of affluence helped to destroy middle-class motivations
and values. American society had been largely, but not entirely, middle
class. Above the middle class, which dominated the country in the first
half of the twentieth century, were a small group of aristocrats. Below
were the petty bourgeoisie, who had middle-class aspirations, but were
generally more insecure and often bitter because they did not obtain
middle-class rewards. Below these two middle classes were two lower
classes: the workers and the Lumpenproletariat or
socially disorganized, who had very little in common with each other.
Outside
this hierarchical
structure of five groups in three classes (aristocrat, middle, and
lower) were two other groupings that were not really part of the
hierarchical structure. On the left were the intellectuals and on the
right were the religious. These held in common the idea that the truth,
to them, was more important than interests; but they differed greatly
from the fact that the religious believed that they knew what the truth
was, while the intellectuals were still seeking it.
This
whole arrangement was
much more like a planetary arrangement of social-economic groupings
than it was like the middle-class vision of society as a ladder of
opportunity. The ladder really included only the middle classes with
the workers below. The planetary view, becoming increasingly
widespread, saw the middle classes in the center with the other five
surrounding these. Social movement was possible in circular as well as
in vertical directions (as the older ladder view of society believed),
so that sons of workers could rise into the middle classes or move
right into the religious, left into the intelligentsia, or even fall
downward into the de-classed dregs. So too, in theory, the children (or
more likely the grandchildren) of the upper middle class could move
upward into the aristocracy, which could also be approached from the
intellectuals or the religious.
Strangely
enough, the
non-middle classes had more characteristics in common with each other
than they did with the middle classes in their midst. The chief reason
for this was that all other groups had value systems different from the
middle classes and, above all, placed no emphasis on display of
material affluence as proof of social status. From this came a number
of somewhat similar qualities and attitudes that often gave the
non-middle-class groups more in common and easier social intercourse
than any of them had with the middle classes. For example, all placed
much more emphasis on real personal qualities and much less on such
things as clothing, residence, academic background, or kind of
transportation used (all of which were important in determining
middle-class reactions to people). In a sense all were more sincere,
personally more secure (not the Lumpenproletariat),
and less
hypocritical than the middle class, and accordingly were much more
inclined to judge any new acquaintance on his merits. Moreover, the
middle classes, in order to provide their children with middle-class
advantages, had few children, while the other groups placed little
restriction on family size (except for some intellectuals). Thus
aristocrats, religious, workers, the de-classed, and many intellectuals
had large families, while only the uppermost and most securely
established middle-class families, as part of the transition to
aristocracy, had larger families.
Ideas
of morality also tended
to set the middle classes off from most of the others. The latter
tended to regard morality in terms of honesty and integrity of
character, while the middle classes based it on actions, especially
sexual actions. Even the religious based sin to some extent on purpose,
attitude, and mental context of the act rather than on the act itself,
and did not restrict morality as narrowly to sexual behavior as did the
middle classes. However, the middle-class influence has been so
pervasive in the modern world that many of the other groups fell under
its influence to the extent that the word "morality," by the early
twentieth century, came to mean sex. The Jansenist influence in
American Roman Catholicism, for example, is so strong that sins
concerning sex are widely regarded by Catholics as the worst of sins,
in spite of the fact that Catholic doctrine continues to regard pride
as the worst sin and sexual sins as much less important (as Dante did).
At any rate, sex was generally regarded with greater indulgence hy
aristocrats, workers, intellectuals, or the de-classed than by the
middle classes or the more puritanical religious.
In
America, as elsewhere,
aristocracy represents money and position grown old, and is organized
in terms of families rather than of individuals. Traditionally it was
made up of those whose families had had money, position, and social
prestige for so long that they never had to think about these and,
above all, never had to impress any other person with the fact that
they had them. They accepted these attributes of family membership as a
right and an obligation. Since they had no idea that these could be
lost, they had a basic psychological security, similar to that of the
religious and workers. Thus like these other two, they were
self-assured, natural, but distant. Their manners were gracious but
impersonal. Their chief characteristic was the assumption that their
family position had obligations. This noblesse oblige
led them
to participate in school sports (even if they lacked obvious talent),
to serve their university (usually a family tradition) in any helpful
way (such as fund raising), to serve their church in a similar way, and
to offer their services to their local community, their state, and
their country as an obligation. They often scandalized their
middle-class acquaintances by their unconventionality and social
informality, greeting workers, recent immigrants, or even outcasts by
their given names, arriving at evening meetings in tweeds, or traveling
in cheap, small cars to formal weddings.
The
kind of a car a person
drove was, until very recently, one of the best guides to middle-class
status, since a car to the middle classes was a status symbol, while to
the other classes it was a means of getting somewhere. Oversized
Oldsmobiles, Cadillacs, and Lincoln Continentals are still middle-class
cars, but in recent years, with the weakening of the middle-class
outlook, almost anyone might be found driving a Volkswagen. Another
good evidence of class may be seen in the treatment given to servants
(or those who work in one's home): the lower classes treat these as
equals, the middle classes treat them as inferiors, while aristocrats
treat them as equals or even superiors.
On
the whole, the number of
aristocratic families in the United States is very few, with a couple
in each of the older states, especially New England, and in the older
areas of the South such as Charleston or Natchez, Mississippi, with the
chief concentrations in the small towns around Boston and in the Hudson
River Valley. Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt would be an example. A somewhat
larger group of semi-aristocrats consist of those like the Lodges,
Rockefellers, or Kennedys who are not yet completely aristocratic
either because they are not, in generations, far enough removed from
money-making, or because of the persistence of a commercial or business
tradition in the family. But these are aristocrats in the sense that
they have accepted a family obligation of service to the community. The
significance of this aristocratic tradition may be seen in
Massachusetts politics; there two decades ago, the governorship and
both senatorial seats were held by a Bradford, a Saltonstall, and a
Lodge, while in 1964 two of these positions were held by Endicott
Peabody and Leverett Saltonstall.
The
working class in the
United States is much smaller than we might assume, since most American
workers are seeking to rise socially, to help their children to rise
socially, and are considerably concerned with status symbols. Such
people, even if laborers, are not working class, but are rather petty
bourgeoisie. The real working class are rather relaxed, have present
rather than future preference, generally worry very little about their
status in the eyes of the world, enjoy their ordinary lives, including
food, sex, and leisure, and have little desire to change their jobs or
positions. They are generally relaxed, have a taste for broad humor,
are natural, direct, and friendly, without large basic insecurities of
personality. The world depression, by destroying their jobs and
economic security, much reduced this group, which was always
proportionately smaller in America, the land of aspiration for
everyone, than in Europe.
The
second most numerous group
in the United States is the petty bourgeoisie, including millions of
persons who regard themselves as middle class and are under all the
middle-class anxieties and pressures, hut often earn less money than
unionized laborers. As a result of these things, they are often very
insecure, envious, filled with hatreds, and are generally the chief
recruits for any ... Right, Fascist, or hate campaigns against any
group that is different or which refuses to conform to middle-class
values. Made up of clerks, shopkeepers, and vast numbers of office
workers in business, government, finance, and education, these tend to
regard their white-collar status as the chief value in life, and live
in an atmosphere of envy, pettiness, insecurity, and frustration. They
form the major portion of the Republican Party's supporters in the
towns of America, as they did for the Nazis in Germany thirty years ago.
In
general, the political
alignments in the United States have been influenced even more by these
class and psychological considerations than they have been by income,
economic, or occupational considerations. The Republican Party has been
the party of the middle classes and the Democratic Party has been the
party of the rest. In general, aristocrats have tended to move toward
the Democrats, while semi-aristocrats often remain Republican (with
their middle-class parents or grandparents), except where historical
circumstance (chiefly in New England, the Middle West, and the South,
where Civil War memories remained green) operated. This meant that the
Republican Party, whose nineteenth century superiority- had been based
on the division of farmers into South and West over the slave issue,
became an established majority party in the twentieth century, but
became, once again, a minority party' because of the disintegration of
their middle-class support following 1945.
Even
in the period of
middle-class dominance, the Republicans had lost control of the Federal
government because of the narrowly plutocratic control of the party
that split it in 1912 and alienated most of the rest of the country in
1932. Twenty years later, in 1952, the country looked solidly middle
class, but, in fact, by that date middle-class morale was almost
totally destroyed, the middle classes themselves were in
disintegration, and the majority of Americans were becoming less middle
class in outlook. This change is one of the most significant
transformations of the twentieth century. The future of the United
States, of Western Civilization, and of the world depends on what kind
of outlook replaces the dissolving middle-class ideology in the next
generation.
The
weakening of this
middle-class ideology was a chief cause of the panic of the middle
classes, and especially of the petty bourgeoisie, in the Eisenhower
era. The general himself was repelled by the ...
Right,
whose impetus had been
a chief element (but far from the most important element) in his
election, although the lower-middle-class groups had preferred Senator
Taft as their leader. Eisenhower, however, had been preferred by the
Eastern Establishment of old Wall Street, Ivy League, semi-aristocratic
Anglophiles whose real strength rested in their control of eastern
financial endowments, operating from foundations, academic halls, and
other tax-exempt refuges.
As
we have said, this Eastern
Establishment was really above parties and was much more concerned with
policies than with party victories. They had been the dominant element
in both parties since 1900, and practiced the political techniques of
William C. Whitney and J. P. Morgan. They were, as we have said,
Anglophile, cosmopolitan, Ivy League, internationalist, astonishingly
liberal, patrons of the arts, and relatively humanitarian. All these
things made them anathema to the lower-middle-class and petty-bourgeois
groups, chiefly in small towns and in the Middle West, who supplied the
votes in Republican electoral victories, but found it so difficult to
control nominations (especially in presidential elections) because the
big money necessary for nominating in a Republican National Convention
was allied to Wall Street and to the Eastern Establishment. The ability
of the latter to nominate Eisenhower over Taft in 1952 was a bitter
pill to the radical bourgeoisie, and was not coated sufficiently by the
naming of Nixon, a man much closer to their hearts, for the
vice-presidential post. The split between these two wings of the
Republican Party, and Eisenhower's preference for the upper bourgeois
rather than for the petty-bourgeois wing, paralyzed both of his
administrations and was the significant element in Kennedy's narrow
victory over Nixon in 1960 and in Johnson's much more decisive victory
over Goldwater in 1964.
Kennedy,
despite his Irish
Catholicism, was an Establishment figure. This did not arise from his
semi-aristocratic attitudes or his Harvard connections (which were
always tenuous, since Irish Catholicism is not yet completely
acceptable at Harvard). These helped, but John Kennedy's introduction
to the Establishment arose from his support of Britain, in opposition
to his father, in the critical days at the American Embassy in London
in 1938-1940. His acceptance into the English Establishment opened its
American branch as well. The former was indicated by a number of
events, such as sister Kathleen's marriage to the Marquis of Hartington
and the shifting of Caroline's nursery school from the White House to
the British Embassy after her father's assassination. (The ambassador,
Ormsby-Gore, fifth Baron Harlech, was the son of an old associate of
Lord Milner and Leo Amery, when they were the active core of the
British-American Atlantic Establishment.) Another indication of this
connection was the large number of Oxford-trained men appointed to
office by President Kennedy.
The
period since 1950 has seen
the beginnings of a revolutionary change in American politics. This
change is not so closely related to the changes in American economic
life as it is to the transformation in social life. But without the
changes in economic life, the social influences could not have
operated. What has been happening has been a disintegration of the
middle class and a corresponding increase in significance by the petty
bourgeoisie at the same time that the economic influence of the older
Wall Street financial groups has been ... challenged by new wealth
springing up outside the eastern cities, notably in the Southwest and
Far West. These new sources of wealth have been based very largely on
government action and government spending but have, none the less,
adopted a petty-bourgeois outlook rather than the semi-aristocratic
outlook that pervades the Eastern Establishment. This new wealth, based
on petroleum, natural gas, ruthless exploitation of national resources,
the aviation industry, military bases in the South and West, and
finally on space with all its attendant activities, has centered in
Texas and southern California. Its existence, for the first time, made
it possible for the petty-bourgeois outlook to make itself felt in the
political nomination process instead of in the unrewarding effort to
influence politics by voting for a Republican candidate nominated under
Eastern Establishment influence.
In
these terms the political
struggle in the United States has shifted in two ways, or even three.
This struggle, in the minds of the ill informed, had always been viewed
as a struggle between Republicans and Democrats at the ballot box in
November. Wall Street, long ago, however, had seen that the real
struggle was in the nominating conventions the preceding summer. This
realization was forced upon the petty-bourgeois supporters of
Republican candidates by their antipathy for Willkie, Dewey,
Eisenhower, and other Wall Street interventionists and their inability
to nominate their congressional favorites, like Senators Knowland,
Bricker, and Taft, at national party conventions. Just as these
disgruntled voters reached this conclusion, with Taft's failure in
1952, the new wealth appeared in the political picture, sharing the
petty bourgeoisie's suspicions of the East, big cities, Ivy League
universities, foreigners, intellectuals, workers, and aristocrats. By
the 1964 election, the major political issue in the country was the
financial struggle behind the scenes between the old wealth, civilized
and cultured in foundations, and the new wealth, virile and uninformed,
arising from the flowing profits of government-dependent corporations
in the Southwest and West.
At
issue here was the whole
future face of America, for the older wealth stood for values and aims
close to the Western traditions of diversity ... while the newer wealth
stood for the narrow and fear-racked aims of petty-bourgeois insecurity
and egocentricity. The nominal issues between them, such as that
between internationalism and unilateral isolationism (which its
supporters preferred to rename "nationalism"), were less fundamental
than they seemed, for the real issue was the control of the Federal
government's tremendous power to influence the future of America by
spending of government funds. The petty bourgeois and new-wealth groups
wanted to continue that spending into the industrial-military complex,
such as defense and space, while the older wealth and non-bourgeois
groups wanted to direct it toward social diversity and social
amelioration for the aged and the young. for education, for social
outcasts, and for protecting national resources for future use.
The
outcome of this struggle,
which still goes on, is one in which civilized people can afford to be
optimistic. For the newer wealth is unbelievably ... misinformed. In
their growing concern to control political nominations, they ignored
the even greater need to win elections. They did not realize that the
disintegration of the middle classes, chiefly from the abandonment of
the middle-class outlook, was creating an American electorate that
would never elect any candidate the newer wealth would care to
nominate. As part of this lack of vision, the new vv earth and its
petty-bourgeois supporters ignored the well-established principle that
a national candidate must have a national appeal and that this is
obtained best by a candidate close to the center.
In
American politics we have
several parties included under the blanket words "Democratic" and
"Republican." In oversimplified terms, as I have said, the Republicans
were the party of the middle classes, and the Democrats were the party
of the fringes. Both of these were subdivided, each with a
Congressional and a National Party wing. The Republican Congressional
Party (representing localism) was much farther to the Right than the
National Republican Party, and as such was closer to the
petty-bourgeois than to the upper-middle-class outlook. The Democratic
Congressional Party was much more clearly of the fringes and minorities
(and thus often further to the Left) than the Democratic National
Party. The party machinery in each case was in Congressional Party
control during the intervals between the quadrennial presidential
elections, but, in order to win these elections, each had to call into
existence, in presidential election years, its shadowy National Party.
This meant that the Republicans had to appear to move to the Left,
closer to the Center, while the Democrats had also to move from the
fringes toward the Center, usually by moving to the Right. As a result,
the National parties and their presidential candidates, with the
Eastern Establishment assiduously fostering the process behind the
scenes, moved closer together and nearly met in the center with almost
identical candidates and platforms, although the process was concealed,
as much as possible, by the revival of obsolescent or meaningless war
cries and slogans (often going back to the Civil War). As soon as the
presidential election was over, the two National parties vanished, and
party controls fell back into the hands of the Congressional parties,
leaving the newly elected President in a precarious position between
the two Congressional parties, neither of which was very close to the
brief National coalition that had elected him.
The
chief problem of [the
Eastern Establishment] ... for a long time has been how to make the two
Congressional parties more national and international. The argument
that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one,
perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is [to the Eastern
Establishment] a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and
academic thinkers. Instead, [they believe that] the two parties should
be almost identical, so that [can control the elections] ... without
leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. The [Eastern
Establishment believes that] policies that are vital and necessary for
America are no longer subjects of significant disagreement, but are
disputable only in details of procedure, priority, or method: we must
remain strong, continue to function as a great world Power in
cooperation with other Powers, ... keep the economy moving without
significant slump, help other countries do the same, provide the basic
social necessities t or all our citizens, open up opportunities for
social shifts for those willing to work to achieve them, and defend the
basic Western outlook of diversity, pluralism, cooperation, and the
rest of it, as already described. These things any national American
party hoping to win a presidential election must accept. But either
party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and
vigor-less. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years
if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things
but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic
policies.
The
capture of the Republican
National Party by the extremist elements of the Republican
Congressional Party in 1964, and their effort to elect Barry Goldwater
to the Presidency with the petty-bourgeois extremists alone, was only a
temporary aberration on the American political scene, and arose from
the fact that President Johnson had preempted all the issues (which
are, as we have said, now acceptable to the overwhelming majority) and
had occupied the whole broad center of the American political spectrum,
so that it was hardly worth while for the Republicans to run a real
contestant against him in the same area. Thus Goldwater was able to
take control of the Republican National Party by default..
The
virulence behind the
Goldwater campaign, however, had nothing to do with default or lack of
intensity. Quite the contrary. His most ardent supporters were of the
extremist petty-bourgeois mentality driven to near hysteria by the
disintegration of the middle classes and the steady rise in prominence
of everything they considered anathema: Catholics, Negroes, immigrants,
intellectuals, aristocrats (and near aristocrats), scientists, and
educated men generally, people from trig cities or from the East,
cosmopolitans and internationalists and, above all, liberals who accept
diversity as a virtue.
This
disintegration of the
middle classes had a variety of causes, some of them intrinsic, many of
them accidental, a few of them obvious, but many of them going deeply
into the very depths of social existence.
All
these causes acted to
destroy the middle classes by acting to destroy the middle-class
outlook. And this outlook was destroyed ... by adult middle-class
persons abandoning it ... [and] ... by a failure or inability of
parents to pass it on to their children. Moreover, this failure was
largely restricted to the middle class itself and not to the petty
bourgeoisie (lower middle class), which, if anything, was clinging to
its particular version of the middle-class outlook more tenaciously and
was passing it on to its offspring in an even more intensified form.
What
I am saying here is that
the disintegration of the middle class arose from a failure to transfer
its outlook to its children. This failure was thus a [deliberate]
failure of education, and may seem, at first glance, to be all the more
surprising, since our education system has been, consciously or
unconsciously, organized as a mechanism for indoctrination of the young
in [secularism, socialism and internationalism, not traditional]
middle-class ideology. In fact, rather surprisingly, it would appear
that our educational system, unlike those of continental Europe, has
been more concerned with indoctrination of middle-class outlook than
with teaching patriotism or nationalism. As a reflection of this, it
has been more concerned with instilling attitudes and behavior than
with intellectual training. In view of the fact that the American
ideals of the 1920's were as much middle class as patriotic, with the
so-called "American way of life" identified rather with the American
economic and social system than with the American political system, and
the fact that a majority of schoolchildren were not from middle-class
families, it is not surprising that the educational system was devoted
to training in the middle-class outlook. Children of racial, religious,
national, and class minorities all passed through the same system and
received the middle-class formative process, with, it must be
recognized, incomplete success in many cases. This refers to the public
schools, but the Roman Catholic school system, especially on its upper
levels, was doing the same things. The large number of Catholic men's
colleges in the country, especially those operated by the Jesuits, had
as their basic, if often unrecognized, aim the desire to transform the
sons of working class, and often of immigrant, origins into
middle-class people in professional occupations (chiefly law, medicine,
business, and teaching).
On
the whole, this system ...
is now becoming less and less successful in turning out middle-class
people, especially from its upper educational levels. This failure can
be attributed ... to a failure of the system itself. As we shall see in
a moment, this failure occurred chiefly within the middle-class family,
a not unexpected situation, since outlook is still determined rather by
reaction to family conditions than by submission to a formal
educational process.
Much
of the disintegration of
the middle-class outlook can be traced to a weakening of its chief
aspects, such as future preference, intense self-discipline and, to a
lesser degree, to a decreasing emphasis on infinitely expandable
material demand and on the importance of middle-class status symbols.
Only a few of the factors that have influenced these changes can he
mentioned here.
The
chief external factor in
the destruction of the middle-class outlook has been the relentless
attack upon it in literature and drama through most of the twentieth
century. In fact, it is difficult to find works that defended this
outlook or even assumed it to be true, as was frequent in the
nineteenth century. Not that such works did not exist in recent years;
they have existed in great numbers, and have been avidly welcomed by
the petty bourgeoisie and by some middle-class housewives. Lending
libraries and women's magazines of the 1910's, 1920's, and 1930's were
full of them, but, by the 1950's they were largely restricted to
television soap dramas. Even those writers who explicitly accepted the
middle-class ideology, like Booth Tarkington, Ben Ames Williams, Sloan
Wilson, or John O'Hara, tended to portray middle-class life as a horror
of false values, hypocrisy, meaningless effort, and insecurity. In Alice
Adams,
for example, Tarkington portrayed a lower-middle-class girl, filled
with hypocrisy and materialistic values, desperately seeking a husband
who would provide her with the higher social status for which she
yearned.
In
the earlier period, even
down to 1940, literature's attack on the middle-class outlook was
direct and brutal, from such works as Upton Sinclair's The
Jungle or Frank Norris's The Pit,
both dealing with the total corruption of personal integrity in the
meat-packing and wheat markets. These early assaults were aimed at the
commercialization of life under bourgeois influence and were
fundamentally reformist in outlook because they assumed that the evils
of the system could somehow be removed, perhaps by state intervention.
By the 1920's the attack was much more total, and saw the problem in
moral terms so fundamental that no remedial action was possible. Only
complete rejection of middle-class values could remove the corruption
of human life seen by Sinclair Lewis in Babbitt or
Main Street.
After
1940, writers tended
less and less to attack the bourgeois way of life; that job had been
done. Instead they described situations, characters, and actions that
were simply non-bourgeois: violence, social irresponsibility, sexual
laxity and perversion, miscegenation, human weakness in relation to
alcohol, narcotics, or sex, or domestic and business relationships
conducted along completely non-bourgeois lines. Ernest Hemingway,
William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, John Dos Passos, and a host of
lesser writers, many of them embracing the cult of violence, showed the
trend. A very popular work like The Lost Weekend
could
represent the whole group. A few, like Hemingway, found a new moral
outlook to replace the middle-class ideology they had abandoned. In
Hemingway's case he shook the dust of upper-middle-class Oak Park,
Illinois, off his feet and immersed himself in the tragic sense of life
of Spain with its constant demand upon men to demonstrate their
virility by incidental activity with women and unflinching courage in
facing death. To Hemingway this could be achieved in the bullring, in
African big-game hunting, in war or, in a more symbolic way, in
prizefighting or crime. The significant point here is that Hemingway's
embrace of the outlook of the Pakistani-Peruvian axis as a token of his
rejection of his middle-class background was always recognized by him
as a pretense, and, when his virility, in the crudest sense, was gone,
he blew out his brains.
The
literary assault on the
bourgeois outlook was directed at all the aspects of it that we have
mentioned, at future preference, at self-discipline, at the emphasis on
materialistic acquisition, at status symbols. The attack on future
preference appeared as a demonstration that the future is never
reached. Its argument was that the individual who constantly postpones
living from the present (with living taken to mean real personal
relationships with individuals) to a hypothetical future eventually
finds that the years have gone by, death is approaching, he has not yet
lived, and is, in most cases, no longer able to do so. If the central
figure in such a work has achieved his materialist ambitions, the
implication is that these achievements, which looked so attractive from
a distance, are but encumbrances to the real values of personal living
when achieved. This theme, which goes back at least to Charles
Dickens's A Christmas Carol or to George Eliot's Silas
Marner,
continued to be presented into the twentieth century. It often took the
form, in more recent times, of a rejection of a man's whole life
achievement by his sons, his wife, or himself.
The
more recent form of this
attack on future preference has appeared in the existentialist novel
and the theater of the absurd. Existentialism, by its belief that
reality and life consist only of the specific, concrete personal
experience of a given place and moment, ignores the context of each
event and thus isolates it. But an event without context has no cause,
meaning, or consequence; it is absurd, as anything is which has no
relationship to any context. And such an event, with neither past nor
future, can have no connection with tradition or with future
preference. This point of view came to saturate twentieth-century
literature so that the original rejection of future preference was
expanded into total rejection of time, which Noms portrayed as simply a
mechanism for enslaving man and depriving him of the opportunity to
experience life. The writings of Thomas Wolfe and, on a higher level,
of the early Dos Passos, were devoted to this theme. The bourgeois time
clock became a tomb or prison that alienated man from life and left him
a cipher, like the appropriately named Mr. Zero in Elmer Rice's play The
Adding Machine (1923).
A
similar attack was made on
self-discipline. The philosophic basis for this attack was found in an
oversimplified Freudianism that regarded all suppression of human
impulse as leading to frustration and psychic distortions that made
subsequent life unattainable. Thus novel after novel or play after play
portrayed the wickedness of the suppression of good, healthy, natural
impulse and the salutary consequences of self-indulgence, especially in
sex. Adultery and other manifestations of undisciplined sexuality were
described in increasingly clinical detail and were generally associated
with excessive drinking or other evasions of personal responsibility,
as in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and The
Sun Also Rises or in John Steinbeck's
love affair with personal irresponsibility in Cannery Row
or Tortilla Flat.
The total rejection of middle-class values, including time,
self-discipline, and material achievement, in favor of a cult of
personal violence was to be found in a multitude of literary works from
James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler to the more recent antics of James
Bond. The result has been a total reversal of middle-class values by
presenting as interesting or admirable simple negation of these values
by aimless, shiftless, and totally irresponsible people.
A
similar reversal of values
has flooded the market with novels filled with pointless clinical
descriptions, presented in obscene language and in fictional form, of
swamps of perversions ranging from homosexuality, incest, sadism, and
masochism, to cannibalism, necrophilia, and coprophagia. These
performances, as the critic Edmund Fuller has said, represent not so
much a loss of values as a loss of any conception of the nature of man.
Instead of seeing man the way the tradition of the Greeks and of the
West regarded him, as a creature midway between animal and God, "a
little lower than the angels?" and thus capable of an infinite variety
of experience, these twentieth-century writers have completed the
revolt against the middle classes by moving downward from the late
nineteenth century's view of man as simply a higher animal to their own
view of man as lower than any animal would naturally descend. From this
has emerged the Puritan view of man (but without the Puritan view of
God) as a creature of total depravity in a deterministic universe
without hope of any redemption.
This
point of view, which, in
the period 1550-1650, justified despotism in a Puritan context, now may
be used, with petty-bourgeois support, to justify a new despotism to
preserve, by force instead of conviction, petty-bourgeois values in a
system of compulsory conformity. George Orwell's 1984
has given
us the picture of this system as Hitler's Germany showed us its
practical operation. But in view of the present upsurge of
non-bourgeois social groups and social pressures, this possibility
becomes decreasingly likely, and Barry Goldwater's defeat in the
presidential election of 1964 moved the possibility so far into the
future that the steady change in social conditions makes it remote
indeed.
The
destruction of the middle
classes by the destruction of the middle-class outlook was brought
about to a much greater degree by internal than by external forces. And
the most significant of these influences have been operating within the
middle-class family. One of the most obvious of these has been the
growing affluence of American society, which removed the pressure of
want from the childbearing process. The child who grows up in affluence
is more difficult to instill with the frustrations and drives that were
so basic in the middle-class outlook. For generations, even in fairly
rich families, this indoctrination had continued because of continued
emphasis on thrift and restraints on consumption. By 1937 the world
depression showed that the basic economic problems were not saving and
investment, but distribution and consumption. Thus there appeared a
growing readiness to consume, spurred on by new sales techniques,
installment selling, and the extension of credit from the productive
side to the consumption side of the economic process. As a result, an
entirely new phenomenon appeared in middle-class families, the practice
of living up to, or even beyond, their incomes—an unthinkable
scandal in any nineteenth-century bourgeois family. One incentive in
this direction was the increased emphasis, within the middle-class
ideology, upon the elements of status and ostentatious display of
wealth as status symbols rather than on the elements of frugality and
prudence. Thus affluence weakened both future preference and
self-denying self-discipline training.
Somewhat
related to this was
the influence of the depression of 1929-1933. The generation that was
entering manhood at that time (having been born in the period
1905-1915) felt that their efforts to fulfill their middle-class
ambitions had involved them in intensive hardships and suffering, such
as working while going to college, doing without leisure, cultural
expansion, and travel, and by the 1950's these were determined that
their children must never have it as hard as they had had it. They
rarely saw that their efforts to make things easy for their children in
the 1950's as a reaction against the hardships they had suffered
themselves in the 1930's were removing from their children's training
process the difficulties that had helped to make them achieving men and
successful middle-class persons and that their efforts to do this were
weakening the moral fiber of their children.
Another
element in this
process was a change in the educational philosophy of America and a
somewhat similar change in the country's ideas on the whole process of
child training. Early generations had continued to cling to the
vestiges of the Puritan outlook to the degree that they insisted that
children must be trained under strict discipline, including corporal
punishment. This seventeenth-century idea, by 1920, was being replaced
in American family ideology by an idea of the nineteenth century that
child maturation is an innate process not subject to modification by
outside training. In educational theory this erroneous idea went back
to the Emile of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762), which idealized the state
of nature as equivalent to the Garden of Eden, and believed that
education must consist in leaving a youth completely free so that his
innate goodness could emerge and reveal itself. This idea was
developed, intensified, and given a pseudoscientific foundation by
advances in biology and genetics in the late nineteenth century. By
1910 or so, child-rearing and educational theories had accepted the
idea that man was a biological organism, like any animal, that his
personality was a consequence of hereditary traits, and that each child
had within him a rigid assortment of inherited talents and a natural
rate of maturation in the development of these talents. These ideas
were incorporated in a series of slogans of which two were: "Every
child is different," and "He'll do it when he's ready."
From
all this came a wholesale
ending of discipline, both in the home and in school, and the advent of
"permissive education," with all that it entailed. Children were
encouraged to have opinions and to speak out on matters of which they
were totally ignorant; acquisition of information and intellectual
training were shoved into the background; and restrictions of time,
place, and movement in schools and homes were reduced to a minimum.
Every emphasis was placed on "spontaneity"; and fixed schedules of time
periods or subject matter to be covered were belittled. All this
greatly weakened the disciplinary influence of the educational process,
leaving the new generation much less disciplined, less organized, and
less aware of time than their parents. Naturally this disintegrative
process was less evident among the children of the petty bourgeois than
in the middle class itself. These influences in themselves would have
contributed much to the weakening of the middle-class outlook among the
rising generation, but other, much more profound, influences w ere also
operating. To examine these we must look inside the middle-class family
structure..
In
marriage, as in so many
other things, Western Civilization has been subjected to quite
antithetical theories; these we might call the Western and the Romantic
theories of love and marriage. The Romantic theory of these things was
that each man or woman had a unique personality consisting of inborn
traits, accumulated by inheritance from a unique combination of
ancestors. This is, of course, the same theory that was used to justify
permissive education. In Romantic love, however, the theory went on to
assume, simply as a matter of faith, that for each man or woman there
existed in a world a person of the opposite sex whose personality
traits would just fit into those of his or her destined mate. The only
problem was to find that mate. It was assumed that this would he done,
at first sight, when an almost instantaneous flash of recognition would
reveal to both that they had found the one possible life's partner.
The
idea of love at first
sight as a flash of recognition was closely related to the Manichaean
and Puritan religious idea that God's truth came to men in a similar
flash of illumination (an idea that goes back, like so many of these
ideas, to Plato's theory of knowledge as reminiscence). In its most
extreme form, this Romantic theory of love assumed that each of the
destined lovers was only part of a person, the two parts fitting
together instantly on meeting into a single personality. Associated
witl1 this were a number of other ideas, including the idea that
marriages were “made in heaven," that such a Romantic marriage
was totally satisfying to the partners, and that such a marriage should
be "eternal."
These
ideas of Romantic love
and marriage were much more acceptable to women than to men (for
reasons we have not time to analyze) and were embraced by the middle
class, but not, to any great extent, by other classes. The theory, like
so much of the middle-class outlook, originated among the medieval
heresies, such as Manichaeism (as the Swiss writer Denis de Rougemont
has shown), and was thus from the same tradition that saw the rise of
the bourgeois outlook in the Middle Ages and its reinforcement by the
closely associated Puritan movement of modern times. The Romantic
theory of love was spread through the middle class by incidental
factors, such as that the bourgeoisie were the only social class that
read much, and Romantic love was basically a literary convention in its
propagation whatever it may have been in its origins. It made no real
impression on the other social classes in European society, such as the
peasants, the nobility, or the urban working craftsmen.
Strangely
enough, Romantic
love, accepted as a theory and ideal by the bourgeoisie, had little
influence on middle-class marriages in practice, since these were
usually based on middle-class values of economic security and material
status rather than on love. More accurately, middle-class marriages
were based on these material considerations in fact, while everyone
concerned pretended that they were based on Romantic love. Any
subsequent recognition of this clash between fact and theory often gave
a severe jolt and has sometimes been a subject for literary
examination, as in the first volume of John Galsworthy's The
Forsyte Saga.
Opposed
to this Romantic
theory of love and marriage, and almost equally opposed to the
bourgeois practice of "sensible" marriage, was what we may call the
Western idea of love and marriage. This assumes that personalities are
dynamic and flexible things formed largely by experiences in the past.
Love and marriage between such personalities are, like everything in
the Western outlook, diverse, imperfect, adjustable, creative,
cooperative, and changeable. The Western idea assumes that a couple
come together for many reasons (sex, loneliness, common interests,
similar background, economic and social cooperation, reciprocal
admiration of character traits, and other reasons). It further assumes
that their whole relationship will be a slow process of getting to know
each other and of mutual adjustment—a process that may never end.
The need for constant adjustment shows the Western recognition that
nothing, even love, is final or perfect. This is also shown by
recognition that love and marriage are never total and all-absorbing,
that each partner remains an independent personality with the right to
an independent life. (This is found throughout the Western tradition
and goes back to the Christian belief that each person is a separate
soul with its own, ultimately separate, fate. )
Thus
there appeared in Western
society at least three kinds of marriage, which we may call Romantic,
bourgeois, and Western. The last, without being much discussed (except
in modern books on love and marriage), is probably the most numerous of
the three, and the other two, if they prove successful, do so by
gradually developing into this third kind. Romantic marriage, based on
the "shock of recognition," has in fact come to be based very largely
on sexual attraction, since this is the chief form that love at first
sight can take. Such marriages often fail, since even sex requires
practice and mutual adjustment and is too momentary a human
relationship to sustain a permanent union unless many other common
interests accumulate around it. Even when this occurs and the marriage
becomes a success, in the sense that it persists, it is never total,
and the Romantic delusion that marriage should be totally absorbing of
the time, attention, and energies of its partners, still expected by
many women brought up on the Romantic idea, merely means that the
marriage becomes an enslaving relationship to the husbands and a source
of disappointment and frustration to the wives.
Middle-class
marriage, in
fact, was not romantic, for, in the middle class, marriage, like
everything else, was subject to the middle-class system of values.
Within that value system, middle-class persons chose a marriage partner
who would assist in achieving middle-class goals of status and
achievement. A woman, with her parents' approval, chose a husband who
showed promise of being a good provider and a steady, reliable, social
achiever, who would be able to give her a material status at least as
high as that provided by her own parents. A man chose as a wife one who
showed promise of being a help in his upward struggle, one able to act
as hostess to his aspirant activities and to provide the domestic
decorum and social graces expected of a successful business or
professional man.
Such
a marriage was based,
from both sides, on status factors rather than on personal factors. The
fact that a man was a Yale graduate, was trained for a profession, had
a position with a good firm, drove an expensive car, could order dinner
with assurance in an expensive restaurant, and had already applied for
membership in a golf or country club were not reasons for loving him as
a person, since they were simply the accessories of his status. Yet
middle-class persons married for reasons such as these and, at the same
time, convinced themselves and their friends that they were marrying
for Romantic love (based on the fact that they were, in addition to
their mutual social acceptability, sexually attracted).
For
a time the new marriage
could keep up these pretenses, especially as the elements of sex and
novelty in the relationship helped conceal the contrast between theory
and fact and that the marriage was basically an external and
superficial relationship. But this fact remained, and in time
unconscious frustrations and dissatisfactions began to operate. Often
these did not reach the conscious level, especially a few generations
ago, but today the question is posed by every women's magazine, "Is
your marriage a success?" But unconsciously, long before this,
realization had been growing that the marriage relationship was not
based on love, which must be a recognition and appreciation of personal
qualities, not of status accessories. Without personal feeling based on
such personal qualities, the relationship was really not a personal
relationship and was really not based on love, even when the partners,
with the usual lack of introspection associated with middle-class
minds, still insisted that it was based on love. The consequences of
such unconscious recognition of the real lack of love in the bourgeois
marital relationship, in a society that never stopped reiterating in
song, cinema, magazine, and book the absolute necessity of love for
human happiness and "fulfillment," will be examined in a moment.
Three
generations ago the
bourgeois wife rarely became aware of her frustrations. She was largely
confined to her home, was kept too busy with children and housework to
find much time for meditation on her situation or for comparison with
other wives or the outside world generally. Brought up in a
male-dominated family, she was prepared to accept a similar situation
in her own life. This means that her outside contacts and her general
picture of the world came to her through the screen of her husband's
vision of these things.
The
decrease in the number of
children in middle-class families and the spread of labor-saving
devices, from vacuum cleaners to frozen foods, gave the bourgeois wife
increasing leisure in the 1920's and 1930'5. Enterprising editors like
Edwin Bok filled that leisure with new slick women's magazines (like
the Ladies' Home Journal). Popular novels and, to a
lesser
extent, the early movies, dramatic matinees, and spreading women's
clubs allowed women to build up a vision of a fantasy world of romantic
love and carefree, middle-class housewives with dazzling homes and
well-behaved and well-scrubbed children. By 1925 the average bourgeois
housewife was becoming increasingly frustrated because her own life was
not that pictured in the women's magazines. Her increasing leisure gave
her time to think about it, and her more frequent contact with other
wives encouraged her to raise her voice in criticism of her husband
whose financial inability to provide her with the life she came to
regard as her due seemed to her to justify her desire to nag him onward
to greater effort in pursuit of money. To him this became nagging; to
her it was only an occasional reminder of the expectations under which
she had entered upon the marriage relationship.
While
this was going on, the
outside world was also changing. Women became "emancipated" as a
consequence of World War I, with considerable urging onward from the
women's magazines. Shorter skirts and shorter hair became symbols of
this process, but even more significant was the appearance in the
outside world of a great increase in the number of jobs that could be
done best, or only, by women. As part of this process, there took place
considerable changes in bourgeois morality, the ending of chaperonage,
greater freedom between the sexes, and the acceptance of divorce as
morally possible in bourgeois life (a custom that came in from the
stage and cinema).
As
part of this whole process,
there occurred a dramatic event of great social significance. This was
the reversal in longevity expectations of men and women in adult life.
A century ago (to be sure, in a largely rural context), a
twenty-year-old man could expect to live longer than a twenty-year-old
wife. In fact, such a man might well bury two or three wives, usually
from the mortality associated with childbirth or other female problems.
Today, a twenty-year-old man has little expectation of living as long
as a twenty-year-old woman. To make matters worse, a twenty-year-old
woman a century ago married a man considerably older than herself, at
least in the middle classes, simply because future preference required
that a man be established economically before he began to raise a
family.
Today,
from a series of
causes, such as the extension of the female expectation of life faster
than the male expectation, the increased practice of birth control,
coeducation (which brings the sexes into contact at the same age),
weakening of future preference and of the middle-class outlook
generally, which leads to marriages by couples of about the same age,
husbands now generally die before their wives. Recognition of this, the
increased independence of women, adaptation to taxes and other legal
nuisances, has given rise to joint financial accounts, to property
being put in the wife's name, and to greatly increased insurance
benefits for wives. Gradually the wealth of the country became
female-owned, even if still largely male-controlled.
But
this had subtle results;
it made women more independent and more outspoken. Bourgeois men
gradually came to live under a regime of persistent nagging to become
"better providers." To many men, work became a refuge and a relief from
domestic revelations of the inadequacy of their performance as economic
achievers. This growth of overwork, of constant tension, of frustration
of emotional life and of leisure began to make more and more men
increasingly willing to accept death as the only method of achieving
rest. Bourgeois men literally began to kill themselves, by unconscious
psychic suicide, from overwork, neurotic overindulgence in alcohol,
smoking, work, and violent leisure, and the middle class slowly
increased its proportion of materially endowed widows.
One
notable change in this
whole process was a shift, over the past century, from the
male-dominated family to a female-dominated family. The locality in
which the young couple set up their home had an increasing tendency to
be matrilocal rather than patrilocal. In increasing numbers of cases,
where the young couple married before the groom's educational process
was finished, they even lived with her family (but very rarely with his
family). Increasingly part of the burden of housework was shifted to
the husband: washing dishes, buying groceries, even tending the
children. In 1840 a child could cry at night and would invariably be
tended by its mother, while the father slept peacefully on, totally
unaware of what was going on. By 1960, if a child cried at night, the
chances were as likely as not that the mother would hear nothing while
the father took over the necessary activities. If this were questioned
by anyone, the mother's retort was pointed: "I take care of baby all
day; I don't see why he can't take care of it at night!".
Closely
related to this
confusion, or even reversal, of the social roles of the sexes was
decreasing sexual differentiation in child-rearing practices. As
recently as the 1920's girl babies were reared differently from boys.
They were dressed differently, treated differently, permitted to do
different things, and admonished about different dangers. By 1960,
children, regardless of sex, were all being brought up the same.
Indeed, with short cropped hair and play-suits on both, it became
impossible to be sure which was which. This led to a decrease in the
personality differences of men and women, with males becoming more
submissive and females more aggressive.
This
tendency was accelerated
by new techniques of education, especially in the first twelve years of
life. The neurological maturation of girls was faster shall that of
boys, especially in regard to coordination, such as in feeding oneself,
talking, dressing oneself, toilet-training, learning to read, and
general adjustment to school. The shift from home to school in the
early grades was adjusted to by girls more easily than by boys, partly
because girls were more self-assured and gregarious. By the age of ten
or twelve, girls were developed physically, neurologically,
emotionally, and socially about two years in advance of boys. All this
tended to make boys less self-assured, indecisive, weak, and dependent.
The steady increase in the percentage of women teachers in the lower
grades worked in the same direction, since women teachers favored girls
and praised those attitudes and techniques that were more natural to
girls. New methods, such as the whole-word method of teaching reading
or the use of true-and-false or multiple-choice examinations, were also
better adapted to female than to masculine talents. Less and less
emphasis was placed on critical judgment, while more and more was
placed on intuitive or subjective decisions. In this environment girls
did better, and boys felt inferior or decided that school was a place
for girls and not for boys. The growing aggressiveness of girls pushed
these hesitant boys aside and intensified the problem. As consequences
of this, boys had twice as many "non-readers" as girls, several times
as many stutterers, and many times as many teen-age bed-wetters.
While
the outside world was
decreasing its differential treatment of children on a sexual basis by
treating boys and girls more and more alike (and that treatment was
better adapted to girls than to boys) within the middle-class home, the
growing emotional frustrations of the mother were leading to an
increasing distinction on a sexual basis in her emotional treatment of
her children.
The
earliest feeling of
sensual reassurance and comfort any child experiences is against the
body of its mother. To a boy baby this is a heterosexual relationship,
while to the girl it is a relationship with the same sex. In most cases
the little girl avoids any undesirable persistence of this homosexual
tendency by shifting her admiration and attention to some available
male, usually her father. Thus by the age of six or eight, a daughter
has become "Daddy's girl," awaiting his return from work to communicate
the news of the day, getting his slippers and newspaper, and hoping
that he will read her a story or share her viewing of a favorite
television program before she must go to bed. By the age of twelve, in
a normal girl, this interest in male creatures has begun to shift to
some boy in her class at school. With a boy baby the transference is
later and less gradual. The undesirable aspects of his love for his
mother are avoided by the powerful social pressures of the incest
taboo, but this merely means that the sexual element in his concern for
the opposite sex is suppressed and is undeveloped. Thus there is a
natural, we might almost say biological, tendency in our society for
the sexual development of the boy to be delayed and for the girl to be
free from this retarding influence.
In
the American middle-class
family of today, these influences have been extraordinarily
exaggerated. Because the middle-class marriage is based on social
rather than personal attraction, the emotional relation of the wife to
her husband is insecure, and the more her husband buries himself in his
work, hobbies, or outside interests, the more insecure and
unsatisfactory it becomes for his wife. Part of the wife's unused
emotional energy begins to be expended in her love for her son. At the
same time, because of the emotional insecurity in the mother's
relationship with her husband, the daughter may come to be regarded as
an emotional rival for the husband's affection. This resentment of the
daughter is most likely to occur when there is some other cause of
disturbance in the mother's psychology, especially if this cause is
associated with her relationship to her own father. For example, as
female domination becomes, generation by generation, a more distinctive
feature of American family life, the daughter's shift of attention to
her father becomes less complete, and, by adolescence, she tends to
pity him rather than to admire him and may become relatively ambivalent
in her feelings toward both her father and mother, sometimes hating the
latter for dominating her father and despising his weakness in allowing
it. In such a case, the whole development of which we speak is
accelerated and intensified in the next generation, and the daughter's
relatively ambivalent feelings toward her parents are repeated in her
relatively ambivalent feelings toward her husband. This serves to
intensify both her emotional smothering and overprotection of her son
and her tendency toward emotional rejection of her daughter as a
potential danger to the relatively precarious emotional relationship
between husband and wife.
As
a consequence of this
situation, the frustrated wife has a tendency to cling to her son by
keeping him dependent and immature as long as possible and to seek to
hasten the maturing of her daughter in order to edge her out of the
family circle as soon as possible. The chief consequence of this is the
increasingly late maturity, the weakness, under-sexuality, and
dependence of American boys and American men of middle-class origins
and the increasingly early maturing, aggressiveness, over-sexuality,
and independence of American middle-class girls. The mother's
alienation of the daughter (which often reaches an acute condition of
mutual hatred) may begin in childhood or even at birth (especially if
the girl baby is beautiful, is not nursed by the mother, and is
welcomed with excessive joy by the husband). It usually becomes acute
when the daughter reaches puberty and may become very acute if the
mother, about the same time, is approaching her menopause (which she
often mistakenly feels will reduce her attraction as a woman to her
husband).
During
this whole period, the
mother's rejection of her daughter appears chiefly in her efforts to
force her to grow up rapidly, and leads to premature exposure of the
daughter to such modern monstrosities as preteen "mixed parties,"
training bras, access to overly "sophisticated" movies, books, and
conversations, and the practice of leaving daughters un-chaperoned in
the house with boy classmates, on the early high school or even junior
high school level. Such experiences and the increasingly frequent
clashes of temperament between mother and daughter lead a surprisingly
large percentage of middle-class girls to move from the home before the
age of twenty. And whether she leaves or not, sexual and emotional
maturity comes to the American middle-class girl earlier and earlier,
not only in comparison with the middle-class boy but even in absolute
terms. We are told, for example, that the onset of puberty among
American girls (an event which can be dated exactly by the first
menstrual period) has been occurring at an earlier age by about nine
months for each passing decade. As a result, this milestone is reached
by American girls today up to three years earlier than with American
girls of the early twentieth century.
Over
the same period, the
American middle-class boy has been moving in the opposite direction,
although the physiological element cannot be documented. Indeed, it
need not be. More significant is the changing relationship between the
arrival of sexual awareness and of emotional readiness to accept sex.
There can be no doubt that the American child today, especially in a
middle-class family, becomes aware of sex much earlier than he did a
generation or two ago, and long before he is emotionally ready to face
the fact of his own sexuality. In the nineteenth century three things
came fairly close together in the fifteen to seventeen age bracket: (1)
sexual awareness; (2) emotional readiness for sex; and (3) the ending
of education and the opportunity to seek economic independence from
parents. Today sexual awareness comes very early for all, perhaps
around the age of ten. Emotional readiness to face the fact of one's
own sexuality comes earlier and earlier for the girl today, but later
and later for the boy, chiefly because the middle-class mother forces
independence and recognition of the fact that she is a woman upon her
daughter but forces dependence and blindness to the fact that he is a
man upon her son. And the date for the ending of education and seeking
economic independence from parents gets somewhat later for girls but
immensely later for men (a process that becomes increasingly
extravagant).
One
result of this is that the
much greater (sometimes indefinitely postponed) delay for a boy of
emotional readiness after sexual awareness leaves the boy emotionally
desexed for so long that it affects his sexuality and emotional
maturity adversely and to an increasingly advanced age. But the
opposite is true for a girl, because of the shorter and decreasing lag
of her emotional readiness after her sexual awareness. Lolita, who is
not as rare as the readers of that novel wanted to imagine, becomes
increasingly frequent, and cannot be satisfied by boys of her own age;
consequently she seeks for many reasons, including financial resources
and greater emotional maturity, her sex companions among older men.
On
the other hand, the
position of the middle-class boy becomes even more complex and pitiful,
since he not only must face the fluctuating chronology of these
developments to a greater degree but must free himself from his
emotional dependence on his mother with little help from anyone. If his
father tries to help (and he is the only one who is likely to try to do
so), and insists that his son become a responsible and independent
human being, the mother fights like a tigress to defend her son's
continued immaturity and dependence, accusing the husband of cruelty,
of hatred for his son, and of jealousy of his son's feeling for the
mother. She does not hesitate to use the weapons that she has. They are
many and powerful, including a "reluctant" and ambiguous "revelation"
to the son that his father hates him. Any effort by the father to argue
that true love must seek to help the son advance in maturity and
independence, and that insistence that he avoid or postpone these
advances might well be regarded as hatred rather than love, are usually
blocked with ease. At this stage in the family history, emotional
frustrations and confusions are generally at so high a level that it is
fairly easy for mother and son to agree that black is white. "Momism"
is usually triumphant for a more or less extended period, while normal
adolescent rebellion becomes a wholesale rejection of the father and
only much later a delayed effort at achieving emotional detachment from
the mother.
The
point of all this is that
normal adolescent rebellion has become, in America today, a radical and
wholesale rejection of parental values, including middle-class values,
because of the protracted emotional warfare which now goes on in the
middle-class home with teen-age children. The chief damage in the
situation lies in the pervasive destruction of the adolescent
middle-class boy and his alienation from the achieving aspects of
middle-class culture. The middle-class girl, chiefly because she still
tries to please her father, may continue to be a considerable success
as an achiever, especially in academic life where her earlier successes
make continuance of the process fairly easy. But the middle-class boy
who rejects the achieving aspects of middle-class life often does so in
academic matters that seem to him to be an alien and feminine world
from the beginning. His rejection of this world and his unconscious
yearning for academic failure arise from a series of emotional
influences: (1) a desire to strike back at his father; (2) a desire to
free himself from dependence on his mother and thus to escape from the
feminine atmosphere of much academic life; and (3) a desire to escape
from the endless academic road, going to age twenty-three or later,
which modern technical and social complexities require for access to
positions leading to high middle-class success. The lengthening of the
interval of time between sexual awareness and the ending of education,
from about two years in the 1880'5 to at least ten or twelve years in
the 1960's, has set up such tensions and strains in the bourgeois
American family that they threaten to destroy the family and are
already in the process of destroying much of the middle-class outlook
that was once so distinctive of the American way of life.
From
this has emerged an
almost total breakdown of communication between teen-agers and their
parents' generation. Generally the adolescents do not tell their
parents their most acute problems; they do not appeal to parents or
adults but to each other for help in facing such problems (except where
emotionally starved girls appeal to men teachers); and, when any effort
is made to talk across the gap between the generations, words may pass
but communication does not. Behind this protective barrier a new
teen-age culture has grown up. Its chief characteristic is rejection of
parental values and of middle-class culture. In many ways this new
culture is like that of African tribes: its tastes in music and the
dance, its emphasis on sex play, its increasingly scanty clothing, its
emphasis on group solidarity, the high value it puts on interpersonal
relations (especially talking and social drinking), its almost total
rejection of future preference and its constant efforts to free itself
from the tyranny of time. Teen-age solidarity and sociality and
especially the solidarity of their groups and subgroups are amazingly
African in attitudes, as they gather nightly, or at least on weekends,
to drink "cokes," talk interminably in the midst of throbbing music,
preferably in semidarkness, with couples drifting off for sex play in
the corners as a kind of social diversion, and a complete emancipation
from time. Usually they have their own language, with vocabulary and
constructions so strange that parents find them almost
incomprehensible. This Africanization of American society is gradually
spreading with the passing years to higher age levels in our culture
and is having profound and damaging effects on the transfer of
middle-class values to the rising generation. A myriad of symbolic
acts, over the last twenty years, have served to demonstrate the
solidarity of teen culture and its rejection of middle-class values.
Many of these involve dress and "dating customs," both major issues in
the Adolescent-Parental Cold War.
In
the days of Horatio Alger,
the marks of youthful middle-class aspiration were such obvious symbols
as well-polished shoes, a necktie and suit coat, a clean-shaved face
and well-cut hair, and punctuality. For almost a generation now, teen
culture has rejected the necktie and suit coat. Well-polished shoes
gave way to dirty saddle shoes, and these in turn to "loafers" and
thong sandals. Shaving became irregular, especially when schools were
not in session; haircuts were postponed endlessly, with much
parental-adolescent bickering. Fewer and fewer young people carried
watches, even when they lived, as on a college campus, in fairly
scheduled lives.
"Dating,"
as part of
adolescent rebellion, became less and less formalized. The formal
middle-class dance of a generation ago, arranged weeks ahead and with a
dance program, became almost obsolete. Everything has to be totally
"casual" or today's youth rejects it. By 1947 a dance program (listing
the dances in numbered order with the girl's partner for each written
down) was obsolete. "Going steady," which meant dancing only with the
boy who invited her, became established, a complete rejection of the
middle-class dance whose purpose was to provide the girl with a maximum
number of different partners in order to widen her acquaintance with
matrimonial possibilities.
"Going
steady," like much of
adolescent culture of the "jive" era, was derived from the gangster
circles of south Chicago and was first introduced to middle-class
knowledge through George Raft movies of the 1930's. It was satirized in
a now forgotten popular song of the 1920's called "I Want to Dance with
the Guy What Brung Me." But by 1947 it was the way of life of much of
adolescent America. As a consequence, teen-age couples at high school
dances "sat out" most of the evening in bored silence or chatted in a
desultory fashion with friends of the same sex. The "jive" language of
the period also had a south-Chicago origin and has been traced back, to
a large extent, to a saloon run by a certain local oracle called "Hep"
early in the twentieth century.
Fortunately,
"going steady"
was only a brief, if drastic, challenge to parental attitudes, and was
soon replaced by tribal gregariousness and tolerant sexual
broad-mindedness, which might be called "clique going," since it
involved social solidarity (sometimes sexual promiscuity) within a
small group, usually of ten or less. This became, to their adults, the
"teen-age gang," which still thrives, but never in a very formal way in
middle-class circles as it does in lower-class ones. Two casualties of
this process are sexual jealousy and sexual privacy, both of which have
largely disappeared among many upper-middle-class young people. In some
groups sex has become a purely physiological act, somewhat like eating
or sleeping. In others, sexual experience is restricted to loved ones,
but since these youths love many persons (or even love everyone) this
is much less of a restriction than it might seem to a middle-class
mind. Generally a sharp distinction is made between "loving someone"
(which justifies sex) and being "in love" with someone (which justifies
monogamous behavior).
But
there is widespread
tolerance and endless discussion of all these issues. This discussion,
like most of the adolescents' endless talk, never reaches any decisions
but leaves the question open or decides that "it all depends on how you
look at it." As part of such discussions, there is complete casual
frankness as to who has had or is having sexual experiences with whom.
Widely permeated with an existentialist outlook, the adolescent society
regards each sexual experience as an isolated, context-less act, with
no necessary cause or consequence, except the momentary merging of two
lonelinesses in an act of togetherness. Among middle-class youth it is
accompanied by an atmosphere of compassion or pity rather than of
passion or even love (the way Holden Caulfield might experience sex).
Among lower-class persons it is much more likely to be physiologically
inspired and associated with passion or roughness. This often attracts
middle-class girls who become dissatisfied with the weakness and
under-sexuality of middle-class boys. But petty-bourgeois youth, as
befits the final defenders of middle-class conventionality and
hypocrisy, still tend to approach sex with secrecy and even guilt.
Because
of the breakdown of
communication between the generations of middle-class families, parents
know little of this side of teen-age culture, at least so far as their
own children are concerned. They usually know much more about the
behavior of their friends' children, because they are more likely to
catch glimpses of the behavior of the latter in unguarded moments. On
the whole, middle-class parents today are surprisingly (and secretly)
tolerant about the behavior of their daughters so long as they do not
create a public scandal by "getting into trouble." Mothers usually feel
that their sons are too young and should wait for sexual experience,
while fathers sometimes secretly think it might do their son's
immaturity some good. When middle-class children get into trouble, or
any kind of a scrape, their only large anxiety is to prevent their
parents from finding out. Petty-bourgeois parents, as the last defense
of middle-class conventionality, generally disapprove of any illicit
sexual experiences by any of their children. Naturally there are great
variations in all these things, with religion as the chief varying
factor and variety of local customs in secondary significance. However
even in religious circles, the behavior of the young is not at all what
their adults expect or believe. For example, the number of Roman
Catholic young people who have premarital, or even casual, sexual
experiences is much larger than the number who are willing to eat meat
on Friday..
One
reason for the spreading
of these relaxed ideas on behavior is the devastating honesty of the
younger generation, especially about themselves. This seems to be based
on their gregarious garrulity. An earlier generation had its share of
illicit actions of various kinds, but they kept these a secret and
regarded each as an aberrant action that was psychologically excluded
from their accepted social patterns and would not, therefore, be
repeated. This view continued, no matter how often it was repeated. But
the younger generation of today has accepted the existentialist idea,
"I am what I do." The adolescent tells his group what he did, and they
usually agree that this is the way he is, however surprising it is.
Their whole attitude is pragmatic, almost experimental: "This is what
happened. This is the way things are. This is the way I am." They are
engaged in a search for themselves as individuals, something they were
called upon to do in the early grades of school, thanks to the
misconceptions of John Dewey, and they are quite alien to any theory
that the self is a creature of trained patterns and is not a creature
of discovered secrets. Now, in the 1960's, this opinion of man's nature
is changing and, as a consequence of George Orwell, mishmash
conceptions of brainwashing, and the revival of Pavlovian psychology
through the work of men like Professor B. F. Skinner of Harvard, the
idea of personality as something trained under discipline to a desired
pattern is being revived. With this revival of a basically Puritanical
idea of human nature reappears the usual Puritan errors on the nature
of evil and acceptance of the theory of the evil of human nature (as
preached in William Golding's Lord of the Flies).
The
new outlook emerging from
all this is complex, tentative, and full of inconsistencies, but it
will surely play an increasing role in our history as the younger
generation grows older, abandoning many of the ideas they now hold,
with increasing responsibility; but at the same time the new outlook
will force very great modifications in the American point of view as a
whole.
This
new outlook of the rising
generation of the middle class has a negative and a positive side. Its
negative side can be seen in its large-scale unconcern for the basic
values of the middle-class outlook, its rejection of self-discipline,
of future preference, of infinitely expandable material living
standards, and of material symbols of middle-class status. In general
this negative attitude appears in many of the activities we have
described and above all in a profound rejection of abstractions,
slogans, cliches, and conventions. These are treated with tolerant
irony tinged with contempt. The targets of these attitudes are the
general values of the petty bourgeoisie and of middle-class parents:
position in society, "what people think," "self-respect," "keeping up
with the Joneses," "the American Way of Life," "virtue," "making
money," "destroying our country's enemies," virginity, respect for
established organizations (including their elders, the clergy,
political leaders, or big businessmen), and such.
The
shift from a destructive
or negative to a positive view of the new American outlook is, to some
extent, chronological; it may be seen in the former popularity of Elvis
Presley and the newer enthusiasm for Joan Baez (or folk singers
generally). There is also a social distinction here to some extent, as
Elvis remains, to a fair degree, popular with the lower classes, while
Joan is a middle-class (or even college-level) favorite. But the
contrast in outlook between the two is what is significant. Joan is
gentle, compassionate, unemphatic, totally honest, concerned about
people as individuals, free of pretenses (singing quietly in a simple
dress and bare feet), full of love and fundamental human decency, and
committed to these.
The
rejection of
acquisitiveness and even of sensuality may be seen in the change in
tastes in movies, especially in the popularity of foreign films
directed by men like Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini. The latter's La
Dolce Vita
(1961), a smash hit in the United States, was a portrayal of the
meaningless disillusionment of material success and of sensuality in
contrast with the power and mystery of nature (symbolized by a giant
fish pulled from the sea and left to die by thoughtless men and the
direct honesty and innocence of a child watching the scene).
This
rejection of material
things and of sensuality is, in some strange way, leading the younger
generation to some kind of increased spirituality. Property and food
mean very little to them. They share almost everything, give to others
when they have very little for themselves, expect reciprocal sharing
but not repayment, and feel free to "borrow" in this way without
permission. Three meals a day is out; in fact, meals are almost out.
They eat very little and irregularly, in sharp contrast to the middle
classes early in the century who overate, as many mature middle-class
persons still do. The petty bourgeoisie and lower classes still tend to
overeat or to be neurotic snackers, but middle-class youth is almost
monastic in its eating. Food just is not important, unless it is an
occasion for a crowd to gather. Much of this decrease in emphasis on
food is a consequence of their rejection of the discipline of time.
Everything in their lives is irregular (including their natural bodily
processes). They usually get up too late to eat breakfast, snack
somewhere along the day, refuse to carry watches, and often have no
idea what day of the week it is.
This
new outlook is basically
existentialist in its emphasis on direct, momentary personal
experience, especially with other people. It emphasizes people, and
finds the highest good of life in interpersonal relations, handled
generally with compassion and irony. The two chief concerns of life are
"caring" and "helping." "Caring," which they usually call "love," means
a general acceptance of the fact that people matter and are subjects of
concern. This love is diffuse and often quite impersonal, not aimed at
a particular individual or friend but at anyone, at persons in general,
and especially at persons one does not know at all, as an act of
recognition, almost of expiation, that we are all helpless children
together. The whole idea is very close to Christ's message, "Love one
another," and has given rise to the younger generation's passionate
concern with remote peoples, the American Negroes, and the outcast
poor. It is reflected in the tremendous enthusiasm among the young for
the Peace Corps, civil rights, and racial equality, and the attack on
poverty, all of which have much greater support among middle-class
young people than can be measured even by the surprisingly large
numbers who actively do something.
This
desire to do something is
what I call "helping." It is a strange and largely symbolic kind of
helping, since there is with it a fairly widespread feeling that
nothing that the helper can do will make any notable dent in the
colossal problem; none the less, there is an obligation to do
something, not only as a symbolic act but also as an almost masochistic
rejection of the middle-class past. The younger generation who support
the Peace Corps, the attack on poverty, and the drive for Negro rights
have an almost irresistible compulsion to do these things as a
demonstration of their rejection of their parents' value system, and as
some restitution for the adults' neglect of these urgent problems. But
the real motivation behind the urge "to help" is closely related with
the urge "to care"; it consists simply of a desire to show another
human being that he is not alone. There is little concern for human
perfectibility or social progress such as accompanied middle-class
humanitarianism in the nineteenth century.
Both
of these urges are
existentialist. They give rise to isolated acts that have no
significant context. Thus an act of loving or helping has no sequence
of causes leading up to it or of consequences flowing from it. It
stands alone as an isolated experience of togetherness and of brief
human sharing. This failure or lack of context for each experience
means a failure or lack of meaning, for meaning and significance arise
from context; that is, from the relationship of the particular
experience to the whole picture. But today's youth has no concern for
the whole picture; they have rejected the past and have very little
faith in the future. Their rejection of intellect and their lack of
faith in human reason gives them no hope that any meaning can be found
for any experience, so each experience becomes an end in itself,
isolated from every other experience.
This
skepticism about meaning,
closely allied with their rejection of organizations and of
abstractions, is also closely related with a failure of responsibility.
Since consequences are divorced from the act or experience itself, the
youth is not bound by any relationship between the two. The result is a
large-scale irresponsibility. If a young person makes an appointment,
he may or may not keep it. He may come very late or not at all. In any
case, he feels no shame at failure to carry out what he had said he
would do. In fact, the young people of today constantly speak of what
they are going to do—after lunch, tonight, tomorrow, next
week—but they rarely do what they say. To them it was always very
tentative, a hope rather than a statement, and binding on no one. If
the young fail to do what they say, they are neither embarrassed nor
apologetic, and hardly think it necessary to explain or even mention
it. Their basic position is that everyone concerned had the same
freedom to come or not, and if you showed up while they did not, this
does not give you any right to complain because you also had the same
right to stay away as they had.
The
other great weakness of
the younger generation is their lack of self-discipline. They are as
episodic in their interests and ambitions as they are in their actions.
They can almost kill themselves with overwork for something that
catches their fancy, usually something associated with their group or
with "caring" and "helping," but in general they have little tenacity
of application or self-discipline in action.
They
lack imagination also, an
almost inevitable consequence of an outlook that concentrates on
experiences without context. Their experiences are necessarily limited
and personal and are never fitted into a larger picture or linked with
the past or the future. As a result they find it almost impossible to
picture anything different from what it is, or even to see what it is
from any long-range perspective. This means that their outlooks, in
spite of their wide exposure to different situations through the mass
media or by personal travel, are very narrow. They lack the desire to
obtain experience vicariously from reading, and the vicarious
experiences that they get from talk (usually with their fellows) are
rarely much different from their own experiences. As a result, their
lives, while erratic, are strangely dull and homogeneous. Even their
sexual experiences are routine, and any efforts to escape this by
experimenting with homosexuality, alcohol, drugs, extra-racial
partners, or other unnecessary fringe accessories generally leave it
dull and routine.
Efforts
by middle-class
parents to prevent their children from developing along these
non-middle-class lines are generally futile. An effort to use parental
discipline to enforce conformity to middle-class values or behavior
means that the child will quote all the many cases in the neighborhood
where the children are not being disciplined. He is encouraged in his
resistance to parental discipline by its large-scale failure all around
him. Moreover, if his parents insist on conformity, he has an
invincible weapon to use against them: academic failure. This weapon is
used by boys rather than by girls, partly because it is a weapon for
the weak, and involves doing nothing rather than doing something, but
also because the school seems to most middle-class boys an alien place
and an essential element in their general adolescent feeling of
homelessness. Girls who are pressured by their parents to conform
resist by sexual delinquencies more often than boys, and in extreme
cases get pregnant or have sexual experiences with Negro boys. From
this whole context of adolescent resistance to parental pressures to
conform to middle-class behavior flows a major portion of middle-class
adolescent delinquency, which is quite distinct in its origin from the
delinquency of the lowest, outcast class in the slums. It involves all
kinds of activities from earliest efforts to smoke or drink, through
speeding, car stealing, and vandalism of property, to major crimes and
perversions. It is quite different in origin and usually in character
from the delinquencies of the uprooted, which are either crimes for
personal benefits (such as thievery and mugging) or crimes of social
resentment (such as slashing tires and convertible tops or smashing
school windows). Some activities, of course, such as automobile
stealing, appear among both.
These
remarks, it must be
emphasized, apply to the middle class, and are not intended to apply to
the other classes in American society. The aristocrats, for example,
have considerable success in passing along their outlook to their
children, partly because it is presented as a class or family attitude,
and not as a parental or personal attitude, partly because their
friends and close associates are also aristocrats or semi-aristocrats,
and rejection of their point of view tends to leave an aristocratic
adolescent much more personally isolated than rejection of his parents'
view leaves a middle-class adolescent (indeed, the latter finds group
togetherness only if he does reject his parents), partly because there
is much more segregation of the sexes among aristocrats than in the
middle class, but chiefly because the aristocrats use a separate school
system, including disciplined boarding schools. The use of the latter,
the key to the long persistence of the aristocratic tradition in
England, makes it possible for outsiders to discipline adolescents
without disrupting the family. Among the middle class, effort to
discipline adolescents is largely in the hands of parents, but the
effort to do so tends to disrupt the family by setting husband against
wife and children against parents. As a result, discipline is usually
held back to retain at least the semblance of family solidarity as
viewed from the outside world (which is what really counts with
middle-class people). But the aristocratic private boarding school,
modeled on those of England in accord with the basic Anglophilism of
the American aristocracy, is sexually segregated from females, tough,
sports-orientated, usually High Episcopal (almost Anglican), and
disciplines its charges with the importance of the group, their duty to
the group, and the painfulness of the ultimate punishment, which is
alienation from the group. As a consequence of this, any resentment the
aristocratic adolescent may have is aimed at his masters, not at his
home and parents, and home comes to represent a relatively desirable
place to which he is admitted occasionally as a reward for long weeks
on the firing line at school. Such a boy is removed from the smothering
influence of "momism," grows up relatively shy of girls, has more than
his share of homosexual experiences (to which he may succumb
completely), but, on the whole, usually grows up to be a very
energetic, constructive, stable, and self-sacrificing citizen, prepared
to inflict the same training process on his own sons.
Unfortunately
for the
aristocrat who wishes to expose his son to the same training process as
that which molded his own outlook, he finds this a difficult thing to
do because the organizations that helped form him outside the family,
the Episcopal Church (or its local equivalent), the boarding school,
the Ivy League university, and the once-sheltered summer resort have
all changed and are being invaded by a large number of non-aristocratic
intruders who change the atmosphere of the whole place.
This
change in atmosphere is
hard to define to anyone who has not experienced it personally.
Fundamentally it is a distinction between playing the game and playing
to win. The aristocrat plays for the sake of the game or the team or
the school. He plays whether he is much good or not, because he feels
that he is contributing to a community effort even if he is on the
scrubs rather than a star or starting player. The newer recruits to
former aristocratic educational institutions play for more personal
reasons, with much greater intensity, even fanaticism, and play to
excel and to distinguish themselves from others.
One
reason for the
accessibility of formerly aristocratic organizations to people of
non-aristocratic origin has already been noted, but probably was
discounted by the reader. That is my statement that the American
Establishment, which is so aristocratic and Anglophile in its
foundation, came to accept the liberal ideology The Episcopal Church,
exclusive boarding schools, and Ivy League universities (like Eton and
Oxford) decided that they must open their door to the "more able" of
the non-aristocratic classes. Accordingly, they established
scholarships, recruited for these in lower schools they had never
thought of before, and made efforts to have their admission
requirements and examinations fit the past experiences of
non-aristocratic applicants. By the end of the 1920's, Philips Exeter
Academy was welcoming on scholarships the sons of laboring immigrants
with polysyllabic names, and by the 1950's Episcopal clergymen were
making calls on "likely-looking" Negro families.
As
a consequence of this, the
sons of aristocrats found themselves being squeezed out of the
formative institutions that had previously trained their fathers and,
at the same time, discovered that these institutions were themselves
changing their character and becoming dominated by petty-bourgeois
rather than by aristocratic values. At the alumni reunions of June
1964, the President of Harvard was asked in an open forum what the
questioner should do with his son, recently rejected for admission to
Harvard in spite of the fact that the son was descended from the Mayflower
voyagers
by eleven consecutive generations of Harvard men. To this tragic
question President Pusey replied: "I don't know what we can do about
your son. We can't send him back, because the Mayflower
isn't
running any more." Despite this facetious retort, which may have been
called forth by the inebriate condition of the questioner, the fact
remains that the aristocratic outlook has a great deal to contribute to
any organization fortunate enough to share it. Among other things, it
has kept Harvard (where aristocratic control continued almost to the
present day) at the top or close to the top of the American educational
hierarchy decade after decade.
The
... effort, by aristocrats
and democrats alike, to make the social ladder in America a ladder of
opportunity rather than a ladder of privilege has opened the way to a
surge of petty-bourgeois recruits over the faltering bodies of the
disintegrating middle class.
The
petty bourgeois are rising
in American society along the channels established in the great
American hierarchies of business, the armed forces, academic life, the
professions, finance, and politics. They are doing this not because
they have imagination, broad vision, judgment, moderation, versatility,
or group loyalties but because they have neurotic drives of personal
ambition and competitiveness, great insecurities and resentments,
narrow specialization, and fanatical application to the task before
each of them. Their fathers, earning $100 a week as bank clerks or
insurance agents while unionized bricklayers were getting $120 a week
when they cared to work, embraced the middle-class ideology with
tenacity as the chief means (along with their "white collared"
clothing) of distinguishing themselves from the unionized labor they
feared or hated. Their wives, whom they had married because they held
the same outlook, looked forward eagerly to seeing their sons become
the kind of material success the father had failed to reach. The family
accepted a common outlook that believed specialization and hard work
either in business or in a profession, would win this material success.
The
steps up that ladder of
success were clearly marked—to be the outstanding boy student and
graduate in school, to win entrance to and graduation from "the best"
university possible (naturally an Ivy League one), and then the final
years of specialized application in a professional school.
Many
of these eager workers
headed for medicine, because to them medicine, despite the ten years of
necessary preparation, meant up to $40,000 a year income by age fifty.
As a consequence, the medical profession in the United States ceased,
very largely, to be a profession of fatherly confessors and
un-professing humanitarians and became one of the largest groups of
hardheaded petty-bourgeois hustlers in the United States, and their
professional association became the most ruthlessly materialistic
lobbying association of any professional group. Similar persons with
lesser opportunities were shunted off the more advantageous rungs of
the ladder into second-best schools and third-rate universities. All
flocked into the professions, even to teaching (which, on the face of
it, might have expected that its practitioners would have some
allegiance to the truth and to helping the young to realize their less
materialistic potentialities), where they quickly abandoned the
classroom for the more remunerative tasks of educational
administration. And, of course, the great mass of these eager beavers
went into science or business, preferably into the largest
corporations, where they looked with fishy-eyed anticipation at those
rich, if remote, plums of vice-presidencies, in General Motors, Ford,
General Dynamics, or International Business Machines.
The
success of these
petty-bourgeois recruits in America's organizational structure rested
on their ability to adapt their lives to the screening processes the
middle classes had set up covering access to the middle-class
organizational structures. The petty bourgeoisie, as the last fanatical
defenders of the middle-class outlook, had, in excess degree, the
qualities of self-discipline and future preference the middle classes
had established as the unstated assumptions behind their screens of
aptitude testing, intelligence evaluation, motivational research, and
potential-success measurements. Above all, the American public school
system, permeated with the unstated assumptions of middle-class values,
was ideally suited to demonstrate petty-bourgeois "success quotients."
These successive barriers in the middle-class screening process were
almost insurmountable to the working class and the outcast, became very
difficult to the new generation of middle-class children, who rejected
their parents' value system, but were ideally adapted to the
petty-bourgeois anxiety neuroses.
By
1960, however, big
business, government civil service, and the Ivy League universities
were becoming disillusioned with these petty-bourgeois recruits. The
difficulty was that these new recruits were rigid, unimaginative,
narrow and, above all, illiberal at a time when liberalism (in the
sense of reaching tentative and approximate decisions through flexible
community interaction) was coming to be regarded as the proper approach
to large organization problems. In his farewell report the Chairman of
Harvard's Admissions Committee, Wilbur Bender, summed up the problem
this way:
"The
student who ranks first
in his class may be genuinely brilliant or he may be a compulsive
worker or the instrument of domineering parents' ambitions or a
conformist or a self-centered careerist who has shrewdly calculated his
teachers' prejudices and expectations and discovered how to regurgitate
efficiently what they want. Or he may have focused narrowly on
grade-getting as compensation for his inadequacies in other areas,
because he lacks other interests or talents or lacks passion and warmth
or normal healthy instincts or is afraid of life. The top high school
student is often, frankly, a pretty dull and bloodless, or peculiar
fellow. The adolescent with wide-ranging curiosity and stubborn
independence, with a vivid imagination and desire to explore
fascinating bypaths, to follow his own interests, to contemplate, to
read the un-required books, the boy filled with sheer love of life and
exuberance, may well seem to his teachers troublesome, undisciplined, a
rebel, may not conform to their stereotype, and may not get the top
grades and the highest rank in class. He may not even score at the
highest level in the standard multiple choice admissions tests, which
may well reward the glib, facile mind at the expense of the
questioning, independent, or slower but more powerful, more subtle, and
more interesting and original mind."
These
remarks bring us close
to one of the major problems in American culture today. We need a
culture that will produce people eager to do things, but we need even
more a culture that will make it possible to decide what to do. This is
the old division of means and goals. Decisions about goals require
values, meaning, context, perspective. They can be set, even
tentatively and approximately, only by people who have some inkling of
the whole picture. The middle-class culture of our past ignored the
whole picture and destroyed our ability to see it by its emphasis on
specialization. Just as mass production came to be based on
specialization, so human preparation for making decisions about goals
also became based on specialization. The free elective system in higher
education was associated with choice of a major field of
specialization, and all the talk about liberal arts, outside electives,
general education, or required distribution were largely futile. They
were futile because no general view of the whole picture could be made
simply by attaching together a number of specialist views of narrow
fields, for the simple reason that each specialist field looks entirely
different, presenting different problems and requiring different
techniques, when it is placed in the general picture. This simple fact
still has not been realized in those circles that talk most about
broadening outlooks. This was clearly shown in the influential Harvard
Report on General Education (1945). As one reviewer of this document
said, "It cost $40,000 to produce and a better answer could have been
found by buying one of the books of Sir Richard Livingstone for $2.75."
This remark is equally mistaken on the opposite side, a fact that shows
that the solution can be found only by all parties freeing themselves
from their preconceptions by getting as familiar as possible with the
diverse special areas in a skeptical way.
Means
are almost as difficult
as ends. In fact, personal responsibility, self-discipline, some sense
of time value and future preference, and, above all, an ability to
distinguish what is important from u hat is merely necessary must be
found. simply as valuable attributes of human beings as human beings.
Neither America nor the world can be saved by a wholesale re-creation
of African social realities here in consequence of our rejection of the
middle-class outlook that brought us this far. Here we must
discriminate. We have an achieving society because we have an achieving
outlook in our society. And that achieving outlook has been, over the
last few centuries, the middle-class outlook. But there are other
achieving outlooks. An achieving society could be constructed on the
aristocratic outlook, on the scientific outlook (pursuit of truth), on
a religious basis, and probably on a large number of other outlooks.
There is no need to go back to the middle-class outlook, which really
killed itself by successfully achieving u hat it set out to do. But
parts of it we need, and above all we need an achieving outlook. It
might be pleasant just to give up, live in the present, enjoying
existential personal experiences, living like lotus-eaters from our
amazing productive system, without personal responsibility,
self-discipline, or thought of the future. But this is impossible,
because the productive system would itself collapse, and our external
enemies would soon destroy us.
We
must have an achieving
society and an achieving outlook. These will inevitably contain parts
of the middle-class outlook, but these parts will unquestionably be
fitted together to serve quite different purposes. Future preference
and self-discipline were originally necessary in our society so that
people would restrict consumption and accumulate savings that could be
spent to provide investment in capital equipment. Now we no longer need
these qualities for this purpose, since flows of income in our economy
provide these on an institutional basis, but we still need these
qualities so that young people will be willing to undergo the years of
hard work and training that will prepare them to work in our complex
technological society. We must get au av from the older crass
materialism and egocentric selfish individualism, and pick up some of
the younger generation's concern for the community and their
fellow-men. The unconventionality of this younger group may make them
more able to provide the new outlook and innovation every society
requires, but they cannot do this if they lack imagination or
perspective.
Above
all, we must bring
meaning back into human experience. This, like establishing an
achieving outlook, can be done by going backward in our Western
tradition to the period before we had any bourgeois outlook. For our
society had both meaning and purpose long before it had any middle
class. Indeed, these are intrinsic elements in our society. In fact,
the middle-class outlook obtained its meaning and purpose from the
society where it grew up; it did not give meaning and purpose to the
society. And capitalism, along with the middle-class outlook, became
meaningless and purposeless when it so absorbed men's time and energies
that men lost touch with the meaning and purpose of the society in
which capitalism was a brief and partial aspect. But as a consequence
of the influence of capitalism and of the middle classes, the tradition
was broken, and the link between the meaning and purpose of our society
as it was before the middle-class revolution is no longer connected
with the search for meaning and purpose by the new post-middle-class
generation. This can be seen even in those groups like the Christian
clergy who insisted that they were still clinging to the basic
Christian tradition of our society. They were doing no such thing, but
instead were usually offering us meaningless verbiage or unrealistic
abstractions that had little to do with our desire to experience and
live in a Christian way here and now.
Unfortunately,
very few
people, even highly regarded experts on the subject, have any very
clear idea of what is the tradition of the West or how it is based on
the fundamental need of Western Civilization to reconcile its
intellectual outlook with the basic facts of the Christian experience.
The reality of the world, time, and the flesh forced, bit by bit,
abandonment of the Greek rationalistic dualism (as in Plato) that
opposed spirit and matter and made knowledge exclusively a concern of
the former, achieved by internal illumination. This point of view that
gave final absolute knowledge ... was replaced in the period 1100-1350
by the medieval point of view that derived knowledge from the tentative
and partial information obtained through sensual experience from which
man derived conceptual universals that fitted the real individual cases
encountered in human experience only approximately. Aquinas, who said,
"Nothing exists in the intelligence which was not first present in the
senses," also said, "We cannot shift from the ideal to the actual." On
this epistemological basis was established the root foundations of both
modern science and modern liberalism, with a very considerable boost to
both from the Franciscan nominalists of the century following Aquinas.
The
Classical world had
constantly fallen into intellectual error because it never solved the
epistemological problem of the relationship between the theories and
concepts in men's minds and the individual objects of sensual
experience. The medieval period made a detailed examination of this
problem, but its answer was ignored when post-Renaissance thinkers
broke the tradition in philosophy because they felt it necessary to
break the tradition in religion. From Descartes onward, this
epistemological problem was ignored or considered in a childish way, as
if the medieval thinkers had never examined it. Today it remains as the
great philosophic problem of our age. Irrational Activism, semanticism,
and existentialism flourish because the present century has no answer
to the epistemological problem. In fact, most contemporary thinkers do
not even recognize that there is a problem. But Bergson's rejection of
intelligence and his advocacy of intuition was based, like the
Irrational Activism whence it sprang, on recognition of the fact that
the space-time continuum in which man generally operates is
nonrational. The whole existential movement was based on the same idea.
Semanticism
tried to solve the
problem, in a similar fashion, by bringing the infinitely varied and
dynamic quality of actuality into the human mind by insisting that the
meaning of each word must follow the dynamics of the world by changing
every time it is used. All these movements tried to reject logic and
rationality from the human thinking process because they are not found
in space-time actuality. But the tradition of the West, as clearly
established in the Christian religion and in medieval philosophy, was
that man must use rationality to the degree it is possible in handling
a universe whose ultimate nature is well beyond man's present rational
capability to grasp. This is the conclusion that the success of the
West in World War II forces the West and the world to recognize once
again. And in recognizing it, we must return to the tradition, so
carelessly discarded in the fifteen century, which had shown the
relationship between thought and action.
Alfred
Korzybski argued (in Science and Sanity)
that mental health depended on successful action and that successful
action depended on an adequate relationship between the irrational
nature of the objective world and the vision of the world that the
actor has subjectively in his head. Korzybski's solution, like most
other thinkers over the last two generations, has been to bring the
irrationality of the world into man's thinking processes. This solution
of the problem is now bankrupt, totally destroyed at Hiroshima and
Berlin in 1945. The alternative solution lies in the tradition of the
West. It must be found, and the link with our past must be restored so
that the tradition may resume the process of growth that was
interrupted so long ago.
Korzybski,
Bergson, and the
rest of them are quite correct—most of man's experience takes
place in an irrational actuality of space-time. But we now know that
man must deal with his experience through subjective processes that are
both rational and logical (using rules of thought explicitly understood
by all concerned); and the necessary adjustments between the
conclusions reached by thought and the confused irrationalities of
experience must be made in the process of shifting from thought to
action, and not in the thinking process itself. Only thus will the West
achieve successful thought, successful action, and the sanity that is
the link between these two.
As
a result of this rupture of
tradition, the thinkers of today are fumbling in an effort to find a
meaning that will satisfy them. This is as true of the contemporary
babbling philosophers as it is of the younger generation who fumblingly
try to express Christ's message of love and help without any apparent
realization that Christ's message is available in writing and that
generations of thinkers debated its implications centuries ago. The
meaning the present generation is seeking can be found in our own past.
Part of it, concerned with loving and helping, can be found in Christ
by going back to the age before his message was overwhelmed in
ritualism and bureaucracy. Part of it can be found in the basic
philosophic outlook of the West as seen in medieval philosophy and the
scientific method that grew out of it.
The
problem of meaning today
is the problem of how the diverse and superficially self-contradictory
experiences of men can be put into a consistent picture that will
provide contemporary man with a convincing basis from which to live and
to act. This can be achieved only by a hierarchy that distinguishes
what is necessary from what is important, as the medieval outlook did.
But any modern explanation based on hierarchy must accept dynamicism as
an all-pervasive element in the system, as the medieval hierarchy so
signally failed to do. The effort of Teilhard de Chardin to do this has
won enormous interest in recent years, but its impact has been much
blunted by the fact that his presentation contained, in reciprocal
relationship, a deficiency of courage and a surplus of deliberate
ambiguity.
However,
the real problem does
not rest so much in theory as in practice. The real value of any
society rests in its ability to develop mature and responsible
individuals prepared to stand on their own feet, make decisions, and be
prepared to accept the consequences of their decisions and actions
without whining or self-justification. This was the ideal that the
Christian tradition established long ago, and in consequence of its
existence, our Western society, whatever its deficiencies, has done
better than any other society that has ever existed. If it has done
less well recently than earlier in its career (a disputable point of
view), this weakness can be remedied only hy some reform in its methods
of child-rearing that will increase its supply of mature and
responsible adults.
Once
this process had been
established, the adults thus produced can be relied upon to adopt from
our Western heritage of the past a modified ideology that will fit the
needs of the present as well as the traditions of the past. And if
Western culture can do that, either in America or in Europe, it need
fear no enemies from within or from without.
Chapter
76—European Ambiguities
The
problems facing Europe
cannot be presented in a simple outline such as we have offered for
those of the United States. Europe is too diverse, on a national or
even regional basis; its long history has left too many influential
survivals as exceptions to any simple analysis; and its class lines are
more complicated and much more rigid than in America. Nonetheless, it
is probably true to way that America has passed Europe in the evolution
of our Western Civilization and that Europeans in general are concerned
with problems, notably the problems of material acquisition, which were
dominant in the United States almost a generation ago. However, because
of the diversity of Europe, any statements we make about this situation
would almost certainly have more exceptions than confirming examples,
in Europe as a whole.
The
general picture we might
draw is of a continent deprived, for at least one full generation
(1914-1950), of political, economic, social, and psychological
security; in consequence, that area came to regard these things as
major aims in its personal behavior patterns. So many European families
were deprived of even the necessary materials of living that they are
today, to varying degrees, obsessed with the desire for these, now that
it seems possible to get them. For this reason, the chief impression
the visiting American brings back from Europe is one of grasping
materialism and exaggerated individualism. This is a spirit akin to
America of the 1920's rather than of the 1950's. It is found, with a
variety of emphasis, among the peasants, the workers, and even the
aristocracy, as well as among the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie,
where we expect it. It is combined with an antagonism between classes
and groups that is rare in America (except among the petty
bourgeoisie). The middle-class adolescent revolt is rarer and much
harsher in Europe, shot through with elements of hatred, where in
America it is shot through with elements of indiscriminate loving. And
in Europe the selfishness ... of middle-class girls is much greater
than in the United States, probably because the stronger male-dominant
tradition of Europe leaves them less freedom, less self-esteem, and
lower personal evaluation. As an example of the diversity of Europe, we
should say that this last remark is more true of southern Europe than
of northern Europe, and largely untrue of England. In fact, most
generalizations about Europe do not apply to England at all.
In
the European search for
security the two dominant aims have been security against a Soviet
attack and nuclear war and security against economic collapse such as
occurred in the 1930's and opened the way to Nazism and World War II.
[As noted above, the threat of a war with the Soviet Union was a myth
to create giant military-industrial complexes which enrich certain
families who own the multinational armament industries in the Western
World.] The disorganization of Europe in the immediate postwar period
allowed the United States to play a dominant role in both of these
aims. However, by the later 1950's, as fear of war and depression
subsided, it became possible for Europe to adopt a more independent
attitude. At the same time, the personal influence of President de
Gaulle gave this new independence anti-American overtones, which,
however justified by the general's personal experiences with
incompetent American foreign policies, none the less were injurious to
the solidarity and prosperity of Europe.
As
long as American influence
was dominant, the security of Europe was based primarily on America's
strategic nuclear power, supplemented in an ambiguous way by the
fifteen-nation NATO Treaty, which included both the United States and
Canada. On the economic side, European prosperity was based, for many
years, on American economic aid. Both of these influences were
exercised to develop, as an ultimate goal, an integrated western Europe
that would include Britain and be closely allied to North America.
As
we have already seen, these
efforts gradually bogged down in a complicated morass of partly
integrated systems on a functional, rather than a federative, basis and
by 1965 were stalemated over a number of unresolved inconsistencies of
approach. These problems will be analyzed in a moment, but before we do
so we should point out that a new Europe is clearly being formed on
lines that have little in common with the Europe of prewar days. That
earlier Europe was based on the social and ideological patterns of the
past, and continued to reflect them, even when the real forces of
military and economic technology were creating quite different
relationships. Moreover, these older patterns were quite rigid and
doctrinaire. In most of Europe they showed sharp, almost
irreconcilable, divisions into three political groupings that we might
designate as conservative, liberal, and Socialist. These represented,
in order, the social forces of the eighteenth century, of the
mid-nineteenth century, and of the early twentieth century. The
conservatives stood for an alliance of all the forces of the period
before the French Revolution of 1789: the agrarian and landed
interests, the old nobility and monarchy, the clerical interests, and
the old army. The liberals stood for the bourgeois interests of the
commercial, financial, and industrial revolutions; they were concerned
with maintaining the dominant position of property, were usually rigid
supporters of laissez faire, were opposed to influence based on birth
or land, were opposed to extension of state authority, and were usually
anti-clerical and anti-militarist. The Socialists represented the
interests and ideas of the working masses of the cities. They were in
favor of democracy and individual political equality, and wanted the
activities of the state to be extended to regulate economic life for
the benefit of the ordinary man. The Socialists were generally opposed
to the same social groups and older interests as the liberals, but
added to these enemies the bourgeoisie also. In general, these three
diverse groupings were rigid, and put more emphasis on the things that
divided them than on matters of common concern. Their hatreds were more
dominant than their common interests.
These
divisions of Europe
along lines of selfish interests, old slogans, doctrinaire hatreds, and
misconceived rivalries made possible the rise of Fascism and the
disasters of World War II. Out of these disasters, in the turmoil and
violence of the Resistance, there began to appear the lineaments of a
new Europe. This new Europe was much more pragmatic, and thus less
doctrinaire; it was much more cooperative and less competitive; it was
much more receptive to diversity, partial solutions, and the need for
mutual dependence than the period before 1939 had been. On the whole
this new spirit, found among the leaders rather than among the masses,
was much closer to what we have defined as the tradition of the West
than the Europe of 1900 had been.
It
must be recognized that
this new Europe had its roots in the Resistance, and, as such, had
traces of those elements of self-sacrifice, human solidarity, personal
integrity, and flexible improvisation that appeared so unexpectedly
among the hardened Resistance fighters. We might say that many of the
elements of outlook and leadership of the new postwar Europe emerged
from underground, and were unnoticed by those who had not been in
active contact with the underground. Thus they were not observed by the
leaders in Washington and in London, even by De Gaulle, and, above all,
were unreported by Allen Dulles, who was supposed to be observing the
underground for the OSS from Switzerland.
Supporters
of this new outlook
were determined to break free from the nationalistic hatreds of the
prewar period and to emphasize instead Europe as a cultural entity of
diverse nationalities. Above all, they were insistent on the urgent
need to heal the terrible breach, running through the heart of Europe,
between France and Germany. They were eager to establish some kind of
liaison between religion and Socialism, by way of Christian charity and
social welfare, in order to repudiate the unnatural nineteenth-century
alliance between the clergy and capitalism. They were determined to use
the power of the state to settle the common problems of man, unhampered
by doctrinaire liberalism and laissez faire. And they recognized the
joint role of capital and labor in any productive process, although
they had no way of measuring or of dividing the rewards of each from
that process. In two words this new outlook was determined to make
Europe more "unified" and more "spiritual."
This
new outlook was unable to
influence the fate of Europe for at least a decade after the ending of
World War II in 1945 because of the urgent material need to repair the
devastation of the war, the overwhelming threat to Europe from the
Soviet Union and from doctrinaire Communism, and because of the
dependence of Europe, both for reconstruction and defense, on the
United States and Britain, both of whom ignored the new forces stirring
on the Continent. By 1955, however, as these urgent problems receded
into the background and Europe became increasingly able to stand on its
own feet, the new structure began to become visible, indicated by the
cooperation of Christian Socialists and Social Democrats in the
constructive process and by the continued decline of the forces of the
extreme Right and the extreme Left.
It
was the new spirit, rooted
in the Resistance and the tacit agreement of the Christian Socialist
and Social Democratic political groups, that made it possible to work
toward European unity and to use this unity as the foundation for a
rich and independent Europe. The task is still only partly done; it
may, indeed, never be completed, for nothing is more persistent than
the old established institutions and outlooks that stand as barriers
along the way.
The
central problem of Europe
remains today, as it has for a century, the problem of Germany. And
today, as before, this problem cannot be solved without Britain. But
such a solution requires that Britain accept the fact that it is, since
the invention of the airplane and the rocket, a European, and not a
world, or even an Atlantic, Power. This the leaders of Britain and the
American branch of the British Establishment have been unwilling to
accept. As a consequence, Britain remains aloof from the Continent,
committed to the "Atlantic Community" and to the Commonwealth of
Nations, and, accordingly, the political unification of Western Europe
stands suspended, part way to fulfillment, while the German problem,
still capable of triggering the destruction of Western society, remains
unsolved.
Briefly
the problem is this:
no one concerned—the Soviet Union, the United States, or Europe
itself—can permit Germany to be unified again in the foreseeable
future. A united Germany would be a force of instability and danger to
everyone, including the Germans, because it would be the most powerful
nation in Europe and, balanced between East and West, might at any time
fall into collaboration with one of these to the intense danger of the
other; or, if the Russian-American antithesis remained irreparable, a
united Germany could put extreme pressures on its lesser neighbors
between the two Superpowers. The peace and stability of Europe thus
require the permanent division of Germany, something on which the
Soviet Union is adamant to the point of resorting to force to retain
it, although the official policy of the United States is still
committed to a reunification of Germany, partly in the belief that the
loyalty of West Germany to the Atlantic Alliance can he retained only
if the United States remains explicitly committed to a future
reacquisition of East Germany by West Germany. In fact, the eagerness
of the latter to acquire the former is dwindling, although very slowly,
since the east is now so poor that it could bring little but poverty to
West Germany's booming prosperity.
This
separation of the
Germanys can be made permanent only if each is incorporated, as fully
as possible, into a larger, and distinct, political system. But the
smaller countries of Europe, particularly the Netherlands and Belgium,
do not wish to be united with Germany; in any federated system that
includes only one other large Power, such as France (or even France and
Italy), since an alignment of West Germany and France in such a
federation could dominate the small states completely. Accordingly, the
small states want Britain, as a democratic counterweight to Germany,
within any West European federal structure. But De Gaulle, as he made
evident in January 1963, will accept Britain into a West European
federation only if Britain becomes clearly a European Power and
renounces its special relationship of close collaboration with the
United States and if it is also N7villing to subordinate its position
as leader of the British Commonwealth of Nations to its membership in
the European system. The abandonment of its "special relationship" with
the United States and with the Commonwealth, the two major concerns of
the English Establishment for more than forty years, was too heavy a
price to pay for membership in the European Economic Community and
would have been an unacceptable reversal of established policy in
return for something that Britain sought without great enthusiasm.
The
integration of Western
Europe began in 1948 as a consequence of the growth of Soviet
aggression that culminated in the Prague coup and the Berlin blockade.
The United States had offered Marshall Plan aid with the provision that
the European recovery be constructed on a cooperative basis. This led
to the Convention for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) signed in
April 1948 and the Hague Congress for European union held the following
month. The OEEC, which eventually had eighteen countries as members and
in 1961 was reorganized as the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development (OECD), sought to administer American aid and further
economic cooperation between sovereign states. The Hague meeting of May
1948, with Winston Churchill and Konrad Adenauer as its chief figures,
called for a united Europe, and took a very minor step in that
direction by establishing a purely advisory consultative body of ten
(later fifteen) states, the Council of Europe, as a parliamentary
assembly at Strasbourg.
These
steps were clearly
inadequate. In 1950 Robert Schuman, then French foreign minister and
later prime minister, who had been a German subject during World War I,
suggested that a first step be taken toward a federation of Europe hy
putting the entire coal and steel production of France and Germany
under a common High Authority. The real attraction of this project was
that it would so integrate this basic industry that it would make any
war between France and Germany "physically impossible." One element in
this project was to reconcile the anti-Germans to the economic
rehabilitation of Germany which the continued Soviet aggressions made
increasingly necessary. It would also provide a solution to the
Franco-German disagreement over the final disposition of the Saar. From
this came the European Coal and Steel Community. This was a truly
revolutionary organization, since it had sovereign powers, including
the authority to raise funds outside any existing state's power. This
treaty, which came into force in July 1952, brought the steel and coal
industries of six countries (France, West Germany, Italy, and Benelux)
under a single High Authority of nine members. This "supranational"
body had the right to control prices, channel investment, raise funds,
allocate coal and steel during shortages, and fix production in times
of surplus. Its power to raise funds for its own use by taxing each ton
produced made it independent of governments. Moreover, its decisions
were binding, and could be reached by majority vote without the
unanimity required in most international organizations of sovereign
states.
The
ECSC was a rudimentary
government, since the High Authority was subject to the control of a
Common Assembly, elected by the parliaments of the member states, which
could force the Authority to resign by a two-thirds vote of censure,
and it had a Court of Justice to settle disputes. Most significantly,
the ECSC Assembly became a genuine parliament with political party
blocs—Christian-Democrats, Socialists, and liberals—sitting
together independent of national origins.
By
1958 the ECSC had abolished
internal barriers to trade in oil and steel among the Six (such trade
increased by 157 percent during the first five years) and had set up a
common tariff against imports of coal and steel into the Six.
Production of steel increased 65 percent during the five years, and the
process of using ECSC funds to modernize the coal industry and to close
down exhausted mines (moving hundreds of thousands of miners out of
mining and into other employment) had begun.
When
the Korean War began in
1950, the United States demanded formation of twelve German divisions
to strengthen NATO in Europe. The French, who feared any rebirth of
German militarism, drew up an elaborate scheme for a European Defense
Community (EDC) that would merge the German recruits into a European
army under joint European control. Like ECSC, the European Defense
Community was to be a supranational agency that would eventually take
its place, along with the ECSC, within a European government. The
general pattern of this super-government was established in the EDC
project itself, with a bicameral European parliament and a president to
preside over a European Cabinet Council. Unfortunately for these plans,
the Left and the Right in the French Assembly joined together to reject
the EDC treaty (August 1954). The Left was opposed to EDC because any
union of Europe would reduce Soviet influence on the Continent, while
the Right, led by the Gaullists, were unwilling to see German armed
forces reestablished without any guarantee that Britain and the United
States would retain forces within Europe to balance the new German
forces. Failure of Britain to recognize explicitly its inevitable
commitment to European defense early in allowed EDC to die.
A
symbolic, but ineffectual,
step was made to calm these French fears in September 1954, when Sir
Anthony Eden instigated a Western European Union (WEU) of seven states
(the Six plus Britain) as a consultative group to oversee German
rearmament. As part of this agreement the British promised to keep four
divisions in Europe until the year 2000 if necessary, but within three
years one of these divisions was pulled out and the other three fell
substantially below full strength.
As
a result of this agreement
and a number of other factors, including recognition that the
rearmament of Germany was inevitable, the French Assembly in December
1954 ratified the Paris Treaties that legalized the changes in
Germany's status that France most feared. Western Germany regained its
sovereign independence, obtained the right to have a national army
(although without nuclear weapons), and became an equal member of NATO.
Having
thus accepted much of
what they did not want (an armed and sovereign Germany), it became
clear to many Frenchmen that they must make a strenuous effort to get
some of the things they did want (chiefly the merging of Germany into a
West European system that would prevent the new German power from being
used in a nationalistic aggression). Accordingly, the Six met again, at
Messina in June 1955. There they decided that the next step toward West
European integration must be economic rather than political. From this
flowed the Rome Treaty of March 1957, which established the European
Economic Community, better known as the Common Market, as well as the
European Atomic Community for joint exploitation of nuclear energy for
peaceful purposes (Euratom). Both agreements went into effect at the
beginning of 1958.
The
EEC Treaty, with 572
articles over almost 400 pages, like the treaties establishing ECSC and
Euratom, looked forward to eventual political union in Europe, and
sought economic integration as an essential step on the way. The
project originated with the head of the French economic planning
commission, Jean Monnet, whose ideas were pushed along by the energy of
Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spank of Belgium. Within the three large
nations, agreement was obtained by the efforts of the leaders of the
respective Christian-Democratic parties: Adenauer, Schuman, and Alcide
de Gasperi. The Catholic religious background of all three was a
significant factor in their willingness to turn from nationalistic to
international economic methods, while Spaak's Socialist prestige helped
to reconcile the moderate Left to the scheme. The slowing up of the
process of economic recovery that had begun with the Marshall Plan in
1949 helped to win widespread acceptance of the new effort for joint
economic expansion.
Briefly
the Rome Treaty
established the methods and time schedule by which the signatory
countries, as well as other nations that might wish to join, could
integrate their economies into a single, more expansive, system.
Tariffs and other restrictions on trade between them were to be
abolished by stages and replaced by a common tariff against the outside
world. At the same time, investment was to be directed so as to
integrate their joint economy as a whole, with special attention to the
industrialization of backward and underdeveloped regions such as
southern Italy. Special consideration was given to agriculture, largely
detaching it from the market economy to cushion the integrative process
while improving the standards of living and social protection of the
farming population. As part of the integrative process there was to be
free movement of persons, services, and capital within the Community,
witl1 gradual development of Community citizenship for workers. This
whole process was to be achieved by stages over many years. The
agricultural agreement, for example, was implemented by an elaborate
agreement that was signed after 140 hours of almost continuous
negotiation in January 1962. By the middle of that year the internal
tariffs among members had been reduced in three stages to half their
1958 levels.
The
institutional organization
for carrying on this process was similar to that set up for the ECSC
and the abortive EDC: a European Parliamentary Assembly of
supranational party blocs of Christian-Democrats, Socialists, and
liberals sitting and voting together irrespective of national origins;
a Council of Ministers representing the member governments directly; an
executive High Commission of nine that is enjoined by law to "exercise
their functions in complete independence" of their national
governments; a Court of Justice vvitl1 powers to interpret the treaty
and settle disputes; two advisory groups (the Monetary Committee and
the Social and Economic Committee); a European Investment Bank to
channel funds for integrative and development purposes within the
Community; the Overseas Development Fund to do the same for former
colonial territories now associated indirectly with the ECC; a European
Social Fund for industrial retraining and unemployment compensation;
and finally the two associated Communities (ECSC and Euratom). These
last two were integrated with ECC from the fact that the Parliamentary
Assembly, the Court of Justice, and the Council of Ministers are shared
by all three communities.
These
organizations have some
of the aspects of sovereignty from the fact that their decisions do not
have to be unanimous, are binding on states and on citizens who have
not agreed to them, and can he financed by funds that may be levied
without current consent of the persons being taxed. On the whole, the
supranational aspects of these institutions will be strengthened in the
future from provisions in the treaties themselves. All this
is very
relevant to the remarks in the last chapter on the disintegration of
the modern, unified sovereign state and the redistribution of its
powers to multilevel hierarchical structures remotely resembling the
structure of the Holy Roman Empire in the late medieval period.
The
impact of these tentative
steps toward an integrative Europe has been spectacular, especially in
the economic sphere. In general, the economic expansion of Western
Europe, especially its industrial expansion, has been at rates far
higher than those of Communist-dominated eastern Europe, with the EEC
rates higher than those of non-EEC Western European countries, and
considerably higher than those of either Britain or the United States.
By 1960 the 300 million people of Western Europe had per capita incomes
over a third higher than the 260 million persons in the same area had
in 1938-1939. Industrial production more than doubled over the same
time span, while agricultural production was a third larger with a
smaller working force. This optimistic picture was even brighter for
the Six of the EEC, whose general economic growth rate was considerably
over 6 percent a year during the 1950's. This was more than double the
rate of growth in the United States, which was not much different from
that in Britain. If these rates are maintained, it has been estimated
that the income per head in the EEC would increase from about a third
of the income per head in the United States in 1960 to more than half
the United States income per head in 1970.
The
reasons for this relative
boom in the EEC (and in Western Europe generally) in comparison with
the slower economic dynamics of the English-speaking countries are of
some importance. It does not seem to rest, as might appear at first
glance, on a contrast between directed planning and laissez faire,
because, within the EEC, the French economy is fairly rigorously
planned and the West German economy is surprisingly free, yet both have
had high rates of growth. The West German conditions, however, have
been misleading and have arisen very largely from artificially low wage
levels and thus low costs of production, especially on articles for
export into the international competitive market, such as Volkswagens.
These low labor costs arose from the large number of East European
refugees seeking work in Germany, a condition that will be of
decreasing importance in the future.
The
conditions of economic
growth in the EEC has been based on steady demand, high rates of
investment, and liberal fiscal and financial policies. In 1961, for
example, the rate of net investment in Britain was about 9 percent
compared to the West German rate of about 17 percent. The high demand
that spurred on this process arose from fiscal policies, but also from
the large new market of about 100 million persons provided in EEC.
In
Britain and in the United
States (with Canada) fiscal policies were much more conservative, with
demand somewhat dampened down by efforts to balance budgets, to control
inflation, and to influence both adverse balances of international
payments and the flows of domestic credit by conservative financial
policies (notably, high interest rates). Moreover, in both countries,
there was a good deal of unproductive expenditure either in misjudged
enterprises and inefficient production or in defense and other
nonproductive areas. As a consequence, not only have growth rates been
low in the English-speaking countries but unemployment rates have been
high. In 1960, for example, the United States unemployment rate was 5.4
percent and the Canadian 6.9 percent, while that of France was 1.3
percent and of West Germany only 0.9 percent.
This
sharp contrast between
the prosperity of the EEC and the languishing economy of Britain
eventually brought the latter to a recognition of the advantages of
membership in the European system. But the decision was too late, based
on wrong motives, and was eventually nullified by the imperious De
Gaulle, who. like an elephant, never forgets an injury. Governments in
London paid lip service to European unity and to British cooperation
with it, but whenever an opportunity offered to take a real step toward
European union, Britain balked. In the immediate postwar period, this
reluctance was attributed to the rather provincial and doctrinaire
Socialist outlook of the British Labour Party, but the situation did
not improve when Winston Churchill returned to office in 1951. The
general British outlook was that British participation in a united
Europe was precluded by Britain's rather intangible and sentimental
commitments to the Commonwealth and to the United States (that is, to
the "English-speaking idea") and that a unification of Europe without
Britain would be a threat to British markets on the Continent. This
decision by Britain was copied by the Scandinavian and Baltic countries
(Denmark and Finland), whose trade alliance with England went back to
the creation of the "Sterling Bloc" in 1932. In a similar way Britain
refused to cooperate in the ECSC or EDC.
This
reluctance in London was
a great tragedy' excluding Britain from the European growth toward
economic prosperity, making it difficult or impossible for the European
effort toward integration to make decisions that would have hastened
the whole integrative process, and leaving Britain emphasizing
Commonwealth and American relationships that were less and less
prepared to give due weight to British ideas and power. In a sense
Britain was making commitments to areas that w ere not prepared to make
reciprocal commitments to Britain and would, if the occasion arose,
leave Britain out on a limb. This, indeed, is exactly what happened in
October 1956, when the United States threatened to throw its power and
prestige against Britain's efforts in the Suez fiasco. And throughout
the period, the chief Commonwealth countries, notably South Africa and
Canada, made it perfectly clear that they were not willing to make any
notable sacrifices for Britain's prosperity, and were reluctant to
follow London's lead in many of the world's political issues of the
period.
In
fact, even with
Commonwealth preference and all the intangibles that link the
Commonwealth together, Britain's trade and financial links with the
Commonwealth are decreasing in importance, and the links of both with
outsiders are increasing. For example, Nigeria and Ghana doubled their
exports to EEC over the 1955-1959 period, while their exports to
Britain decreased by 15 percent. On the whole, in recent years, the
countries associated with the sterling area have found that association
one of decreasing satisfaction. This is reflected in matters other than
market conditions. Sterling itself has been subject to periodic crises
since the war ended. The reason is obvious, for the United Kingdom
tries to handle $12.3 billion in imports and $10.9 billion in floating
short-term debts on a base of reserves of no more than $3 billion (in
1961), while, at the same time, the EEC, with $16 billion in reserves,
had only $2 billion in short-term debts and handled $23.2 billion in
imports. As a result of all this, London is decreasingly attractive as
a source of investment capital, while the EEC becomes increasingly
prominent in that activity. And as a source of development funds for
backward areas, the United Kingdom has ceased to be of major
significance. In 1960, for example, the United States provided $3,781
million and EEC provided $2,626 million, compared to the United
Kingdom's $857 million and the rest of the OECD countries' $469
million. In fact Germany's $616 million was almost comparable to
Britain's $857 million, with both far less than France's $1,287
million. Thus the Six provide about a third of the world's financial
assistance to underdeveloped countries, while Britain provides only
one-ninth.
Considerations
such as these
help to indicate that the Commonwealth attachment to the United Kingdom
is based rather on the intangibles of traditions and old patterns than
on the solid advantages of today's economic and financial situation.
The merging of the United Kingdom into the EEC would still give a fair
jolt to economic life both in England and in the Commonwealth, but the
slack would be taken up very rapidly. In fact, the rising demand for
goods of higher quality in Japan will probably draw much of the export
trade of New Zealand and Australia in butter, meat, or even wool from
their older English-speaking markets even without Britain joining the
Common Market.
The
reluctance of the English
leadership to face these changing conditions, like their refusal to
face the causes of Britain's economic lassitude, contributed much to
confuse the situation that Europe, and especially EEC, reached by the
mid-1960's. In December 1956, in a vain effort to sidetrack European
integration, British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd produced a "Grand
Design," a pompous name for an undigested scheme to dump an assortment
of European consultative bodies into the Common Assembly of the Coal
and Steel Community. This idea was generally recognized as sabotage,
and sank without a ripple.
The
next British effort was
for a Free Trade Area; this was a scheme to permit British goods to
enter the Common Market without Britain joining it. This was necessary,
in British eves, because the joint external tariff of the ECC was to he
higher than the tariffs of four of the Six had previously been, and
would reduce British sales in those countries. The Free Trade Area plan
was for an all-Europe free-trade zone embracing the Six along with all
those who did not wish to join the EEC. That means that the Free Trade
Area would abolish mutual trade barriers but would not establish a
common external tariff. This British suggestion, made in November 1956,
was regarded within EEC as another effort at sabotage, or, at best, a
typical British attempt to have the advantages of both worlds by
combining the abolition of European tariffs on British goods with
continued British preference for Commonwealth foodstuffs. The lower
prices on the latter (compared to food prices within the Six) would
permit Britain to have lower wage costs and thus lower industrial
prices to give British industry a competitive advantage in the
unprotected Common Market.
When
France, with West German
support, broke off the Free Trade Area negotiations in December 1958,
the British were left out of the EEC, which began to function in the
ruins of the Free Trade Area. Britain reacted by forming the European
Free Trade Association (EFTA) of Britain, Sweden, Norway, Denmark,
Austria, Switzerland, Portugal, and (later) Finland.
This
EFTA provided for mutual
tariff reductions of member states by steps to complete abolition by
1970, but the process added only 38 million persons to the existing
British market of 52 million, and promised small prospect of any
substantial increase in sales because the tariffs of most of these
countries were already low on British goods. This could not compare
with the EEC market of 170 million customers, but British public
opinion, even in the 1960's, could not bring itself to accept the
reorientation of outlook required to view itself as a European state
necessary to make it possible to accept the economic integration that
could make this great market available to British industry. For this,
the semi-slump of 1960-1961 was needed, and only in July 1961 did the
British government announce its readiness to start the complex
negotiations needed for its joining the Common Market. By that late
date, De Gaulle was well established in power in France, and was
prepared to impose his own peculiar point of view on the negotiations.
The
French economic
resurgence, which the British so belatedly asked to join, was in no
sense a consequence of De Gaulle's policies, nor were they
synchronized, except accidentally, with the advent of De Gaulle and his
Fifth French Republic on May 13, 1958. The basis for the French
economic boom was laid under the Fourth French Republic, and De Gaulle
simply profited from it. It might be said that the economic expansion,
and its continuation after 1958, was based on those factors of the
French system which the new De Gaulle regime left relatively
unchanged—an educational structure accessible to anyone willing
to work hard at his studies, the high quality of upper-level technical
education, the close alliance between the administrative bureaucracy
and the industrial system, and the ease with which highly educated
technicians can pass from one to the other; by the readiness of the
French mind to accept a rational, over-all view of life and its
problems (this contributed considerably to the success of French
economic planning), and by the whole concept of individual opportunity
and careers open to talent within a structured social arrangement. All
these go back to the Napoleonic period of French history and were,
thus, well adapted to De Gaulle's personal inclinations. The fact that
they are all quite alien to the English way of life also helps to
explain the relative failure of the British economy in the Plan Era.
The
Fifth Republic was
obviously tailored to De Gaulle's personal inclinations, hut it was
also adapted to the bureaucratic substructure that had continued, as a
semi-alien basis, to underlie the French political system in the
bourgeois era. Worded in another way, we might say that the shift of
the Western world over the last three decades from a bourgeois to a
technocratic pattern was well adapted to the subterranean bureaucratic
basis that had survived in France, more or less unobserved, during the
century in which property was obviously triumphant. The bureaucracy
Louis XIV and Napoleon had built up had been directed toward
totalitarian power and national glory; the age of property (roughly
1836-1936) had sought to establish the influence of wealtl1 unhampered
by bureaucracy, and one of its chief aims had been to keep the
bureaucratic structure, the centralized French tradition of
administration, and the forces of French rationalism outside the sphere
of economics and moneymaking. The economic depression of the 1930's and
the defeat of 1940, both directly caused by the selfish interests and
the narrow outlook (especially the narrow and selfish financial
outlook) of the French bourgeoisie, made it clear that some new system
was needed in France, just as the experience of the Resistance made it
clear that some new system was needed in Europe. It was, in view of the
French rationalist and bureaucratic tradition, almost inevitable that
the new domestic system would he a more integrated, more rational, and
more bureaucratic one than that of the bourgeois era, although it is
not so clear what this new system will establish as its goal. This,
indeed, is the problem facing France today, a problem concerned with
goals rather than with methods, since there is now a broad consensus
(including the bourgeoisie) prepared to accept a rationalized, planned,
bureaucratized society dominated by a pervasive fiscalism, a kind of
neo-mercantilism, but there is no consensus on what goals this new
organization should seek.
Only
a very small group of
Frenchmen share De Gaulle's idea that the new system of France, the
Fifth Republic, should make national power and glory its primary aim. A
larger, and surprisingly influential, group, best represented by
Monnet, wishes to work for the kind of rational humanism or unified
diversity that this volume has used as its chief criterion for judging
historical change. This group hopes, by the proper organization of men
and resources, to increase the production of wealth and to reduce the
conflicts of power sufficiently to remove these distracting matters
from the center of human concern so that, once prosperity and peace
have been relatively secured, men will find the time and energy to turn
to their more important ends of personality development, artistic
expression, and intellectual exploration. This point of view, based on
a significant distinction between what is necessary and what is
important, hopes to find the opportunity to turn to important matters
once the necessary ones have achieved a level of minimal satisfactions.
The
Frenchmen of a third
group, which includes the major part of the population, have little
concern with the goals of De Gaulle and even less with those of Monnet
but are concerned with an almost repulsive pursuit of material
affluence, something of which they had long heard but never considered
achievable before. Today, for the first time, such affluence seems
achievable to the great mass of Frenchmen as it does to the great mass
of West Germans, to many English, and to increasing number of Italians.
Americans and Swedes, who are already disillusioned with the fruits of
affluence, must be indulgent to these recent arrivals in the
materialist rat race. The chief political aim of this large group is
for political stability free from partisan upheavals, an end that De
Gaulle and the Fifth Republic seem more capable of securing than the
unstable, multi-partied Fourth Republic.
Much
of the ambiguity about De
Gaulle rests on a failure of historical synchronisms. This can be seen
in regard to the three aspects of (a) political
ideology, (b) economic management, and (c)
the relationship between these two. In the 1920's, all three of these
were antipathetic to De Gaulle's outlook, since forty years ago the
three were: (a) a democratic, nationalist,
sovereign, independent state pursuing the goal of national
self-interest; (b) a capitalistic economy; and (c)
a laissez-faire relationship of no government in business. De Gaulle's
ideas are rather those of Louis XIV, that is: (a) a
sovereign, independent, authoritarian state pursuing the goal of
national glory; (b) a mixed economy of a corporative
sort; and (c) political domination of economic life.
The point of view of the "new Europeans" on these matters was: (a)
a democratic, cooperative political structure of shared and divided
powers on a European basis, seeking peace and stability in an
interlocking organizational structure rising through European,
Atlantic-Western, and worldwide levels; (b) a mixed
economy; and (c) a planned, state-directed drive
toward increased affluence. De Gaulle cares only for (a) and has little
interest in (b) or (c) so long as
they provide him with a rate of economic expansion capable of
supporting his ambitions in (a). The mass of French
people care little about De Gaulle's ambitions in (a)
so long as they obtain political stability that will allow them to seek
the affluence they wish from (c); while the
technicians, concerned largely with (b), are
prepared to let De Gaulle seek glory in (a) and the
people seek affluence in (c) so long as both leave
them alone to manage the proper mixture of the economy they desire in (b).
Thus France, by this most extraordinary mixture of cross-purposes, is
led into the future by a man whose ideas in all three areas are almost
completely obsolete.
It
is easy for
English-speaking persons to condemn De Gaulle. Many of them consider
his obsolescent ideas a danger to Europe and to the world. Indeed, they
are, but this does not mean that they do not have some basis in De
Gaulle's personal experience and in the recent history of France
itself. The general was determined to restore the power and prestige of
France as an independent state within a context of national states
similar to that in which France had suffered the blows to its prestige
in 1919-1945. To him these defeats were almost personal psychic
injuries that could be repaired only by new French triumphs in the same
nationalistic context and not by successes in an entirely different
context such as that of an integrated Europe. Obsessed by the pursuit
of the glory of France in the nationalistic era in which his own
character had been formed and personally piqued by the rebuffs he had
received in his own career, the rejection of his military advice by his
superiors in the 1920's and 1930s, the defeats of France in the
diplomatic and military arenas in the period 1936-1940, the rebuffs
administered by the United States Department of State and the White
House to his efforts to make himself the leader of the Free French in
1940-1943, and finally the general belittling, as he saw it, to his
ideas and dignity during the liberation— all these served to make
his outlook more remote, more rigid, and more opinionated until he came
to regard himself as the God-given leader for a revived France and came
to regard the English-speaking nations as the chief obstacles in his
path to this end.
The
culmination of De Gaulle's
irritation with the United States came during the five years 1953-1958,
during which he was retired from public life and had to watch, in
helpless impotence, John Foster Dulles's studied belittling of France's
role in world affairs. The American Secretary of State's unilateralism
and "brinkmanship," his emphasis on the Far East and his ignoring of
Europe, his refusal to consult with his NATO allies, and his lack of
sympathy for the French position in Indochina, Algeria, and Europe
itself—all this drove De Gaulle into an icy antipathy for
American policy and a conviction that the interests of France could be
protected only by France itself and could be furthered as well by
collaboration with the Soviet Union as by alliance with the United
States.
De
Gaulle was especially
irritated by the American lack of concern for French and European
interests in nuclear-weapons policy Dulles's willingness to go to war
with the Communist Powers over Asiatic questions (such as the Chinese
offshore islands or the Formosa Strait) without consultation with its
European allies, when the most immediate consequence of any
Soviet-American war would be a Russian attack on Europe and the
exposure of France to a threat of nuclear attack over an issue on which
Paris had not even been consulted gave De Gaulle (perfectly
justifiably) profound irritation.
When
the disruption of French
political life over the Algerian dispute brought De Gaulle back to
public life as premier in June 1958, he took steps to end this
situation. What he wanted was a "Western troika," that is, a tripartite
consultation of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France on
all world disputes that could involve NATO) in war in Europe. In this
way he hoped to prevent in the future such events as Dulles's
unilateral cancellation of the American offer of credits for the Aswan
Dam that had led to the Suez crisis of 1956. This suggestion by De
Gaulle was rebuffed, and led by logical steps to his decision to
disentangle France from its NATO obligations and to establish an
independent French nuclear force de frappe.
According
to De Gaulle's line
of thought, Washington not only ignored French interests and ideas on a
worldwide basis, hut involved it, without consultation, in the risk of
war in Europe. The general also argued that the growth of nuclear
stalemate between the United States and the Soviet Union left Europe
unprotected so long as it based its security on an American threat of
nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Washington, he felt, would not reply
to a Soviet aggression in Europe by any nuclear attack on the Soviet
Union when it realized that the Soviet counter-reply to such an attack
would he the nuclear devastation of American cities by Soviet missiles.
Why, according to De Gaulle, would the United States destroy its own
cities in retaliation for a Soviet aggression, at any level, on Europe?
This opened the whole problem of "nuclear credibility," with De Gaulle
at such a high level of skepticism of American good faith that he saw
little credibility and thus little deterrent value in the American
threat to use nuclear u capons against the Soviet Union to defend
France. According to De Gaulle, the only secure French defense must he
based on France's own military power, which must, inevitably, be
nuclear power.
At
first glance, the idea of
modest French nuclear armaments serving as deterrence to the mighty
Soviet threat to Europe, either conventional or nuclear, seems even
less credible. But De Gaulle was one of the first to recognize, as a
feasible policy, an idea that was subsequently adopted by the Soviet
Union itself. This was the idea that a nuclear deterrence does not
require the possession of overwhelming nuclear power or even the
nuclear superiority in which Washington long believed, but may be based
on the capacity to inflict unacceptable nuclear damage. In De Gaulle's
mind, the explosion of French hydrogen bombs over three or four major
Soviet cities, including Moscow, would constitute unacceptable damage
in the Kremlin's eyes and would thus provide effective deterrence
against a Soviet aggression in Europe (or at least against France)
without any need for France to rely on any uncertain American response.
To
provide for such a French
threat of nuclear response to Soviet aggression, De Gaulle's regime
accepted the great economic and financial burden of obtaining a force
de frappe.
In its first stage, to be achieved by 1966, this would consist of 62
Mirage IV supersonic manned jet bombing planes to carry France's
first-generation, 60-kiloton plutonium bombs. By the end of 1964, when
twenty of these planes were operational, they were being produced at a
rate of one a month and were being matched by the production of one
bomb a month from the atomic pile at Marcoule. By 1966 the power of the
bomb is expected to increase to its maximum size of about 300 kilotons.
The
Mirage IV, as vehicle for
the French nuclear threat, will be replaced by twenty-five land-based
missiles fired from underground silos. These will be operational about
1969, and will shift their warheads from A-bombs to H-bombs some time
in the early 1970'5. The third generation of French nuclear weapons
will probably be Polaris-type nuclear submarines to become operational
some time in the 1970'5. If these can be speeded up and the Mirage IV
could be retained, it is possible that the brief transition stage of
land-based missiles might be skipped completely. The total nuclear
submarine fleet will probably not exceed three vessels, even in the
late 1970'5.
These
plans do not seem
impressive in comparison with the nuclear armament of the two
Superpowers, but they are expected to make France an independent
nuclear Power and allow it to exercise an independent nuclear
deterrence. However, if countermeasures, such as the development of an
anti-missile missile, become more successful, the additional
penetration devices needed to allow the French nuclear threat to be
credible may raise the financial cost of the whole effort to a level
that would put a very severe strain on the French budget. In that case,
France must either give up the effort or try to persuade the European
Community to do it as a joint effort. (This might re-activate the West
European Union or fall to the largest fragment of a divided NATO.) But
in this case, France, despite De Gaulle, will have to accept some kind
of European political union.
All
of this points up the fact
that the future political and military structure of Europe revolves
about two quite separate problems: (1) Will it be a united Europe or a
Europe of national states? (as De Gaulle wants), and (2) Will it be
aligned with the United States or will it be an independent neutralist
factor in the Cold War? The United States wants Europe to be united and
allied; De Gaulle wants it to be disunited and independent; the Kremlin
wants it disunited and neutral; London's policy, until 1960, was to see
it disunited and allied to the Atlantic system. It seems likely, for
reasons already given, that Europe's interests and those of the world
as a whole might be served best if Europe could be united and
independent. Moreover, in view of the conflicting forces involved, it
seems very likely that Europe, after a considerable delay caused by De
Gaulle, will finally emerge as united and independent.
Thus
the future of Europe,
like that of France itself, depended, in the mid-1960's, on De Gaulle's
continuance in office. This was ensured, at least until the next
presidential election in 1965, unless interrupted by death, by the fact
that no alternative to De Gaulle could be seen clearly even by his
opponents. In the early 1960's, the political pattern of France was
dominated by four factors: (1) the terrorism of the extreme Right, led
by the Secret Army Organization (OAS), which resisted the Algerian
settlement even after it was completed in 1962 and made several efforts
to assassinate De Gaulle; (2) the disorganization and discontent of the
older political leaders as De Gaulle continued to change French
politics to a simple administrative structure with himself as an almost
monarchical figure standing as a symbol of France above political
considerations; (3) the steady, if not always enthusiastic, support of
De Gaulle by the passive mass of Frenchmen who saw the general as a
center of solidity in the middle of a sea of confusions; and (4) the
unpredictable and despotic control of the political initiative by De
Gaulle himself..
The
chief discontents came in
1960 and 1961 from those groups in the population, notably farmers,
civil servants, and university students, who found that they were
sharing in the economic boom less than others or were being squeezed by
its dynamics. The price inflation of about 50 percent in the decade
following 1953 injured government employees, whose salaries did not
rise as rapidly as prices; university students were also squeezed by
the inflation but were squeezed much more literally in housing, eating
accommodations, and classroom space by a great increase in enrollments
which was not sufficiently prepared for by government efforts to
increase facilities. And the peasants, encouraged by government
technocrats to modernize their methods, found that increased production
led to lower farm prices and decreased incomes for themselves.
In
view of the authoritarian
character of the De Gaulle regime, these discontents tended to become
extralegal agitations. There were sporadic strikes, protest parades,
and even riots of these groups to call public attention to their
grievances. Farmers were particularly violent when agricultural prices
decreased and industrial prices continued to inch upward. The Gaullist
government hoped to remedy the situation by reducing the costs of
distribution through middlemen and thus provide French farmers with an
increasing share of the reduced price of produce to the consumer, but
on the whole the incredibly inefficient distribution of French farm
produce, which forced most produce, regardless of source or
destination, to pass through the Parisian markets, was too difficult a
problem even for De Gaulle's experts, at least in any time interval
that mattered. To obtain concessions, the farmers rioted, often on a
large scale, such as an outburst of 35,000 of them at Amiens in
February 1960. They blocked national automobile routes with their
tractors, spread unsold or unremuneratively priced farm produce over
the roads or city streets, and responded with violence when efforts
were made to disperse them.
Through
this whole period, De
Gaulle's conduct of the government, through his handpicked prime
ministers, made a shambles of the Fifth Republic constitution, which
had been tailored to his specifications. Since a government could not
be overthrown by defeat of a bill but only by a specific vote of
censure, and this latter would lead to a general election in which all
of De Gaulle's prestige could be used against those who had voted for
the censure, the ordinary deputy's love of office and reluctance to
wage an expensive and risky electoral campaign made it possible for De
Gaulle's premiers to obtain almost any law he desired. The older
political leaders were very restive under this system but could
mobilize no organized opposition to it, because no one could see any
real alternative to De Gaulle.
A
significant example of De
Gaulle's high-handed operations may be seen in the way he forced
through the bill to create an independent French nuclear force without
allowing the Assembly to debate the issue or to vote on the bill itself
(November-December 1960). This was done under Article 49 of the
constitution, which allows the government to pass a bill on its own
responsibility without consideration by the Assembly unless a vote of
censure is passed by a majority (277) of all the deputies. By use of
this article, the three readings of the Nuclear Arms bill were replaced
by three motions of censure that obtained no more than 215 votes. There
seems to have been a clear majority, both in the Assembly and in the
country as a whole, against the nuclear force, but few were willing to
risk the fall of the government with no acceptable alternative in
sight, and even fewer were willing to precipitate a general election.
As
might be expected in such a
system, the danger of assassination as a method for changing a
government increased greatly, but De Gaulle continued on his
imperturbable course in spite of a number of attempts on his life. One
of the chief dangers to the Gaullist regime came from the discontent of
the highest officers in the armed forces, but the mutiny and revolt of
several army contingents in Algeria in April 1961 showed fairly clearly
that this opposition movement was largely restricted to the highest
officers, and De Gaulle was able to eliminate them and thus to reduce
them, like the rest of his opponents, to angry impotence or to
assassination efforts. De Gaulle's success in retiring from public life
the only surviving Marshal of France, Alphonse Juin, clinched his
superiority over the army.
Equally
successful, and
typical of De Gaulle's actions, were his constant appeals to public
opinion, by television or on personal regional tours, or by local
elections or plebiscites, against the disunited opposition, especially
against the traditional political party leaders. A successful example
of these techniques occurred in 1962 when De Gaulle decided to change
the method of electing the president (or reelecting himself) from the
constitutional method of choice by an electoral college of 80,000
"notables" to election by popular vote. To bypass the Senate, which was
constitutionally entitled to vote on such matters and would
unquestionably reject the change, De Gaulle announced that the
amendment would be submitted to a popular referendum of the whole
electorate. This method of changing the constitution by referendum was
denounced as unconstitutional by all the political parties except his
own, and was declared illegal by the Council of State.
Gaston
Monnerville, president
of the senate, who would become president of France if De Gaulle died,
denounced the referendum as illegal, and accused De Gaulle of
"malfeasance." When De Gaulle's rage at Monnerville became evident, the
Senate reelected Monnerville as its presiding officer with only three
dissenting votes. The Assembly, in an overnight session, October 4-5,
1962, passed a vote of censure with 280 votes. By the referendum on the
constitutional change, on October 28, 1962, De Gaulle achieved his
purpose with almost 62 percent of the votes registering "ayes" (this
was only 46 percent of the registered votes because of the 23 percent
non-voting) in spite of the fact that his proposal was opposed by all
political parties except his own. The following month, November 1962,
in the general election made necessary by the vote of censure, De
Gaulle's bloc won 234 seats out of 480, with an additional 41 seats
committed to his support. The Right was practically wiped out in the
election, although the Communists increased slightly to 41 seats.
This
pattern of personal and
rather arbitrary rule, opposed by the older ruling groups but sustained
by the ordinary Frenchman whenever De Gaulle asked for such support,
has continued to be the pattern of De Gaulle's political system, and
will undoubtedly continue unless he meets some unforeseen sharp
diplomatic defeat or a domestic economic collapse. Both of these are
unlikely at the present time.
While
French political life
passed through these stages of superficial drama and fundamental
boredom, British political life wallowed in a malaise of mediocrity. No
groups were actually discontented, and certainly none was enthusiastic
about the situation in Britain over the1957-1964 period leading up to
the General Election of October 1964. The Conservative Government came
to office in 1951, was returned in the elections of 1955, and returned
again in the elections of October 1959. Anthony Eden served a brief and
rather unsuccessful prime ministership from the retirement of Winston
Churchill in April 1955 until his own retirement in favor of Harold
Macmillan in January 1957. The latter's term of office had no
spectacular failures such as Eden had experienced in the Suez Crisis of
October 1956, but on the whole there were also no great successes.
Macmillan
sought to avoid
issues if possible, to strengthen contacts with the United States and
the Commonwealth by personal diplomacy, to follow Washington's policy
as closely as possible without appearing openly obsequious, and to hold
a fairly tight rein over the Conservative Party and the House of
Commons. An endless series of nasty little problems were met and
somehow disposed of, to be followed by the rise of similar problems
without any significant changes of course or speed. Abroad, the chief
problems arose from the demands of various areas within the
Commonwealth for self-government and the intrusion of the racial issue
into these disputes, especially in Central Africa, East Africa, British
Guiana, and Malaya. The chief problems at home were equally endless and
were concerned with the continual weakness of the pound sterling on the
foreign exchange market and the social problems associated with the
British economic expansion, such as increased vehicular traffic,
spreading juvenile and adolescent delinquency, an apparent decline in
the level of adult moral behavior, and the growing attacks, especially
in industry and finance, on the economic bases of the older
Establishment.
In
general, there was a slow
spreading disillusionment with the structure of English society,
especially with the continued dominance hy the old established families
of political and economic life. This was especially notable among the
middle and lower middle classes, while the lower class was, apparently,
less antagonistic because of the continued relative prosperity and,
above all, from the weakening of what might be called the Labour Party
ideology of class conflict.
In
spite of a weakening of
class antagonisms, there was a spreading rejection of the established
class structure of England as it had existed for about a century. The
good manners of the lower and middle classes, which had made visits to
England such a pleasure, have slowly worsened, since they have come to
be regarded as a mark of acceptance of the rigid class structure of the
country, something that is decreasing in all classes. This shift is
evident even in legislation, such as an Act of 1963, permitting peers
to give up their titles in order to run for office in the House of
Commons. It is, perhaps, most threatening in the animosity expressed by
some of the new class of very rich who reject the established social
prestige of the older aristocratic families.
This
last point is of some
importance, for it may mark the end of a very significant period of
English history. In this history the English social structure was
retained because of its flexibility rather than its rigidity. Access to
higher social levels had never been closed to those with the energy and
luck to work upward. These climbers invariably became strong defenders
of the class structure, buying country houses, sending their children
to boarding schools, and adopting the accent and other distinctive
idiosyncrasies of the English upper classes. This "aping of their
betters" on all levels preserved the English class structure and
provided the relatively frictionless character of English social life.
Frictions have now appeared at the very time that class antagonisms
have been weakened. The reason for this has been the slow spreading in
Britain of a kind of individualistic and nominalistic outlook that had
been prevalent in much of the Western world for several generations but
had been played down in Britain, until the last decade or so, by the
pressures to conform on those who wished to rise socially and even on
those who wished to remain in their same social level. As a result,
traditionally in England, individualists have been eccentrics, that is,
persons so well established that their social positions could not be
changed notably by their personal behavior. This is now changing.
Increasingly,
those who wish
to remain in their social status and, most significantly, a surprising
number of those who are rising in the economic, academic, and political
hierarchies feel called upon to reject in an explicit fashion the
established class structure. This began with the writings of Labour
Party intellectuals early in the century; but it has now become so
widespread that rising young men today still continue to rise without
conforming to the established behavioral patterns of their aspirant
levels. One reason for this, of course, is that control of the ladders
to success are no longer so closely held. In the old days, the merchant
bankers of London, EC2,
controlled
fairly well the funds that were needed for almost any enterprise to
become a substantial success. Today much larger funds are available
from many diverse sources, from abroad, from government sources, from
insurance and pension funds, from profits of other enterprises, and
from other sources. These are no longer held under closely associated
controls and are much more impersonal and professionalized in their
disposal, so that, on the whole, an energetic man (or a group with a
good idea) can get access to larger funds today and can do so without
anyone much caring if he accepts the established social precedents.
At
the same time, on lower
levels, young men working their way upward, although not, perhaps, to
"the top," no longer conform in dress and behavior to the expected
patterns of respectability of their social aspirations, but often show
a more or less open defiance of these. The most obvious, and in a way
most frightening, examples of this are to be found in the open defiance
of all respectability by adolescents and post-adolescents of various
social levels, but chiefly low ones, who have rioted by the thousands
at various seaside resorts on long weekends in recent years.
These
most obvious examples of
rebellion against English conformity are, however, not nearly so
significant as the less obvious, but much more significant, rejections
of the established system by men whose training and positions would
lead us to expect that they would be firm supporters of it. This
includes men like the following: (1) John Grigg, who disclaimed his
title of Lord Altrincham in 1963, was educated at Eton and New College,
was in the Grenadier Guards, edited the National Review
(which
had been acquired from Lady Milner), and was close to the Establishment
from his father's long-time associations with the Milner Group, the Times,
the Round Table, and his intimate friendship with Lord Brand; the son
shocked the Court by his open criticism of the Queen's social
associations as undemocratic; and his weekly articles for the Guardian
advocated, among other things, abolition of a hereditary House of
Lords; or (2) Goronwy Rees of New College and All Souls who had
denounced the English amateur tradition in government and business as a
"cult of incompetence," and demanded, to replace it, a system of
training and recruitment that will provide a British managerial class
marked by professional competence rather than by what he regards as
"frivolity"; or (3) John Vaizey, one-time Scholar of Queens College,
Cambridge and now Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, who denounces
the whole English educational system as inadequate and misguided and
would replace it with something more like the French openly competitive
system of free education.
One,
perhaps surprising, voice
in this criticism, aimed at attitudes rather than class structure, has
been that of Prince Philip. He has tried, with only moderate success,
to introduce scientists, technicians, and managerial types into Court
circles (at least occasionally), but these circles continue, as in the
past, to be dominated by the old rural upperclass interests of horses,
hunting, and parlor games. At the same time, by a series of calculated
indiscretions, His Royal Highness has sought to encourage the change of
attitude that so many feel is essential to the continued survival of
Britain in an era of advanced technology. Samples of his statements
continue to be quoted, especially in circles that disapprove of them.
In February 1961, the Prince said, "If anyone has a new idea in this
country, there are twice as many people who advocate putting a man with
a red flag in front of it," and eighteen months later, in a speech on
Britain's inability to remain competitive in the world's export
markets, he said, ". . . we are suffering a national defeat comparable
to any lost military campaign, and, what is more, a self-inflicted
one.... The bastions of the smug and the stick-in-the-mud can only be
toppled by persistent undermining...." These criticisms of complacency,
now a chronic disease of the British upper classes, have had relatively
small influence, at least in those circles where they are most needed
and where they are discreetly regarded as "unfortunate remarks."
However,
the volume of such
criticism, especially on relatively high levels of the established
hierarchies, has been growing, and must eventually force significant
changes of outlook and behavior. They are more effective evidence of
the breakdown of established outlooks than more spectacular events,
like the antics of juvenile rioters or even the sinful lives of Cabinet
ministers exposed in the popular press for the whole world to see, as
was done of the war minister's encounters with a teenage prostitute
whom he met (of all places) at Lady Astor's "Cliveden" estate. It seems
possible, however, that any constructive change in England will be so
long delayed that it may be anticipated by waves of unconstructive
change, especially the rapid spread of frantic materialism,
self-indulgence, and undisciplined individualism. That this should
occur in the country that offered the world of the twentieth century
its finest examples of self-disciplined response to the calls of social
duty would, indeed, be a profound tragedy.
It
would seem that Britain,
perhaps more than any other European country except Sweden, is passing
through a critical phase where it does not know what it wants or what
it should seek. The patterns of outlook and behavior that brought it to
world leadership by 1880 were going to seed by 1938. There was
sufficient vitality still left in them to bring forth the magnificent
effort of 1940-1945, but since 1945 it has become clear that the old
patterns are not adapted to success in the contemporary world of
technocracy, operations research, rationalization, and mass
mobilization of resources. The British method of operating through a
small elite, coordinated by ... personal contact and shared outlooks,
and trained in the humanities, cannot handle the problems of the late
twentieth century. Britain has the quality to do this, for, as we have
seen, operations research, jet engines, radar, and many of the
technological advances that helped create the contemporary world
originated in Britain; but these things must be available on a mass
basis for any country wishing to retain a position of substantial world
leadership today, and they cannot be made available in Britain on a
quantity basis by any continuation of the patterns of training and
recruitment used by Britain in the nineteenth century.
There
are those who say in al1
sincerity that there is no need for Britain to seek to retain a
position of leadership that would require it to destroy everything that
made the country distinctive. These people are prepared to abandon
world leadership, international influence, and economic expansion for
the sake of preserving the late nineteenth-century patterns of life and
society. But pressures from outside as well as from within make this
impossible. Lycurgus renounced social change in prehistoric Sparta only
by militarizing the society. Britain certainly cannot refuse to change
and at the same time hope to retain the leisurely, semi-aristocratic,
informally improvising social structure of its recent past. The outside
world is not prepared to allow this, and, above all, the mass of
British people wil1 not allow it. In fact, the reluctance Or the
Conservative Party under Macmillan to face up to this problem has
pushed a large number of British voters, reluctantly, toward the Labour
Party. As a result, Labour won the election of October 1964 by a bare
majority of the House of Commons.
It
is widely agreed that
Britain's problems in facing the contemporary world fal1 under two
headings: (a) a rather complacent lack of enterprise
and (b)
an educational system that is not adapted to the contemporary world.
The lack of enterprise is rooted in the self-satisfied attitude of the
established elite, especially in their rather unimaginative attitude
toward industry and business. For example, at the time that the
Volkswagen was sweeping the American small-car import markets, the
British Motor Corporation had in the Morris Minor a car that was
slightly inferior in a few points, superior on several important
points, and sold for several hundred dollars less, yet no real effort
was made by the British firm to fight for a share of the American
market.
Critics
of contemporary
England tend to concentrate their fire on the educational system,
which, despite great changes, remains inadequate, in the sense that
large numbers of young people are not being trained for the tasks that
have to be done, especially for teaching itself. To be sure, Britain
has provided about three billion dollars on new educational buildings
since the war, with about a hundred thousand more teachers, an
extension in the school-leaving age of about eighteen months, and a
sixfold increase in opportunities for higher education (with new
universities being established in provincial towns almost yearly); but
the subjects studied, the methods used, and the attitudes toward these
are not directed toward the needs of the future world; no real
coordination or ready access is provided between the educational system
and the world of action, and access to either by the ordinary
Englishman remains restricted by social and economic barriers.
Instead
of the gradual
elimination of those who are unwilling to study, such as operates in
theory in France and to a lesser extent in the United States, Britain
still has barriers at ages eleven and eighteen that shunt the major
part of the country's young people into terminating and specialized
curricula, and do so on largely irrelevant criteria, such as ability to
pay or social background. A survey of more than four thousand children,
reported by Thomas Pakenham in The Observer,
concluded that
"the 11-plus examination and our selective educational system itself
are seriously biased in favour of middle-class children and against
virtually all those from poorer families." Using I.Q. tests that are
themselves biased in favor of middle-class children, the survey showed
that of all eight-year-old children with I.Q.'s of 105, only 12 percent
of lower-class children were subsequently able to get to grammar
schools, while 46 percent of those from the middle class could get to
grammar schools (and thus get access to a curriculum preparing for
college). Of eight-year-olds with I.Q.'s of 111, 30 percent from the
lower class but 60 percent of a higher social background subsequently
reached grammar school. And of those exceptional children with I.Q.'s
above 126, about 8: percent of both social levels get to grammar school.
These
figures are taken from a recent volume, edited by Arthur Koestler,
entitled Suicide of a Nation?
( Hutchinson, 1963). The significance of the volume does not rest so
much in what it says as in the fact that a team of writers, including
Koestler, Hugh Seton-Watson, Malcolm Muggeridge, Cyril Connolly, Austen
Albu, M. P., Henry Fairlie, John Mander, Michael Shanks, and others,
could contribute to a volume witl1 the rhetorical title borne by this
one. Several of these writers apply to the ruling groups of
contemporary Britain the designation that Gilbert Murray, more than a
generation ago, taught their elders to use with reference to ancient
Athens: "a failure of nerve." There may indeed be a failure of nerve in
both historical cases, but there is equally evident a failure of
imagination and of energy. For the Britain that won ... in World War II
had many opportunities to do great things in the postwar period but
failed to do so because its leaders were unwilling to grasp the
opportunity.
On
the whole, the two
contending political parties in Britain continue to offer the mass of
English voters opposing visions that have no real appeal to the great
majority of English, and, at the same time, show an obvious
disinclination to take drastic action to realize these visions,
probably because party leaders know that their views are repugnant to
the majority.
These
two opposed visions
offer, on the one hand, the nostalgic yearnings of the Conservatives
for the world of 1908 and, on the other side, the state Socialism and
unilateral disarmament of the Labour Party doctrinaires. Neither of
these has much to contribute to the real problems facing Britain in the
last half of the twentieth century, which is why the mass of British
voters, who can detect irrelevance even when they themselves have no
clear knowledge of what is relevant, have little enthusiasm for either.
The Conservative stand-patters were challenged by a number of vigorous
and able veterans of World War II, such as lain Macleod, Peter
Thorneycroft, Quintin Hogg (Lord Hailsham), Reginald Maudling, Enoch
Powell, Ted Heath, and others. These were essentially empiricists, but
they wanted Conservatism to make an active attack on Britain's problems
and to make their party more appealing to the great mass of Englishmen
by associating it with vigor and a social conscience.
In
one way or another,
Macmillan was able to sidetrack all of these, to derail the traditional
leader of the older aristocratic Conservative families, Lord Salisbury,
and to block other significant contenders for control of the party such
as R. A. Butler. In fact, Macmillan's eagerness to avoid decisions or
activity in matters concerned with the welfare of the country was
exceeded only by his activity in consolidating his own personal power
in the party. In some ways, notably in his insatiable yearning for
power, his skill in concealing this fact, and his evident lack of any
very rigid principles on other matters, Macmillan recalled his
predecessor, Baldwin. Both had the same pose as typical country squires
and both had Oxford University closer to their hearts than any other
public issue. But where Baldwin was lethargic and relatively sensitive,
Macmillan was active and secretly ruthless, quite willing, apparently,
to disrupt the Establishment or the party itself to further his
personal position and his surprisingly narrow social interests. This
was seen in his last-minute, successful, campaign against Sir Oliver
Franks for the honorary position of Chancellor of Oxford University in
1960 and in the way in which, operating from a hospital bed in 1963, he
pushed aside all other claimants to be his successor as prime minister
to put into that office the fourteenth Earl of Home, Alexander
Frederick Douglas-Home. This disregard of tradition, of the lines of
expected procedure, of the claims of past service and cooperation, and,
above all, of the expectations of public opinion in order to raise a
man whose chief claim seemed to many to be based on long lineage was a
fair commentary on Macmillan's attitude toward his office and his
party. Its influence on the morale of the party itself cannot be
assessed, but it cannot have been a good one.
The
Labour Party was similarly
divided, and similarly fell under the control of a man whose will to
power was stronger than any ideology or party principles. On the whole
the party was split between leaders of labor-union origin and
intellectuals from jobs in university teaching. At the same time, it
was split between those who still saw some merit in the old theories of
class struggles and imperialist wars and felt that the solutions to
both was to be found in nationalization of industry and drastic, if not
unilateral, disarmament (at least in regard to nuclear weapons). The
postwar world, in Britain as elsewhere, violated all the anticipations
of Socialist Party theories. The former Socialist Utopia, the Soviet
Union, became the archenemy, and the United States, previously regarded
as the epitome of capitalist corruption, became a combination of St.
George and Santa Claus; the postwar experience with nationalization
disillusioned all but the most doctrinaire of Socialists, and the
majority of voters, once they had obtained the basic elements of social
welfare, medical care, and social insurance in the immediate post-war
period, showed a strange preference for moderate or even Conservative
leaders rather than for the advocates of Left-wing policies..
As
a consequence of these
experiences, the Labour Party tended to split into a major wing that
sought to win votes and office by appeals to moderation and a minor
wing that sought to repeat the older war cries for seeking
working-class benefits through class legislation and nationalization.
The disappearance from the scene of the prewar Labour Party leaders,
such as Clement Atlee, Ernest Bevin, and Hugh Dalton, made Hugh
Gaitskell leader of the party and of its moderate wing. By 1956
Gaitskell was being challenged from the Left by Frank Cousins, a former
miner, who was backed by a million votes in the Transport and General
Workers Union. At the Party Conference of 1960 Gaitskell was defeated
on four resolutions favoring unilateral disarmament and rejecting
British cooperation with NATO, which were passed over his objections.
Gaitskell was able to reverse these votes in 196r, but could not wipe
from the public mind the impression that the party might not be
completely reliable in support of Britain's role in the defense of the
West against Communist aggressions. While still concerned with this
task, Gaitskell died early in 1963, and was succeeded as party leader
by Harold Wilson, whose brilliant record as student and teacher did not
hamper his work as a skilled and tireless manipulator of intra-party
political influence.
From
1959 onward, a small but
steady sagging in popular support for the Conservatives was evident.
The party delayed calling a new election until the very end of the
five-year term of the Parliament's life in tile vain hope that some
success, or at least some decisive improvement in Britain's economic
condition, might provide the margin for an unprecedented fourth
consecutive electoral victory. By late 1960 it w as clear that some
decisive step must be taken to regain popular support. Macmillan was
driven, still with reluctance, to seek membership for Britain in the
booming European Economic Community. Application was made in August
1961, opening many months of onerous negotiations. During this period
De Gaulle made a spectacular state visit to West Germany, spoke of the
national glories of Germany, and persuaded Chancellor Adenauer to sign
a special treaty of Franco-German friendship, whose real meaning was
ambiguous to all concerned, except that it seemed to exclude both the
great English-speaking Powers from the inner European circle. The
latter two reaffirmed their solidarity—in what looked to some
like British inferiority to Washington—in a conference between
Macmillan and President Kennedy in the Bahamas in December 1962.
The
Nassau Conference sought
to iron out various Anglo-American differences, to agree on steps that
might avert De Gaulle's steady weakening of NATO, and, on Macmillan's
part, to show the British electorate the Conservative leader's close
relations with President Kennedy. The meeting confirmed an American
decision to abandon the "Skybolt," an air-to-ground missile on which
the British had constructed much of their nuclear defense, and proposed
to strengthen NATO by establishing a "multinational force." The latter
project hoped to establish NATO's strategic nuclear force in a fleet of
surface naval vessels, armed with Polaris-type missiles and operated by
mixed crews from all the NATO Powers. These mixed crews would prevent
France from continuing its divisive policies within the NATO military
array, increase the cohesion of Europe, give its nuclear strategy at
least an appearance of independence from the United States, and provide
the groundwork for some kind of European Defense Community, including
Britain, if France split NATO completely.
De
Gaulle's answer to this
weak and symbolic gesture of Anglo-American cooperation was decisive.
Within less than a month, in January 1963, he rejected the British
seventeen-month-old application to join the EEC. This resounding defeat
to Macmillan and the United States was delivered in typical De Gaulle
fashion. In superb disregard of the established EEC procedures for
dealing with applications for membership, De Gaulle, at a personal
press conference, announced that France would oppose the British
request, on the grounds that it was a belated effort to get into a
system that the British had earlier sought to impede witl1 their rival
Outer Seven Free Trade Area and that Britain was not yet ready for
admission to any purely European system since, as he said, "Britain, in
effect, is insular, maritime, and linked by her trade, her markets, and
her suppliers to a great variety of countries, many of them
distant...[so that] the nature, structure, and circumstances of Britain
differ profoundly from those of continental states." If Britain were
admitted to EEC, according to De Gaulle, she would at once seek to
bring in all the other members of OECD, and "in the end there would
appear a colossal Atlantic community under American dominance and
leadership which would completely swallow up the European Community."
The
other five EEC nations,
with Britain and the United States, opposed De Gaulle's efforts to
break off the Brussels talks on the British application for membership,
but on January 29, 1963, the French vetoed continuance of the
discussion, and the British application was, in effect, rejected.
The
De Gaulle veto suspended
indefinitely the movement toward Europe's political unity. At tile same
time, De Gaulle rejected the Anglo-American suggestion for a
multinational nuclear force within NATO. On January 22, 1963, with
President Adenauer of West Germany, he signed the French-German Treaty
of friendship and consultation, providing periodic conferences of the
two countries on foreign policy, defense, and cultural matters. Before
the end of the month, over strong Labour Party opposition, the British
Parliament approved the Anglo-American Nassau Pact and heard Prime
Minister Macmillan announce his government's determination to build an
independent nuclear force of four or five British-built Polaris
submarines by purchasing the necessary equipment from the United States.
In
this way, the movement for
European unity was suspended and the Continent remained "at sixes and
sevens." This condition of stalemate was protracted for almost two
years, through 1963 and 1964, by extensive governmental changes and
important national elections. In February 1963, the Conservative
government of Prime Minister Diefenbaker of Canada was overthrown on a
no-confidence vote based on charges that he had failed in vigor in
supplying warheads for Canada's section of the North American defense
system. He was replaced by a Liberal government headed by Lester B.
Pearson. In the same month, in England the death of the Labour Party
leader Gaitskell brought to the head of that opposition group a
relatively unknown Left-wing intellectual and former university
instructor, Harold Wilson, who had often supported Aneurin Bevan
against Gaitskell's more moderate views. In June of 1963 the whole
movement for Christian religious reunion and reform of the Catholic
Church was suspended by the death of the very popular Pope John XXIII
and installation of his successor as Pope Paul VII. In October one of
the semipermanent fixtures of the European postwar political scene
disappeared when the eighty-seven-year-old Chancellor Konrad Adenauer
resigned after a fourteen-year term; he was replaced in the
chancellorship by Economic Minister Ludwig Erhard, who was widely
regarded as the chief architect of Germany's spectacular economic
recovery. Three days after Adenauer's resignation, Harold Macmillan, on
grounds of ill health, resigned as prime minister and was able to
impose on his party as his successor the ex-Earl of Home, renamed Sir
Alec Douglas-Home. Thus the British General Election of October rg64
was fought with new leaders on both sides.
A
few weeks after the shift of
government in London, a more significant change of government took
place in Rome as part of a long-term shift to the Left in the Italian
political balance. Essentially the dominant Christian-Democratic group
broke free, to some extent, from its reactionary Right wing and from
the need to seek support on the Right by detaching the Left-wing
Socialists from their long and uncomfortable alliance with the
Communists by bringing this group into the government and leaving the
Communists almost completely isolated on the Left. Aldo Moro, political
secretary of the Christian Democratic Party, became premier of the new
arrangement in December 1963, with Pietro Nenni, of the Left-wing
Socialists, as deputy premier. In theory the coalition rested on an
agreement to seek to extend the benefits of the Italian prosperity boom
to the less affluent workers' groups who had been relatively neglected
in the hysterical pursuit of profits by more affluent entrepreneurs
under the preceding governments.
The
Italian Cabinet shift was
still in process when President Kennedy was assassinated by an unstable
political fanatic in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. This, in view
of the power and influence of the American Presidency, was the most
significant governmental change for many years. After an unprecedented
display of worldwide mourning, the new President, Lyndon B. Johnson, of
Texas, took control of the American Presidency's global
responsibilities and national obligations with only eleven months in
which to establish his position as a candidate in the presidential
election of 1964.
As
a consequence of these
changes, the removal from office of Khrushchev in October 1964, and the
death that year of Jawaharlal Nehru, who had been prime minister of
India from the achievement of independence in 1947, the governments of
all major countries except France and Red China underwent significant
shifts of personnel in a period of about fifteen months. This gave rise
to a "pause" in world history for almost all of 1963-1964, during which
each country placed increased emphasis on its domestic problems,
especially on the demands of its citizens for increased prosperity,
civil rights, and social security. Since the same tendency became
evident also in France and Red China where the previous leaders
continued in power, the last two years covered by this book were years
of hesitation, decreased world tension, and confused plans for future
courses.
Chapter 77—Conclusion
Tragedy
and Hope? The tragedy
of the period covered by this book is obvious, but the hope may seem
dubious to many. Only the passage of time will show if the hope I seem
to see in the future is actually there or is the result of
mis-observation and self-deception.
The
historian has difficulty
distinguishing the features of the present, and generally prefers to
restrict his studies to the past, w here the evidence is more freely
available and where perspective helps him to interpret the evidence.
Thus the historian speaks with decreasing assurance about the nature
and significance of events as they approach his own day. The time
covered by this book seems to this historian to fall into three
periods: the nineteenth century from about 1814 to about 1895; the
twentieth century, which did not begin until after World War II,
perhaps as late as 1950; and a long period of transition from 1895 to
1950. The nature of our experiences in the first two of these periods
is clear enough, while the character of the third, in which we have
been for only half a generation, is much less clear.
A
few things do seem evident,
notably that the twentieth century now forming is utterly different
from the nineteenth century and that the age of transition between the
two was one of the most awful periods in all human history. Some,
looking back on the nineteenth century across the horrors of the age of
transition, may regard it with nostalgia or even envy. But the
nineteenth century was, however hopeful in its general processes, a
period of materialism, selfishness, false values, hypocrisy, and secret
vices. It was the working of these underlying evils that eventually
destroyed the century's hopeful qualities and emerged in all their
nakedness to become dominant in 1914. Nothing is more revealing of the
nature of the nineteenth century than the misguided complacency and
optimism of 1913 and early 1914 and the misconceptions with which the
world's leaders went to war in August of 1914.
The
events of the following
thirty years, from 1914 to 194;, showed the real nature of the
preceding generation, its ignorance, complacency, and false values. Two
terrible wars sandwiching a world economic depression revealed man's
real inability to control his life by the nineteenth century's
techniques of laissez faire, materialism, competition, selfishness,
nationalism, violence, and imperialism. These characteristics of late
nineteenth-century life culminated in World War II in which more than
50 million persons, 23 million of them in uniform, the rest civilians,
were killed, most of them by horrible deaths.
The
hope of the twentieth
century rests on its recognition that war and depression are man-made,
and needless. They can be avoided in the future by turning from the
nineteenth-century characteristics just mentioned and going back to
other characteristics that our Western society has always regarded as
virtues: generosity, compassion, cooperation, rationality, and
foresight, and finding an increased role in human life for love,
spirituality, charity, and self-discipline. We now know fairly well how
to control the increase in population, how to produce wealth and reduce
poverty or disease; we may, in the near future, know how to postpone
senility and death; it certainly should be clear to those who have
their eyes open that violence, extermination, and despotism do not
solve problems for anyone and that victory and conquest are delusions
as long as they are merely physical and materialistic. Some things we
clearly do not yet know, including the most important of all, which is
how to bring up children to form them into mature, responsible adults,
but on the whole we do know now, as we have already shown, that we can
avoid continuing the horrors of 1914-1915, and on that basis alone we
may be optimistic over our ability to go back to the tradition of our
Western society and to resume its development along its old patterns of
Inclusive Diversity.
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