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Topic VIII--The Quest for Total Power
Introduction In the decades following the end of the Great War in 1918, a new kind of modern state and society emerged in several regions of the world. In the unsettled and chaotic conditions that characterized the postwar years in the 1920s, and then later when the Great Depression brought terrible economic misery to millions of people in the 1930s, this new kind of regime--called totalitarian--accumulated and concentrated great power and exerted increasing control over its citizens. Totalitarianism appeared in two forms. Right-wing regimes, for example in Italy, Germany, and Japan, were motivated by extreme forms of nationalism, and their goals included military conquest, economic domination, and the creation of empires. In Russia, a left-wing form of totalitarianism emerged, motivated by Karl Marx's theory of communist revolution. All twentieth-century totalitarian states used modern technologies to exercise domination over their own populations. The totalitarian state not only controlled how citizens behaved in public, but tried to control how they lived (and even thought) in private. To begin studying this topic, read carefully the introduction to Chapter 8 of The Modern World on p. 213, where you will find a working definition of totalitarianism. Totalitarian ideas never made much headway in the United States. Instead, the political and economic crisis of the Great Depression produced a redefinition of capitalism and democratic government called the "New Deal," which started with the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as President in 1932. In Spain, meanwhile, the struggle between supporters and enemies of right-wing totalitarianism came to a climax in a civil war (1936-1939), a conflict with implications far beyond Spain itself.
In 1922, Benito Mussolini led thousands of his Fascist Party followers in a "March on Rome," seizing power, overthrowing the elected Italian government, and establishing a dictatorship that ruled Italy until 1943. In January 1933, Adolf Hitler, long an admirer of Mussolini, was appointed Chancellor of Germany. Initially, Hitler was a constitutionally elected leader, since his National Socialist (Nazi) Party had received the most votes in the last election. In less than two months, however, Hitler had suspended the German constitution and had himself appointed "President for Life." Nazism and Fascism had many common elements. Both were aggressively nationalistic, militaristic, and hostile to democracy, liberalism and (even more strongly) to communism. (See Mussolini's "The Nature of Fascism" in Documenting the Modern World, p. 153). For a more detailed introduction to the history of each regime, see these BBC sites on the History of Fascism (Document 8-1), and the History of Nazism (Document 8-2). Both political movements elevated the role of the "leader" to mythical or semi-divine status. "Il Duce" in Italy (the picture at top left shows a steely, heroic Mussolini on the cover of patriotic Fascist sheet music called "Youth") and "der Fuehrer" in Germany became synonyms for absolute wisdom and the objects of total unquestioning loyalty. Both movements preached the glory of "the nation," both its past exploits and its future triumphs. Both movements outlawed any opposition to the party or the leader, and both used violence and intimidation to reinforce their rule. Finally, both captured masses of followers through appeals to fear, resentment, and the many angry anxieties--social, economic, racial, national--felt by millions of people after the Great War and during the Great Depression. Right-wing totalitarianism had followers everywhere, not only in Italy and Germany. See the biography of the French fascist Charles Maurras in The Modern World, p. 232. Though both were totalitarian states, there were important differences between Italian Fascism and German Nazism, primarily in the Nazis' obsession with race and racial differences. For example, read Hitler's appeal to anti-Jewish racism in Documenting the Modern World, pp. 158-159. Fear and hatred of Jews was absolutely central to the Nazi ideology.
Left-Wing Totalitarianism--The Bolsheviks
and the
whose supreme leader was Vladimir Lenin, outlawed and eliminated all political opponents. See Lenin's explanation of this policy in "State and Revolution" (Documenting the Modern World, pp. 149-150). Under the military leadership of Leon Trotsky), the Bolsheviks they fought a civil war (1918-1920) against Russian and foreign elements seeking to end the communist revolution. After Lenin's death in 1924, a power struggle saw Trotsky defeated and exiled, and Joseph Stalin emerge as the new leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1927.
In Western Europe and North America, the Russian Revolution was admired by some, and feared by many. For its supporters, the Revolution promised a new age of social justice and equality. Trotsky, who had many followers in the West, was the most accomplished writer among the Bolsheviks. He summarized the Revolution's early history in this conclusion to his History of the Russian Revolution (Document 8-3), published in exile in 1930. How does Trotsky defend the revolution? Alexandra Kollontai was another revolutionary official. Kollontai's feminist perspective and policies were permitted during the first years, but like many "progressive" aspects of the Russian Revolution, they were thoroughly crushed once Stalin came to power. Kollontai's 1919 Child Welfare Decree (Document 8-4) suggests the kind of utopian ideas that some of the early Russian revolutionaries advocated. While Kollontai argued for the rights of women and children under socialism, Lenin and the Bolsheviks created the structure of Soviet totalitarianism that Stalin would perfect (see The Modern World, pp. 218-222). By the mid 1930s, during the years of the Great Purges, Stalin's Soviet Union may have been the most thoroughly repressive totalitarian regime in modern history. The absurd heights of his rule can be seen in this Hymn to Stalin (Document 8-5), an example of the kind of hero-worship that he cultivated (as did Hitler and Mussolini) and that became second nature to millions of Soviet citizens.
Visual Source Exercise: Describe these two images
of the Russian Revolution. What visual elements do they have in common?
What kinds of feelings do they produce in the viewer? How do you think
they influence the viewer's understanding of the Russian Revolution?
Building Street Barricades in Petrograd Russian Revolution, 1919
Russian Revolutionary Poster: "The Red Army Marching" Source for both images: www.marxists.org/history/ussr/pictures/index.htm
In his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), the economist John Maynard Keynes warned that the Treaty of Versailles had ignored a great danger: that the Great War had left "every one owing every one else immense sums of money" (see Documenting the Modern World, pp. 130-131). The brief prosperity of the mid 1920s, much of it based on speculation and the circulation of debt, did nothing to change that essential fact. When prosperity collapsed following the stock market crash of October 1929, the world was plunged into the worst economic crisis of modern times: The Great Depression. In the United States, the economy slowed and contracted until unemployment reached 25% by 1932. The election of Franklin D. Roosevelt that year signaled a major change. Roosevelt's cheerful public personality greatly contributed to his appeal. By bringing that optimism to the White House at the worst moment in the Great Depression, FDR succeeded in giving Americans hope for the future at a very grim time. One of Roosevelt's most effective strategies were his "Fireside Chats," radio talks that millions of Americans listened to every week. In the 1930s, the radio was the most modern form of mass communication. Politicians around the world--including Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin--used it very effectively. The photograph below shows FDR delivering a radio address.
FDR's "New Deal" created a much larger and much more active federal government (see The Modern World, pp. 233-236). The New Deal did not end the Depression in America, but it softened the worst effects of it for many Americans. FDR's policies introduced many important laws and programs, such as Social Security, unemployment insurance, laws protecting labor unions, and banking regulations that protected depositors' money (many banks failed in 1930 and 1931, wiping out savings accounts). At a time when totalitarian regimes were on the rise and capitalism seemed on the verge of collapse, these new programs succeeded in preserving both the economic system and democratic government in the United States. When Roosevelt did attempt to increase presidential power--by trying to increase the number of Supreme Court justices in order to appoint judges more sympathetic to New Deal programs--the proposal was sharply opposed and defeated. This 1937 letter from a Rochester, New York newspaper publisher named Frank Gannett (Gannett Letter, Document 8-6) illustrates the kind of opposition FDR faced when he tried to "pack the court." (This web document is a photograph of the letter Gannett sent to government officials in Washington.) New Deal government agencies also sponsored the work of artists and writers, who collected and created powerful evidence for understanding American society and American history. The photograph below, taken by Dorothea Lange and depicting a California migrant farm worker and her children, is a very famous image of the Depression. To find out how Lange created this image, and the larger role photography played in the politics of the New Deal, examine this online exhibition of Farm Security Administration Photographs (Document 8-7). What kind of emotions do these photographs produce? Read the introduction to the exhibition. What political purpose did these photographs serve? Were photographers like Lange and Walker Evans using the camera to manipulate the truth?
In the 1930s, the Great Depression, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of fascist and extreme nationalist regimes all generated impassioned and sometimes bloody political conflict. The totalitarian regimes dominated their populations, while more moderate political systems trembled and tottered, assaulted from the left by communists and from the right by fascists, each of these extremist ideologies promising "the answer" to troubled people in difficult times. By 1938 only ten of twenty-seven European countries had open political systems in which more than one party honestly competed for power and citizens were genuinely free to think and act as they wished. In 1936, a civil war that erupted in Spain put all these conflicts on display. The Spanish Republic was a moderate "Popular Front" regime with socialist, republican, and liberal elements. Its policies were largely hostile to the Catholic Church and large landowners, the traditional centers of power in Spanish society. General Francisco Franco, a young officer, led a military rebellion against the government in the name of these traditional conservative powers. Germany and Italy sided with Franco and the rebels, while the Soviet Union sided with the Spanish government. The democratic western powers, Britain, France, and the United States, all of them terrified of another war, stayed studiously neutral and refused to help the Spanish government. For Hitler and Mussolini, the Spanish war became a place to test policies and weapons. The Luftwaffe, the German air force, tried out its new bombers on Spanish cities. The great Spanish artist Pablo Picasso immortalized one of these attacks in the painting called Guernica (Document 8-8), an acknowledged masterpiece of modern art. Thousands of foreign volunteers from Europe and North America, convinced that stopping Franco's rebellion mean stopping (or at least challenging) fascism and Nazism, flocked to Spain to fight for the Republic. One of these antifascist volunteers was George Orwell, a young British writer later famous for writing 1984 and Animal Farm, two classic modern political novels. Orwell was a socialist, and in Homage to Catalonia (Document 8-9), which he wrote after returning to England in 1938, he described what he found when he went to Barcelona, one of the strongholds of Spanish socialism. Note, as you read, Orwell's description of posters on the walls of Barcelona's buildings. The images below are examples of the sort of poster art, created during the Spanish Civil War, that Orwell refers to.
Visual Source Exercise: Describe these two Spanish Civil War posters. What visual elements in them are most powerful? What kind of emotional reaction do they produce? Connect specific parts of the posters with the specific feelings they provoke. What kind of political impact do you think they had on viewers?
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