15. THE "ROARING 20s"

AMERICA AND THE WORLD

Despite the Idealism of many of the European leaders, especially those of Great Britain and France, the mood of the average European was not all that different from the average American, rural or urban.

For Europeans, who had suffered greatly through the four years of war, the post-war period was troubled with the thought that all of the war's high-sounding nationalist spirit had produced in the end only mindless death and destruction.  A spirit of disillusionment with politicians and cynicism with respect to their ideas and programs set in, much as it did in America.

This cynical spirit stirred a sense of political opportunity among a number of extremist political factions and their leaders: Communists and Social Democrats on the Left and Fascists on the Right.  They found their appeal strongest among the social classes that had suffered most from the crumbling of the older social order.

Socialism/Communism.  European soldiers coming out of the war found that with the war over and war-time industry cutting back, jobs were scarce, and the ones that did exist paid very poorly.  They were deeply resentful of the way their personal sacrifices were so poorly rewarded – while fat-cat wartime industrialist owners or capitalists still seemed to be doing fairly well for themselves.  This group of industrial workers was thus easily manipulated by leaders who urged the workers to rise up against the wealthy industrial property owners, seize their property and make it communally their own.  This was the basis of the Communist appeal which produced workers’ uprisings all across Europe in the 1920s (and the huge Red Scare in early 1920s America).

Fascism.  Other European soldiers, upon a return to their farms, found that they had been left behind economically and culturally by developments brought on by the war.  With international farm prices running at a new low, farmers found it difficult to sustain a living for themselves and their families.  They watched with resentment as a fast-growing urban industrial order appeared to be enjoying many of the new economic opportunities of the post-war world.  This agrarian/ small-townsmen group was easily manipulated by leaders who stressed the importance of restoring a largely romanticized traditional agrarian social order. They promised to bring the glories of a mythical past back to existence – if the people simply surrendered their hopes and dreams to the total management by their great leaders.  This appeal is the basis for what will come to be called Fascism.

European Fascism actually had its roots in Italy when post-war Italy seemed literally to have fallen apart politically.  Although Italy had finally joined the war in 1915 on the "victorious" side in the Great War, there had been nothing at all about Italy’s performance in the war to indicate to the average Italian that they had achieved anything at all of what might be classed as victory.  Instead, coming out of the war, the Italians generally considered their former leaders as grand failures – which the Italian leaders themselves understood was their political standing in Italy. Thus they tended to lay low.  And thus also a power vacuum existed in Italy after the war.

And into that vacuum had stepped Benito Mussolini, the bombastic editor of a Milan newspaper.  Mussolini had started out as a Socialist propagandist – who turned against Socialism when it refused to support the Italian entry into the Great War. Mussolini saw the war as a means of bringing Italy to a new strength and prominence: strength through collective struggle (Fascism).  Mussolini became bitterly opposed to Marxist Socialism, with its call to European workers to resist taking up arms on behalf of capitalist war profiteers – a call which Europe’s fiercely nationalist workers had largely ignored … and then had paid a huge price for their patriotism.

But Mussolini was opposed not only to Socialist pacifism, he was as opposed to Liberal Idealism with its hopes to build an international order of peace through a new spirit of international democratic cooperation.  Mussolini accused such philosophies of peace as merely weakening human strength and producing effete societies.  He exalted strength – strength through conflict, strength through struggle – which would produce a warlike character among a people.  This in turn would bring them to greatness – greatness such as the ancient Romans had once exemplified.  The key to this process was achieving an absolute unity of the people through unswerving loyalty to a great leader, a Duce (Italian simply for "Leader") such as Mussolini himself proposed to become.  He promised Italians (notably Italy’s industrial leaders) to bring unity to Italy through a policy of strict enforcement of social conformity through the use of his street toughs (the Fascist Blackshirts) – who stood ready to strike total fear in the hearts of labor agitators and anarchists through whatever means necessary to do so.

At a time when Italy seemed to be threatened internally by the same forces tearing Russia and Germany apart, this Fascist call of Mussolini's to enforced unity had a very strong appeal.  Thus it was that in October of 1922 a small group of Mussolini's Fascists marched on Rome – facing virtually no resistance.  The Italian king responded by asking Mussolini to save the nation by becoming its leader.  Italy now began to head down the path of Fascism – forced national unity under the domination of the Duce, who was to do the thinking and direct all the actions of the Italian nation.  Any resistance to his program, actively or even just verbally, was met with stiff repression.