I. ENTANGLEMENTS

The 1920s boom in America was unique. It was the most autarkic of nations. There were no enemies on its continent and great oceans on its shores. It had vast natural resources, an ambitious and entrepreneurial population, and an outsize share of the world’s money. It was the world leader in mass production manufacturing, in energy, in industrial research, and in the average education of its population. It was no mystery that with the war ended, Congress and the great majority of Americans wanted to shake off the dust of Europe and enjoy the blessings of “normalcy,” frolicking in the world’s first consumer paradise of cars, phonographs, radios, movies, packaged foods, exciting new music, and electric homes.

But the entanglements were not to be escaped so easily. Wilson had brought the country into the war, and Americans had seats of power in virtually all the negotiations for ending it. There were still American troops in Europe, and Americans wanted them home. They had approved of the reparations to be exacted from the Germans, and they wanted their own massive wartime lending to be repaid. And there were the murky questions of national boundaries, of restoring national defenses, of limiting German rearmament, and of specifying periods of occupations and inspections.

Resolving these issues took the entire decade of the 1920s, and beyond. The drawn-out process delayed the reestablishment of stable governments, empowered extremists, stoked paranoia and recriminations on the part of both right and left parties, and fed into the toxic brew of tribalism and race that ultimately exploded into another global paroxysm that dwarfed the “Great War.”

The magic elixir for navigating weighty international impasses is always money, and in the aftermath of the war, with all the economies of Europe stagnant and staggering, the only money of interest was gold. Understanding the role of gold in this era requires understanding how nineteenth-century Britons managed their world empire.