I. THE LEGACY OF WAR

It is hard to conceive of the Great Depression absent World War I. Presumably, if Austria-Hungary had behaved as most diplomats expected and not mobilized, the Sarajevo crisis would have been papered over as multiple other such crises had been, and millions of casualties and trillions in economic losses would not have occurred. But the “if” in that sentence is a very large one. Great Britain’s Victorian dispensation was surely entering its dotage. Germany, France, Russia, Japan, and other rising states were determined to expand their boundaries, whether in Europe or in colonies abroad. German industry, especially, was decisively outperforming Great Britain’s and the rest of Europe’s in almost every category, and was determined to expand its footprint, whether on the continent or abroad. But more than merely mercenary considerations were in play. There was an engrained metaphysics of war, an atavistic “Idea” of war as a purifying flame, a ratification of the quality of one’s racial stock, an essential step to the realization of national destinies. The philosopher William James, a pacifist, in order to emphasize the difficulties of the pacifist cause, extolled the virtues of war:

Patriotism no one thinks discreditable; nor does anyone deny that war is the romance of history… and the possibility of violent death the soul of all romance.… It is a sort of sacrament. Its profits are to the vanquished as well as the victor… it is an absolute good we are told, for it is human nature at its highest dynamic.¹

And so the war came. Rivers of blood were shed. Millions of men died in pestilential trench mud. Industrial and cultural edifices were turned to ashes. National treasuries were emptied. Whole populations displaced.

To make matters worse, the “Spanish flu” pandemic arrived in Europe some months before the armistice. It was almost certainly carried by American soldiers and was dubbed the “pale rider” of the troop ships. The European version of the disease was far more virulent than the one in America, and the disruptions of war—poor nutrition, crowded refugee camps, unhygienic field hospitals—helped it spread like wildfire.²

Travelers’ reports painted a grim picture. A number commented on the evident undernourishment of German children, but many blamed it on the Germans. “[The country] makes political capital out of her undernourished children,” one wrote, even as they rerouted food supplies to a wildly profitable black market. Germans, he went on, were a nation of “scheibers,” who refused to live by the rules. While he was “deeply touched” by the sight of the children, he was disgusted at the two hundred all-night restaurants in Berlin “filled with revelers reveling in their own stolid fashion and eating vast quantities of forbidden food while the rest of the nation converses glibly of starving children.”³

Other veteran travelers to Germany were surprised at the condition of Berlin, a once slumless city that had now become a “slum en bloc,” with beggars exposing their mutilated limbs and streets filled with “unshaven men and ill-washed women,” along with “loosely organized soldiers who roamed the city at will.” American travelers were surprised at their friendly reception in Germany, although others realized it was just in contrast to the German hatred of the French. Most Germans seemed anxious to press their war narrative on visitors: “we won the war—on the field of battle, such a war as never before waged against a nation in history… our line never cracked.” The loss was due to the “arrival of the Americans, starvation due to the naval blockade, a military command gone ‘stale’,” and the realization that “the whole world [was] against us.”⁴

Travelers to Vienna, one of the world’s most elegant cities, found it in a pitiable state: “The Peace Conference stripped Austria of everything she needs in order to exist.… She can’t buy coal, she can’t buy food, she can’t buy raw materials.… She is cold and starved and helpless and hopeless.” But the locals revered Herbert Hoover, whose relief operations were keeping the city on survival diets. An Austrian official said Hoover was “the most humane, the best-informed, the most practical, and the biggest-brained man not only in the United States, but in the world today.”⁵

Some travelers engaged in a kind of battlefield porn—special tours to the battle sites and trenches that ran through northern France and Belgium. The desolation at Ypres awed visitors: one described a mangled tank as “a most pathetic animal… more human than any other kind of machinery… lying amid the blackened stumps and seas of mud.”⁶

An American traveler who had lived for twenty years in Germany and France was surprised at first at the number of young French women working in jobs usually held by men, until he realized it was a consequence of the war’s fearsome toll on young men. He found less explicable the booming business at theaters, cabarets, and casinos: the “hotels as spacious and luxurious as ever; the restaurants… as glittering and gay,” but he gradually realized that just beneath the surface, the “European continent [was] a seething hell of hate: life is oppressed by a pall of vindictiveness and mutual distrust.”⁷

All of the tangled threads that twisted together to create the catastrophe of the Depression originated in Europe and can be traced through the choices made by the governments of the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and France. Those choices, however, wrongheaded as they often were, were made in the context of large global forces that ensured that their consequences were often as bad as they could possibly be.