2

DEMOCRACY

The world must be made safe for democracy.

WOODROW WILSON, 1917

We have got to make democracy safe for the world.

STANLEY BALDWIN, 1928¹

At the end of the war, declared H. G. Wells, Woodrow Wilson “was transfigured in the eyes of men. He ceased to be a common statesman; he became a Messiah.”² The president was welcomed ecstatically in London on December 26, 1918, en route to the peace conference in Paris. Standing on the balcony of Buckingham Palace with King George V, he acknowledged the cheers of a huge crowd. Next evening he attended a state banquet at the palace to celebrate the Allied victory. The guests represented all parts of Britain and the Empire—hundreds of generals and politicians, ambassadors and ministers, resplendent in uniforms and official dress adorned with medals and jewels. “All of the table service is of solid gold, bearing the royal arms,” Wilson’s physician noted: its value was reputedly $15 million. But the guest of honor cut a very different figure. The president wore an ordinary black suit, without medals or braid. His speech of thanks was clipped and cold, making no mention of the role of the British Empire in defeating Germany. “There was no glow of friendship or of gladness at meeting men who had been partners in a common enterprise,” Lloyd George recalled. This almost Cromwellian visitation at the pageant of princes was a dramatic sign that the president of the United States had his own agenda.³

Wilson had talked of making the world “safe for democracy,” but democracy was an embattled ideal after the Great War. The crisis of 1917–18 ignited the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, offering a very different political program, which threatened to spread across Europe. The backlash against it fuelled Mussolini’s fascist movement, which gained power in Italy in 1922. By the 1930s, fascist or rightwing authoritarian regimes, backed by military force, had become the norm across central and eastern Europe and above all in Germany. Even France became polarized between right and left. In this new age of communism and fascism, of mass politics and political “supermen,” the liberal variant of democracy seemed antiquated and irrelevant.

Yet, bucking the trend, Britain remained a liberal polity, adapting its representative institutions to the era of mass electorates and class politics. Socialism was domesticated and constitutional monarchy survived. Equally important, Britain retained a robust two-party system, at a time when continental politics were characterized by either a monolithic “totalitarian” party or by a kaleidoscope of factions. Even Ireland transcended the violence of civil war to become a stable, constitutional, two-party state. Across the Atlantic in the United States, not only communism but also socialism failed to take hold—divorcing the American experience from that of all of Europe, Britain included.

In February 1917, the Romanovs, Europe’s most repressive autocracy, were overthrown in less than two weeks. Lenin was still exiled in Zurich. “It’s so staggering,” he exclaimed to his wife. “It’s so completely unexpected.” The poet Alexander Blok likened the sudden collapse of tsarism to “a train crash in the night.”⁴ The spark had been Russia’s dire food crisis: in early 1917 a combination of military demands and appalling weather paralyzed supplies, provoking bread riots in the major cities. Yet the February Revolution was largely the story of just one city, Petrograd (the wartime, de-Germanized name of St. Petersburg). Measured against the rest of urban Europe, it was a very unusual city.

Petrograd was the fifth largest metropolis in Europe. A seething industrial sweatshop of 2.4 million people set in a predominantly rural country, 70 percent of its workers were employed in factories of more than one thousand people. This was a proportion unmatched even in the conurbations of America or Germany. Sucked in by the war boom, the proletariat lived in the most appalling squalor: more than three people on average to every cellar or single-room apartment—double the figure for Berlin or Paris. Roughly half the homes lacked a water supply or sewage system; a quarter of all babies died in their first year. Yet wealth and privilege stared these workers in the face—leered at them, you might say—because the main factory district, Vyborg, lay just across the Neva River from fashionable Nevsky Prospekt and the Imperial Palace. Other European capitals were also industrial centers, but in Berlin, Paris, and London suburbanization was more extensive: workers lived in their own slums some miles from the center of government.⁵ Equally important, Petrograd was a vast military garrison, with more than 300,000 soldiers in the city and its immediate environs. One eyewitness likened this to placing “kindling wood near a powder keg.”⁶ What turned the bread riots into full-scale revolution was the mutiny of these peasant soldiers, who first refused to fire on the protestors and then took their side. Once the Army command lost control of the capital, it panicked and persuaded Nicholas II to abdicate. The tsar’s brother then rejected the poisoned chalice, and so the Romanov dynasty, rulers of Russia for three centuries, came to an abrupt end. The whole business had taken ten days.

The fragility of the old order can be explained in large part because, uniquely among European states, tsarist Russia remained essentially a personal despotism. Nicholas, like his father, Alexander III, had revived the old Byzantine traditions of the tsar as parent of his people, the embodiment of God on Earth, the feudal landowner of the whole domain of Russia. Suspicious not merely of parliament but also of bureaucracy and the rule of law as fetters on their personal rule, father and son obstinately upheld their coronation oath to the principles of “Autocracy.” As symbols of the state and its glory, the Romanovs therefore got the blame for the escalating catastrophe of the Great War. And when the dynasty fell apart in 1917, so did the whole fabric of political and social order. Russia’s problem after the February Revolution was not simply the existence of two rival power centers: the provisional government, based in parliament, and the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. This gridlock of “dual power” was part of a general political vacuum—police, judges, priests, teachers, bureaucrats, village elders, even husbands all lost their authority without the tsar. As the country slid into anarchy, Lenin saw his chance. Far from being swept to power by the masses, as celebrated in Sergei Eisenstein’s tenth-anniversary epic film October, he gained it through a daring, small-scale coup, over the doubts of many of his Bolshevik colleagues. The ensuing social revolution swept away the remaining vestiges of the old order, while at the top Lenin gradually centralized all power in his party. “As a form of absolutist rule the Bolshevik regime was distinctly Russian,” observes historian Orlando Figes. “It was a mirror-image of the Tsarist state.” ⁷

The Russian revolutions of 1917 were therefore rooted in the peculiarities of Romanov rule. That was not, however, how they seemed to many contemporaries. What brought the tsarist regime to its knees was the crisis of war mobilization, many features of which were common to Europe as a whole. Across the Continent millions of men had been enlisted into the armed forces—15 percent of the population of the Habsburg Empire by November 1918, 17 percent of the Kaiserreich, and 21 percent in the case of France. The strain on soldiers was immense: France’s army mutinied in 1917, followed in 1918 by those of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Millions more men and women were sucked into war industries, but the housing stock proved totally inadequate and pay rates failed to keep pace with raging inflation. By 1917–18 all the belligerent states were wracked by shortages of food, coal, and other necessities and industrial centers such as Milan, Paris, and Berlin became hotbeds of labor radicalism. Although the pressures were mostly contained during the war, apart from in Russia, after the armistice they exploded in violent strikes and protests across Europe. Exacerbating these tensions was the demobilization, often very rapid, of millions of soldiers, schooled in violence and facing little prospect of employment as the war boom tailed off.⁸

At the time, therefore, the parallels between Russia and the rest of Europe appeared more striking than the differences. What happened in Germany in November 1918 had evident similarities with Russia’s surprise revolution of February 1917.⁹ Here too mutiny in the armed forces was the catalyst, although the trouble started in the provinces, rather than the capital, with an uprising among sailors in Kiel. Unrest then spread rapidly across northern Germany, the Rhineland, and the south, spawning workers’ and soldiers’ councils (Räte) on the Bolshevik model, before challenging the regime in Berlin itself. Less than two weeks after the Kiel mutiny began, Germany had become a socialist-led republic and the kaiser fled into exile in Holland. In January 1919 the German communist party (the KPD) capitalized on the crisis by mounting its own Lenin-style bid for power in Berlin. The rising was brutally put down, the socialist government relying heavily on the Army and volunteer veterans, the Freikorps, to restore order. But strikes and protests spread across Germany during the spring, with a Bolshevik republic proclaimed in Bavaria. “It may be assumed that the rest of Germany will follow,” asserted the novelist Thomas Mann, and then “the proletariat of the Allied countries” would have “no choice but to do the same.”¹⁰

In fact, the Bavarian republic lasted only a month before being suppressed after bloody street fighting, but by then Hungary had raised the Red Flag. This Soviet government was led by Béla Kun, a radical journalist before the war who had thrown in his lot with Lenin after the revolution and was bankrolled by Bolshevik money. Neither Kun nor his regime looked impressive: British diplomat Harold Nicolson described him as a “shifty” little man with a “puffy white face and loose wet lips”—the looks of “a sulky and uncertain criminal.”¹¹ Through a frenzy of reform, including the nationalization of businesses, the breakup of landed estates, a ban on alcohol, and compulsory sex education in schools, Kun managed to alienate almost everyone in quick time. The Hungarian Soviet Republic survived only for three and a half months, from March to August 1919, before it was toppled by the Romanian Army.

The upheavals in Germany and Hungary, though brief, were deeply alarming. Revolution, it seemed, was not peculiar to Asiatic Russia; it could also explode in the heart of modern Europe. Contemporaries, mindful perhaps of the global pandemic of influenza in 1918–19, spoke of Bolshevism as a virus or a plague against which they had to erect a cordon sanitaire. This anxiety pervaded European politics immediately after the war, including in Britain. In the event, however, Bolshevism failed to take root outside the Soviet Union: strong communist parties developed in only two European states during the 1920s. One was Germany, where the Kommunistiche Partei Deutschlands (KPD) peaked with nearly 17 percent of the vote in the November 1932 elections. But German communists failed to exploit their popular support, willing neither to participate in government nor to embark on revolution, and then they were destroyed by Hitler in 1933. During the 1920s, the Parti Communiste Français (PCF), generally won around a tenth of the vote, surging to over 15 percent in 1936. This breakthrough was partly the result of a change of strategy, from KPD-style sectarian isolationism in the 1920s to Popular Front cooperation with other anti-fascist parties. But communist success also reflected the unique place of revolution in French political culture, going back to 1870, 1848, and 1789. In no other European country could communism be fused so powerfully with nationalism.¹²

More important in the long term than the threat of communist revolution was the new strength of the socialist left and the consequent reaction from the right. This took place amid the biggest revolution of all, the explosion of mass democracy. In France all men had exercised the vote since 1848, in Germany since 1871, while in the United States adult male suffrage (for whites) dated back to the 1830s. But in 1918 the franchise was dramatically expanded across Europe—mainly to reward the workers for their war efforts, though it was also a hasty response to the precedent set by Bolshevik Russia. Many of the states of the former Habsburg Empire adopted adult male suffrage; likewise Italy and the United Kingdom. America and Germany also granted the vote to women, and the UK enfranchised women over the age of thirty. (Female suffrage was not conceded in France and Italy until after the Second World War.) The result of these changes, mostly enacted in 1918, was a dramatic expansion of the electorate—nearly threefold in both Britain and Germany. Political elites feared that workers and women would fortify the parties of the left.

Democracy was not defined simply by the franchise; it also involved the method of government. In Germany and across the former Habsburg Europe, parliaments, whatever the franchise, had previously enjoyed little say over how the polity was governed. In imperial Germany, for instance, government ministers had been responsible to the kaiser and not to the Reichstag. But the German revolution of 1918 harnessed the existing democratic franchise (plus women) to a new parliamentary government. In Britain and Italy the dynamic worked in the opposite direction: both states had a liberal tradition of parliamentary government that they now had to adapt for a hugely enlarged electorate. In most of the new states of East and Southeast Europe, there was an added complication—the Constitution. In all the attention given to the “Wilsonian moment,” it is often forgotten that the constitutions of these new democracies were modeled not on America but on Europe’s most renowned democracy, France—in other words, a weak executive and strong legislature, with ministries formed from the balance of forces in the assembly. In such a system political stability depended on building coalitions among a mix of rival parties and the adroit use of limited governmental powers—no easy task.

Coping with the new mass democracy was Europe’s great political challenge of the postwar era. On the Continent, the forces of the right would prove more successful than those of the left. The two countries that mattered above all were Italy and Germany.¹³ Germany’s crisis has received more attention, because it laid the powder trail for another war, but Italy’s rightist revolution happened more than a decade before Hitler took power and it influenced politics across Europe.

The victory of fascism in Italy reflected deep social cleavages opened up by the war. The country had remained neutral in August 1914: the decision for war in May 1915 was taken by a few political leaders against the wishes of most of the population and without even consulting the general staff. Rallying to the patriotic cause, interventionists, backed by much of the press, clamored for the government to complete what was seen as the “redemption” of Italian lands from Habsburg rule, especially the northeastern province of Trentino and the city of Trieste. Passionate interventisti even glorified war as an end in itself: Gabriele D’Annunzio, the flamboyant author, rewrote Christ’s Sermon on the Mount to declare: “Blessed are the young who hunger and thirst after glory, for they shall be sated.”¹⁴ But most Catholics were lukewarm, and the Italian Socialist Party—uniquely in Europe—openly opposed the war. Throughout 1916 and 1917 the Army chief of staff, Gen. Luigi Cadorna, drove his troops forward in futile offensives in the Alpine foothills along the Isonzo River, maintaining discipline by savage punishments and random executions—until the twelfth battle of Isonzo in October 1917, better known as Caporetto, after the nearby town. The Habsburg Army had been stiffened by German storm troopers, among them an audacious young company commander called Erwin Rommel. Their surprise attack, swooping up and down the ridges, routed the bemused Italians, who fell back to within thirty kilometers of Venice: 300,000 were taken prisoner, another 350,000 deserted. Caporetto entered the Italian language as a synonym for shambolic collapse.

Although the Italians regained most of the Trentino when the Habsburg armies collapsed, the armistice left a sour taste. Socialists and Catholics felt grimly vindicated by the appalling losses, while the military and the right blamed all that had gone wrong on those “red and black defeatists.” In October 1918 Mussolini was already damning the “evil brood of caporettisti” who had “stabbed the nation in the back.”¹⁵ And Italy’s death toll of nearly 600,000 encouraged extravagant demands, including the city of Fiume and much of the eastern Adriatic coast, to compensate for the “mutilated victory” (vittoria mutilata). In September 1919, D’Annunzio, who had gained new fame as a wartime fighter pilot, took matters into his own hands. He marched into Fiume with two thousand “legionaries” and reigned there in swaggering splendor for fifteen months. His internationally notorious act of defiance dramatized the feebleness of the Italian state.

Somewhat desperately, Italy’s traditional ruling elite of liberal politicians tried to play the democratic card. In December 1918 they conceded universal male suffrage to reward the troops; the following summer they introduced proportional representation, hoping to placate moderate Catholics and socialists and thereby head off extremism. Neither gamble worked: 1919 and 1920 have gone down in Italian political folklore as the Two Red Years (biennio rosso), with bitter strikes among tenant farmers in Tuscany and the Po Valley and in the northwest industrial triangle of Milan, Genoa, and Turin. After the elections of November 1919, Italy’s most open to date, the new chamber was dominated by two new mass parties: the Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI), which won a fifth of the vote, and the Catholic Partito Popolare Italiano (PPI) with one-third. Henceforth, any liberal government would need the support of one of them, but the PSI was committed (at least rhetorically) to revolution while the PPI was an unstable and inexperienced amalgam of different classes and did not stay long in government.

With the Italian state therefore ineffectual, a leading role in suppressing the left, as in Germany, was taken by paramilitary groups. Italy’s equivalent of the Freikorps was the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, often war veterans but also militant students, led by the former socialist editor Benito Mussolini. In the summer of 1920 his armed squads struck back in the Red provinces of north and central Italy, beating up local union members, restoring landlord power, and bolstering the middle class. Hoping to coopt this new political force into traditional politics, the liberal politico Giovanni Giolitti incorporated the fascists in his National Bloc in the May 1921 elections, but that simply gave Mussolini political respectability. During 1921 he rebranded his movement as a mass party, the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF), while retaining the squads who now enjoyed near immunity from police restraint. The PNF was therefore a complicated hybrid—both “political party” engaged in the parliamentary game and also “military organization” using applied violence.¹⁶ And it was this dual-track approach that finally brought Mussolini to power in October 1922. With the Catholic PPI still on the margins and the PSI mounting a general strike, the liberal elite had nowhere else to turn. Fascist squads marched on the provincial capitals and threatened Rome: the liberal elite caved in under this intimidation and the king appointed Mussolini prime minister. The squaddies then entered the capital in triumph, an event celebrated hereafter by fascists as the March on Rome.

Hitler’s success derived from a crisis of state legitimacy that was even more profound than in liberal Italy. Its roots lay in Germany’s abrupt collapse after the failure of the great offensives of spring 1918. Ludendorff’s panicked demand for an armistice shocked troops and public alike, who had been kept in the dark about the gravity of the situation, and it sparked the revolutions across Germany in early November. Yet the German Army, though retreating, had not been routed: in the west it was not even fighting on German soil. Hence the plausibility of claims that Germany had been the victim of a “stab in the back” by socialists and revolutionaries at home (Dolchstoss). This image had Wagnerian overtones: when Ludendorff told his staff that Germany must seek an armistice, one officer tearfully recalled Siegfried at the end of Götterdämmerung, “with his death wound in the back from Hagen’s spear.” Ludendorff insisted that a new civilian government “must now clean up the mess they’ve got us into,” even though it was his call for an armistice that started the avalanche.¹⁷ Ludendorff’s Machiavellian ploy paid off: it was the new socialist-led republican government that had to carry the can for the armistice and the hated Treaty of Versailles. Weimar was born in original sin that nothing and nobody could redeem.

Anger was particularly intense among the extreme right-wing veterans’ groups such as the Steel Helmets (Stahlhelm), whose Brandenburg branch declared in 1928 that “we hate with all our soul the present constitution of the state” because “it deprives us of the prospect of liberating our enslaved Fatherland” and “gaining necessary living-space in the east.” Most of the three-million-plus members of Germany’s veterans associations (Kriegsvereinen) in 1930 also believed that the Reich had been stabbed in the back and entertained little affection for the Republic. Here was fertile soil for Hitlerite dogma. Weimar’s armed forces were determined to break the humiliating shackles of Versailles—100,000 troops, no air force, tanks, battleships, or submarines—and restore Germany to the rank of a great power. In the medium term that would mean conflict with France, eventually with Britain and America. The military considered that a republican Germany and a castrated army were “anomalies” born of military defeat and political collapse. None of this implied automatic support for Hitler: most of the political right and the officer corps were nostalgic monarchists but they had no affection for the Republic and were susceptible to firm militaristic leadership.¹⁸

In Germany, like Italy, the left proved ineffectual—the communist KPD being unready to mount a revolution and the socialist SPD reluctant to exercise constitutional power in the new republic. The SPD was, in fact, the largest party in the Reichstag for almost all the 1920s but it generally shunned coalition with the bourgeois parties. The Weimar Republic’s center of gravity therefore lay with the Centre Party (Zentrum), largely Catholic, and the liberal People’s Party (Deutsche Volkspartei, DVP). Although postwar Germany was also plagued by street violence—the state being restricted to an army of only 100,000 under the Treaty of Versailles—this subsided after the Munich putsch of November 1923 when the Nazis tried and failed to emulate Mussolini’s March on Rome. Learning the dual-track lesson, Hitler reconstructed his movement as a mass political party, the National Socialists, while also retaining the paramilitary thugs.

In Germany the turning point, quite different from Italy, was the disastrous depression of 1929–33, which, at its nadir, left more than one-third of the workforce unemployed. The crisis of capitalism will be examined more fully in chapter 4; what matters here are its political consequences. Few polities could have survived Germany’s level of unemployment: voters deserted the center for the extremes, both left and right, where the Nazis were the big beneficiaries of the election of 1930. Increasingly the Nazis seemed to offer Germany’s political and military elites the equivalent of the fascists in Italy a decade earlier: a serviceable mass party to help turn back the swelling leftist tide—hence the appointment of Hitler as chancellor in January 1933. “Don’t worry, we’ve hired him,” joked former chancellor Franz von Papen. “If Hitler wants to establish a dictatorship in the Reich,” predicted Gen. Kurt von Schleicher, “then the army will be the dictatorship within the dictatorship.” This was fatal complacency. Papen survived, just; Schleicher was murdered eighteen months later.¹⁹

The cult of a strong leader was central to both Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. It embodied, in vulgarized form, the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose craggy face and great drooping walrus mustache had helped make him a cultural icon by 1900. Nietzsche was a protean thinker, whose rambling discourses and pungent slogans could be interpreted in numerous ways: talk of the “death of God” and of a new morality “beyond good and evil” endeared him to the radical left and the avant-garde before the Great War.²⁰ But increasingly it was the militaristic right who adopted Nietzsche, attracted by his contempt for “herdlike” democracy, his insistence on the “will to power” as life’s central principle, and his adulation of the Übermensch. That word is almost impossible to translate into English: higher man, overman, and superman have all been used. Nietzsche’s core meaning was probably self-mastery—in the words of biographer Walter Kaufmann: “The man who has overcome himself has become an overman”—but Nietzsche’s writings also extolled the opportunities offered by mass democracies for mastery of others. “Men who learn easily, who submit easily, are the rule: the herd-animal, extremely intelligent, has been prepared. Whoever can command will find those who must obey.”²¹

Mussolini was an ardent admirer of Nietzsche, who, he said, filled him with “spiritual eroticism,” and from whom he derived favorite phrases such as “the will to power” and “live dangerously.” Although formally eschewing any idea of dictatorship, he “deliberately developed the myth of mussolinismo as the one essential dogma of his regime.” In 1929 he was simultaneously prime minister and the head of eight other ministries, from Foreign Affairs to Public Works. During the 1920s the cult of the DUCE (in capital letters) became a civic religion in Italy.²²

The term Führer was first applied by Nazis to Hitler in the general sense of “our leader”; but after the March on Rome in 1922 he was lauded as “the leader” for whom all Germany had been waiting—“our Mussolini.” Once the Nazis gained power, Goebbels imposed a new German greeting, modeled on Mussolini’s Roman salute—right arm raised while declaiming, “Heil Hitler.” After the death of Hindenburg in 1934, the offices of chancellor and president were merged and Hitler’s messianic stature was confirmed by the epic Nuremburg Party Rally, when he descended from heaven, his plane casting a cruciform shadow over the marching troops, as Rudolf Hess intoned: “Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler.”²³ The rally was commemorated in Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will, whose Nietzschean title was personally chosen by Hitler. The Führer, unlike the Duce, was not himself much influenced by Nietzsche, but during the 1930s the philosopher was Nazified as a bellicose German nationalist and the apostle of an Aryan master race. The Third Reich increasingly labeled its enemies and outsiders as Üntermenschen—a term Nietzsche had used infrequently but which, as the antonym of Übermensch, now became shorthand for the Jews and Slavs who had to be eliminated.²⁴

How to define fascism, whether indeed any definition is possible, has engendered endless historical debate, but certain general features are: the cult of the dynamic leader, shrewd manipulation of the new mass politics, a fierce nationalism feeding on the bitter fruits of war, and the celebration of willpower and violence.²⁵ Although only three other countries—Austria, Hungary, and Romania—spawned fascist movements with significant popular support, Europe in the 1930s saw a surge of anti-left politics. These included radical rightist regimes based on military rule and also conservatives who favored nineteenth-century elitism buttressed by traditional religion. Their common denominator was a profound reaction against the failings of parliamentary democracy. In Poland, for instance, where there were twenty-six Polish parties and another thirty-three among the ethnic minorities, Piłsudski mounted a military coup in 1926 to break the political deadlock. The result was not a one-party fascist state but controlled parliamentarianism of a pre-1914 sort, regulated by the armed forces. This was a common pattern across eastern Europe, sometimes imposed—as in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Romania—by the monarch, whose standing had revived as the passion for democracy waned. In places this took the form of “pre-emptive authoritarianism”—the restriction of parliamentary democracy by the elites to avert a full-scale fascist challenge from outside. Romania in 1938 was one example, following Estonia and Latvia in 1934. Only two of the “new” states invented on the continent of Europe in 1918–19 survived to 1939 as something like liberal democracies—Finland and Czechoslovakia.²⁶

During the 1930s instability spread to Western Europe. French politics were hamstrung by the Third Republic’s Constitution (1875), which, fearful of another Napoleonic Empire, ensured a weak executive and a strong assembly, from which a variety of parties formed short-lived coalition governments. Between the triumphant Armistice of 1918 and its humiliating successor in 1940, France had no fewer than forty-two separate cabinets.²⁷ In the deepening depression, French politics became polarized while the country’s socialist and communist left, now the most significant in Europe, was challenged by quasi-fascist “leagues,” notably the royalist Action Française and the veterans’ organization Croix-de-Feu, which had nearly half a million members by early 1936.²⁸ Its leader, François de La Rocque, a retired colonel from a royalist family, deployed motorized paramilitaries to terrorize “red districts.” With the country apparently sliding toward fascism, and mindful of the rifts among the left that had helped Hitler to power, socialists and communists forged an unprecedented Popular Front, which won a majority of Assembly seats in May 1936. The new socialist premier, Léon Blum, pushed through long-overdue reforms—a forty-hour week with paid holidays and legalized recognition of unions—but the right was appalled. “Behind the Popular Front,” declared Gen. Maurice Gamelin, “one saw the spectre of Bolshevism.” Obsessed by the leftist challenge from within, France was ill prepared to confront the threat from Hitler’s Germany.²⁹

In Spain, political polarization resulted in all-out civil war. In 1914 the country had been a corrupt parliamentary monarchy, stabilized by Italian-style deal making. Although Spain remained profitably neutral in the Great War, this did not save it from spasms of revolutionary violence between 1917 and 1923, during which fifteen governments came and went, until stability of sorts was imposed by military dictatorship under Gen. Miguel Primo de Rivera.³⁰ So far, it seemed, Spain was following the general European pattern, but the collapse of the dictatorship in 1930 and the overthrow of the monarchy the following year ushered in Spain’s Second Republic. Mass political parties took off for the first time and the pendulum lurched left and then right before a Popular Front coalition of socialists and communists gained power in February 1936. Its radical program of land reform and seizure of estates provoked elements of the Army to mount a coup in July. This unleashed a civil war that lasted nearly three years, cost more than half a million lives, and came, for many contemporaries, to symbolize Europe’s political crisis as a whole.

The conflict is now usually depicted as a Manichean struggle between fascism and democracy. Yet Gen. Francisco Franco was essentially a military strongman who included the Spanish fascists (the Falange) in a Unity Party of rightists and nationalists to avoid what he deemed Primo de Rivera’s “error” of establishing military rule without a party base or ideology.³¹ And on the other side, the Republicans became a truly revolutionary force in many areas, enacting new rights for women, collectivizing farms and factories, and, more darkly, stirring up political terror, especially against the clergy. “It should be clearly understood that we are not fighting for the democratic republic,” the Confederacíon Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) anarcho-syndicalist union declared. “We are fighting for the triumph of the proletarian revolution.”³² With Soviet Russia supporting the Republic, many governments, including Britain, adopted a policy of so-called nonintervention, fearful that Republican victory would spread the Bolshevik virus, not least into France. But this benefited Franco, since he was backed by Germany and Italy.

The crises of 1936 in France and Spain were savage reminders of the fragility of parliamentary democracy in Western Europe, as well as in Germany, Italy, and eastern Europe. So why was the British story significantly different? How did the United Kingdom manage a relatively smooth transition to mass democracy, with a socialist party twice forming a government, and without generating a fascist backlash?

A large part of the answer, again, is victory. The huge sacrifices of blood and wealth made by Britain during the war did not end in abject defeat. It was the war’s losers—Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottomans—who descended into revolution, and also Italy, where the victory was seen as “mutilated.”³³

Victory had certainly not been taken for granted in Britain: indeed in the spring of 1918 politics were conducted “under the shadow of defeat.”³⁴ After a winter of escalating labor protests, the German breakthrough had a sobering effect on public opinion. Official reports in mid-April spoke of “the magical disappearance of labour opposition” and of the “almost entire cessation of public meetings to advocate an immediate peace.” The populace in Britain (though not in Ireland) now accepted a draconian extension of the conscription laws—“measures which only that crisis rendered psychologically possible,” in the words of Lloyd George. “Had any attempt been made to enforce them previously, it would have provoked civil disturbance and domestic collapse.” The change of mood, combined with the sudden disintegration of the enemy, helped see the government through.³⁵

But if Ludendorff’s hammer blows had succeeded in driving Haig’s army back to the Channel, 1940–style, maybe even forcing Britain to sign a compromise peace, then the ingredients of a British stab-in-the-back myth were already there. One can see it in wartime animosity toward aliens and Jews, as well as in the growing middle-class anger about how, supposedly, industrial workers—exempt from conscription—were profiting from wartime pay raises while they paid the “blood tax” at the front. Had Britain been engulfed in the rancorous atmosphere of defeat, observes historian Adrian Gregory, it was not inconceivable that an opportunistic journalist could have leveraged himself to power, like Mussolini, on the back of middle-class rage. Someone such as the unscrupulous jingoist Horatio Bottomley whose paper, John Bull, was predicting in May 1918 “the impending collapse of parliamentary government” because the politicians had “sold the pass.” Such counterfactual speculation should not be pushed too far, of course, but it underlines the point that victory really mattered.³⁶

However, resentment at the war’s outcome is not the whole explanation for political instability across continental Europe because, as we have seen, neutral Spain and victorious France were also in turmoil by the 1930s. We have to dig deeper into the British experience to understand how the country’s institutions came to terms with mass democracy.

The British elite were not complacent about the challenge facing them at the end of the war. The fall of the tsar had been applauded by the British left: H. G. Wells demanded that Britain also throw off “the ancient trappings of throne and sceptre,” lamenting that the country had to struggle through the war under “an alien and uninspiring Court.” Wells’ jibe incensed King George V. “I may be uninspiring,” he grunted, “but I’ll be damned if I’m alien.” On a personal level this was fair comment: the king acted and sounded like a crusty English country gentleman. But many of his relatives were German princes, not least his cousin the kaiser, and his dynasty was formally known as the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha—hardly ideal when London was being pounded by Gotha bombers. So concerned was Lord Stamfordham, the king’s private secretary, that he invented a Shakespearean-sounding alternative, the House of Windsor, which was formally adopted in July 1917. The king persuaded his English relatives to Anglicize their names and titles: the Battenbergs became the Mountbattens, for instance, and the Duke of Teck was reinvented as Marquis of Cambridge. Henceforth, it was decreed, the king’s children would marry suitable British stock rather than foreign royalty. “We stand at the parting of the ways,” warned Lord Esher, a trusted royal adviser, in November 1918. “The Monarchy and its cost will have to be justified in the future in the eyes of a war-worn and hungry proletariat, endowed with a huge preponderance of voting power.”³⁷

The Representation of the People Act in 1918 almost tripled the electorate to 21.4 million, or nearly 80 percent of people over the age of twenty-one. Previously the franchise had been closely tied to the ownership or occupancy of property, on the grounds that this gave a man a stake in his locality. But the 1918 Act gave the vote to most men over twenty-one, plus most women over thirty, and no one could predict the political consequences. Lord Bryce, the distinguished constitutional historian, called it “the wildest revolutionary change” in Britain since the civil war of the 1640s. In the general election on December 14, 1918, the first under the new rules, the Labour Party won nearly 23 percent of the vote and 57 of the 707 seats. This was half its target but still a momentous breakthrough.³⁸

In several ways the events of 1914–18 helped resolve problems that had seemed intractable during the fraught prewar constitutional crisis. For one thing, there was now a coalition government that forged new working relationships “with the men we have been fighting bitterly for years,” in the words of Lord Selborne, a leading Unionist. And the franchise issue was eventually handled through a Speaker’s Conference, bringing together senior backbenchers from all the main parties, who thrashed out a compromise quietly behind the scenes during the autumn and winter of 1916–17. By this time the war had changed the terms of debate about franchise reform. A quarter of the adult male population of the UK, 5.7 million men, had served in the British Army during the conflict, of whom 2.45 million (43 percent) were volunteers. Giving the vote to propertyless working men, once seen as a rootless proletariat, was now viewed as just reward for patriotic soldiers, many of whom had chosen to risk life and limb. “What property would any man have in this country if it were not for the soldiers and sailors who are fighting our battles?” declared Sir Edward Carson, the Ulster Unionist leader and erstwhile diehard. “If a man is good enough to fight for you, he is good enough to vote for you.” The slogan “One Gun, One Vote” proved compelling: when in 1918 the vote was given to virtually all men over twenty-one and soldiers of any age, it was also denied to conscientious objectors.³⁹

This principle of useful service for the war effort also transformed the argument about women’s suffrage. At least 800,000 women worked in the munitions industry during the war, winning nicknames such as “Tommy’s sister” and “the girl behind the man behind the gun.” Hundreds of thousands more worked in factories, clerical jobs, or public transport, filling the places vacated by soldiers and turning out essential supplies. “Tents are munitions, boots are munitions, biscuits and jam are munitions,” insisted Susan Lawrence, a union leader. The “canary girls” in the explosives factories, so called because their skins turned jaundice yellow from the poisonous chemicals, attracted particular public sympathy. Former opponents of votes for women now conceded the principle. “How could we have carried on the War without them?” admitted Herbert Asquith, the former prime minister, in 1917, though he argued that women had changed as well by abandoning their “detestable” prewar campaign of violent agitation. Tatler, a high-society magazine, ran a cartoon showing a female munitions worker unlocking the door of Parliament with a key marked “National Work,” having dropped the ax of “Militancy.”⁴⁰

Ironically, many of those canary girls did not actually gain the vote in 1918, because Parliament limited the franchise to women over the age of thirty who were householders or their wives.* This, scoffed Lord Curzon, was like saying to women war workers “we are so grateful to you” that “we propose to give the vote to your elder sister, to your mother, to your grandmother, and to your maiden aunt.” The aim was to avoid an electorate with more women than men and also to exclude young single women who, supposedly, would vote “more by sentiment than reason” or go for “the best-looking candidate.” So wartime service was the criterion for conceding votes to young men but not, ultimately, to young women. While moving away from household suffrage for men, Parliament introduced what has been called “housewife suffrage” for women. Enfranchisement of all women over twenty-one had to wait until 1928.⁴¹

Even so, the tripling of the electorate in 1918 presaged a much more volatile pattern of politics. At the same time, the country was wracked by protests on a massive scale. January 1919 saw disturbances at various Army camps about the slow and unfair procedures for demobilization, including a full-scale mutiny among soldiers in Calais. Mass delegations of troops lobbied Whitehall. Pushing his way through them, Sir Henry Wilson, chief of the imperial general staff, told the cabinet that the men “bore a dangerous resemblance to a soviet.” The demobilization crisis coincided with major strikes by engineering workers along the river Clyde around Glasgow, demanding shorter working hours, and in the spring of 1919 there were threats, as before 1914, of a Triple Alliance of the coal, rail, and transport unions. Since the mines and the railways had been brought under government control during the war, Lloyd George saw this as a direct syndicalist-style challenge. “Once the strike begins it is imperative that the state should win,” he told the cabinet. “Failure to do so would inevitably lead to a Soviet Republic.” In the end, the government bought off the miners with higher wages and shorter hours rather than “take risks with Labour,” as the prime minister put it, and thereby “create an enemy within our borders.” He warned his colleagues darkly that there were now in Britain “millions of men who had been trained to arms” and also “plenty of guns and ammunition available.”⁴²

During 1919 nearly 35 million days were lost to strikes; in 1920, close to 29 million. Taking 1917–20 as a whole, “more workers undertook strike action in those four years than in any comparable span of time in the history of British industrial relations.” This was partly a reflection of the new power of organized labor: between 1914 and 1920 union membership had doubled to 8.3 million people, nearly half the workforce.⁴³

On closer inspection, however, the threat from the left was less menacing than it seemed. Despite shortages and complaints, the rationing and transport systems worked adequately: Britain did not experience the shortages of bread, coal, and other essentials that undermined tsarism in 1917 and the Central Powers in 1918. Although Britain lost six million work days to strikes in 1918, four times the German figure, the Kaiserreich was effectively under martial law from 1914, whereas British civil liberties had not been abridged to anything like that extent. Most British strikes were about pay and conditions, with very few of the politicized protests seen on the Continent. In fact, Britain’s really big strike wave began in the second half of 1918 and then peaked in 1919: workers were demanding not revolution but a payback for victory.⁴⁴

The Coalition’s dominant instinct in 1918–19, despite the occasional use of force, such as with Clydeside, was to placate the workers. Aware that real wages had fallen substantially since 1914, Lloyd George and his colleagues approved large pay raises, judging for the moment that the main threat to social order stemmed from industrial militancy rather than rising inflation. Even more important, the Coalition slashed working hours despite the postwar economic downturn. During 1919, more than six million workers had their working week reduced by an average of six and a half hours—with 60 percent of the cuts occurring between January and April, when the political mood was at its most febrile. The two years after the armistice saw “the most marked and widespread drops ever in the length of the basic working day in British industry.” Lloyd George’s mixture of general appeasement and selective toughness drew the sting of labor protest. The threat of a general strike by the Triple Alliance fizzled in 1919 and again in 1921 when the miners were deserted by the railwaymen and the dockworkers. In the slump of 1921–22 union membership fell sharply: it would not regain the 1920 peak (8.3 million) until after World War II.⁴⁵

The strikes of 1918–20 were therefore much more economic than political in motivation. This is confirmed by the comparatively conservative temper of workers in Britain, which, alone among major European states in the early twentieth century, did not produce a mass Marxist party. For this a number of reasons have been advanced. Most plants and factories were small: there were few giant companies on the scale of Vickers shipbuilders in Barrow-in-Furness or the engineering giant Armstrong Whitworth on Tyneside. In fact, in the 1900s only half a dozen heavy industrial firms in the UK employed more than 10,000 people—unimpressive by the standards of Petrograd, Turin, or Essen. Even in big companies there were strict demarcations of craft and status and this physical and social fragmentation of the workforce made it difficult to foster an overall sense of working-class solidarity. Neither did British workers feel alienated from the wider popular culture of churches, chapels, and sports clubs. The Labour Party was deeply rooted in nonconformist Protestantism, and its membership transcended class lines. Arthur Henderson, for instance, was not only an ironworker and union organizer who became party leader; he was also one of the country’s leading lay Methodists, not to mention a founder of Newcastle United Football Club and an aficionado of lawn bowls. In Germany, by contrast, socialists (and Catholics) often lived in self-contained “communities of solidarity” with their own schools, choirs, and sports clubs.⁴⁶

The exception that proves the rule was “Red Clydeside,” whose radicalism was rooted in a profound sense of alienation. Scottish industry had lagged behind England in the acceptance of collective bargaining. Employers denied union recognition, kept wages lower than south of the border, and exploited ethnic divisions within the workforce, often using a loyal core of non-union Lowland skilled labor with Highlanders and Irish for more basic tasks. The employers were also prominent in the Presbyterian elite, which dominated politics. On Clydeside formal trade union structures were less important than collective solidarity in the workplace, where local shop stewards wielded inordinate power during the war. Most workers were employed by a few big companies, notably John Brown shipbuilders, and lived nearby in squalid tenements: 70 percent of Glasgow’s housing stock took the form of one- or two-bedroom apartments at extortionate rents. This all smacked more of Petrograd than most of Britain: the result was a stark confrontation between capital and labor, as articulated in Marxist theory. The big strike of January 1919 was carefully planned by the so-called West of Scotland Soviet under John Maclean, a former schoolteacher who had served for a while as Bolshevik Russia’s consul in Glasgow. Although the immediate demand was for a forty-hour week, Maclean saw this as a popular way to build up support for a general strike to challenge state power. Troops with machine guns were eventually deployed to restore order and the strike leaders put in jail, which the Glasgow Herald welcomed as a blow against “that squalid terrorism which the world now describes as Bolshevism.” But even after Red Clydeside was crushed, Glasgow’s proletarian culture remained a seedbed of radical Marxists, including Britain’s longest-serving communist MP, Willie Gallacher, and Labour militants such as James Maxton and Emanuel Shinwell.⁴⁷

But most of British Labour was not Marxist; in fact party members and their leaders were strongly supportive of the existing parliamentary order. Henderson took the lead in reorganizing the Labour Party in 1917 and giving it a socialist Constitution with the famous “Clause Four” commitment to “the common ownership of the means of production.” This was not a revolutionary gesture, however, but the very opposite. After visiting Russia that summer, Henderson returned home alarmed by the Bolshevik challenge yet convinced that radical change could be achieved through politics not revolution. A properly constituted Labour Party, he argued, was now vital to show that “the Democratic State of tomorrow can be established without an intervening period of violent upheaval and dislocation.” In subsequent years Labour rebuffed all requests for affiliation with the party from British communists. They were, asserted the miners’ leader Frank Hodges in 1922, simply “slaves of Moscow” who were “taking orders from the Asiatic mind.” John Clynes, the party’s postwar leader, recalled that when he started in politics, Labour supporters were derided as cranks. A former worker in the Lancashire cotton mills, Clynes took exception to the term. “A crank is a little thing that makes revolutions,” he pointed out. “We were not cranks, and we staved off a British revolution by giving British workmen a hand in the legislation by which their lives were ruled.”⁴⁸

Workers had been given the vote in other countries after the war, but the way it was done also mattered. In Italy, as we have seen, the combination of universal male suffrage and proportional representation (PR) completely destabilized the old parliamentary system. In Britain, PR was being pushed in 1918—but mainly by the unelected House of Lords, who hoped it would moderate extremist forces in the new electorate and thereby prevent a repeat of the radical Parliament of 1906–14. But the Commons firmly rejected the idea. This renewed commitment to the first-past-the-post system, at a time when proportional representation was all the rage on the Continent, helped in the long run to preserve a robust two-party system in Britain.⁴⁹ The early 1920s did see a brief revival of the Liberal Party, freed from the incubus of coalition and the rift between Asquith and Lloyd George. In the 1923 election, Labour and Liberals each gained around 30 percent of the vote. But in 1924 the Liberals slipped to the position of a third force, as British politics realigned permanently into a struggle between Labour and Conservatives. The Tory decision in 1925 to abandon the title “Unionist,” the party’s official name since 1912, was testimony not only to settlement of the Irish question but also to the centrality of anti-socialism in the Tories’ new identity.⁵⁰

On January 22, 1924, thanks to Tory miscalculation and Liberal complicity, Labour was able to form a minority government led by Ramsay MacDonald, the illegitimate son of a Scottish farm laborer. It was twenty-three years to the day, King George noted sadly in his diary, since the death of “dear Grandmama,” Queen Victoria. “I wonder what she would have thought of a Labour Government!”⁵¹ The right issued apocalyptic warnings—the “sun of England seems menaced by final eclipse,” lamented the English Review—while patriots noted that MacDonald had opposed Britain’s involvement in the Great War. George V was particularly disturbed by a public reminder from Labour MP George Lansbury that “some centuries ago a King stood against the common people and he lost his head.” But that remark lost Lansbury a seat in the cabinet: MacDonald’s paramount concern was to show how “respectable” the party was and dispel suspicions of imminent revolution.⁵² Jimmy Thomas, the former railwaymen’s leader and new colonial secretary, expressed his “gratitude to the constitution that enables the engine cleaner of yesterday to be the Minister of today. That constitution, so broad, so wide, so democratic, must be preserved, and the Empire which provides it must be maintained.” The evident pleasure of MacDonald, Thomas, and others at hobnobbing with princes, peers, and tycoons disgusted the left and titillated the right, but Labour’s leaders mirrored the conservative political culture of British workers. A reverence for the fundamentals of King, Parliament, and Empire distinguished the Labour Party from most of the European left.⁵³

Although Britain’s first Labour government was undermined by right-wing smears about supposed links with Bolshevism, its nine months in office in 1924 showed that the party could be a responsible party of government. In June 1929, MacDonald formed a second minority Labour government, this time as the largest single party in the Commons, which lasted more than two years until overwhelmed by the financial crisis of 1931. Radical slogans from 1918, such as the nationalization of land and the abolition of the House of Lords, disappeared from the party’s agenda. This was partly tactical prudence, but MacDonald also genuinely believed that British socialism was lost if it degenerated into “a guerrilla fight with capitalism.” He stuck to his prewar conviction that true socialism came from “the growth of society, not the uprising of a class”; it meant getting everyone to “think and act socialistically.” Here was an essentially organic and evolutionary view of Labour’s mission. Though stigmatized as a class traitor by many on the left for leading a crisis coalition government in 1931–35, MacDonald proved vital in persuading millions of ex-Liberal voters that Labour was not just a bunch of rabid socialists and class-conscious workers but was now the “great progressive party” for modern Britain, the only realistic alternative to the Tories.⁵⁴

The emergence of Labour, with its idiosyncratic mix of radical policies and conservative culture, was one element in the stabilization of British politics in the 1920s. The other, even more important, was the revival of the Tories, but as a party of democracy. Before the war the party had lost three elections in a row, allowing the Liberals in concert with Irish Nationalists to rewrite the Constitution by emasculating the House of Lords and enacting Home Rule for Ireland. But 1918, apart from franchise reform, also saw a redrawing of constituency boundaries to reduce the gross disparity between the smallest and largest seats (in 1910 the Irish constituency of Kilkenny had a few hundred electors; Romford in suburban Essex over 50,000). The redistribution of 1918 was worth about 30 seats to the Tories. Even more important was the removal of some 70 guaranteed opponents after Ireland gained its own parliament in 1921. The cumulative effect of these changes was to transform the Tories from “the natural minority party they had been before 1914 to a natural majority party until the Second World War.” Apart from the Labour governments of 1924 and 1929–31, the Tories held office for all of that time, either independently or in governments they dominated.⁵⁵

Yet structural changes alone are not sufficient to explain the new Tory hegemony: the party also reached out to the newly enfranchised masses. Initially Tories regarded the 1918 franchise with deep apprehension—none more so than Stanley Baldwin, the shrewd, bluff Worcestershire businessman who was party leader for fourteen years from 1923 to 1937 and prime minister on three occasions (1923–24, 1924–29, and 1935–37). Although the family’s iron and steel business made Baldwin a very wealthy man, his approach to both business and politics was paternalistic and inclusive—in short, a “One-Nation” Tory. And from his mother’s more cultured family (the painter Edward Burne-Jones was an uncle and Rudyard Kipling one of his cousins) Baldwin derived a keen, often romanticized sense of England’s heritage. In his opinion the Great War had revealed “how thin was the crust of civilisation”: during those four years men “climbed to the doors of heaven” but also “sank to the gates of hell,” toppling historic structures and unleashing ruinous savagery. In particular he dreaded the sudden explosion of mass politics. “Democracy has arrived at a gallop in England,” he mused in 1928, “and I feel all the time that it is a race for life; can we educate them before the crash comes?” Here was the central plank of Baldwin’s political philosophy—not to make the world “safe for democracy,” as Wilson had proclaimed in 1917, but to “make democracy safe for the world.”⁵⁶

Baldwin’s tactical thinking was both negative and positive. The negative aspect was his readiness to attack Labour as a narrow, class-driven movement in which dangerous extremism lurked behind MacDonald’s constitutional veneer. The threat of a general strike in 1925–26 therefore proved a propaganda godsend, allowing Baldwin to claim that it was the Tories who upheld “the lifted torch of democracy” against those making “no secret of their desire to undermine the Constitution by revolutionary threat.” Although ready to negotiate over the underlying issue of pay and conditions in the coal industry, Baldwin was unyielding about the Strike itself when this was finally declared in May 1926. “The General Strike is a challenge to Parliament,” he told the public in a special radio broadcast: it was “the road to anarchy and ruin.” The strike collapsed after ten days, and the following year Baldwin pushed through Parliament a Trade Disputes Act to eliminate general strikes in the future through restrictions on sympathy strikes and on mass picketing.⁵⁷

While attacking union power, however, Baldwin sought more positively to woo the new working-class voters. His initial ploy was to revive the policy of Joseph Chamberlain, who had offered the new working-class voters of the 1880s a single “big idea”—tariff reform to turn the British Empire into a protected trading bloc, which supposedly meant “cheap food.” But when Baldwin espoused tariff reform again in 1923, it proved an electoral disaster—squandering a huge Tory majority and letting in Labour. Thereafter Baldwin, backed by progressive Tories such as Neville Chamberlain, Joseph’s son, grasped the importance of breaking down the “working class” into interest groups, for example, savers, taxpayers, and ratepayers, and wooing each with targeted policies and benefits. The Tory aim, he declared, was not to “depress” the people into a “society of State ownership” but to raise them up into “a society in which, increasingly, the individual may become an owner.” At a time when Labour was trying to address the housing crisis through government-funded houses and flats for rent, Baldwin insisted that “we differ profoundly from the Socialists” in wanting “the people to own their own homes.” In the 1930s he started using the phrase “a property-owning democracy”—today a cliché but at the time suggesting a radical new way to cope with mass politics. Under the old householder franchise, only the few with a stake in society were allowed the right to vote; now the Tories were offering millions of new voters a stake in society.⁵⁸

In fact the interwar years saw spectacular growth in home ownership. Before the Great War most accommodation, for people of all classes, was rented from private landlords. Although exact figures are problematic, owner occupancy rose from about 10 percent of the total housing stock in England and Wales in 1914 to roughly 35 percent in 1938. Initially much of the increase stemmed from the sale of rented property to sitting tenants, but by the 1930s private house building took over as construction costs fell dramatically. A three-bedroom semidetached house cost £800 to build in 1920 but less than £300 in the early 1930s. Building societies, previously strongest in northern cities such as Leeds and Halifax, now spread across the South and Midlands: between 1910 and 1940 their total assets increased tenfold to £756 million. Flush with funds, they were able to loan 90 or even 95 percent of the total purchase price. On the Continent, by contrast, states tended to shore up the private rental market: the housing norm in Russian, French, and German cities remained large tenements, such as the notorious Mietskasernen of Berlin. In Scotland, too, where there was much less new construction, grim multistory tenements remained the norm for city housing. So England and Wales were very unusual in seeing such a dramatic growth of owner occupancy in urban areas: this was a “silent” revolution behind the stereotype of the grim 1930s.⁵⁹

Ironically, given claims that owner occupancy would help head off working-class militancy, the principal beneficiaries were middle class. Yet that in itself was a stabilizing force because in continental countries, such as Italy in the early 1920s and Germany a decade later, it was not so much the rise of a proletariat that proved revolutionary as the political backlash against it, supported by an anxious, impoverished middle class. Britain’s postwar economy was more stable and more affluent than those on the Continent (despite the slump), but the Tory bid to consolidate the middle class, attract better-off workers, and stigmatize Labour as envious sectarian socialists played a significant part.⁶⁰

Apart from the workers, the other unknown force unleashed by franchise reform was women, and here, too, the Tories proved successful. Before 1914 it was assumed that women did not matter politically. “DON’T be satisfied with seeing the wife,” Tory canvassers were instructed. “She may talk, but remember that the husband is the voter.” After 1918, however, women over age thirty were also voters and ten years later it was the Tories who enfranchised all women over twenty-one—giving them parity with men. Again Baldwin moved with the times, arguing that democracy was “incomplete and lop-sided” until it embraced the “whole people.” Equalization of the franchise became law in June 1928 despite vehement opposition from the Daily Mail, which howled that “votes for flappers” would add millions of “irresponsible” young girls to the electoral roll and probably mean “the exclusion of the Conservatives for a generation and the misgovernment of the country at a most critical point in English history.” Such scaremongering was an expression of the fevered anti-socialist mind of the paper’s owner, Lord Rothermere: after 1928, women formed a majority of the electorate and they proved highly susceptible to Tory policies, especially on “domestic” issues concerning the family, housing, and morality. Women also proved far more active than men in party work for local constituencies.⁶¹

The conservative inclinations of British female voters were not atypical: the same pattern is evident in Germany, where women over twenty were enfranchised at the end of the war. This was an even more explosive “big bang” than in Britain, but again with fallout that favored the right. During the 1920s it was conservative and Catholic parties in Germany that gained disproportionately from women’s suffrage. In the early 1930s, “women’s votes played a substantial part in bringing Hitler to power,” but that was because the Nazis had become a major political party as a result of the depression. In Britain, however, no such extreme option existed because national politics responded very differently to the economic crisis.⁶²

The sustained run on sterling in the summer of 1931 obliged MacDonald’s government to seek financial support from Wall Street. But the deflationary terms demanded, including a cut in unemployment benefit, split the Labour cabinet. On August 24, MacDonald went to the palace to tender his resignation, only to return to Downing Street a few hours later as premier of an emergency “National Government,” to incredulous anger among his colleagues. In this constitutional crisis George V played a significant role by dissuading MacDonald from resigning as premier: it was his appeal to patriotic duty that “turned the scales.” The king’s intervention left Baldwin with little choice but to join the National Government, despite his aversion to coalitions after the Lloyd George government of 1918–22. A delighted George V commented that “while France and other countries existed weeks without a Government, in this country our constitution is so generous that the leaders of Parties, after fighting each other for months in the House of Commons, were ready to meet together under the roof of the Sovereign and sink their own differences for a common good.” This remark, although sententious and somewhat naïve, contained a hard kernel of truth.⁶³

The party leaders formed an emergency cabinet comprising four Labour ministers, four Tories, and two Liberals in order to push through an agreed package of deflationary measures. This, it was assumed, would take a month or so, after which a general election could be held in which each party would compete on its own. But the financial crisis deepened, eventually forcing sterling off the gold standard on September 21, and most of MacDonald’s Labour colleagues moved into official opposition against the National Government. In October 1931, the National Government went to the country as a united force, campaigning like the coalition of November 1918 on a patriotic, anti-socialist platform. With capitalism apparently in ruins, Labour abandoned MacDonald-style moderation and demanded radical socialist policies, including nationalizing the banks and key industries, while Philip Snowden, now the “National Labour” chancellor of the exchequer, attacked his former comrades for advocating “Bolshevism run mad.” As in 1918, anti-leftist rhetoric worked, and the coalition won a massive victory, capturing two-thirds of the vote and 554 of the 615 seats; Labour ended up with only 52. More than 80 percent of the National Government MPs were Tories. “In effect the British nation has done through the ballot box what Continental countries can only do by revolution,” exclaimed J.C.C. Davidson, the Tory Party chairman. “We have a Dictatorship.”⁶⁴

The Tory-dominated National Government ran Britain for the rest of the 1930s, initially under MacDonald—shattered and ailing but a totem of its “National” character—and then under Baldwin and Chamberlain. In the crisis of 1940 this National Government was replaced by a genuine coalition, in which Labour abandoned its stance of official opposition to work with Churchill in the war against Germany. When one takes into account the coalitions of 1915–22 led by Asquith and Lloyd George, a larger point emerges: Between August 1914 and July 1945, the United Kingdom was ruled by coalitions for twenty-one of those thirty-one years.⁶⁵ In other words, the periods of acute national crisis—the Great War, postwar reconstruction, the crash of 1931, the depression, and World War II—were faced by governments with some degree of cross-party support. Admittedly the Tories were generally the dominant partner but the fact that the British ship of state was a broad-bottomed vessel helps explain why it did not lurch disastrously either to port or to starboard during the storms of 1914–45.

The contrast between Britain and Germany in the early 1930s is particularly marked. The German Depression proved the making of the Nazi Party as a political force; its rise to power was abetted by conservative elites who thought Hitler could be managed, and by the head of state, President Paul Hindenburg, a retired field marshal and war hero who despised parliamentary politics. In Britain, however, the economic crisis resulted not in a government of the extreme right but an all-party coalition forged with the encouragement of the head of the state. That coalition was certainly conservative dominated, but Britain’s riposte to the socialist left in 1931 took the form of ballots not bullets. If the result was something like a dictatorship, at least it was “Parliamentary Dictatorship,” in the words of Tom Jones, deputy cabinet secretary, who voted Tory for the first time in his life because Labour “had to be thrashed.”⁶⁶

Was fascism ever a possibility in Britain? As on the Continent, there were rumblings of discontent in the 1920s about the pernicious effects of democracy and the corruption of party politics. The right was entranced by Mussolini: in 1924, John St. Loe Strachey, editor of the Spectator, commended his “Fascist counter-revolution” for restoring Italy’s morale and unity, calling it “one of the most notable events in the social and political history of the modern world.”⁶⁷ The nearest to a British Mussolini was the demagogic politician Sir Oswald Mosley. The son of minor Staffordshire gentry, Mosley served with distinction during the Great War and then used his brains, eloquence, and womanizing charm for political advancement. Mosley was as promiscuous in politics as he was in bed—shifting from Coalition Tory to Independent and then Labour, before forming his own New Party in 1930–31 and finally heading his British Union of Fascists (BUF) from 1932, attired in trademark black shirts. Mosley advocated a larger role for the state in economic management and welcomed women into the BUF. But what really drove Mosley was not ideology but ego. When he lauded Mussolini in 1932 as “the great Italian” who represented “the first emergence of the modern man to power,” he saw himself in the same mold.⁶⁸

In January 1934 the BUF won the support of the Daily Mail, whose proprietor, Lord Rothermere, told readers: “At the next vital election Britain’s survival as a Great Power will depend on the existence of a well-organized Party of the Right, ready to take responsibility for national affairs with the same directness of purpose and energy of method that Mussolini and Hitler have shown. . . . That is why I say Hurrah for the Blackshirts!”⁶⁹ But Rothermere’s passion for the BUF was another of his madcap campaigns, like the crusade against the “Flapper Vote,” and it cooled rapidly after violent scenes at the BUF’s big London rally in July 1934 and Mosley’s shift to rampant anti-Semitism. The BUF never numbered more than a few thousand activists, and it depended heavily on covert funds from Mussolini’s Italy. Apart from the fact that Mosley’s authoritarian, charismatic politics did not fit Britain’s political culture, he was also frustrated by the timing of events. The surprise formation of a National Government in 1931 cut the ground from under his New Party, and he then pulled the BUF back from contesting the 1935 election, conscious that the nadir of the depression was over. Even in the worst moments of the 1910s and 1930s, Britain’s economic situation was never as dire as that of Italy or Germany: this, as well as the persistence of a coalition government, limited the appeal of extremism.⁷⁰

Coalition politics also managed to squeeze out the most charismatic and radical figures of the political mainstream. In the 1900s, the playwright George Bernard Shaw had popularized Nietzsche’s idea of a “superman,” though he stated that he did not seek the “salvation of society” in the “despotism” of a “Napoleonic” figure. The two Napoleons of interwar British politics were Lloyd George and Churchill—both of whom put policies and self-promotion before party loyalty but who also, unlike Mosley, managed to stay in the parliamentary game. Lloyd George’s Machiavellian skills kept him on top of a largely Tory coalition for four years after the war: when the Tories broke away in 1922 Baldwin described Lloyd George as a “dynamic force” that had “smashed to pieces” the Liberal Party and could do the same to the Tories. For another decade a Lloyd George comeback still seemed possible, but 1922 was really his last hurrah.⁷¹

The dynamic superman whom Baldwin now feared was Churchill, whose career in the 1920s and 1930s in fact points up key themes of this chapter. As we have seen, many Conservative politicians anguished about franchise enlargement, votes for women, and the socialist challenge. What marked out Churchill was the intemperateness of his reactions. In 1918–19 he was the cabinet’s leading advocate of intervention in the Russian Civil War in order to suppress what he called the “foul baboonery” of Bolshevism. He insisted that “of all the tyrannies in history the Bolshevik tyranny is the worst, the most destructive, the most degrading”—in fact “far worse than German militarism.” So intense and persistent was Churchill that Lloyd George warned him this “obsession” was “upsetting your balance.” Churchill was equally agitated by the leftist challenge at home. This prompted his return to the Conservative fold, which he had deserted in 1905 for the Liberals, thereby earning himself a lasting reputation as a turncoat. The “enthronement of a Socialist Government,” he warned in 1924, would be “a serious national misfortune such as has usually befallen great states only on the morrow of defeat in war.” In 1926, Churchill was so exercised about the general strike that Baldwin put him in charge of the government newspaper, the British Gazette, on the grounds that it would “keep him busy and stop him doing worse things.” Visiting Rome in 1927, Churchill lavished extravagant praise on Mussolini, declaring that fascist Italy had “provided the necessary antidote to the Russian poison” and declaring: “If I had been an Italian I am sure that I would have been wholeheartedly with you from start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.” ⁷²

Churchill’s antipathy toward socialism reflected his residual Liberalism—dislike of state control and commitment to basic freedoms—but by the 1930s he began to sound openly anti-democratic. “Democratic governments drift along the line of least resistance,” he warned in 1931, “taking short views, paying their way with sops and doles.” Out of office since 1929, Churchill seemed to be intent on stirring up all possible trouble for the National Government to force his way back into the cabinet. He opposed proposals for greater autonomy and a broader franchise in India, calling them “faded flowers of Victorian Liberalism which, however admirable in themselves, have nothing to do with Asia and are being universally derided and discarded throughout the continent of Europe.” In the abdication crisis of 1936 he was Baldwin’s leading foe, talked of as an alternative premier at the head of a “King’s Party” if Edward VIII toughed it out and forced Baldwin to resign. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Churchill tilted to Franco because of the danger of a “Communist Spain spreading its snaky tentacles through Portugal and France.” He even told the Commons in April 1937 that, although detesting both creeds, “I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism and Nazism, I would choose Communism.” ⁷³

Not surprisingly, relations between Churchill and Baldwin became seriously strained. During one of many bitter Commons debates, Churchill popped into the men’s room. Only one space was vacant and he found himself standing next to Baldwin. There was an embarrassed silence, even more so than is usual on such occasions. Then Baldwin said: “I am glad there is still one platform where we can meet together.” ⁷⁴

Although Baldwin never applied the phrase “dynamic force” to Churchill, he undoubtedly perceived him as a man whose formidable will and energy was potentially destructive. He joked that when Churchill was born, fairies swooped down to shower his cradle with gifts—imagination, eloquence, industry, ability, and so on—all except the gifts of “judgment” and “wisdom.” And that, said Baldwin, is why “while we delight to listen to him in the House, we do not take his advice.” It was also why Baldwin kept Churchill out of government throughout the 1930s, though he did make this striking observation in private in 1935: “If there is going to be a war—and no one can say that there is not—we must keep him fresh to be our war Prime Minister.” ⁷⁵

In British politics the 1920s and 1930s were not the era of Lloyd George and Churchill, would-be “supermen.” This was instead the age of MacDonald and Baldwin, two leaders who pulled their rival parties toward the center ground, trying to make socialism and democracy safe for Britain, if not the world. The political culture over which they presided, especially the cultural conservatism of Labour, helps explain why Britain was more successful than the Continent in coping with the destructive legacies of the Great War.

The other important force for stability in the era of MacDonald and Baldwin was the British Crown, which rebranded itself astutely as an integral part of democratic Britain. This was all the more remarkable given the catastrophic decline of the British aristocracy, of which the monarchy formed the apex. The war itself played a part in that decline. Of all the British and Irish peers and their sons who served, one in five was killed: the death toll among the armed forces as a whole was one in eight. “Not since the Wars of the Roses had so many patricians died so suddenly and so violently.” At the same time the aristocracy’s landed wealth was decimated by taxation, which the author and politician Charles Masterman declared floridly in 1922, “is destroying the whole Feudal system as it extended practically but little changed from 1066 and 1914.” Estate duties were first imposed in 1894, with a levy of 8 percent on estates with an inheritance value of over a million pounds, but the rates soared after the war: 40 percent from 1919, 50 percent after 1930, and 60 percent by 1939. At the same time the ever-rising income tax and the new “Super-Tax” on the highest incomes added to the aristocracy’s burdens, leading to the breakup of many large estates across the UK, especially in Ireland and Wales. Oscar Wilde had seen the writing on the wall in the 1890s. As Lady Bracknell put it in The Importance of Being Earnest, “What between the duties expected of one during one’s lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one’s death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up.” ⁷⁶

Except, that is, if one was the monarch. From the very start the Crown was exempt from estate duties. Income tax had been dutifully paid by Queen Victoria, but this burden was also gradually removed during the reign of George V. Lloyd George, when chancellor before the war, had been keen to conciliate the sovereign during the crisis over the House of Lords, and the precedent he set was extended during the 1920s and 1930s, eventually exempting from income tax both the Crown’s private income as well as public money from the “Civil List.” So the monarchy quietly fattened while the rest of the aristocracy was cut to the bone.⁷⁷

At the same time George V gave the Crown a new acceptability after those edgy years at the end of the war. Personally he was not very attractive: a martinet father, obsessed about court protocol, and also rather thick. His official biographer Harold Nicolson noted (privately) that in the future king’s youth “for seventeen years he did nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps.” But George V had a genuine love of his country and a paternalistic feeling for his people. Coached by shrewd courtiers he learned to speak to the nation via the new medium of radio: his first Christmas broadcast in 1932 was delivered with a thick cloth on the table, to muffle the sound of pages rustling in his trembling hands. The king’s charismatic, Americanized son wooed a younger generation while prince of Wales, and was then squeezed out by Baldwin before he could do too much damage as a hands-on monarch, Edward VIII, whereupon his earnest younger brother restored the decorum of family monarchy as George VI. Back in 1918, Lord Esher had noted the American threat to monarchy as well as that posed by Bolshevism: “The strength of Republicanism lies in the personality of Wilson! and the use he has made of his position. It is a lesson. He has made the ‘fashion’ of a Republic. We can ‘go one better’ if we try.” By the end of the 1930s the “House of Windsor” had personalized monarchy and made it, if not fashionable, at least acceptable in a democratic age. When one considers the damage done by continental heads of state such as Hindenburg, this was not a trivial achievement.⁷⁸

Democratic stability was the last thing one would have predicted for Ireland in 1923. The war of independence against Britain had cost some 1,200 Irish dead; four or five thousand more were killed in the subsequent civil war of 1922–23.⁷⁹ This internecine conflict left enduring hatreds. The pragmatists who accepted the Anglo-Irish Treaty as the best deal possible for the moment—giving effective independence though within the British Empire—formed the government of the new Irish Free State. But their defeated opponents, backed by the rump of the Irish Republican Army, accepted neither the legitimacy of the Irish Free State nor the partition of the country—treating both as relics of British colonial rule at odds with the republican ideals of the 1916 Easter Rising. Consequently they would not sit in the Irish Parliament, the Dáil, making Ireland effectively a one-party state dominated by the ruling Cumann na nGaedheal, or Society of the Gaels (CnaG). Here, surely, was fertile soil for continental-style fascism? Yet by the mid-1930s, Ireland had established a viable two-party system of democratic politics, which squeezed fascism to the margins.

The architect of the new Irish state was William Cosgrave, who became CnaG leader and head of government in August 1922 following the shock deaths in ten days first of Arthur Griffith, from a heart attack, and then Michael Collins, whose head was blown off in an IRA ambush. The burly, handsome Collins was a charismatic leader; Cosgrave, by contrast, was a quiet, dapper little man who had fought in the Easter Rising but later prospered as an insurance salesman. His priority was to create an efficient administration after the trauma of civil war. “I am not interested in a Republican form of government,” he declared. “I don’t care what form it is, so long as it is free, independent, authoritative and the sovereign government of the people.”⁸⁰ Cosgrave helped establish key institutions such as an unarmed police force, moving beyond the hated Royal Irish Constabulary; an effective civil service, building on British legacies; and a functioning system of taxation to recoup the country’s ravaged finances. By the mid-1920s the leader of anti-Treatyites, Éamon de Valera, could see that, having lost the civil war, they were now losing the political struggle as well: rigid ideological opposition to the Irish Free State served only to exclude them from influence and strengthen the gunmen.

De Valera—tall, bespectacled, and austere, another charismatic—was a disciple of Machiavelli who could play both the lion and the fox. He now applied his persuasive talents to bring the bulk of the anti-Treatyites in from the cold, forming a new political party, Fianna Fáil (Warriors of Destiny). In 1927 they contested an election for the first time, performing almost as well as CnaG. But in order to take up their seats in the Dáil, they were obliged under the Constitution to sign the hated oath of allegiance to the British Crown. De Valera huffed and puffed but eventually conformed, claiming that signing was just an “empty formality” required in order to enter the Parliament building. A devout Catholic, he moved the Bible to the other end of the room, covered up the words of the oath, and wrote his name in the official book “in the same way,” he said, “as I would sign an autograph.”⁸¹

Although taking a hard line with the gunmen, Cosgrave was determined to forge a parliamentary democracy. “We have been in power too long,” he admitted in 1928 to an American journalist. “What I would like to see before long is the present Government stepping down and the other fellow taking the reins.” Rare words from a politician, especially one whose career had been forged on the anvil of civil war. The transfer of power was not quite as magnanimous as that: Cosgrave’s party fought the February 1932 election almost entirely on the “Red” threat to law and order, with de Valera portrayed as a front for gunmen and communists. But after the votes were counted, Fianna Fáil ended up by far the largest single party; talk in parts of the Army about a preemptive coup came to nothing. The peaceful transfer of power from the victors of the civil war to the vanquished was a landmark in Irish history. It gave people “a new sense of legitimacy in the institutions of the new State,” reflected politician and historian Conor Cruise O’Brien. “Up to 1932, the State and the pro-Treaty party had seemed one thing” and this tarnished the quality of Irish independence. Now the Irish state was bipartisan property. Even de Valera later acknowledged (in private) that Cosgrave and his colleagues “did a magnificent job.”⁸²

If Cosgrave was the architect of the Irish state, de Valera shaped its sense of national identity. During the 1920s, Cosgrave had avoided clashes with Britain, aware that his country’s economy was still almost entirely reliant on trade across the Irish Sea. De Valera, by contrast, affirmed Ireland’s national self through confrontation with everything British. He embarked on a damaging trade war, presenting it as a continuation of the war of independence: “If the British succeed in beating us—then we’ll have no freedom.”⁸³ He also used the abdication to sever residual constitutional links with Britain, though Ireland remained nominally within the Empire. His new Irish Constitution asserted jurisdiction over “the whole island of Ireland” and, although stipulating freedom of religion, it affirmed the “special position” of the Catholic Church, banned divorce, and lauded the family as the “fundamental unit group of Society.” A woman’s place was definitely in the home.

The Constitution bore de Valera’s personal imprint. Even some cabinet colleagues opposed its pinched religiosity, and secularists claimed that Catholicism was itself a form of “colonialism” in Ireland—the land where, in James Joyce’s words, “Christ and Caesar are hand in glove.” In their view true independence required a break from “Mother Church” as much as “Mother England.” Many women also considered that de Valera had betrayed the gender equality proclaimed in 1916. The Constitution was not even “a return to the Middle Ages,” declared Mary Hayden, a leading feminist: “It is something much worse.” In a referendum on the Constitution in July 1937 only 56 percent of valid votes were in favor. And the Catholic cast of the Constitution further alienated Ulster Protestants: one of de Valera’s leading critics, Frank MacDermot, said that it “might have been specially designed to consolidate Partition.”⁸⁴

Ireland did flirt with fascism, but this proved ephemeral. In September 1933 the remnants of CnaG allied with other opponents of Fianna Fáil in a new party, Fine Gael (Gaelic Nation), led by Eoin O’Duffy, who had been sacked as police chief by de Valera. O’Duffy developed distinctly fascist tendencies: his blue-shirted paramilitary units engaged in marches and rallies, greeting their leader with “Hoch O’Duffy” salutes. But despite his boasts that he was “the third greatest man in Europe” after Hitler and Mussolini, Ireland did not go down the same path. O’Duffy was in fact an alcoholic who lacked political judgment: Fine Gael quickly realized its mistake and Cosgrave took over the party leadership. Although the Blueshirt membership surged to nearly 50,000 by mid-1934, this was driven by economics more than ideology. Most of the support came from County Cork and the southwest, where cattle farmers had been hard-hit by the trade war that de Valera had been waging with Britain. When that dispute was resolved at the end of 1934, Blueshirt numbers collapsed.⁸⁵

A threat still lurked on the left: the IRA, though banned by both CnaG and Fianna Fáil, had not been extinguished, and that legacy of the civil war would also endure. But although Ireland, unlike Britain, had a long tradition of anti-state violence, which 1916–23 had exacerbated, the country lacked other key preconditions for continental fascism—notably powerful socialist and communist parties, destabilizing ethnic tensions, and profound economic crisis. Between them Cosgrave and de Valera had proved Ireland’s commitment to parliamentary democracy, itself a legacy of British rule, and de Valera’s Constitution was a conservative document, affirming traditional Catholic values shared by much of the population. It might be going too far to say that Irish history after 1918 was driven by “great hatreds over small differences,” but beneath the obsessive political discourse about right and wrong, rather than right and left, there lay a deeper consensus in Ireland about parliamentary democracy.⁸⁶

Across the Atlantic, the United States was even less threatened than Great Britain by serious challenges from the left or right. But paradoxically, the fear of political radicalism was much greater.

As in continental Europe, so in the United States, rapid industrialization in the late nineteenth century had provoked severe social conflict. The railroad strike of 1894, for instance, sparked mob violence in the streets of Chicago. Yet left-wing politics never caught on in the United States. The American Socialist Party, even at its peak in the election of 1912, won only 6 percent of the popular vote. Eugene Debs, the party’s leader and five-time presidential candidate, never advocated a “labor party” along British lines let alone a Bolshevik uprising. In his view, the real revolution America needed was a return to the spirit of 1776, which had been perverted by ruthless plutocrats and corrupt politicians. American workingmen, he declared, were not “hereditary bondsmen” but the sons of “free born” fathers who had the ballot and could use it to “make and unmake presidents and congresses and courts.” Debs’s analysis was correct but it undercut the socialist case. In Britain and Germany the rise of socialism was inextricably entangled with the struggle of workingmen to win the vote. In America, however, most white men had been enfranchised since the 1830s and they participated in a lively two-party system. Workers therefore saw little need for a new class-based party to advance their goals.⁸⁷

America’s major unions also operated within the political system. The most significant was the American Federation of Labor, or AFL, led for forty years by Samuel Gompers—a Jewish immigrant from London’s East End. Gompers had no time for socialists, convinced they cared only for their party. He believed that unions were an integral part of American business, like management, rather than a subversive force, and declared that “we American trade unionists want to work out our problems in the spirit of true Americanism.” Gompers wanted to foster unions for individual trades rather than create a single union for a whole industry; he also concentrated on skilled craftsmen and did little to organize unskilled workers in the manufacturing industry. Even after a wartime surge in numbers, there were only four million union members in the United States in early 1919—half the figure in the UK, a country with less than half America’s population.⁸⁸

So Debs and Gompers managed to Americanize socialism and unions, undermining their radical potential. But there were deeper social reasons why socialism failed to catch on in America. The German commentator Werner Sombart noted the high standard of living there relative to Europe: “this prosperity was not in spite of capitalism but because of it.” American workers, he declared, were too comfortable to be radical: “All Socialist utopias came to nothing on roast beef and apple pie.” Sombart was painting too rosy a picture, because millions of American workers lived in grinding poverty, but many did eventually rise into the middle class, or watched their children do so. Even more important, hundreds of thousands of workers moved to better jobs in another city or in the burgeoning suburbs. The United States had an unusually high degree of geographical mobility compared with Europe, and this helped to undermine the sense of local working-class community that sustained socialism in urban Britain and Germany.⁸⁹

An equally significant obstacle to class consciousness was racial and ethnic division. Wartime demand for industrial workers drew several hundred thousand blacks from the rural South into northern cities such as Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. Yet America’s strict racial divide cut across any sense of mutual solidarity with white workers. Many of the latter were recent immigrants from Europe, part of an unprecedented influx of fifteen million people during the quarter century from 1890 to 1914. Whereas earlier migrants had come mainly from Britain, Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia, most of these “new immigrants” originated from Italy, Russia, the Balkans, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They included future household names such as Irving Berlin and Samuel Goldwyn, both of them Jews fleeing the Russian empire. Although some new immigrants, such as Jewish garment workers in New York, became ardent socialists, most had little sense of class consciousness—being divided from their fellows by language, religion, and lifestyle and inhabiting their own tight ethnic communities. In the dark alleys and dank courtyards of Lower Manhattan, reporter Jacob Riis noted, one might find little colonies of Italians, Germans, French, Africans, Spanish, Bohemians, Russians, Scandinavians, Jews, and Chinese—a “queer conglomerate mass of heterogeneous elements, ever striving and working like whiskey and water in one glass.” Since these immigrants were eligible after five years to become naturalized US citizens and therefore voters, they were much keener to keep their jobs and avoid a police record than to agitate for a left-wing utopia.⁹⁰

So the failure of European-style radicalism to develop in the United States reflects the deep structures of American politics and society. Yet the aftermath of the Great War was also hugely significant. American workers, like those in Britain, demanded a payback for victory. One of the achievements was the Nineteenth Amendment, finally giving the vote to women, but 1919 also saw a surge of industrial militancy with one worker in five out on strike—a higher level of unrest than ever before in US history. And on June 2 parcel bombs exploded at the homes of prominent figures in cities from Boston to Pittsburgh. The US attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, had the whole front of his Washington home blown in. In response the Justice Department rounded up several thousand radicals, mostly foreigners, often arresting them without warrant and beating them up. The “Palmer Raids” broke up the American communist movement, a mere 70,000 strong, and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a revolutionary syndicalist union of similar strength.⁹¹

The Red Scare, though brief, left lasting scars. In American politics communism was now firmly off-limits and socialism marginalized. Union membership slumped from a peak of five million in 1920 to three million in 1933, and the unionization of heavy industry did not take off until the late 1930s. Although there were marked differences between Republicans and Democrats, ideologically these two mainstream parties would have fit on the center to right of the European political spectrum. Left-wing politics European-style were virtually unknown to Americans and therefore easily stigmatized as Bolshevik.

In foreign policy, too, American reactions to the Russian revolution were extreme. Unlike the countries of Western Europe, the United States, though trading with Russia, did not extend diplomatic recognition to the new Soviet government all through the 1920s. Instead it stuck to a line enunciated in August 1920 that no diplomatic relations were possible with a government whose leaders had declared that “the maintenance of their own rule” depended on “the occurrence of revolutions in all the other great civilized nations, including the United States.” This nonrecognition policy failed to achieve its aim of promoting regime change within Russia, so in 1933 President Franklin Roosevelt accepted that the Soviet Union was a reality and initiated formal diplomatic relations. He was struck by his wife’s experience when opening a rural school. On the wall was a world map with a “great blank place” where the Soviet Union should have been; the teacher said they were even forbidden to speak about it. In 1933, FDR finally put the USSR on the map but in the American mind it would remain a blank space, and one that became deeply sinister after 1945.⁹²

When Woodrow Wilson spoke in 1917 of making the world safe for democracy, he envisaged the export of political values already deeply rooted in American life. Although the Soviet Union began to function as a new Other for American political identity, symbolizing what the United States was not, overall the Great War had limited political impact in America. In Europe, however, the introduction of a democratic franchise, coupled often with parliamentary government, amounted to a political explosion, shaking some states to their foundations. Hence Baldwin’s assertion that the real problem was making democracy safe for the world. As we have seen, Britain was more successful in doing so than most of continental Europe, where liberal democracy had withered by the early 1930s. But the Wilsonian challenge was global in its implications. Outside Europe, the debates about nationalism and democracy would be played out in a global arena where empires still held sway.

 

* Also enfranchised were women who were university graduates or who occupied property where the rent was more than £5 a year.