A History of the World (78 page)

Even then, Germany might have escaped political extremism and strengthened her democracy through the later 1920s and beyond, had it not been for the Great Crash of 1929, which happened first in America’s runaway consumer economy. This could have been followed by a local correction, except that weak leadership in the democracies, including under Ramsay MacDonald in Britain and President Herbert Hoover in the US, took the world towards a general trade depression and mass unemployment. This greatly raised the prestige of dictatorship as an alternative route to growth: protectionist tariffs and the freezing-up of world business seemed to be bringing capitalist democracy to its knees. The yearning for a patriotic strongman to take charge and suspend the normal rules of the market was not confined to Munich.

Many European nations had had only a short experience of democratic politics, anyway. Spain, after a century of authoritarian monarchy, dictatorships, coups, rebellions and restorations, had fallen under the sway of a new dictator, Primo de Rivera, before the Second Republic was declared in 1931 – this was the left-wing government that would in turn be destroyed by civil war after the military rebellion of General Francisco Franco. With its intense religiosity and its peasant economy on the one hand, and its industrial cities and republican traditions on the other, Spain had been divided long before Franco’s rebellion. Italy was a new nation, still learning the culture of democracy, when the former journalist and left-winger Benito Mussolini seized power in 1922 in an audacious coup, later mythologized as ‘the march on Rome’. Like Spain, Italy had been divided by increasing industrial militancy. Poland had only five years of parliamentary government between her victory over the Bolshevik Russians in 1919–21 and the seizure of power by General Jozef Pilsudski in 1926. As in Germany, anti-Semitism and nationalism would be powerful currents in Polish politics as the Great Depression neared.

The central European countries that had emerged from the 1919 carve-up of the ruined Austro-Hungarian Empire were newer still. Dictatorial monarchs held sway in Yugoslavia and Albania; the dictators General Metaxas in Greece and Kimon Georgiev in Bulgaria; there was Admiral Miklos Horthy’s regime in Hungary, a military government in Portugal and a form of monarchical authoritarianism in Romania. So although Germany became the most extreme example of European Fascism, this was a fashion, not a German invention. Because the democracies would eventually triumph in Western Europe it is easy to forget that, from an interwar perspective, the democracies seemed the odd ones out.

The relationship between democracy and prosperity seemed far less obvious than it had been. Italy, not Germany, had been the test case. There, Mussolini’s boasted corporatism, involving the reclaiming of marshland, subsidies to increase grain production and eventually the takeover and amalgamation of banks and industrial businesses, appeared successful. True, Il Duce was behaving badly abroad, but after all, his desire for some kind of African empire to provide raw materials and cheap labour was no different from what other European countries had aspired to, and achieved. It turns out that Fascism
did not much help the Italian economy. In the decade between the Great Crash and the start of the Second World War it was growing at around half the rate of pre-war times, and nearly half of Italians were still employed on the land. The total rate of investment actually fell during Mussolini’s pre-war rule. But none of this was obvious to outsiders at the time.

Hitler himself found economics dull and secondary. His chaotic personal way of running Germany more or less excluded him from economic planning. One of his biographers says bluntly: ‘The extraordinary economic recovery that rapidly formed an essential component of the Führer myth was not of Hitler’s making.’
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Fascinated by cars, Hitler authorized huge detachments of workers, paid very little and organized in militaristic camps, to build the new autobahns as well as labouring on other drainage and forestry projects. Unemployment crashed from around six million at the beginning of his time as Chancellor to negligible levels by 1938–9. The exclusion from the unemployment figures of women, who Nazis thought should be at home looking after their families, and of Jews, was part of the statistical story. Another part of it was the banning of independent trade unions and strikes.

Still, those huge public sector projects and the even larger project of rearmament soaked up many of the previously workless. Under Hjalmar Schacht, the central banker and economics minister, the Nazis ran a semi-military version of Keynesian economics, keeping prices low and building up huge government deficits during the later 1930s, when military investment was running well ahead of ordinary industrial spending. An unsustainable sprint towards war was taking place. Imports were limited to essential raw materials and food; everything that could be replaced or substituted inside Germany, was. Goebbels talked about ‘fantastic sums’ being spent on armaments, while Hitler repeatedly urged that ‘money’ – by which he meant economics – was meaningless compared to the need for military readiness. ‘The economy’ did not really exist in Nazi thinking as a separate entity from the nation, armed and ready.

Germany had a superb scientific and industrial infrastructure, however, which had survived the defeat of 1918, and a powerful network of business leaders who were left mostly alone by Hitler in return for backing the Nazis. It would take a long time for the
expulsion of the Jews and the imposition of Nazi ideology to cripple German ingenuity and industrial flair. Even late into the war, despite shortages of power and raw materials the big German combines were still producing new weaponry of outstanding quality.

Yet the huge deficits and the short-term planning for a war economy told their own story. By the time he was planning the invasion of Poland, Hitler was using the unsustainable nature of the German economic boom, created to prepare for war, as a reason for the
necessity
of war. The real nature of this gamble was not widely understood at the time. Hitler’s economic miracle was trumpeted at home and abroad. In America, even Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with his ‘New Deal’ public works programme, seemed to be finding it harder to get the US economy moving.

The democracies would recover their confidence. Before rearmament became the priority, growth was returning both in Britain under Stanley Baldwin and in the US under Roosevelt. But the biggest political difference between nations struggling with recession in the interwar period and nations struggling with it today, after the 2008 banking crash, is that, the first time round, there seemed to be effective alternatives to capitalist democracy. Mussolini, who seems a buffoon today, was widely regarded as a Roman genius. At the other end of the spectrum, ignorance about the true state of affairs in the Soviet Union made it possible for Stalin’s propagandists to dupe the West into believing he too was making a successful leap into a triumphantly powerful industrial economy.

Katharine and Margaret

In New York in the summer of 1921, while Adolf Hitler was ranting in Munich drinking-dens, two women in their forties one day sat down and eyed one another. One was a red-haired agitator, born of working-class Irish stock in upstate New York. The other was an elegant daughter of America’s industrial aristocracy, who spent much of her time looking after her schizophrenic husband at their Californian hideaway. Margaret Sanger and Katharine Dexter McCormick were very different kinds of American, who together would do more to change women’s lives by the later part of the century than any politician, in
the US or Europe. Their cause, however, was undeniably political. It was to give women control over their own fertility or, to put it more bluntly, to help them stop having babies they did not want, while continuing to have the sex they did want.

Margaret Sanger is a feminist heroine but not an easy woman to warm to. She was self-promoting, often disloyal, and an unreliable witness. Even her own highly sympathetic biographer admits: ‘In her memoir, Margaret was not always completely honest about her life.’
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She savagely attacked Marie Stopes, the British birth-control pioneer, merely for being a rival, and cast off her first husband and (for a while) her children with shocking coolness. Later she would be attacked for racist and eugenicist views. But there is no reason to think that courageous campaigners need be consistent or easy to get on with; it is more often the other way about.

Sanger’s determination to give women control over their reproduction was deeply rooted in the experiences of her early life. Her father was a free-thinking Irish radical, but a ferocious patriarch at home, in a small town in New York state. Her mother, a devout Catholic, had no fewer than eighteen pregnancies in twenty-two years, and died aged fifty of cervical cancer. Margaret trained as a nurse, and watched young working-class women die of botched abortions in the slums of Manhattan, where people lived seven or eight to a room. She spent the years before the First World War with an anarchist and socialist crowd, helping organize strikes, talking of revolution, of the morality of assassination and of the joy of sex. Slowly, however, she turned her focus onto the simpler, more practical issue of how to help women desperate for contraceptive help. As the world went to war in 1914 Sanger launched a magazine,
The Woman Rebel
, advocating something she had found a new phrase for, ‘birth control’. But she came immediately into conflict with another powerful current in American public life – puritanism.

Anthony Comstock was a mutton-chop-moustached postal inspector and former soldier, who had formed the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. He boasted of having had fifteen tons of books and four million pictures destroyed, as well as thousands of people arrested. Comstock found vice everywhere. He had a special nose for it. He found vice in medical textbooks, in the display of wax dummies in tailors’ shops, in postcards, novels and the plays of George Bernard Shaw.

His greatest achievement was the 1873 US federal Comstock Act, which prohibited the sending of obscene or lewd material by post. This included items used for, and any information about, birth control. In the words of the Act, any item or article ‘for the prevention of conception, or for causing unlawful abortion’ would attract a large fine, or between six months and five years in prison, with hard labour. Comstock would trap doctors into giving advice on contraception by sending pitiful-sounding letters, apparently from desperate women, and then pursuing any doctor compassionate enough to write back, often achieving long prison sentences for them.

Sanger, meanwhile, wanted to publish a book giving contraceptive options. In 1914 Comstock and his law came after her. Under an assumed name, fearing prison, Sanger fled to Britain. There she met the sex campaigner Havelock Ellis and had a brief affair with H.G. Wells, which was mandatory for left-wing women in Britain during this period. But the most important outcome of her European exile was a visit to a Dutch contraceptive clinic in 1915.

For as far back as we have written records, we know that women have tried all sorts of devices and techniques to avoid pregnancy, from lint tampons soaked in honey, which were used in ancient Egypt, to wet tea-leaves, pieces of oiled paper, sponges dipped in vinegar, home-made glycerine suppositories, and condoms made from everything from leaves and bark to sheep’s gut. (Some of the more outlandish remedies, such as crocodile dung, turn out to have a scientific justification, since crocodiles often eat a weed that contains a contraceptive-enhancing drug.) The invention of latex and new forms of rubber had produced better condoms, and also caps and diaphragms for women; and it was only when Sanger got to Holland and was shown the published pamphlets about their use and the latest diaphragms that she became aware of what was possible. This was really at the heart of her meeting with Katharine McCormick.

For Sanger had returned to the United States and started to publish contraceptive advice, opening the first clinic offering help in Brooklyn in 1916. She had swiftly fallen foul of the law again, and in 1917 was sent to a workhouse for thirty days. But the tide of opinion was slowly turning, and using her court appearances to promote the cause, Sanger was becoming a heroine to American women’s rights campaigners. Using a loophole in the law which allowed contraception on
medical advice, she was able to successfully publish pamphlets and books. By the early 1920s she had set up a fund-raising and campaigning organization, an all-women birth control clinic, and was speaking across America – and, indeed, in Japan and China too. What she needed for her clinic, however, were actual contraceptives. That meant diaphragms, which were not easily legally available in the US. And that led her to McCormick.

Katharine Dexter McCormick’s world had been very different. She was as near as the US had to aristocracy. She came from a proud and wealthy family that had arrived in America in the 1640s, taken a prominent part in the rebellion against the British Crown, and had become pioneers in Michigan, where the town of Dexter was named after them. By the late nineteenth century they were part of the super-rich Chicago elite, mingling with famous family names like Pullman, Kellogg and Otis. Katharine’s father, a philanthropic lawyer, had died when she was quite young, and her mother had progressive views, including supporting votes for women.

Showing great determination, Katharine had worked her way through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the first women to get a science degree there. She became a keen suffragist and had married another wealthy young radical, the scion of the McCormick industrial empire, whose agricultural machines had helped open up the mid-West to farmers. Unfortunately, her husband Stanley quickly fell ill with schizophrenia and would spend the rest of his life needing virtually full-time care. She threw herself into a double life, overseeing his psychiatric treatment and campaigning for women’s suffrage – which was how she had heard of Sanger.