Thinking Small (25 page)

The big dreams and big contributions to the American economy that were represented by men like Edison and Ford had improved the American quality of life. At the same time, however, that same wave had led to certain excesses and unhealthy actions, and those would become obvious in the 1930s. These excesses, and the country’s failure to dream big
and
simultaneously remain awake and aware of the consequences of their actions (to think small), would
devastate the country from the inside out—both economically and environmentally. It would take everyone in America—from the Edisons and the Fords to the farmers and the young men working for the Civilian Conservation Corps—to get the country back to a state of health. And those deep changes would not come without a great amount of frustrating debate.

Economics in America had always been a balance between government intervention and the laissez-faire practice of leaving private enterprise alone. The debate over this balance extended as far back as the country’s foundation, to arguments
represented by Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. There were groups lobbying for more government aid on one side, and groups wanting less government intervention on the other. Over the years, the
friction between regulation and deregulation had produced the lasting (though always controversial) mainstays of America: the modern banking system, “natural monopolies” in transportation (providing necessities like train tracks and roads, public works and utility services), and a boom in private enterprise that had made businesses like General Electric, General Motors, and Ford into national stars. The prosperity of the twenties in the United States made it clear that
the government needed private corporations. The 1930s would make it clear that the private corporations needed the government as well. It was a relationship of “can’t live with them, can’t live without them” in every sense.

Laissez-faire has always been the underlying philosophy of the American market. (At least in theory, most everyone agrees there should be no permanent centralization or control). And yet, neither the citizen-staffed government nor the citizen-staffed corporations have ever been able to truly leave things alone. The paradox, as many began to discover (or rediscover) in the thirties and forties, is that leaving something alone often requires regulation: Over the years,
it’s come to light that a lot of discipline is necessary for the market to “naturally flow.” Consumption in economic concerns is related to private consumption: It can feel so good to indulge, but too much indulgence can make a system sick, just as too much indulgence in food or drink can make a body sick. In the early 1930s, America was sick, and the symptoms were environmental and economic.

Still, corporations and bankers and the free market had indeed brought a lot of good things to America. And for that reason, government had stepped back, so much so that when the market crashed, President Hoover refused to have the government directly intervene in the domestic market, trusting that it would correct itself. And while Hoover was actually a believer in the beneficent hand (he believed that by being on the side of
big business, the
government could help the American economy, and thus the American people themselves), those American people (the consumers) soon began to mistrust big business, understandably confused about where big business ended and Wall Street began. This new consumer mood, and the desperate situation of the Depression, meant that Herbert Hoover did not win a second term. Instead, Franklin Roosevelt came to office, a man who was not afraid to let the government directly intervene in the
country’s economics: He set up the New Deal. With its philosophy of relief, recovery, and reform, millions of dollars were poured into government projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), to stimulate the economy, making men like Wendell Wilkie, the president of Commonwealth and Southern, furious about the government’s interference (one of the primary goals of the TVA was to provide poor, rural areas of the country
with electricity).

But Roosevelt was aware that it was not only money that would help; it was a change in mood. “After all,”
²
he said in his fireside chat of March 12, 1933, “there is an element in the readjustment of our financial system more important than currency, more important than gold, and that is the confidence of the people. Confidence and courage
are the essentials of success in carrying out our plan. You people must have faith; you must not be stampeded by rumors or guesses. Let us unite in banishing fear. We have provided the machinery to restore our financial system; it is up to you to support and make it work. It is your problem no less than it is mine. Together we cannot fail.” The real problem was one of thought and meaning, of how to connect one’s work and pay back to something inspiring again. The jolt
of the Depression came from many changes, but perhaps the most significant was that the powering of the United States was no longer agricultural but rather industrially-based. And the country’s overall mind-set—reflected in everything from factory conditional to farms to the rules of Wall Street—now had to evolve to adjust to that change.

Roosevelt’s election and the New Deal signaled a political realignment away from the corporations and toward their employees: Workers’ rights and civil rights would now become the object of focus in the papers and the press. The United Auto Workers Union would be formed. Because the New Deal was a giant project with its hands everywhere in the market, many corporations resisted Roosevelt’s administration, and that included men
like Wendell Wilkie, Alfred P. Sloan and Henry Ford. Throughout the 1930s, American government and American corporations began a domestic battle to “win” American citizens; public relations and advertising would be the battleground. The people, Congress, big business, and the administration of the president—all would make mistakes, but those mistakes would not go unnoticed: A healthy rivalry (healthy only because it existed within a system of checks and balances)
would ensure that a delicate balance was maintained.

The struggle between big business and government was a paradoxical fight in some ways—even Edward Bernays would say that “Politics was the first big business
³
in America”—but it would prove to be an important one, essential to America’s health in the long-term. In Hitler’s Germany, for example, there would be no such
debate allowed, and Germany would feel the consequences of having a government with total control. Still, in those dramatic years of the 1930s, this long zoom view was by no means obvious. To some, it seemed the American model was too messy, too volatile, and might indeed collapse. Democracy and capitalism did not look strong. In fact, in the limited view of that decade, there was the sense that Germany’s model was the one gaining speed and power.

After all, in the 1930s, such centralization of both the economy and the power of the government worked in Germany. Rearmament gave the country a giant economic and psychological boost, as did the road construction project. But even more important, there had been a dearth of motivation, and now people were motivated again. And yet the foundations for all that growth were corrupt and unsustainable: while on the surface it
looked like industry was
flourishing, underneath it all, the German economy was broken and in dire need of a war. By 1939, economists knew that the growth was a mere façade: the director of the Reichsbank, for example, sent Hitler a note demanding restraint in finances and predicting an imminent and dangerous inflation. Hitler sacked the Reichsbank man and called his words “mutiny,” but he must have known they were true. The country’s demands for raw materials and food, alongside
its need for even more workers, meant it had to conquer new areas in order to get its hands on both. Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland would be the first areas that would feel Germany’s push.

The truth always comes out eventually, and by the end of the 1930s, it was rearing its head. German people began to feel the weight of both price controls and rationing. But the inertia that had been garnered made it difficult to change economic paths or build a resistance. Hitler’s reign had started with the vote, but by 1939, the NSDAP had accumulated six years of authoritarian power. It was no longer necessary for them to hide their intentions. Domestically
and internationally, the German government became openly totalitarian.
⁴
People were brought into the NSDAP without such niceties as asking for their consent. It was in 1939, for instance, that all forms of police and protection became part of Heinrich Himmler’s SS: Whereas state and local police forces had been allowed to remain separate, in 1939, they all became part
of Hitler’s machine. The picture Germany had painted for the international community was crumbling as well. Hitler’s peace speeches proved a ruse as he took Austria and invaded Czechoslovakia. Next came Poland, leaving France and Britain no choice but to respond in defense. In the autumn of 1939, just as Ferdinand Porsche was setting up his little hut in The Town of the Strength through Joy Car and preparing to finally build the automobile he’d spent more than
twenty years of his life discovering and inventing, Europe entered an open and official state of war. Once again, Porsche and his little car had met a seemingly insurmountable wall.

Heinrich Nordhoff
was walking the same Berlin streets he’d once explored as a child, taking his daughters to the same museums he’d visited all those years before. As a young man, Berlin had offered the culture, music, and art that Nordhoff needed in his life, things he soaked in hungrily every chance he got. And his desire for such things had only grown. He was always reading and learning and looking
for the connections between disparate things. Perhaps for this reason, his young daughters thought their father knew everything. Sometimes they would try to find the hardest questions they could—even searching their schoolbooks for subjects about which they could quiz him—but their father always seemed to know the answer to whatever question they posed. Still, there were some things he could not explain at the time, had he been asked. He didn’t know how to
explain what was happening in his country or how to judge his own complicity in it, and he didn’t understand why they were going to war, though he and his family were soon to be deeply affected by it.

Just as Hitler was beginning to invade Czechoslovakia, Opel had transferred Heinrich to their executive offices in Berlin. But it was no longer the town of his youth. The mood he found there was very different from the one he’d known in the 1920s. Long gone were the artists and writers and musicians who had once packed Berlin’s streets. Now the capital had been rearranged to fit a Nazi fantasy—bloodred flags with swastikas hung from windows, parades
of Nazi officials marched down the streets, and Germans of the “wrong race” were fleeing, hiding, or being rooted out and killed. Much of the modern art that Heinrich had so loved as a teenager was gone—masterpieces labeled as “degenerate” by the Nazi Party, including Nordhoff’s favorite painting from his youth, the
Tower of Blue Horses
by Franz Marc. Schlesinger, Nordhoff’s favorite professor, had been forced out by then,
too, and many of the city’s brightest minds had fled
long ago. Anxiety hung thick in the air, unspoken but ever present. But Heinrich was given a nice executive job in Berlin, and the surrounding unrest was not enough to make him pack up his family and move. He stayed.

In retrospect, one can’t help but wonder how Germans who were not part of the Nazi Party were able to stay during this time, but in those days, things were not so clear, which is why even those most in danger often refused to leave. After the Reichstag fire in 1934 and the Night of the Long Knives, Jewish people were warned and encouraged to emigrate, but many refused. Even at the end of 1938, when the
Kristallnacht
occurred, many Jewish families
continued to stay. But of course leaving was a much harder task by then, impossible for some. In his autobiography, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a prominent literary critic in Germany and a Jewish man who survived the Holocaust, talks of these days in Berlin. He was among those who had stayed, and would ultimately be sent to a concentration camp. He writes that two conflicting attitudes emerged among his Jewish family and friends in the mid-1930s:

He goes on to say that many Jews felt the hatred of the Nazi regime was directed toward Jewish immigrants rather than those who were native-born. And what about the Jewish men who had served Germany in the First World War? Ranicki says that these people felt invincible: After what they had sacrificed, how could Germany not treat them well? Jewish and German friends tried to mutually assure one another: