How The Great Depression Sent Shockwaves Around The World | Impossible Peace | Real History

[Music] two world wars tore the heart out of the 20th century they are a rent in the fabric of History the world lurched into the tear with high hopes and mixed feelings but as the 20s went on some knew that careless optimism was leading to a terrible crash and an impossible [Music] peace as Paris lurched into 1929 it seemed on the surface for those with long Pockets that the party would go [Music] on the American writer Robert MC Alman was there surrounded by artists and writers and Hangers On he glimpsed beneath the gloss with rare perception their wraiths all of them Ma Alman said they aren't people God knows what they've done with their realities this is a new day all gods are dead all wars fought and all Faith shaken according to Scott Fitzgerald on October the 3rd 1929 Gustaf stresman the chancellor and a level-headed hope for the success of the viar Republic suddenly died plunging Germany's future into uncertainty during his lifetime he was lorded abroad and hated it at home in many ways but I I think at the very least his significance is that he's a great Pro pragmatist once he is gone uh there's a kind of precarious void really um that happens and that's when we get also into these kind of sequences of the abuse of executive powers um and the the change of chancellors that never really stops until Hitler is appointed in its obituary the times said of prman that because of his leadership Germany is now prospering and has an important place in the Affairs of Europe stresman knew better just before his death he said that the German economy is doing well only on the surface Germany is in fact dancing on a volcano if the short-term loans are called in by America stressman said most of our economy will collapse and because of the Wall Street Crash that is exactly what happened Soviet Russia or tury quarantined it from the worst of the global depression but not from misery in the first 3 years of Stalin's 5-year plan beginning in 1929 the population of Moscow grew by 50% swollen by 26 million peasants who voluntarily under duress shifted creating the proletariat the revolution needed to fulfill the Marxist prediction arguably the October Revolution the Bic Revolution was not the most important event in the first 20 or 30 years of the of the 20th century because the majority of the population their life didn't change much peasants were now toiling in factories in 1929 the Red Army had 90 tanks 4 years later it had 4,700 the major change came with the with collectivization Force collectivization and uh uh rapid industrialization after 1929 on the 21st of December Joseph Stalin celebrated his 50th birthday and the birth of an unparallel Cult of Personality Stalin is an immensely slippery figure just as you start to think you understand Stalin and what's going on he slips through your fingers and and he shifts and he shape shifts again Italy also promoted a cult of personality but its hero was obliged to seek an accommodation with the old centers of power musolini doesn't enjoy absolute power and Italy so the king is still in place will remain in place until musini is HED uh from power and there's also the Catholic Church led by the pope who who are uh autonomous and exert quite a lot of influence on Italian Society early in 1929 protocols were signed at the leran palace defining and formalizing the relationship between fascist Italy and the Vatican [Music] the historic document was signed at the Lan by the duci and Cardinal gaspari the faal Secretary of State the Treaty of the Lan means much for internal peace and Harmony in [Music] Italy by the latter inact fascism made Catholicism the official state religion but the church gave away more it made fascism the state and in a referendum on March the 24th more than 8 and a half million Italians voted yes in support of the regime only 135,000 voted no musolini was now prime minister and also head of eight [Applause] Ministries there was no personality in Britain which had always found Ordinary People more appealing Stanley Baldwin's government campaigned under perhaps the least inspiring political slogan ever promoted safety first it was the first election in which all women aged over 21 were able to vote it was nicknamed the flapper election and Safety First lost out out to Labor's promise we can conquer unemployment which they couldn't in December two motions were put at the annual conference of the Indian National Congress one was a modest demand for Dominion status backed by veteran Congress member motilal in 1929 uh there is this Congress held and there the tension really explodes mtio and Gandhi say you know India should move by steps to Greater self-government uh by first gaining Dominion status um like the um white settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand and Canada the second motion was a ferocious demand for Independence now jointly sponsored by subas Bose and motilal son joah halalu who would become India's first prime minister the Young younger generation neru and B say you know the time for that is over now we want swaraj which meant full Independence the phrase was P full Independence so the future was stirring in some parts of the world and the past hanging on in others a drenching from a big burst bubble was threatening the global economy and the 20s were done the flapper era ends wrote Wallace stegner a Harvard academic and journalist in grimness bewilderment and [Music] anger British prime minister Ramsey MacDonald was starting to show the signs of mental collapse that would cause a contemporary to recall that when when he rose to speak in Parliament no one knew what he was going to say and when he did say it nobody understood it in 1930 the British prime minister wrote my head won't work other countries were also in less than reliable hands Spain was drifting into a republic phase in the wake of the dictatorship from 1923 to 19 30 of Primo derera a military man whose adroitness as a ruler was perhaps best assessed by his remark that had I known in my youth that I would one day have to govern this country I would have spent more time studying and less [Music] fornicating in Germany's 1928 election the right-wing parties had lost ground and and the Nazis attracted a poultry 2. 6% of the popular vote but disaster was just around the corner a moderate Coalition ceased to function and power shifted to the president Paul ludvic Hans Anon Von bondorf own Fon Hindenberg in March Hindenberg relying on Clause 48 of the viar Constitution appointed Germany's first presidential cabinet [Applause] in the June state election in Saxony Nazi support jumped to 14% the party's Focus had shifted from the crude antisemitic tirades of the early 20s to the urgent need for laen ROM and complaint about the shambles of viar democracy which only national socialism could solve how didn't matter it just could it was I regret to say the fascist leaders who understood the power of of film it was people like musolini it was people like Oswald Mosley in England and above all it was Hitler in Germany they understood how important it was to communicate with people to give a theatrical performance in one day the national socialists Advanced from 2. 6% of the vote and 12 seats to 18.

3% and 1 107 seats the day was September the 14th 1930 almost 6 and5 million Germans voted for Hitler in the main the vote had swung across from the Bourgeois parties of the center and the right roughly a quarter of those who voted Nazi had never voted before confronted by Hitler's success money panicked and about half of Germany's currency reserves when flying out of the country it's often been said that a lot of the people who later become Nazis are not the generation who fight during the first world war in Germany but the generation who are just too young to have seen Combat on December the 5th All Quiet on the Western Front at its German Premiere at the Mozart Hall in Berlin barely 10 minutes after it had begun the performance was interrupted when the National Socialist propaganda Chief ysf GBL walked noisily out of the theater this was the signal for Nazi activists in the audience to release white mice stink bombs and itching powder into the crowded Auditorium fights broke out with the thugs unimaginatively chanting Jews out Jews out and screeching yuden film on December the 11th the Supreme film censorship board revoked its decision to pass the film on the grounds that it was detrimental to German Prestige Frank peas president of the Hollywood technical Directors Association agreed with Geral and also called for All Quiet on the Western Front to be banned it will he said go far to raise a race of yellow streaks Slackers and dis loyalists but the threat to American society came not from an anti-war novel whose author incidentally was Catholic not Jewish but from an economic disaster that was starting to infect every industrial power and would become the badge of the decade it's with the coming of the depression I think that people start to feel that they're living in a pre-war era rather than a post-war era liberalism comes under huge attack of course after the 1929 economic crisis when the economic aspect of that edifice comes crashing down and then the masks fall one of the things that happens as a result of the depression after the Wall Street Crash of course is that every government thinks to itself what's my priority my priority is trying to make things better for my population in 1930 44% of the American population was still classified as rural more than 45 million were without indoor plumbing and almost all of the rural population was without electricity in November 1930 the farmer who received $135 a bushel for his wheat last year now got 75 cents and it had been a searing summer of drought so he had little to sell in any case staggering damages to crops have been suffered in Kansas and other wheat states where grains have been stunted and literally burnt up by the successive weeks of blistering heat day after day a blazing sun has resulted in stalks that may never bear heat deps too are mounting daily water is being hauled for miles to many farms in a desperate effort to save a part of the crop but the toll in ruined Farms is the worst in the history of the nation Bank closures in the month set a new Mark 236 the record would not survive in December 328 went under small Banks can't have a diverse portfolio if you have a small Bank in the middle of the of the Corn Belt uh the banker looks out of his window all he sees is corn people coming in to borrow money from him or grow corn if the price of corn collapses he's in trouble the response to the crisis was more kneejerk than well considered and President Hoover could not reign in the ex es of Congress in applying 1930's smooth Hy tariff Bill erecting forbidding barriers to trade the most notorious piece of legislation passed in the Herbert Hoover period is a smoo hly tariff which massively raises tariffs um which is an effort to try and protect the American Home Market but all it really does is spark retaliation from a European block a British Empire Block and so you're getting then very early on a huge trade War [Music] and that was precisely the wrong move to make at a time when trade is faltering exchange is faltering people are buying much less in terms of production uh putting in a strong protectionist law um which is then going to trigger retaliatory measures from other countries has the effect of putting not just the American economy put the entire Western world's economy into nose dive smooth Hy signed into law on June the 17th 1930 raised us tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods Henry Ford called it economic stupidity and more than a thousand economists signed a petition asking the president to veto the bill the value of European exports to the US was $1,334 million in 1929 in 1930 it was $390 million balit tariffs impacted on trade in the other direction US exports to Europe fell from $2,341 million in 1929 to $784 million in 1932 Hoover signing smooth Hy into law was seen as the moment in which according to political writer Walter Lipman he surrendered everything for nothing he accepted a mischievous product of stupidity and greed why did he sign and I think he was a good president his problem was that he was president when the Great Depression hit and he like many others didn't know really what to do you know should they cut taxes was that the way to to try and get the economy going in should they put up trade barriers Congress was certainly pushing for trade barriers to try and protect American Industries and American production and I think hover like a lot of people didn't know what to do um and he really floundered smooth Hy did not arrest the slide into depression Ford cut its working week from 5 days to 3 and the lights went out on neighborhood Banks there was a dispute over a mortgage and Mr Grace Jones and her family find themselves in the open but they're not discouraged and carry on just as though they had walls surrounding them Hoover described the American banking system as the element most sensitive to fear it was never a robust system with an average of 500 failures a year throughout the 1920s but in 1930 fear stumble towards panic and in the last 60 days of 1930 600 banks closed their doors 1,352 for the year it has to be un understood that of America's 25,000 Banks only 751 had branches the others were according to Carter glass Woodrow Wilson's treasury secretary run by Little Corner Grocery men calling themselves Bankers if the scale of the Depression was seismic its effect logically depended on the strength of the structures it shook and across Europe these were far from robust revolving door governments military takeovers and authoritarian regimes control countries from the Baltic to the Balkans by December industrial production had fallen by 30% in the USA 25% in Germany 30% in Britain 5 million were unemployed in America 4. 5 million in Germany 2 million in Britain the 1929 crisis shatters the belief in the ability of a liberal economic system based on mobility and trade uh to sustain itself in fact it plac in the hand of the enemies of liberalism both on the left and the right countries are in terribly depth because they are owing money that they owe probably even be from before the period of the depression but now in the depression the creditors are coming and they want their money and you have to pay so Cuts have to be done and uh and these Cuts tend to be painful Berlin streets were filled with entrepreneurial Desperados trafficking matches loose cigarettes palis shoe shines shoelaces rag Pickers bag carriers cars door openers panhandlers urat Barbers and doorway sex and Lord davanon Britain's Ambassador complained that this depression is the stupidest and most gratuitous in history investment didn't take place and businesses began to contract and as they contracted they laid off workers and these workers of course could not spend Revolution may not have been in the air but the fear of Revolution was and the Soviet football team scheduled to play a friendly International was denied entry into England on account of fears that the visit might be exploited by Soviet propaganda there was a real fear of international communism in the 1920s and 193s and it was not entirely misplaced I mean the Soviet government was a very curious hybrid on the one hand it behav like an ordinary government it signed treaties and trade agreements and it had ambassadors with with various exchange of ambassadors with various people but it was also headquarters of the Comon communist International which was dedicated to creating Revolution Soviet peasants meanwhile did not slide silently into collectivization the secret police the Checker reported 402 revolts in January 1930 1048 in February and 6,528 in March almost 14,000 riots and revolts involving 2 and2 million peasants in 1930 and the apparatus of the state effective if not efficient had closed 80% of Soviet Village churches by the end of 1930 it was becoming one of the observable phenomena of the age that ruthless total Arian regimes could get things done in contrast to the instability inherent in Jim crack but Democratic coalitions a fine example of which was the government put together in France by Andre tardier who was obliged to patch together a cabinet of 33 members prompting radical leader Edward deader to say it's not a cabinet it's a tribe some political leaders did not even have the power to form fragile coalitions 1930 was the year of perhaps the best known event in the Indian campaign for Independence until Gandhi it had been very much a small Club of liberal Elites uh petitioning the British Gandhi brought a very different uh conception of what Indian Nationalism could be he made it a mass movement the salt tax cost the average Indian at most 15 cents a year but salt was an essential of life and the British had the Monopoly Gandhi was really a genius of manipulating mass media if you like he was a genius of speaking to many different audiences Monopoly was the point and a good point it was in rousing popular support Gandhi's Salt March was a success yes if you look at the way he constructed his March uh he was very careful to choreograph it he designed the uniforms of all the Marchers he wanted them to look like a kind of universal uh uh procession not just carrying political Insignia he sent his followers in advance to villagers to whip up excitement so that when he came there were crowds cheering and then his great coup was to invite foreign film Crews to film him [Music] government studiously ignored the March but Gandhi had made his point Gandhi was was able to take potential weakness the fact that Indians were unarmed the fact that Indians didn't have military uh or even material power to fight the British and turn that weakness into a form of power against the British thousands of nationalist crowed the great tent to hear the farewell message of Gandhi leader of the demands for India's Independence its Echoes were heard in London recently during the Imperial conference and there may be [Music] fireworks as 1930 closed the poet wh Ordon saw this Britain he could have found the same scene almost anywhere smokeless chimneys damaged Bridges rotting Wares and choked canals tram lines buckled smash trucks lying on their side across the rails power stations locked deserted since they drew the boiler fires pylons falling or subsiding trailing dead high tension [Music] [Applause] wires writing in 1951 the poet Steven spender recalled that from 1931 onwards in common with many other people I felt hounded by external events it was the year that n coward's caval Cade opened the character Fanny asked in her song 20th century blue in this strange illusion chaos and confusion people seem to lose their way what is there to strive for love or keep alive for in the spring of 1931 chaos arrived in Austria its largest and most reputable Bank was credit anstalt Baron Louie de Rothchild chaired a board that included representatives of the bank of England and major American banks in the spring it failed and set in motion a Cascade of events that no one was able to stop when news of the problem reached London Harry sepman an adviser to the governor of the bank of England said this I think is it and it may well bring down the whole house of cards in which we have been living Harry was right one of the characteristics of the Decades after the end of the first world war is I think a strong sense that people had of endings and of Crisis crisis of capitalism ends of Empire somehow other civilization under threat Panic is a component of every crisis if Vienna was insolvent then what of Berlin as International Players tried to find a way of stabilizing the situation in Austria German banks came under pressure and with about a billion dollars of short-term credits Advanced to Germany by American Banks its system too was at risk down came the house of [Music] cards in the first 3 weeks of June Germany lost half of its gold reserves and the shock waves from the crisis rattle banks in Hungary Romania Poland and Spain on June the 20th President Hoover announced that the US would forgo repayments from Britain France and Italy for 12 months if they in turn would forgo reparations due from Germany but Herbert Hoover and all his men having consulted widely in Congress and with the British were found to have made an Omission as inexcusable as it was incomprehensible they had neglected to tell the French and France whose economy was strong and whose Central Bank was sitting on the second largest gold Reserve in the world was Furious France and the US argued and negotiated and Germany continued to Hemorrhage [Music] gold on July the 7th the Americans and French reached agreement but while they had been arguing the horse had bolted on July the 8th Germany's thirdd largest bank informed the reiches bank that it could not meet its liabilities but the reiches bank having lost so much gold could not bail out of the dunnut bankk without sparking a disastrous run on the currency goldridge France was in a position to help and made a loan offer contingent on a number of political demands rang ing from Banning nationalist demonstrations to halting construction of new warships the central bank was not empowered to comment on let alone act on such demands on Sunday July the 12th the German government announced that it was rejecting what every German newspaper called political blackmail who would offer the leadership that might halt this irrational slide as one economic historian put it the British couldn't and the Americans wouldn't as late as December with the grip of depression tightening American lawmakers stated that it was against the policy of Congress that any indebtedness of foreign countries to the United States should in any means be cancelled or reduced in the context of the world's economic crisis it was said sir Ronald Lindsay Britain's Ambassador in Washington an exhibition of irresponsibility buffoonery and ineptitude surviving inflation deflation stagnation required resourceful resilience and a loosening of a previously rigid morality crime pilfering Petty pilfering every sort of sorry survival strategy became widespread a fact of life that found its way into viar music Cabaret Cinema britz Lang's 1931 film M which is a film about the search for a Serial child murderer and ultimately this murderer played by Peter lri uh is not caught and dealt with by the police but by a criminal's court and I think in many ways that speaks again to a lot of things that are popular or are sources of anxiety in viar and that is based on a sense that Law and Order is collapsing extremism Street thuggery was a real threat and bruning's decree of December the 7th 1931 B and the wearing of uniforms so the brown shirts in white shirts like so many well drilled public servants and with bottle tops as badges paraded their threat to Law and Order the brown shirt the storm AB tyum or sa and their leader and the room wanted Power by violence the Party Machine sought power at The Ballot [Music] Box in 1931 the machine won through and 500 members of the sa were purged in 1934 the tension would flare again and be the death of [Music] ernstrom on September the 21st rather than borrow money Great Britain abandoned the gold standard whereby the Bank of England agreed to pay on demand 113 grains of fine gold in exchange for a pound note the world's most stable currency floated it floated down 30% against the dollar confidence in one of the world's few reliable institutions was at once demolished and The Age of Anxiety grew more perplexed stumbling on with less and less less to believe in the underlying problems of the British economy with the steeply rising unemployment and with the government running a large budget deficit came home to roost with a crisis over the exchange rate of the pound a flight from Sterling a withdrawal from gold from London near imminent banking collapse John mayard ke the unorthodox and somewhat Visionary Economist rejoiced at the breaking of our gold Fetters which one by one other currencies followed and Britain's historic past as Banker to the world became a ghastly nightmare as investors around the world fearing that defaults elsewhere would mean London being unable to meet its obligations began to withdraw funds in the last 2 weeks of July Britain lost all almost half of its gold reserves inevitably a move from dollars to Gold followed the Swiss National Bank transferred some $200 million the National Bank of Belgium $130 million putting pressure on the American currency by the end of the year one in every 10 American Banks had suspended operations money was being pulled back into the relative safety of mattresses strong boxes and holes in the ground the British labor government obliged to consider borrowing proceeded to plan for fiscal tightening in order to secure a loan through JP Morgan the Dole was to be cut by 10% and taxes raised the deal split the cabinet and the Prime Minister resigned retaining the Premiership by forming a coalition national government with the conservatives his ideological opposites it was the king who asked Baldwin Point Blank whether in this moment of national Peril and National crisis he would be willing to serve under McDonald what answer could a patriotic conservative party leader give to that other than [Music] yes the budget cuts did no good and the loan matched by one from a Consortium of French banks was spent in 3 weeks as unemployment dragged tax yields down while the cost of unemployment benefits soared rising in the UK from12 million in 1928 to15 million in [Music] 1931 The Strain and and drain on Ramsey MacDonald the Prime Minister was visible Churchill called him the Boneless wonder and the Fizz is out of him said Lloyd [Music] George strain may have also contributed to the early death of Spanish dictator Miguel Primo de rera he lost the support of the king and the military left office and within 2 months was dead at the age of 60 when the Great Depression started because of the huge loans that had been taken to pay for all the various public works there was an economic collapse and eventually by January of 1930 he felt that you know he couldn't carry on anymore and he literally upped and went almost without warning a broad-based coalition of socialists and middleclass Republicans with a reform agenda was elected to follow Dera into power on April the 14th 1931 is a period of enormous change enormous experimentation enormous progress in many ways but the problem is that this the there is a polarization and there's um the the discourse becomes violent and people tends to demonize the opposition so there's intense dialogue among the people who shared their own ideas but there's no dialogue between people who have different ideas and that's the problem the death Nell of the Spanish monarchy had been sounded in April's provincial elections which having effectively become a pleite on Royal Rule and Alonso the 13th voted Republican the Republic was declared and the royal family departed noiselessly into Exile thousands of people Jam Victoria Station to get a look at King Alonso who has taken Refuge among his Royal British relatives his ex-m majesty had to leave Spain in a hurry but is he downhearted he doesn't look it even though he is just plain Mralons bourbon but who Republic did they leave behind the Republican government faced with the fiscal shambles left by the ambitious but inept Primo de Rivera was immediately hampered when JP Morgan canceled the $60 million loan it had agreed with the now departed regime the stage was set for something but no one could foresee how terrible and bloody that something would be France continued its double life of Patchwork coalitions unstable and short-lived side by side with Le an fall the crazy years of Paris between the wars a Paris in which Josephine Baker's signature song Jore which she first recorded in 1931 rang out celebrating the sensation she had caused the white imagination sure is something when it comes to blacks she [Applause] [Music] said in Italy the deali the festive celebration of 10 years since the march on Rome took place in 1931 not everyone was an unqualified fan of huchi Giovani jatti party secretary complained that musolini wanted the people to believe that he not only conducted the orchestra but also played all the major inst instruments not surprisingly jurati did not last uch replaced him with Ailes daachi a man he described as a kettin but an obedient one far from the banking crisis and unemployment cues of Europe Japan's campaign to modernize and industrialize was feted by the global downturn in a country so dependent on foreign trade and so bereft of Natural Resources the Depression was a prodigious disaster which journalist KK kawakami in the New York Times of the 7th of June 1931 said had profoundly affected the mental Outlook of the entire nation in what way these are the years that help Hitler or enable Hitler to get into Power these are the years which make a lot of people give up on Li democracy these are the years the Japanese militarists increasingly dominate the Japanese government Japan moves into M Manchuria or the Japanese military move into menuria in 1931 in defiance of orders from their own civilian government shortly after 10 p. m.

on September the 18th 1931 a bomb exploded alongside the South Manchurian Railway Japanese troops without Tokyo's Authority had set it and then launched themselves at the Chinese claiming that it had been a Chinese attack in 1931 the Japanese gondal Army a Garrison Army based in Manchuria the northeastern provinces of China launched what was essentially a lightning coup it had been planned by two relatively Junior officers but within the space of about 5 to 10 days they managed to occupy large parts of a region that is about the size of France and Germany combined the blast was the first bomb of a long War the last would drop on Nagasaki on August the 9th 1945 Japanese troops are steadily advancing into Manchuria and occupying towns and villages in the wake of the fighting are being enacted the usual scenes of Civilian Panic a population prayed upon by Bandit overlords and baptized in military brigandage crowds the highways and attempts to flee regardless of the fact that Japan's coming represents the biggest influence for Law and established order in this corner of the globe I think there's General agreement that there's a lot of of the Japanese government in Tokyo having to act as an apologist for what has happened and they feel they can't go back National imperatives will not allow them to go back manua became manchukuo a puppet state with an obedient stooge on the throne Henry Pui a weakling whom the Japanese had prepared for the job with 7 years of [Music] women on September the 22nd 1931 the American minister in China sent a telegram to the Secretary of State it is my conviction he wrote that the steps taken Must Fall within any definition of War but the timidity of The Intern naal response to Japan's aggression bordered on indifference everyone had other things to worry about Japan essentially walks in and takes over Manchuria turns it into manchuko which means Manu land and what are you going to do what the United States does is say we're not going to recognize you this is not terribly useful as far as the British are concerned and indeed the Lord president of the council Stanley Baldwin a once in future Prime Minister said all you get from the Americans are words big words but just words following the invasion of manua the Philadelphia record by no means a lone voice declared that the American people don't give a hoot in a rain barrel who controls North China with h sight we might say that the American people should have cared but at the time they had more immediate problems on their mind it has been estimated that in 1931 in Chicago alone the value of lost wages the money that Ordinary People would otherwise have been spending on the necessities of life was $2 million each day relief expenditure cover the deficiency was a mere $100,000 a day Chicago's mayor Anton chernek told Washington that it would either have to send relief to his City or it would have to send troops radio was a strong opiate during the Depression in 1931 cbs's advertising Revenue was $14.