Between the Wars 1919-1939

The Cartoonists' Vision

Dr Roy Douglas, Roy Douglas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781136108525
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First Published in 1992. `Between the wars' was the great age of the cartoon character. The adventures of Mickey Mouse, Popeye, and Donald Duck were followed avidly by millions. Even the political leaders of the grim world of the 1920s and 1930s were known to millions as cartoon characters - gawky, bespectacled Woodrow Wilson, the balloon-like Mussolini, and the moustache men Hitler, Stalin, Neville Chamberlain and Ramsay MacDonald.
Comic, mordant, and irreverent, political cartoons reveal more about popular concerns in the world of the slump, of rising nationalism and aggression, than either official documents or the work of most journalists. Published in newspapers or magazines with a wide circulation, they `made sense' to the ordinary reader. More than half a century on, that sense of immediate identification has been lost, and political cartoons of the period now need detailed explanation.
Roy Douglas, author of the acclaimed The World War: The Cartoonist's Vision, now applies the same skills to the interwar period. His scope is international, and he has selected his cartoons from many different countries. Douglas covers all the great political and social issues of the period as they revealed themselves through the cartoonist's eyes. His greatest gift is for concise, clear explanation, setting each cartoon into its historical context.
Throughout this book it is easy to trace the decay of hope in the 1920s, through the fear of war in the 1930s, to the determination at its end that fascism `must be stopped'. These cartoons, intended for the man and woman `in the street', in Europe, North America, in the Soviet Union and in Asia mirror their changing attitudes and beliefs, as their nations shaped up for war.

1

They make a wilderness … 1918–20

The First World War had been an utterly new kind of experience for the great majority of people whom it affected. The scale of human suffering bore no comparision with any conflict fought within living memory, save only the American Civil War of the 1860s. No less remarkable was the degree to which not only combatants, but civilians, national economies and — above all — human minds were influenced by the events. For four years the war was the centre of attention in most European countries, and eventually it became the centre of attention for countries outside the confines of Europe, notably the United States and Japan.

To many people, war was at first a thrilling, challenging experience. Pictures survive which show great crowds, mainly of young men, gathered in the principal cities of Europe to cheer their own countries’ entry into the war. Recruiting offices were besieged by eager volunteers. Even amid the worst horrors of the real war which followed, deep and lasting friendships were forged. Old men who fought still often recall their experiences with a measure of sentimental nostalgia.

At the beginning, the principal belligerents on one side — generally known as the Allies — were Britain, France, Belgium, Russia and Japan. Italy joined the Allies in 1915. In 1917, Russia withdrew from the war, in circumstances to which we shall need constantly to allude; but in the same year the United States joined in on the Allied side. The other side, commonly called the Central Powers, was made up of Germany, Austro-Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria.

Europeans and Americans were assailed by propaganda through all available media of expression. Patriotic propaganda, designed to encourage support for the various national war efforts, was countered by appeals directed by the other side towards potentially disaffected ethnic minorities. The British tried to stir up Arabs against the Turks, the Germans tried to stir up Irish against the British, the Austrians tried to stir up Poles against the Russians, the French tried to stir up Czechs against the Austrians, and so on.

There were people in all countries who, starting from very disparate ideological standpoints, regarded the war as an evil thing which should be stopped at the earliest possible moment; people who considered the restoration of peace to be more important than victory for one side. Some of those people saw war as inconsistent with the Christian faith; others, of all religions and of none, refused to accept the dreadful moral burden of wilfully encompassing human death and mutilation.

There were political objectors to the war. Many Socialists had long contended that international war was fratricide among the working class; that workers, if they fought anybody, should fight the ‘class enemy’ at home, not members of their own class who happened to live in different countries. Many Liberals perceived that all war was likely to involve the loss of hard-won liberties, and a long check for reforms which they sought to achieve. Many Conservatives saw that war would destroy the stable and ordered relationships which they considered indispensable for human well-being.

In the United Kingdom, where the pressures were a good deal less severe than in most continental countries, there were various signs of opposition to war. Two members of the Liberal Cabinet and a junior minister resigned when Britain entered the conflict. Other prominent Liberals, and a number of parliamentary backbenchers, later began to work for peace negotiations. One leading Conservative did the same, and wrecked his career in consequence. The sessional Chairman of the Labour Party in 1914 was an opponent of the war; but he and those colleagues who agreed with him were thrust aside by other members of their party. The introduction of conscription presented many difficulties, and arrangements had to be made to permit Quakers and others who opposed the war on moral grounds to register as Conscientious Objectors. It was never politically possible to extend conscription to Ireland.

When people do particularly nasty things to each other, they usually devise highly idealistic explanations of what they are doing. Ordinary people, as well as official propagandists, had to persuade themselves that the destruction and suffering was all worth while. In Allied countries, politicians began to speak of the ‘war to end war’. All the hatred and slaughter and suffering and destruction was presented as a kind of catharsis, essential for creation of the peaceful world which would assuredly follow. At the same time social injustices would be rectified; those heroes of the war who survived would receive from a grateful nation the treatment which their sacrifice demanded. We do not need to castigate the men who offered such promises, or deride them as hypocrites; in most cases, they had probably convinced themselves of the truth of what they were saying. The human power of self-delusion is almost unbounded.

The most dramatic political changes of the wartime period occurred in Russia. For the first two years of war, the Russian Empire ranked along with Britain and France as one of the principal Allied Powers. In March 1917, the Tsar was forced to abdicate, and a republic was proclaimed. The ‘Provisional Government’ of the Republic sought to continue the war, and many people in Britain and France viewed the change of administration with relief.

In the event, the new government of Russia brought no military benefit to the Allies; and in November the second phase of the revolution occurred, with a coup d’état by the Bolsheviks against the Provisional Government. It will be necessary to revert later to the story of that revolution, and its world-wide implications; suffice, for the moment, to say that the Bolsheviks were pledged to take Russia out of the war. In March 1918, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was concluded between the Bolsheviks and the Central Powers. It resulted in great tracts of the former Russian Empire passing into the hands of Germany and Austro-Hungary.

By this time, the United States had entered the war on the Allied side. In January 1918, President Wilson set out his celebrated ‘Fourteen Points’ which, he judged, should govern the peace settlement. In so far as those points were specific they were moderate indeed, and they were shot through with a strong idealism, very much the President’s own. Yet Wilson spoke only for himself. He had no authority to speak even for the American Congress, still less for the other Allies.

In the first part of 1918, the cards seemed stacked in favour of victory for the Central Powers, provided only that they could finish the war before the almost limitless reserves of American manpower were fielded. After their triumph in the east, a serious effort was made to win a similar victory in the west. The German ‘spring offensive’ of 1918 was held by the Allies; but it was touch-and-go. This was followed by a long period of hiatus; but then, in the autumn, the Central Powers collapsed quite suddenly. First Bulgaria and then Turkey sought and obtained armistices from the Allies. Late in October, the Austro-Hungarian Empire began to fall to pieces, and on 3 November it concluded an armistice – while the process of internal disruption continued. A few days later the German Emperor decided that the war was lost, and fled. On 11 November the German armistice was signed.

When wars of the past had come to an end, the belligerents sought to make peace as quickly as possible, in order that everyone could regulate his life under the new state of affairs. That arrangement had usually worked, because the spokesmen of victors and vanquished alike were small minorities, and there was no real ‘public opinion’ which could hold them to account.

The same course was followed again. The Paris Peace Conference opened on 18 January 1919, less than ten weeks after the fighting ended. All the public pressures were still for revenge. The draft treaty of peace with Germany was presented on 7 May, and signed at Versailles on 28 June. The treaty with Austria was signed at Saint-Germain in September, the Treaty of Neuilly with Bulgaria in November. The treaties with Hungary and Turkey took rather longer, but both of these were concluded in 1920.

What principles governed the peace treaties? The map of Europe was to be redrawn. The new territorial definitions were based on several different ideas which commended themselves to the victorious Allies. Nationalism prescribed the establishment of states each roughly corresponding with a single nationality or a small group of closely related nationalities. Economics prescribed that the new states should each contain a range of different resources and means of production. Strategy prescribed that they should be limited by geographical features which were difficult to cross. A sense of history prescribed that they should correspond with units which had existed in the past. Overriding all of these considerations was the rule ‘woe to the vanquished’, which required that the defeated enemy should in no circumstances stand in a better position than he had been in before the war. Unfortunately these various ideas were frequently in conflict, and almost any frontier which could be justified on one principle could be condemned on another.

The territorial settlement was to some extent predetermined by promises which had been made during the war, and by the more or less openly declared interests of the victorious Powers. France bitterly resented the amputation of Alsace and Lorraine which had followed the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–1, and successfully demanded restitution. Belgium enforced an ethnic claim to a much smaller slice of German territory. The German coal-producing area of the Saar, contiguous with France, was separated from Germany for fifteen years, at the end of which time a plebiscite would be held to decide its eventual fate. The Rhineland — the part of Germany lying between the Rhine and the French frontier, along with a few bridgeheads to the east — was set under protracted Allied occupation.

President Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ had included the promise of an independent Poland with access to the sea. This seemed reasonable enough, for Poland had been partitioned between Russia, Prussia and Austria in the late eighteenth century, and the Poles were plainly anxious to see their country restored. Access to the sea was imperative; but where could that access be granted? In a large part of eastern Germany there was a mixed population, German and Polish. Eventually the so-called ‘Polish Corridor’ was created, coming to the sea at Gdynia. Gdynia, however, could not handle all of Poland’s overseas trade, and so the ethnically German town of Danzig (now Gdansk) was cut off from Germany and established as a ‘Free City’, controlled by the League of Nations but linked economically to Poland. Thus Germany was split into two parts, separated by the Corridor and Danzig. The smaller part, centring on Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), became known as East Prussia. Memel (now Klaipeda) was also cut from Germany as a ‘Free City’, but it was soon incorporated in Lithuania.

Other parts of Germany — the northern part of Schleswig and part of Silesia — were eventually cut off, in response to the will of their inhabitants. Before the war Germany had had a number of colonies. These had probably been of little value to Germany, and they had certainly been administered with much brutality. All were given as ‘Mandates’ to various Allied countries.

If Germany sustained serious territorial losses, not all of which were justified on ethnic grounds, Austro-Hun...