A vexatious, nightmare interlude

Most of time, historians who want to be taken seriously by their academic peers confine themselves monographs, studying deeply small aspects of big subjects. For example, this study of war financing by the Union during the US Civil War. These make building blocks for grand narratives of the past; it is audacious and usually quite senior practitioners who attempt to offer their readers broad sweeping stories.

This is what economic historian Adam Tooze does in The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931. His narrative bridges two episodes which have grabbed most if the available attention in popular 20th century history -- the horrific conflict which was World War I in Europe and the even more horrible sequel of economic collapse, war and fascism in Europe, as well as the definitive end of European global empires.

But what happened in the 1920s? If we have any mental picture at all, it's likely of a mess of little states stumbling to failure in Europe while Prohibition of liquor and crazed dancing of the Charleston captured energies in the United States. That is, an historic void.

Tooze is certain we're missing the significance of that time. The United States, haltingly, came into the leading role in the world its economic dominance implied.

A new order emerged from the Great War that promised, above the bickering and nationalist grandstanding of the new states, fundamentally to restructure relations between the great powers -- Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Germany, Russia, and the United States. It took geostrategic and historical imagination to comprehend the scale and significance of this power transformation. The new order that was in the making was defined in large part by the absent presence of its main defining element-- the new power of the United States. ... The one nation that emerged apparently unscathed and vastly more powerful from the war was the United States. ... Tracing the ways in which the world came to terms with America's new centrality, through the struggle to shape a new order, will be the central preoccupation of this book.

But powerful political movements and nations sought a different path.

... We grasp movements like fascism or Soviet communism only very partially if we normalize them as familiar expressions of the racist, imperialist mainstream of modern European history, or if we tell their story backwards from the dizzying moment in 1940-42, when they rampaged victoriously through Europe and Asia and the future seemed to belong to them. ... the leaders of Fascist Italy, National Socialist Germany, Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union all saw themselves as radical insurgents against an oppressive and powerful world order. ... This was the terrifying lesson that the insurgents derived from the story of world politics between 1916 and 1933, the story recounted in this book.

Something new had been released between states and peoples by the horrible carnage of 1914-18.

The Great War may have begun in the eyes of many participants as a clash of empires, a classic great power war, but it ended as something far more morally and politically charged -- a crusading victory for a coalition that proclaimed itself the champion of a new world order. With an American president in the lead, the 'war to end all wars' was fought and won to uphold the rule of international law and to put down autocracy and militarism. As one Japanese observer remarked: "German's surrender has challenged militarism and bureaucratism from the roots. As a natural consequence, politics based on the people, reflecting the will of the people, namely democracy, has, like a race to heaven, conquered the thought of the whole world." ...

... To describe the United States as the inheritor of Britain's hegemonic mantle is to adopt the vantage point of those who in 1908 insisted on referring to Henry Ford's Model T as a 'horseless carriage." The label was not so much wrong as vainly anachronistic. This was not a succession. This was a paradigm shift. ...

Tooze documents why America was unready and unwilling to exercise the stabilizing leadership which the world created by war hoped for and demanded. 

This isn't just about "isolationism;" it is also about America's struggles to stabilize its own internal and financial polity. It required the Great Depression and Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal for the United States in the 1930s for the country to find its way internally and then assume the world leadership that its power and money implied.

And so, in addition to the mediocrity of the corrupt Warren G. Harding and silent Calvin Coolidge presidencies, it becomes clearer why the decade of the 1920s has receded from historical memory. If I believe Tooze, and I do, the United States was coming to terms with itself on the verge of jumping atop a truly global role.

How much of history is actually these "in-between" times which subsequent events will show were necessary preparation for what came later? Obviously, this view reads history backward and it a bit loose-brained for many. Still, it is interesting, for example, to try to situate the Obama presidency as such an episode. I guess we'll have to live out more of the sequel to find out.