1925: A Year in Review
In historical hindsight, the big event in 1925 was Adolf Hitler’s publication of Mein Kampf and re-organization of the National Socialist party[1] to emphasize the the extreme nationalism that is a common element of fascist political philosophy rather than its original socialist leanings.
In fact, in 1925, the Nazis were not yet a significant political power and what Germans call Die goldenen zwanziger Jahre (The Golden Twenties) was at its height. The economy was on its way to recovery from the hyperinflation that had plagued it since 1923 , thanks to the passage of the Dawes Plan in 1924, which put the German economy under foreign supervision and stabilized the mark. The political landscape was relatively calm, on the floor of the Reichstag if not in the streets,[2] under the strong leadership of Gustav Streseman[3]. General Paul von Hindenburg, having reluctantly agreed to run for president, won by a huge margin, giving the illusion of national political unity. The country was enjoying an artistic intellectual blossoming that was dynamic, challenging, and transgressive. In short, Germany seemed to be stable.
Meanwhile, in the United States:
On March 18, the Tri-State Tornado, the deadliest tornado in United States history tore through southeast Missouri, southern Illinois and southwest Indiana, leaving 695 people dead, more than two thousand injured thousands homeless, and $16.5 million in property damage.[4].
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- Clarence Darrow
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- John T. Scopes
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- William Jennings Bryan
In July, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryant squared off over the teaching of evolution in Tennessee schools. Dubbed the Scopes Monkey Trial by journalist H.L. Mencken, the case began as an effort by the ACLU to test whether the Butler Law which made such teaching illegal in Tennessee, was constitutional. The ACLU ran ads in Tennessee newspapers offering to pay the legal expenses of any teacher willing to challenge the law. Twenty-four year old high school teacher and football coach John T. Scopes stepped up, backed by a group of local residents eager to put their economically depressed town in the news. It worked, for more than a week, Dayton, Tennessee, was the center of the nation’s attention. Reporters came from as far away as London and Hong Kong to report on the trial. More than six hundred spectators crowded into the courtroom each day. Thousands more listened to a live radio broadcast from the courtroom—the first such broadcast to be made. It took the jury nine minutes to find Scopes guilty. He was fined $100. The Supreme Court of Tennessee overturned the verdict on a technicality, but ruled the Butler Law to be constitutional. In 1968, the United States Supreme Court found a similar law in Arkansas to be a violation of the First Amendment. (Change is slow.)
Elsewhere in the world:
On January 3, Benito Mussolini effectively declared himself dictator of Italy in a speech to the Italian parliament, after a nudge from his party members, who felt he was moving too slowly in his efforts to dismantle Italian democracy from within.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk abolished Islam as the state religion in Turkey—the first step in a series of reforms designed to secularize the Turkish state, including the abolition of polygamy, the prohibition of the fez, the modernization of women’s clothing , and adoption of the Latin alphabet.
A fragile alliance had existed between the Chinese Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party after the 1912 revolution that established the Republic of China. With the death of charismatic revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen on March 12, 1925, and the ascension of Chaing Kai-shek to the head of the Nationalists, ideological differences between the two parties intensified, leading to a brutal civil war between them from 1927 to 1949.
Rubble in the streets of Damascus. From the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society
France occupied Syria and Lebanon in the early 1920s as part of the League of Nations’ mandate system. The mandates were intended to be a temporary arrangement designed to administer former German colonies and Ottoman territories with the goal of eventual independence. Not surprisingly, the mandate quickly looked a great deal like colonialism, including economic extraction that benefited France and not the mandated territories, with no sign of independence in sight. In the summer of 1925, what became known as the Great Syrian Revolt erupted in Syria and Lebanon. The French responded violently. In October, the revolt caught the world’s attention when revolutionaries attacked the French troops in Damascus. The high commander of the French miliary administration decided to take drastic measures against the revolutionaries and ordered troops to bombard the city. After nearly twenty-four hours of heavy fire from French airplanes and tanks, much of the city was in ruins. The violence marked a turning point in discussions about European colonial dominance and humanitarian aid in Syria, with Geneva as the center for the debate. For a time, there were calls to remove the mandate from French control. Those calls ultimately failed. By 1927, the revolt had been brutally quashed.
In a step toward greater democracy, Japan introduced universal male suffrage.[5] On the other hand, Japan also passed the Peace Preservation Law in 1925. This law gave the government the power to limit political dissent, providing the foundation for the militarism of the 1930s.
A few non-political things to end on a high note:
F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby
The Grand Ole Opry began broadcasting from Nashville
The first surrealist exhibition opened in Paris
John Logie Baird transmitted the first recognizable black and white television picture on October 2. The following January, he gave the first public demonstration of television.
And, ahem, Sigrid Schultz became the Berlin bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune.
[1] The term Nazis didn’t come into common use until 1931. Prior to that they were referred to as National Socialists, Hitlerites, or small-f fascists.
[2] Violence in the streets was a regular feature of German political life in the period between the two world wars.
[3] A successful businessman before he entered politics, Gustav Streseman was the head of the liberal German People’s Party. After a brief term as chancellor in 1923, he served unchallenged as the Weimar Republic’s foreign minister until his unexpected death at the age of fifty-one in 1929, shortly before the American stock market crashed and took the German economy with it. In my opinion, Germany’s response to the Great Depression might have been very different if Streseman had been there.
[4] $28.6 billion today
[5] Women didn’t get the vote until 1945.
From the Archives: Word with a Past: Genocide
I’m dragging with a nasty respiratory virus. Instead of writing through the fog, or leaving you without a Friday blog post, I’ve chosen an old post from 2014 to share. (Enjoy may not be quite the right word.)
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Genocide as an activity is probably as old as the concepts of “us” and “them”.
Genocide as a word is relatively new, coined by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, several years before the world knew about the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps
As a result of studying the history of anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia, the mass murder of Armenians by the Ottomans in 1915-16 (now considered genocide by most scholars), and other examples of violence directed at specific groups, Lemkin made the introduction of international legal safeguards for minority religious and ethnic groups his life’s work. He first proposed such legislation at an international legal conference in 1933.*
When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Lemkin tried to persuade his family to seek asylum outside of German-occupied territories, with no success. (Forty-nine members of his family, including his parents, were imprisoned by the Nazis and later gassed in Treblinka.) Lemkin himself escaped through unoccupied Lithuania and Latvia to Stockholm.
In Stockholm, Lemkin studied Nazi actions through the lens of jurisprudence, using information regarding Nazi laws, regulations and proclamations provided by Swedish diplomats in Nazi occupied territories. In 1944, now an analyst with the United States’ War Department, he published his monumental study of patterns of destruction in Nazi-held territories, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, in which he introduced the term genocide to describe “the crime without a name”:
“By ‘genocide’ we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. This new word, coined by the author to denote the old practice in its modern development, is made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing)….It is intended to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.
After the war, Lemkin worked as a prosecutor at the Nurenberg trials. He was able to get the word “genocide” included in the indictments, but genocide was not yet recognized as a legal crime and was not reflected in the final verdicts.
When Lemkin returned from Europe, he took on the task of pushing the Genocide Convention through the newly formed United Nations. The recognition of genocide as an international crime became an all encompassing crusade for Lemkin. He gave up adjunct teaching positions at Yale and New York University in order to give all his time to the task. Impoverished and sometimes homeless, he relentlessly lobbied national delegations and influential leaders for their support. The UN passed the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide on December 9, 1948–in large part due to Lemkin’s efforts. The United States finally signed the Genocide Convention forty years later,.
Genocide: the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group
* Several months after Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany.
Fairy Tales, Pt. 4 Madame d’Aulnoy Coins the Term “contés de fees”(fairy tales)
As best I can tell, Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness[1] d’Aulnoy (1652-1705) led a wild life.
At the age of 13, she was married to the Baron d’Aulnoy, who was a “freethinker,”[2] a gambler, and thirty years her senior. Three years and three children later, her husband was accused of treason. The accusations were proved to be false and his accusers were executed. There was speculation that she and her mother were involved in the plot against d’Aulnoy as a way of getting rid of a dissolute and possibly abusive husband.[3] A warrant was issued for their arrest. Madame d’Aulnoy escaped through a window and hid in a church. Her mother fled to England.
Madame d’Aulnoy spent the next twenty years traveling throughout Europe, occasionally making brief stops in Paris. Other than the fact that she had three more children, little is known of her life during this period. She later claimed she spent the time traveling in England, Holland, and Spain. Some believe she worked as a secret agent for King Louis XIV..
In 1685, Madame D’Aulnoy returned to Paris for good. Once re-established in Parisian society she enjoyed a successful career as an author, and hosted one of the most popular salons of the period. She published a popular novel and three pseudo-memoirs about her travels in England and Spain. But she was best known for her fairy tales, a term she invented. The tales were written for adults in a conversational style that reflected the salon culture of the day and featured strong female characters. (No waiting around to be rescued by a prince–for Madame d’Aulnoy or her heroines!) They don’t always end happily ever after
She often read her fairy tales at her salon before they were published. Her guests followed her lead, reciting fairy tales as part of the evening’s entertainment and occasionally coming in fairy tale costumes.
Altogether, she published twenty-five fairy tales in two collections, some of which were included by Andrew and Nora Lang in their popular fairy tale collections in the late nineteenth century.[4] Neither Madame d’Aulnoy nor her stories are remembered today, but she created a taste for fairy tales in the French court in which Charles Perrault and Antoine Galland could build. Perhaps making her the genre’s fairy godmother?
[1] Or perhaps comtesse. The records is not clear. We’ll just call her Madame d’Aulnoy going forward.
[2] A term that can be taken many ways. In this case, I assume it means not adhering to church doctrine. Or not.
[3] I could not find details about his eventual death in 1700.
[4] The Langs published twelve collections between 1889 and 1913, known as the Coloured Fairy Books. As happens all too often , Nora was not credited for the books on the cover or title page even though Andrew acknowledged in the preface of The Lilac Fairy Book, which appeared rather late in the series, that “The fairy books are almost wholly the work of Mrs. Lang, who haas translated and adapted them from the French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish Catalan and other languages.” Grrr.