In the Time of the Americans by David Fromkin

Author:David Fromkin [Fromkin, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, World War II
ISBN: 9780307766069
Google: VjN2CCjU2MgC
Amazon: 0333639006
Publisher: Humanity Press/prometheus Bk
Published: 1995-01-01T11:00:00+00:00

THE PATTERN OF POLITICS that MacArthur observed in Europe as he traveled to observe army maneuvers there in 1931 and again in 1932 was not unlike that in Japan—and was entirely different from that which had been envisioned by Woodrow Wilson when he brought the United States into the European war in 1917. The war had shattered states, governments, economies, and societies; but peace-loving, free-trading democracies had not arisen in their place. Instead the world was moving in the opposite direction. The United States and the Allies at great cost had won the Great War, but the world that had emerged from it was, by 1932, far more dangerous and terrible than the world they had set out to change.

In Italy the once-socialist adventurer Benito Mussolini, who had taken power in 1922, had become dictator in 1926, giving the postwar world a new word: fascisti (the plural of fascio, a “bundle,” used to signify his bundles of supporters). The Russian revolutions, which had aroused so many false hopes, by 1922 had led to the primacy of Joseph Stalin in the Kremlin and, by the 1930s, to his totalitarian dictatorship. Stalin, even more than Mussolini, exerted a pull on loyalties outside the frontiers of his own country; and communism and fascism, despite or because of their similarities, were seen as rivals.

By 1932 eyes had turned to Germany, economically the hardest-hit country in Europe. Versailles had crippled German industrial capacity; by the late 1920s the country’s prosperity was based on the American loans, which were withdrawn after the Wall Street collapse. So in 1932 6 million Germans were unemployed and, though other factors also were involved, were vulnerable to the demonic appeal of Adolf Hitler.

Among the lesser European powers, dictatorship had become commonplace. Miguel Primo de Rivera y Orbaneja had made himself dictator of Spain in 1923. Marshal Józef Piłsudski took power in Poland in 1926. A military revolt in Portugal in 1926 eventually had led to the dictatorship of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar. Alexander I proclaimed Yugoslavia a royal dictatorship in 1929. Admiral Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya ruled Hungary. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, though he encouraged the forms of democracy, served as Turkey’s dictator. The chancellor of Austria, Engelbert Dollfuss, was in the process of destroying the country’s republican government and establishing his own authoritarian regime. Greece was only years away from the dictatorship of General Ioannis Metaxas.

Republics, parliaments, and politicians were discredited by their ineffectiveness. They were unable to deal with mass unemployment. They proved helpless in the face of the violence introduced into politics by extremists of Right and Left. Traditional society, with its restraints, had been destroyed by the war and the crash. Europe and Japan now lived in a dark age of coups and conspiracies in which ultranationalist killers assassinated the civilian leaders who might stand in their way, gunning down, among others, German foreign minister Walter Rathenau, Bulgarian prime minister Alexander Stamboliski, and Japanese prime minister Osachi Hamaguchi.

The worldwide communist organization that served as an agency of

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