Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties Read Online Free PDF

B’) , for subsequent hounding, arrest and even execution. The liberal Anglo-Saxon democracies were by no means immune to these pressures. After Lloyd George came to power in the crisis of December 1916, the full rigours of conscription and the oppressive Defence of the Realm Act were enforced, and manufacturing, transport and supply mobilized under corporatist war boards.
    Even more dramatic was the eagerness, five months later, with which the Wilson administration launched the United States into war corporatism. The pointers had, indeed, been there before. In 1909 Herbert Croly in The Promise of American Life had predicted it could only be fulfilled by the state deliberately intervening to promote ‘a more highly socialized democracy’. Three years later Charles Van Hise’s Concentration and Control: a Solution of the Trust Problem in the United States presented the case for corporatism. These ideas were behind Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘New Nationalism’, which Wilson appropriated and enlarged to win the war. 46 There was a Fuel Administration, which enforced ‘gasless Sundays’, a War Labor Policies Board, intervening in industrial disputes, a Food Administration under Herbert Hoover, fixing prices for commodities, and a Shipping Board which launched 100 new vessels on 4 July 1918 (it had already taken over 9 million tons into its operating control). 47 The central organ was the War Industries Board, whose first achievement was the scrapping of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, a sure index of corporatism, and whose members (Bernard Baruch, Hugh Johnson, Gerard Swope and others) ran a kindergarten for1920s interventionism and the New Deal, which in turn inspired the New Frontier and the Great Society. The war corporatism of 1917 began one of the great continuities of modern American history, sometimes Underground, sometimes on the surface, which culminated in the vast welfare state which Lyndon Johnson brought into being in the late 1960s. John Dewey noted at the time that the war had undermined the hitherto irresistible claims of private property: ‘No matter how many among the special agencies for public control decay with the disappearance of war stress, the movement will never go backward.’ 48 This proved an accurate prediction. At the same time, restrictive new laws, such as the Espionage Act (1917) and the Sedition Act (1918), were often savagely enforced: the socialist Eugene Debs got ten years for an anti-war speech, and one man who obstructed the draft received a forty-year sentence. 49 In all the belligerents, and not just in Russia, the climacteric year 1917 demonstrated that private liberty and private property tended to stand or fall together.
    Thus the war demonstrated both the impressive speed with which the modern state could expand itself and the inexhaustible appetite which it thereupon developed both for the destruction of its enemies and for the exercise of despotic power over its own Citizens. As the war ended, there were plenty of sensible men who understood the gravity of these developments. But could the clock be turned back to where it had stood in July 1914? Indeed, did anyone wish to turn it back? Europe had twice before experienced general settlements after long and terrible wars. In 1648 the treaties known as the Peace of Westphalia had avoided the impossible task of restoring the status quo ante and had in large part simply accepted the political and religious frontiers which a war of exhaustion had created. The settlement did not last, though religion ceased to be a casus belli. The settlement imposed in 1814–15 by the Congress of Vienna after the Napoleonic Wars had been more ambitious and on the whole more successful. Its object had been to restore, as far as possible, the system of major and minor divine-right monarchies which had existed before the French Revolution, as the only framework within which men would accept European frontiers as legitimate and durable. 50 The device worked