The Temptation of Improvement

World War I, lasting from 1914 until 1918 and so often referred to as “The Great War,” left all the nations who had been entangled within its reach changed. Some nations found themselves the victors, now the conquerors of a global enemy. Others found their economies, homes, and pride pillaged and destroyed by their loss. For all nations, life would never be the same. Perhaps the country most visibly changed by World War I was the United States : this war was the United States ’ first major altercation on the global scene, its first true dip into the sea of international politics. The United States ’ success in bringing aid to the Triple Entente at the end of the Great War laid important foundations for its national behavior throughout the following decade of the 1920s, a time of great progress for America .

When the war came to a close in 1918, Americans arrived home to realize the enormity of the task they had completed. They had won the war: they were heroes. This great feat – crushing some of the great Old World European powers – gave hope to American society of a new age. They were filled with “an invincible optimism [after World War I] … which refuses to believe that things [would] always be as they [were] and cannot be better.”[1] This optimism brought them to believe that they could improve society, and so the American populus set out to improve itself in every venue from industry to society. There became a new measure of American success, no longer based on the finding of the old American dream in the possession of one’s own land and religious freedom, but a new drive to achieve visible wealth. “Machines, money, and materialism”[2] became the new mantra, and to stretch these as far as possible became the successful American’s new goal.

While America ’s business world was focused on extreme and rapid economic expansion, the social world was actively attempting to improve the actual members of society. Social reforms like Prohibition attempted to elevate the morality of the population, while nativist movements ballooned as people attempted to actually cleanse the genetic makeup of society. America turned away from its global role, reaching inward to solve its problems and become greater than it ever had been.

America during the 1920s was truly a powerful force, one to be reckoned with on the global scene, as it had proven with World War I, but it was also dangerous with the speed of its social reforms, so heavily supported by the governing bodies at the time, from the various presidents to the members of the House. During this same time and later, other societies were experiencing similar expansions, like Communist Russia under Stalin, Fascist Italy under Mussolini, and Socialist Germany under Hitler. Though America held on tightly to its founding ideals of democracy, in truth, American society in the 1920s became dangerously close to falling off of the edge of the democratic boundary and becoming a state strikingly similar to that of Nazi Germany.

Though it is well-known and undeniable that the United States in the 1920s never reached the severity that the rising Nazi Germany in the 1930s did, the parallels are remarkable. America in the Twenties and Hitler’s rising Nazi party in the Thirties both showed an overwhelming turn toward national isolation, a return to social conservatism and desire to purify society, a strong support of business by the governing bodies, and nationalistic movements that stressed the desire to return society to a clearly defined superior race.

The roots of these changes in America can be attributed to America’s role in World War I. America’s entrance into World War I broke its former isolationist role, which had dated back to the beginning of the nation, with George Washington’s Farewell Address of 1789, in which he urged the countrymen “against the insidious wiles of foreign influence… [for] the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake; since history and experience prove, that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of Republican Government.”[3] Though the United States had ample opportunity to become entangled in foreign altercations, like the French Revolution (1789-1799) or the Russian Revolution (beginning in 1905), it largely held onto this principle of isolationism, becoming involved in only three major altercations, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War. However, all three of these engagements either involved actual United States soil or territory that the

hoped to gain as their own, and ultimately did. In this vein, the US never got involved in any military conflict as a third party, as it did with World War I.

America entered World War I on the side of the Triple Entente ( Great Britain , France, and Russia ), fighting against the nations of the Triple Alliance ( Germany , Italy , and Austria-Hungary ). For America, this was a clear decision; however, despite many informal alliances and preferences between the US and the member nations of the Triple Alliance, the US had never actively pursued official alliances with any foreign nation, again as urged by Washington as he bade future American leaders to remember that “the duty of holding a neutral conduct may be inferred, without any thing more, from the obligation which justice and humanity impose on every nation, in cases in which it is free to act, to maintain inviolate the relations of peace and amity towards other nations.”

At the conclusion of the war, President Woodrow Wilson became the first American politician to truly enter international negotiations as a key player, as one of the “Big Four” at the Versailles peace talks.[4] At this point, the world believed that the United States would become a dominant world power; they saw the US as “the young, brash giant of the Western world.”[5] They saw America as holder of the power to revitalize Europe physically and socially. Ravaged by the destruction the Great War wrought, Europe needed somewhere to turn for aid in reconstruction after the war, and so they turned to the long-dominant Great Britain , and the emerging giant, America .

With his famous 24-point plan, Wilson proposed a League of Nations to band together as a sort of international regulatory agency that would be able both to decide repercussions for nations which acted outside their boundaries, and to prevent countries from becoming destructive giants. Ostensibly, the League of Nations would prevent the occurrence of another tragedy as great as World War I. This agency would become the basis for the modern-day United Nations, founded in 1945.

Yet despite Wilson ’s central role in the formation of the League of Nations, the United States chose not to join, instead deciding to retreat back within itself. Without the trouble of foreign nations and their problems and inputs, America could once again focus on its own self-improvement as it had for the past 130 years.

With this internal focus, America also attempted to close its borders, completing its isolationist state. The 1920s were observer to a series of harsh anti-immigration laws passed in the United States , partially motivated by the Red Scare of 1919-1920, which caused panic in many citizens of those with communist or anarchist ties.

Throughout its history, the US had been known as a country with borders open to all who sought to prosper in freedom and democracy. Immigration was constant, yet it experienced its first peak in 1890, when immigration of western Europeans surged. Immigration slowed at the turn of the century and again dramatically during the World War. But in the 1920s, it drastically increased again. This time, however, the immigrants were from southern and eastern European nations, their features noticeably different than the light-colored citizenry that currently made up America : these were the Jews, the Greeks, and Slavs, and the Poles, darker skinned with more distinct features and dark hair.

A second difference with this second massive wave of immigration of people to the United States was that the US decided to limit their numbers. In 1921, the US passed the Emergency Quota Act, which limited the immigration population from a country to 3% of the number of people from that country living in the US in 1890. This act was aimed at reducing the immigration populations of southern and eastern Europeans, and it did so successfully: it reduced the current southern and eastern European immigration population by 75%.[6]

However, Congress strongly voted three years later to pass the US Immigration Act of 1924, with only six members of the Senate dissenting. This act superseded the Emergency Quota Act, reducing the allowed immigration population to 2% of the 1890 population in hopes of further restricting the immigration of southern and eastern Europeans. Its effects were clear: at the end of 1924, 86% of the permitted immigrant entrances into the US were from the British Isles, France , Germany , and other northern European nations.[7] The 1924 act also closed the doors of America completely to the Japanese immigrant population.

This rise in isolationism of America was closely echoed by Germany . After the close of World War I, Germans were angry, hurt, and shamed by their defeat. Article 231 of the Versailles peace treaty, the so-called “War-Guilt Clause,” only served to enhance their indignation, as with that clause, Germany claimed all responsibility for instigating the war. Other articles of the Treaty of Versailles also piled on Germany huge reparations and substantial limitations that would ideally prevent them from ever having a potent military force again. For instance, their national army was limited to 100,000 men, a number that is great, but would stand no chance against another nation’s army. Germany also lost the coveted French territory of Alsace-Lorraine it had fought so hard to obtain under the leadership of Otto von Bismarck.

Understandably, the German people wanted to renovate and rebuild their nation so it would be something worthwhile again, instead of a crushed country. Many Germans, including the later-noteworthy Adolf Hitler, who had been a soldier in the war, were angry and wanted to avenge the shame of their defeat. In later years, as Hitler was beginning his ascent to power, he preached the theory of lebensraum, or “living space.” The idea was that it was imperative for Germany to become entirely self-sufficient as a country: to be able to live as a powerful nation without any reliance on other nations. They were angry at the nations they fought against for instituting harsh punishments against them with the post-war Treaty, and felt betrayed by those who fought with them, for they had not fought their battles well enough to win.

With Point 3 of his 25-point party platform of 1920, Hitler said that the German people will “demand land and territory for the maintenance of [their] people and the settlement of [their] surplus population.” Here, lebensraum shines through in the desire to extend the bounds of German territory to the point where there would be resources for all: necessary crops for food, materials for shelter, and raw materials for industries. They would build their own factories and have their own industries. Germany would, as Hitler planned, not need to rely on anyone else for anything.

Hitler’s 25 Points also presented a strict criterion for German citizenship: German blood. Without it, citizens would be inferior and disposable. In Point 4, Hitler claimed that “Only those who are our fellow countrymen can become citizens. Only those who have German blood, regardless of creed, can be our countrymen.” With Point 5, he laid out that “those who are not citizens must live in Germany as foreigners and must be subject to the law of aliens.” Point 7 furthered the lowly situation of foreign-born Germans: “…if it should not be possible to feed the whole population, then aliens must be expelled from the Reich.” Finally, Hitler made it clear that no more non-Germans should enter Germany with Point 8, where he proclaimed that “Any further immigration of non-Germans must be prevented. We demand that all non-Germans who have entered Germany since August 2, 1914 shall be compelled to leave the Reich immediately.”[8]

Both 1920s America and 1930s Germany under Hitler had their own forms of stringent laws which denoted a return to social conservatism. In America , it was Prohibition that captured the wind of moral reform. Prohibition was part of the temperance movement that wanted to illegalize alcohol. The American Prohibition, lasting from 1920 until 1933, was not the only prohibition to exist; independent prohibitions also existed in countries such as Canada , Finland , and Australia .

The main proponents of Prohibitions were the prohibitionists of the Prohibition Party, which was founded in 1869 and still exists today, making it the longest running political party in the US ever, with the exception of the Republicans and the Democrats. Prohibition had sponsored a candidate in every presidential election since 1872, and continues this trend: the 2004 candidate was Gene Amondson.[9]

While the prohibitionists’ main success was in 1919 with the passage of federal prohibitionist laws, the party had achieved prior success, beginning in 1905 when three states outlawed alcohol. By 1912, this number had expanded to nine, and in 1916 a majority of states had outlawed alcohol, with 26 states passing prohibitionary laws. The prohibitionists’ success also lasted beyond federal Prohibition: after the repeal of the national law in 1930, Oklahoma , Kansas , and Mississippi held onto their laws at the state level, with Mississippi not repealing until 1966.[10]

Federal Prohibition in the US began in January 1919 when the 18^th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified. This amendment banned alcohol in all forms, including its production, sale, transport, import, and export. In October of that same year, the Volstead Act was passed, which made the 18^th Amendment easier to enforce by defining the definition of “alcohol”: an alcoholic beverage was anything that had an alcohol content greater than 0.5 percent. Prohibition formally went into effect in January of 1920.[11]

Prohibition lasted for thirteen years, until 1933, when it was repealed by state conventions with the passage of the 21^st Amendment. The urgency of this decision is underscored by the method of this amendment’s passage: the 18^th Amendment was repealed through special state conventions, a method of amending the Constitution only used this once.

Despite the Prohibitionists’ goals, Prohibition did not mean a dry period for America . During this time, there were certainly many other ways for people to obtain alcohol, including “speakeasies,” undergrounds, private bars, smuggling, “bootlegging,” home brewing, the allotments of wine allowed to religious institutions, prescription whiskey, and patent medicines with their high alcohol contents masked by plasticizers.

Bootlegging, the most dominant of these methods, was controlled almost exclusively by organized crime, with gangs in cities being controlled by leaders such as Al “Scarface” Capone, who was the ringleader in Chicago . When the gangs controlled bootlegging, they controlled all aspects of it, from the actual importation of the alcohol or its manufacture, to its distribution. As a result, underground crime in 1930 had a total revenue of somewhere between $12 billion and $18 billion, an annual revenue that surpassed that of the US government.[12]

Hitler in Germany also was very anti-alcohol. Morally, he had a strong tendency toward “social rapprochement,”[13] attempting to reform society through his laws, including the Nuremburg Laws that were passed on September 15, 1935. Personally, Hitler was completely sober by the time he reached his thirties. This decision stemmed back to his celebration of a good exam grade at age 15 with alcohol, getting drunk. He found it “a humiliating experience and vowed never to get drunk again.”[14] He kept his promise. Publicly, Hitler had all alcoholics arrested.

While moral reform was moving along rapidly, economic reform came in the form of expansion, allowed by the government’s strong support of big business on both fronts. In the

, big business’ roots were in the 1890s, when the “Gilded Age” spawned business magnates such as J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, and Alfred Sloan[15], all of whom possessed extraordinary, even excessive, wealth. The wealth these individuals possessed had never been seen before in

America

, be it in the hands of one person or simply in general.

The magnates’ wealth played an important role in financing World War I. Private dollars went to the extensive manufacturing industries that provided munitions, arms, and other supplies, and the revenue from these industries helped the federal financing of the war. The huge success of business gave it the go-ahead, and in the 1920s, America was focused on business, leading president Calvin Coolidge to proclaim at one point that “

America

’s business is business.”

The 1920s was the last decade that the laissez-faire policy was completely in control in America . During this time, there was almost no governmental regulation of business. This was largely a result of the decade’s presidents: all three – Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover – were Republican and strongly in support of big business.

However, the American economy struggled with its post-World War I economy, largely because of the shift from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy. In times of war versus times of peace, different resources are employed, different industries are dominant, and there is a different employed workforce. As a result of these problems, the United States suffered a business depression from 1920 until 1921 that was the worst depression in history.[16]

This depression was resolved, and followed by a 6-year era of business expansion. The decline in production and profits caused by the end of the war was offset by the US ’s huge wartime surplus. The United States was on the winning side and therefore got a share of the Versailles reparations, but more importantly, it wasn’t involved in the war long enough to suffer extensive damages. Additionally, because the war was not fought on the home front, significant costs were averted because there was no structural damage on US soil and therefore within the bounds of US economic responsibility.

However, despite this boon, farmers suffered greatly at the end of the war, and they did not find such similar luck. Due to factors including competition from European farmers and the economic turn to monopolies, industry and big business that left farming and small businesses behind, there was an enormous increase in farm bankruptcies from 1924 to 1926. This gap between those who benefited from the post-war surplus and those who were left struggling only contributed to a growing gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots.”

The distinction between these two groups was only made worse by the entrance of a new managerial theory that came into play in the 1920s, designed by Frederick Taylor.[17] Taylor ’s theory pointed out the need to transfer the running of a company from ownership to management in order to make the worker more productive and therefore the company more efficient. In the new setting, all decisions would be made by management, and workers had no options but to carry out managerial orders. This prompted a greater socioeconomic separation between the employers and the workers because now the employers and managers, who make more money, now also had a social situation of superiority: they held the upper hand over the workers. Thus, the workers become inferior: they don’t make as much money and have no say in the process in which they are employed.

Another side effect of Taylor ’s new managerial theory, aside from making businesses more efficient, was the centralization of wealth into the hands of a few people, namely, those in positions of power and control in the firm. There had never been so much money before in America or any country that was in the hands of people other than the king or royal families – anyone had access to this sort of high-flying wealth. Also, it was not just one or two groups who had vast wealth: many people – all the heads of the different ends of the industries – had more money than they knew what to do with.

Industries that had once been competitive now became monopolistic, because no one could compete with the firms that had seemingly unending wealth. This bankrupted the small businesses, which were owned by members of the middle classes, and fueled the wealth of the magnates and leaders, who were now of upper class society, only leading to greater separation between the rich and the poor, and fueling the wealth of a few individuals at the expense of the rest of the population. Between 1923 and 1929, manufacturing output per person-hour increased by 32 percent, but workers’ wages grew by only eight percent. During this same time, corporate profit increased by 65 percent, but the wealthy kept this revenue due to the Revenue Act of 1926, which cut the taxes of those people making $1 million or more annually by more than two-thirds.[18]

Consequently, there was excruciatingly poor income distribution in the 1920s in America . In 1925, only 2.4 percent of the population could be classified as “wealthy,” with an annual income of over $10,000. Those considered “comfortable,” making over $3000 yearly, comprised 19.6 percent of the population, and the poor, making less than $1500 annually, were 78 percent of the population. In 1927, the accepted budget for a family of four was $1304, in the “poor bracket.”[19] This meant that 78 percent of the population is averaging half of the accepted budget, because the average income figure would be offset by the high incomes of the wealthy 2.4 percent. Not surprisingly, in 1929, the top 0.1 percent of American families had a total income equal to that of the bottom 42 percent.[20]

On the other side of the Atlantic and a decade later, the Nazi government also encouraged big business and industrial growth. Granted, the Nazis were fundamentally a socialist party, and Hitler hated capitalism. However, in post-World War I Germany, there actually was a discreet laissez-faire policy in Germany . “Vigorous encouragement of private enterprise was one of the programmatic points Hitler presented to the Reichstag in March 1933,”[21] and an article in December 14, 1935 issue of The Economist called the Nazis the “anti-Socialist socialists,” stating that “in Germany, it is therefore practicable, and is indeed necessary, to be capitalistic and socialistic at the same time.”[22] Despite the continual tirades of Hitler against business and in support of the farmer and small businessman, and despite the shared principle of socialism, “’secured concentration of capital’… remained fundamentally uncontested.”[23]

The Nazis were a party formed on the foundations of the worker. Indeed, their name incorporates this devotion: “Nazi” is short for National Socialist German Worker’s Party (in German, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei).[24] Hitler himself, the leader of the party, proclaimed proudly at a rally, “I too have been a worker.”[25] Yet this theory of equality, known as volksgemeinschaft, was inconsistent. Though everyone was the same at a political rally – a “worker” – when they went back home, or the next morning at the workplace, “the employer was to remain an employer, and the worker a worker.”[26]

In the early post-World War I German government from 1918 until 1930, there were 80 total Weimar ministers. Of these, there were 49 with doctoral degrees, and 15 with diplomas. These two groups made up 80 percent of the population of the ministry. In addition, 12 had been blue- or white-collar workers, one had been a teacher, and one a middle civil servant. Nine percent were members of the nobility. Clearly, the workers were not running the country. Further, in 1925, when asked to identify their socioeconomic background, 70% of all politicians said they were of the “middle and lower classes,” while 29% of the Reichstag deputies identified themselves as “workers.”[27] In the army, almost 20 percent of staff positions in 1932 were held by aristocrats, a number proportionally large when compared to the percentage of the population that was aristocratic, and 47.3 percent of these men were in the elite cavalry units.[28]

Even as the industries grew and the elite maintained control of government, farmers, despite Hitler’s constants claims to vigorously defend their population, suffered. “The farm population [in Germany ] continued to decline… and the white-collar population to grow.”[29] Farmers are the prototypical workers – how could Hitler leave them behind? Small business owners were also in the same situation as the farmers, their needs forsaken due to the success of the larger corporations. Schooling, a commonly powerful denotation of the degree of success a group is facing, is demonstrative of the economic plight farmers and small business owners were facing during the 1930s in Germany , as “the relatively high prewar frequency of students from small business and farm families [attending university] fell, reflecting economic pressure.”[30]

Germany

’s industries, especially those in the manufacturing business, were actually heavily tied to US industries. American businessmen gave a lot of money to German industries with the dawn of the Nazi republic; one of the most notable Americans who aided Hitler and the Nazi economy was Henry Ford, the automobile magnate. He showed Hitler the technique of the production line that he used in his Ford Model T vehicle to mass produce automobiles, which later became the German Volkswagen.[31]

The most frightening aspect of the movements in 1920s America and 1930s Germany is clearly both groups’ nationalistic movements that supported, and in some cases, enforced a “superior” race.

In the United States , nationalism was evident in the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in its second era. In 1915, D.W. Griffith produced the first-ever feature length film, a silent film that lasted 190 minutes.[32] This film, The Birth of a Nation, portrayed KKK members saving society from blacks and other racial minorities. President Woodrow Wilson, a friend of Griffith ’s, announced his support of the film. This film, and others like it, made people believe that their economic woes were causes by blacks, Jewish bankers, and other minorities. These nativist theories endorsed “100% Americanism,” and denounced Communism.

During this Second Era of the KKK, the Klan reached its highest points of membership ever. In the period from 1915-1917, the Klan attained nearly 3000 members. From June 1920 until September 1921, the Klan grew in size to approach 100,000 members, and by 1922 had inducted over one million members, including a very public induction of President Warren Harding (while he was in office). The KKK reached its peak for membership in 1924, when it could count a total of somewhere between three and five million members.[33] During the twenties, the Klan was more powerful than it had ever been, and fears that paralleled those from the time of Reconstruction were high and valid, for the Klan’s activities were similar to those they partook in during that era, including many lynchings. Surprisingly, the states with the highest Klan membership in the 1920s were not the South, as it had been during Reconstruction, but middle-western states, notably Indiana .

Hatred toward those who did not fit the white democratic Anglo-Saxon Protestant mold did not stop with the KKK in the United States , however, during the 1920s. The decade was kicked off by the Red Scare of 1919 to 1920, in which society’s fear of communism got out of control. The rise in communism worldwide is evident, with Communist regimes popping up globally, and is indicated in America by the 1920 presidential election, in which Eugene V. Debs, running on the Communist party platform from a jail cell, received 20 percent of the vote. Newspapers only helped to spread Communist fears, writing stories of Communists and grossly exaggerating evidence.

The Palmer Raids underscored that the fear of Communism was spread throughout both the populus and the government. In 1919, Attorney General W. Mitchell Palmer’s house was raided: one of his secretaries went to get the mail, and it exploded, taking her arms off.[34] Palmer automatically assumed this was the work of communists, and staged a series of raids on the houses of suspected communists. With this, the government violated many of the constitutional rights of the suspects. First, they broke the principle of freedom of speech and expression, for technically, people are allowed to publish Communist ideas, as long as they don’t threaten the existing form of government. Second, they committed acts of unreasonable search and seizure, and they didn’t have concrete evidence that these suspected communists were first, communists, and second, at all responsible for the attack on Palmer’s house. Finally, they didn’t provide fair trials for the suspects, per constitutional provision: they simply deported them.

American demonization of Communism and its intense fear of it is perhaps best highlighted by the Sacco and Vanzetti case of the 1920s. In April 1920, two men robbed a shoe factory outside of Boston , Massachusetts , and killed the guard and paymaster. Three weeks later, Nicola Sacco and Bartolemeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants and known anarchists, were arrested. After a seven-week trial, Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted of the crime on circumstantial evidence and sentenced to death.[35] Ultimately, the two men were executed in 1927 via the electric chair, but their conviction was highly controversial. Many claimed that they were blamed for the crime based on their anarchist beliefs, or their immigrant status, and were simply the victims of overwhelming societal prejudice against their stereotypical “group.”

The prejudice seen in the Sacco and Vanzetti case was not unique to that situation. While the two were anarchists, they were also Italian, and therefore eastern European, immigrants. Thus, they suffered this stigma as well, with hatred of the two groups just as virulent in the 1920s. Race also played a role in Prohibition: prohibition propaganda linked the liquor industry to German and other foreign sources, playing on the xenophobic tendencies of the population. The propaganda pointed out that German-Americans own and managed many American breweries, and therefore could make the claim that foreigners were bringing alcohol, a sinful thing, to America . With Prohibition and the general rejection of alcohol, this painted a very unflattering picture of these people. Additionally, the new wave of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were hated because they came in during the time that the American working class was overseas fighting. When the men came back, they tried to reclaim their old jobs, but found them taken by immigrants. Situations such as these only served to strengthen the fear and hatred of immigrant groups that allowed the murky conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti.

In Nazi Germany, the nationalist movements were much more severe, as the course of history can tell. The Nazis, in their ideology, stressed the importance of the Aryan race. Blood was vital to the success of person – true genealogy was the basis of importance. “The goal… was that a child’s future chances be solely determined by his genetic material.”[36] The class enemy, those who were discriminated against, “included not only the Jewish Marxists, and the Catholics, but certain elements of an incorrigible, stupid, reactionary bourgeoisie,” said Hitler in 1935.[37]

The worker versus employer distinction that was visible in the United States in the 1920s was visible in Nazi Germany, but was more firmly rooted in its racial origins. At one point, it was estimated that there were roughly “3.5 million jobs to which [Aryans] were ill-suited.” Indeed, Hitler said that “everyone has to be given the same opportunity to climb [the social ladder as it is understood in America ],”[38] yet the ideals of America allowed truly anyone to do this, whereas Hitler’s Nazis allowed only successful Aryans to do so.

This extreme prejudice of the Nazis based on race is very similar to the prejudices of the American Ku Klux Klan, and the growth of the Nazi party is just as dramatic as that of the KKK in the 1920s. At the end of 1920, there were 3000 members of the Nazi party. In 1923, there were 55,000 members, and 15,000 SA members (Hitler’s personal army). In 1925, Hitler was jailed, and membership fell to 27,000 members, but it quickly rose again in 1929 to 178,000 members, with 100,000 SA members. At this point, the size of Hitler’s SA “brown shirts” militia was the same size as the German national army as allowed by the Treaty of Versailles. In 1932, the Nazi party boasted 800,000 members, 400,000 SA members, and the designation of being the largest party in the Reichstag with 37 percent of seats, toppling the leadership of the 84-year-old von Hindenburg.

Though Germany suffered greatly from the economic problems caused by the worldwide Great Depression that began in 1929, but with Hitler’s economic programs, including a public works program much like FDR’s New Deal regime in America, as well as his massive rearmament program, he brought Germany through this roadblock, further boosting membership in the Nazi party. In 1929, three million people were unemployed in Germany . In 1932, six million were unemployed as a result of the depression. By 1934, the number of unemployed had dropped to 2.6 million, and in 1937, it was less than 500,000, a rather astonishing feat. With Hitler’s success in lowering the unemployment rate and bringing back economic stability came greater adoration of him and his Nazis: in 1934, there were 2.5 million SA men (and countless Nazi members),[39] and by 1937, the Nazi regime was so strong that it was on the brink of its World War II invasions. (Germany officially annexed Austria in March 1938.)

With their Reichstag majority in 1932 and Hitler’s designation as fuhrer in 1933, the harsh racist measures that the Nazis are known for began, with most of the discrimination against Jews, though those who were persecuted were all but Aryans. In April 1933, Jews were barred from government service, and Jewish civil servants, including teachers, were fired from their positions. Beginning in 1933, it was taught in schools that “non-Aryans” were racially inferior. In October 1934, the first wave of arrests of homosexuals took place. In April 1935, Jehovah’s Witnesses were banned from all civil service jobs and arrested.

The Nuremburg Laws, the first of which were passed in September 1935, were very harsh against Jews. They said that Jewish doctors could not practice, Jewish teachers could not teacher, Jewish children were expelled from German schools and universities, Jews were banned from public areas, and Jews had to sell their businesses and real estate. They continually evolved and continually became worse. Further amendments said that Jews had to carry ID cards and later badges identifying them as Jewish. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, where Nazi troops destroyed Jewish businesses and temples, a set of Nuremburg Laws required Jews to pay reparations for damages suffered during this event.

Gypsies were persecuted as well: the Nazis required Gypsy children to be fingerprinted, because Hitler decided that Gypsies were “criminally asocial.” Gypsies were actually the first group sent to concentration camps, in 1939. During this time, and extending into 1940, Jews were sent to ghettoes in Poland , such as Warsaw and Lodz . Late in 1941, gassing of all of these groups began in mobile gassing vans, and in 1942, Hitler’s Final Solution began as the Nazis began the mass murder of Jews in gas chambers in the concentration camps in Auschwitz , Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Majdanek-Lublin. The ultimate death toll was over six million Jews, part of the grand total of 11 million Nazi executions.[40]

The Nazis did not simply aim to rid their new society of those who did not fit in it; they also sought to improve the genetic condition of those who were a part of it. Their eugenics movements were based on the eugenics movement that existed in the United States , which they greatly respected: David Morgan in the Chicago Tribune wrote that “early US policies [of eugenics legislation drew] glowing reviews from authorities in pre-Nazi Germany .”

The eugenics movement in the United States was the movement behind the “science” of creating a perfect race, first originated in England by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, and influenced by the theory of social Darwinism. It was developed in the United States by Charles Davenport and Henry Laughlin in the 1920s, and was based on the principle that “science could engineer progress [in genetic evolution] by attacking supposedly hereditary problems including moral decadence, crime, venereal disease, tuberculosis, and alcoholism.”[41]

The first state eugenics law was passed in Indiana in 1907, and by 1944, more than 40,000 people had been sterilized through state laws due to their classification as “feeble-minded.” During these times, there were 18 states in which forced sterilization was legal, with most states allowing the decision to be made by a third party. The process of neutering so-called “mentally defective” people was supported on the grounds that it would “relieve the public of the cost of caring for future generations of the mentally ill.”[42]

The landmark case in American eugenics came with Carrie Buck in Buck vs. Bell, which lasted from 1926 until 1927. Carrie Buck was deemed mentally retarded, as were her mother and daughter. The state wanted to sterilize Carrie, but she refused. Hence, the case was brought to court and ultimately made its way to the Supreme Court, where notable justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the majority decision in favor of her sterilization, saying that “three generations of imbeciles are enough,” and that her sterilization was necessary because it would help society “prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”

Other legislation that aimed to genetically preserve a superior race came in the 1920s in the form of anti-miscegenation laws which existed in states such as Virginia . These laws prohibited white people from marrying black people, legally banning the “mixing” of the races.

The eugenics experiments of Nazi Germany were far worse than any that ever took place in the United States, however, as it has been mentioned, they were rooted in the same methodology. The experiments were carried out by doctors, such as Dr. Josef Mengele and Dr. Karl Brandt, who was Hitler’s personal physician. Experiments by the Nazi doctors included those such as the freezing experiments, whose goal was to figure out how to help prepare German troops for the bitter cold that they encountered on the eastern fronts. By either putting the person in an icy vat of water or outside naked in sub-zero temperatures, they would lower the patient’s body temperature to see how cold a person could get before dying. If the patient didn’t die, the warming methods were just as painful and sometimes humiliating.

The Nazis also were fascinated by the phenomenon of twins, and so they would collect extensive data on the twins’ features while they were alive, and then kill them precisely in the same way so they could dissect them. In other experiments, the Nazis experimented with an attempted tuberculosis vaccine, but ended up simply giving thousands of people tuberculosis and killing them. They also tried to find a way to successful transplant bones, muscles, and joints to see if they could reconnect detached limbs. They couldn’t, and ultimately had just cut up a lot of people, leaving them disabled and often deformed.[43]

Hitler had his own personal program, known as the T-4 euthanasia program. This program was established in order to maintain the purity of the Aryan race, and systematically killed children and adults who were born with physical deformities or who suffered from mental illness. Later, this euthanasia program was expanded to include involuntary sterilization of adults (like that of US eugenics programs) to prevent any “deficient” member of the German master face from breeding so they couldn’t pass on their genetic inferiority. Roughly 200,000 people died under the T-4 euthanasia program.[44]

Clearly, the harsh nativist, elitist, and xenophobic tendencies of 1920s American society closely paralleled those of Nazi Germany. However, the Nazis took these ideas much farther than Americans ever did. The American era discussed here took place in the years prior to the height of the Nazi regime: the Americans could have become the 20^th century’s Nazis, but they didn’t. What prevented this?

An important distinction is the timing of the Great Depression. For the United States , it burst its bubble of societal utopia, coming after years of prosperity following the post-war economic boom and the 1920s era of expansion under laissez-faire. For Germany, it came when the German economy was still struggling due to their post-war costs, and at just the right time for Hitler to lead the country through it and far beyond it, which was undoubtedly one of the largest reasons for his success: people adored him because he gave them jobs and prosperity -- he “offered hope in the midst of widespread pessimism and despair.”[45]

Just as important is the stability of the American government that was in place in the 1920s and its focus on democracy, which Hitler hated so much. Though the government did allow and support certain policies and decisions that were not in line with the founding principles of American democracy, the American government at the time was large enough and established enough that there were in place the proper checks to have stopped the utter ascension of cruelty. Conversely, the German people expressed a “lack of political and social consensus,”[46] and the German government was in a shambles, unstable for years and still weakened by the failure of the Kaiser in World War I and the unpopular Weimar Republic .

It is also vital to consider the scale of the compared movements: where Hitler and the Nazis rallied the German nation behind them in their beliefs, the nativist movement in the United States in the 1920s, though large and reaching to all corners of socioeconomic distinction, was not a majority movement and clearly not uniform throughout the country, as it was in Nazi Germany, due intensely to Nazi propaganda’s ability to brainwash the people and rally their support.

The fundamental difference, then, is that

America

was coming off of a supreme victory in World War I, and was simply trying to find the best way to use its newfound power for “good” or improvement, to purify society in order to continue its upward climb in global and internal stature. In contrast, Germany was coming off the supreme defeat of World War I and the humiliating Treaty of Versailles. The Germans felt a need to dig themselves of their hole of shame in both the social and economic global scenes. Where the Americans were jubilant and optimistic, the Germans were pessimistic and resentful of those who beat them, and even more bitter toward those they blamed for instigating the loss, for allowing their great republic to fall.

Additionally, the United States at the time was so vast, both in terms of land possession and population, that groups which were considered inferior and kicked out of mainstream society had the capacity to break off from the dominant culture and form their own miniature communities, as Italians and Jews often did, either within large cities or scattered about the countryside throughout the US. As time progressed, these small clans of minorities eventually evolved into viable subcultures with important skill sets and resources that they could donate to the larger society, and were integrated into mainstream American society once the prejudices against them faded.

Though American society approached a dangerous place in the 1920s with its pursuit of nativist theories and its alienation of the working class, it served only as a warning for what could happen and did in Nazi Germany ten years later with the ascent of Hitler. America was saved from the unthinkable brutality of Nazi Germany by its own past stability and its motivation for change. Improvement was the mantra for Americans in the twenties, where it was reinvention or purification for the Germans. Thus, America was able to tempt itself with hatred, but did not succumb to it as Germany did in the 1930s.

[1] Sisley Huddleston, quoted in Knoles (p. 30)

[2] Galsworthy, quoted in Knoles (p. 6)

[3] George Washington’s “Farewell Address” (1789).

[4] The others were Lloyd George of Great Britain , George Clemenceau of France , and Joseph Stalin of Russia .

[5] Knoles p. 4

[6] Wikipedia “Emergency Quota Act”

[7] Wikipedia “Immigration Act of 1924”

[8] Here, it is interesting to note that Hitler himself was not German-born. His parents, Alois and Klara Hitler, were Austrian, and Hitler lived in Austria until 1913. (Bendersky)

[9] Wikipedia “United States Prohibition Party”

[10] Wikipedia “Prohibition”

[11] Schultz

[12] Wikipedia “Prohibition” and Schultz

[13] Schoenbaum p. 47

[14] “Adolf Hitler”

[15] Goodman, p. 55

[16] Obviously, this depression was surpassed in scale by the Great Depression beginning in 1929.

[17] Goldberg p. 127

[18] MSN History “Causes of the Depression”

[19] Goldberg p. 128

[20] MSN History “Causes of the Depression”

[21] Schoenbaum p. 55

[22] Quoted in Schoenbaum, p. 56

[23] From Han Ruban’s “Mehr Sozialismus” in Die Deutsche Volkswirtschaft (December 1935), quoted in Schoenbaum, p. 56

[24] Wikipedia “Nazism”

[25] Schoenbaum, p. 61

[26] Schoenbaum, p. 59

[27] Schoenbaum, p. 253

[28] Schoenbaum, p. 254

[29] and ³⁰ Schoenbaum, p. 252

[30] asd

[31] Some of the American businessmen who gave money and other forms of capital to Nazi industries weren’t exactly aware of where their money was going, but many were. Henry Ford, to use the stated example, was scathingly anti-Semitic and supported Hitler’s social policies. Nazism and the link between it and American finance was an important factor in the leap in anti-Semitism in the United States during the 1930s, demonstrated through movements such as the Silver Shirts.

[32] www.imdb.com

[33] Mosing

[34] Gonzalez

[35] Sopheia, Hackey, Kemp, and O’Ryan.

[36] Schoenbaum, p. 59

[37] Quoted in Schoenbaum, p. 69

[38] Both quotations from Schoenbaum, p. 60

[39] Spielvogel

[40] Dates in preceding three paragraphs from “Nazi Timeline”

[41] and ⁴² Morgan

[42]

[43] Information about eugenics experiments from Tyson

[44] Wikipedia “T-4 Euthanasia Program”

[45] Bendersky p. 81

[46] Bendersky, p. 5

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