0:10 Two world wars tore the heart out of the 20th century. They are a rent in the fabric of history. The world lurched into the tear with high hopes and mixed feelings. But as the 20s went on, some knew that careless optimism was leading to a terrible crash and an impossible peace. As Paris lurched into 1929, it seemed on the surface, for those with long pockets, that the party would go on. The
0:58 American writer, Robert MacUllman, was there, surrounded by artists and writers and hangers-on. He glimpsed beneath the glass with rare perception. They're wraiths, all of them, MacUllman said. They aren't people. God knows what they've done with their realities. This is a new day. All gods are dead, all wars fought, and all faiths shaken, according to Scott Fitzcarroll. On October the 3rd, 1929, Gustav Stressmann, the chancellor and a level-headed
1:47 hope for the success of the Weimar Republic, suddenly died, plunging Germany's future into uncertainty. During his lifetime, he was lauded abroad and hated at home in many ways. But I think, at the very least, his significance is that he's a great pragmatist. Once he is gone, there's a kind of precarious void, really. that happens and that's when we get also into these kind of sequences of the abuse of executive powers and the change of chancellors that never really stops until Hitler is appointed. In its obituary, the Times said of Stressmann that because of his leadership, Germany is now prospering and has an
2:35 important place in the affairs of Europe. Stressmann knew better. Just before his death, he said that The German economy is doing well only on the surface. Germany is in fact dancing on a volcano. If the short-term loans are called in by America, Stressman said, most of our economy will collapse. And because of the Wall Street crash, that is exactly what happened. Soviet Russia's autarky quarantined it from the worst of the global depression, but not from misery. In the first three years of Stalin's five-year plan, beginning in 1929,
3:23 the population of Moscow grew by 50%, swollen by 26 million peasants who voluntarily, under duress, shifted, creating the proletariat the revolution needed to fulfill the Marxist prediction. The October Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, was not the most important event in the first 20 or 30 years of the 20th century, because the majority of the population, their life didn't change much. Peasants were now toiling in factories. In 1929, the Red Army had 90 tanks. Four years later, it had 4,700.
4:10 The major change came with collectivization, forced collectivization and rapid industrialization after 1929. On the 21st of December, Joseph Stalin celebrated his 50th birthday and the birth of an unparalleled cult of personality. Stalin is an immensely slippery figure. Just as you start to think you understand Stalin and what's going on, he slips through your fingers and he shifts and he shapeshifts again. Italy also promoted a cult of personality, but its hero was obliged to seek an accommodation with the old centres of power.
4:56 Mussolini doesn't enjoy absolute power in Italy, so the king is still in place and will remain in place until Mussolini's ousted. from power and there's also the Catholic Church Led by the Pope who are autonomous and exert quite a lot of influence on Italian society Early in 1929 protocols were signed at the Lateran Palace defining and formalizing the relationship between fascist Italy and the Vatican and The historic document was signed at the Lateran by the Duce and Cardinal Gasparri, the faithful Secretary of State. The Treaty of the Lateran means much for internal peace and harmony in
5:44 Italy. By the Lateran Pact, Fascism made Catholicism the official state religion. But the Church gave away more. It made Fascism the state. And in a referendum on March 24th, more than 8.5 million Italians voted yes in support of the regime. Only 135,000 voted no. Mussolini was now Prime Minister and also head of eight ministries. There was no personality cult in Britain. which had always found ordinary people more appealing.
6:35 Stanley Baldwin's government campaigned under perhaps the least inspiring political slogan ever promoted, Safety First. It was the first election in which all women aged over 21 were able to vote. It was nicknamed the Flapper election and Safety First lost out to Labour's promise, we can conquer unemployment, which they couldn't. In December, two motions were put at the annual conference of the Indian National Congress. One was a modest demand for dominion status, backed by veteran Congress
7:20 member Motilam. In 1929, there is this Congress held, and there the tension really explodes. Motilal Nehru and Gandhi say India should move by steps to greater self-government by first gaining dominion status, like the white settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand and Canada. The second motion was a ferocious demand for independence now, jointly sponsored by Subhas Bose and Motilal's son, Jawaharlal Nehru, who would become India's first prime minister. The younger generation, Nehru and Bose, say, you know, the time for that is over. Now we want Swaraj, which meant full independence. The
8:07 phrase was Purna Swaraj, full independence. So the future was stirring in some parts of the world and the past hanging on in others. A drenching from a big burst bubble was threatening the global economy. And the 20s were done. The Flapper era ends, wrote Wallace Stegner, a Harvard academic and journalist, in grimness, bewilderment and anger. British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald was starting to show the signs of mental collapse that would
8:57 cause a contemporary to recall that when he rose to speak in Parliament, no one knew what he was going to say, and when he did say it, nobody understood it. In 1930, the British Prime Minister wrote, My head won't work. Other countries were also in less than reliable hands. Spain was drifting into a republic phase in the wake of the dictatorship from 1923 to 1930 of Primo de Rivera, a military man whose adroitness as a ruler was perhaps best assessed by his remark that, Had I known in my youth that I would one day have to govern this country. I would have spent more time studying and less fornicating.
9:52 In Germany's 1928 election, the right-wing parties had lost ground and the Nazis attracted a paltry 2.6% of the popular vote. But disaster was just around the corner. A moderate coalition ceased to function and power shifted to the president. Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorf und von Hindenburg. In March, Hindenburg, relying on clause 48 of the Weimar Constitution, appointed Germany's first presidential cabinet. In the June state election in Saxony, Nazi support jumped to 14%.
10:41 The party's focus had shifted. From the crude anti-Semitic tirades of the early 20s, to the urgent need for Lebensraum, and complaint about the shambles of Weimar democracy, which only National Socialism could solve. How? Didn't matter. It just could. It was, I regret to say, the fascist leaders who understood the power of film. It was people like Mussolini. It was people like Oswald Mosley in England. And above all, it was Hitler in Germany. They understood how important it was to communicate with people, to give a theatrical performance. In one day, the National Socialists advanced from 2.6% of the vote and 12 seats to 18.3% and 107
11:26 seats. The day was September the 14th, 1930. Almost six and a half million Germans voted for Hitler. In the main, the vote had swung across from the bourgeois parties of the centre and the right. Roughly a quarter of those who voted Nazi had never voted before. Confronted by Hitler's success, money panicked, and about half of Germany's currency reserves went flying out of the country. It's often been said that a lot of the people who later become Nazis are not the generation who fight during the First World War in Germany, but the generation
12:13 who are just too young to have seen combat. On December the 5th, all quiet on the Western Front had its German premiere at the Mozart Hall in Berlin. Barely 10 minutes after it had begun, The performance was interrupted when the National Socialist propaganda chief, Josef Goebbels, walked noisily out of the theatre. This was the signal for Nazi activists in the audience to release white mice, stink bombs and itching powder into the crowded auditorium. Fights broke out with the thugs unimaginatively chanting, Jews out, Jews out, and screeching, Judenfilm.
13:03 On December the 11th, the Supreme Film Centorship Board revoked its decision to pass the film on the grounds that it was detrimental to German prestige. Frank Pease, president of the Hollywood Technical Directors Association, agreed with Goebbels and also called for all quiet on the Western Front to be banned. It will, he said. go far to raise a race of yellow streaks, slackers and disloyalists. But the threat to American society came not from an anti-war novel, whose author, incidentally, was Catholic, not Jewish, but from an economic disaster that was starting to infect every industrial power and would become the badge of
13:53 the decade. It's the coming of the Depression, I think, that people start to feel that they're living in a pre-war era rather than a post-war era. Liberalism comes under huge attack, of course, after the 1929 economic crisis, when the economic aspect of that edifice comes crashing down, and then the masks fall. One of the things that happens as a result of the Depression after the Wall Street crash, of course, is that every government thinks to itself, what's my priority? My priority is trying to make things better for my population. In 1930, 44% of the American population was still classified as rural. More than 45 million
14:43 were without indoor plumbing, and almost all of the rural population was without electricity. In November 1930, The farmer who received $1.35 a bushel for his wheat last year now got 75 cents. And it had been a searing summer of drought, so he had little to sell in any case. Staggering damages to crops have been suffered in Kansas and other wheat states, where grains have been stunted and literally burnt up by the successive weeks of blistering heat. Day after day, a blazing sun has resulted in midget stocks that may never bear. Heat depths too are mounting daily. Water is being
15:29 hauled for miles to many farms in a desperate effort to save a part of the crop. But the toll in ruined farms is the worst in the history of the nation. Bank closures in the month set a new mark, 236. The record would not survive. In December, 328 went under. Small banks can't have a diverse portfolio. If you have a small bank in the middle of the corn belt, the banker looks out of his window, all he sees is corn. People are coming in to borrow money from him or
16:14 grow corn. Now, if the price of corn collapses, he's in trouble. The response to the crisis was more knee-jerk than well considered and President Hoover could not rein in the excesses of Congress in applying 1930s Smoot-Hawley Tariff Bill, erecting forbidding barriers to trade. The most notorious piece of legislation passed in the Herbert Hoover period is a Smoot-Hawley Tariff which massively raises tariffs which is an to unprotect the American home market, but all it really does is spark retaliation from a European bloc, a British Empire bloc. And so you're getting then very early on a huge trade war.
17:03 And that was precisely the wrong move to make at a time when trade is faltering, exchange is faltering, people are buying much less in terms of production. putting in a strong protectionist law, which is then going to trigger retaliatory measures from other countries. It has the effect of putting not just the American economy, but the entire Western world's economy into a nosedive. Smoot Hawley, signed into law on June 17, 1930, raised U.S. tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods. Henry Ford called it economic stupidity, and more than a thousand economists
17:51 signed a petition asking the president to veto the bill. The value of European exports to the US was $1,334 million in 1929. In 1930, it was $390 million, But territory tariffs impacted on trade in the other direction. US exports to Europe fell from $2,341 million in 1929 to $784 million in 1932.
18:37 Hoover signing Smoot-Hawley into law was seen as the moment in which According to political writer Walter Lippmann, he surrendered everything for nothing. He accepted a mischievous product of stupidity and greed. Why did he sign? I think he was a good president. His problem was that he was president when the Great Depression hit. And he, like many others, didn't know really what to do. You know, should they cut taxes? Was that the way to try and get the economy going again? Should they put up trade barriers? Congress was certainly pushing for trade barriers to try and protect American industries and American production. And I think Hoover, like a lot of people, didn't know what to do. And he really floundered. Smoot-Hawley did not arrest the slide into
19:27 depression. Ford cut its working week from five days to three, and the lights went out on neighborhood banks. There was a dispute over a mortgage, and Mrs. Grace Jones and her family find themselves in the open. But they're not discouraged and carry on just as though they had walls surrounding them. Hoover described the American banking system as the element most sensitive to fear. It was never a robust system, with an average of 500 failures a year throughout the 1920s. But in 1930, fear stumbled towards
20:14 panic. And in the last 60 days of 1930, 600 banks closed their doors, 1,352 for the year. It has to be understood that of America's 25,000 banks, Only 751 had branches. The others were, according to Carter Glass, Woodrow Wilson's Treasury Secretary, run by little corner grocery men calling themselves bankers. If the scale of the Depression was seismic, its effect logically depended on the strength of the structures it shook. And across Europe, these were far from robust.
21:00 Revolving door governments, military takeovers, and authoritarian regimes control countries from the Baltic to the Balkans. By December, industrial production had fallen by 30% in the USA. 25% in Germany, 30% in Britain. 5 million were unemployed in America. 4.5 million in Germany, 2 million in Britain. The 1929 crisis shatters the belief in the ability of a liberal economic system based on mobility and trade to sustain itself. In fact, it plays in the hand of the enemies of liberalism, both on the left and the right.
21:50 Countries are entirely in debt because they are owing money that they all probably even be from before the period of the Depression. But now, in the Depression, the creditors are coming and they want their money. And you have to pay. So cuts have to be done, and these cuts tend to be painful. Berlin streets were filled with entrepreneurial desperados trafficking matches, loose cigarettes, palmists, shoe-shines, shoe-laces, rag-pickers, bag-carriers, car door openers, panhandlers, ersatz barbers and doorway sex. And Lord Dabberman, Britain's ambassador, complained that this depression is the
22:39 stupidest and most gratuitous in history. Investment didn't take place. And businesses began to contract. And as they contracted, they laid off workers. And these workers, of course, could not spend Revolution may not have been in the air, but the fear of revolution was. And the Soviet football team, scheduled to play a friendly international, was denied entry into England on account of fears that the visit might be exploited by Soviet propaganda. There was a real fear of international communism in the 1920s and 1930s, and it was not entirely misplaced. I mean, the Soviet government was very curious On the one
23:27 hand, it behaved like an ordinary government. It signed treaties and trade agreements, and it had ambassadors with various exchange of ambassadors with various people. But it was also headquarters of the Cominton, Communist International, which was dedicated to creating revolution. Soviet peasants, meanwhile, did not slide silently into collectivization. The secret police, the Chekhov, reported 402 revolts in January 1930. 1,048 in February and 6,528 in March. Almost 14,000 riots and revolts involving 2.5 million peasants in 1930. And the apparatus of the state, effective if not efficient, had closed 80% of Soviet
24:17 village churches by the end of 1930. It was becoming one of the observable phenomena of the age. that ruthless totalitarian regimes could get things done, in contrast to the instability inherent in Jimcrack but democratic coalitions. A fine example of which was the government put together in France by André Tardieu, who was obliged to patch together a cabinet of 33 members, prompting radical leader Edouard Deladier to say, it's not a cabinet, it's a tribe. Some political leaders did not even have the power to form fragile coalitions. 1930
25:05 was the year of perhaps the best known event in the Indian campaign for independence. Until Gandhi, it had been very much a small club of liberal elites petitioning the British. Gandhi brought a very different conception of what Indian nationalism could be. He made it a mass movement. The salt tax cost the average Indian at most 15 cents a year. But salt was an essential of life, and the British had the monopoly. Gandhi was really a genius of manipulating mass media, if you like. He was a genius of speaking to many different audiences. Monopoly was the point, and a good point it was.
25:52 In rousing popular support, Gandhi's salt march was a success. If you look at the way he constructed his march, he was very careful to choreograph it. He designed the uniforms of all the marches. He wanted them to look like a kind of universal procession, not just carrying political insignia. He sent his followers in advance to villagers to whip up excitement so that when he came there were crowds cheering. And then his great coup was to invite foreign film crews to film him. Government studiously ignored the march, but Gandhi had made his point. Gandhi was able to take potential weakness the fact that Indians were unarmed the fact that
26:42 Indians didn't have military or even material power to fight the British and turn that weakness into a form of power against the British. Thousands of nationalists crowd the great tent to hear the farewell message of Gandhi leader of the demands for India's independence its echoes were heard in London recently during the Imperial Conference and there may be fireworks. As 1930 closed, the poet W.H. Auden saw this Britain. He could have found the same scene almost anywhere. Smokeless chimneys, damaged bridges, rotting wharves and choked canals. Tramlines buckled,
27:30 smashed trucks lying on their side across the rails. Power stations locked, deserted, since they drew the boiler fires. Pylons falling or subsiding. trailing dead high-tensioned wires. Writing in 1951, the poet Stephen Spender recalled, that from 1931 onwards, in common with many other people, I felt hounded by
28:17 external events. It was the year that Noel Coward's cavalcade opened. The character Fanny asked in her song, 20th Century Blues, in this strange illusion, chaos and confusion, people seem to lose their way. What is there to strive for, love, or keep alive for? In the spring of 1931, chaos arrived in Austria. Its largest and most reputable bank was Credit Anstalt. Baron Louis de Rothschild chaired a board that included representatives of the Bank of England and major American banks. In the spring, it failed and set in motion a
29:04 cascade of events that no one was able to stop. When news of the problem reached London, Harry Siepman, an advisor to the governor of the Bank of England, said, this, I think, is it. And it may well bring down the whole house of cards in which we have been living. Harry was right. One of the characteristics of the decades after the end of the First World War is, I think, a strong sense that people had of endings and of crisis, crisis of capitalism, ends of empire, somehow or other civilisation under threat. Panic is a component of every crisis. If Vienna was insolvent, then
29:55 what of Berlin? As international players tried to find a way of stabilising the situation in Austria, German banks came under pressure. And with about a billion dollars of short-term credits, advanced to Germany by American banks, its system too was at risk. Down came the house of cards. In the first three weeks of June, Germany lost half of its gold reserves and the shockwaves from the crisis rattled banks in Hungary, Romania, Poland and Spain. On June the 20th, President Hoover announced that the US would forego repayments from Britain, France and Italy for 12 months if they in turn would forego reparations due from
30:44 Germany. But Herbert Hoover and all his men, having consulted widely in Congress and with the British, were found to have made an omission as inexcusable as it was incomprehensible. They had neglected to tell the French. And France, whose economy was strong and whose central bank was sitting on the second largest gold reserve in the world, was furious. France and the U.S. argued and negotiated, and Germany continued to hemorrhage gold. On July the 7th, the Americans and French reached agreement, but whilst they had been arguing, the horse had bolted. On July the 8th, Germany's third largest
31:33 bank informed the Reichsbank that it could not meet its liabilities. But the Reichsbank, having lost so much gold, could not bail out of the Donatbank without sparking a disastrous run on the currency. Gold-rich France was in a position to help and made a loan offer contingent on a number of political demands, ranging from banning nationalist demonstrations the halting construction of new warships. The central bank was not empowered to comment on, let alone act on, such demands. On Sunday, July the 12th, the German government announced that it was rejecting what every German newspaper called political blackmail.
32:22 Who would offer the leadership that might halt this irrational slide? As one economic historian put it, The British couldn't and the Americans wouldn't. As late as December, with the grip of depression tightening, American lawmakers stated that it was against the policy of Congress that any indebtedness of foreign countries to the United States should in any means be cancelled or reduced. In the context of the world's economic crisis, it was, said Sir Ronald Lindsay, Britain's ambassador in Washington, an exhibition of irresponsibility, buffoonery, and ineptitude. Surviving inflation,
33:11 deflation, stagnation required resourceful resilience and a loosening of a previously rigid morality. Crime, pilfering, petty pilfering, every sort of sorry survival strategy became widespread. a fact of life that found its way into Weimar music, cabaret, cinema. Fritz Lang's 1931 film M, which is a film about the search for a serial child murderer. And ultimately, this murderer, played by Peter Lorre, is not caught and dealt with by the police, but by a criminal's court. I think in many ways that
34:01 speaks again to a lot of things that are popular or are sources of anxiety in Weimar. And that is based on a sense that law and order is collapsing. Extremism, street thuggery was a real threat. And Brüning's decree of December the 7th, 1931 banned the wearing of uniforms. So the brownshirts, in white shirts like so many well-drilled public servants, and with bottle tops as badges, paraded their threat to law and order. The brownshirts, the Stormabteilung or SA, and their leader Ernst
34:51 Ruhm, wanted power by violence. The party machine sought power at the ballot box In 1931, the machine won through and 500 members of the SA were purged. In 1934, the tension would flare again and be the death of Ernst Romm. On September the 21st, rather than borrow money, Great Britain abandoned the gold standard, whereby the Bank of England agreed to pay on demand 113 grains of fine gold in exchange for a pound note. The world's most stable currency floated.
35:39 It floated down 30% against the dollar. Confidence in one of the world's few reliable institutions was at once demolished, and the age of anxiety grew more perplexed, stumbling on with less and less to believe in. The underlying problems of the British economy, with the steeply rising unemployment and with the government running a large budget deficit, came home to roost with a crisis over the exchange rate of the pound. A flight from sterling, a withdrawal from gold from London, near imminent banking collapse.
36:24 John Maynard Keynes, the unorthodox and somewhat visionary economist, rejoiced at the breaking of our gold fetters, which, one by one, other currencies followed. And Britain's historic past as banker to the world became a ghastly nightmare as investors around the world, fearing that defaults elsewhere would mean London being unable to meet its obligations, began to withdraw funds. In the last two weeks of July, Britain lost almost half of its gold reserves. Inevitably, a move from dollars to gold followed. The Swiss National Bank transferred some $200 million, the National Bank of Belgium, $130
37:13 million, putting pressure on the American currency. By the end of the year, one in every 10 American banks had suspended operations. Money was being pulled back into the relative safety of mattresses, strong boxes and holes in the ground. The British Labour government, obliged to consider borrowing, proceeded to plan for fiscal tightening in order to secure a loan through J.P. Morgan. The dole was to be cut by 10% and taxes raised. The deal split the cabinet and the Prime Minister resigned. Retaining the premiership by forming a coalition national government with the Conservatives,
38:01 his ideological opposites. It was the king who asked Baldwin point blank whether in this moment of national peril and national crisis, he would be willing to serve under MacDonald. What answer could a patriotic Conservative Party leader give to that other than, yes. The budget cuts did no good and the loan, matched by one from a consortium of French banks, was spent in three weeks as unemployment dragged tax yields down, while the cost of unemployment benefits soared, rising in the UK from £12 million in 1928 to £125 million in 1931.
38:55 The strain and drain on Ramsay MacDonald, the Prime Minister, was visible. Churchill called him the boneless wonder and the fizz is out of him, said Lloyd George. Strain may have also contributed to the early death of Spanish dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera. He lost the support of the king and the military. left office and within two months was dead at the age of 60. When the Great Depression started, because of the huge loans that had been taken to pay for all the various public works, there was an economic collapse. And eventually, by January of 1930,
39:43 he felt that, you know, he couldn't carry on anymore. And he literally upped and went, almost without warning. A broad-based coalition of socialists and middle-class Republicans with a reform agenda, was elected to follow Derivada into power on April the 14th, 1931. It's a period of enormous change, enormous experimentation, enormous progress in many ways. But the problem is that there is a polarization and the discourse becomes violent and people tend to demonize the opposition. So there's intense dialogue among the people who shared their own ideas, but there's
40:32 no dialogue between people who have different ideas, and that's the problem. The death knell of the Spanish monarchy had been sounded in April's provincial elections, which having effectively become a plebiscite on royal rule and Alfonso XIII, voted Republican. The Republic was declared and the royal family departed, noiselessly, into exile. Thousands of people jammed Victoria Station to get a look at King Alfonso, who has taken refuge among his royal British relatives. His ex-majesty had to leave Spain in a hurry, but is he downhearted? He doesn't look it, even though he is just plain
41:20 Mr. Alphonse Bourbon. But whose Republic did they leave behind? The Republican government, faced with the fiscal shambles left by the ambitious but inept Primo de Rivera, was immediately hampered when J.P. Morgan cancelled the $60 million loan it had agreed with the now departed regime. The stage was set for something, but no one could foresee how terrible and bloody that something would be. France continued its double life. of patchwork coalitions, unstable and short-lived, side by side with Les Années Foules, the crazy years of Paris between the wars. A Paris in which
42:10 Josephine Baker's signature song, Je Deux Amours, which she first recorded in 1931, rang out, celebrating the sensation she had caused. The white imagination sure is something when it comes to blacks, she said. In Italy, the Deccanale, the festive celebration of ten years since the March on Rome, took place in 1931. Not everyone was an unqualified fan of Il Duce. Giovanni Giuratti, party secretary, complained that Mussolini wanted the people to believe that he not only conducted the orchestra, but also played all the major instruments. Not surprisingly, Giuratti did not last.
43:01 Il Duce replaced him with Achilles De Raci, a man he described as a cretin, but an obedient one. Far from the banking crisis and unemployment queues of Europe, Japan's campaign to modernize and industrialize was fettered by the global downturn. In a country so dependent on foreign trade and so bereft of natural resources, the depression was a prodigious disaster, which journalist K.K. Kawakami in the New York Times of the 7th of June, 1931 said, had profoundly affected the mental outlook of the entire nation. In what way? These are the
43:48 years that help Hitler, or enable Hitler to get into power. These are the years which make a lot of people give up on liberal democracy. These are the years that Japanese militarists increasingly dominate the Japanese government. Japan moves into Manchuria, or the Japanese military move into Manchuria in 1931 in defiance of orders from their own civilian government. Shortly after 10 p.m. on September the 18th, 1931, a bomb exploded alongside the South Manchurian railway. Japanese troops without Tokyo's authority had set it and then launched themselves at the Chinese, claiming that it had been a Chinese attack. In 1931, the Japanese Guangdong army, a garrison army based in Manchuria, the
44:39 northeastern provinces of China, launched what was essentially a lightning coup. It had been planned by two relatively junior officers, but within the space of about five to ten days, they managed to occupy large parts of a region that is about the size of France and Germany combined. The blast, was the first bomb of a long war. The last would drop on Nagasaki on August the 9th, 1945. Japanese troops are steadily advancing into Manchuria and occupying towns and villages. In the wake of the fighting are being enacted the usual scenes of civilian panic. A population preyed upon by bandit overlords and baptized in military brigandage crowds the highways
45:27 and attempts to flee, regardless of the fact that Japan's coming represents the biggest influence for law and established order in this corner of the globe. I think there's general agreement that there's a lot of the Japanese government in Tokyo having to act as an apologist for what has happened and they feel they can't go back. National imperatives will not allow them to go back. Manchuria became Manchukuo, a puppet state with an obedient stooge on the throne, Henry Puyi, a weakling whom the Japanese had prepared for the job with seven years of women. On September the 22nd, 1931, the American minister in China sent a
46:14 telegram to the Secretary of State. It is my conviction, he wrote, that the steps taken must fall within any definition of war. But the timidity of the international response to Japan's aggression bordered on indifference. Everyone had other things to worry about. Japan essentially walks in and takes over Manchuria, turns it into Manchuko, which means Manchuland. And what are you going to do? What the United States does is say, We're not going to recognize you. This is not terribly useful as far as the British are concerned. Indeed, the Lord President of the Council, Stanley Baldwin, a once and
46:59 future Prime Minister, said, all you get from the Americans are words, big words, but just words. Following the invasion of Manchuria, the Philadelphia Record, by no means a lone voice, declared that The American people don't give a hoot in a rain barrel. Who controls North China? With hindsight, we might say that the American people should have cared. But at the time, they had more immediate problems on their mind. It has been estimated that in 1931, in Chicago alone, the value of lost wages
47:45 The money that ordinary people would otherwise have been spending on the necessities of life was $2 million each day. Relief expenditure to cover the deficiency was a mere $100,000 a day. Chicago's mayor, Anton Chernak, told Washington that it would either have to send relief to his city or it would have to send troops. Radio was a strong opiate during the Depression. In 1931, CBS's advertising revenue was $14.5 million. Other places looked for other ways of scrambling out of the hole. In 1931, Governor Fred
48:31 Bowser of Nevada announced the legalization of gambling in his state and the birth of Las Vegas. But it was going to take more than the spin of a wheel. to change the course of times that had grown menacing. Writing of Berlin in the winter of 1931-32 in Mr. Norris Changes Trains, Christopher Isherwood said that, hate exploded suddenly, without warning, out of nowhere.
