Chapter 15 – Years of Crisis

1. Chapter 15 – Years of Crisis Mrs. Tucker World History Victor Valley High School

2. Main Points • Postwar Uncertainty • Worldwide Depression • Fascism Rising in Europe • Aggressors Invade Nations

3. California Standards • 10.6.4 – Discuss the influence of World War I on literature, art, and intellectual life in the West (e.g. Pablo Picasso, the “lost generation” of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway).

4. Postwar Uncertainty • New Revolutions in Science • Albert Einstein – German Born – Theory of Relativity; • Sigmund Freud – psychology; believed human behavior is irrational – beyond reason -- this was the “unconsciousness;”

5. Literature in the 1920s • Devastation of World War I caused writers to question accepted ideas of reason and doubt of traditional religious values • T.S. Eliot, 1922, American poet living in England – Western society lost its spiritual values; Postwar world a “barren wasteland” drained of faith and hope; • William Butler Yeats, Irish poet, wrote about a sense of dark times - “The Second Coming” (1921);

6. Existentialism • Jean Paul Sartre • Belief that there is no universal meaning to life. Perople create their own mean in life through their choices and actions; • Friedrich Nietzsche, German Philosopher, was influenced by Existentialism; • Western ideas like reason, democracy, and progress stifled creativity. He urged return to ancient heroic values – pride, assertiveness, and strength;

7. Existentialism

8. Literature in the 1920s • Czech-born author, Franz Kafka, The Trial, (1925), The Castle, (1926) – people caught in threatening situations they cannot understand nor escape; • James Joyce, Irish author, stream of consciousness novel, Ulysses (1922);

9. Kafka and Joyce

10. Revolution in the Arts • Artists Rebel against Tradition; • Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky – used bold colors and distorted or exaggerated forms;

11. Surrealism • Surreal – means “beyond or above reality” Used unconscious part of their minds – had an eerie, dreamlike quality to depict objects in unrealistic ways; • Movement that tried to link the world of dreams with real life – inspired by Freud’s ideas. • Salvador Dali, Spanish painter, “The Persistence of Memory,” (1931);

12. The Persistence of Memory

13. Cubism • Transformed natural shapes into geometric forms; • Objects broken down into differnet parts with sharp angles and edges; • Creator of Cubism; Pablo Picasso, Spanish Painter, Guernica; and • Georges Braque, French painter, The Violin and the Candlestick;

14. Cubism – Guernica and Violin of Candlesticks

15. Music • Classical • Movement away from traditional styles; • Russian Composer - Igor Stravinsky, “The Rite of Spring,”—irregular rhythms and dissonances; harsh combinations of sound; • Austrian composer, Arnold Schoenberg – rejected traditional harmonies and musical scales;

16. Jazz • Emerged from the United States, from most African American artists in New Orleans, Memphis, and Chicago. • Lively, loose beat captured the new freedom of the age;

17. Jazz

18. New Orleans Jazz

19. Society Challenges Convention • Change in Women’s Roles • Women worked in men’s jobs and in war effort, and wanted the right to vote; • Many countries granted women’s suffrage into law such as the US, Britain, Germany, Sweden, and Austria. • Women abandoned restrictive clothing and hairstyles; shorter looser garments and short “bobbed” hair;

20. Women’s Changes in Fashion

21. Women’s Roles Change • Women wore make up, drove cars, drank and smoked in public; • Most women followed traditional paths of marriage and family; • Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman risked arrest, speaking out in support of birth control; • Women began to seek careers in medicine, education, journalism, and clerical fields;

22. Margaret Sanger/1920s women

23. Technological Advances Improve Life • Automobiles – after war were more affordable; people traveled for pleasure; • People moved to suburbs and commuted to work in cities; • Airplanes transform travel; International air travel; • Charles Lindbergh – 33-hour solo flight from New York to Paris – Spirit of St. Louis; • Passenger airlines established during 1920s. • Amelia Earhart, American – in 1932 was first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic;

24. Aviation Advances

25. Radio and Movies Dominate Popular Entertainment • Guglielmo Marconi – first successful experiments with radio in 1895; • Radio developed mostly through World War I; • By 1920 the first commercial radio station --- KDKA in Pittsburgh was broadcasting; • Radio swept the nation and soon every major city had stations broadcasting news, plays and live sporting events; • Soon most families would own a radio;

26. Radios

27. Hollywood • Motion pictures began with Nickelodeons in working-class, immigrant neighborhoods; • Movie makers were charged with corrupting the youth, movie makers tried to make their movies more respectable. • Movie makers had to find a way to make their product more in line with the dominant culture of a more conservative middle class society. They did that and in doing that they would broaden the appeal and removing the movies;

28. Hollywood

29. Hollywood “Big Eight Movie Companies” • Paramount studies was the first of the studios at this time. • The “Big Eight” • Paramount • Fox • MGM • Universal • Warner Brothers • Columbia • United Artists • RKO

30. Worldwide Depression • California Standard 10.6. 2. Describe the effects of the war and resulting peace treaties on population movement, the international economy, and shifts in the geographic and political borders of Europe and the Middle East.

31. Postwar Europe • Unstable New Democracies • With the end of WWI, the last of Europe’s absolute rulers were overthrown; • Provisional Government – Russia’s brief democratic government; • Weimar Republic – Germany’s new democratic government;

32. Weimar Republic • Set up in 1919; • Named for the city where the national assembly met; • Weak from the start; • Germany lacked a strong democratic tradition; • Germany had several major political parties and many minor ones; • Millions of Germans blamed the Weimar government for the defeat and postwar humiliation by signing Treaty of Versailles

33. Weimar Republic

34. Inflation Caused Crisis in Germany • Germany did not increase wartime taxes -- Germans just printed more money; • After the war, Germany printed even more money to pay war reparations; • Paper money lost its value and the German mark’s value fell sharply. • Severe inflation set in; • In 1918, a loaf of bread cost less than a mark; In 1922 it was over 160 marks, and in 1923, more than 200 billion marks; • As a result – many Germans questioned the value of the Weimar Republic;

35. Hyperinflation

36. Dawes Plan • In 1924, International Committee headed by American banker, Charles Dawes, provided for a $200 million loan from US banks to stabilize German currency and strengthen its economy; • Plan set more realistic schedule for payment of Germany’s reparations; • The plan helped slow inflation, the German Economy began to recover, and factories were at prewar production by 1929;

37. The Dawes Plan

38. Lasting Peace • With German prosperity, Germany’s foreign minister, Gustav Stresemann and France’s foreign minister, Aristide Briand met to sign a treaty promising France and Germany would never go to war against each other; • Germany agreed to respect the existing borders of France and Belgium; • Germany was then admitted to League of Nations;

39. Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact • US Secretary of State, Frank Kellogg, and France’s Aristide Briand arranged an agreement to “renounce war as an instrument of national policy.” • Almost all nations signed this agreement; • The League of Nations – the obvious group to enforce this treaty, had no armed forces ;

40. Kellogg Briand Pact

41. Financial Collapse • The US economic prosperity largely sustained the world economy; • In 1929, US factories turned out nearly half the world’s industrial goods; • This productivity led to enormous profits but the new wealth was not evenly distributed; • The richest 5% of the population, received 33% of all personal income in 1929;

42. Financial Collapse • 60% of all American families earned less than $2,000 a year; • Most families were too poor to buy the goods being produced; • Unable to sell all their goods, store owners would cut back their orders from factories; • Factories reduced production and laid-off workers; • This began a downward economic spiral;

43. Bank Failures

44. Financial Collapse • Overproduction affected US farmers also; • Scientific farming methods and new farm machinery dramatically increased crop yields; • US farmers were producing more food, but faced new competition from farmers in Australia, Latin America, and Europe; • There was a worldwide surplus of agricultural products which drove prices and profits down;

45. Financial Collapse • Unable to sell their crops at a profit, many farmers could not pay off their bank loans; • These unpaid debts weakened banks and forced some to close; • This overproduction by factories and farms should have been a warning to those gambling on the stock market -- but no one heeded the warning;

46. The Stock Market Crashes • 1929 – New York City’s Wall Street – financial capital of the world; • Investors were optimistic about the booming economy; • In order to invest in the boom economy – many middle-income people bought stocks on “margin” (on credit).

47. The Stock Market Crashes • In September, 1929, some investors thought the stock prices were unnaturally high and started selling their stocks; • By Thursday, October 24, the gradual lowering of stock prices became an all-out slide downward; • This resulted in a panic! Everyone wanted to sell stocks and no one wanted to buy; • On Tuesday, October 29, “Black Tuesday,” a record 16 million stocks were sold and the market collapsed.

48. Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929

49. The Great Depression • Investors who bought stocks on margin could not pay what they owed and the stocks were now worthless. • Within months of the crash, unemployment rates began to rise and industrial production, prices, and wages declined; • This long business slump would be called the Great Depression; • The stock market crash alone did not cause the Great Depression but quickened the economy’s collapse;

50. The Great Depression