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In one sector — business — the American people thought they had nothing to worry about. Henry Ford's mass production of automobiles had blossomed into the economic wonder of all time. The industry produced 896,000 cars in 1915, 1,906,000 in 1920 and 5,358,000 in 1929. The rest of business tried to keep pace, although home construction began to slip in 1926 and farm income lagged behind.
By the mid-'20s the American businessman had almost lived down the stigma of selfishness attached to him in the early years of the century. He had invented "service," had come honestly to believe that the justification for his existence was what he contributed to the community. (In 1950 he still believed it, and was ridiculed by his European brethren for his conviction.) Service and rising living standards and more & more production seemed to be progressing toward a materialist Nirvana.
When the stock market broke, it was not just another panic, so familiar in American history. The others had been more or less expected; this one was the end of a dream.
Elsewhere other dreams were ending. In Britain the shame of the dole, the misery of the depressed areas, settled, like coal dust, on the power and glory and glitter of the Empire. Churchill went back to the Tory Party in 1925. From 1924 to 1929 he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer. To this post he brought his amazing administrative ability and his infirm grasp of the decimal system ("those damn little dots"). He put Britain back on the gold standard (1925) and helped break the General Strike of 1926. It was not one of his better decades; in 1922 he was even beaten for Parliament by a Mr. Scrim-geour, a Prohibitionist and Christian Socialist who had unsuccessfully contested the seat at Dundee against Churchill in five elections since 1908.
Upheavals.
The 19303 brought more surprises and upheavals. Some of them:
In 1931 Japan grabbed Manchuria in the first major postwar aggression in defiance of the League of Nations. Within ten years Japan organized Manchurian raw materials and manpower into an industrial asset without which she would not have dared attack the U.S. The implications of this feat stretch beyond 1950; the Communists, who seized control of almost all China in 1949, have a parallel opportunity.
In Germany, Hitler took power. In the U.S., Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal achieved victory, if not definition. Its underlying thrust was the same vague, restless force which Theodore Roosevelt had met with the Square Deal and Wilson with the New Freedom. This force was multiplied by the calamities of 1929-33: farm riots, .bank closings, apple-selling unemployed-and the U.S.'s least glorious military action, the assault on the bonus marchers at Anacostia. Also multiplied by the depression was the old self-doubt troubling the conscience of U.S. business. In Roosevelt's Hundred Days, businessmen rushed to Government like wet chicks to a hen, sheltering under the wings of Hugh Johnson's NRA Blue Eagle. The early New Deal's immense and contradictory activity generated an impression of constructive action. One of the pleasanter surprises of the aoth Century was how rapidly confidence and normal business life began to revive. The New Deal did not lick the depression, which lingered until rearmament, but it did lick the creeping