346 Chapter Nine
war, were far too dazzling to abandon with the peace.^66 But private
pursuit of the good life, however defined, was taken for granted, and
the United States explored the possibilities of mass production of
automobiles and other consumables in the 1920s with an enthusiasm
unmatched elsewhere.
The Soviet Union stood at the opposite pole, seriously impover
ished by civil war and revolution, and ideologically committed to
socialism, if necessary in only one country. But there, too, reaction set
in. The New Economic Policy of 1921–28 explicitly relied on market
incentives to manage agriculture as well as the artisan level of man
ufacture. In the rest of Europe, residues of the war faded slowly, since
boundary changes and land redistribution programs in eastern Europe,
reconstruction of war damage in France, catastrophic inflation in
Germany, and war debts and reparations everywhere prolonged eco
nomic dislocation. New American loans to Germany after 1924
underwrote a brief period of industrial prosperity; but in 1929 the
onset of the Great Depression inaugurated a new crisis. Responses
varied, but in Russia, Germany, and the United States return to pat
terns of political management that had been first explored during
World War I became unmistakable by the mid-1930s. Japan, too,
began to construct a war economy of its own in the Far East after
- Then, at the end of the decade. World War II broke out and
lasted long enough to make managed economies normal in all of the
more industrialized countries of the world.
With the advantages of half a century’s perspective, the kinship
between wartime mobilization and governmental programs respond
ing to the economic crises of the 1930s seems apparent. But at the
time, few recognized or perhaps wished to admit any such thing.
Russia’s first Five-Year Plan, for example, 1928–32, was trumpeted as
a monument to socialism, while its urgent military objectives were
systematically disguised.^67 But during the second Five-Year Plan,
1932–37, the rapid growth of arms output made the kinship of
- The United States’ GNP approximately doubled during World War I; and for the
first time the 1920 census found more than half the population to be urban dwellers.
Perhaps the most important result of World War I for the United States was the decisive
impetus it gave to the transformation of American agriculture from family farm to
agribusiness. High prices, guaranteed by the government, induced a surge in output and
encouraged heavy investment in tractors and other farm machinery. On the wartime
transformation of United States rural life see David Danbom, The Resisted Revolution:
Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture, 1900–1930 (Ames, Iowa, 1979),
pp. 97–109.
- John Ericson, The Soviet High Command: A Military-Political History (London,
1962), pp. 303–6.
