But March 2020 was also a month of reflection. I was finishing up work on a book—and I was thinking about the people I was writing about, and the many echoes between their experiences and what we were collectively living through.

For the past 10 years, I have investigated how French classically trained musicians used their art to cope with the traumas of World War I, a conflict that killed a generation of French men, and millions of women and children. I’ve read thousands of letters and hundreds of diaries, memoirs, and autobiographical novels; I’ve looked at dozens of psychology and physiology texts, compositions, and music method books. This window into people living in wartime and interwar France made me realize that they understood music-making as an embodied therapeutic practice with tremendous potential to console. Their stories have a crucial role to play today, too, as the world reckons with the pain and traumas inflicted by the pandemic.

Like many of us coping with COVID today, people in World War I-era France experienced trauma with a lot of not-knowing and uncertainty. News coverage of the war in French newspapers was extensive, but most in France weren’t getting the whole story. People on the front lines knew what was really happening, but weren’t always permitted to talk about it; for instance, civilians whose loved ones had been killed often waited months to have deaths confirmed.

Combined with the disruption of everyday social interactions, the zone of silence surrounding wartime experiences led to intense isolation. And to make things worse, French culture looked down upon talking about trauma. “Too much” public mourning was deemed disgraceful. The salon hostess and amateur musician Marguerite de Saint-Marceaux wrote in her diary that the composer Maurice Ravel and his brother “were distraught” and “couldn’t remain upright” at the funeral of their mother: “Both were in utter turmoil, incapable of reaction or self-control. A lamentable and distressing spectacle at this time when heroism displays itself as naturally as breathing,” she sniped—and she was their friend.

French doctors, scientists, and members of the military viewed traumatic responses as moral weaknesses. Newspapers recounted contemporary debates about the harsh electrotherapy “treatments” inflicted on soldiers who reported trauma and injury but whose wounds had no visible signs. In this context, there was little room for expressing feelings. As a result, music became a vital way for people to cope with trauma.

How French musicians coped with the traumas they experienced took many forms. Public performance venues in France closed promptly at the conflict’s outset in August 1914, and as a result musicians’ “normal” ways of connecting with one another, through live performance, were brought to a screeching halt. So they found alternative venues for music performance, often in their homes or in other informal settings. When they couldn’t find instruments, they made them out of whatever materials they could find. Musicians didn’t always expressly recognize that they were using music as a coping tool, but they likely had some sense of what music could do for them. While music therapy wasn’t yet an institutionalized discipline during World War I, French psychologists understood mind and body to be intimately connected. Given these musicians’ familiarity with psychological theories of their time, many realized that the embodied nature of making music—that it requires people to move their bodies in the act of creation—gave it the power to soothe.

At the turn of the 20th century, French art music, inspired by post-Romantic composers like Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, was largely lush and dissonant with little rhythmic regularity. But during the war French musicians began to compose and perform extremely rhythmically regular “neoclassical” music that, in its predictability and repetitive patterns, soothed their bodies and distracted their minds. For example, after their husbands died in the first months of the war, the pianist Marguerite Long and the violinist Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, previously known for performing the lush music of Claude Debussy and Gabriel Fauré, turned to repetitive music filled with ostinati—continuously repeating musical phrases—and regular rhythms that allowed them to move their bodies in a soothing groove. Much of this music was either from the 18th century or written by their friends Maurice Ravel, Jean Roger-Ducasse, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre, all of whom had either participated in or lost loved ones in the war.  According to the French journalist Raymond Escholier, Long reported that when she sat down to play the Andante movement of the Piano Concerto in G Major, written for and dedicated to her by Ravel, she was “so moved by it” that she had tears in her eyes, particularly in the part of the movement that features a great deal of rhythmic regularity provided by constant 32nd notes.

Musicians’ private writings also suggest that music-making fostered personal relationships that helped them cope with trauma. In a letter to Nadia and Lili Boulanger, the musician-soldier Jacques de la Presle wrote in 1916 that “in a small place of rest we make music—voilà, one of our joys. You can see that for the souls submitted to such a hardship, music is the great and principal consoler.” Many other musicians, especially those serving on the front lines, concurred, including Ernest Mangeret who confided that “a few moments of leisure permitted me to become myself again” when he found a piano in a half-demolished house. “[W]e went down into the basement (you can understand why!),” he wrote, “and when the evening came, we came together, several friends, in order to make a little bit of music.”

Music-making also offered a way to remember what life had been like before the war. The cellist Maurice Maréchal, who enlisted in 1914, wrote in his letters and diary that performing with friends on the front lines and listening to phonograph recordings reminded him of his pre-war life at the Paris Conservatoire—allowing him to step out of his traumatic military life for just a moment. For others still, performing, composing, and organizing concerts brought visceral reminders of friends and family who had died. The composer and teacher Nadia Boulanger, for instance, reworked pieces written by her younger sister Lili, who died of intestinal tuberculosis in 1918, and performed them in concerts for the rest of her life.

Musicians’ experiences in 1910s and 1920s France remind us that today, as we struggle with the trauma of COVID-19, we must take into account the inextricability of mind and body. Psychologists like Bessel van der Kolk, Stephen Porges, Resmaa Menakem, and Peter Levine have recently underlined how trauma becomes, to use van der Kolk’s phrase, “lodged in the body,” and recommended body- and movement-oriented practices—such as yoga, theater, and yes, music-making—to help counter trauma’s negative effects.

Music holds incredible potential for helping people cope—and indeed, we’ve already seen it take on this role during COVID. As musicologist Emily Abrams Ansari has noted, using music as a tool for remembering past times, people, and places became commonplace during the first months of the pandemic. Similar to how French music lovers of the 1910s and 1920s embraced familiar music, many people in lockdown also turned to nostalgic music that reminded them of earlier times, evidenced by a substantial increase in Spotify playlists based on music from the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.

While we should embrace the benefits that music brings, we must also heed the darker lessons of the World War I-era during this pandemic and going forward. The toxic masculinity that surrounded the expression of grief and trauma back then still resounds today. In the 21st century, we must be thoughtful and ethical in how we engage with one another, as well as with music and sound. We shouldn’t expect people to “get over” trauma quickly. Rather, we need to push for cultural, societal, and policy change that prioritizes mental and emotional health. People in positions of power—government officials, police officers, teachers, school administrators—need training to deal with trauma effectively. Mental health care—including music and sound therapy—needs to be made more accessible to anyone who might benefit from it. Musicians and the music industry must reckon, too, with the ways music has been used as a weapon of control, punishment, exploitation and coercion.

If we can be mindful of how we engage with music, sound, and trauma, though, we can produce new ways of thinking about our ethical engagements with one another.

At its best, music can restore and rejuvenate the body and mind. And there’s some comfort in knowing that people who respond emotionally to music will always find a way to make music, no matter how difficult it may be. Just as World War I-era musicians made music wherever they could, often in houses and churches that had been destroyed by bombs, in the spring of 2020, I was heartened to see musicians of all stripes cultivating Zoom performances to provide themselves and others with comfort, whether through performing classical pieces like Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” or hymns in the Sacred Heart singing tradition. Even the simple act of singing can do wonders. Alone in my bungalow with my two cats, I’d sing to them their favorite songs—“You Are My Sunshine” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”—and find myself suddenly feeling more alive and less alone.

The post When Music Became Therapy in Interwar France appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But soon Luigi started following the news a little too avidly. Then he started going to meetings on the sly. Suddenly the De Michelis’ good boy was more interested in the man the newspapers called “Comandante” than in the approval of family and teachers. Before his parents realized what was happening, Luigi ran away from home, without finishing high school, to join the movement that had won his heart and mind.

Late in 1920, Luigi sent a letter home to prepare his parents for the imminent reckoning, an armed clash between Italian nationalists (of which Luigi was one) and the Kingdom of Italy’s army, a battle which would come to be called “The Christmas of Blood.” Luigi warned: “Soon there will be battle, maybe soon I shall be no more. Console yourselves in thinking that I died for the purest of Causes …”

How does populist, political charisma change the world and how can we hold it in check? The story of how the De Michelis family lost hold of a child—the history surrounding “the Christmas of Blood”—offers enduring answers to those questions.

Charismatic, populist politicians can have the pull of a cult. The Comandante to whom Luigi was in thrall was not Mussolini, but his precursor, Gabriele D’Annunzio, who was the most famous living Italian in 1920. By the end of World War I, D’Annunzio had created a craze around his own personality in ways only a much-loved celebrity can.

Before World War I, D’Annunzio had been Italy’s most revered decadent poet and womanizer. During the war, at 52 years of age, he enlisted as Italy’s oldest officer volunteer. He flew airplanes, manned ships, and screamed from the trenches, everywhere using his prominence to campaign for Italy’s military cause. After the war, he was the most vocal proponent of Italian territorial expansion.

Mussolini would echo D’Annunzio’s calls, though the two did not get along, agreeing about little beside Italy’s greatness and the feebleness of its government. While Mussolini busily recruited thugs to build his fascist party, D’Annunzio used his far greater fame to stage huge rallies and flood the media with his audacious and emotionally manipulative snubbing of traditional state authority.

D’Annunzio created stirs by combining shock and empathy. He could quote Dante and then call Italy’s prime minister a “shithead.” An elegant dandy, he nevertheless presented himself as “one of the guys,” determined to vindicate those who felt cheated by the state and the world at large. Nice middle-class boys like Luigi hadn’t been cheated, of course, but they responded to the daring of saying what one shouldn’t and to a cause that promised to prevent corrupt bureaucracy from keeping Italy from its destined greatness.

How would Italy achieve that greatness? What was the cause that Luigi was prepared to die for? The last line of Luigi’s letter to his parents makes this clear: “Stay safe, your son salutes you, declaring himself above all ashamed of being Italian, that he no longer wants to be Italian, and from now on is Fiumian. Goodbye, Luigi.”

The reference to “Fiumian” is now obscure, but then was a rallying cry for Italian territorial expansion. Fiume, today known by its Croatian name Rijeka, was a multiethnic port town located in the northeastern Adriatic. Before 1918, it was a semi-independent city-state within the Hungarian half of the Habsburg monarchy. Most Fiumians (unlike Luigi) did not identify as mother-tongue Italians and most were multi-lingual. Significant swathes of Fiumians declared their mother-tongue as something other than Italian—26 percent Croatian, 13 percent Hungarian, 5 percent Slovene, 5 percent German.

This diversity did not interest D’Annunzio and his followers. Instead, they saw Fiume as filled with Italians and as a target—a place they could usurp to make Italy great again.

Fiume seemed ripe for usurpation because of the political fallout at the end of World War I. Before the war, almost 300 million Europeans (including Fiumians) lived within a continental empire, whether German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, or Ottoman. When all these empires were dissolved in 1918, new countries were created out of their territories, with others expanding to absorb any lands they could get. Under the leadership of the victorious Entente powers, the 1919 Paris Peace talks became a squabbling ground over which states would get what.

Little Fiume turned into one of the biggest headaches that Paris diplomats tried to solve because the town’s Italian-nationalist leadership declared itself diplomatically and legally independent now that its empire was gone (citing their long-standing city-state semi-independence). This wasn’t the only problem. They also insisted that their new independence gave them the right to annex themselves to Italy.

Paris Peace diplomats, with the American president Woodrow Wilson in the forefront, repeatedly rebuffed attempts to annex Fiume to Italy; they made free-trade arguments against giving Italy a full monopoly over the Adriatic and pointed out that at least half the town didn’t consider itself Italian.

D’Annunzio soon became the most prominent critic of this stance, proclaiming that Wilson was trying to “mutilate” Italy’s WWI victory by denying its rightly earned dominance over the Adriatic. For months, D’Annunzio staged call-and-response rallies filled with lies to push for Italy’s control of the Adriatic and with xenophobic images against “Slavs.” In September 1919, D’Annunzio and his crew stopped just talking and decided to take Fiume.

D’Annunzio and his followers chose Fiume over other Adriatic hotspots because Fiume’s leadership invited them in. So, to the sound of church bells and without a shot fired, they entered Fiume and proclaimed it part of Italy, regardless of what the stuffed shirts in Paris, Rome, Belgrade, or Washington, D.C., said. This unsanctioned seizure of the town was titillating, and newspapers the world over covered it. Luigi was among those desperate to be part of this spectacular Fiume story.

D’Annunzio and his crew expected their de facto annexation of Fiume to Italy to be authorized within a few weeks’ time. They guessed wrong. Month after month, they marched around town proclaiming their endless motto of annexation to “Italy or death!” but no heads of state were willing to recognize their fait accompli.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Fiumians suffered the realities of what it meant to be a state gone rogue from the global order. Counterfeiting went into overdrive, with 60 percent of Fiume’s money supply falsified and no big state infrastructure available to crack down and stabilize. Law codes written in imperial times were patched over to make them look and sound Italian, but everyone was confused about what the real rules were.

Unsure where Fiume would eventually land on the geopolitical map, city policemen refused to follow orders to register their own nationality, even though they all spoke Italian. Croatian- and Hungarian-speaking schoolteachers were ordered to take Italian courses in their free time to make sure the proclamations of Fiume’s Italianness rang truer. Translators were hired to hide the fact that many bureaucrats and businesses still functioned more within a multilingual Central European mindset than a monolingual Italian one. And every day, everyone got poorer and hungrier as D’Annunzio’s Fiume grew more diplomatically isolated.

The Fiume fiasco lasted 15 months before the Kingdom of Italy and the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (soon to be known as Yugoslavia) agreed that the only way to end this destabilizing interregnum was to make Fiume an independent city-state. That meant that neither nation-state would get it. D’Annunzio refused to recognize the treaty; he still demanded annexation to “Italy or death!” Italy threatened military action. D’Annunzio’s reply: Bring it.

Eventually, Italy decided to attack, but—to avoid attention—waited until Christmas 1920, when newspaper readership was at its lowest. (Italian politicians had learned the hard way that D’Annunzio was catnip to the media).

Before the first shots were fired, D’Annunzio proved again why the press could never get enough of him. He dubbed Italy’s attack a fratricidal “Christmas of Blood,” a name that has stuck. He might have won the media war, but there was no way the Italian army would lose the real one. The town was bombed; Italian soldiers invaded. D’Annunzio’s followers blew things up and shot at the arriving soldiers. Fortunately, hardly any soldiers died, though D’Annunzio often lied about this, inflating the numbers of casualties on both sides. Even fewer civilians perished, mostly because they hid in their homes waiting for the madness to end.

By New Year’s Eve, Fiumian statesmen had convinced D’Annunzio to surrender and recognize the treaty. Italy had won, but all sides felt they had lost. Italy was regularly demonized for perpetrating a fratricidal attack in a holy season. D’Annunzio was ridiculed for not surrendering in the first place.

Like most of his comrades, Luigi survived and returned home hungover (literally and figuratively) from the entire experience. He spent the next years working to catch up on the middle-class plans his parents had always had for him. With his “Fiumian” identity shed, he finished university, joined the Fascist party (like millions of others), and became a respected pharmacist in a seaside town north of Rome.

The future for real Fiumians was less easy to rehabilitate, however. They were left living in the material and political rubble of a “Christmas of Blood” most had hid from and few had supported.

None of this should have happened. That it did still produces important questions. Why would Italian nationalists go to war against their own Italian nation-state? Why would nice boys like Luigi drop everything to join them? And how and why did a town filled with so many non-Italians put up with all these D’Annunzio converts in their desperate mission to make Fiume part of “Italy or death”?

Historians of charismatic politics have written hundreds of books trying to answer the first two questions; most ignore the last one. Many of their answers are psychological at their core; they investigate how people got brainwashed into thinking that “justice” for Italy would come from taking over a town few Italians had ever heard of. These histories are frightening because they make it seem that the right combination of charisma, anger, and a tendentious media will convince people to do things they would never have thought acceptable before.

It’s easy to see how this lesson relates to Mussolini’s rise, but it’s also frighteningly relevant right now, in the United States and around the world.

For me, the scariest part of the power of charismatic populism is different, though. I’m most afraid of the very last line of Luigi’s letter, where he identifies himself as “Fiumian.”

Nothing could have been further from the truth. In his diary and letters, Luigi admitted often how foreign Fiume was. But he and the rest of D’Annunzio’s entourage successfully convinced themselves, much of the newspaper-reading world, and most historians that they—aggressive outsiders—were everything and everyone, that they were Fiume. As this entire “Christmas of Blood” narrative shows, charismatic populist politics don’t merely convince us to run away from home or leave behind our family and country. They have the power to erase everything outside those politics, including reality itself.

That’s why, in confronting populism and charismatic leaders, we must focus more on the world erased than the world they hoped to impose. We need more study of how wrong the brainwashed thinking was, instead of focusing on its appeal to people. Otherwise, we risk replicating precisely this nefarious vision: that the leader and his followers are all the world worth knowing about.

That’s also why history matters. It’s important to replace prepackaged “extraordinary” stories like the “Christmas of Blood” with the realities that produced a “Christmas of Rubble.” And it’s important to recognize that defeating charisma politics requires taking away its stage or balcony, so that people can see all the drama, troubles, hope, and failures of the big multiethnic world that the D’Annunzios, Mussolinis, and Trumps have worked so hard to overshadow.

The post How a Charismatic Populist Destroyed Christmas appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Make no mistake: Understanding what fascism meant in its time, 1920 to 1945, is absolutely crucial to understanding the gravity of our own current national political crisis—as well as to summoning up the huge political creativity we will need to address it. But we won’t get close to that understanding if we keep confusing fascism, the historical phenomenon, with fascism, the political label.

If you grew up as I did, in the United States after the Second World War, everyone seemed to be an anti-fascist, at least at first. America had fought the good fight, and triumphed. I ached at my father’s war stories about the misery of the newly liberated Italians, studied army snapshots of him in front of a mound of corpses at Dachau, and suffered nightmares at learning what the Nazis and the Fascists did to the Jews.

But the picture grew complicated. From my Jewish American mother, a New Dealer and later a communist fellow traveler, I learned that McCarthyism was the form fascism took in America. After my study abroad in Italy during the 1960s, where I had joined student and worker demonstrations against the country’s still-vivid authoritarian streak, I came home rhetorically armed to denounce fascists. America seemed riddled with them—starting with those “fascist pigs” in the Princeton, New Jersey, police force who hauled the Black kids (and my little brothers) into custody for Halloween pranks and held them indefinitely, as if habeas corpus didn’t apply to juveniles. My Smith College dorm mother was a fascist for enforcing fascistic-patriarchal rules in loco parentis, as were a couple of professors who argued that fascism and communism were opposite sides of the same coin. The ranks of the fascists included LBJ for Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger for many reasons, and even my father (who also supported the Vietnam war) for his haywire libertarian politics.

Calling people “fascists” has been as American as apple pie for as long as I can remember. But, after becoming a scholar of fascism, I came to see the phenomenon of fascist labeling very differently.

This is especially true now, 20 years into the 21st century, heading up to the 2022 centenary of Mussolini’s March on Rome.

It’s been 75 years since the coalition of armies—spearheaded by the U.S., the Soviet Union, and Great Britain—crushed the Axis belligerents, Germany, Italy, and Japan. And it’s been 30 years since 1990, when the relatively stable Cold War world order, ruled by the two superpowers, broke up with the dissolution of the Soviet bloc.

I now see the fascist phenomenon with new context—the crumbling of the liberal norms that were constructed to save the world from a recurrence of authoritarianism after World War II; the social inequities and financial crises arising from globalization; the failures of American unilateralism; and the obsolescence of domestic and international institutions in the face of new challenges, from climate change to the COVID-19 pandemic, that are posed to wreak even greater global disorder.

In this 21st-century light, fascism and its horrific trajectory in the second quarter of the 20th century look at once inexorable and global, awful and attractive, even understandable. Fascism, its early 20th-century proponents claimed, had all of the answers to the political, material, and existential crises of the British-led imperialist world order in the wake of World War I: It would mobilize the militarism generated by World War I to reorder civilian life. It signaled a third way between capitalism and socialism by imposing harmony between labor and capital. And fascism would establish new racial hierarchies to defend the West against soulless American materialism, Judeo-Bolshevism, and the inexorable advance of Asia’s “yellow masses.” It would knock the hypocritical British Empire off its plutocratic pedestal, destroy the puppet League of Nations, and carve out new colonial empires to let the proletarian nations of the world get their just desserts.

It makes sense that Italy was home to the first fascist takeover. After surviving well enough as a second-order power through the end of the 19th century, the country’s retrograde monarchy eschewed undertaking needed social reforms and instead got swept up in the competition for colonies, empowering a flamboyant young nationalist right. These activists dominated debates in the piazzas and ultimately pushed the country to enter World War I believing it would be richly rewarded with new lands.

But that vision was not to be. Mobilizing at a grand scale to fight the Austrians and Germans unhinged Italy’s political system. The country divided into interventionist and anti-war camps. After fighting ended, the old political class secured a few new territories out of the Versailles Peace Conference, but not enough to satisfy the imperialist expectations of the pro-war factions. Nor could elites deliver a substantial program of reforms that would have made war sacrifices seem worthwhile to the ever-larger, ever-more-exasperated movements of workers and peasants spearheaded by socialist and Catholic opposition parties.

By 1921, the liberal political elite calculated that if it opened its electoral coalition to Benito Mussolini’s burgeoning fasci di combattimento movement, it could coopt this vigorous political upstart, punish the left and Catholic opposition, and shore up its own power.

Who better than the brilliant, unscrupulous journalist Mussolini, a leading socialist turned radical nationalist, to offer a new way? Lover and tutee of brilliant cosmopolitan women, with a facile ear for big ideas and overweening self-confidence in his political intuition, Mussolini claimed to be both a revolutionary and a reactionary—and positioned his anti-party’s armed squads as the only bulwark against the Reds’ advance. Avowedly opportunistic, he seized every moment to bash the opposition, ingratiate himself with the old elites, stymie alternative solutions, and woo the military and the police by stressing their shared struggle to restore law and order against the Bolsheviks.

Called by the king to form a coalition government, Mussolini embarked on a restoration more than a revolution. He established an unshakable political majority by outlawing opposition parties. He revived the economy through austerity measures, outlawing non-fascist unions, and renegotiating war debts to prompt U.S. capital to pour into Italy. He restored national prestige by swagger and bluff, no longer a junior partner to Great Britain in the Mediterranean and East Africa, but a freebooting statesman with the ambition to reestablish Italy’s Roman empire.

Fascists spoke of the state as something alive, with a moral personality of its own, and justifiably predatory to survive in a Darwinian world. They celebrated people as energetic animals—New Men and Women who needed hierarchy and a true leader to harness their vigor. The males could become more virile breedstock, the women more fertile, all for the purposes of the State.

Between 1920 and 1930, as Mussolini turned his one-time radical-populist social movement into a giant party-militia, seized power, and transformed his government into totalitarian dictatorship—in his words, “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State”—fascism established itself as an international reference point for a wide array of like-minded political entrepreneurs and collaborating movements. With the Great Depression, Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany, and fascist Italy’s alliance with the Third Reich, fascism would transform into a multi-pronged global force. Militarily, Mussolini conquered Ethiopia and Hitler re-armed, both in defiance of the League of Nations. They intervened to help General Francisco Franco overthrow the Spanish Second Republic and formed their anti-Bolshevik Axis with Imperial Japan.

Economically, fascism appealed during a worldwide depression because it seemed to have found a winning model to confront it: closed economies, big state spending, and tightly controlled labor organizations and markets to control wages and inflation. Revved up by rearmament spending, Germany was becoming the new engine of Europe and the leading trade partner for most of its neighboring nations. Germany boasted that it had no unemployment, and Italy had at least suppressed the visibility of out-of-work citizens by recruiting them for its ever-growing volunteer militia, sending them back to their rural home towns, settling them in its new empire in Libya and Ethiopia, or offering them assistance through winter help funds. In both regimes, leaders claimed, capital and labor cooperated in the national interest.

Political enthusiasm displayed itself in whole peoples uniformed and integrated into mass organizations, their distinctions effaced, united in their cult of the leader. By 1938, propagandists were speaking of the Nazi-Fascist New Order as the true heir to European culture. It launched a counter-Hollywood in the form of UFA, the giant German-dominated film production and distribution cartel, and financed joint film productions with the Japanese as well as a dazzling film festival at Venice to counter the one at Cannes.

The Nazi-Fascist New Order championed the new sciences of demographics and race hygienics in scientific congresses and exchanges. It fostered debates over how to revive jurisprudence and political science by differentiating between friends and enemies in legal codes and in international law and how to build more totalizing welfare states by incorporating sports and healthy eating, in addition to eugenic measures to prevent “useless” lives from detracting from the social good. And it portrayed itself as a pioneer in geopolitics, striking a new balance so that all of the world’s great powers would have their so-called vital spaces or “lebensraum.” Just as the U.S. would rule Latin America through its Monroe Doctrine, fascist geopoliticians said, Italy would have Eur-Africa, Japan its Co-Prosperity Sphere in Asia, and Germany its Ost-Plan for colonizing eastern Europe and Russia. On that basis, fascism had a right to make war and for the winning regimes to re-distribute chunks of colonial empire to the “deserving.”

It’s scary to look at a map of the world in 1941: continental Europe conquered for the New Order, the Nazi war machine at the gates of Moscow; Italy in the Balkans, its armies in the field from Benghazi to British Somalia; Japan occupying much of East Asia. The war was a true crusade, driven by its dictators’ furies, as well as old-fashioned imperialism: for the fascists, winning meant not just territorial conquest, but population elimination including the global eradication of the Jews, wholesale pillage, and capturing prisoners for slave labor. The tyrants had few qualms about immolating their own peoples to salvage their lost cause. Rather than capitulate to the Allies in June 1943, Mussolini abandoned Italy to German military occupation and two more years of bombardment, invasion, and civil war. Refusing to capitulate as Soviet forces encircled Berlin, Hitler summoned his people to continue the “sacrifice” and “struggle,” then killed himself.

Americans may think we know this history, but we have oversimplified its complexity. Boasting about defeating fascism, and declaring it our duty to police the world against any recurrence, we have lost sight of the global crises of the early 20th century, born of World War I and the Great Depression, that fascism was invented to address.

Over time, we have become accustomed to political leaders of both parties turning the history of fascism into a set of political hobgoblins to legitimate new wars. Never again a Munich, where the great powers capitulated to Hitler, to justify intervention in Vietnam. Never again the Holocaust, to justify intervention in the Balkans and Libya. Never would we bow to an Arab Hitler, to justify invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

We also have gotten used to Hollywood turning the U.S. encounter with Nazi-Fascism into mawkish images of good and evil, and to facile evocations of the Holocaust making Antisemitism practically the sole measure of what it meant to be fascist. “Fascinating Fascism” is the term Susan Sontag, the literary critic, once used to call out American culture’s superficiality at being beguiled by fascism’s kitschy aesthetics and by the sadomasochistic pleasure of thinking of fascism as chains and shackles that, once shaken off, reinvigorate the meaning of being whole and free.

By cultivating such a jejune view of what fascism was historically, we have struggled to understand the highly relevant story of why it took two decades between the world wars to develop a coalition powerful enough to fight it. Fascism always had opponents, of course, but they—dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, old-fashioned liberals, Catholic centrists, social democrats, communists, and anarchists—were deeply divided. Mussolini got points from his men when, after outlawing the opposition, he brushed off its leaders as “anti-fascists,” meaning they had no program except to contest his.

It is no disrespect to the hard-fought struggles of anti-fascist forces to underscore how hard it was to win, much less sustain, electoral victories once the right in polarized political systems aligns itself with forces identifying with fascism. In Spain, the left-wing coalition known as the Popular Front won in February 1936, only to be overthrown by a military coup, backed by international fascism. In France, the May 1936 victory of the Popular Front was reversed in short order as capital took flight for fear of a Red revolution, the economy stalled, and the coalition dissolved.

Most places sought to immunize themselves from fascism by becoming more conservative. Nearly everywhere, the interwar years were a time of nationalism, red-baiting, and eugenics. Antisemitism and race-mongering were normal. There was only one place in Europe that fended off the fascist turn with substantial social reforms: the Kingdom of Sweden, where the Social Democratic party won the vote in 1932. Of course, this solid left regime only could thrive as a neutral power, as a niche at the edge of the New Order, supplying the German war machine with coal and steel.

Ultimately, it was the rising hegemons, the United States and the Soviet Union, which had the strongest interests in battling Nazi-Fascist hegemony: the Soviet Union because it was in the direct line of Nazi aggression; the United States because it opposed German and Italian, allied with Japanese expansionism around the global. But it still took years for New Deal America, the troglodyte British Empire, and Stalin’s walled-off USSR to overcome their differences and forge a functioning antifascist military alliance.

Fascism was not fully vanquished by the military victories of World War II alone. Preventing its revival required a big rethink of economic and political principles around the world. It called for big projects, for huge investments, and for government planning to bring about economic recovery. How could a nation’s subjects be citizens if they were excluded by their poverty, and by caste-like differences in their education, standards of living, and life prospects? How could enhanced productivity, and big profits from new mass-industrial technologies like cars and radios, be more equitably distributed? Capitalism had to accept regulation. Old-fashioned liberalism had to accept labor reform and state spending on social benefits. Europe, if it was to end its warring divisions, had to accept some kind of federalism. The Catholic Church had to resolve its theological ambivalence and champion human rights universally, not only for Christians. Socialism (and communism) had to become more patriotic and reformist. World government had to become stronger, fairer, and more universal.

The substance, then, of fascism, but also of anti-fascism, is what mattered about fascism—not the label of “fascism” that obsesses so many people and dominates our politics today. That focus on substance is what we need now in the U.S. as we face not fascism, but rather a crisis of a kind that historic fascism invented itself to address, in the most awful ways. In this crisis, we need to summon up the terrifying honesty to address our nation’s responsibility for the crumbling of the liberal international order, and, if history serves, to create Popular Front forms of collective action nationally and globally with the power to confront our many challenges—ideally, well short of new wars.

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Many adventurous and patriotic young women longed to defend their country during the Great War. They discovered that if they wanted to serve in uniform, they could not merely perform as well as the young men in the American Expeditionary Forces, who sailed to Europe in 1917 to help the Allies defeat the Germans. Women, still denied the vote, would have to perform better. They would have to do something the men could not. America’s ongoing Industrial Revolution gave the “Hello Girls,” as the first female recruits came to be known, their opportunity to serve the nation and earn full rights as citizens.

In May 1917, the month after Congress declared war on Germany, General John Pershing sailed for France. He stuffed his ship’s hold with the newest technologies: Military tackle had undergone a revolution since Pershing served in the Indian wars of the 1880s. Planes had replaced horses. Trucks had overtaken mule trains. Telephone wires had outrun flares and semaphore flags.

Sitting near a war bonds poster depicting Joan of Arc, Raymonde Breton (R) visits her sister Louise in the Signal Corps barracks at Neufchateau, later bombed by German planes. Photo courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration.

Invented in the United States, American telephones reached farther, conveyed more messages on a wire, and reproduced sound with greater fidelity than telephones anywhere else in the world. They were the only military technology in which America enjoyed superiority over both allies and enemies. When the British commanding officer in World War I used an American-built line to place a call from France to England, he exclaimed, “Would you believe it? They actually recognized my voice in London before I told them who I was!”

Commands to advance or retreat, and to fire or stand down, were relayed by phone during the Great War. If America was going to position its immense armies quickly and effectively, it needed experts to handle this critical technology. “The importance of intercommunication in warfare cannot well be exaggerated,” wrote Brigadier General George Squier, chief signal officer for the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Without communications for even an hour, “the whole military machine would collapse.”

At home, telephone operating was sex-segregated. Callers rang female operators, who connected nearly every call made. Their job was demanding. With hands darting like hummingbirds, operators connected hundreds of impatient callers each hour. Diligent and quick, they talked with customers while manipulating plugs in a constantly changing pattern.

U.S. General John “Black Jack” Pershing inspects switchboard operators serving in occupied Germany. Women remained on duty until discharged after World War I ended in November 1918. The last women were relieved in 1920. Photo courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration.

When Pershing arrived in France, he found male recruits ill-suited for this work. They were inefficient, and prone to frustration when dealing with rude callers. Few doughboys possessed the foreign language skills necessary to cooperate with French telephone operators when making long-distance connections. Necessity required innovation, so Pershing—an innovative thinker who had been nicknamed “Black Jack” after he commanded an African-American regiment on the frontier—departed from precedent, law, and the wishes of the Army itself to recruit women. Before most doughboys arrived, and well after they left, bilingual women served in France. They withstood submarine warfare, cannon fire, influenza, aerial bombardment, and petty-minded bureaucrats to send the word over there.

Most worked behind the lines in safer regions of France. But one small group, led by Grace Banker, a 25-year-old graduate of Barnard College, followed Pershing from the short but intense Battle of St. Mihiel to the desperately extended Meuse-Argonne Offensive, lasting 47 days. The women ran switchboards 24 hours a day within range of artillery fire that lit up the horizon and shook their equipment. Enemy planes buzzed overhead. A German prisoner of war overturned an oil stove and burned their barracks to the ground. Yet the indomitable women embraced every challenge. The highest aspiration of nearly every female Signal Corps member was to serve as near the battle as possible.

Grace Banker, with three service stripes on her sleeve, wears the Distinguished Service Medal, awarded to only 18 Signal Corps officers of the U.S. Army, including her. Photo courtesy of Robert, Grace, and Carolyn Timbie.

Their efforts, along with those of female Army nurses and private volunteers, helped shape another great debate: whether or not to grant women the vote. World War I altered expectations about citizenship globally. Not only did the Russian, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and German Empires fragment into a dozen new nations, but cracks also ran under the British, French, and Dutch Empires as diverse peoples claimed a right to popular sovereignty. Within older democracies, groups who never had much voice raised theirs with new conviction.

Women, in particular, leveraged the conflict for suffrage. By war’s end, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and 10 other countries had enfranchised females. Not surprisingly, the nation latest to the war was also late to the vote. Accustomed to congratulating itself as the vanguard of democracy, the United States brought up the rear. Its suffrage movement had struggled for 70 years without producing victory. Founders like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton died without seeing their life’s work fulfilled.

But the war—and female recruits’ efforts in battle—changed the mind of one crucial U.S. leader: President Woodrow Wilson. Prior to his election in 1912, he told an aide that he was “definitely and irreconcilably opposed to woman suffrage; woman’s place was in the home, and the type of woman who took an active part in the suffrage agitation was totally abhorrent to him.”

Six years later, at the height of American fighting in France, Wilson told the U.S. Senate that the women’s vote was vital to the “realization of the objects for which the war is being fought.” He hoped America might eventually organize an enduring democratic peace, guaranteed by a League of Nations. But how could the United States lead the free world if it was behind everyone else? Once women’s suffrage was entangled with Wilson’s foreign policy goals, it became necessary, not discretionary. The president made two arguments: The United States could not hold itself aloof from world opinion, and women had amply earned the privileges of citizenship.

General Pershing Entering St. Mihiel by Ernest Clifford Peixotto, 1918. Image courtesy of Division of Armed Forces History, National Museum of American History.

“Are we alone to refuse to learn the lesson?” he asked the conservative Senate. Wilson made scant reference to suffragists in his speeches to Congress. Militant activists continued to irk him. But he had come to admire female citizens doing their duty “upon the very skirts and edges of the battle itself.” The war could not be fought without them. “Are we alone to ask and take the utmost women can give—service and sacrifice of every kind—and still say that we do not see what title that gives them?” the president asked. “Shall we admit them only to a partnership of sacrifice and suffering and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and of right?”

When the war ended on November 11, 1918, Grace Banker received the Distinguished Service Medal for assuring “the success of the telephone service during the operations of the First Army against the St. Mihiel salient and the operations to the north of Verdun.” Only 18 out of 16,000 eligible Signal Corps officers received the medal. Grace Banker was one of them. Thirty other women received citations for “exceptionally meritorious and conspicuous services” in the war zone.

U.S. Army Signal Corps Female Telephone Operator uniform. Worn by Helen Cook, Chief Operator. Gift of Helen Cook through The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America. Image courtesy of Division of Armed Forces History, National Museum of American History. On view in Uniformed Women in the Great War.

Sadly, such recognition was transitory. Once operators returned home in 1919 (two died in France), the Army denied them veterans’ bonuses, victory medals, hospitalization for disabilities, and even a flag on their coffins. As a result, the Hello Girls commenced a new struggle for recognition as veterans that eventually caught the second wave of feminism. In 1979, assisted by the National Organization for Women, 31 survivors received their World War I Victory Medals at last.

Yet every Hello Girl had the satisfaction of knowing she had demonstrated women’s willingness to fulfill the hardest duty of citizenship. As testimony in the Congressional Record for 1918 and 1919 shows, the men who helped pass the Susan B. Anthony Amendment—which finally gave women the right to vote—understood this, too.

“Women have performed more than their part in this great struggle for democracy, freedom, and liberty,” Senator William Thompson said, echoing many others. In the United States, France, and England, female citizens had produced food, guns, ammunition, planes, and trains. They loaded baggage, drove trucks, operated switchboards, and were ready, “if necessary, to shoulder the gun and march to the front themselves.” Thompson had traveled throughout the war zone. Women, he found, were praised everywhere.

Women’s activism laid the basis for women’s suffrage. World War I secured it. The Hello Girls fought on both fronts.

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Economic inequality has always been with us, and when you observe a dramatic market compression you can always link it to a disastrous event. These events come in four flavors: intense popular military mobilization, violent and transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic epidemics. These are very severe episodes that hold true across history. It is very hard, if not impossible, to find any episode of major equalization that is not linked to one of these four types of events.

Just as in many other developed countries at the time, external shocks—in the form of war and the Great Depression—acted as critical catalysts for Sweden’s redistributive fiscal reform and the eventual expansion of the welfare state.

Although Sweden is located at the margins of the European continent, it is adjacent to the major powers involved in both world wars: Germany, Great Britain, and Russia. In World War I, conservative Swedish elites sided with Germany and raked in large profits while food shortages caused by the Entente naval blockade and labor unrest rocked the country. Hunger marches near the end of the war triggered heavy-handed police responses.

Sweden, a nonbelligerent, largely missed out on the World War I surge in top taxation, and continued to lag behind Europe’s liberal democracies until the next war. Military mass mobilization, progressive graduation of tax rates, and the targeting of elite wealth on top of income constituted the three main ingredients of fiscal leveling. Popular discontent paved the way for the country’s first Liberal-Social Democrat coalition government, which started to take tentative steps in a more progressive direction under the growing shadow of the Russian Revolution not far from Sweden’s shores. Once the war had ended, overseas markets collapsed and industrial overcapacity ushered in financial crisis and unemployment. The wealthy, deeply enmeshed in these businesses, suffered disproportionately.

During World War II, when Germany invaded Denmark and Norway, Sweden was completely surrounded by the Nazis and their allies. Once the Nazi war machine had shifted into high gear, as a leading Social Democrat politician in 1940 put it, the Swedes found themselves “living in front of the muzzle of a loaded cannon.” The country was exposed to both German and Allied pressure. At one point Germany threatened to bomb Swedish cities unless granted transit concessions. Later in the war, Germany drew up a contingency plan for an invasion in the event of an Allied incursion into Sweden.

The Swedes had to put virtually everything on a war footing to stand a chance of defending themselves against an invasion. They experienced full mobilization—there was no actual fighting, but they mobilized a very large share of their population. They had to create military industries virtually out of nothing overnight. This crisis transformed what had been a right-wing military force into a people’s army based on mass conscription and volunteerism. Some 400,000 men served out of a population of 6.3 million, and of those, 50,000 soldiers were invalided as the result of injuries, accidents, and harsh service conditions. Strict rationing among the civilian population served as a crucial means of leveling class differences. Shared military and civilian service helped overcome existing distrust and fostered teamwork and mutual dependency.

As John Gilmour puts it in his landmark study of wartime Sweden, the country “experienced significant social, political, and economic disruption as a result of wartime conditions and emerged in 1945 as an altered society in attitude and aspiration.” The country “gained social benefits from war without suffering the same loss of life and property as the belligerents and occupied nations.”

All these things together produced an effect quite similar to what happened in countries that endured actual fighting. People were more willing to go along with it because of the perceived existential threat. This shows that societies did not have to experience this mass violence firsthand. It was enough if it happened next door and there was a serious risk of getting involved, and everyone had to prepare for this.

Sweden’s eightfold military build-up during World War II dramatically boosted income tax rates for top earners and corporations. Whereas fiscal responses to the Great Depression had remained modest, the tax reform of 1939 greatly raised top rates and created a temporary defense tax that became highly progressive only for the highest earners and that was further sharpened in 1940 and 1942. In addition, the statutory corporate tax rate rose to 40 percent. The strengthening of military capacity was the official rationale for all these measures. Thanks to the threat of war, in a telling departure from the fractious politics of the 1920s and 1930s, these reforms were passed with little debate or controversy as an almost unanimous political decision.

In this sense, Sweden did experience a major war mobilization effect that was conducive to the subsequent expansion of the welfare state. In the longer term, the war years left their mark on popular beliefs: The vision of Sweden as a small country that had been saved by a coalition government and societal consensus contributed to the formation of the ideal of a solidaristic society sustained by a redistributive welfare state.

Postwar policy was grounded in the wartime footing of the tax system and the shared war experience of the general population. In 1944, as the war was drawing to a close, the Social Democrats, together with the Trade Union Confederation, developed a policy program meant to equalize income and wealth by means of progressive taxation. This was part of the Social Democrats’ commitment to ensure that, as the Post-War Program put it, “the majority is liberated from dependence upon a few owners of capital, and the social order based on economic classes is replaced by a community of citizens cooperating on the basis of freedom and equality.”

After the war had ended, this program carried the day. The people had sacrificed during the war, and now expected something in return. The shared experience of the war years was the crucial catalyst for the blossoming of the Swedish welfare state.

But this may now, in fact, be changing. The offer of generous welfare for anyone who shows up in Sweden ended last spring when the country restored border controls between Sweden and Denmark for the first time in decades. And this was merely the latest step. Following a severe fiscal crisis in the early 1990s, the government had long been cutting back on welfare provisions and promoted privatization of public services. Thanks to these measures and the impact of globalization and technological change, income inequality before taxes and transfers has been rising for decades.

Sweden’s future, just like that of many other European countries with aging populations, depends on continuing immigration, in no small part from Africa and the Middle East. As Swedish society becomes more and more ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse, the social consensus on redistribution faces growing pressure. Europe has already shed much of its progressive postwar culture, and we must wonder how well Swedish egalitarianism will stand the test of time.

The post How Deprivation and the Threat of Violence Made Sweden Equal appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But that choice was accompanied by a healthy skepticism of the role of money in the halls of government. As the years went by, recurrent scandals prompted rounds of reform, fostering an intricate system of rules to promote ethical conduct.

The result is a daunting interface between private and public life, the line marked by financial investigation, disclosure, and divestiture. Still, from the early 20th century, U.S. presidents began to routinely call on leaders from business and industry to head key agencies of the government. And despite nagging public suspicion, the moguls drafted into service were consistently free of accusations—let alone outright findings—of corruption or misconduct.

Keep in mind, the sort of corruption threatened by the rich and powerful is quite distinct from the more garden-variety graft usually associated with public officials—bribery, principally; or undue allegiance to one political party or another. Such concerns were addressed in the late 19th century by the institution of the civil service, when federal employees were subjected for the first time to entrance exams, and protected from political removal. It marked the advent of a new kind of entity: the career civil servant.

Reckoning with the threat posed by wealthy appointees—that they might place their private interests ahead of the public’s, using their positions to help their friends or augment their fortunes—came later, and required more elaborate safeguards.

It was the onset of the first World War and the attendant task of retooling the nation’s industrial economy for wartime production that brought a surge of business executives into the government. Drafted by President Woodrow Wilson, starting in 1917, they signed on for service in new government bureaus at the nominal salary of a dollar a year.

First among these wartime stalwarts was Bernard Baruch, a financier and speculator known in his day as “the lone wolf of Wall Street.” Appointed head of the new War Industries Board, Baruch recruited a bevy of his tycoon chums and together they put the peacetime economy on footing to produce uniforms, tanks, and ammunition.

Another Wilson appointee was Herbert Hoover. A mining executive then based in London, Hoover emerged on the public stage by leading humanitarian war relief efforts for neutral Belgium. Calling Hoover back to the U.S., Wilson named him Food Administrator, and charged him with limiting domestic consumption and keeping the U.S. Army and its allies fed in the field.

Both of these men—and the dozens of other businessmen drafted to assist them—performed capably. Though these appointments came at the height of the Progressive Era, and the wary view of wealth that went with it, the American public came to accept these appointments as legitimate without audible objection.

Skip forward a decade, to 1929, and wealthy office-holders had become a routine feature in the federal government. More than that, it was a non-partisan phenomenon. Bernard Baruch had become the titular head and chief fundraiser for the Democratic Party, while Hoover, after a brief dalliance with the Democrats, won the presidency as a Republican. When Hoover became president, he decided to continue the dollar-a-year tradition, donating his salary to charity.

During Hoover’s tenure the crisis was not war but the Great Depression, and he again turned to men of wealth. One of Hoover’s principal innovations was to launch the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which would channel bailout funds to foundering banks and railroads. Selected to lead the new agency was Charles Dawes, a Chicago banker with a history of moonlighting for the government—he was the nation’s first Comptroller of the Currency, under President William McKinley, and later elected vice president with Calvin Coolidge. In 1925 he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his adroit management of postwar international debts.

Dawes immersed himself in launching the RFC until the bank owned by his family, the Central Republic Bank of Chicago, began to founder. Despite Hoover’s protest, in June 1932 Dawes resigned his post and rushed home to wrestle with panicked creditors. Soon after, now against Dawes’ private protest (he feared, rightly, political blowback), Central Republic was named recipient of the largest loan yet issued by the RFC. Though the bank ultimately closed, the bailout made for an orderly transition and the loans were repaid. But public resentment over what appeared to be an in-house deal damaged the reputation of Hoover and of the relief agency.

Here was just the sort of misconduct that critics had feared from the outset—men of wealth protecting their personal interests. But the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt later that year seemed to clear the air.

Roosevelt was more sparing in his reliance on the men of industry and finance—and yes, all were men—but utilize them he did, especially when faced with a new World War. As the crisis loomed, like President Wilson before him, Roosevelt called on the dollar-a-year crowd. Leading this troop of civilians was Bill Knudsen, then-president of General Motors. An expert in mass production, Knudsen was appointed in 1940 chairman of the Office of Production Management and member of the National Defense Advisory Commission, at a salary of $1 a year.

As production ramped up, Knudsen brought with him executives from car companies, AT&T, and U.S. Steel. New Deal bureaucrats and labor activists denounced the appointments, but despite all the procurement contracts, all the millions spent, there was hardly a whiff of scandal.

By 1942, when Knudsen was awarded with a formal commission as Lieutenant General in the Army, the worst his critics could say was that he had been too slow in converting from peaceful industrial production to a war footing. “We are beginning to pay a heavy price for leaving the mobilization of industry in the hands of business men,” the Nation warned in 1942. Steel makers, in particular, were fighting expanded production “as a menace to monopolistic practices and stable prices,” argued an editorial. It was “Dollar-a-Year Sabotage,” The New Republic headlined.

But those criticisms were drowned out by the din of factory production, the great outpouring of armament that yielded an “arsenal of democracy,” as Knudsen phrased it, that carried the Allies to victory. “We won because we smothered the enemy in an avalanche of production,” Knudsen remarked later. For all the fears of conflicted interest, the businessmen had proved their worth.

The dollar-a-year appointment routine went out with World War II, but presidents continued to tap the moneyed elite for advice and expertise, a practice that became the source of a growing thicket of regulations designed to forestall malfeasance. Roosevelt broke first ground here, in 1937, with an order barring purchase or sale of stock by government employees “for speculative purpose.” Later, his War Production Administration required its dollar-a-year men to disclose financial holdings and undergo background checks.

From there, safeguards advanced by stages. John F. Kennedy, during his aspirational 1960 campaign, called for a new standard, by which “no officer or employee of the executive branch shall use his official position for financial profit or personal gain.” Upon his election, he followed up with an executive order barring any “use of public office for private gain,” and then lobbied Congress for parallel laws. The result was new criminal statutes covering bribery and conflict of interest.

Lyndon Johnson was never an exemplar of disinterested politics, but early scandal in his administration, involving influence peddling by Johnson intimate Bobby Baker, a businessman and Democratic party organizer, prompted a new round of rulemaking. Each federal agency should have its own ethics code, Johnson ordered, and all presidential appointees were now required to file financial disclosure statements. In the 1970s, the fallout from the Watergate scandal, together with the troubles of presidential chum and advisor Burt Lance, prompted a new round of reform from President Jimmy Carter.

As with so many things, the status of ethics in an administration tends to reflect the character of the chief executive, regardless of the rules in place at the time. Consider the following exchange, in 1934, between Franklin Roosevelt, Joe Kennedy, and presidential aide Ray Moley, prior to Kennedy’s appointment at the SEC.

As recounted by Joe Kennedy biographer David Nasaw, Kennedy warned Roosevelt that he had “done plenty of things that people could find fault with.” At that point, Moley interjected: “Joe, I know you want this job. But if there is anything in your business career that could injure the president, this is the time to spill it.”

Kennedy’s reaction was quick and sharp. “With a burst of profanity he defied anyone to question his devotion to public interest or to point to a single shady act in his whole life. The president did not need to worry about that, he said. What was more, he would give his critics—and here again the profanity flowed freely—an administration of the SEC that would be a credit to his country, the president, himself and his family.”

After an exchange like that, codes and rules might seem superfluous. To outsiders, the Kennedy appointment appeared rash; “setting a wolf to guard a flock of sheep,” one critic charged. But Roosevelt was unfazed. Asked why he’d named such a notorious crook as Kennedy, Roosevelt quipped, “Takes one to catch one.” In the event, while nobody ever proposed Joe Kennedy for sainthood, he was never accused of misconduct or self-dealing while presiding at the SEC.

The post When the President’s Best and Brightest Were Also the Richest appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Getty’s Nancy Perloff, a co-curator of the exhibition, showed the crowd at the American Film Institute a selection of cartoons from World War I that appeared in satirical journals, posters, and prints. The purpose of these cartoons was to elevate a particular culture and denigrate the enemy, said Perloff. The most widely satirized figure of the war was Kaiser Wilhelm II, the German emperor. But how he was depicted differed from country to country. Perloff showed one image by a French artist depicting him in a cape, surrounded by bats; a Russian artist depicted Wilhelm writing in a black book, “I will destroy all of Europe.”

The jingoism, nationalism, and patriotism of World War I cartoons were echoed decades later, when the U.S. entered the war on terror. Marty Kaplan, director of USC Annenberg School’s Norman Lear Center and the evening’s moderator, asked Chris Lamb, author of Drawn to Extremes: The Use and Abuse of Editorial Cartoons, to talk about the role cartoonists played in early 21st century American culture and politics.

Lamb said that cartoonists fell into three camps: Some gave President George W. Bush and the Iraq invasion their full support; others wanted to hold onto their jobs and offered tepid support; and “a few brave cartoonists” came out criticizing the president and got hammered by the media.

Turning to cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz, who creates the syndicated “La Cucaracha” strip and is a writer on the upcoming TV series Bordertown, Kaplan asked if he feels as though he’s wielding or aspiring to any kind of political power or influence with his cartoons.

“I always say I do this to amuse myself, primarily,” said Alcaraz. “I have strong opinions, and that’s why I do this job. I just want to say the truth.”

Perloff and Lamb both answered yes to the question of whether cartoonists, caricaturists, and satirists have actual power. Alcaraz demurred, but then admitted that a cartoon he drew after Disney tried to trademark the term “Dia de los muertos” (of a large, skeleton version of Mickey Mouse) may have played a role in Disney withdrawing its trademark application.

Alcaraz saw the headline and posted his cartoon on Facebook and Twitter a few hours later. A few hours after that, Disney stood down. World War I artists were in a totally different place in terms of technology, said Perloff. But though immediacy was lacking, the journals in which the cartoons appeared had huge audiences. The home front was “becoming increasingly desperate” over how long the war was lasting. The cartoons “were supposed to uplift people,” she said.

But were those cartoons—and are political cartoons in general—funny? What kind of funny are they, exactly?

Alcaraz said his goal is to be “brutally funny” and “impolite.” He doesn’t draw to be offensive and get a rise out of people, however.

Cartoons are “wincing funny, uncomfortable funny,” said Lamb. They’re “supposed to wake you up and say, ‘You idiot, why haven’t you been paying attention?’”

Cartoons rely heavily on symbols to get a larger idea across. Kaplan asked Alcaraz to three of his cartoons that used the Statue of Liberty in different ways. One, explained Alcaraz, was meant to criticize Arizona’s anti-immigrant law, SB 1070, and depicted a family of immigrants crossing the border as a family of Statues of Liberty. Another, supporting the immigrant students getting an education under the DREAM Act, depicted a brown college student in a robe and graduation cap posed as the statue. The third, on gay marriage, showed two statues holding hands.

“We have to use shorthand symbols to communicate because the primary function of the cartoon is to communicate a very succinct message,” said Alcaraz. Just as Mexican restaurants use guys in sombreros with giant moustaches, cartoonists tend to use the same images over and over again.

Cartoons “can reduce a complex issue into something you can digest in just a few seconds,” said Lamb. “Some of the best cartoons are those that have the fewest words.”

Perloff said that many World War I-era cartoons relied more on pictures than words. The words offered context, but the images—which became codes, in the form of certain animals or body types representing certain countries—were crucial. “What interests me is, how long does a cartoon last? How long do its visual codes stay relevant?” said Perloff.

What happens when the state tries to push back against a cartoonist?

Lamb said that in the years leading up to World War I—the golden age of cartoons—about 500 or 600 cartoonists worked for daily newspapers in the U.S. They were split on whether or not the U.S. should enter the war, but once the country jumped into the fray, President Woodrow Wilson said that criticism was not going to be tolerated. Newspapers shut the door to cartoonists, and Congress passed the Sedition Act. About 2,000 people were indicted, and editorial cartooning was essentially shut down for the next few decades.

After the war, however, cartoonists were able to be more critical. In France, said Perloff, Marianne, the country’s emblem, appeared on a newspaper cover surrounded by wounded soldiers. A drawing of a destroyed village showed a landscape so decimated it looks “like a moonscape.”

Quoting from Lamb’s book, Kaplan said that, “An Israeli cartoonist once called the editorial cartoon the most extreme form of expression that a society will accept or tolerate.”

Alcaraz said that when he reads the hate mail he receives, he feels “I’ve already won the argument.” His image has gotten inside someone’s head—and it’s not going to come out, ever. He even professed to feeling a bit of sympathy for his detractors.

Before turning the discussion over to the audience question-and-answer session, Kaplan asked the panelists if they feel magazines and newspapers should have reprinted controversial cartoons from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in the wake of a terrorist attack.

“It was an awful thing that happened, and I felt as a cartoonist, I stand behind them 100 percent,” said Alcaraz. “However, I don’t stand 100 percent behind the material they publish.” He added that as a member of a marginalized group himself, he understands why Muslims in France—another marginalized group—are offended. He has no sympathy for the men who shot his colleagues, but he does sympathize with the Muslim community. “It’s complicated,” he said.

Perloff added that in working on the Getty exhibition, she and her colleagues were appalled at the viciousness of the cartoons. The Russians in particular had no limits and would turn the Germans into pigs and other animals. Those images, however, were internal to their nation. Now, cartoons are circulated to a global audience.

In the audience question-and-answer session, the panelists were asked if a truly effective cartoon is ever in danger of being misinterpreted.

Lamb said that in his view, truly effective cartoons shouldn’t be misinterpreted. “But that’s what makes the art form so difficult,” he said. “It requires so many skills.”

Alcaraz recounted a cartoon he drew called “How to spot a Mexican dad” that was based on his own father, and depicted a man sitting in an easy chair and drinking beers, with chorizo stains on his undershirt—with these various elements labeled with captions. Alcaraz described a pained letter to the editor from a woman who called the cartoon anti-Semitic; she pointed to 1930s Nazi cartoons showing Jews with exaggerated racial characteristics and labels.

The criticism was off-base—but both cartoons do depict stereotypes. Kaplan asked Alcaraz if he finds stereotypes to be dangerous and explosive.

Alcaraz said he tries to take stereotypes “head-on.” His mother cleaned houses, and his father was a gardener; he feels it’s his right to draw cartoons that deal with those stereotypes of Mexican-Americans. But he also feels that if a cartoon of someone with a different background rings true and he can defend it, he can draw it. “I don’t put anything down on paper that is careless,” he said. “That’s my responsibility as a writer and an artist.”

The post Those Jingoistic, Nationalistic, Patriotic Cartoons appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

War’s a joke for me and you,
While we know such dreams are true.
–Siegfried Sassoon

Out there, we’ve walked quite friendly up to Death,–
Sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland,–
Pardoned his spilling mess-tins in our hand.
We’ve sniffed the green thick odour of his breath,–
Our eyes wept, but our courage didn’t writhe.
He’s spat at us with bullets and he’s coughed
Shrapnel. We chorussed when he sang aloft,
We whistled while he shaved us with his scythe.

Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
No soldier’s paid to kick against His powers.
We laughed,–knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags
He wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.

The post The Next War appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The headlines these days all seem to demand exclamation marks. Iraq is teetering on the brink! Russian troops are massing on the Ukrainian border! Gaza lies in ruins! World’s worst Ebola epidemic afflicts Africa!

Oh, and it is also National Goat Cheese Month. Welcome to another quiet and peaceful August.

Yeah, right. One of the puzzles of summer is why so many of us persist in pretending that August is a month when nothing happens, when we can step back, tune out, take a break, and recharge. Europeans even think they are entitled to take the entire month off.

Perhaps there’s something about late summer, a couple months gone since school let out in June, that makes us forget our history. This year, August is full of reminders. We’re commemorating the 40th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s resignation and the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I.

Bellicose August also brought the Gulf of Tonkin incident that triggered our involvement in Vietnam, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the failed coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact in 1939 that enabled Hitler to invade Poland on September 1, and the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945 and ensuing Japanese surrender. Hurricane Katrina also occurred in August, but let’s leave Mother Nature out of it.

There’s a melancholic quality to August, a month nearly synonymous with “waning days of summer.” Less acknowledged in our cultural vernacular is the extent to which the “waning” feeling is as much about the end of another year as it is about the end of summer.

Sure, we sing “Auld Lang Syne,” kiss under the mistletoe, and wish each other a “Happy New Year” when December turns to January. But who among us doesn’t feel that the real reset moment each year, the new beginning, comes in September, the day after Labor Day? The fall is when we start school and football season and the U.S. government fiscal year, and when we get serious, if we ever do, about our work.

August, then, is about the waning not only of summer, but also of each passing year, and lost possibilities. It is about the waning of life, even. There is a grasping, desperate quality to many of the historical events that took place in August—hence the resonance of the title of Barbara W. Tuchman’s historical bestseller about the outset of World War I, The Guns of August. It’s quite fashionable to study the sequence of events that led to the so-called “Great War,” which in retrospect appear like dominoes falling as if on a predetermined course. The rest of the war is far less fashionable to read about, as it proves too muddled a narrative. Best to focus on the August beginning, and how it ended all that came before.

Mischief conspires with melancholia in August, the notion that mice can play while the cat’s vacationing. It’s not clear whether Saddam Hussein thought he would get away with taking over Kuwait if he did so while the American president was summering in Maine, or whether that president’s son, when he was in office a decade later, would have taken warnings of an airborne Al Qaeda plot more seriously had he been briefed about them at some time and place other than August at his Texas ranch.

August and the waning days of summer (and of the year, I insist) is when we let our guards down, creating an opening for those with an agenda, be it the invasion of Poland or Kuwait, or the shorting of the pound (George Soros famously bet against the British currency in August 1992, and won big). So keep your eye on colleagues who seem especially busy and eager to stick around the office this month. Who knows what they’re up to?

Financial markets are notoriously slow in August, the month of lowest trading volumes, when bankers follow their clients to the beach. But “slow” can be a deceptive term in business as in life, given that lower volume and less liquidity in a market can make it more volatile, and more susceptible to speculation. If you buy or sell 1,000 shares of a company, you are far more likely to influence that stock price on a day when only 5,000 shares trade hands than on a day when 100,000 shares trade hands.

That same dynamic applies to anyone seeking to influence the outcome of any event: your influence increases the fewer people are engaged. Which is what makes this such a dodgy month, and the current news headlines so ominous.

And now, I’m off to the beach for a week. It’s August, after all.

The post Stop Pretending Nothing Happens in August appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The government didn’t have time to waste while its citizens made up their minds about joining the fight. How could ordinary Americans be convinced to participate in the war “Over There,” as one of the most popular songs of the era described it?

Posters—which were so well designed and illustrated that people collected and displayed them in fine art galleries—possessed both visual appeal and ease of reproduction. They could be pasted on the sides of buildings, put in the windows of homes, tacked up in workplaces, and resized to appear above cable car windows and in magazines. And they could easily be reprinted in a variety of languages.

To merge this popular form of advertising with key messages about the war, the U.S. government’s public information committee formed a Division of Pictorial Publicity in 1917. The chairman, George Creel, asked Charles Dana Gibson, one of most famous American illustrators of the period, to be his partner in the effort. Gibson, who was president of the Society of Illustrators, reached out to the country’s best illustrators and encouraged them to volunteer their creativity to the war effort.

These illustrators produced some indelible images, including one of the most iconic American images ever made: James Montgomery Flagg’s stern image of Uncle Sam pointing to the viewer above the words, “I Want You for U.S. Army.” (Flagg’s inspiration came from an image of the British Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, designed by Alfred Leete.) The illustrators used advertising strategies and graphic design to engage the casual passerby and elicit emotional responses. How could you avoid the pointing finger of Uncle Sam or Lady Liberty? How could you stand by and do nothing when you saw starving children and a (fictional) attack on New York City?

“Posters sold the war,” said David H. Mihaly, the curator of graphic arts and social history at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, where 55 of these posters will go on view August 2. “These posters inspired you to enlist, to pick up the flag and support your country. They made you in some cases fear an enemy or created a fear you didn’t know you had. Nations needed to convince their citizens that this war was just, and we needed to participate and not sit and watch.” There were certainly propaganda posters before 1917, but the organization and mass distribution of World War I posters distinguished them from previous printings, Mihaly said.

Despite the passage of 100 years—as well as many wars and disillusionment about them—these posters retain their power to make you stare. Good and evil are clearly delineated. The suffering is hard to ignore. The posters tell you how to help, and the look in the eyes of Uncle Sam makes sure you do.

“Your Country Calls!: Posters of the First World War” will be on view at the Huntington from August 2 to November 3, 2014.

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