Upheavals. The 1930s 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 20th 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 chaos of 1932. The New Deal exchanged part of the American dream
of opportunity for a new and perhaps more illusory dream of security. Most of
the nation loved the warmhearted, skillful, and sometimes fuzzy-minded
politician who had presided over the exchange.
-- U.S. union labor, moribund in the '20s and feverishly feeble until 1933, got
a boost from Roosevelt. Sit-down strikes ("When they tie a can to a union man,
sit-down, sit-down") established unions in the automobile industry. As 1949
ended there were 16 million members of U.S. unions--five times as many as in
1933.
-- Huey Long proved that the U.S. was not safe against Fascism. His Share Our
Wealth Society promised to make "Every Man a King." Huey blamed the people's
woes on the big money interests. His followers sang:
