This Fleeting World

76 This Fleeting World
Modern industrial states mobilized for “total war” effectively as they took
control of national economies to supply their armies. The home fronts—
where women replaced men on the farms, in munitions factories, or on
the railways—were as vital to success as the armies. Indeed, the vital role
played by women during World War I was a major factor in the rapid
spread of women’s suffrage during the postwar years. World War I was
not the first total war of the industrial era—the U.S. Civil War deserves
that title more—but it demonstrated even more powerfully the appalling
scale and destructiveness of industrialized warfare, and it was the first
truly global war of the modern era.
Global Upheaval
A punitive peace treaty negotiated in Versailles, France, and the failure of
the newly created League of Nations ensured that the rivalries that had
caused World War I did not go away. In 1929 the international trading
and banking system finally collapsed, leading to a depression that affected
all the major capitalist powers, as well as the Asian, Latin American,
and African countries that supplied them with raw materials. The Great
Depression seemed to confirm the socialist prediction that the capitalist
system would eventually break down. Many governments retreated even
further into autarky (national economic self-sufficiency and independence)
as they saw themselves competing for a dwindling share of world resources
and markets.
In 1933 in Germany a fascist government emerged led by Adolf Hitler
(1889–1945). Hitler was determined to reverse the losses of World War I,
if necessary through conquest. Fascism also took hold in Italy, the birthplace
of fascism’s founder, Benito Mussolini (1883–1945), as well as in
Spain, Brazil, and elsewhere. Fascism and socialism both reflected a deep
disillusionment with the liberal capitalist ideologies of the late nineteenth
century, but whereas fascists anticipated an era of national and racial conflict,
in which the fittest and most powerful would triumph, revolutionary
socialists framed the conflict in terms of class war that would pit capitalism
against socialism, and capitalists against workers.
The appearance in Russia of a Marxist-inspired socialist state determined
to overthrow capitalism was another apparent sign of the breakdown
of nineteenth-century capitalism. Russia’s czarist government had
encouraged industrial growth but had failed (unlike the Meiji government