averilburystedmunds: Echoes of The Thirties?

Family group, 1942/3

I have only recently looked again at the details of that decade in which I was born, the 1930s, which was not a peaceful period! It was marked by a global economic crisis, the rise of populist leaders, extreme nationalism and declining international cooperation, all of which laid the groundwork for World War 11. I do remember quite a lot of that war, albeit from a child’s perspective. I remember my brothers, almost a generation older than I, two in uniform; brother Jack in the Grenadier Guards in France; brother Joe in the Sherwood Foresters, in Italy while brother Horace, protected from fighting, continued serving as a nationally important fire-man or stoker, later an engine driver, on the railways; and brother Reg, quickly invalided out of the Army due to latent brain damage following an horrendous car crash, and his return to the peacetime pursuit of bricklaying and posing as a 'man-about-town'!. I also remember the American Army camp eventually established on what we had called ‘the Top Field’ where my little sisters and I had played but which then became out of bounds to children for their former Cowboys and Indians games.

I keep reading that Donald Trump has frightened Americans with his admiration for strongmen like Putin; his contempt for restraints on his exercise of
power; his demonisation of minorities and foreigners; his expansionist tendencies [he is still threatening that Canada, that neighbour and old friend, will be the U.S. fifty second state, and pronouncing the U.S. security need to annexe Greenland, incidentally, a fellow NATO member.] A strong global fear is that he truly threatens to establish fascism as he seeks to severely restrict U.S. immigration policies, pondering whether citizenship should be based on ancestry and race only. This causes a shudder of apprehension with its echoes of the fascist ideologies of the Thirties. Certainly, his immigration policies including banning citizens from certain Muslim countries and his strenuous efforts to deport millions of immigrants without due process; people he describes as a

‘threat’ (no proof needed) demonstrate isolationist and chauvinistic tendencies. He had, in his first term, withdrawn from international agreements like the Paris Climate Accord; the Iran Nuclear Deal thus strengthening the position of Iran in political and nuclear arenas; and the World Health Organisation. Despite Joe Biden’s attempts to cancel or reverse some of the worst Trump legislation, his, Trump’s, nationalistic rhetoric remains deeply embedded in U.S. policy and further, largely appeals to the extreme chauvinism and conservatism of swathes of American society.

Although Nationalists were established in power in Europe in the Thirties, they were not, in the U.S. But one powerful man, Senator Huey Long, Governor of Louisiana, a state he ruled as his own personal fiefdom, was immensely popular in the Thirties and would probably have made it to the Presidency had he not been fortuitously assassinated in time. Long’s devotees loved his economic populism and his slogan, “Share Our Wealth” appealed strongly to those who had lost their jobs and could not find a replacement; those whose wages had been eroded; those who felt lost out and left behind. Long went over the heads of the hated press, communicating directly with the voters through a medium he could completely control, his own private newspaper, The Louisiana Progress [founded March 1930]which he had delivered by the Highway Patrol. He forced State employees to subscribe and also to deliver copies and State agencies to buy advertising space. He stoked the fears of popular xenophobes; directed hostility to Roman Catholics from eastern Europe; and supported Lindbergh and his America First movement. All of this in the depths of America’s Great Depression.

Long’s personal abuse of his political opponents, often mocking recipients’ physical characteristics; his tirades targeting judges for whom he seemed to harbour a particular ire; his loud distrust of the press; all of this made for his widespread popularity and is reminscent of Trump now with his Truth Social and his massive political campaigns with current anti-Woke proclamations. Long’s hugely popular following and his xenophobic publicity do find strong echoes in Trump today with his policies aimed primarily at altering the demographic and social composition of the United States to favour conservative groups and traditional white populations.

The two periods provide very different contexts, however. Then, the Great Depression. Now, the huge power of technology and much greater global economic interdependence. Let us hope these differences will be critical. Interesting to note that Huey was stopped when he was murdered by the son-in-law of a judge, he had publicly reviled and whose dismissal he had engineered. The latest attempt on Trump’s life was unsuccessful but speaks of a similar anger and despair in some of the population.