Born into iron and blood
The world my parents invited me to join nearly 80 years ago was different from ours in many respects. Fundamentally, though, it was remarkably similar.
No one put it better than the Irish poet, W. B. Yeats: The best lacked all conviction and the worst were full of passionate intensity. Germany’s new chancellor, Adolf Hitler, denounced the Versailles Treaty that provided for German disarmament. In Britain, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s cabinet responded by offering an agreement, seen as firm but conciliatory, that limited the size of the German fleet to 35 per cent of the Royal Navy. The AngloGerman naval pact of 1935, an early attempt at appeasement, was signed on June 18, three days after I was born.
The same month saw the Third Communist International or Comintern, the Kremlin’s long arm abroad, introduce the idea of the Popular Front. J.V. Stalin would permit his Communist comrades to participate in non-Communist but “progressive” — i.e., socialist-influenced — coalition governments. Liberals saw this, mistakenly, as Stalin’s compromise with ideological purity for the cause of anti-fascism. The Kremlin saw it, accurately, as an opportunity to infiltrate and subvert liberal democracies.
The swastika’s rise continued. A plebiscite in the Saar Basin showed nine out of 10 voters choosing reunion with Germany over union with France or continued rule by the League of Nations, which had been administering the industrial region since the end of the First World War. The League duly returned the Saar to Germany — which did not prevent Hitler from announcing seven months later, on October 14, that Germany was withdrawing from the League. Japan did likewise, having already announced that it would. Benito Mussolini made no announcement, but Italy invaded Abyssinia (now Ethiopia.) Il Duce’s troops occupied Emperor Haile Selassie’s provincial capital of Makale on November 8. Ten days later the league responded by imposing — guess what? — economic sanctions on Italy.
Before the first snows fell on Europe 80 years ago, half the world’s future combatants had in effect declared the League of Nations null and void. With unerring instincts, the League’s bureaucrats chose this moment to move into their new headquarters, a splendid white palace constructed for them in Geneva at the cost of $6 million (the equivalent of over $100 million dollars today).
Pierre Laval, then 51, formed a new cabinet in France. Laval had been a lawyer, a defender of left-wing causes, a pacifist, an ex-socialist deputy. The thought that 10 years later his countrymen would execute him for collaborating with the Nazis would not have crossed his mind. Actually, the thought that he would collaborate with the Nazis would probably not have crossed Laval’s mind in 1935.
Meeting in Nuremberg on September 15, the Nazi Party Congress enacted the Nuremberg Laws. The edicts deprived Jews of German citizenship, prohibited intermarriage, and made sexual intercourse between “Aryans” and Jews punishable by death. The new capital offense was called “racial pollution.”
On the other side of the Atlantic, the top news featured the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann for kidnapping the Lindbergh baby (Jan. 3); a tragic plane crash that took the lives of comedian Will Rogers and aviator Wiley Post (Aug. 15); and the assassination of Louisiana senator Huey Long (Sept. 8). European events still seemed far away.
A contemporary snapshot shows the first woman to fly solo from Oahu, Hawaii, to Oakland, Calif. Amelia Earhart is sitting on the running board of a Standard Oil fuel truck, wearing a brown jacket, a print scarf, and a pensive expression on her face.
On May 14 Americans played their first major league baseball game at night. The game in Cincinnati started by President Franklin Delano Roos- evelt pressing a button in Washington, D.C., which turned on 363 lights of 1,000 kilowatts each mounted on eight giant towers to illuminate Crosley Field. Exactly three months later, on Aug. 14, the U.S. Congress passed the Social Security Act. The era of bread and circuses, a.k.a. the New Deal, was in full swing.
Canada not only followed but extended the interventionist trend. Parliament established a Wheat Board with headquarters at Winnipeg, to handle barley, oat, and wheat exports. The board would tell farmers how much they could plant each year with a guarantee that the government would buy what they had planted.
The year of my birth was the year in which Persia became Iran by order of Reza Shah Pahlavi, who by then had been controlling the country for 10 years. China was just emerging from the latest conflict with its own Muslim population, the “Turki” Rebellion of 1932–1934. Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang had its foothold in Nanking; Mao Tse-Tung (as we spelled his name then) had just embarked with his ragtag Communist forces on the Long March. Merchants along Marco Polo’s old trade route knew that times would be ominous when the price of dried dragon’s eye rose to a Chinese dollar and twenty cents for half a catty.
Newly created Czechoslovakia’s first president, Thomas Masaryk, resigned at the age of 85, handing the succession to his foreign minister, Eduard Benes. Belfast saw anti-Catholic riots in July, followed by an early example of ethnic (or at least religious) cleansing, in which Northern Ireland expelled Catholic families, while Catholics in the Irish Free State retaliated in kind. In England, Lawrence of Arabia died in a motorcycle crash. Shortly before his death he wrote, “To have news value is to have a tin can tied to one’s tail.”
Moscow’s Metropol subway opened in May with 5.5 miles of track that would eventually grow to become a 105-mile system with more than 90 stations. Some stations were modelled after the great 19th-century U.S. railroad terminals with marble, magnificent murals, and chandeliers. Europe’s chattering classes talked about the showpiece; what they failed to note was Stalin’s decree of the same year making Soviet children above age 12 subject to the same punitive laws that applied to adults — eight years in a labour camp for stealing corn or potatoes, for instance, or five years for stealing cucumbers. The famine in Ukraine had eased, but scientific socialism still found it easier to build showcases in Moscow or labour camps in Siberia than to feed children in the countryside.
Some events foreshadowed why the West would triumph and the Soviet system collapse 56 years later. In Britain a Scottish physicist named Robert Alexander Watson-Watt set up the first radio detecting and ranging (radar) systems on behalf of Britain’s Government Radio Research Station. In America Pan Am Clipper flights provided the first hot meals to be served in the air. Alkali Division of Britain’s Imperial Chemical Industries developed polyethylene, the first true plastic. Meanwhile in the Soviet Union T.D. Lysenko, an agronomist who fancied that acquired characteristics could be inherited, called his scientific critics “Trotskyite bandits.” Stalin was pleased. “Bravo, comrade Lysenko, bravo,” the Great Leader said, making Lysenkoism the agricultural gospel of the Soviet Union. The agronomist gave Stalin scientific support for the supremacy of nurture over nature, the iron fist of the commissar over the invisible hand of the market. Lysenko’s theory implied that once people were brainwashed into Marxism-Leninism, their children would inherit MarxistLeninist genes. No wonder Stalin admired Lysenko.
The architect of modern Germany, Prince Otto von Bismarck, predicted that the great questions of the day would not be settled by speeches and majority votes but “by iron and blood.” Seventy-three years after the Iron Chancellor made this remark, Hitler created the Luftwaffe under the command of First World War ace Hermann Göring. The same year, President Roosevelt established America’s first independent air force under the command of Brig. Gen. Frank Maxwell Andrews. Dodging the armoured war birds flew the stork that calmly dropped me into this world. Iron was in plain sight; blood was soon to follow.