Cottonwood Connection

In War Time: The Years Between

Season 4 Episode 10 | 24m 59sVideo has Closed Captions

The years after World War I brought in the Roaring 20s, but set up the Great Depression.

Aired 05/19/2024

Cottonwood Connection

In War Time: The Years Between

Season 4 Episode 10 | 24m 59sVideo has Closed Captions

The years after World War I brought in the Roaring 20s, but set up the Great Depression.

The influence and aftermath of World War I may have ushered in the social and economic aspects of the Roaring 20s, but it also set the stage for the depression and Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

Aired 05/19/2024

Problems with Closed Captions? Closed Captioning Feedback

Cottonwood Connection is a local public television program presented by Smoky Hills PBS

Cottonwood Connection

In War Time: The Years Between

Season 4 Episode 10 | 24m 59sVideo has Closed Captions

The influence and aftermath of World War I may have ushered in the social and economic aspects of the Roaring 20s, but it also set the stage for the depression and Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

Aired 05/19/2024

Problems with Closed Captions? Closed Captioning Feedback

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[Music] With the conclusion of the Great War, the world faced numerous challenges, some of which would ultimately lead to a second field of conflict. This is episode two of our three-part series, "In Time of War, The Years Betold.

" [Music] Coming out of World War I, they'd seen all the mechanization during World War I. Tanks could move a lot faster than cavalry and have a lot more firepower. So I think there was kind of a trend there to get mechanized. They could plow with a tractor in one day what it used to take, you know, four days. Mechanization on the farm in the early 19th century was at a minimum.

A lot of what you were doing was manual labor.

But as we see engines becoming more prominent, then we start seeing the industrialization of farming as well.

And this impacts how much labor you need to actually do your farming.

This is connected with the war effort because as we lose labor on the farm to the war effort, we need ways to still be able to do food production. And so this was a major question that industry and science were coming together to solve.

But it has a flip side.

It has this unintended consequence that as we figured out how to meet the labor needs, then there wasn't the same amount of labor need when people from the war efforts start to come home.

And so we do start to see some population loss around World War I. And we start to see changes where local identities start to be introduced into more global contexts.

They'd had a taste of other people as far as dancing and entertainment in Europe.

And so that really got more popular although in pioneer days there were a lot of dances.

But I think the music changed and it had the big bands and stuff like that that were touring.

And part of that was also with the radio.

They were introduced to music from other places and stars.

It just wasn't Joe over the hill that could yodel.

It was somebody that could sing and do it well.

There were a lot more cars in Europe so people started getting cars.

Some people you know stuck to the horse and buggy through the 1920s.

But the young people, no, car was the thing to do.

They could go a lot of places and the cars also got bigger.

There were the touring cars.

It affected the United States big time.

Even the manufacturing got better from the mechanization.

It wasn't so much hard labor. And those were basically in the cities and people saw that Simultaneously we also see a lot of movement from from rural to urban.

And the war industry is a big driver of this. If you can make more money in the city, if you're getting better wages in the city, it's really hard to compete with that.

We also see that greater mechanization happening as well.

So the technological revolutions that occurred with any given war have effects on how we do farming. And all of this contributes to farmers needing fewer people to do the same amount of work. So you have these two different factors.

You have a pull factor of industry bringing people into the cities.

And then you have a push factor of farmers don't need as many hands anymore.

So there's just not as much work to be done.

We see this industrialization of the farm occurring.

And that definitely impacts small towns.

As far as farming in the 1920s, the prices went down steeply after World War I.

The demand for the grains, the small grains like wheat, oats, and stuff over in Europe had decreased because they could do their own farming. Domestically, there were overlapping crises that hit at the end of the war.

The first is an economic depression, not the one that comes from the stock market crash.

But in 1919, demobilization leads to a financial crisis in the US.

War industries had been selling things to Europe. All of a sudden, the last thing Europe needs is more ammunition, more artillery pieces.

And all of that industry now has to find new markets and retool to do new things.

Agriculture had been selling to Europe because Europe couldn't grow most of its own food.

All of a sudden, they can plant. So the price went down big time.

And so the farmers were used to the high prices, but they overproduced, especially after the war.

They still had these large machines.

And so they're still breaking out a lot of the lands in the 1920s to plant wheat, to plant more wheat.

Although the price was going down, you plant more wheat, you still had this income that you had to pay off your loans and your interests and stuff like that. So it was kind of a slump.

And so this went on throughout the 1920s, although the city life was pretty good and living was fairly well.

We're in a peacetime.

And then the depression of the 1930s hit.

In 1929, the American stock market crash creates a global depression.

European banks collapsed as American banks withdrew credit. And then both European states and the US respond by putting up increasingly high protectionist barriers, which strangles global trade.

But it cripples European economies, which were based on global trade.

Efforts by the German government to spark recovery fail, and Germany falls into increasingly deep levels of unemployment, exceeding 25% of the workforce by about 1931.

German democracy basically stops working because the extremes gain so much power.

Again, by 1931, half of Germany's parliament are Nazis or communists. Makes it very hard to run a democratic government.

For the US, it survives internationally.

The Americans were far less exposed to international trade.

Our problems were domestic.

400 million acres.

The Great Plains seemed inexhaustible.

Yet in 50 years, we turned a part of it into a dust bowl. We put too many cattle and sheep in it.

We granted homesteads of rangeland that never should have been plowed.

We tore up grass for war needs.

We invented new machinery, making it possible for one man cheaply to plow thousands of acres.

An unprecedented drought completed the havoc.

There was no grass left to hold the light soil against the high winds.

The dust bowl was very hard on the people and the land too.

And part of the reason of the dust bowl is what the soil scientists say is because so much land was broken out and in a dry period and the high winds that had done it had remained grasslands that the dust storms wouldn't have been as bad as it could.

But the 1930s were hard.

You hear stories from people in the 1930s who had taken an animal to the sale barn to sell because they didn't have any feed at home and they wouldn't sell it at the sale barn and they needed the money because nobody had money to pay it and nobody had any feed for it.

As a linguist, this is a period that I find fascinating because we still see some similar linguistic patterns in California that are tied to migration from this time period.

So, Kansan and Oklahoma accents that were established with the way people were talking between the wars show up in areas of California because of the extent of population loss.

The dirty 30s as it was known are the dust bowl years and the depression of the 1930s. People were moving out.

They went to find jobs towards the west, Oregon, Washington, California.

So when we think of that westward migration, there's a real sustained population loss. Sometimes, you know, double 75 percent of a single community would just be gone.

And so the people who stuck around were making a really big commitment to the land.

So the 30s were tough on everybody and people started leaving and that's where some of the government programs came up.

When Franklin Roosevelt assumed the presidency, nobody was sure what he was going to do.

He had been studiously vague in his election promises.

He effectively said, "I will try anything to beat the depression and if that doesn't work, I'll try something else."

He comes up with a whole series of new government programs.

Things like the WPA, the Works Project Administration, which builds infrastructure like bridges and roads, but also public buildings, sidewalks.

It funds art projects to get artists back into work.

They fund things like translating the foreign language press in the United States. And so he did things to give people money by giving them what he viewed as temporary government employment.

He also instituted something called the Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC, and it was based on work camps.

People, mainly men, would get hired to build things for the government, but small scale things.

Things like local irrigation projects.

Things that were designed generally to facilitate economic activity after they were built.

They built airports in rural places so that you could expand the air transport system to make shipping work better, to encourage the airline industry, and things like airplane production, and in Wichita as a result. A lot of people have heard that Wichita is the air capital of the world, and that really began before World War I.

Some of the very first airplanes designed and built in Kansas were starting to arise before World War I.

When the war was over, people came back.

It started picking up again.

There were several designers and builders that started companies in the U.S. And then it really got a boost when Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic.

That just set the whole country and Kansas on fire with what they called air mindedness.

Everybody wanted something to do with aviation, and it really accelerated.

The depression came along and stopped a lot of companies, but it didn't stop them all, and aviation continued.

The first airlines began arising between the wars, serving Kansas.

The Fokker Tri-Motor, the same folks that brought you the Fokker Tri-Plane, were now in the Netherlands building airliners, and those were used here in the U.S.

They were made of wood.

And the forerunner of Trans World Airlines, TWA, was serving Kansas from Kansas City.

Wichita stops all along, even in Topeka.

And that was fine until a wooden Fokker came apart in a thunderstorm and killed the famous football coach, Newt Rockne.

And people that drive the Kansas Turnpike always see the sign near Bazaar about the memorial to Newt Rockne.

That led to the end of the use of wooden airplanes in airline service.

And the Ford Tri-Motor shows up. It looks just almost like a Fokker Tri-Motor, only it's made of metal.

It's called the Tin Goose.

The airlines started picking up, even with the depression underway.

And a lot of that was because the government wanted to see airlines get going. And so they would subsidize them by hauling air mail. A lot of the WPA camps and CCC camps were primarily run as a military installation. Although you weren't in the military, there were officers or people that had served in the military and they liked the deal of the discipline and the people all dressing the same and eating in the barracks.

These camps were led by the military.

They were civilian.

The men were not in the army. But the Civilian Conservation Corps is an army run thing.

And it's actually treated like a preview of where we can create our cadre of soldiers.

We're training them, they're given military discipline, but they're also working for the good of the country and creating these projects here. This was divisive within the army.

Douglas MacArthur, who was technically in charge of the program, opposed it.

He viewed it as distracting the army from training for war and complained that it reduced combat readiness.

Meanwhile, someone like George Marshall thought it was a great thing for the army because one, for the army to be funded, you needed to beat the depression. But also, he thought this was a great opportunity to give reserve officers command experience. They're run by officers and they're run by officers who eventually get their stars during the Second World War.

Yes, they weren't commanding in battle, but they were still leading hundreds of men at a time.

They had to administer things and organize these camps.

Feeding the camps was a lot like logistics for a small army unit.

He said, "No, this is great.

Our officers are getting experience."

And a lot of these men are getting a form of military training and experience, not combat, but there's physical training as part of this. They're learning to work within a militarized system.

And so Marshall, prior to this time, even prior to his taking and becoming chief of the army, looks at Roosevelt's program, Civilian Conservation Corps.

And this is the army's thinking, this is a great way to create a cadre of ready soldiers.

Just in case, and looking at Europe, we're into the next war.

The interesting thing at Fort Riley is that you have so many far-reaching officers that come to the fore in the Second World War that are actually out here.

We have all this great grassland and we use it as training and we're trying out different methods of attack.

And one of my favorite guys is Major General Terry Allen.

He was a colonel here at Fort Riley before the war, and he's a cavalry guy.

41, 42, he becomes a major general and he is given command of the first infantry division, which is one of the first divisions to be overseas.

And that training that he had here was a cavalry guy, reconnaissance and things, and developed night fighting techniques. Very difficult to fight even in the Second World War at night, develops these techniques and then goes over and leads the division through North Africa and Sicily.

Hap Arnold, Henry Hap Arnold, he's out here in the 1920s.

He sees these biplanes out here and he's an air guy and he thinks, well, we could do air ground operations.

We can actually coordinate air power to fit ground operations and creating tactics that are going to be carried over into the Second World War.

We've got George Patton out here.

And George Patton's a horse guy.

He brings his polo ponies out here and he then has the ability in the cavalry school, both as a student and both as an instructor at the cavalry school, to try doctrine that hasn't been tried yet and to see if it works.

And so Fort Riley is actually, it's kind of that incubator for those general officers that really, really shine in World War II.

Everybody was supporting World War I and again the war to end all other wars is how it was advertised.

So people really behind it so there'd be peace on earth and maybe not goodwill towards men but peace on earth anyway by that and it only lasted a while.

By the 1920s things started to change in Europe and then on through in the 1930s with Hitler and his crew.

After two elections in 1932, both of which lead to the Nazi party being the largest party but not a majority.

But in the face of this and their refusal to work with anyone else unless they lead it, lead the government, German conservatives make a Faustian bargain with the Nazis in January 1933.

Hitler becomes chancellor, prime minister of Germany, but he will exploit German divisions and within a couple of months emerge effectively as Germany's dictator with powers to waive the constitution at will. Americans respond to this with a fair amount of unease.

Hitler is never popular in the United States but Americans view Europe as not their problem. Interestingly American views of the crisis in Asia are a little bit different as even in places like Kansas, sometimes especially because rural Kansas has strong connections to China in the 1930s because of the missionary movement.

Rural churches put a lot of time and money into supporting Christian missions abroad and ground zero for mission work in the 20s, 30s, and before that had been China. And so when Japan starts launching attacks against China in 1931 with the occupation of Manchuria, China has a lot of sympathy in Kansas and in a lot of places in the United States. That's where World War II really starts in China with the Marco Polo bridge incident in July 1937 and then Japan's invasion of Shanghai.

The breaking point is June of 1940 when the French army is defeated in battle.

It's hard to underestimate what a shock that was in 1940.

Up until it happened the French army was one of the most respected in the world. Remember it was the army that helped win American independence.

A French army was standing right next to Washington at Yorktown. The French army is the army of Napoleon.

It was the army that did the most to win World War I. It was one that it could be destroyed in six weeks.

And what if Britain surrendered? It wasn't a given that Churchill would choose to fight on and it wasn't a given that he would survive. Without France, what if Britain failed?

Germany could rule all of Europe and maybe the British and French empires, which included parts of North and South America and all of Africa and most of the Middle East.

The United States faced the gravest strategic crisis since the Civil War. And FDR used that to begin peeling back isolation.

He brought in two new measures. The first was conscription, the first peacetime draft in American history in 1940. In World War I, America enters the war with almost no army.

In April 1917, FDR knows he's going to need that army on day one.

If FDR had not brought in conscription, there wouldn't have been enough troops to protect Hawaii after Pearl Harbor.

The next thing he does is Lend/lease.

Britain can't afford to pay for everything they need to fight the Germans.

Neither can the Chinese. I ask this Congress for authority and for funds sufficient to manufactur additional munitions and war supplys of many kinds to be turned over to those nations which are now in actual war with aggressor nations our most usful and immediate is to act as an arsenal for them as well as for ourselves.

America became the arsenal democracy, providing aircraft, any kind of weapons, but especially aircraft to our allies.

And they were able to take delivery of the aircraft.

We lent them to them, lent the aircraft to them, and they were expected to pay for it if and when the war was over and things went their way economically.

And a lot of countries felt that America was the arsenal democracy and helped ensure the eventual defeat of the Axis powers.

So America entering the war is divided.

There's a strong isolationist sentiment, but FDR has begun mobilization in advance through conscription, through lend/lease, which lets him build up a war industry so that when the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, an FDR gets an overwhelming vote for war in the Congress. America is in a lot stronger position than it had been in 1917 or would have been in 1939.

Cottonwood Connection is a local public television program presented by Smoky Hills PBS