"Very interesting" if not somewhat simplistic, albeit given the space constraints still interesting.
Bear in mind that Wilson's nationalization of the railroads came after a series of boneheaded government decisions that wasted hundreds of millions of dollars back then (many billion now), but don't get me started on the USSB buffoonery, that by overspending came very close to ruining the whole economy; including in the fall of 1917 stacking almost every RR car in the country up to 2-300 miles back from the east coast ports (well past Pittsburgh in the case of Philadelphia) because they couldn't handle all the cargo the government was trying to jam through, partly because there weren't enough ships or cranes etc, even so the RR train engines out in the boonies had to keep running for the refrigerator cars to try to keep all the vast amounts of meat from rotting, assuming the engines could get the fuel (ie coal) to keep running, and largely failing of course.
Meanwhile the national economy began to shut down because there were hardly any RR trains left to move or deliver anything else in the rest of the country, especially the west, while the RR trains were stuck and unable to unload, so the country was almost paralyzed but because of government censorship and willing support from the major newspapers like the NYT etc, nobody knew about it or what had caused it.
This is when the patriotic RR unions chose to strike, and rather than negotiate rationally or intelligently, the government caved and gave the unions everything they wanted, even though that eventually hurt them because they didn't care about the new technologies already changing the industry or the long term effects of the strike ruining the RR industry through the '20's and 30's with all the featherbedding that kept new investors from bothering etc, and not becoming profitable again until the late 1970's (ie after OPEC's 73 quadrupling the price of oil), NTM having that question still on the IRS form; "Do you have a railroad pension?"
For some reason none of the centennial reviews or histories of WWI covered this and other examples of incredibly stupid [US] government management incompetence, nor was it much covered after the war, or the country might have objected to the stupidities of the new deal rather more strongly.
Lincoln was a far better war president than Wilson with his PhD etc, and his 2nd inaugural speech far more appropriate than Wilson's 14 point attempts to deny human nature etc, let alone that of nations, a typical progressive socialist attitude.
As for the great depression following WWI, it was more than ten years later, and had a host of causes quite unrelated to it.
Regardless of what the French Revolution publicly espoused, it was really about payback, not just of aristocrats but by lots of of the middle class against their neighbors, incidentally because the middle class was not an invention of the British or industrial revolution, predating it by thousands of years.
Rather the industrial revolution enabled the middle class to expand enormously, while reducing the royal/aristocratic control of the economy, compelling them to deal with the new power of so many richer citizens.
Thus almost all modern political movements in the last 3 centuries have started from the middle class, in part because they have more time for it and are more aware of the gap between their power and what they believe it should be, and perhaps more importantly with a better chance of success; though all the medieval peasant rebellions, and those around the world indicate how old aristocratic incompetence is and the lack of a successful revolution without the middle class's involvement.
You imply the dictators had wars simply because they had this excess war materiel lying around unused, which was hardly the case, though they were quite happy to get their desires by mere bluster if that was all it took to get France and Britain to cave.
Mussolini didn't build that much war materiel during the 20's and 30's, regardless of what he said, and what he did create was rather obsolete by June of 1940.
Hitler started later, but he had a far more industrialized country, and initially built a lot of WWI weapons, like the 40 year old G98 Mauser, still the army's primary weapon throughout WWII, along with far too much horse drawn artillery [75% still horse drawn in 1944] and supply wagons, using more horses in WWII than in WWI despite all the hype about the panzers and 'motorized' divisions.
Yes, WWI ruined the European established or state churches, because they had invested themselves in the war far too much, just as it ruined all the royal houses except Britain's.
Fascism, another form of socialism, actually had quite an inspiring ideology according to its proponents, indeed after WWII anyone in Germany appealing to people's better nature was often accused of being a Nazi, permitting all sorts of less than moral activity.
The Nazi party base was the lower middle class, whose party positions, modeled on the communist party's [like the neighborhood watch etc] enabled them to get their own back at their previously better off neighbors, just like the French revolution.
Yes, the German industrialists tried to protect themselves, but many if not most failed.
L
[quote="DMcCunney"][quote="PeterZ"]Recall that Woodrow Wilson nationalized the Railroads in the US and the regulated wages for the industry once the RRs were re-privatized. Was this policy an experiment in classic socialism or an impulse towards fascism? Both policies centralized political and economic control over elements of national wealth. How each policy executed control is different, but not the aggregation of control.[/quote]Wars tend to produce centralized control of economies, simply to orient them to war production, and that can happen on both sides of the fence. The question is what happens to the controls once the war is over and that sort of centralized planning isn't required.
An interesting volume to look at is Peter F. Drucker's "The End of Economic Man". It's actually his first book, and the original draft was written in 1933 when he still lived in Austria. He was trying to understand how totalitarian fascism could arise and succeed in Germany and Italy.
While he didn't use those terms, his answer was essentially "The old gods had failed."
Europe was a fundamentally Christian place, and Christianity had ideals of how the world should be and how people should behave. (See Max Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" and R. H. Tawney's "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism" for excellent discussions of the influence religion had on economic development.)
The French Revolution promoted the ideals of liberty and equality.
The Industrial Revolution in Britain provided the ideal of capitalism providing vastly increased production that would make everybody better off, and lessen the distinction between the extremely rich and the very poor by creating a middle class that was the next stage in economic development.
World War I put paid to the idea of liberty and equality as absolute monarchy reasserted itself.
The Great Depression following World War I put paid to the idea of capitalism providing partial economic equality.
For both Germany and Italy, though they expressed in an somewhat different forms, the purpose of Fascism was [i]full employment[/i]. They would get full employment by centralized government control of the economy, and putting the economy on a war footing, and producing war materiel. The problem with that, of course, is that at some point you have to [i]fight[/i] a war to justify doing it.
With the failure of the old ideals, the question was what new paradigms would replace them? Fascism explicitly [i]didn't[/i] provide a new ideal, and that lack proved ultimately fatal.
(And speaking of Fascism, See also Seymour Martin Lipset's "Political Man." Lipset was a sociologist analyzing politics. His contention was that Oligarchy was a system imposed from above, by a ruling class preserving its rule. Dictatorship was imposed from below, by a successful revolution of the poor against the rich, and designed to preserve and extend their power. Fascism was fundamentally a [i]middle class[/i] movement, supported by a group that saw itself squeezed between the existing rich industrial class and a rising and increasingly assertive proletariat seeks a larger piece of the pie. The true supporters of Fascism in Germany and Italy were middle class. The notion that the rich industrialists supported Hitler, for example, proves to be not really the case. They did what they thought was needed to preserve what they had and cooperated with the government, but many would have been far happier not having to.)
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[b]Dennis[/b][/quote]
