Looking back to 1924, with the benefit of hindsight

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/01/2024 (674 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As the adage goes, “hindsight is 20-20.” Often understanding the true historical significance of a person or event, and seeing how issues and actions are connected over time, requires years, even decades, of perspective.

People who lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s, for example, knew that they were experiencing an unprecedented economic turmoil. But preoccupied as they were with their daily struggles to survive, they did not comprehend how these economic hardships would influence all aspects of society and life across the world.

Similarly, it will be years before the long-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic or the coming 2024 U.S. presidential election will be fully realized.

With the benefit of hindsight and historical scholarship, we can trace the origins of the Second World War to the outcome and ramifications of the end of the First World War in 1918 (and even earlier than that) and key decisions that were imposed at the Paris peace talks in 1919.

Yet, 100 years ago, in the political and economic tumult caused by the aftermath of the First World War, it was not as clear who would influence future world events, good or bad, and which events would be historically consequential.

In early 1924, three political personalities were mentioned in western news stories, two of whom were to impact the 20th century in profound and tragic ways that was not wholly perceived at the time.

Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler each captured the world’s attention, though to different degrees. Had you asked a journalist or academic of the day who among the three was most likely to leave their mark on world history, they almost certainly would have said it would have been Mussolini.

A century later, Mussolini is remembered as a brutal dictator, a bit of a buffoon and an underling in his relations with Hitler.

Yet in 1924, he was the prime minister of Italy. He had first come to prominence in 1921 as the head of a national fascist organization and then a year later used the threat of violence to compel King Victor Emmanuel II to appoint him head of the government. By early January 1925, he declared himself dictator of Italy and was seen as one of the most influential and dangerous authoritarian leaders in the world.

On January 21, 1924, the death of Vladimir Lenin, the head of the Bolsheviks who had led the Russian Revolution in 1917 and established the Soviet Union, propelled Stalin’s career and power, though it was a gradual evolution. Stalin had been mentored by Lenin as a revolutionary agitator and by 1922 had become a key member of the Central Committee of the ruling Communist Party.

By all accounts, Lenin would have preferred that Leon Trotsky, a brilliant ideologue and superb organizer, succeeded him.

Yet, Stalin, who grew to detest and fear Trotsky — in 1940, Stalin ordered Trotsky’s gruesome assassination while he was exiled in Mexico — bided his time and outmanoeuvred him and other leadership rivals.

While Stalin was less frequently mentioned in news stories in the western press in early 1924 than Mussolini or Hitler, within five years, he became the supreme leader of the party and the Soviet Union and would remain so until his death in 1953. His reign of terror knew no bounds and he was responsible for the deaths of millions of people.

In the spring of 1924, Hitler’s leadership of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (or Nazi by its German acronym), then an extremist fringe party, seemed to be over, or at least stalled. Tellingly referred to as the “German Mussolini,” at the age of 34 he had a cult-like following — especially among young students — who found him charismatic and were mesmerized by his oratorical skills. According to German scholar Detlev Clemens, other political observers in Germany considered him a “dangerous demagogue with a touch of megalomania and insanity.”

Hitler detested the leaders of the Weimar constitutional republic formed in the wake of Germany’s defeat in the First World War, and blamed Jews and Communists, among others, for Germany’s humiliating downfall.

In November of 1923, he led a failed and poorly planned putsch (or coup) in Munich with then intent of overthrowing the Bavarian government. During a gun battle with the police, Hitler was nearly killed. “Had the bullet…been a foot to the right,” his biographer Ian Kershaw writes, “history would have taken a different course.”

Instead, Hitler was arrested, tried for treason and given a five-year prison sentence, of which he served about nine months.

While incarcerated he wrote (or more accurately dictated) his propaganda tract, Mein Kampf, the story of his so-called “struggle” to find his place in the world. There was no indication that by 1933 he would be the chancellor of Germany; indeed, the idea would have been regarded as highly unlikely, if not preposterous.

The popular Austrian writer Stefan Zweig who witnessed the rise of Nazism, later remarked, that in the early 1920s, “the swastikas and stormtroopers disappeared, and the name of Adolf Hitler fell back almost into oblivion. Nobody thought of him any longer as a possible in terms of power.”

Zweig was so very wrong. But, of course, he did not have the benefit of hindsight.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.