Urban War

In the end, it would take the approach of World War II, with its demand for the materials of strife, to end the Great Depression. But years before the United States entered that war, another, different kind of combat was being waged on the streets of the nation’s cities. Prohibition had spawned a gangster culture in the 1920s, which many Americans found colorful, almost romantic. After all, the urban outlaws supplied the public with the good times that government denied them.

Then came St. Valentine’s Day, 1929, the day Al Capone decided to eliminate rival Chicago gangland leader “Bugs” Moran. Capone dispatched gunmen, disguised as policemen, who rounded up seven members of the gang, stood them up against the wall of Moran’s commercial garage, and brutally executed them with Tommy guns. (Moran himself wasn’t present and escaped assassination.) Mobsters had been rubbing one another out for years, but the blatant butchery of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre finally outraged the public. Capone and other gangsters were no longer viewed as Robin Hoods, but as cold-blooded murderers. Yet, as gangsters became more viciously violent, they also became increasingly organized.

In the same year as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Capone proposed to the gang leaders of New York and other cities that they meet to organize crime throughout the United States. The meeting took place in Atlantic City and included such underworld luminaries as Lucky Luciano, Joe Adonis, Alberto Anastasia, Frank Costello, and Meyer Lansky. The national crime Syndicate was born, consolidating nationwide gambling, prostitution, extortion, and liquor trafficking. After 1933, when the 18th Amendment was repealed, thereby ending Prohibition, the Syndicate began to enter the trade in narcotics, hoping it would replace booze as the public’s illicit substance of choice.

The economic conditions of the 1930s produced at least two durable legacies into American life: one, a federal government that takes an active role in the welfare of its citizens (even today, when many conservative politicians clamor to slash “welfare budgets,” few are foolhardy enough to suggest reducing the Social Security program) and two, organized crime.

A New War

The Great Depression brought the United States close to the brink of revolution, but a deeply ingrained tradition of democratic capitalism, combined with FDR’s ability to restore and maintain faith in the government, averted a violent breakdown. In Europe, also hard hit by the Depression, the people of Italy and Germany hungered not for democracy, but for the strongman leadership promised by a journalist named Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) and a failed artist, sometimes house painter, and full-time political agitator named Adolf Hitler (1889-1945). Exhausted humanity had assumed that the horrors of World War I, combined with the peaceful prosperity of the 1920s, guaranteed the permanent rise of international stability and liberal constitutionalism. But Germany, crippled by the harsh conditions of the Versailles treaty, was robbed of postwar prosperity. Then the Depression drove its people to desperation. In Germany and Italy, militaristic authoritarianism burst into iron blossom with promises of a return to national glory and national prosperity.

Europe Darkens, Then Dies

In Germany, Hitler and his Nazi party won a popular following that propelled him to the position of chancellor under the aged and infirm President Paul von Hindenberg and into absolute dictatorship after Hindenberg’s death in 1934. Hitler took Germany out of the League of Nations in 1933 and, in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, initiated a massive rearmament program. In 1936, the dictator sent troops into the Rhineland, which had been demilitarized by the Versailles treaty. The League of Nations stood by helplessly, as did the Allies of World War I. Indeed, one of those erstwhile Allies, Italy, openly sided with Nazi Germany. Seeking an easy foreign conquest to solidify popular support, Benito Mussolini, like some monstrous incarnation of a schoolyard bully, sent Italy’s modern army into Africa against Ethiopians who were armed chiefly with spears. Ethiopia collapsed by 1936, and although the nation’s emperor, Haile Salassie (1892-1975), appealed to the League of Nations with great dignity and eloquence, the world body, once again, proved impotent.

Hard on the heels of the Italian conquest of Ethiopia came the Spanish Civil War (193-639), a complex struggle between factions allied with the nation’s liberal-leftist republican government and Fascist-sympathizing rightists led primarily by General Francisco Franco (1892-1975). Hitler and Mussolini eagerly sent military aid to Franco, and Hitler’s Luftwaffe (air force) in particular used Spanish towns as practice targets in preparation for the greater conflict looming on the dark horizon. While Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) gave military equipment to the Spanish republicans, the United States, Britain, and France—fearing the outbreak of a general war—remained neutral.

Their reluctance was as understandable as it was tragic. After all, in 1914, a tangle of alliances had escalated a local Balkans war into a conflagration that engulfed the world. Yet while the former Allies waffled and waited, Germany and Italy forged the Rome-Berlin Axis in 1936. That same year, in Asia, the Empire of Japan concluded the Anti-Comintern Pact (an alliance against Communism) with Germany; in 1937, Italy signed on to the pact as well. The following year, 1938, Hitler invaded Austria and annexed it to his Third Reich. The year 1938 also saw Hitler’s demand that the Sudetenland—western Czechoslovakia, where many ethnic Germans lived—be joined to the Reich. France and Britain were bound by treaty to defend the territorial integrity of Czechoslovakia, but they nevertheless yielded the Sudetenland to Germany in an effort to “appease” Hitler. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain told the world that the cession of the Sudetenland (the Munich Agreement) insured “peace in our time.”

He was wrong. In 1939, Hitler seized the rest of Czechoslovakia, then took a part of Lithuania and prepared to gobble up the so-called Polish Corridor, a narrow strip of land that separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany. At this time, Mussolini’s Italy annexed Albania. Finally, on September 1, 1939, Germany invaded—and crushed—Poland. France and Britain could no longer stand by. World War II had begun.

Infamy at Pearl

While American eyes focused nervously on Europe, Asia was heating to the point of crisis. Despite a 1922 pledge to respect China’s territorial integrity, Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 and established the puppet state of Manchuko the following year. The League of Nations protested, resulting in nothing more than Japan’s withdrawal from the organization in 1933. By 1, 93 7, Japan and China were engaged in full-scale war. On September 27, 1940, Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Italy and Germany, thereby creating the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis.

Although it remained officially neutral, the United States, guided by Roosevelt, edged closer to war. The sale of military supplies was authorized, and then, in March 1941, Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act, permitting the shipment of material to nations whose defense was considered vital to U.S. security—Great Britain and, later, China and the U.S.S.R. In September 1940, the first peacetime draft law in U.S. history had been passed, authorizing the registration of 17 million men. In August and September 1941, U.S. merchant vessels were armed for self-defense. The powder was packed in the keg. All it took was a flame for the war to explode upon America.