Tara Zahra - Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars

AGAINST
THE WORLD

ANTI-GLOBALISM AND MASS POLITICS
BETWEEN THE WORLD WARS

Tara Zahra

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

Celebrating a Century of Independent Publishing

For Eloisa

IN 1946, HITLER YOUTH leader Baldur von Schirach testified at Nuremberg that Henry Fords book The International Jew was the decisive anti-Semitic book that inspired him and his Nazi friends in the 1920s. I read it and became an anti-Semite. Hitler famously singled out Ford for praise in Mein Kampf. In America, he argued, It is Jews who govern the stock exchange.... Every year makes them more and more the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty million; only a single great man, Ford, to their fury, still maintains full independence. In 1938, Ford accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from the Nazi government. He eventually became a member of the anti-Semitic America First Committee, which pressured the US government to stay out of the Second World War.

In Germany during the Second World War, the Cologne factory of the Ford Motor Company churned out military vehicles by use of slave labor from Eastern Europe. The shoe factories of the so-called Ford of Europe also served the German war effort. During and after the Second World War, the Bata Shoe Company would split three ways. The Nazis seized the companys factories in Eastern Europe and employed slave labor from concentration camps. After the war, that branch was seized again and nationalized by the Communists. Jan Bata barely escaped Europe and tried to shift operations to Belcamp, Maryland. In the process, however, he alienated President Franklin Delano Roosevelt by supporting a primary challenger in 1940 and refused to unambiguously condemn the Nazis or support the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. Bata also promoted a far-fetched scheme to move the entire population of Czechoslovakia to Patagonia. None of this won him the favor of the Allies or Czechs at home. He was blacklisted by the American government, convicted in absentia in postwar Czechoslovakia for collaboration, and narrowly escaped to Brazil, where he died in 1965.

Thomas Bata, the son of Tom, was far more successful. He emigrated to Canada and set up another Bata outpost there. The Canadian Bata immediately entered into the service of the Allies, fulfilling military contracts throughout the war. Thomas denounced the Nazis. He identified himself as a Canadian. He was rewarded for his efforts on behalf of the Allies with control of the vast majority of the Bata firms branches and wealth outside the Socialist Bloc. By 1962, Bata was producing and selling shoes in 79 countries and employed 80,000 people. As of 2022, many Indians would be surprised to learn that Bata is not an Indian firm; it remains the largest footwear retailer in India.

Ralph Borsodi continued to operate his School of Living until the death of his wife in 1948. He then embarked on a tour of Asia, inspired by Gandhis ideals of self-sufficiency and village industries, in search of what he called Asianism. He was disappointed. Today Asia has abandoned what Asia really has to offer the world, he lamented. Borsodi argued that the only real hope for Asia and the rest of the world was to adopt the neglected values of Old Asia; namely, the value of the family and village life. He moved to another homesteading community in Florida, where he fought desegregation, and then on to Exeter, New Hampshire, where he attempted to invent and circulate an inflation-proof village currency in the 1970s.

Shortly before Borsodis death in 1977, a reporter from the New York Times revisited the homesteading communities of Rockland County, New York. They had become affluent suburbs. They originally set out for the frontier; with dreams of establishing truly open communities, living off the land, attaining self-sufficiency, and blazing a trail for others to follow. Most of these dreams have been left behind. Living off the land inevitably came to nothing more than an occasional goat or chicken and a few abortive vegetable gardens. Resident Evelyn McGregor recalled, Borsodi had all sorts of plans on how we were going to

Borsodis role model, Gandhi, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize (for the fifth time) in 1948. After helping to lead India to independence, Gandhi protested the partition of India and Pakistan and the eruption of religious violence, undertaking several hunger strikes. He was assassinated in January 1948 by a Hindu nationalist before the prize was awarded.

The Indian national flag is still woven from khadi, which has enjoyed a renaissance among ethically conscious fashion designers and consumers in India. Vogue magazine reported in 2019, Once the stereotypical uniform of somber politicians and a symbol of self-reliance in Indias independence struggle, khadi is now the darling textile of Indias fashion houses, and is frequently spotted at pop-up shops, art biennales, and on runaways across the country. One designer explained, Khadi gave India economic freedom during the independence struggle, but today it gives environmental freedom. It is the call of the hour considering the ill effects of the synthetic textile industry. Ethics still come at a cost, however. This new generation of fashionable khadi is clearly aimed at a luxury market, as designers aim to transform a poor-mans cloth into glamorous ensembles.

The US Supreme Court decision that rendered Rosika Schwimmer stateless in 1929 was finally overturned in 1946. Alongside Gandhi, Schwimmer was also nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1948. But she died, still stateless, before learning that no prize was awarded.

In a world of falling prices, no stock has dropped more catastrophically than International Cooperation.

DOROTHY THOMPSON, 1931

THE ERA OF globalism was over.

Even committed internationalists have lost faith and join in the chorus of those who never sympathized with our ideals, and say internationalism has failed, despaired Mary Sheepshanks, a British feminist and internationalist. Although she was confident that the spirit of internationalism would return once the fumes cleared from mens brains, it had been replaced for the moment by race hatred and national jealousy, leading to tariffs, militarism, armaments, crushing taxation, restricted intercourse, mutual butchery, and the ruin of all progress.

The year was 1916. Hundreds of thousands of European boys and men were already dead, and nearly everyone was penning obituaries for internationalism. The fumes did not clear quickly. More than twenty-five years later, the Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig would publish his memoir, The World of Yesterday. It was a nostalgic eulogy for a lost era of globalism. Zweig, a self-described citizen of the world, recalled, Before 1914, the earth had belonged to all. People went where they wished and stayed as long as they pleased. There were no permits, no visas, and it always gives me pleasure to astonish the young by telling them that before 1914 I travelled from Europe to India and to America without passport and without ever having seen one. After the war,

In Britain, economist John Maynard Keynes penned his famous obituary for globalization shortly after the war ended. What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August, 1914! he wrote. In the golden age before the war, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep. It was an age in which the projects of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper. These looming threats appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of his social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice.