The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s

Dates Covered: 1917 - 1941
ISBN: 0375408819
HH Rating:

Our Take

This book's subtitle is "A Panorama of the 1930s", and a little art history here will illustrate exactly what that means. Panoramas were 360 degree paintings invented by itinerant painter Robert Baker in the eighteenth century. The point was that you'd walk inside, and sort of turn around this circular painting, and take in the whole scene. By the 1800s these things were fifty feet high and 300 feet long.

Brendon has put forth a similarly heroic effort in The Dark Valley. To accurately depict what was going on in the years preceding and including the 1930s, he puts forth detailed pictures, political, economic, and social, of Britain, China, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, the USSR, and the United States. There's a well-described cast of hundreds, and while Brendon does an excellent job exploring the motivations and actions of the major players, he shines in providing intimate details and quirks of their behavior. Who knew that Calvin Coolidge's speeches were so predictable that James Thurber could report on them without bothering to hear them, or that Mussolini considered banning pasta from Italy because it made the Italian people "heavy, brutish ... slow and pessimistic"?

By revealing these details, Brendon paints a far richer picture than might be expected of one trying to integrate so many nations and political and economic movements. Can one really expect lucid explanations of both Japan's actions in Manchuria and the social orgy that was 1920s Berlin in the same volume? How about a thorough examination of the Soviet diet following Stalin's rape of the Eurasian breadbasket, or the revelation that, in an effort to curb too much drinking, France's Minister of Agriculture announced that red wine was a cure for alcoholism? Indeed, so meticulous are the strokes Brendon paints one is almost at a loss to step back and see the decade in its expansive terror and glory.

In so apprehending, one is stricken by the inexorability of the slide of all of these countries and movements into the dark days of World War II, and how each nation's unique trouble and failings commingle with all the others. Loss in the faith of the Church required Pope Pius XI to get in cahoots with Mussolini. As Fascism rose, Hitler and Stalin learned its lessons of control and wielded them heavily on their own states, which weren't always friendly to religion. Each nation, challenged with economic troubles, responded in different ways, and Brendon's exhaustive rendering of the varied factors that led to these responses makes them almost predetermined. Each individual country suffered from a variety of economic or natural disasters; sometimes both, that started roughly at the end of World War I and propelled them headlong into World War II. Germany might well have been first in line in the economic ills department.

In 1923, Germany's finances were doomed. Inflation exploded; by November of that year the exchange rate was somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,200,000,000,000 marks to the dollar. Brendon writes,

Eventually, stacks of cash were not counted at all but weighed or measured with a ruler. Life was turned into a bizarre paperchase. Patrons of restaurants found their meals becoming more expensive as they ate. Factory workers saw their wages shrinking in value as they queued up to collect them ... beggars rejected anything less than a million marks ...Bureaucrats in the Finance Ministry took part of their salaries in potatoes.

It was ugly. One of our German grandmothers recalls getting paid twice daily; once at midday with a short break to sprint to the store in an effort to outrun the prices, and once in the evening, when the value of one's workday had changed.

Indeed, such crises, coupled with the humiliation of paying war reparations to France (the German government abetted inflation to reduce its own payments), anti-Semitism flourished and the people thirsted for decisive action from anybody. We all know what happened next.

Likewise, Stalin was able to exploit similar nationalistic feelings first wrought by Lenin. Brendon treats the reader to Lenin's fate:

...the embalmers sometimes got drunk on the 96 per cent proof spirit used in the preservation process ...To foreign journalists they nervously demonstrated the contuining elasticity of [Lenin's] flesh, pinching the cheeks and tweaking the nose. Plainly Lenin possessed enough e'lan vital to defy rigor mortis.

Standing on Lenin's platform, Stalin launched a campaign to remove the legions of peasants in the nation who were actually doing well, called kulaks, in order to produce a classless society (one of Stalin's minions remarked, "We are fond of describing any peasant who has enough to eat as a kulak,"), by systematic, brutal persecution. Stalin required that his heretofore backward countrymen leap up to match, even exceed, the educational level and economic output of the Europeans, and he did so by working everybody to death. Brendon harrowingly describes the working conditions in a variety of Soviet industries, and memorably touches that ironclad theme that the Soviets (and the Russians) often pay for their advances in blood: "Ill-clad, half-starved and inadequately equipped, the workers were pitilessly sacrificed to the work ...They lacked the tools and the skill to weld metal on rickety scaffolding 100 feet high in temperatures of -50 degrees Fahrenheit." Fortunately for Stalin, the USSR was rich in expendable human capital in the Thirties.

Things were no better for Japan. It was recovering from its own economic crisis, brought about by a massive earthquake that leveled Yokohama and Tokyo in 1923. Such a leveling also brought about a massive influx of things Western (Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel "triumphantly survived, though the floor of its banqueting hall dropped two feet") and a predictable nationalist backlash. This led to an invasion of Manchuria, among other, dark, unpleasant things. Brenden accompanies a Japanese waltz through Shanghai with startling statistics of the decadent city's demographics:

Shanghai contained more prostitutes per head of population than any other city on earth: one in 130, compared to one in 250 for Tokyo, one in 481 for Paris, one in 580 for Berlin and one in 960 for London. There were 1,500 opium dens and the crime rate was twelve times higher than that of Chicago; visiting policemen from the Windy City begged to be allowed to "go home".

While all of this is going on, FDR is working the New Deal, Britain is dealing with a would-be Mussolini, France is pathetically twiddling its fingers, and each episode receives similar amounts of sweeping, majestic detail. There's also the Spanish Civil War thrown in to boot, and Stalin's later political purges, wherein everyone was either an informer for the state or dead. As the book continues, the author's sense of dread grows palpable in the material he selects.

As Brendon writes of the different crises encountered by the various countries and the dissatisfaction of their peoples, one gets the sense that they're all in the same bathtub heading towards the same drain, even as disparate personal experiences color and mottle the collective presentation. There almost seems to be a disconnection between the common folk and the political forces that drag them to and fro, as if a collective will supersedes the individual desires of people in it or politicians outside it. In the Dark Valley, Brendon manages to paint a vista of enormous complexity and direction inexorable, and somehow conveys the feeling that history is propelled by forces greater than the sum of its parts. It's a familiar (and, in many ways, accurate) thesis, but rarely do such details and erudition argue it so eloquently. It's a desert island book, for sure.

Read More at Amazon.com

Discuss this book in our forums