In early January 1931, Homer Coney, a middle-aged tenant farmer in the American state of Arkansas, was visited by a neighbour. She was a young mother and she told Coney that her children had not eaten for two days.
Having spent the winter huddled in a one-room shack, trying to keep his own family together on Red Cross rations, Coney snapped. He got into his truck, rallied his neighbours and led them to the nearby town of England. When he and about 500 hungry men began to harangue the mayor and the chief of police, word spread that a communist revolution was about to take place in rural Arkansas. Emergency rations were sent from the next town and the farmers were appeased. But America was deeply shaken.
If the conservative heartlands of the deep south seemed to be on the brink of hunger-driven upheaval, what might be about to happen in the tough frontiers of the teeming cities?
Yet, by the end of the 1930s, the notion that there might be violent upheaval anywhere and at any time had become commonplace. This was the decade in which the unimaginable became ordinary and the old norms of western liberalism became a fragile, tenuous vestige of a seemingly dead world. A new kind of politics, at once collective and insidious, invading both the streets and the darkest corners of the mind, took hold.
New forms of hatred, wildly irrational but meticulously organised, full both of self-aggrandisement and self-abasement, were brought into the world. As the accepted route into modernity - the steady advance of free-market capitalism - was blocked, other routes opened up. That they led, not to the promised land but to the abyss, was in the early part of the decade by no means clear. It may be that one of the reasons the 1930s was marked by a retreat into various forms of nationalism was that the decade began with a bitter experience of what it meant to live in a global marketplace. By the end of the 1920s, the USA had become, by a large margin, the world's greatest economic power: in 1929, it had 42 per cent of the world's total economic output. Most of the silk that Japan produced went to make stockings for the legs of American women. Most of Ghana's cocoa was consumed as bedtime comfort by the children of middle America.
It followed that a crisis in the US economy could not be contained to one country or even to one continent. When, after the Wall Street Crash of October 1929, US industrial production fell by a third in two years, the world prices of foodstuffs and raw materials tumbled, dragging the rest of the planet into a disastrous depression. World trade fell by 60 per cent between 1929 and 1932.
The slump ripped apart the bonds of loyalty that had tied the majority of working people to the free market capitalist system and the liberalism that was its political expression. The promise that those who worked hard would be rewarded with steadily rising standards of living was broken.
In most developed countries, between a quarter and a third of the workforce was unemployed. In Germany, an astonishing 44 per cent were out of work by 1933. Even when the global economy started to pick up after 1933, levels of unemployment remained extremely high for the rest of the decade. And this was at a time when only a minority had any form of social insurance to fall back on.
One consequence of these shocks was a huge rise in popular participation in radical political and social organisations. In 1930s alone, membership of the Nazi Party increased fivefold, to just over a million. Between late 1936 and late 1937, membership of the militant United Auto Workers trade union in the USA grew from 30,000 to over 400,000. Between 1935 and 1939, membership of the anti-colonial Congress Party in India grew from 60,000 to 1.5 million.
But, paradoxically, participation was often the beginning of the subjugation of the self to the will of a leader. The motto of the Nazi's SS - "Mein Ehre ist Treue" ("Honour lies in subordination") - summed up the appeal of the most potent new force, the radical Right.
As the liberal centre collapsed, politics shifted at once to the left and to the right. In the German election of mid-1932, the Communists and the Nazis between them polled an absolute majority of the vote. In the US and much of Latin America, the left gained ground. The Democratic Party enjoyed an extraordinary renaissance under the banner of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, almost doubling its vote and giving the US the most leftist government in its history. In Sweden, the radical Social Democrats began their long hold on power.
Even in Ireland, the election of Eamon de Valera's Fianna Fail represented, at least in terms of economic policy, a modest shift to the left. But elsewhere in Europe, the left was seriously weakened by the determination of the communist parties, under the direction of Moscow, to see their main enemies, not as the rising forces of the far right, but as the mainstream social democratic movements with whom they competed for leadership of the working-class and labour constituencies.
Eric Hobsbawn has estimated that in 1920 there were about 35 functioning liberal democracies but that in 1938 there were only about half that number. None of those democracies was overthrown by what was supposed to be the main threat to their existence - communist revolution. All of them were ousted by the forces of what was supposed to be conservatism. The damage was done either by the rise of militarist nationalism or by that new kind of movement, characterised by mass participation, street violence, populist rhetoric, adherence to a charismatic leader and reactionary mysticism, called fascism.
Though the lines dividing these strands of the radical right were often rather blurred, Salazar in Portugal, Franco in Spain and Dolfuss in Austria were of the first type, and Mussolini in Italy was the father of the second family of right-wing reactionaries. But both militarist nationalism and fascism produced new and much more virulent variants in Japan and Germany.
In each case, the element that was added to old-style repression was a deliberate and powerful manipulation of racist ideology.
The Japanese regime that came to power in 1930 added to the familiar ideology of military might, authoritarian command and colonial expansion a greatly heightened sense of racial superiority. It was not content, therefore, merely to invade and subdue Manchuria and China, but was bent, too, on sadism and enslavement. The organised orgy of murder, rape and torture directed against the civilian population of Nanking in 1937, claiming the lives of at least 200,000 people, showed what could happen when the slogans of racial superiority were translated into action.
Japan's brutal expansion was part of its determination to join the modern European world, and, right at the heart of civilised Europe, it had a perfect example to follow. The most destructive government in the history of the world had come to power. And, though its rise was rooted in the economic and social chaos of Germany, it was clear that rabid anti-Semitism was, at the very least, not a barrier to its progress.
Adolf Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, with the active assistance of the traditional rightwing parties, even though in the general election of the previous November, his vote had slipped from 37 to 33 per cent. Yet by March 1933, after the Nazis had begun to unleash violence against the Jews, the Nazi vote had risen to 44 per cent.
Hitler's anti-Semitism was much more than a cynical, populist stunt. Right from the start, the Nazis had proclaimed that "no Jew may be a member of the nation", a statement that logically implied the physical elimination of millions of Germans. And the anti-Jewish programme was given immediate priority. On April 1st, Hitler announced a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses. By early summer, signposts were erected at the limits of towns and cities with declarations like "Entry Forbidden to Jews". Widespread acts of violence and humiliation were sponsored by the new government. By September 1935, with the passage of the Nuremberg Laws stripping Jews of their citizenship and banning sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews, the separation of the Jews from the Volk, and therefore from humanity itself, had been encoded. And when, in November 1938, the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels unleashed what became known as Kristallnacht - the mass destruction of synagogues and Jewish property and the dispatch of 30,000 Jews to concentration camps - it was clear that Hitler intended to move, gradually but inexorably, towards the extermination of an entire people.
Elsewhere, the challenge to liberalism was all the more profound because, while the remaining democracies were still in a slump, authoritarianism seemed to be solving the basic economic problems. The Soviet Union under Stalin tripled its industrial output in the course of the decade. The Nazis created virtually full employment in five years. By 1939, Germany had not merely recovered to pre-slump levels of output, but surged 25 per cent above them. Political disturbance shaped almost everything, even public responses to sport and entertainment. The 1936 Olympic games in Berlin became, in effect, a symbolic war between the Nazi superman and the "inferior" peoples, with the great black American athlete Jesse Owens taking, not just four gold medals, but the pleasure of demonstrating the stupidity of such theories to the world. Likewise the titanic heavyweight boxing matches between the black American Joe Louis and the German Max Schmelling.
In the rising atmosphere of paranoia, Orson Welles's mockdocumentary radio adaptation of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds ("The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips") sparked an attempted mass evacuation of New York and New Jersey. Radio itself crackled with a new urgency as people around the world could hear, for the first time, live broadcasts of tumultuous political events.
Photography really took off as a vital medium, with images like Dorothea Lange's pictures of the great depression in America and Robert Capa's photographs of the Spanish Civil War conveying the immediacy of disaster in a much more personal way than ever before. Conversely, the Hollywood dream machine, fuelled by a desperate need to escape from the bitter realities of most people's lives, began its long dominance of world cinema.
There were dream machines outside the cinemas, too. Many decent people, appalled by both the social injustice of the capitalist democracies and the barbarism of the Nazis, desperately wanted to believe that the Soviet Union was the best hope of humanity. In reality, Stalin's headlong rush towards industrial modernity came at a terrible cost. Peasant resistance to Stalin's policy of enforced collectivisation pitched the Soviet Union into famine, and, through a combination of politically-induced hunger and mass repression, about 14 million people lost their lives.
The state apparatus developed, in parallel with the Nazis, new ways of combining terror with fantasy. But this reality was too painful for many in the west. Even the great sceptic George Bernard Shaw, visiting the Soviet Union in 1932, declared reports of starvation and repression to be "nonsense".
Sometimes, the mixture of hope and despair produced a kind of reckless, heroic idealism exemplified by the young men who left everything behind to fight fascism in the terrible Spanish Civil War. For many of them, it felt as if the millennium had arrived, not at the end of the century, but less than half way through. Not yet inured to the sheer scale of atrocity that the 20th century could invent, they imagined that evil could be defeated once and for all and that the shape of goodness, when it triumphed, would be clear and simple.
The Irish Times Book of the Century by Fintan O'Toole (Gill & Macmillan, £25)
