Upton Sinclair, Accidental Prognosticator

[peristaltor]

I'm right now a quarter-way through Upton Sinclair's second Lanny Budd novel, Between Two Worlds. This series is one he wrote through the eyes of a young man with manufacturing and political connections, an educated lad who sees the rise of Europe into the Great War and follows into the Second World War.

We're at 1922 in the story. Lanny and his friend attend one of the many conferences held by the victors in WWI to try to get the money the Versailles Treaty promised them— which, it should be noted, amounts to Germany literally owing the Allies more gold than has been mined from the earth in human history. The two see someone the Socialists in Italy revile, a traitor to their cause. The Socialists call him The Blessed Little Pouter. As they explain in the narrative, it's a play on his name: "Benito" means Blessed by God, and if you drop an S, "muso" means someone throwing a mild tantrum; "lini is a common diminutive.

A year passes. Lanny and his friend interview Mussolini, the Little Pouter. He has risen in prestige for some reason, and now commands early fascist thugs. After the interview, Lanny asks his friend if Mussolini can achieve the leadership role he seeks. His friend answers,

"He might…. But of course some other upstart would unhorse him in a few months."

(I truncated the sentence and emboldened the accidental prediction.)

Let's remember that Sinclair published Between Two Worlds in 1941, years before Mussolini was unhorsed.

Well, partially unhorsed.

Comments

[nojay]

The Versailles Treaty demanded five billion gold marks in reparations from Germany, the instigators of WW1. This, oddly enough, was the exact sum the victorious Prussians demanded (and got) from France after winning the war of 1871. Receiving that sum over a few years caused a disastrous deflation and depression in Prussia based on speculation and land price rises. That sum of five billion gold marks was demanded by the Prussians because that was the exact sum Napoleon Bonaparte demanded of them when he conquered Prussia in the early 1800s. There's history between France and Germany...

Five billion gold marks is about $350 billion in today's money, allowing for inflation.

[peristaltor]

Yup. France, however, also demanded some drastic additions to the mere gold, according to Keynes' Economic Consequences of Peace and these Sinclair novels. Almost all the rolling stock in Germany's rail, 40% or so of its merchant fleet, and a bunch more. Were Germany to pay the reparations and turn over its productive industry…. More wealth than ever dug up.

The Weimar Government hyperinflated its currency deliberately (according to Mark Blyth; something about the Ruhr Valley paying French workers), but that was solved by '23.

That Franco-Prussian War must have been a bitch.

[nojay]

Railways had become a major logistics factor in warfare by the American Civil War and I've seen claims that WW1 was made inevitable by railway timetables -- once the trains were diverted to start moving troops to the front lines they couldn't be stopped as it was an obvious marker of intent and the Other Side would immediately start doing the same thing. Taking away their trains would cripple that capability. It's part of why the Germans went in for autobahn building in the 1930s... However it doesn't take long to build new rolling stock and the replacements were better than the pre-war trains that were confiscated.

Part of the intent of the Versailles Treaty was to defang the German's capability to produce war-making materiel and that meant taking away their heavy industry and its energy supply, the Ruhr coalmines. The problem with THAT idea was that it wasn't difficult to replace that heavy industry, just like the trains and the replacements were new, better and more efficient than the obsolescent twenty and thirty-year-old machinery the victors tried to claim.

After WWII the victors again considered reducing Germany to a rural second-world economy but the Americans needed a bulwark against Communism in Europe so instead West Germany got turned into an armed camp pointed at Moscow (the dream of every Western conqueror since Napoleon) with the implicit promise that if the Germans got uppity again they would be glassed next time. The Soviets in their turn developed the Warsaw Pact as a buffer against what they saw as the next inevitable attack to come out of Western Europe.