Who Flew?

The two pilots tasked with the ambitious journey were General Sir Helperus Andreas “Pierre” van Ryneveld and Air Vice Marshal Sir Christopher Joseph Quintin “Flossie” Brand. Both men were highly decorated military veterans and had lengthy aviation experience that made them uniquely suited for the expedition. Pierre and Flossie were each highly decorated earning awards such as the Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE), the Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB), the Distinguished Service Award (DSO), and the Military Cross (MC) during their careers. After their successful flight each man was officially knighted by the British Empire. 

General Sir Helperus Andreas van Ryneveld (aka Pierre van Ryneveld)

Despite Pierre van Ryneveld’s impressive military career, he is most notably known for the trans-African flight. During the first world war Pierre originally served as a part of the North Lancashire Regiment before he transferred to the Royal Flying Corp, and then to the Royal Air Force. After the war, and in addition to his other awards Pierre was given the Chevalier of Legion of Honor by the French government. Part of the reason Pierre was chosen to take on such an ambitious flight was to establish the first South African Air Force (SAAF) on behalf of the British government. Following the success of the flight Pierre established the SAAF and became the director of such until 1933, after which he became the Chief General Staff until his retirement in 1949. 

Air Vice Marshal Sir Christopher Joseph Quintin Brand (aka Flossie)

Commonly referred to as Quintin Brand or Flossie, although did not begin his career within the air force he still managed to accumulate an impressive career. Originally Flossie joined the CID Inspectors Unit (Criminal Investigation Department) in Johannesburg, and only a few years later in 1913 he joined the South African Defense Force, which included the air force at the time. In 1915 Flossie traveled to England to join England’s Royal Flying Corps, and earned several medals of honor which also included the Distinguishable Service Order. After his successful flight to Cape Town, Flossie continued his military career during the second world war and was made a commanding officer with several different air force regiments. 

Jan Smuts
Although Smuts did not personally take to the sky, he was a significant driving force behind the financial and political support for the flight. Before becoming one of the more influential prime ministers of his era, Smuts was a decorated military officer, statesman and philosopher. He took office as the prime minister of the Union of South Africa between 1919-1924 and 1939-1948. His government fueled a large majority of expeditions, and viewed it as a technological opportunity and as a symbolic gesture to link South Africa to the British Empire. 

Reasons for Flight

The origins of the flight were rooted in both competition and imperial ambition. One contemporary report suggested that The Times of London had offered a £10,000 prize for the fastest flight from London to Cape Town. Smuts, eager to demonstrate South Africa’s modernity and its place within the British imperial network, authorized the purchase of the Vickers Vimy for £4,500 and selected Pierre and Flossie to undertake the mission. However several other accounts emphasize the fact that Pierre was also tasked with establishing the South African Air Force after landing in Cape Town.

The only reason the flight was deemed feasible was because of the significant innovation made in aviation technology during the first world war. Such innovations included advancements in propellers, engines and turbines which allowed for longer flight times and more stability while in flight.  

Innovations in Aviation

Although the first world war resulted in mass casualties, violence, and the collapse of several empires, it also provided the world with several innovations in technology. Despite the fact that many of these innovations were a part of destructive machines and weaponry, there were several other developments made that greatly improved modern life. Such as innovations made within aviation. These improvements included the modernization of communication between pilots and those on the ground, within the early years of the first world war these communications mainly occurred through Morse code, however by the end of the war radiotelephone communication made it easier, faster and clearer to communicate. Additionally innovations were made so that planes were able to endure more types of weather conditions, as well as allowed pilots to fly for long times and distances. The installation of oxygen systems allowed for the long-range flights, and several German pioneers created liquid-oxygen systems for extended altitude missions. The development of the Gyroscopic instruments enabled safer night and cloud-covered flights. Several other innovations in engines and propellers, as well as in the very design of aircrafts themselves made flight, and especially long-distance flights more possible. Without these modernizations in aircraft the first trans-African flight would have never occurred, and it’s likely that modern flight would have been different than what many know today. 

The Events of the Flight

The journey itself began on February 4th  1920, when Pierre and Flossie departed from Brooklands in the United Kingdom. They aimed to reach Cape Town, completing a direct air route that had never before been achieved. Their arrival on March 20th 1920 marked the end of a 45‑day odyssey that included multiple crashes, mechanical failures, and aircraft changes. 
The original Vickers Vimy, named The Silver Queen, was forced to land in Wadi Halfa after crossing the Mediterranean and was ultimately deemed beyond repair. A second Vimy, The Silver Queen II, carried them from Cairo until a crash in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) on March 5th-6th. The final leg of the journey was completed in an Airco DH.9, renamed The Voortrekker, provided by the South African government. In total, the flight required 109 hours and 30 minutes of actual flying time. In May of 1920, both aviators were knighted for their achievement. 

The map below is interactive, and details the flight path taken by Pierre and Flossie, the purple pins are confirmed stops within official reports and the blue pins illustrates the flight path Leo Walmsley detailed in his report from March 1920.

Public Reactions

There were several different reactions to the success of the first trans-African flight. Although the majority of the public, both in London and in South Africa, had very positive and hopeful reactions there were also several groups of people who reacted negatively to the flight’s success. 

The divided reactions between populations revealed deeper political and social tensions within Africa, and especially within South Africa and Cape Town. The public’s reactions were sharply drawn by racial and social differences that were already deeply rooted within their society.  For the better half of a century South Africa, and especially Cape Town was colonized by Britain, therefore it’s unsurprising a large population of white people lived within the settlements. The majority of this population was very proud of this achievement, since it not only demonstrated Western superiority in aircraft technology but it also connected the British Empire in ways never before seen. This reaffirmed their connections to their home country. Simultaneously these triumphant feelings exposed racial anxieties of the white population who felt political unrest and resistance from black South Africans even before the flight. The celebration of the flight thus became entangled with efforts to assert control and reinforce racial hierarchies. 
 On the contrary the native and black populations of the settlements often viewed and met the success of the flight with much skepticism and even indifference. Rather than the flight symbolizing progress, it represented a deepening entrenchment of imperial power and the strengthening of settler authority. The aircraft itself, descending from the sky, and bearing the symbols of the empire, became a metaphor for the technological and political imbalances that defined colonial rule. In this sense, the flight encapsulated the contradictions of the early 20th century: extraordinary technological innovation paired with profound social inequality. 

How this reflects themes of the 1920s

The significance of the 1920 trans‑African flight extended far beyond its technical accomplishment. It demonstrated the rapid advances in aviation technology that had emerged from the First World War and showcased the growing ability of aircraft to shrink imperial space. Before this moment, travel between Britain and South Africa required long sea voyages along the western coast of Africa. The flight symbolically collapsed this distance, reinforcing the idea that the empire could be connected through modern technology. It also positioned Britain, and by extension its dominions, as leaders in global aviation. The flight also stands as a representation of the broader themes of the early 1900s and the 1920s in particular. It highlights the transformative impact of wartime technological development, the imperial ambitions of Britain and its dominions, and the racial tensions that shaped South African society. It was both a triumph of engineering and a reminder of the unequal world in which such triumphs were celebrated. 

Conclusion

The 1920 trans‑African flight ultimately stands as far more than a remarkable feat of early aviation. It was a moment in which the technological momentum generated by the First World War collided with the political ambitions of the empire and the deeply hierarchical social realities of South Africa. Pierre van Ryneveld and Quintin Brand’s journey demonstrated how wartime innovations which included stronger engines, improved communications, oxygen systems, and more reliable aircraft designs, had transformed the possibilities of flight, shrinking imperial space and redefining the limits of human mobility. Yet the public responses to their achievement revealed that technological progress did not translate into social unity. Instead, the flight exposed the fractures within South African society: the pride and imperial enthusiasm of white settlers contrasted sharply with the skepticism and apprehension of Black Africans who saw the event as another symbol of entrenched colonial power. In this way, the Silver Queen expedition encapsulated the contradictions of the early twentieth century, an era marked by extraordinary innovation alongside profound inequality. By tracing the story of this flight, its origins, and its reception, we gain insight not only into the development of modern aviation but also into the contested meanings of “progress” in a world still shaped by empire, race, and the legacies of war.

Citations

• Barker, Ralph. “A Brief History of the Royal Flying Corps in World War I : Barker, Ralph, 1917- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” Internet Archive, 2022, archive.org/details/briefhistoryofro0000bark/page/n5/mode/2up. 
• Barns, T. Alexander. “A Trans-African Expedition.” Journal of the Royal African Society, vol. 24, no. 96, 1925, pp. 272–86. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/716208. 
• Biddle, Tami Davis. “AIR POWER THEORY: AN ANALYTICAL NARRATIVE FROM THE FIRST WORLD WAR TO THE PRESENT.” VOLUME I: THEORY OF WAR AND STRATEGY, edited by J. Boone Bartholomees, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, 2010, pp. 279–310. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep12114.23. Accessed 2 May 2026.
• DEDERING, TILMAN. “Blue Skies into White Space: Southern African Responses to the Trans-African Flight of the Silver Queen, 1920.” Technology and Culture, vol. 59, no. 2, 2018, pp. 289–312. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26804414. 
• Filby, A. E. “A New Trans-African Route.” The Geographical Journal, vol. 93, no. 5, 1939, pp. 419–24. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1788712. Accessed 1 Apr. 2026.
• Gazette, London. ““The London Gazette” Issue 31900.” The Gazette Official Public Record, 14 May 1920, p. 5480, www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/31900/page/5480.
• Masego Panyane. “University of Pretoria Commemorates 100 Years of Trans-African Flight and Re-Installation of Flight Monument.” University of Pretoria, 2020, www.up.ac.za/news/university-of-pretoria-commemorates-100-years-of-trans-african-flight-and-re-installation-of. Accessed 1 Apr. 2026.
• Stanley, William R. “Trans-South Atlantic Air Link in World War II.” GeoJournal, vol. 33, no. 4, 1 Aug. 1994, pp. 459–463, https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00806430. 
• “The Evolution of World War I Aircraft.” Si.edu, 7 May 2025, airandspace.si.edu/explore/stories/world-war-i-laboratory-air.
• Walmsley, Leo. “The Recent Trans-African Flight and Its Lesson.” Geographical Review, vol. 9, no. 3, 1920, pp. 149–60. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/207254.  

madison

Madison is currently a senior at the Ramapo College of New Jersey, who took this course in the spring of 2026. She has a major in Visual Arts, with a concentration in Art History, along with a double minor in Anthropology and Museum and Exhibitions Studies. After graduating Madison hopes to continue her education in order to become an Archaeologist or Museum Educator.

The textbook chapters from The Story of Our Country (1948) and The Americans (2005) largely reflect the topics historians were writing about during their respective time periods. The Story of our Country focuses more on business than The Americans does, as demonstrated in the visualization to the right. This was fairly consistent with the historical scholarship written shortly after the textbook was published. Some of these monographs include The Dollar Decade: Business Ideas in the 1920s by James Warren Prothro and The Great Crash by John Kenneth Galbraith. These books were both written in 1954 and they address the corporate ideology of the 1920s and the leadup to the Wall Street Crash respectively. ¹ This focus on business reflects the concerns of historians at the time. One way that The Story of Our Country does not fit neatly into the historiographical timeline Goldberg outlines is in its discussion of World War I. The only book that Goldberg references that discusses the war is his own 1999 monograph Discontented America: The United States in the 1920s, which “emphasizes the extent to which conflicts during the decade emanated from World War I.” ² The textbook’s focus on conflict is an outlier in the historiographical discussion of the decade because most books written around the same time focus on business and the economy.

The Americans has a stronger emphasis on people than it does business, which is demonstrated in the word cloud to the right. Ideas about minorities, including women and Black Americans, are featured more heavily in this chapter than they are in The Story of Our Country. Both of these trends are consistent with the books published 10 to 15 years before the textbook. For example, Kristi Andersen’s 1996 book After Suffrage: Women in Partisan and Electoral Politics before the New Deal examines the lives of women after the 19th Amendment was ratified, and the 2002 books “We Return Righting:” The Civil Rights Movement in the Jazz Age by Mark Robert Schneider and Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics and Citizenship of Jim Crow Virginia by J. Douglas Smith examine Black Americans in the North and South respectively. ³ The textbook’s discussion of people that have been excluded from the historical narrative in the past is consistent with much of the scholarship that was published in the years preceding it.

The textbooks have very different focuses when compared to one another. The Story of Our Country has a stronger emphasis on business and the war, taking a broader approach that focuses less on what life was like for everyday people during the 1920s. Voyant’s reader tool (below, left) demonstrates the book’s emphasis on what happened in the war itself rather than how it impacted people. Similarly, the bubbleline tool (below, right) indicates how much more important conflict was in the 1948 textbook’s narrative than it was in 2005. The Americans takes a much more in-depth look at the lives of specific demographics in 1920s society. For example, it has a more robust discussion of the lives of Black people during this time. Even accounting for the outdated descriptions of raced utilized when The Story of Our Country was written, it contains far less description of Black history than The Americans. The latter includes more information about Black experiences during the 1920s, although the organization of its bubbleline indicates it was largely relegated to a single section. Still, comparing the two textbooks demonstrates the vastly different priorities of the time they were written in. Specifically, it shows a concern for business and war in the late 1940s and a focus on the lives of minorities in the mid-2000s.

The reader tool (left) shows how The Story of Our Country discusses war. The bubbleline (right) shows the difference in how both textbooks discuss Black history.

While older history is not necessarily less professional than what scholars produce today, knowing when a historian writes helps to evaluate and understand a source. Society’s values and priorities have shifted drastically over the years and they will only continue to do so; acknowledging what most historians considered important during a certain time period allows readers to understand why scholars may include some information and ignore others. It may also reveal an author’s personal biases, as it is very difficult for anyone, including historians, to completely disregard the prejudices and values of their time when writing. Understanding the era a source was created in allows researchers to recognize not only what a scholar was writing about but why and how they chose to do so.

Grace Martinez

Grace Martinez is a Ramapo college history major with a minor in museum & exhibition studies.

www.linkedin.com/in/%20grace-martinezz

The Shanghai Massacre of April 12, 1927, is an event that embodies the sheer chaos of political party rivalries in China during the 1920s and the potency of anti-communist ideologies around the globe. On this day, right-wing forces within the Chinese Nationalist Party gathered up and executed any known members of the Chinese Communist Party and anyone associated with the left-wing faction of the nationalists who supported an alliance with the Communist Party. As part of the much larger conflict between nationalist reformers and radical revolutionaries that consumed China for nearly the entire first half of the 20th century, the massacre marks a crucial turning point. After this violent suppression of Communist leaders and other political dissenters in major cities such as Shanghai, the Chinese Communist Party was fundamentally weakened, and the Chinese Nationalist Party was divided into those who condoned the violence and those who still favored diplomacy.

In a global context, depictions of the Shanghai Massacre in newspapers throughout Europe and the United States (or the mere lack of depictions) reflect how communism as a political concept conjured vastly different fears and anxieties depending on the preexisting cultural climate of a region. Both geographical proximity to the newly formed Soviet Union and an underlying social turmoil in regard to the government’s role in public life shaped the clash between Communists and non-Communists in China into a bloody struggle for political control. Although Western media during the 1920s was in a frenzy about the existential threat posed by the spread of communism, these fears did not take into account the violent oppression that encouraged even the average Chinese citizen to embrace revolution of any kind.

The story of how an internal divide began brewing amongst Chinese nationalists, and how the Chinese Communist Party was initially formed, comprises countless political decisions in both China and the Soviet Union throughout the early 1920s. The first such event that specifically set the stage for the violent spring of 1927 was the contact between Russian Comintern agent Hendrik Sneevliet and Republic of China founder Sun Yat-sen in December of 1921.¹ Yat-sen had been instrumental in overthrowing the Qing dynasty a decade earlier, and Sneevliet viewed him as the perfect candidate for helping communism catch on in China. As the leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party, Yat-sen recognized the newly formed Chinese Communist Party as a legitimate political party and pursued a diplomatic alliance. This combination of Communists and those in the nationalist party who supported their political existence became known as the “First United Front.”²

While Sneevliet’s influence upon the formation of the First United Front is obviously impossible to quantify, the Soviet Union’s geopolitical game plan was soon impacted by preexisting rivalries between Chinese nationalist leaders. In June of 1922, one of the most influential military leaders within the Nationalist Party, Chen Jiongming, renounced Yat-sen’s authority and forced him to withdraw from Guangzhou and flee to Shanghai.³ Although Sun Yat-sen ultimately returned to Guangzhou with support from the Communist Party, it had become clear that not everyone shared his willingness to include Communists in contemporary Chinese society. As Yat-sen continued his push towards unifying China under one nationalist government, he faced heavy resistance not just from local warlords but from dissenting officials within his own party. After his death from cancer in 1925 left an empty place at the top of the Nationalist Party, this power struggle intensified dramatically.

On the right-wing side of the Nationalist Party and in command of the National Revolutionary Army was Chiang Kai-shek: a hardened military commander with his sights set on political and ideological domination. On the left-wing side of the party was a prominent politician and poet, Wang Jingwei, who embraced collaboration with the Chinese Communist Party and the Soviets. As these two factions battled for control of their party, Kai-shek was continuing Yat-sen’s military campaign to conquer Northern China. Unable to counter his use of the military, Communist-supported leaders asserted that the Central Executive Committee held ultimate power over the nationalist government. On March 10, 1927, the Committee met without Kai-shek and resolved to strip him of his power, citing his dismissal of their authority and anti-Communist sentiments.⁴

Infuriated by this move to curtail his power, Chiang Kai-shek redirected his military campaign through Northern China towards Shanghai and planned to take the city as a display of his personal authority. However, in late March Communist-led workers assumed control of Shanghai, and other Nationalist generals were withholding their attacks out of fear of foreign intervention from the Soviet Union. Upon first arriving at the city and observing the strength of assembled Communist forces, Kai-shek did not pursue immediate military action but rather began forging secret alliances with anti-Communist warlords and other Nationalist leaders who favored the right-wing faction.⁵

Meanwhile, Wang Jingwei of the leftist faction had been reassured by both local Nationalist leaders in Shanghai and Soviet officials that with their support, Kai-shek would be unable to take the city.⁶ Unaware of the pending threat of Chiang Kai-shek’s secret network of supporters, pro-Communist organizations proceeded with multiple public strikes and demonstrations on April 12. Nationalist forces seized this moment and engaged in a widespread purge of anyone who was visibly associated with leftist ideology. Even unarmed people who were merely seen demonstrating in the streets were arrested, if not killed for suspected Communist ties. Over the next two months, all Communist cells operating within Shanghai and in other cities where Kai-shek was able to encourage allies to assist with the purge were exposed and crushed. Striking workers, many of whom only opposed the practices of singular companies, were either executed or imprisoned for their associations with the Chinese Communist Party.

Political leaders from both the Communist Party and the leftist faction of the Nationalist Party were hunted down and brought to the same fate. This forced politicians who had been actively engaged in diplomatic negotiations with other leaders of the Nationalist government to flee for friendly provinces in the South, where Kai-shek’s Northern Campaign had no local implications. Some of the local warlords who supported the purge were even more violent and aggressive with the individuals they rounded up. In Kwangtung, Governor Li Chi-shen’s forces gathered approximately 2,000 suspected opponents of right-wing nationalism and had many of them shot publicly.⁷

This violent suppression of Communists across various major cities in China cemented a political divide within the country’s population and leaders. Left-leaning individuals who may have supported some type of alliance between the Communist Party and the Nationalist Party were now painfully aware that such collaboration would never be possible, given the standard of confrontation Chiang Kai-shek set in April of 1927. If they chose to relinquish all ties to Chinese nationalism, they would be seen as traitors by the country’s largest military force and would have few other options besides joining the unprepared and under-funded Communist Party. If they chose to ally with the right-wing branch of the Nationalist Party, they would essentially be at the whim of constant scrutiny and suspicion. From within the party, there was no longer any hope of reaching agreements with political minorities, even those that could facilitate an alliance with the Soviet Union.

Chiang Kai-shek’s drastic and destructive action against Communist groups and their allies essentially ensured the length and scope of the subsequent Chinese Civil War. Nationalists were internally divided by the sheer intensity of the anti-Communist violence, and the Communist Party itself now carried with it a story that elicited sympathy from all other political factions. Between the polarization of the Chinese public and the Soviet Union’s obvious support for the Communist Party, the imminent civil war would not be another simple crushing of dissenters. It would be an extenuating violent conflict, lasting from 1927, in the aftermath of the Shanghai Massacre, until the Communist Party’s eventual conquering of nearly the entire country in 1949. Although a 21st-century perspective on history seems to paint the Chinese Communist Party as a massive political and military force with a very blatant agenda, the bloodshed of the April 12th massacre was part of a much larger sequence of events that brought Communists the internal cohesion and popular support needed to amass more power. Perhaps presciently, Kalfred Dip Lum wrote in 1927 that Chinese Nationalist leaders “have started something which they cannot control.”⁸

Significance

The purging of Communist leaders and supporters by the Chinese Nationalist Party in 1927 serves as a grim reminder of the intensity of anti-communist ideology during the 1920s and the stark discrepancies in how this sentiment impacted different regions of the world. Compared to the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, which occurred the same year, the Shanghai Massacre represents an entirely different tier of chaos and destruction. Yet due to isolationist attitudes, the violent clash between Communists and Nationalists in China was treated as generally irrelevant throughout the Western world.

In many cases, newspapers in the United States did not even mention that the political factions being suppressed were in fact communist. One Illinois paper referred to the events of April 12th as nationalist troops fighting to disarm “Guerilla gunmen.”⁹ With most American readers struggling to picture what Shanghai even looked like, media outlets had completely free reign over the context in which they placed the violence of the Shanghai Massacre. During a decade when major business interests in the United States would do anything to bar communist ideology from catching any foothold in the public consciousness, the press naturally hesitated from expressing sympathy for communist communities. Publishing more accurate accounts of the Shanghai Massacre would expose American audiences to a situation in which nationalists were violently attempting to crush all forms of political dissent, with no consideration of the Chinese public’s best interests.

The massacre marked the beginning of a ferocious push by Chinese nationalists to eliminate dissent of any kind and highlighted the dangers of organizing widespread initiatives for governmental reform. In the context of Chinese history, it set the stage for a bloody conflict between the Communist and Nationalist parties, which would last for many decades. Placed in a global context, the violence in China serves as a reminder that Europe was not the only setting of destructive ideological conflict during the early 20th century.

Particularly in the United States, changing patterns of immigration and the formation of the Soviet Union sparked a Red Scare during the 1920s. This was largely sustained by wealthy, white Protestants, who were desperate to maintain their political and social authority at a time when American isolationism and the internal culture of the country itself were undergoing fundamental evolutions. While this manifested as an “overwhelming insistence upon conformity,”¹⁰ in the United States, there is no comparison to the violent suppression of Communists in China. Therefore, events such as the Shanghai Massacre paint a very different picture of global anti-communist attitudes during the 1920s than the stories constructed by American businessmen who merely feared losing their fortunes to public ownership.

While historian Lynn Dumenil explains that in the U.S., “The agendas of the business community, voluntary associations, politicians, and the press helped persuade a susceptible public that the Bolshevik menace was a serious one,”¹¹ the Communist Party was by no means a media phantom in China. Influenced by the geographical proximity of the Soviet Union combined with countless cultural factors, communism was able to gain traction in China that was simply not achievable in the United States. Therefore, conservatives within the Nationalist Party, such as Chiang Kai-shek, plunged the country into war in an effort to resist the same revolutionary change that Americans feared.

Although the conflict between new ideologies and strict nationalism embodied the decade of the 1920s in both countries, the sheer differences in scope of that conflict created drastically different legacies of anti-communist sentiment. As Dumenil notes, the Red Scare in the United States was fueled by a broader resistance to social change, which ultimately ebbed and flowed in relevance depending on contemporary economic conditions.¹² However, for interwar China, the clash between Nationalists and Communists set the stage for an extenuating military conflict that would last until 1949 and shape the course of Asian history throughout the entire century. Ultimately, the Red Scare of the 1920s in the United States was largely minimized in history by later clashes with communism, which developed from the aftermath of events like the Shanghai Massacre in China.

Citations

Footnotes

1. David P. Barrett, “The Role of Hu Hanmin in the ‘First United Front’: 1922-27,” The China Quarterly, no. 89 (March 1982): 35. ︎
2. Ibid., 34. ︎
3. Ibid., 36. ︎
4. F. Gilbert Chan and Thomas H. Etzold, China in the 1920s: Nationalism and Revolution (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976), 147-149. ︎
5. Ibid., 150-151. ︎
6. Ibid., 153. ︎
7. Ibid., 157. ︎
8. Kalfred Dip Lum, “Chinese Civil War and Foreign Relations,” News Bulletin (Institute of Pacific Relations) (February 1927): 20. ︎
9. International News Service, “Chinese Nationalists in Frantic Efforts to Strengthen Position; China in a Ferment,” Waukegan News-Sun, April 12, 1927, p. 16. ︎
10. Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 218. ︎
11. Ibid., 221. ︎
12. Ibid., 225. ︎

Bibliography

• Featured image: “Communists being rounded up in one of the purges.” April 1927. Accessed May 6, 2026. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Communist_purge.jpg.
• Barrett, David P. “The Role of Hu Hanmin in the ‘First United Front’: 1922-27.” The China Quarterly, no. 89 (1982): 34-64. https://www.jstor.org/stable/653620.
• Chan, F. Gilbert, and Etzold, Thomas H., eds. China in the 1920s: Nationalism and Revolution. New Viewpoints, 1976.
• Chang, Kuo-t’ao. The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party. University Press of Kansas, 1971.
• Dumenil, Lynn. The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s. Hill and Wang, 1995.
• International News Service. “Chinese Nationalists in Frantic Efforts to Strengthen Position: China in a Ferment.” Waukegan News-Sun, April 12, 1927, p. 16.
• Lum, Kalfred Dip. “Chinese Civil War and Foreign Relations.” News Bulletin (Institute of Pacific Relations), (1927): 19-22. https://doi.org/10.2307/2485490.
• Wilbur, C. Martin. The Nationalist Revolution in China: 1923–1928. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

More Resources

• Coble, Parks M. The Shanghai Capitalists and the Nationalist Government, 1927-1937. Harvard University Press, 1986.
• Isaacs, Harold R. The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution. Stanford University Press, 1938.
• Thornton, Richard C. China, the Struggle for Power, 1917-1972. Indiana University Press, 1973.

Chris Flug

A senior at Ramapo College, majoring in American Studies and minoring in Anthropology.

The Battle was a part of the Soviet-Polish war. The war began in 1919 and ended in 1921. Poland before 1918 was occupied by the Russians, the Germans, and Austria Hungry for over a hundred years. At the end of World War Ⅰ, the Poles were able to gain their independence from Germany on November 11, 1918.¹ During this time, the Russian were going through a Civil War, between the Bolshevik communist and anti-communist front of the Monarchists, Republicans, and other leftist movements. The Communists won the war, to then form the Soviet Union. The leader of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, wanted a more Communist Europe and wanted Germany as a Communist ally. Poland was the roadblock that stopped them.

The Soviets saw Germany as a potential ally. Germany was a very industrialized county, which would be a perfect communist ally. Lenin did not want to make an ally with the Imperialist Monarchy of Germany, but rather the working class who could overthrow their government. Lenin stated that a Communist Revolution is almost certain in Germany and if they don’t see it coming then they are fools who deserve to be overthrown.² But this was not the only reason why the Soviets wanted Germany. Lenin believed that Germany was the key to the survival of Communism.³ Communism could only work in a society that was industrialized, and Germany was Lenin’s solution for prolonging Communism’s existence. Poland was the only thing that stood in the way of a potential German ally. In July of 1920, the Soviet General Mikhail  Tukhachevsky gave the order to march into Poland. The order read,

“The time of reckoning has come. In the blood of the defeated Polish army we will drown the criminal government of Pilsudski. Turn your eyes to the West. In the West, the fate of World Revolution is being decided. Over the corpse of White Poland lies the road to World Conflagration. On our bayonets we will bring happiness and peace to the toiling masses of mankind. The hour of attack has struck! Westwards! On to Wilno, Minsk, Warsaw-Forwards!”⁴

He rallied his men to reclaim old Russian land and march westward to spread communism. He ordered the march of Soviets troops into the region he referred to as the “gates of Smoolensk,” which was the city of Vitebsk in modern day Belarus.⁵ This march began the Soviet’s advance into Poland, and is the reason for the start of the war in the view of some historians.

Some Historians like Adam Zamoyski state the war started in 1919 due to small skirmishes. With the withdrawal of the German army, Lenin created the Army of the West to reclaim Russian land on January 5th of 1919.⁶ The army would go west and clash with Polish irregulars for land. Due to the fact that there was no Declaration of War and that the Soviets were not facing the Army of Poland, historians did not believe the War started in 1919. Over the following years, multiple skirmishes occurred in regions like Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. On April 20th, 1919, Poland sent an army to liberate Belarus from Soviet occupation.⁷ They were led by Józef Piłsudski, the so-called George Washington of Poland. They were successful and routed all Soviets present in the area. Afterward, other small skirmishes happened on the border of Poland and the Soviet Union. These events helped lead to the Soviet’s invasion of Poland.

In the beginning, the condition for the Polish army was not good. The Polish army had just recently begun retreating back into Poland and their spirits were not high. One report from a soldier who was a part of the Poland’s 37th Leczycz Infantry contained the following comment about the retreat: “The heat, the lack of water, the stench of rotting corpses and the forest fires are turning it into a sort of hellish torture.”⁸ Testimonies from Polish soldiers showed that the army’s morale while entering into battle was not high. The public, on the other hand, had not a care in the world about the impending Soviet advancement. Lord D’Abernon, a British ambassador to Poland, who witnessed the battle first hand, wrote in his diary about how amazed he was by seeing the people of Warsaw so detached from the War and them acting like the war was not happening.⁹ Though this did not mean the city was not prepared for the upcoming battle. Poland saw a surge of volunteers shortly before the battle began, and the Polish Socialist Party formed militias to help defend the city.¹⁰ Though not everyone was preparing for the upcoming battle, there were small groups that ensured that the battle would have been a clear Soviet victory. The military also took measures to increase its discipline; repeat offenders of desertion were executed, along with increased surveillance for spies or rats among the army.¹¹ Poland was gearing up for battle, and tried their best to ensure they would not lose.

Days before the battle started, both sides were acting on their own assumptions rather than any real data of enemy movements. Polish aviation could not spot the Soviet army, and the Soviet aviation did not reach the front. Both Polish General Piłsudski and Soviet General Tukhachevsky needed to make major decisions for their armies before the battle began. Piłsudski assumed that Tukhachevsky would send his troops straight to Warsaw. This was not true because Tukhachevsky sent his soldiers more northwest rather than just west. Tukhachevsky had accidentally obtained Piłsudski’s plans due to finding a dead soldier still in possession of his orders, but Tukhachevsky believed it was a trick and chose to ignore it.¹² It actually had everything about Piłsudski’s movements. Tukachevsky decided to head more northward to avoid meeting a massive Polish resistance in Warsaw. Piłsudski decided to plan for a counterattack in the middle right of his flank. He chose the center right flank for the counterattack due it being the only army group not to be outmaneuvered or too far away from the battle to aid.¹³ This single decision would be Poland’s savoir.

The battle was fought in four separate areas: the Vistula Bridgehead, The Wkra, the Wieprz, and the Prussian Frontier. The Vistula was the river right next to Poland. The Wkra line was just above Warsaw. The Wieprz line was southeast. The Prussian Frontier was also in the north. The Vistula bridgehead was commanded by General Franciszek Latinik who led the First Army. The Wkra line was commanded by General Waldyslaw Sikorski who led the 5th army. The Wieprz line was commanded by General Józef Piłsudski who led the 4th army. Lastly, the Prussian Frontier was commanded by Generals Józef Halle and Sikorski. The Prussian Frontier was a joint line with multiple generals giving orders for the line. The Vistula Bridge position was well defended; it had 46,000 infantry, 2000 cavalry, 730 machine guns, 192 artillery guns, along with a few tanks.¹⁴ The worst front to be in was the Wkra’s front. Polish General Waldyslaw Sikorski had the least amount of time to prepare for his operations because his HQ was established in Moldlin on August 10, only two days before the battle. ¹⁵

Men were not the only ones who served in the Polish Army. During the War, Poland opened its policy about volunteers from accepting only men to accepting both men and women. The volunteers were known as Ochotnicza Legia Kobiet (OLK), which translates to Voluntary Legion of Women. They consisted of women who did not want to be hospital nurses, but rathered to be soldiers defending their country.¹⁶ The OLK challenged traditional gender norms of the 1920s. Most women prior to the 1920s were seen as caretakers, pure, and motherly. The OLK were the opposite of that idea. They were a front line infantry unit who fought alongside men for the defense of Poland against Communism. They were similar to Lynn Dumenil’s views of the New Women. The New Women challenged the old ideas regarding the roles and behavior of a woman.¹⁷ The OLK wore short hair, fought alongside men in the defense of Warsaw and helped fight in other battles.¹⁸ These women helped redefine traditional notions of what it meant to be a woman in the 1920s.

The battle began on August 12 as the Soviet soldiers attacked the city of Radzymin. The Soviet’s III army 21st division invaded the city by night. Polish general Haller left the city, which caused the Radzymin to be taken by the Soviets due to fears of fighting a larger army. In the following days, Polish soldiers under Haller made multiple counterattacks to retake the city. They were aided by tanks and fought tooth and nail to reclaim their city. On August 15, the city was retaken; and on August 18 the front was cleared of Soviet presence.¹⁹ This started the beginning of the Polish counterattack.

Sikorski received orders from Haller to make a counterattack. He was ordered to head northeast, crossing the Wkra river, to conduct raids on August 14. During one of Sikorski raids,he captured the city of Ciechanow, which caused the Soviet officers to destroy their own radios. The city was also important to Polish history because it was home to princes, a castle, war with the old Teutonic order, and was the inspiration of some books.²⁰ The morale of the Polish army was greatly boosted by reclaiming this city that was very important to its people. Sikorski also made contact with the center of the Soviet line, revealing the Soviet’s plan to take the Northeast rather than just the city. The Sikorski raid surprised the Soviet generals who then thought more raids would occur. This caused multiple flanks to be thinned out in order to support the Soviet defense against Sikorski’s raids. This distraction ultimately caused Pilsudski’s great counter attack.

Pilsudski’s attack was a huge gamble that changed the tide of the battle, and also the War. On August 16, Pilsudski advanced northwards from the Vistula; and by August 18, he encircled the Soviet Northern army.²¹ If Pilsudski had failed, the front would have been lost and Warsaw could have fallen. If they had succeeded, then the Battle would be won and the Soviets would lose many men. Sikorski also aided Pilsudski during this time by conducting his own attacks. Their goal was to ensure that enough of the Soviet’s attention was on the Prussian front, and to cause them to focus less on Warsaw.²² Pilsudski completed his goal on the 25th by marching his soldiers up north to the East Prussian Frontier, which divided the Soviet army in two, and many were taken as prisoners. The forward momentum of the Soviet Union was lost in a matter of days due to a risky gambit that determined the fate of Poland. Pilsudski’s risky maneuver was the reason why the battle is known as the “Miracle of the Vistula.”

A reason why the Soviets did so poorly was because they did not react in time to the Polish strategies. The Soviets attacked Polish northern cities instead of dealing with the forces pressuring the center front or the Wiepz River. Sergey Kamenev, another Soviet general, warned Tukhachevsky about the Polish not retreating to Modlin but to Warsaw, and that his attacking would endanger the southern front.²³ If the Polish made a maneuver that would attack the undefended south, then the Soviet’s forces would be endangered. With the south front in danger, the entire army could be encircled and be destroyed just as Pilsudski did during his counterattack. Tukhachevsky argued back that Joseph Stalin would handle the southern flank and Sergey was overly reacting to the situation.²⁴ Stalin did not join the Southern flank, but instead went to Crimea by order of Lenin.²⁵ This miscommunication between leaders and generals caused no one to truly know where the Soviet positions were during the conflict. Only after the battle finished and records of the generals surfaced did the reality emerge that the Soviets had mishandled the situation.

The battle was not the final nail in the coffin for the war. The war would continue for another six months after the battle. But this battle was a much needed achievement for the Polish. The battle saw huge casualties for the Soviet side. Tukhachevsky reported that he lost over 100,000 men during the battle. Tukhachevsky had tremendous difficulty trying to replace his officers that he lost.²⁶ Due to those heavy casualties, the Polish army was able to advance into Soviet-controlled Belarus. Belarus would be incorporated into Poland after the war. The war showed that Poland was able to stand for itself and showed the imperialist nature of the Soviets. Due to the communists taking over Russia, some assumed that they would not be imperialist like the Tsarist Russia. But the war showed the world that they were wrong, and that the Soviets were imperialist like their former leaders.²⁷ The battle also showed that communism could be defeated.

During the 1920, multiple countries such as America, Britain, and other Western countries experienced “Red Scares”. This Red Scare was a basic fear that communism would infect their politics and a communist uprising would occur from within. The Red Scare was sparked by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and by the united efforts of the White army, and that foreign aid could not defeat them. The United States’ first Red Scare was directed toward reformers. They were criticized as being communist because their ideas challenged or hindered Capitalism.²⁸ It did not matter if the reformers were actually communist or not; they were labeled as such just to hurt their ideas and reforms. During the war, the Polish Catholic Church was adamant to denounce communism and rally the masses for war.²⁹ Beside the foreign threat of communism, there was internal pressure to save the country from communism. Most countries who had Red Scares also had these internal pressures, whether it be politicians, newspapers journalists, or the church that put pressure on communism. The battle, on the other hand, showed these countries that their fears about Communism should be tamed. Poland proved to the world that communism could not defeat a united people.

The “Miracle of the Vistula” battle was a big source of national pride. Poland proved to themselves and the World that it could defeat a powerful country like the Soviets. The battle tackled the 1920s themes of gender and Communism. The Battle determined the fate of Poland, with Pilsudski shifting the battle in favor of Poland. Due to a lack of cooperation and a large amount of infighting, the Soviets failed to achieve their goal to win the battle. Poland would rise high by beating the number one rival country in East Europe in a war, until World War Ⅱ.

1. Norman Davies, White Eagle, Red Star: the Polish-Soviet War, 1919-20, (London: MacDonalds, 1972) 19. ︎
2. Vladimir Lenin, “War and Revolution”(May 14, 1917) In Lenin Collection Works (Moscow: 1964), 398-421, accessed on March 16, 2026. On Marxists.com ︎
3. Adam Zamoyski, Warsaw 1920: Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Europe, (London: HarperCollins, 2008), 7. ︎
4. Zamoyski, Warsaw 1920, 53 ︎
5. Richard M. Watts, Bitter Glory : Poland and its Fate, 1918 to 1939 (New York : Simon and Schuster, 1979), 126 ︎
6. Zamoyski, Warsaw 1920. 8. ︎
7. Zamoyski, Warsaw 1920. 9. ︎
8. Zamoyski, Warsaw 1920, 67. ︎
9. Davies, White Eagle Red Star, 188. ︎
10. Davies, White Eagle Red Star, 193. ︎
11. Davies, White Eagle Red Star ,193. ︎
12. Davies, White Eagle Red Star, 197. ︎
13. Davies, White Eagle Red Star, 197. ︎
14. Davies, White Eagle Red Star, 200. ︎
15. Davies, White Eagle Red Star, 201. ︎
16. Robert M Ponichtera, “Feminists, Nationalists, and Soldiers: Women in the Fight for Polish Independence.” The International History Review 19, no. 1 (1997): 25 JSTOR ︎
17. Lynn Dumenil. The Modern Temper, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 98. ︎
18. Ponichtera . “Feminists, Nationalists, and Soldiers”, 25. ︎
19. Davies, White Eagle Red Star, 201. ︎
20. Davies, White Eagle Red Star, 203. ︎
21. Davies, White Eagle Red Star, 203. ︎
22. Davies, White Eagle Red Star, 205. ︎
23. Zamoyski. Warsaw 1920, 80. ︎
24. Zamoyski. Warsaw 1920, 81. ︎
25. Zamoyski. Warsaw 1920, 81. ︎
26. Zamoyski, Warsaw 1920, 110. ︎
27. Zamoyski, Warsaw 1920, 110. ︎
28. Lynn Dumenil. The Modern Temper, 22. ︎
29. Zamoyski. Warsaw 1920, 74. ︎

Bibliography and Suggested Readings

“Battle For Warsaw Ends with Retreat of Two Soviet Units Cut Off” The Republican. Mon, Aug 23, 1920. From Newspaper.com

“Battle For Warsaw Started” The Idabel News. Thu, Aug 19, 1920. From Newspaper.com

Davies, Norman. White Eagle, Red Star: the Polish-Soviet War, 1919-20. (London: MacDonalds, 1972).

Dumenil, Lynn. The Modern Temper. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995).

“Expert French Soldiers Assisting Polish Cause” The Saginaw News. Wed, Aug 18, 1920. From Newspaper.com

Lenin Vladimir. “War and Revolution”(May 14, 1917) In Lenin Collection Works (Moscow: 1964), 398-421, accessed on March 16, 2026. On Marxists.com 

“Peace Parley in on at Minsk; Battle Rages” Buffalo Courier Express. Tue, Aug 17, 1920. From Newspaper.com

“Poles Plan the Recapture of Bret-Litovsk; Battle of Warsaw Polish Victory, Not French” The Miami News. Fri, Aug 20, 1920. From Newspaper.com

“Polish Capital Gets Prepared For Siege; City in Panic’s Grip” The Buffalo Enquirer. Mon, Aug 16, 1920. From Newspaper.com

Ponichtera, Robert M. “Feminists, Nationalists, and Soldiers: Women in the Fight for Polish Independence.” The International History Review 19, no. 1 (1997). JSTOR

“Russians Only 21 Miles From Warsaw” The Caledonian-Record. Sat, Aug 14, 1920. From Newspaper.com

“Soviet Cavalry Retreat After Armies Are Divided By New Attacks of Enemy” The Oklahoman. Wed, Aug 25, 1920. From Newspaper.com

“Third Stage In Battle for Warsaw and Poland Is Begun by Red Army” Atlantic City Sunday Press the Sunday Gazette. Sun, Aug 22, 1920. From Newspaper.com

Watts, Richard M. Bitter Glory : Poland and its Fate, 1918 to 1939. (New York : Simon and Schuster, 1979)

J Pelar

Josh Pelar is a History student at Ramapo College of New Jersey.

Chapter 1 of The Modern Temper talks about the event leading up to the 1920s and WW1’s affect on the era. One thing that the chapter mentioned was the Red Scare. Historian Lynn states “The optimism of the immediate postwar period did not last long. The Red Scare, with its insistence that Bolshevism posted serious threat to American institution, painted most reform with a radical pigment, and reformers knew early on that they would have to struggle odds to implement their goals”.¹ American reformers had to face a uphill battle against being labeled a communist and having their voice squashed. Poland faced a similar issue, but instead of the Bolshevik threat being a political threat, it was an actual military threat. The threat of communism was a danger for both societies, and they both needed to overcome communism in their own way to prevail in their ideas. Poland wanted to govern their own country since the past 100 years someone else ruled the Poles, but the Soviets wanted Poland for their own goals. Poland needed to fight back against the Soviets, not just to preserve their government, but also to be able to have the opportunity to make their own decisions on how their government should run.

The theme of the New Woman is somewhat connected to the Battle of Warsaw. During the war a new special unit was created known as the Ochotnicza Legia Kobiet(Voluntary legion of Women) or OLK for short. The legion was made up of Polish and Ukrainian women who served as infantry soldiers during the Soviet-Polish War. They helped defend the city of Warsaw during the battle of Warsaw.² In the Modern Temper, women’s identity changed during the 1920’s. In America, women were redefining how a woman should be, act, and look. Due to World War 1, many women joined male dominated fields like factory workers. After the war, though many women were content going back to normalcy, though some wanted to continue working, and with immigration it was harder to deny women from working in factories.³ In Poland, women were allowed to fight which is different from most of Europe and the United States. Prior to the wars in the 1920’s women were not allowed to fight, but due to the conflict, women were able to fight for their country. Though this battle did not start the era of the New Woman in Poland, without the OLK’s help it would have been a more difficult fight for Poland.

Though Modern Temper mostly discusses the themes that America’s 1920 had, Poland shared some of those changes. Both the United States and Poland faced adversities due to a communist presence. The United States had a new age of feminism, with women being more involved in politics and work, while women in Poland were voluntarily joining the war to defend Poland, just like the men. These few connections brought to light the fact that the 1920’s had greater themes that connected to different countries, even if the themes were slightly different for each country.

1. Lynn Dumenil. The Modern Temper, (new York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 22. ︎
2. Robert M Ponichtera . “Feminists, Nationalists, and Soldiers: Women in the Fight for Polish Independence.” The International History Review 19, no. 1 (1997): 25. ︎
3. Dumenil. The Modern Temper, 112-113. ︎

J Pelar

Josh Pelar is a History student at Ramapo College of New Jersey.

Many historians and political organizations would say the Nazi Party was one of the most powerful and influential organizations of the 20th century. But did you know it took the Nazi party less than 15 years to have control of Germany? In addition, its mere existence lasted for only 25 years. However, in those 25 years, the Nazi Party was able to take a country that was devastated by World War I and took most of the blame for the destruction of Europe. Was able to turn around another world war, almost taking over the entire world. This paper will analyze and understand how the Nazi party was able to gain so much power in such a short time and explain the events that put the party on the map, as well as the people that supported/influenced the rise of the far-right extremist movement. Adolf Hitler might have been the one to bring the party to its highest potential; however, it was the party that started the ideology of a far-right, extremist anti-Semitic movement.

The Aftermath of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles:

On November 11, 1918, the German army and the country finally surrendered, which would mark the end of the First World War. After four years of bloodshed and destruction, as well as the first time the world has ever seen a world war. The world was at ease when Germany took full blame for the destruction and economic hardship of the other ally countries. Despite other countries starting to rebuild after a devastating world war, Germany was the country most affected by the war and had some of the biggest problems within its nation. Poverty, economic, township, and destruction throughout Germany made the country look like a third-world country with no vision of it getting better or easier for the German citizens. In addition, European countries forced Germany to sign an agreement that would inevitably be the reason some would say that caused World War II. This document would be called the Treaty of Versailles. 

The Treaty of Versailles was presented by other European countries to prevent Germany from causing another world war. This treaty made Germany give up land, population, military freedom, and the German economy to rebuild Europe. “Germany lost 13% of its land and 12% of its population to the Allies. This land made up 48% of Germany’s iron production and a large proportion of its coal production, limiting its economic power.² The German Army was limited to 100,000 soldiers, and the Navy was limited to 15,000 sailors”. This treaty devastated the German economy and brought record inflation and massive unemployment, and Germans struggled to understand their country’s uncertain future.³ 

The German government and politicians tried reassuring their citizens, saying it would take a couple of years for the economy to bounce back and look like pre-war times. However, politicians and government officials had no clear vision or opportunities to fix the German economy and solve the unemployment crisis. “Early in 1922, a dollar was worth 1,000 marks—by November, a dollar bought 6,000 marks. On January 4, 1923, a dollar fetched 8,000 marks; less than a week later, it was worth 10,000 marks, and by January 15, it took 56,000 marks to purchase one US currency unit. From then on, the mark skyrocketed with little relation to anything approaching economic reality, reaching 60,000,000 marks to the dollar by the first week of September. 7 Inflation was such that a typical Hamburg dock worker was paid 17 billion marks a day by fall 1923”.⁵ With record spending by the German government, corrupt politicians, a treaty devastating the German economy, and no clear sign of what Germany’s future will look like—this cost far right and far left groups to start gaining momentum and popularity with citizens. Germany’s status in 1919 ultimately created the German Workers Party (DAP), founded by a far-right politician named Anton Drexler. 

The Start of the Party:

In January 1919, Anton Drexler, a far-right extremist, saw the economic status and corrupt politicians within the German country and wanted to make a change and bring Germany back to prosperity. He was the primary founder of the German Worker Party (GAP), which, at the start, had about 30 members. Drexler oversaw the appointment of the chairman of the DAP, Karl Harrer. Harrer was appointed chairman on January 5, 1919, which would mark the start of the DAP party. “The party met weekly in a beer hall in Munich. After the pressures of the war, Munich was politically unstable. People were inclined to support new ideas that advocated extreme change. The party advocated a range of ideas, including hostility toward the Treaty of Versailles, nationalism, concern about the nation’s moral standards and changing culture, and extreme antisemitism”.⁶ In the first year of the parties, they lacked support from outsiders and local party organizations. However, on September 12, 1919, a man walked into a bar hall where the DAP were having their usual meeting. The man sparked interest in what the DAP was campaigning for in terms of the future of Germany. The man ultimately joined the discussion with the DAP members, and the man’s name was Adolf Hitler. “Hitler entered into a discussion with the main speaker at the event, and Drexler, impressed with Hitler’s points and oratory skills, invited him to join the party”.⁷ 

Anton Drexler:

Anton Drexler was born on June 13, 1884, in Munich. In Drexler’s early life, he was a railway toolmaker and a locksmith in Berlin. Sources suggest that Drexler struggled with financial sustainability and alcoholism. He was also summoned to serve in World War I but was ultimately discharged due to being physically unfit. During the war, he joined the German Fatherland Party, which was ultimately a far-right party. Drexler got involved with the Free Workers Committee, and while working on the committee, he met a journalist named Karl Harrer. Both men shared a lot of the same views on nationalism and antisemitism. Ultimately, Drexler founded a new party, which was called the German Worker Party, and appointed Harrer as Reich chairman. On February 24, 1920, the party saw a complete renaming, and Drexler became the chairman of the party. However, despite Drexler being the leader of the party, he was ultimately removed as chairman after falling out with Adolf Hitler. On July 29, 1921, Drexler was removed as chairman, and his replacement was Hitler. He ultimately left the party in 1923 but rejoined in 1933 after the party’s success in Parliament and Hitler’s becoming chancellor. Anton Drexler died on February 24, 1942, at the age of 57 due to his lengthy illness due to alcoholism. Despite being in the party for only a short amount of time, he is the primary reason why Hitler got into politics and the primary founder of the Nazi party. 

The Beginning of the Nazi (1920-1923)

The German Workers Party has finally been established and, at this point, has been around for over a year. The party’s membership of followers varied throughout the year, getting as high as 35 but as low as only 13. However, this would all change when Adolf Hitler joined the party. Drexler showed Hitler the parties, values, and far-right policies he hoped to spread and gain support from outsiders. Drexler did not realize at first how important Hitler would be to the parties, growth, and popularity within a couple of months. Hitler was a phenomenal speaker and passionate about the policy and future that Germany should take. The way that Hitler preached his policies and rhetoric made people listen and want to learn more about what they could do and how to join. Because of this, the party went through a rebranding on February 24, 1920. The party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) or the German Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. This would also be the time when the party came up with the ideology of Nazism, a far-right antisemitic movement. In the years following the rebrand, the party expanded little by little, gaining support from middle-class workers and people who had lost faith in the German government. The following shows how the Nazi party progressed through the years with party membership and how they spread their propaganda: 

“These early days of the NSDAP were unspectacular and gave no promise whatever that it would ever achieve prominence, even within Bavaria, for it was competing for support principally among the most radically minded sections of the middle class along with a score of similar groups such as the Germanen-Orden, the Thule Society, and the Deutschvöllische Schutz-und Trutz Bund. The party, whose membership was only 1,100 in June 1920, lay in the twilight world of local Munich politics and several times might easily have collapsed. Even the advent of Hitler as a party member in September 1919 did not immediately produce a significant improvement in prospects. However, the oratorical and propagandistic skills of Hitler eventually allowed the NSDAP to make something of a minor breakthrough in terms of public recognition, mainly on account of his anti-Semitism, which was vehement even by Munich standards. Membership gradually increased to 3,300 by August 1921, and the party managed to secure a more definite foothold in radical rightist circles. Its innately social darwinistic outlook supplied a basic impetus behind NSDAP activity, but of more specific importance were the changes in the organization, leadership, and direction of the party in July 1921”.⁸

Stachura, Peter D. “The Political Strategy of the Nazi Party, 1919-1933.” German Studies Review 3, no. 2 (1980): 261–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/1429723.

The Party’s Takeover of Germany: (1924-1933)

By the middle of 1921, the Nazi parties made a name for themselves and started getting crowds, listening to what they had to say and proposing policies for the future of Germany. Despite Hitler being one of the main reasons why the party was gaining popularity, he still did not have full control. Drexler still was the chairman of the party and still called the shots for what the party should do next. However, Hitler disagreed with most Drexler ideas. One of Drexler’s prominent ideas was to combine forces with another far-right party. In July 1921, Drexler held a secret meeting without Hitler’s knowledge to work with other parties to gain more popularity. Hitler was outraged at Drexler, so the next day he left the Nazi Party. But when other members of the party heard about Hitler’s exit from the party, they were outraged and realized that Hitler was their only hope for the future of the Nazi party. On July 29, 1921, Drexler was kicked out as chairman, and Hitler became the chairman and dictator of the Nazi party. The future of the party was now in Adolf Hitler’s hands.

The Nazi Party’s first attempt to take over the German government was the Beer Hall Putsch. On November 8, 1923, Hitler and his party set up a protest to overthrow the German government. However, Hitler’s plan did not go through as he planned; the next day he was stopped by the German army and arrested for the attempt to overthrow the national government. Yet this did not stop the Nazi party. The party realized that overthrowing the government would take a lot of men and weaponry to have somewhat of a chance. Hitler and the Nazi party realized the popularity his party was getting around Germany. So the party decided to do it the way that all other parties did it: by winning seats in Parliament. The first time the Nazi party gained seats in Parliament was in the election of 1828, where they gained 12 seats. After that election, the Nazis gained momentum and popularity around Germany, and by November 1933, the Nazis had taken over parliament. Despite the Nazi party only being around for about 13 years, the party would get complete control of Germany on January 30, 1933, when Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany by President Hindenburg. By 1934, after the death of President Paul Von Hindenburg, the Nazi party had complete control of the German government and the whole country. After 15 years of the party’s founding, the Nazis completely controlled Germany.

Significance:

The reason why I picked this topic for the 1920s project was because I wanted to understand how the Nazi party got its name, its members, and how it became so powerful so quickly. I always thought that Hitler was the one who started the movement and his own far-right policies. But when researching the Nazi Party, I found that that was not the case where the party originated before Hitler even joined. Most of Hitler’s views on ideology came from joining what was then called the German Workers Party. Despite Hitler being the one who took the Nazis from 30 members to taking over the whole country. If it were not for the party and their rallies, Hitler might have never gotten into politics in the first place. It was the German Workers Party that started the evil, bloodshed, destruction, and immoral beliefs of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, A.K.A. the Nazi Party.

Bibliography

1. “File: Nazi Party Rally Grounds (1938) 3.Jpg.” n.d. Wikimedia.org. Accessed May 3, 2024. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nazi_party_rally_grounds_(1938)_3.jpg. ︎
2. “The Aftermath of the First World War – The Holocaust Explained: Designed for Schools.” n.d. Theholocaustexplained.org. Accessed May 2, 2024. https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/the-nazi-rise-to-power/the-effects-of-the-first-world-war-on-germany/. ︎
3. “Aftermath of World War I and the Rise of Nazism, 1918–1933.” n.d. Ushmm.org. Accessed May 2, 2024. https://www.ushmm.org/learn/holocaust/aftermath-of-world-war-i-and-the-rise-of-nazism-1918-1933. ︎
4. Homeschool History. 2021. “The Early Years of the Nazi Party 1919-1923 | GCSE History.” Youtube. November 11, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fkPOpyNVJ8. ︎
5. Pelz, William A. “Economic Collapse and the Rise of Fascism, 1920–33.” In A People’s History of Modern Europe, 127–41. Pluto Press, 2016. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1c2crfj.14. ︎
6. “The Early Years of the Nazi Party – The Holocaust Explained: Designed for Schools.” n.d. Theholocaustexplained.org. Accessed May 2, 2024. https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/the-nazi-rise-to-power/the-early-years-of-the-nazi-party/. ︎
7. “The Early Years of the Nazi Party – The Holocaust Explained: Designed for Schools.” Accessed May 2, 2024. https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/the-nazi-rise-to-power/the-early-years-of-the-nazi-party/. ︎
8. Stachura, Peter D. “The Political Strategy of the Nazi Party, 1919-1933.” German Studies Review 3, no. 2 (1980): 261–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/1429723. ︎
9. Niets. 2023. “Horst Wessel Lied – Co-National Anthem of Nazi Germany.” Youtube. November 7, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awKecML3GXs. ︎
10. Wikipedia contributors. “Nazi Party.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. May 3, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party#Election_results ︎

Before the fire, Smyrna was a vibrant, diverse city, perhaps the most diverse within modern-day Turkey by the beginning of the 1920s. According to the most recent statistics before the city burned, there were one hundred and sixty-five thousand Turks, one hundred and fifty thousand Greeks, twenty-five thousand Armenians, twenty-five thousand Jews, and twenty thousand foreigners.¹ Compare this to Constantinople’s population, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, from a decade before, which had two hundred seventy nine thousand Muslims, sixty four thousand Greeks, twenty seven thousand Armenians, and 13 thousand Jews.² Smyrna’s demographics resembled those of an American city rather than one that might be part of an ethnic Greek or Turkish state. The city had four quarters: the Turkish/Muslim Quarter, Jewish Quarter, Armenian Quarter, and Greek/European Quarter. Although it would be very common to see all 4 groups outside of their quarters and mingling with each other. There was even a 5th group who resided outside of the city called the Levantines who were descendents of European immigrants that had started to assimilate into Turkish culture.³ 

Once WWI ended everyone knew that Smyrna was going to change hands, but the question was how would each of these groups fit into the state that would control Smyrna next. The Ottoman Empire, the state that governed Smyrna before, was on its last legs and the Greeks had plans to annex Western Turkey. Inside the Ottoman Empire a group of Turkish nationalists called the Young Turks, were becoming very popular and it seemed the Young Turks and the Greeks would soon be on a collision course for Smyrna. The Turks, the Greeks, and maybe even the Armenians knew what each of these states meant for them, but for the Jews it was different. They faced the same questions as the Jews in America during the 1920s: how to balance their Jewish identity with that of their state. Under the Ottoman Empire, Jews were Jews, as it wasn’t a nation-state, but under a Turkish or Greek state it was more complex. In America during the 1920s, Jews found ways to preserve their ethnic identity while embracing Americanization.⁴

The Greeks ended up being the first to make move on Smyrna after WWI ended. The Greeks at the Paris Peace conference of 1919 represented by their Prime Minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, claimed almost all of modern-day Western Turkey that bordered the Aegean Sea on the grounds that it was the historic lands of the Greeks and that many of those places had Greek majority populations. . Then on May 9 at a meeting of the big three Allied Powers, Britain, France, and the United States would decide to allow the Greeks to invade Smyrna to deter the Italians from gaining territory in Asia Minor. David Lloyd George brought up the idea to Venizelos by asking him the simple question of “Do you have troops available?”⁵ This simple question would have obvious consequences that the leaders of the big three all should of known but decided to ignore. By letting the Greeks invade they opened up Pandora’s box and the Greeks, Turks, and Armenians of Anatolia would pay a great price for it.

The Greek Invasion and Occupation of Smyrna

The Greeks invaded Smyrna on the May 15, 1919 and were greeted by the cheers of the Greek population. The Greeks had failed to plan ahead to secure the city though and the month that followed the invasion was chaos. The Greeks started looting the Turkish houses and massacres of both Turks and Greeks were committed. For a month there wasn’t even a Greek General in Smyrna.⁶

The Greek occupation and invasion of Smyrna would only last for about 3 years. The invasion only made the Turk and Greek Nationalists hate each other even more. With Greeks being resettled, Turks being kicked out, and the lower ranks of the military and Greek citizens committing violent acts against the Turks. ⁷ The Greeks decided to keep pushing East but eventually the Turks beat them back and pushed them all the way back to Smyrna. Turkish troops under the command of their nationalist commander, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, ended the Greek occupation of Smyrna on September, 9, 1922. This assured Smyrna and its diverse population that the city would be apart of a future Turkish state. But, a Turkish state was supposed to only include Turks so the question was now what would happen to the Greeks, Armenians, Levantine, and the other non-Turk populations of the city. 4 days later those population would figure out what the new Turkish leaders of the city wanted to do with them.

The Turkish Occupation

The Fire

In the afternoon on September 13, 1922 a small fire broke out in the Armenian quarter in Smyrna. This small fire would end up devouring the entire Greek and Armenians quarters of the city and heavily damaging the general European quarter of the city. This is the 1922 Fire of Smyrna. According to the Minnie Mills of the American Collegiate Institute she saw a Turkish soldier enter the building in the Armenian quarter where the first fire started and then exit with tins that containing fuel. Then soon after many other small fires started. She added that on this day the wind was blowing West away from the Turkish quarter. Mills also said that soon after Armenians start to crowd the streets but the Turks blocked the road and instructed them to go back into their houses. Mrs. King Birge who went to the top of the tower of the American Collegiate Institute also said she saw Turkish soldiers with fuel cans setting fires in the Armenian quarter of Smyrna. When George Horton, the American Consul in Smyrna, looked out his terrace on the afternoon of September 13 he saw a dark cloud of black smoke covering the city. ⁸ The fires in the Armenian quarter were only the beginning of the fire. The fire would spread to the Greek and European quarters and would last for 9 whole days.

The Americans weren’t the only ones to notice Turkish soldiers lighting fire to the Armenian quarter. A firemen who arrived to the scene of the first fire, Sargent Tchorbadjis, testified that he saw a Turkish solider lighting fire to the interior of a drawer in an Armenian house. Another firefighter, Emanuel Kastros, said he saw Turkish soldiers puring drums of petroleum in an Armenian;s house and when asked about it they said their orders were to light fire to the Armenian houses. By 2 PM almost the entire Armenian quarter was in flames and all the residents who didn’t burn in the fire or weren’t murdered by Turkish soldiers crowded the wharf. ⁹ The Armenians were now stuck in a huge crowd between the bay and the giant fire raging behind them. They would wait on the wharf for 9 days while they watched their homes and the city that they called home turn into ashes. The Armenians had lived mostly peacefully in Smyrna for centuries and now the forces that adhered to the foreign ideology of Nationalism had erased all of that history. They forced the Armenians to leave the only place they called home just because they weren’t considered Turks.

On the first day the Armenians weren’t the only ones who were in trouble. The British, the French, and the Americans had to also flee from the European quarter on the first day of the Fire. The Europeans and the Americans though had a safe far away place to retreat to. Any American, French, or British citizen was guaranteed a spot on a battleship of the coast away from the blazing heat and choking black smoke of the fire. For example, some French Catholic fathers from their Church that was on fire to the French Consulate where after that caught fire they were transferred to a French battleship.¹⁰

The Europeans and Americans did have a safe place to go to offshore but on their way there many tried to help the Greek and Armenian refugees. For example, George Horton held 2,000 refugees that consisted of Armenians, Americans, and Greeks. Horton had an American petty officer James Webster along with other American Marines guided Armenian, Greek, and American refugees to the wharf and protected them when Turkish soldiers started shooting at them on their way to the wharf.¹¹ Horton and the other Americans would end up using those same marines to push through the crowd at the wharf to get to the waterfront and leave on a ship.leaving the Another example, is when the French decided to take an Armenian girl and her immediate family onto their battleship after she showed up at the French consulate speaking great French. ¹²

By the end of the first day almost of the Armenians and Europeans had evacuated the city proper and were either stranded on the wharf or sailing back to their home countries. The Armenian and European quarters of the city were in ashes by the end of the day, but for the Greek quarter it was a different story. The Greeks had not totally evacuated the city yet as not the entire quarter was in flames and the Turks had been focusing on the Armenians all day so there were still safe places to hide in the Greek quarter. But, by the next day on September 14 the slight relief the Greeks felt would end. For example, Georgios Tsoubariots, an eleven year old Greek child at the time was hiding with his family in a Greek Church on the 13th but in the morning of the 14th bandits came with knifes and robbed them at knife point. After they fled to the inside of family tomb at a Greek Cemetery. Another Greek family, the Verkine family had survived hiding in their house the first night but on the second day the flames finally caught up to their house and they were forced to flee to the wharf.¹³

The Quay

Almost all of the refugees who were fleeing their burning homes ended up at the quay. The quay was indeed safe from the fire thanks to it being but at the quay there was much more to worry about than just the fire. Horton described the quay as he was sailing away on the night of the 13th as “a narrow water-front covered with a great throng of people-an ever increasing throng”.¹⁴ An even more detailed account by a British eyewitness, Mr Wallace, described the quay as the most tragic sight he ever saw. The quay had no food or water there and was crowded beyond capacity. They were so starved and exhausted that the fire no longer even panicked them. ¹⁵ According to the American vice-consul in the middle of the hunger, thirst, and exhausted refugees were armed Turks with clubs that were going through hitting everyone in sight.¹⁶

By the 19th of September conditions at the quay became even worse. Decaying corpses were spread among the hundreds of thousands of people stranded and disease was rampant thanks to contaminated food and water. The Allies had refused to use their ships in the Smyrna harbor to help the starving masses of refugees. Luckily, thanks to one man’s intense resolve to help the people on the quay they wouldn’t have to say their much longer. This man was Asa Jennings, an employee of Smyrna’s YMCA. Jennings through a combination of bluffing and pure luck had convinced the Greeks to put him in charge of all Greek ships in the Aegean and an American ship to escort them to Smyrna. By morning of September 24 his rescue fleet arrived at the quay.¹⁷

Jennings had made it to Smyrna with a fleet of Greek ships, but getting the ships to come was the easy part comparatively to his next task. There were hundreds of thousands of refugees on the quay who were desperate for help to escape the fire and only a limited amount of ships. The Turkish authorities didn’t make it easy at first for Jennings to rescue them and put severe restrictions on Jennings rescue effort. Eventually the Turkish authorities realized this was how they would get rid of the non-Turks of the new Turkish state and started helping the evacuation effort. All of the living refugees on the quay would be evacuated to Greece where refugees either or used a jumping off point to immigrate to other countries like France, the United States, and Canada.¹⁸

Aftermath

There are conflicting reports on the amount of the shear cost of human life the fire had caused. The lowest estimates of the time from the newspapers said 120,000 people had died. The United States had spent over 95 millions 1922 dollars on relief for the refugees of Smyrna.¹⁹ Later estimates said 100,000 people died while another 100,00 were deported to the interior.²⁰ Newspapers in America and England at the time did talk about the death and destruction, but it was a lot more focused on the American and British destruction that was done. The front page of the Washington Times from September 16, 1922 said in big letters “U.S. Suffers Loss of 15,000,000 in Great Fire Sweeping Smyrna” and under that in small letters they put “300,000 homeless.²¹ The Birmingham Post in England titled their article on December 2, 1924 “£20,000,000 Involved in Insurance Claims. The article was about how an insurance company went to court to have it decide if the fire was an accident or not as his clients were trying claiming it wasn’t an accident to reap the insurance benefits.²² The American, British, and other European governments were pushing the narrative that the Turks started the fire yet here were British businessmen trying to go against all the proof that those governments had stated just so they didn’t have to suffer the loss of property in a place that was in conflict for years before the fire.

At the end of the day the specific human and monetary cost of the damage doesn’t matter. What matters is the Turks purposefully set the fire to purge all the non-Turks from one of the most diverse cities in Asia Minor by almost all accounts of the time. What matters is once the fire ended hundreds of thousands of people were now homeless and kicked out of the only home they ever knew. What matters is that almost the entire cultural history of two populations who lived in Smyrna peacefully for centuries was erased in the matter of weeks. What matters is that Turkish historians still deny today that the Turkish military had any involvement in the fire despite the hundreds of personal accounts of the fire by Greeks, Armenians, and other who say otherwise.

Sadly in Turkey and Greece the animosity between the two populations only grew until the Greco-Turkish war ended with the Treaty of Lausanne and the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations in 1923. The convention didn’t transfer though just the Greek and Turkish populations in each state like it is popularly thought. The text of the agreement specifically says that Greek Orthodox Christians in Turkey will go to Greece and Muslims in Greece will go to Turkey.²³ There were ethnic Greeks and other ethnicities in Turkey who were Greek Orthodox and Muslims in Greece who weren’t Turkish and so they got caught up in the fight and had to leave their homes. 1.6 million people left their homes and transferred to their new declared countries as said by a bunch of leaders who had not asked them whether they wanted to move or not. The Fire of Smyrna was only a small part and precursor to this much larger conflict.

The Fire of Smyrna and the 1920s

Smyrna before the fire could very much be described as a “melting pot” just like how many people described America in the 20s. Both the people of Smyrna and all of the over the world, especially in America were trying figure whether being a “melting pot” was a good or bad. In the 1920s it was decided in many places including America and Smyrna that this was bad and their countries needed to be more homogenous. The Turks did this with the Fire of Smyrna and the population transfer at the end of it. The Americans did this by enacting immigration legislation and calling for the Americanization of immigrants that were already there.²⁴ The Greeks, Turks, and other ethnicities were also forced with Grecification and Turkification when they arrived in their newly assigned countries. In Greece the refugees were forced to live in poverty in the worst quarter of Athens, but they forged a community there.²⁵ The same was true for American immigrants like Mexicans who lived in poor conditions but forged a community through that.²⁶

Another big theme of the 1920s persistent in the narrative of the Fire of Smyrna was the rise of cooperate power. American and other European corporations had a lot interests in Smyrna as seen by the earlier mentioned news articles. In the 20s it was a popular opinion that business should just be allowed to pursue their interests with as government interference as possible and was favorable towards business in general.²⁷ This explains the context behind why so many foreign newspapers were covering the loss suffered by business in the fire because many people genuinely wanted to know about it and probably thought businesses should be able to recoup their losses from the fire.

Another big theme of the 1920s persistent in the narrative of the Fire of Smyrna was the rise of cooperate power. American and other European corporations had a lot interests in Smyrna as seen by the earlier mentioned news articles. In the 20s it was a popular opinion that business should just be allowed to pursue their interests with as government interference as possible and was favorable towards business in general.²⁷ This explains the context behind why so many foreign newspapers were covering the loss suffered by business in the fire because many people genuinely wanted to know about it and probably thought businesses should be able to recoup their losses from the fire.

Significance

The Fire of Smyrna is just one small example of the many crimes that were committed before and after the Greco-Turkish War by both governments, the consequences of Nationalism, and European intervention. Nationalism was a European invented ideology that had spread to one of the few places in the world where multiple different peoples, ethnicities, and religions had gotten a long for almost a thousand years. All over the Middle East in the post WWI era massacres just the like Fire of Smyrna motivated by Nationalism. Hundreds of thousands of people died then and still die today because Europeans decided to spread the ideology that caused them to fight the biggest and deadliest war to ever be fought in history at the time to the places they colonized and traded with. Massacres like the Fire of Smyrna should not just be used an example of why genocide needs to be prevented, but why Nationalism is a flawed ideology that leads to conflict not peace. Neither the Turks nor the Greeks started the conflict that led up to the Fire of Smyrna, the Europeans started. Its the same for almost every other conflict in the Middle East. One people for one land always leads to crimes like the Fire of Smyrna happening whether that was the intention or not. People need to realize in battles all over the world that the battles they are fighting are not their battles, but the battles foreign nations wanted them to fight. They need stop blaming each other for starting conflicts and instead blame the real culprits, European colonial powers.

The Fire of Smyrna on a Map of Modern Day Izmir

Additional Resources

• Greek Genocide Resource Center provides online access to resources on the atrocities the Ottoman Empire and Turkey committed against from 1914 – 1923.
• Armenian National Institute is a website dedicated to the study of the Armenian Genocide.
• Levantine Heritage Foundation is a website dedicated the study and preservation of the communities in the Levant from the 1600s to the 1900s. The website has a lot of really amazing information about the Greek and Armenian communities in Smyrna before the fire and was one of my main resources when making my map.

Footnotes

1. George Horton, The Blight of Asia: an Account of the Systematic Extermination of Christian Populations by Mohammedans and of the Culpability of Certain Great Powers; with the True Story of the Burning of Smyrna, (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1926), 101. ︎
2. Kemal H. Karpat, Ottoman Population 1830-1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics, (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 102. ︎
3. ︎
4. Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 260-262. ︎
5. Michael Llewyn Smith, Ionian Vision: Greece in Asia Minor 1919-1922, (New York: St Martins Press, 1973), 78-81. ︎
6. ︎
7. ︎
8. Horton, Blight of Asia, 144-145. ︎
9. Giles Milton, Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922: Destruction of a Christian City in the Islamic World, (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 307-309. ︎
10. Ibid, 308. ︎
11. Ibid, 312. ︎
12. Horton, Blight of Asia, 152. ︎
13. Milton, Paradise Lost, 329-332. ︎
14. Horton, Blight of Asia, 152. ︎
15. “Smyrna’s Last Days: A Manchester Man’s Experience” in The Martyrdom of Smyrna and Eastern Christendom: A File of Overwhelming Evidence, Denouncing the Misdeeds of the Turks in Asia Minor and Showing Their Responsibility for the Horrors of Smyrna, ed. Lysimachos, Oeconomos, (Plymouth, UK: The Mayflower Press, 1922), 52-54. ︎
16. Milton, Paradise Lost, 336. ︎
17. Ibid, 354-360. ︎
18. Ibid, 361-373. ︎
19. Horton, The Blight of Asia, 173-175. ︎
20. Milton, Paradise Lost, 373. ︎
21. “US Suffer Loss of $15,000,000 in Great Fire Sweeping Smyrna”, Washington TImes, (Washington D.C., District of Columbia), Sep 16, 1922. ︎
22. “The Law Courts: Sequel to the Great Fire At Smyrna: £20,000,000 Involved in Insurance Claims”, Birmingham Post, (Birmingham, UK), 2 Dec, 1924. ︎
23. Treaty of Lausanne IV: Convention Concerning The Exchange on Greek and Turkish Populations, (Hellenic Resources Network, 1923), ︎
24. Dumenil, The Modern Temper, 203-206. ︎
25. Milton, Paradise Lost, 374. ︎
26. Dumenil, The Modern Temper, 251. ︎
27. Ibid, 32-34. ︎
28. Ibid, 32-34. ︎

Bibliography

• Dumenil, Lynn. The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.
• Horton, George. The Blight of Asia: An Account of the Systematic Extermination of Christian Populations by Mohammedans and of the Culpability of Certain Great Powers; with a True Story of the Burning of Smyrna. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1926.
• Karpat, Kemal H. Ottoman Population 1830-1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000.
• Milton, Giles. Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 – The Destruction of Islam’s City of Tolerance. New York: Basic Books, 2008.
• Oeconomos, Lysimachos. The Martyrdom of Smyrna and Eastern Christendom: A File of Overwhelming Evidence, Denouncing the Misdeeds of the Turks in Asia Minor and Showing Their Responsibility for the Horrors of Smyrna. Plymouth, UK: The Mayflower Press, 1922.
• Smith, Michael Llewellyn. Ionian Vision: Greece in Asia Minor, 1919-1922. New York: St Martins Press, 1973.
• The Law Courts: Sequel to the Great Fire At Smyrna: £20,000,000 Involved in Insurance Claims”. Birmingham Post.(Birmingham, UK). 2 Dec, 1924. ︎
• “US Suffer Loss of $15,000,000 in Great Fire Sweeping Smyrna”, Washington Times. (Washington D.C., District of Columbia). Sep 16, 1922.

Both articles are very broad on the topics they talk about; they do not focus on one event in the 1920s but talk about multiple throughout their writings. However, despite talking about the same decade, both articles had different viewpoints on certain historical events, and the future of America after this decade. An example of this is in the article published in 1956 by May, in which he argues for the reason that America’s prosperity during the 1920s was the result of postwar errors, particularly World War I, that brought manufacturing jobs and America’s help in rebuilding Europe after the war. However, in the article published in 2007 by Goldberg, he argues the reason why America prospered during the 1920s was due to entrepreneurs like Henry Ford, a lack of government involvement, corporate greed, and a high labor market, mostly due to immigration. May is right that America did prosper after both world wars in the 20s and the 50s. In addition, he doesn’t point out what exactly made the economy so strong or the problems that led to the stock market crash of 1929. However, Goldberg does point out the causes of a booming economy but also realizes the devastation it could have if not properly managed. 

From the evidence that was just presented, we can safely say that these two articles disagree more than they agree on what the 1920s decade brought to America. Something else that needs to be noted when comparing these two articles is that the one by Goldberg mentions more than the broad topics the 1920s brought us. The article mentioned things like the KKK, unions developing, presidents’ flaws/achievements, racism, jazz errors, and women’s rights. Whereas we look at the May 1956 article. Most of those topics are either not mentioned or completely looked over in the article. However, May does mention key problems in the 1920s but fails to explain or elaborate on those issues. We can see by looking at both articles that both have different ideas on what is an important topic to talk about when looking into the 1920s decade. Both articles do mention key factors and events that happened during the 1920s but failed to bring up more defining issues (women’s suffrage, corporate greed, causes for certain events, and discrimination problems) that impacted not just the United States but the rest of the world.

How I see the change in historical events in the 1920s from then to now is that today we can take responsibility for our actions. Whereas I have seen back, then we either hide those tragic events or justify our bad behavior. Our society today is not afraid to point out the wrongdoings that previous generations did back then. In addition, we can see that papers that were published back then, only talked about one viewpoint of the 1920s, usually white middle-class men. Completely excluding anybody else’s viewpoint or problems during that time. Today, we are more open to seeing everybody’s side and understanding everybody’s problems, and nobody’s problems or issues are more important than others. Also, what helps me understand history is reading articles that were published in the 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, et cetera, because it shows you how people thought of events and portrayed them during that particular time. Overall, the lesson that I would take away from this assignment is to never look at or read one article about a particular time but to read several articles on the same issue and see which ones connect with or agree with one another. 

Bibliography

• Goldberg, David J. “Rethinking the 1920S: Historians and Changing Perspectives.” OAH Magazine of History 21, no. 3 (2007): 7–10. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25162122.
• May, Henry F. “Shifting Perspectives on the 1920’s.” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 43, no. 3 (1956): 405–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/1893530.

The Irish Civil War started on June 28, 1922, and lasted approximately ten months, ending on May 24, 1923. Even though this war started in June 1922, the Irish had been fighting for their independence way before that. In reality, the Irish started fighting for their independence from Great Britain in 1919. Great Britain refused Ireland’s departure to leave the United Kingdom and to be an independent country. Ireland and Britain fought in over a two-year war, with many casualties and land destroyed. Despite the majority of Irish citizens wanting to leave the United Kingdom summit districts in Ireland, did not want to leave the United Kingdom. This created a separate territory, called Northern Ireland, that voted to remain in the United Kingdom and have close connections with Great Britain. However, England was unwilling to give up all of Ireland, and they suggested negotiating new terms to make Ireland an independent country while remaining in the United Kingdom. 

The Build-Up to the Civil War:

After the war against the United Kingdom, Ireland, in the majority of the population, didn’t want to give up the hopes of Ireland becoming an independent country. Even though there were a lot of lives lost, homes destroyed, and a lack of motivation, Ireland would not go back to the old rules the United Kingdom had under. So Ireland’s parliament and England’s parliament agreed to negotiate terms on how independent Ireland would be, what terms they no longer have to follow, and what terms they still have to follow. Despite Ireland’s resentment toward negotiating with Britain, they realized it was better to negotiate than have more bloodshed and damage to their country. Ireland brought their top-ranking officials in the military and in politics to negotiate the new terms for Ireland’s independence. However, Britain also brought its brightest and most highly ranked commanders to negotiate on behalf of the United Kingdom the terms of Ireland’s independence.

In November 1921, negotiations started with Britain and Ireland on what would ultimately determine how much control the United Kingdom would have over Ireland. Negotiations were held at 10 Downing St. in London. The people who were negotiating on Ireland’s behalf were people like Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith, and Robert Barton. The people negotiating on behalf of the United Kingdom were people like David L George, Lorn Birkenhead, Authen Chamberlain, and even Winston Churchill. To this day, we still do not know what the negotiations were like in what specific topics either side we’re fighting for. A lot of it was to remain confidential and were to be announced when Ireland reached their homeland. Ultimately, the treaty was finally signed on December 6, 1921, with all members in the room signing their names on the document. The treaty was called the “Anglo-Irish Treaty,” which gave the United Kingdom less control of Ireland, but still stayed in power, uncertain things the country did. The United Kingdom parliament and members ultimately agreed to the new terms; however, it would be quite different in Ireland. Now the people who negotiated these terms have to convince the Irish citizens and parliament that Ireland is finally gaining its independence.

The Anglo-Irish Treaty was finalized and now just has to be passed in the Irish parliament. The negotiators had to convince the Irish parliament of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which would ultimately prevent another war or conflict with Britain. Some of the terms and regulations that Irish citizens and government must obey are the following:

• Recognized parliament for non-imperial affairs: The Irish parliament can make decisions on behalf of its citizens, but not from a broad perspective. 
• Financial Autonomy: the British would only have some control of Ireland’s finances.
• Small Military Force: Ireland could have only a limited number of military troops. However, British troops would ultimately leave Ireland.
• Ireland State remains within the British Empire: Ireland will remain in the United Kingdom and must swear allegiance to the British monarchy for any person in elected office. 
• The Royal Navy would patrol Irish Waters: the British controlled the waters around Ireland
• Ulster’s Six Counties can choose to join or not: Give counties the option to remain completely in the control of the United Kingdom. (Northern Ireland)¹

The treaty finally reached the public and the Irish parliament, and there were many different opinions about the treaty. Some members of parliament didn’t like all the terms in the treaty but ultimately agreed, and some parliament members agreed to the treaty not because they liked it but because they didn’t want more conflict or division with Britain. However, there was a group of parliamentarians who were completely outraged by the terms they had to follow and obey. Some members stated that this was the opposite direction of Irish independence and believed that the negotiators just applied to anything that England said. Ultimately, the Anglo-Irish Treaty went up for a vote on January 7, 1922. It passed the Irish parliament 64 to 57 in favor of the treaty. This sparked a whole new division in Ireland, no longer with the United Kingdom, but now between their own citizens.

This image represents the 1922 election and what parties held what seats. As well as how the outcome of the Anglo-Irish Treaty passing happened. Red: Labour Party 17 seats, Green: Anti-treaty party 36 seats, Light Green: Pro-treaty 58 seats, Yellow: Farmer’s Party 7 seats, Blue: BPG 1 seat, White: Independent 9 seats. (Irish general election 1922)

The passing of the treaty raised high tensions in Ireland, not just in parliament, but around the whole country. Due to the passage of the treaty, some ministers of parliament started resigning. On January 14, 1922, Éamon de Valera, Cathal Brugha, and Austin Stack resigned from their post. From January to June, tensions rose throughout Ireland on the treaty and the new rules they must obey. This tension created two sides in Ireland: the Irish Free States (also called pro-treaty forces) and the Anti-Treaty IRA (also called anti-treaty forces). Ultimately, the forces of the two sides would become a reality when a man named Michael Collins and his forces attacked the Four Quarts, which ultimately would be the start of the Irish Civil War. 

The Two Sides in the War:

At the beginning of any war, there are always multiple sides that become frustrated and take action, which ultimately results in fighting and battles. In the Irish Civil War, there were two sides to the war, and one of the sides was the Pro-Treaty Forces. The people who aligned with these forces agreed with the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the rules that came with it. They believe this is one step forward to Irish independence and the country being an independent nation. Some members did not even agree with every measure and term in the treaty but did not want to raise conflict or more bloodshed with the British Empire. Some of the leaders of the pro-treaties forces were people like Arthur Griffin, Richard Mulcshy, Elon O’Buffy, and most notably Michael Collins. Collins is an important figure, being a high-ranking politician and military officer, as well as being the commander and chief of the Irish free state forces. He was also the cause of the start of the Irish Civil War when he directed an order to bombard the Four Quarts in Dublin, which anti-treaty forces had taken control of two months prior. This side also had the support of the United Kingdom and its military forces.

“Deputies have spoken about whether dead men would approve of it, and they have spoken whether children yet unborn would approve it, but few have spoken of whether the living approve it.”

-Michael Collins, Dáil debate, Christmas 1921.³

On the other side of the Civil War was the Anti-Treaty IRA. The anti-treaty for us is that they will do anything in their power—even go to war again with the United Kingdom—to finally have Ireland as an independent nation. They believed that the British Empire was keeping Ireland from doing great things economically and self-governing their citizens. They believe the Anglo-Irish Treaty favors England more than it does Ireland. The leaders of the anti-Treaty forces were people like Liam Lynch, Frank Allen, and most notably Éamon de Valer. Valera was one of the first ministers to speak out against the treaty and was the first to resign from parliament when the treaty passed. He could not plan on behalf of the anti-treaty and got Irish citizens to volunteer in the army to fight the pro-treaty forces. However, his charisma and popularity would ultimately get him in trouble with British forces being in prison for speaking against the Anglo-Irish Treaty and fighting for complete independence from the British Empire.

Beginning & End of the War:

The Four Courts were occupied by anti-treaty forces that took control of Dublin in the beginning of April. Michael Collins and pro-treaty forces were starting to exert pressure on the UK and their own forces about the anti-treaty forces’ control of the Four Courts. Winston Churchill told Michael Collins that if he did not get control of Dublin by August 10, he would inevitably have to send British troops to Ireland to stop the conflict. Michael Collins ultimately made the decision to bombard the courts on June 28, 1822, to get control back and push the anti-treaty forces out of Dublin. This is considered the start of the Irish Civil War and the first battle.

The first battle of the Irish Civil War was called the Battle of Dublin. Where pro-treaty forces and anti-treaty forces fought for control of the four courts and Dublin as a whole. The battle started on the 28th of June and lasted until the 5th of July, when, ultimately, pro-treaty forces got control back of the four quarts and Dublin from the anti-treaty forces. Ultimately, 44 soldiers were killed, a couple hundred were wounded, and 35 citizens were killed and over 100 wounded as well. Despite the bloodshed and people injured during this battle, it still did not stop both forces from fighting for what they ultimately wanted. Both sides continued the fight despite the bloodshed, injuries, and destruction in their own countries; there were no signs of them slowing down in the early months of the war. July, August, and September are where the most bloodshed happened, as well as destruction and battles. However, the war would take a dramatic turn at the end of August when news broke out about a certain man.

On August 22, 1922, about two months into the war, the commander-in-chief of the pro-treaty forces, Michael Collin, was killed in battle. This brought a new wave of supporters to the pro-treaty forces, who supported the treaty and even joined the fight. Ultimately, the man who replaced Collins as commander-in-chief was called Richard Mulcahy. Despite Collins’ death, the fighting did not stop, with both forces coming at each other from all angles and around the whole country. The Irish parliament, which was controlled by the pro-treaty forces, tried passing legislation to stop the fighting and prevent more bloodshed and destruction in their country. 

However, on May 24, 1923, over 10 months into the war, a man named Frank Aiken, told the anti-treaty forces to “dump their arms” and surrender. This decision ultimately got the approval of Éamon de Valera, knowing that this war would not go anywhere and that innocent people were dying because of it. This officially marked the end of the Irish Civil War. Despite the war being over, there was still conflict between the pro-treaty forces and the anti-treaty forces, with some people being killed and assassinated after the end of the war. Months later, the anti-treaty forces finally accepted the Anglo-Irish Treaty. The treaty was ultimately put into law on March 31, 1922, and stayed the same for a couple of decades until the Irish attempted a second try to gain their independence in 1949 from the United Kingdom, and that battle had a different outcome than this one.

Significance:

The reason why I picked this topic was because of the interest I have in the United Kingdom and the empire they have built throughout the centuries. The United Kingdom or the British Empire was one of the biggest empires in the world controlling over 90% of the world at one point. But since 1776, the British Empire has been losing its colonies and countries for years, and there is a reason for all of them many of them are quite different. Sometimes the British Empire was OK with giving up some countries or negotiating with them for partial independence. Despite the British going easy on other countries, that was not the case with Ireland with the British fought tooth and nail to keep Ireland part of the United Kingdom. It always interests me how the Irish got into a Civil War with their people, and how different it was compared to the American Civil War. Hence the reason why I picked the Irish Civil War was to understand how desperate the Irish were to gain independence and how powerful/influential the United Kingdom was trying to keep them in their empire.

 Bibliography

1. The Great War. 2021. “Treaty That Caused Irish Civil War – the Anglo-Irish Treaty 1921 (Documentary).” Youtube. November 26, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4h8XTRj6Oc. ︎
2. “File: Michael Collins 1921.Jpg.” n.d. Wikimedia.org. Accessed March 26, 2024. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Michael_Collins_1921.jpg. ︎
3. “‘They’ll Never Shoot Me in My Own County’ — Famous Quotes from Michael Collins.” 2022. Irishexaminer.com. August 20, 2022. https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/spotlight/arid-40942814.html. ︎
4. “File: Eamon de Valera c 1922-30.Jpg.” n.d. Wikimedia.org. Accessed March 26, 2024. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eamon_de_Valera_c_1922-30.jpg. ︎
5. “30 Best Eamon DE Valera Quotes with Image.” 2023. Bookey.App. September 4, 2023. https://www.bookey.app/quote-author/eamon-de-valera. ︎
6. joekilgobinet. 2009. “The Irish Civil War 1922 1923.” Youtube. May 31, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9ayLHPLROg. ︎
7. “Timeline of the Irish Civil War.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. March 26, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Timeline_of_the_Irish_Civil_War&oldid=1215710689. ︎

The first connection this book brings to the Irish Civil War, or its whole independence attempt is corporate lobbying. In America, a lot of corporations had many politicians in their pockets by striking down certain legislation and rights that would harm or cost corporations money. So that meant for workers many of the rights that they needed or wanted were not being granted by the government because of corporations in politicians’ pockets. This situation could connect with the politicians in Ireland to the parliament in the United Kingdom. Before the Irish Civil War, the United Kingdom had major control of Ireland, and many of the decisions that were made for Ireland were made by the UK parliament. This meant the citizens of Ireland if they wanted rights or certain legislation to pass, would have to convince people that do not even live in their country to pass these rights or legislations. The author explains how corporations had control of the federal government in America and is the same as the UK’s parliament having complete control of Ireland’s government and the decisions they made.

The second connection the author brings up in the book that coincides with the Irish Civil War is the women’s rights movement. When comparing women’s rights in the Irish Civil War, countless things are different, but there are also major similarities. Like in America, women were fighting for the right to vote, and be represented in their government. However, in Ireland, they were fighting for the same rights but instead of just women, it’s all the citizens of Ireland. Ireland did get some representation in parliament, but not enough to make significant changes to its country. This involved a conflict in which Ireland wanted to be independent and not rely on Britain or the United Kingdom for self-governance. Women want their voices heard and participate in the act of voting and being able to represent. Ireland wanted the same thing of being represented equally under parliament and the British monarchy. Henceforth the reason the Anglo-Irish Treaty was developed. 

Overall when comparing America in Ireland’s problems these two events are pretty different in what they are fighting for. However, they are the same in the rights they are fighting for. One of them is the government which is supposed to represent them while not being controlled by someone else. (Corporations/UK’s government) As well as people fighting to have equal representation under their government in the voting process and self-representation. (women’s suffrage/Anglo-Irish Treaty) 

• Dumenil, Lynn. The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s. United States: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.