THE DARK VALLEY: A Panorama of the 1930s

The sudden, baffling economic depression of the 1930s brought worldwide unemployment, poverty, and despair—the 20thcentury equivalent of the Black Death. Those in brief authority remained perplexed. Nobody could get the unemployed back to work or deliver what the farmers were producing to the people who were starving. Democratic capitalism no longer seemed to function. The solution, when it came, turned out to be World War II.

Brendon, Keeper of the Churchill Archives and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, gives the 1930s a wonderful summing up in this chronicle of how the Great Depression affected the great powers (the United States, Germany, Italy, France, Britain, Japan, and the Soviet Union). He could have called his book an unauthorized biography of the decade, for, along with reviewing the specialized and revisionist studies, he has mined all the gossip from diaries and memoirs. In a style that combines the authoritative speculations of A. J. P. Taylor with the amusing ironies of Malcolm Muggeridge, Brendon tells us what people wore, what they ate, what they read.

He is particularly interested in the manipulation of public opinion, which the new media of radio and motion pictures took to unprecedented levels. "Propaganda became part of the air people breathed during the 1930s," he writes. Public spectacles and entertainments around the globe were crafted with a propagandist intent: "King George V’s Silver Jubilee celebrations and his son’s coronation were a democratic riposte to Hitler’s barbaric pageants at Nuremberg. Stalin’s purge trials dramatised a new kind of tyranny. Mussolini’s aerial circuses advertised the virility of Fascism.... Hollywood created celluloid myths to banish the Depression and affirm the New Deal."

Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill get the high marks from Brendon, who nonetheless provides a snapshot that both credits and discredits Churchill. As First Lord of the Admiralty before becoming prime minister, Churchill habitually enjoyed long dinners featuring champagne and liqueurs, returned to the office after 10 p.m., and worked until long after midnight. "He has got into the habit of calling conferences of subordinates after 1 a.m.," a Times journalist wrote in his diary, "which naturally upsets some of the Admirals, who are men of sound habits. So there is a general atmosphere of strain at the Admiralty, which is all wrong. Yet Winston is such a popular hero & so much the war-leader that he cannot be dropped."

Brendon reminds us that instability, not equilibrium, is the global norm, and that faith in the invincibility of democratic capitalism can prove misplaced. We may assure ourselves that the current prosperity will extend to the hereafter, but so did people in 1929. As Brendon cautions, "Today almost invariably misreads tomorrow, sometimes grossly."

Comprehensive as it is, the book has a few unforgivable omissions. Where is Rudy Vallee crooning, in his upper-class accent, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" And why no dancing Fred and Ginger surrounded by luxury, unaffected by the blind man on the corner selling apples and singing "Beall Street Blues"?

—Jacob A. Stein