President Warren G. Harding declared the twenties as “a return to normalcy.†However, nowhere in the world would there be the longed for tranquility during the dizzying decade known as the Roaring Twenties. The Treaty of Versailles and the newly created League of Nations, which were supposed to maintain peace and hold Germany in check, instead created political and economic chaos in Germany that led to Hitler's rise during the twenties. Great reparations imposed on Germany in the treaty, led to German backlash. Mixed with inflation in the mid-twenties, civil disorder - internal attempts to overthrow the new German Weimar Republic, widespread fears of the rise of communism, and sympathies of a return to the old ways, made for an chaotic mixture.
The rest of the world was also in a rough spot. Russia's civil war was ending, but a famine that would lead to millions of deaths was underway, and Stalin's reign would lead to brutal political and ethnic genocides. In China, civil difficulties continued. Hirohito took the throne and a military-based leadership was being formed in Japan. Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini seized power in Italy in 1922. In France, the franc plummeted an
* 2,132,000 unemployed. Unemployment 5.2%
*The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot | Portrayl of the modern world's loss of personal, moral, and spiritual values.
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