The 1930s and 1940s witnessed a formative era in nation-building, through the conscious ‘making’ of New Zealand. At the same time, New Zealanders had to ‘make do’ through depression and another world war, and these global onslaughts only intensified the quest for security at home and abroad. Making do and creating a nation moved in symbiosis, because, as often happens with the evolution of a sense of national identity, panic, crisis, anxiety, or rupture produces stories and rituals to soothe and explain. This context saw the rise to power of the first Labour government, which resolved to pick up where the 1890s’ Liberal model of state development left off.

The book’s emphasis is on Americans who in private capacities went overseas between 1935 and 1941. The quandaries faced within the United States and around its geostrategic edges are here probed with less reference than is usual in World War II historiography to holders of high office, military authority, or diplomatic responsibility. This approach allows two related things. First, the reader and I can contend with the churning national identity as it had evolved when the United States skirted around but then plunged into the Second World War. Albeit a nebulous concept, tied to eternal scholarly wrangles on “imagined communities” or Abraham’s Lincoln’s “mystic chords of memory,” my use of national character/identity functions as shorthand for the contradictory US mood and attitudes of 1935-1941: earnest, avaricious, high-minded, sour, naive, shrewd, indecisive, provincial, universalistic. Second, this assemblage of expats is valuable in that it reflected, and lets us elucidate, the fault lines of political allegiance and personal preference that ran through the country before Pearl Harbor. In an important sense, this book destabilizes the notion of “American.”

This chapter examines the shift from almost total estrangement in the early 1920s to broad enmeshment in cultural, economic, and finally diplomatic exchanges in the early 1930s. While acknowledging the importance of converging economic and strategic interests, the chapter argues that images and ideas were also significant, particularly in defining the identities and trajectories of the two countries. It illuminates the divergence between American anticommunists who loathed the atheist Soviet dictatorship and the growing number of intellectuals, journalists, African Americans, and others who became fascinated by the Soviet experiment in social and economic transformation. It also analyzes the ambivalence of Soviet writers, cartoonists, and political leaders about the United States, which they harshly criticized for its imperialism, racism, and economic exploitation, but also admired for its energy, productivity, and advanced technology. The chapter closes with a discussion of how President Franklin Roosevelt disregarded a terrible famine in Ukraine and protests by Ukrainian Americans as he negotiated for the establishment of diplomatic relations.

Chapter 2 explores how American policymakers built a government-sponsored housing finance model during and after the Great Depression. While the country entered the depression without major national housing programs, it emerged with an expansive toolkit of demand-side housing policies. The FDR administration discovered that subsidizing home mortgages would produce economic cascade effects by stimulating bank lending, construction, employment, wages, and consumer spending, reinforcing the country's emerging demand-led growth regime. The core idea behind New Deal housing programs was to transform mortgage markets to lower the cost for borrowers and minimize risk for creditors. These initiatives included the Federal Housing Administration's mortgage insurance program, which offered affordable mortgages to millions of homeowners - although excluding racialized minorities. These housing initiatives helped overcome the depression and permanently made housing finance a "national champion," albeit one heavily dependent on state support. Reinforcing housing-based growth became a routine response to address economic challenges well into the post-WWII period.

The Great Depression is uniquely poised for literary-critical reevaluation, following the reorienting new lenses of Economic Criticism and the New History of Capitalism. Thinking (more) materially has permitted literary scholars in particular to better apprehend the textured record of modern lives: one where production and consumption infuse interior landscapes and unsettle divisive ontologies; where objects and goods occupy central space in the cultural imaginary and affective ecologies; where the human, natural, and built worlds overlay in unruly, disruptive ways; and where the tyranny of the human subject collapses into a broader network of interconnection that imperils the hoary axioms of civilization itself. This chapter offers a reading of Richard Wright’s posthumously published novel The Man Who Lived Underground (written just after the Depression) in the context of US Southern, African American, and Native American perspectives on the destabilizing and dehumanizing consequences of economic collapse. These contrapuntal readings unveil an American modernity marked by profound, multivalent loss: where money fails to orient, so too does race, and the uncanny (and always, finally, imaginary) freedom from both measures is by turns exhilarating and insupportable.

This chapter examines Henry Stimson’s career and his rise to the pinnacle of the US government until his resignation as secretary of state in March 1933. It analyzes his background, the formation of his political views, and the creation of his foreign policy ideas as a committed member of the Republican Party. Specifically, it explores his tortuous relationship with the American empire and how he became an unbridled internationalist.

This chapter examines the political culture of the fragile Weimar Republic, focusing in particular on its tumultuous beginning and its calamitous end. Rather than narrating a story of unavoidable doom or one that focuses exclusively on Weimar’s cultural achievements, it stresses the complexity and the multifaceted crises that marked this era of German history. This essay considers the particularly German elements of the Weimar period but also the ways in which Germany’s post-First World War experience can be situated within a broader regional context.

In the early twentieth century, changes in production targeted low-income family consumption with labour-saving domestic appliances and factory-produced clothing and shoes. Employment of maids declined. Women’s factory work increased. After the Great War, governments and housing producer groups tamed male-worker unrest with low-interest housing loans. Working-class families left shoddy inner-city tenement abodes for bright, practical homes in Midwest suburbs. White mothers returned to household production. Non-English-speaking families migrated into rural areas. Consequently, family economists like Hazel Kyrk, Elizabeth Hoyt, Margaret Reid, and others studied how to improve the consumption activities of low-income and farming families, a problem that intensified during the Great Depression. Methods included studies of family expenditure, calculations of the value of household production for family income, and the development of consumer price indices. Their pragmatism produced policies to secure adequate family budgets and consumer-friendly markets. However, they accepted gendered divisions of household–market labour, distancing themselves from the feminist organisations that had supported women through war with cooperative domestic labour. Differences in living standards between urban and rural families, and between white and non-white families, were mostly viewed as outcomes of family preference, and not as injustices. Methodologies did not reach the family consumption of Dustbowl evacuees.

What were the chief characteristics of the new social democratic system of government that developed in Britain between 1931 and 1976?

The chapter argues that Germany’s major corporate leaders largely agreed between 1918 and 1932 on a self-serving analysis of Germany’s economic problems and an unpopular approach to dealing with them (the Consensus) but splintered and dithered in identifying an appropriate political vehicle for these views (the Dissensus). As a result, they neither defended the Republic nor brought Hitler to power.

The evolution of banking regulation and banking crises are highly intertwined. The post–World War Two period was marked the globalisation of banking and increased banking instability. This initiated a trend towards harmonised frameworks for banking regulation, leading to a common framework for measuring capital adequacy in 1988 (Basel I). The path towards the Basel framework in 1988 was very different in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. When statutory capital requirements were introduced in Switzerland in 1935, most banks were indifferent. This indifference changed towards the end of the 1950s, when capital regulation became a bottleneck for growth. The United Kingdom lacked the experience of a solvency crisis during the 1930s, resulting in capital in banking becoming an almost irrelevant topic. It took until the secondary banking crisis in 1973/4 for banks’ regulation to be reconsidered. The United States did experience a deep banking crisis in the 1930s but introduced statutory capital requirements only in the 1980s, following increased domestic banking instability and the threat of potentially high losses from the Latin American debt crisis.

This chapter analyzes why the SPD failed to stop the collapse of the Weimar Republic and whether it could have averted this outcome, discusses the lessons that German Social Democrats drew from this failure, and assesses to what extent the history of Weimar democracy and its collapse is relevant for analyzing the threat or reality of democratic breakdown in the contemporary world. The SPD leadership decided not to initiate any direct protest action to oppose the Nazi takeover. The chapter argues that any such action, if it had been undertaken, would very likely have been crushed and proven ineffective. There is no imminent threat of democratic breakdown in contemporary Germany or Western Europe. However, the Nazi takeover was the culmination of a process of executive aggrandizement that characterizes many contemporary cases of democratic decline and breakdown. Champions of democracy must combat this process from the outset – before it is too late.