mic crisis deepened, they observed with acute discomfort the slow but definite increase of sentiment friendly to the Soviet Union among some sections of the workers, and even more so among the intellectuals of their own countries. The well-advertised increases in productive potentials during the Five-Year Plans exercised the influence of example upon those who, faced by declining living standards, preferred the promise of security to the bitter and uncertain bread of freedom. At home, restlessness, demonstrations, increasing tensions, and conflicts that became more acute as the curve of production went lower frightened the bankers, the industrialists, the landowners, and their political and ideological pensioners.
In Germany and Italy these were the groups which lifted Fascism into the saddle. For it cannot be too often repeated, neither Mussolini nor Hitler actually won power in open struggle. It was given them by influential conservative circles—“the best people” who saw in Fascism the only alternative to Bolshevism. This sentiment was world-wide and accounted for the support Mussolini received not only in England but even in America. Thomas W. Lamont of the House of Morgan negotiated a loan that saved the Italian Fascist régime when it was tottering. Industrialists praised it: trains ran on time! Irving Babbitt, a leading member of the American professoriate, wrote: “Circumstances may arise when we may esteem ourselves fortunate if we get the American equivalent of a Mussolini; he may be needed to save us from the American equivalent of a Lenin.”[1] It is interesting to observe that these were the only social groups, aside from the outright organizational Fascists, who took seriously the agitational slogans of the Communist International—“either Communism or Fascism.”
Undoubtedly much more influential than the possibility, fearful even if mythical, that the Bolsheviks would overrun the West, were the economic decline of capitalism and its inability to come out of the throes of depression as quickly as it had in other periods. The sheer facts of unemployment and want compelled the existing governments to adopt measures that seemed to threaten the traditional position, prestige, and income of propertied conservative groups. These groups were prepared to let the crisis work itself out “normally,” that is, at the cost of those who suffered most. They resented the taxes, the social welfare legislation, and all the halfway measures of regulated
- ↑ Democracy and Leadership, p. 312, New York, 1924.
