European domestic politics also offered reason for hope. During the Ruhr occupation and the great inflation, Germany’s republican government appeared ready to collapse. In 1923 Communists momentarily entered provincial governments, which frightened Europe’s leaders, who worried that Communist Bolsheviks would carry the revolution to the West. In November an obscure politician named Adolf Hitler proclaimed a “national socialist revolution” in a Munich beer hall. Hitler’s plot to seize government control was poorly organized and easily crushed. Hitler was sentenced to prison, where he outlined his theories and program in his book Mein Kampf (My Struggle, 1925). Throughout the 1920s Hitler’s National Socialist Party attracted support from only a few fanatical anti-Semites, ultranationalists, and disgruntled former servicemen.

The moderate businessmen who tended to dominate the various German coalition governments believed that economic prosperity demanded good relations with the Western powers, and they supported parliamentary government at home. Elections were held regularly, and as the economy boomed, republican democracy appeared to have growing support among a majority of Germans. There were, however, sharp political divisions in the country. Many unrepentant nationalists and monarchists populated the right and the army. Members of Germany’s Communist Party received directions from Moscow, and they accused the Social Democrats of betraying the revolution. The working classes were divided politically, but a majority supported the socialist, but nonrevolutionary, Social Democrats.

France’s situation was similar to Germany’s. Communists and socialists battled for the workers’ support. After 1924 the democratically elected government rested mainly in the hands of moderate coalitions, and business interests were well represented. France’s great accomplishment was rapid rebuilding of its war-torn northern region, and good times prevailed until 1930.

Britain, too, faced challenges after 1920. The great problem was unemployment, which hovered around 12 percent throughout the 1920s. The state provided unemployment benefits and supplemented those payments with subsidized housing, medical aid, and increased old-age pensions. These and other measures kept living standards from seriously declining, defused class tensions, and pointed the way to the welfare state Britain established after World War II.

Thus the wartime trend toward greater social equality continued, helping maintain social harmony. Relative social harmony was accompanied by the rise of the Labour Party. Committed to moderate, “revisionist” socialism (see “The Socialist Movement” in Chapter 24), the Labour Party under Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937) governed the country in 1924 and 1929–1935. Labour moved toward socialism gradually and democratically, so that the middle classes were not overly frightened as the working classes won new benefits.

The British Conservatives under Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) showed the same compromising spirit on social issues, and Britain experienced only limited social unrest in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1922 Britain granted southern, Catholic Ireland full autonomy after a bitter guerrilla war, thereby removing another source of prewar friction. Thus developments in both international relations and domestic politics gave the leading democracies cause for cautious optimism in the late 1920s.