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. 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).

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 in the aftermath of the Dawes Plan, 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.

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 a range of additional social services. 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.

The wartime trend toward greater social equality continued, however, 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.

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. Thus developments in both international relations and domestic politics gave the leading democracies cause for cautious optimism in the late 1920s.