Could it happen here? Sinclair Lewis asked in 1935. Du Bois asked the readers of his newspaper column. “Do we Negroes believe in democracy?” W. E. B. “What Does Democracy Mean?” NBC radio asked listeners. But there was more to be afraid of, including Americans’ own declining faith in self-government. said in his first Inaugural Address, telling Americans that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself. “We do not distrust the future of essential democracy,” F.D.R. A decade later, he declared, “The liberal state is destined to perish.” Photograph from GettyĪmerican democracy, too, staggered, weakened by corruption, monopoly, apathy, inequality, political violence, hucksterism, racial injustice, unemployment, even starvation. In 1922, Benito Mussolini (center) marched on Rome. “The present century is the century of authority,” he declared, “a century of the Right, a Fascist century.” Authoritarians multiplied in Portugal, Uruguay, Spain. “All the political experiments of our day are anti-liberal.” By 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, the American political commentator Walter Lippmann was telling an audience of students at Berkeley that “the old relationships among the great masses of the people of the earth have disappeared.” What next? More epitaphs: Greece, Romania, Estonia, and Latvia. “The liberal state is destined to perish,” Mussolini predicted in 1932. The annus horribilis that followed differed from every other year in the history of the world, according to the British historian Arnold Toynbee: “In 1931, men and women all over the world were seriously contemplating and frankly discussing the possibility that the Western system of Society might break down and cease to work.” When Japan invaded Manchuria, the League of Nations condemned the annexation, to no avail. “Epitaphs for democracy are the fashion of the day,” the soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote, dismally, in 1930. Receive alerts about new stories in our exploration of democracy in America. Now Fascism and Communism toppled these governments in a matter of months, even before the stock-market crash of 1929 and the misery that ensued. It had taken a century and a half for European monarchs who ruled by divine right and brute force to be replaced by constitutional democracies and the rule of law. Benito Mussolini marched on Rome in 1922. In older states, too, the desperate masses turned to authoritarianism. Infant democracies grew, toddled, wobbled, and fell: Hungary, Albania, Poland, Lithuania, Yugoslavia. The number of democracies in the world rose the spread of liberal-democratic governance began to appear inevitable. In 1917, Woodrow Wilson’s Administration had promised that winning the Great War would “make the world safe for democracy.” The peace carved nearly a dozen new states out of the former Russian, Ottoman, and Austrian empires. In the nineteen-thirties, you could count on the Yankees winning the World Series, dust storms plaguing the prairies, evangelicals preaching on the radio, Franklin Delano Roosevelt residing in the White House, people lining up for blocks to get scraps of food, and democracies dying, from the Andes to the Urals and the Alps. “Now, now, we don’t allow that,” the moderator said, calmly, and asked him to leave. “You are a liar!” one guy shouted from the audience during a political debate heard on the radio by ten million Americans, from Missoula to Tallahassee. “In the Legislatures, over the radio, at the luncheon table, in the drawing rooms, at meetings of forums and in all kinds of groups of citizens everywhere, people are talking about the democratic way of life.” People bickered and people hollered, and they also made rules. “The future of democracy is topic number one in the animated discussion going on all over America,” a contributor to the New York Times wrote in 1937. The last time democracy nearly died all over the world and almost all at once, Americans argued about it, and then they tried to fix it. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

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