Hegel once said that the morning news had replaced morning prayer, one reason I guess my parents never subscribed to the Sunday paper. I used to chafe at that, but starting each day for the past three weeks with the latest furor erupting from America’s new führer has me reconsidering the matter. Imbibing the news and then the telling Substack commentary upon it lands me at my desk in fear and trembling, and probably not the sort that St. Paul recommended. Maybe it’s of the Kierkegaardian kind, I dunno. He certainly did hate Hegel…. 

In these circumstances Mom and Dad would urge me to turn to the Bible, and I do. It helps to have magnificent commentaries like Wes Granberg-Michaelson’s of last Friday, re-orienting our notion of time. Amid the führer’s first hundred days we should recall Jesus’ counterpart, Wes says, and nurture our souls on his means and ends for the work to come. As a historian I take what I hope is a complementary approach, telling time by comparing our moment to ones that have gone before.

In doing so we need to remember that history is a complicated business. We tend to overdetermine the narrative in retrospect, as if explaining what happened means that it had to happen that way. But a closer look reveals some other ways things might have turned out. So in my annual century-retrospective, let’s look back at 1925 to see the portents of the year but also its other possibilities, to compare what looked big at the time to the small things that turned out to be more important. We could all use a break from looming fate right now.

Asia

Let’s begin, as did the year, with bad portents and parallels. On New Year’s Day, 1925, the French instituted a puppet regime in Syria under a “mandate” they extracted from the new League of Nations. There ensued a two-year rebellion which was finally subdued by aerial bombardment of Damascus and other cities. The Assad family would take the example to heart in their ruthless 53-year dictatorship that came to an end only two months ago. The next step remains to be seen. 

For their part the British spent March and April, 1925, trying out the same new technology on recalcitrant tribes in South Waziristan, as a land campaign had failed five years earlier; so would a repeat offensive twelve years later. A fitting forecast of American ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, 2001-2020. Much more newsworthy at the time was the birth of the May Thirtieth Movement in China, triggered by police assaults on Shanghai workers and students who had taken to the streets to mourn the death of Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Chinese Republic. Things quickly turned into pro-labor and anti-imperialist demonstrations that spread across the nation and began the steady radicalization of the rising generation. Even though regional warlords spent the rest of the year fighting each other, both the Nationalist and Communist parties profited from the uprising. 

Europe

Portents in Europe had greater weight, it still being at the center of world affairs. On January 3, Benito Mussolini gave a speech in parliament that effectively brought fascism to Italy. His minions bulldozed constitutional limits, eliminated elections and civil liberties, suppressed rival parties and labor unions, and threw thousands of “suspect” people into exile or prison. In Germany, Friedrich Ebert, first president of the Weimar Republic, died on February 28 of complications from abdominal surgery. His condition had been aggravated by vicious right-wing attacks on his policies and character, and the courts not only failed to defend him but piled on with charges of their own. 

Adolf Hitler took heart. On February 27, he reinstituted the Nazi Party with a speech at the same beer hall in Munich that his abortive putsch had occurred two years before. Unlike our own führer, Hitler had actually been imprisoned for his attempted coup, but that only increased the adoration of the thousands who gathered for his comeback speech. The first volume of the book he had written in jail, Mein Kampf, was released on July 18, and on November 9 the SS was instituted as his personal bodyguard. Meanwhile, World War I Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg succeeded Ebert as president and proceeded to dilly-dally until finally appointing Hitler chancellor in 1933. 

Rounding off the totalitarian team, Joseph Stalin cemented his succession to recently deceased Vladimir Lenin by demoting his chief rival Leon Trotsky from leadership of the Red Army. Later in the year, Pravda and TASS came online as the Fox News of their place and time, and the Dear Comrade saw the Volga River city of Tsaritsyn renamed in his honor: Stalingrad. On the democracies’ side, Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill racked up another one in his error column by putting Britain back on the gold standard, fating the nation to economic doldrums for the rest of the decade, with the Great Depression awaiting in the next. France was thriving culturally but stuck to the past in rejecting women’s suffrage in 1925 for the second of an eventual six times. Things would change only with the liberation of 1944. 

America

It was undoubtedly morning in America. In 1925, having already wrested global financial leadership from London, New York City surpassed it as the largest city in the world. Calvin Coolidge was inaugurated for a full term on March 4, and the Dow Jones average fulfilled his promise of good times by setting new record highs no fewer than 65 times that year. Women’s suffrage was thriving with Nellie Ross (Wyoming) and Miriam (Ma) Ferguson (Texas) installed as the nation’s first two female governors. Texas had an all-women supreme court as well. 

It was a great year for the media, too, with the Scopes “Monkey Trial” in Dayton, Tennessee, July 10-21, a prime sensation. John Scopes, local high school science teacher, consented to test the state’s new law forbidding the teaching of human evolution from lower orders of life. Radical gadfly Clarence Darrow stood up for the defense; three-time Democratic candidate for president and former secretary of state William Jennings Bryan stood in for God and the prosecution. Local yokels and snooty east-coast reporters played each other for laughs under the hot Southern sun until things blessedly ended with Scopes being found guilty, as indeed he meant to be. He was fined $100; Bryan offered to pay. 

Bryan turned out to be the real loser, however. Consenting to cross-examination by Darrow, he was reduced to a laughingstock of ignorance and self-contradiction. With that the Fundamentalist cause he represented was not just defeated but hooted off stage, and there it remained for fifty years until reemerging in the 1970s as “Evangelical.” Fifty more years further on, it now claims unprecedented power as part of the führer’s retinue. 

Green Shoots of Hope

That very development—this consummate disaster for the cause of Christianity—might give us hope. Had anyone in Dayton predicted Evangelicals’ current power a century in the future they would have been dismissed as rudely as Bryan. And so the forecast today—that if Protestant Christianity has any future in the United States, it lies with the sidelined and much derided “mainline”—might have a precedent. Besides, in 1925 the moderates in the Presbyterian Church definitively turned back the Fundamentalists’ takeover bid, while simultaneously the United Church of Canada was instituted in Toronto, joining together Methodists, Congregationalists, and many Presbyterians. 

There were other signs of hope. In December, Pope Pius XI instituted Christ the King Sunday, partly to assert spiritual claims above the roars of militant nationalism. Simultaneously, the Treaty of Locarno was ratified, settling outstanding border issues from the Treaty of Versailles. Its many solemn pledges began to tumble ten years later, but for now the French left the Ruhr, which they had occupied for two years to Germany’s great humiliation. Coolidge’s vice-president, Charles Dawes, won the 1925 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in devising a plan to ease German reparation payments and turn the country back toward prosperity after its nightmare of hyperinflation. 

Auguries

These were the green shoots of something that might have been. Of equal importance were seeds planted at the time but only sprouting much later. Railroad crashes got all the headlines but 1925 forecast the aeronautical future with the origins of Delta Airlines as a crop-dusting business, the ground-breaking of all 287 acres of Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport—today the world’s busiest, and sixteen times larger—and the authorization of U.S. mail transport by private lines, the birth of American civil aviation.    

Inventions yet to come—movies with sound and color along with television—account for the remarkable cohort of entertainers born this year. Jack Lemmon, Hal Holbrook, Maureen Stapleton, Julie Harris; Paul Newman, Rod Steiger, Rock Hudson, and Richard Burton; June Lockhart, Merv Griffin, Johnny Carson, Arlene Dahl. Directors Robert Altman and Sam Peckinpah; musicians Oscar Peterson, Bill Haley, and B.B. King. Authors Flannery O’Connor and William Styron. On the political side Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Patrice Lumumba, and Franz Fanon, with a serving of Margaret Thatcher and William Buckley on the Right and Brent Scowcroft in between.

Literature

What was seen and what was not seen? Franz Kafka’s last novel, Der Prozess (The Trial), was published posthumously on April 26. George Bernard Shaw won the Nobel Prize in literature; Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (May 14) would take the honor today. Likewise, the Pulitzer Prize in literature went to Edna Ferber for So Big which, even though it features Dutch-American characters, does not exactly match up to The Great Gatsby (published April 15). With its full-throated Ivy League monster, mobsters made and unmade, felonies unpunished, the girl who chooses money over love, a hopping Manhattan scene reached via the valley of ashes, Gatsby certainly echoes our own scene. Yet its sales in 1925 were disappointing and remained so for a long time to come. 

Still, in my book it’s the Great American Novel, white male division, new-kid-comes-to-town subdivision. (Huck Finn takes the prize in the homeboy-hits-the-road category.) There is such longing, such American Dreaming in the novel’s conclusion. I’ve often thought of them as an illusion waiting to be popped, a willful self-indulgence ignorant of history. But now, not with green but malevolent orange on our horizon, I wonder if there’s something to be honored here, cherished, certainly mourned. Listen to Nick Carroway’s elegy, a valedictory not just to the American dream but—in our moment—to America itself:

“And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. 

“And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. 

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further… And one fine morning— 

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”