

"What the hell is he talking about?" "What the hell is he talking about?"



Okay maybe not. But the similarity comes down to everything but the booze - after all, why do we need all that sugar and froth? Alcohol doesn’t taste THAT bad… today. But what you have in your hand, while everyone else wonders why you ordered it, is the reaction bartenders had to cut alcohol – as in ‘cut with,’ meaning god knows what else was in there. That shit tasted like poison, because it more or less was – I mean all alcohol is, after all, just poison, and when you’re drinking you’re enjoying poisoning yourself. But back in the days of the Shirley Temple, people would sometimes die from foul-tasting alcohol; and if you paid a lot for that alcohol, you wanted them to not know what they were at risk of. When you order a weird-ass sweet concoction – even ones that weren’t around back then – you are drinking a reminder of the era known as Prohibition.





Does not compute Does not compute



“But alcohol was banned, people weren’t drinking, right?” Man shut up, everyone was hammered back then. The start of a really good book on New York during that time (Dry Manhattan, fyi) talks about a German dignitary who comes to the city and asks the mayor ‘So when does Prohibition start?’ and it’s been law for years. Cities like NYC were arresting people for boozing, sure – but they would arrest so many people that they would let everyone out in the morning; the courts would have been even more overwhelmed otherwise. I mean imagine everyone you see drunk on the weekends in your town – Prohibition wouldn’t stop them, it would just make them criminals; it was a pretty wild situation, an upside-down world – like the Jurassic.



Prohibition didn’t just take place in New York, though – Chicago, Detroit, and New Orleans were as ‘wet’ (alcohol-soaked) or wetter. Hell, it didn’t even take place only in the United States! The organized crime syndicates of Canada and Mexico were funneling booze into the USA via their respective borders, Havana became a playground for US citizens looking for a place to party (as did a lot of other spots, including Tijuana and Vancouver), and the United States’ most desolate borders – the maritime lines where US territory ended and international waters began – saw groups of ships gather in ‘Rum Rows.’ Yes, off of every coast the USA has you could find salesmen plying bulk alcohol, playing off that nation’s mistake.





Seized at Rum Row. Don't miss your bribe payments, kids Seized at Rum Row. Don't miss your bribe payments, kids



Truth is, though, that the United States and its environs only made up one front in a three-theater cultural explosion that happened during that time between the Great War and World War II. Europe was on break from battle and had some wild stuff going on, and the culture birthed by Prohibition and all that even made it to Asia. And I’m not talking about a few Japanese kids nerding out on jazz – the Japanese army, even though they were fighting that music’s country of origin, had to let the troops listen to jazz to keep up moral; it was that burrowed into the national psyche.



While the Great Depression was slicing apart US society in the 1930s, Tokyo and Osaka were interacting with Western culture, creating hybrid creatures like the mobo and moga – modern boy and modern girl. They would wear American clothes, listen to jazz, and generally act very un-Japanese – I’ll get back to that line of thought later – exemplifying the type of cultural cross-pollination that seems normal now but back then was anything but. Manila – now somewhat of a Southeast Asian backwater – was also seeing an East meets West moment, as it was at the time a US colony; I can’t find much about that, but the Art Deco buildings are still standing – that’s a book waiting to happen y’all.





Moga squad Moga squad



Shit was going down in Shanghai at the same time, but that’s its own story and more problematic. The Opium Wars had ended not so long ago – the ones Britain fought for the right to sell addictive drugs to the Chinese population – and after those China was forced to open treaty ports, one of which was Shanghai (which grew in size and importance after the treaties). So, unlike Japan, Shanghai was not Asia absorbing Western culture on its own terms (I’m not going to make assumptions about how welcome the West was in the Philippines, but they didn’t seem to have a choice either). Instead you had a pretty fucked up system where the native Chinese were lower class citizens and Westerners had their own settlements. Again, a reminder of a past age in Shanghai is a neighborhood called the French Concession, which I’m assuming was where the French lived before conceding the land to the people it belonged to.





Ruan Lingyu in Goddess. Shhh Ruan Lingyu in Goddess. Shhh



The following isn’t to say ‘Oh but it’s okay to do what the West did’ because there’s no excuse for that kind of trashy geopolitics; in fact China still heavily resents Britain for the Opium Wars – although they’re pretty forgotten in the UK – and I definitely side with Beijing on that one. However, even if the West hadn’t been invited there, the Chinese managed to take advantage of the situation. There was a flowering of art and culture in the Chinese quarters of Shanghai in the 1930s that is hard to deny the beauty of – a Chinese silent film industry developed, even. And they dug the hell out of jazz too.





The original 'Is this art?' mindfuck, by Duchamp The original 'Is this art?' mindfuck, by Duchamp



So we’ve been to North America and Asia, now it’s time for the Europe segment, right? Well, sadly enough I don’t know much about the Interwar Period in the actual war zones, but there was Dada and I’ll talk about that: basically Switzerland was neutral during World War I, and a bunch of artists were independently like ‘man, screw this fighting crap!’ and came to Zurich. In a bar/restaurant called the Cabaret Voltaire – which still exists – they came up with manifestos and ideas that would change the art world forever, birthing the movement known as Dada. “Yeah a local art scene? C’mon, I have one of those in my city!” Right, but after this one germinated in Switzerland, the war ended and all those artists went home, spreading like seeds and growing outposts of the movement all over Europe.





Dada art by Hannah Höch, Berlin Dada art by Hannah Höch, Berlin



Including Germany. Now, just so we don’t forget, Germany had lost WWI, and was in the kind of economic bind you get in when you attack other countries and they win – it was poor, and the kind of unpleasant poverty breeds. However because the old guard had literally been beaten into submission and taken out of power, shit was being run by people that had formerly been outsiders in the country, with mixed results. This era in Germany, when it was the Weimar Republic, was one crazy time, but even though I should I don’t know enough about it to say much else. But I do know how it ended.





Spoiler alert Spoiler alert



I mean, I’m not pretending to know what really happened, but I’ve got a timeline and a theory. Immediately after the First World War, Prohibition started, which kicked off the Jazz Age, a name for the Interwar Period that tends to describe mainstream US culture. It’s called that because jazz was everywhere – and not the jazz we know today, more of a frantic, complex music with a lot of horns that was made for dancing. Al Capone notoriously brought jazz musicians to Chicago, money brought them to NYC, and it got so big that jazz reached Japan, as noted; once in Japan, it was an easy target for the Nationalists, the people that ran Japan during the war, to point to as the decline of Japanese civilization. It certainly wasn’t their entire platform, but it was a factor in their rise. Couple this with Dada providing Hitler and friends with ammunition to talk about the fall of Germany, and you might start to see my point – that what happened culturally after World War I actually contributed to the start of World War II. Like the extremely liberal culture the West experienced during the Interwar Period not only couldn’t last, but those extremes had a part to play in the rise of Hitler and the Japanese Nationalists, and thus the start of both theaters of the Second World War.



I don’t think culture is the only history people should care about, but I do think that its role in world history is overlooked. That’s why I focus on it, and this is a prime example – the cultural excesses of the Interwar Period in Japan and Germany had a role in the rise of the Axis powers, however small, and that’s a link I’ve honestly never heard anyone else make. I mean it’s pretty easy to argue that LSD had a role in stopping the Vietnam War, but the culture of the 1920s never really gets play in that sense. And it should.





LSD! LSD! LSD! LSD!