Intro: Glimpses of Modernity
In February 1921, three judges in a New York court of special sessions convicted Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap of obscenity. Their crime was publishing a chapter of a novel most of them had not fully read. The offending material was the "Nausicaa" episode of James Joyce's Ulysses, serialized in Anderson and Heap's magazine The Little Review, in which Leopold Bloom watches a young woman on a beach and, in prose so elliptical that a defender could plausibly argue the average reader would miss what was happening, reaches orgasm as fireworks go off overhead. One judge described the novel as the work of a disordered mind. Anderson and Heap were fined, fingerprinted, and forbidden from publishing another word of it. Ulysses would not be legally printed in the United States for over a decade, and the ban would hold in Britain even longer.
The case turned on a nineteenth-century English standard, the Hicklin test, which asked not whether a work was obscene taken as a whole but whether any isolated passage might corrupt an imagined vulnerable reader. It was, in other words, a legal framework built for a world before modernism arrived to make fragmentation and interior monologue the century's native language. Joyce had spent seven years building a book out of the unruly, unedited traffic of a single mind, and the court did not have a category for what that traffic might be for, only categories for what it might corrupt. The novel would go on being smuggled, pirated, and eventually vindicated by a different judge in a different decade, who found in it not the leer of the sensualist but a kind of catharsis. In 1921, none of that had happened yet. What had happened was a fine, a burned magazine, and a closed door.
A different kind of door closes at the end of Charlie Chaplin's The Kid, released that same month, and it closes on a much gentler note. Chaplin's first feature stars the Tramp as an accidental father to an abandoned infant, played first by an unnamed baby and then, five years on, by seven-year-old Jackie Coogan. The film had begun as something else entirely — a comedy called The Waif, conceived only ten days after Chaplin's own newborn son, Norman, died three days after birth. Whatever grief went into the writing, what came out was neither maudlin nor bitter: a slum comedy about window-breaking and pancakes and a boy and a tramp defending each other against an indifferent city, punctuated by moments — the Kid dragged off in a welfare officer's wagon, screaming, arms out — that most contemporary reviewers found genuinely devastating rather than merely sentimental. It made Coogan the first child star the movies had produced, a fame so consuming it would later require its own protective legislation, decades after this particular boy had stopped being profitable to protect. In 1921, though, none of that had soured yet. Audiences simply wept and laughed, sometimes in the same scene, at a film that took poverty seriously enough to make jokes about it.
Where Chaplin found a way to hold comedy and grief in the same frame without either one canceling the other out, Luigi Pirandello, three months later, tried something considerably more hostile to his own audience. Six Characters in Search of an Author premiered at Rome's Teatro Valle in early May to something closer to a riot than an opening night: a theater company arrives to rehearse a play and is interrupted by six figures who claim to be characters abandoned mid-story by an author who lost his nerve, and who now want actors to finish what he wouldn't. The audience, confronted with a stage that refused to tell them where the rehearsal ended and the reality began, shouted "Manicomio" — madhouse — and Pirandello had to be smuggled out through a side exit while the argument continued in the street outside. It was not a succès de scandale that mellowed with time so much as one that relocated: the same play, staged in Milan four months later, was received as a masterpiece. Within a few years it would be credited, not entirely hyperbolically, with having supplied the entire vocabulary for the century's theater of self-consciousness — the idea that a play might be about the impossibility of ever finishing the story it's telling. It is worth noting, without dwelling on it, what else was happening in Rome that same week: five days after the riot at the Teatro Valle, Benito Mussolini and thirty-five other Fascists won parliamentary seats for the first time. The coincidence proves nothing. It is simply true that in the same city, in the same May, one kind of authority was being dismantled on a stage and another kind was being assembled in a chamber, and only one of them announced itself as fiction.
Against all this — the prosecutions, the grief disguised as comedy, the riots over unfinished stories — 1921 also produced something that asked to be nothing more than what it was. On the fifth of May, in her boutique at 31 Rue Cambon, Coco Chanel began selling a perfume designed by the Russian émigré chemist Ernest Beaux, who had built it around an overdose of aldehydes so far outside the era's floral conventions that it smelled, by design, like nothing found in a garden. Chanel wanted something that would smell like a woman rather than like a rose, a scent that refused the old division between the respectable single-flower fragrances worn by married women and the heavy musk associated with courtesans. She named it for the number she considered lucky and presented it on the date that contained that number twice. It was a small, commercial, almost weightless event compared to a censorship trial or a theater riot — and yet it, too, was an argument about what a woman was allowed to be in public, made not in a courtroom or on a stage but in a bottle designed to look like nothing had been decided about it at all.
Four attempts, in other words, at the same problem: how does a form — a novel, a film, a play, a scent — hold a fractured decade together? Joyce's answer got him banned. Chaplin's got him beloved. Pirandello's got him chased through the streets before it got him canonized. Chanel's got her an empire. None of them agreed on how the century should watch itself. All four were, whether they intended it or not, teaching it to.
Part I: Oppression
On May 30, 1921, a young Black shoeshiner named Dick Rowland stepped into an elevator at Tulsa's Drexel Building operated by a white seventeen-year-old, Sarah Page. What happened in that elevator has never been established with any confidence — the most common account holds that Rowland stumbled and caught himself against Page, who cried out — but what followed is not in dispute. Rowland was arrested the next morning, and the Tulsa Tribune ran an inflammatory story that all but announced a lynching was coming. Armed Black Tulsans, many of them World War I veterans, went to the courthouse to prevent it, echoing the same instinct for self-defense that had organized Black communities across the country during the Red Summer riots two years earlier. A confrontation with an armed white crowd ended in gunfire, and by the early hours of June 1, thousands of white Tulsans — some of them deputized on the spot by city officials, with instructions, according to one eyewitness, to "get a gun and get a Negro" — poured across the railroad tracks into Greenwood.
Greenwood was one of the wealthiest Black communities in the country, a district of doctors, hotels, theaters, and newspapers known nationally as Black Wall Street. Over the following hours it was looted, burned, and in places bombed from the air by private aircraft, whose occupants have been credibly reported to have dropped incendiary devices on the district below. A renowned Black surgeon, A. C. Jackson, was shot after surrendering. Thirty-five city blocks were reduced to ash. Contemporary reports counted the dead at around three dozen; historians who have since worked from Red Cross records, oral histories, and recent forensic searches for mass graves believe the true toll may run into the hundreds, though — and this is worth stating plainly rather than resolving artificially — no fixed number commands consensus, because no thorough accounting was ever done at the time. Nearly nine thousand people were left homeless. Some spent that winter in tents. The city's insurers, and for decades the city's own official memory, called it a riot, a term that placed the violence at a comfortable distance from the men who deputized the mob and the officials who declined to stop it. The word massacre, which has only recently become standard, is the more honest one.
Three months later and a very different kind of armed crowd assembled in the hills of Logan County, West Virginia — though the underlying grievance, unchecked power exercised by those who controlled land and law, was not so far removed. Since the previous decade, coal miners across southern West Virginia had lived under a company-town system in which they were paid in scrip redeemable only at company stores, evicted at will by private mine guards, and blacklisted for so much as speaking to a union organizer. The Baldwin-Felts detective agency, hired muscle for the coal operators, had already become notorious for the 1920 Matewan shootout, in which the pro-union police chief Sid Hatfield killed several agents attempting to evict miners' families. When Baldwin-Felts men gunned Hatfield down on a courthouse's steps in August 1921, in front of his wife, thousands of miners — many of them, again, veterans of the war just concluded — armed themselves with military-surplus rifles and marched toward Mingo County to free jailed union men and break the martial law that Governor Ephraim Morgan had imposed on the coalfields.
Their route required passing through Logan County, controlled by an anti-union sheriff, Don Chafin, whose salary was effectively paid by the coal operators and who had assembled some three thousand deputies and guards along the fifteen-mile ridge of Blair Mountain. What followed, over roughly five days at the end of August and start of September, remains the largest armed insurrection on American soil since the Civil War: an estimated ten to fifteen thousand miners exchanging something on the order of a million rounds with Chafin's forces, while Chafin's side, in an escalation that has few parallels in American labor history, dropped homemade bombs — and, according to some accounts, gas munitions — from private airplanes onto the miners' positions. The uprising ended only when President Harding dispatched federal troops, whom the miners, many still holding their old service loyalties, refused to fight; they surrendered their weapons and went home to face treason and murder charges that mostly collapsed in front of sympathetic local juries. In the short term it broke the union: membership in the United Mine Workers, which had stood near fifty thousand in the state, would fall to a few hundred by the end of the decade. It would take the Depression and the New Deal to bring it back.
What connects Tulsa and Blair Mountain is not that they were caused by the same forces — one was racial terror carried out with the tacit blessing of civic authority, the other a class conflict in which the state ultimately intervened, however belatedly, on the side of federal order rather than local power. What connects them is the year's evident willingness to let private violence do public work: deputized mobs, private mine guards, hired detectives, aircraft used not for war but for enforcement, all operating in the gap where the state's actual monopoly on force was supposed to sit and mostly declined to. Both episodes, too, were substantially erased from the memory of the country that produced them. Tulsa went undiscussed in Oklahoma's own textbooks for most of a century. Blair Mountain became, for decades, a labor legend told mostly within the labor movement itself, its battlefield nearly lost to strip-mining before preservationists intervened.
The same congressional session that watched both of these erupt had, that May, already moved to close a different kind of door. The Emergency Quota Act, signed by Harding on May 19, was the first law in American history to cap immigration using a national-origins formula, limiting arrivals from any given country to three percent of that nationality's population already in the U.S. as of the 1910 census — a baseline chosen because it preserved the country's existing northern- and western-European tilt and throttled the more recent waves from Italy, Poland, and the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, along with Eastern European Jews fleeing pogroms and, that same year, the deepening chaos and famine in Russia itself. The law halved annual immigration almost overnight, from over eight hundred thousand arrivals in 1920 to roughly three hundred thousand the following year. Its architects spoke openly of protecting American racial stock from dilution, and the bill arrived on the heels of the Palmer Raids, in which the Justice Department had spent the previous two years rounding up and deporting immigrant radicals during the Red Scare — two pieces of the same anxiety, that foreignness itself carried danger, arriving within eighteen months of each other. It was framed as emergency, temporary legislation. It would prove to be the template for the far harsher, still more restrictive act that followed it three years later, and the national-origins logic it introduced would govern American immigration policy for another four decades.
Here, then, is the same instinct in three different registers: a mob given license to destroy a Black city within a city; a sheriff's private army given machine guns and airplanes to put down a labor uprising; a Congress given a census table and told to decide, by formula, which nationalities the country could still absorb. 1921 did not require a war to produce violence. It only required an existing hierarchy, a moment of postwar exhaustion, and enough people willing to treat the maintenance of that hierarchy as self-evidently worth the cost.
Part II: The Turks Hold
By the start of 1921, the Greek expeditionary force in Anatolia had been advancing for the better part of two years without ever quite winning the war it was fighting. Landed at Smyrna in May 1919 with British encouragement — London saw the Greek army as a convenient instrument for crushing the Turkish nationalist movement gathering around Mustafa Kemal — the Greeks had pushed deep into western Anatolia by the following autumn, taking Bursa, Eskişehir, and a string of towns along the rail lines that connected the coast to the interior. The Ottoman government in Constantinople, powerless and discredited, had already signed away the country's future at Sèvres. Kemal's nationalists in Ankara refused to recognize any of it.
What the Greek advance ran into that spring was something new: not the irregular bands and scattered resistance they had faced before, but a disciplined, entrenched regular army under İsmet Pasha, who fought them to a standstill outside İnönü in a nine-day battle at the end of March. The Greek army pressed again in July, breaking through at Kütahya and Eskişehir and advancing to within striking distance of Ankara itself — and then, in a decision that would prove fatal to the entire campaign, halted rather than pursued, giving the Turkish forces room to fall back in order rather than collapse. It was the kind of hesitation that looks decisive only in hindsight. At the time, the Greek high command still believed one more push would finish the war.
That push came in August. Nine Greek divisions — roughly 120,000 men, with artillery and air support the Turks could not match — marched across arid, open country toward the Sakarya River, forty-five miles from Ankara, behind which Kemal's forces had dug in along a defensive line built on ridges and river bends rather than a single fixed front. Kemal, given emergency powers by the Grand National Assembly only weeks before, took personal command and told his officers there would be no line of retreat, only a field of defense, and that field was the entire country. What followed was three weeks of attritional fighting across a hundred-kilometer front — assault, counterassault, mountain positions taken and given up and taken again — that has since been remembered on the Turkish side as the Battle of Sakarya, and that cost both armies dearly: Turkish losses alone are estimated at somewhere around twenty thousand killed and wounded, Greek losses comparable or higher, with reliable, precise figures elusive on both sides given the condition of the record. By mid-September the Greek offensive had spent itself. Papoulas ordered a general retreat back to the positions his army had held a month earlier, and the war, for all practical purposes, was decided in that retreat, even though another year of fighting remained before Smyrna would fall.
Greek units carried out scorched-earth reprisals as they pushed east that summer, burning villages and, by at least one Greek officer's own diary account, killing elderly residents who could not flee in time; the same scorched-earth pattern recurred, in the other direction, as Greek forces withdrew from the Sakarya line in September, leaving little of use behind them. Turkish accounts, gathered from villages along the front and passed down through families for a century since, describe Greek units rounding up civilians, burning homes, and abducting young women during the weeks the front sat astride their land — accounts that, whatever their precision after a hundred years of retelling, describe a consistent and credible pattern of wartime brutality against a civilian population that had no say in why the front had arrived at their doorstep. Irregular Turkish and Circassian bands, for their part, carried out reprisal killings against local Greek and Armenian civilians in territory the nationalists held, a pattern of ethnic violence that both predated Sakarya and would outlast it. None of this was unique to 1921 or to this particular war — it was the same logic of ethnic score-settling that had already convulsed the region through the Balkan Wars and the Armenian catastrophe of the preceding decade — but it belongs in the record of this year rather than deferred to the more famous catastrophe still to come at Smyrna, because the civilians caught in the Sakarya campaign did not know they were living through a rehearsal.
Behind the battlefield, the war's diplomacy was quietly rearranging itself in ways that made the Greek defeat harder to reverse. Bolshevik Russia, eager to check British influence and cultivate a friendly buyer of Western unrest on its southern flank, had signed a treaty of friendship with Ankara that March and begun shipping the nationalists arms and ammunition even as the fighting at Sakarya was underway. Britain, which had backed the Greek adventure from the start, was growing visibly uneasy with the government in Athens and its costs; France, sensing which way the war was turning, would sign its own separate agreement with the Kemalists that October, handing over resource-rich territory it had previously occupied and recognizing the nationalist government outright. Sakarya did not just stop a Greek army outside Ankara. It persuaded three great powers, within months of each other, that they had backed the wrong side, or that backing either side further was no longer worth the cost. Kemal returned to Ankara from the battlefield with the rank of field marshal and a new title, Gazi — victor — bestowed by the same assembly that had granted him near-dictatorial authority to fight the battle in the first place. The war had another year left to run. But the outcome that would eventually send a million and a half people across the Aegean in one direction and half a million in the other, dissolve six centuries of Ottoman rule, and put a general from Salonica in charge of a republic that did not yet exist, had already been settled on a riverbank in September, in a battle whose casualty figures nobody on either side can state with full confidence to this day.
Part III: A Devastating Victory
Nothing about the winter of 1921 in Soviet Russia looked like victory. The Civil War had been won — Kolchak captured and executed, Denikin gone into exile, Wrangel's remnant evacuated from Crimea the previous autumn — but the country the Bolsheviks had inherited was a ruin of its own making as much as the war's. Three years of War Communism had nationalized industry, banned private trade, and above all instituted forced requisitioning of peasant grain, a policy that had kept the cities fed through the war years by taking, at gunpoint if necessary, whatever surplus the countryside produced, and often more than the surplus. By early 1921 the peasantry had responded in the most predictable way available to it: planting less, since anything beyond bare subsistence would simply be confiscated. Into that already-strained system, in the spring and summer of 1921, came one of the worst droughts the Volga basin had seen in a generation.
The result was the worst famine Europe had experienced since the Middle Ages. It struck hardest along the Volga and in the Urals, a region that had been the empire's breadbasket, and it did not stay contained there: by some estimates as many as thirty-five million people across dozens of provinces were affected, roughly a fifth of the country's population, with something on the order of twenty million in acute distress in the core famine zone. Cities emptied into the countryside looking for food that did not exist there either; peasant families along the railway lines walked toward Siberia, toward Moscow, toward anywhere, not knowing whether anywhere was better. What happened in the worst-hit districts is difficult to state without seeming to sensationalize: relief workers and Soviet investigators alike documented cases of families eating the bodies of relatives who had already died, of grave-robbing for meat, of a black-market trade in human flesh disguised at market as beef or horsemeat. Estimates of the total death toll vary enormously, from just over a million by the most conservative accounting to as high as ten million by the least conservative — a spread that says as much about the impossibility of counting the dead in a famine of this scale as it does about any single figure. Most serious historians converge somewhere in the neighborhood of five million.
The famine forced Lenin to do something his government had, until then, refused to do: ask the capitalist world for help. Maxim Gorky's open appeal that July, to "all honest people," reached Herbert Hoover's American Relief Administration, which had spent years feeding a starving postwar Europe and now, after tense negotiations conducted in Riga, began doing the same for the country that had just spent three years denouncing the West as the enemy of the revolution. By the following year the ARA was fielding a small army of a few hundred Americans and well over a hundred thousand Russian employees, importing more than a million tons of grain, and feeding upward of ten million people a day at its peak — the largest famine relief operation the world had yet seen, quietly saving the government that had rebuffed it two years earlier, and quietly embarrassing it too, since Soviet authorities would go on exporting grain for hard currency even as American food kept much of the country alive.
The same crisis that broke the countryside was, that spring, already breaking something else: the fiction that the revolution's furthest south-western territory would be left to govern itself. Georgia had declared independence from the collapsing empire in 1918, and the Bolshevik government in Moscow had formally recognized that independence by treaty as recently as May 1920. The recognition did not survive the year that followed. The invasion, when it came in February 1921, was substantially the project of two Bolsheviks who were Georgian by birth — Joseph Stalin and Sergo Ordzhonikidze — and who obtained Lenin's consent to intervene on the pretext of supporting a "peasants' and workers' rebellion" inside Georgia that they themselves had done much to manufacture. The Red Army's 11th Army crossed the border on February 16; Georgian forces put up a genuinely stubborn defense of the approaches to Tbilisi, inflicting enough casualties in the first days that the Soviet advance stalled for nearly a week, but the capital fell on February 25, and within three weeks the rest of the country had been overrun. The Menshevik government fled into exile in France. A Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic was proclaimed in Tbilisi on the same day the city fell, staffed by Georgian Bolsheviks, governing a country whose actual sovereignty had just been erased by two of its own sons acting in Moscow's name — the peculiar, recurring cruelty of an empire conquering its periphery through the periphery's own émigrés.
And in the same weeks that the Red Army was marching into Tbilisi, a rebellion broke out inside Russia itself that the regime found far more disturbing than anything happening on its borders, because it came from people who were not supposed to be capable of turning against it. The sailors of the Kronstadt naval fortress, twenty miles from Petrograd across the frozen Gulf of Finland, had been among the Bolsheviks' most reliable allies in 1917 — the Aurora, whose guns had signaled the start of the October Revolution, belonged to their fleet. By 1921, after three winters of War Communism, requisitioning, and one-party rule, they had had enough. On March 1, a mass meeting of sailors and workers passed a resolution with fifteen demands: new elections to the soviets by secret ballot, freedom of speech and the press for left-wing parties, freedom of assembly for unions and peasant organizations, an end to the political departments that kept Communists embedded in the military, and above all an end to grain requisitioning. Their slogan, deliberately, was a version of 1917's own rallying cry: all power to the soviets, not to the parties.
The government's response was immediate and unambiguous. Trotsky and Zinoviev denounced the rebellion as a White conspiracy — a claim historians have since found essentially baseless, resting on a single unsigned memorandum from an émigré organization that had merely hoped to exploit an uprising it expected to happen anyway — took the sailors' families in Petrograd hostage to pressure a surrender, and gave Kronstadt an ultimatum to lay down its arms or be "shot like partridges." When the deadline passed, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a young officer who would rise to marshal rank before Stalin had him shot in the following decade's purges, led a force of some fifty thousand across the ice to retake the fortress from its roughly fifteen thousand defenders. The assault, launched the night of March 7 and pressed home over the following ten days by troops crossing open ice under artillery fire, succeeded on March 18. What followed was not a battlefield reckoning but an administrative one: the Cheka arrested more than two thousand people, tried the alleged ringleaders in secret, and executed hundreds without public hearing over the following months, while some eight thousand rebels fled across the thawing ice into Finnish exile rather than wait to find out what surrender would cost them.
What makes Kronstadt worth dwelling on, beyond the brutality of its suppression, is its timing against the very same crisis that had produced it. The Bolsheviks' Tenth Party Congress was in session in Moscow throughout the assault on the fortress, and it was at that congress, even as Tukhachevsky's troops were still fighting their way across the ice, that Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy — abolishing forced grain requisitioning in favor of a fixed tax in kind, permitting peasants to sell their surplus on an open market, opening a narrow lane for private trade. It was, in economic substance, close to what the Kronstadt sailors had been demanding. It arrived, in political substance, alongside their extermination. The same congress that granted the peasantry the market freedom the rebellion had called for also formally banned factions within the party itself, closing off the last channel through which dissent like Kronstadt's might have found a legal home. The revolution, faced with a choice between reforming itself and defending its own monopoly on power, did both at once, in the same week, on the same ice.
Part IV: Roads to Independence
In the Rif mountains of northern Morocco, a war began in 1921 that would not properly end for another five years, and it began with the single worst catastrophe a European colonial army had suffered since the Italians were routed at Adwa a quarter-century earlier. Spain had held a formal protectorate over northern Morocco since 1912, but formal authority and actual control were two different things in the Rif's mountainous interior, where Berber tribes had never been subdued and had little interest in beginning now. The Spanish command in the eastern zone, under General Manuel Fernández Silvestre — a favorite of King Alfonso XIII, and by most later accounts an impetuous officer who had doubled the territory under nominal Spanish control in barely a year — pushed a thin, overextended line of small fortified outposts deep into country the army did not actually hold, connected by supply lines too weak to support them and manned in some cases by units so under-resourced that ammunition ran low before any siege had even properly begun.
The man who broke that line was Abd el-Krim, a former qadi and Spanish colonial functionary — he had worked as a translator and journalist inside the protectorate's own administration before turning against it, after a spell in Spanish custody had convinced him that colonization had never been about the development it promised. Through June and July 1921 his fighters picked off isolated Spanish outposts one at a time, seizing weapons and ammunition as each position fell and using them to besiege the next. On July 22, with his forward supply base at Igueriben already lost and his troops critically short of water and ammunition, Silvestre ordered the evacuation of the main camp at Annual. The retreat collapsed into a rout. Spanish soldiers were shot and stabbed as they fled; Silvestre himself vanished in the chaos, his body never conclusively identified. Within a matter of weeks the Spanish had lost every position they had built up since 1909 and been pushed back to the walled enclave of Melilla, their principal base, with somewhere between eight and sixteen thousand dead depending on whose count one trusts — the Spanish government's own eventual tally to the Cortes was 13,192 — and the survivors of one besieged garrison at Monte Arruit massacred after they had already surrendered under a promise of safe passage that was not honored.
The disaster, known in Spain simply as Annual, did more than humiliate an army. It humiliated a monarchy: the subsequent parliamentary investigation, the Expediente Picasso, laid bare a record of negligent leadership, corrupt supply contracts, and an officer corps more concerned with royal favor than competence, and the political fallout it produced would help destabilize the Spanish government all the way to Primo de Rivera's coup two years later. Buoyed by his victory and the arms it had put in his hands — by his own later estimate, one catastrophic night had supplied him with everything he needed to fight a real war — Abd el-Krim proclaimed something close to an independent state in the territory he now controlled, and would go on, over the following two years, to formalize it as the Republic of the Rif: a government with sharia courts, a nascent bureaucracy, and international ambitions Abd el-Krim himself compared, loosely, to what Kemal was simultaneously building in Ankara. Spain would spend the next five years and eventually call in the French to get the territory back. In 1921, though, none of that reversal had happened yet. What had happened was that a colonized people, led by a man the empire had once employed to translate its own decrees, had inflicted on a European power one of the worst defeats any colonial army suffered in the whole of the century — and had, for the moment, made themselves free.
Nearly three thousand miles to the north-west, a different colonized people reached, in the same year, a very different kind of ending to the same basic argument. The Irish War of Independence had ground on since 1919 in a form of fighting the British army was not able to translate into victory: ambushes, assassinations, reprisals, the Royal Irish Constabulary reinforced by the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries, atrocity answering atrocity through Bloody Sunday and beyond, until a truce was finally called in July 1921. What followed was five months of formal negotiation in London between a British delegation led by Prime Minister David Lloyd George — with Winston Churchill and the formidable Lord Birkenhead among his team — and an Irish delegation headed by Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, sent by Éamon de Valera, who had chosen for reasons historians still debate not to lead the delegation himself.
The negotiations turned, in the end, on a single unresolvable asymmetry: the Irish delegation wanted a republic, and Britain was never going to grant one, offering instead dominion status — self-government within the Commonwealth, on the model of Canada, with an oath of allegiance to the Crown that would prove the treaty's most bitterly resented clause, and with Northern Ireland given the right to opt out of the new state entirely, a right its parliament exercised almost immediately. Collins and Griffith, empowered as plenipotentiaries to sign without reference back to Dublin, ultimately accepted the compromise rather than resume a war they knew the IRA's guerrilla campaign could not sustain much longer, signing the Articles of Agreement in the early hours of December 6, 1921, after a final negotiating session so tense that Lord Birkenhead reportedly told Collins he might have just signed his own political death warrant, to which Collins is said to have replied that he had signed his actual one. He would be proven right within nine months, shot dead by former comrades who considered the treaty a betrayal of the republic they had all fought for.
The Dáil ratified the treaty on January 7, 1922, by the narrowest of margins — sixty-four votes to fifty-seven — and de Valera resigned the presidency in protest two days later rather than accept a settlement he considered a partition of the republic he still believed the country had already won. The split that vote exposed did not stay confined to parliamentary procedure; it would erupt, within six months, into a civil war between former allies that killed more people than the war against Britain had. But in December 1921 itself, what existed was an agreement, freshly signed, that ended eight centuries of formal British rule over the greater part of Ireland and created, within a year, the Irish Free State — the first British colonial possession of any real size to negotiate its way, however incompletely, out from under the empire, rather than simply be granted independence by London's own reckoning of what its subjects deserved.
Here, then, are this year's two answers to the same demand for self-rule, arrived at by almost exactly opposite means. Ireland's independence was won at a negotiating table by men who had first fought a guerrilla war brutal enough to make the alternative to negotiation look worse than compromise, and it came, even so, sealed with an oath its own negotiators found nearly impossible to accept, a partition that would fester for the rest of the century, and a civil war among the victors that would claim one of the two men who signed it. The Rif's independence was won on a mountainside, unrecognized, unnegotiated, and provisional in a way its architect could not yet know: Abd el-Krim's republic existed in 1921 because Spain had been too incompetent and too overextended to stop it, not because any great power had agreed it should exist, and within five years two of those powers would combine their armies to make sure it stopped existing at all. Ireland got a state that survived, at the cost of a war among its own people. The Rif got a state that did not survive, at the cost of a war against people who came from outside. Independence, this year makes plain, was never a single door that opened the same way twice.
Coda: Fascism Forms
In May 1921, running as the "extreme right wing" of Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti's National Bloc, thirty-five Fascists won seats in the Italian parliament for the first time, in an election conducted in a climate of violence the coalition's own allies had done nothing to restrain. By then the squadristi — black-shirted veterans of the war's shock troops, financed by landowners in the Po Valley who found them a useful tool against socialist peasant leagues — had spent a year touring the countryside by truck, burning union halls, dissolving elected socialist councils, and administering their signature punishment to organizers and mayors alike: a forced dose of castor oil, sometimes mixed with gasoline, that left its victims doubled over, humiliated, and marked, for weeks, as men the fascio had gotten to. A union organizer named Natale Gaiba was beaten and shot dead in front of his family that year for the crime of continuing his work after the squads had banned it. None of this was hidden. Much of it happened with the police looking on, or looking away.
By midsummer, Mussolini himself seemed briefly to want less of it. In August, worried that the violence was becoming a liability rather than an asset now that his movement had a parliamentary toehold to protect, he signed a Pact of Pacification with the Italian Socialist Party, an attempt to formally end the squadristi's campaign of reprisal. The local ras — men like Italo Balbo in Ferrara and Roberto Farinacci in Cremona, who had built their own regional power on exactly the violence Mussolini now wanted to suspend — simply ignored it. Mussolini, who had never fully controlled the squads he had inspired, abandoned the Pact instead. When the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento gathered in Rome that November for its Third Congress, one of its first acts was to formally renounce the peace it had made only three months before, and its second was to reorganize itself, once and for all, into a proper political party — the Partito Nazionale Fascista — better financed, still undisciplined, but now possessed of the thing a street movement had lacked: a structure built to outlast any single truce, and a leader who had just learned that his own followers could out-vote him even when he was the one giving orders.
The fascio, bundle of rods bound together, had been the movement's chosen emblem since Mussolini founded its precursor in a Milan square in 1919 — an old Roman symbol of strength through unity, a single rod easily broken, many rods together not. The metaphor took on an unexpected secondary interpretation by November 1921. For two years, Mussolini had attempted to consolidate the movement under his absolute control, yet the ras openly flouted his peace treaty. This defiance demonstrated that the bundle was unified by a distinct internal logic, one that did not operate solely through his authority. It would take him another year, and a march on a capital that offered no resistance, to close that gap. In November 1921, all that existed yet was the party, freshly founded, and the violence that had built it, freshly ratified rather than restrained.