While debating the 1922 issue of benefits to be paid to the American W.W. I veterans, this record of salary and the post-war benefits paid by the other combatant nations was distributed to members of Congress.
A 1921 column that clearly pointed out all the hardships created for Germany as a result of the Versailles Treaty.
The framers of that agreement could never have envisioned that the post-war landscape they designed for Germany would be pock-marked with such a myriad of frustrations - such as the border skirmishes between Germany and Poland, inflation, famine, the Salzburg Plebiscite and such harsh reparation payments that, when combined with all the other afflictions, simply served to create the kind of Germany that made Hitler's rise a reality.
Another article about the despondency in 1920s Germany can be read here...
"To-day was a great day in London. The Guards' Division was inspected by the King at Buckingham Palace and had a triumphant march to welcome them home...East End and West End rubbed shoulders to-day and showed the same respect for each other that not so long ago they had shown in the trenches."
Click here to read an article about the German veterans of W.W. I.
In 1920 there were many articles celebrating the three-hundredth anniversary of the Puritan's arrival on Cape Cod. This one writer decried the lack of enthusiasm that marked the modern age following the end of the Great War - a world that stood in contrast to the Pilgrim spirit. Religious faith, patriotism, and the belief in human progress had all been called into question by the mass carnage experienced during the war. Shell shocked and traumatized, the world seemed different: the old order had collapsed, replaced by an age of machines. The author of this column, Preston Slosson, was one of the observant souls to realize that the legacy of the First World War was disillusionment and cynicism.
"Our stock of idealism has temporarily run low and a mood of cynicism has replaced the devoted enthusiasm of 1918..."
Click here to read a 1916 article about life on the German home front. At the thirty-fifth annual Church Congress of the Protestant Episcopal Church (1919), clergy members seemed to agree that Christian leaders were needlessly complicit concerning their support for the First World War and were guilty of substituting Christian principles for patriotism:
"Christianity has betrayed itself body and soul".
If you would like to read about the spirit of disillusion that permeated post-war literature, click here. "Communist uprisings in Germany are blamed on Moscow by a practically unanimous Berlin press, and some newspapers flatly accuse the Russian official representative in Berlin, a Mr. Kopp, and his staff, of being the instigators of these disturbances, and so demand their expulsion." | 
