How It Happened Part 1

Throughout the late 1920’s, politics in Germany were dominated by the Social Democratic Party (SDP), which operated on a platform of democratic socialism which should be pretty fricking obvious given the name, and a coalition of centrist and conservative parties.  Now given that neither of these groups really saw eye to eye, and neither was able to gain or maintain power consistently over the other, the German government really didn’t do all that much during this period.  However, nobody really seemed to care all that much because the economy was booming, and though the rich were definitely taking more than their fair share, overall everyone was doing better than they had previously.  Of course, that all ended with the start of the Great Depression in 1929, when people suddenly got real tired real quick of their government not doing shit.  This proved quite beneficial to what had previously been considered more fringe parties, most notably the German Communist Party and a little known group called the National Socialist German Workers Party, better known as the Nazis.

Now at the time, Germany operated under a rather complicated system of government with all sorts of fun names which we are going to completely ignore because fuck that noise.  The basics of it was there was a parliament led by a Chancellor who did most of the legislating, and a President whose main role was to command the military, issue edicts as needed in times of emergency, and order a new parliamentary election when parliament proved itself unable to do shit.  Germany’s president was a corpulent old conservative general by the name of Paul von Hindenburg, who was less than pleased when the economy began to spiral downward out of control and parliament collapsed into a bunch of squabbling nitwits who refused to compromise in any way to solve the very real issues facing the country.  Not having many tools at his disposal, Hindenburg solved this little problem by forcing the old SPD Chancellor to resign, replacing him with a conservative chap named Heinrich Bruning.  This move was right up Hindenburg’s alley given that he dreamed of someday restoring the monarchy and the SPD was the main group involved in its overthrow back in 1918.  However, this move was less than popular given that parliament usually elected its own Chancellor, but given it was an emergency and all, Hindenburg could do pretty much whatever the hell he wanted according to the German constitution.  Unfortunately, Bruning had no more luck than his predecessor getting parliament to do shit, and as a result, he eventually requested Hindenburg dissolve parliament so there could be new elections, which Hindenburg promptly did in 1930.  That’s when the shit really started to hit the fan.

At this point in time, Germany had only been a functioning democracy for thirteen years, having been ruled by various monarchs prior to the end of World War I.  While the majority of parliament was run by pro-democracy parties, there were several prominent parties who supported a return to the monarchy.  Communism was also seen as a viable alternative at the time, with the German Communist party regularly getting over 10 percent of the vote despite its entire platform being dismantle the government in favor of a socialist dictatorship.  Given this, it should come as less of a surprise that the Nazis managed to rise to prominence.

By 1931, the Nazi party had existed for eleven years.  However, most of its early days were as a paramilitary organization which infamously failed in an attempted coup, resulting in its leader, Adolf Hitler, being sent to prison for a year or two.  Surprisingly, such shenanigans didn’t spell the end of the Nazis.  However, it is worth noting that the Communist party had at one point also tried to overthrow the government, and they continued to be a political party as well, so all in all Germans seemed okay with such things.  Anyways, after getting out of prison, Hitler set to work throughout the late 1920’s converting his band of racist thugs into a viable political party.  As far as political parties went, they had a bit of something for everyone.  While they were most certainly traditionalist, racist, autocratic, and militaristic, they were also anti-big business and supporters of enhanced social programs.  Similar to the Communist party, the Nazis wanted a socialist dictatorship, with the added twist of saying fuck off to anyone who wasn’t German.  This combination of conservative and liberal platforms proved surprisingly popular with the German people, especially amongst the lower middle class, small business owners, public servants, and teachers.  However, despite this growing popularity, the Nazis got less than 3 percent of the vote in the 1928 election.

The Great Depression is what really turned the Nazi party from being a random bunch of asshats into a competitive political party.  Widespread unemployment and business failures, and the inability of the government to do jack shit, led to many people looking for alternatives.  Unfortunately, many people landed on the Nazis.  Hitler largely utilized rhetoric focused on making Germany great again, and blaming outsiders for Germany’s problems, especially the Jewish people.  Antisemitism wasn’t a new thing in Germany, but the Nazis made it a focus of everything wrong in the country.  Though Jews made up less than 1 percent of the population, they had an out sized role in large businesses and at universities.  This made them a target for people who needed someone to blame for the economic downturn.  As a result, the Nazis became the second largest political party in the country after the 1930 election.

Bad Time for a Sick Day

In mid-January of 1919, racist ass hat U.S. President Woodrow Wilson arrived in Paris to begin negotiations to officially end World War I.  It should go without saying that the war was one of the most devastating in history.  Thanks to all sorts of mechanically assisted innovations in slaughtering people, some 18 million died, with an even greater number left grievously injured both physically and mentally.  Due to this, avoiding future wars was a pretty high up priority for many people, perhaps none more so than President Woody.  When Woody came to Paris, he brought with him extensive plans for what he called peace without victory.  To avoid conflict at a later date, he wanted the Allies to basically chalk the war up as being everyone’s fault, forgiving Germany and not demanding anything in the way of reparations.  He also wanted to create a League of Nations to arbitrate future international disputes, promote free trade, and move towards ending Eurocentric imperialism by giving greater autonomy to the native populations of various colonies around the world.  This was all somewhat ironic, given that back home in America, Woody was a hardcore segregationist who had pushed the country into the war, and then basically ran it as a fascist dictatorship during the war.  However, such contradictions of character aside, world peace is world peace.

Anyways, upon arriving in Paris, Woody found most of the other major allies not totally onboard with his plans, especially the prime minster of France, a monopoly man looking guy named Georges Clemenceau.  France had been pretty well fucked up by the war, with nearly 5% of its population killed, including 25% of its young men, and the majority of its industrial capacity destroyed.  Germany had invaded France twice in the past fifty years, and from Georges’ point of view it would be best to make sure that a third invasion never happened by turning Germany into France’s bitch.  Georges wanted Germany to surrender wide swaths of highly valuable territory, pay a ridiculous amount of money in reparations, and agree to pretty much completely demilitarize.

It should go without saying that Woody and Georges had a hard time finding middle ground.  Many of the meetings basically turned into screaming matches, with Britain and Italy, the other two major allies at the table, basically ping-ponging back and forth based upon who ever had the more eloquent argument that day.  Germany wasn’t even involved in the negotiation of the peace treaty, because they were so down and out that their opinions weren’t even considered important.  This crap went on for nearly four months, during which time pretty much zero progress was made.  During this time, millions of people were dying, not of the war, but rather of the Spanish flu, a pandemic that would infect a third of the world’s population and kill around 50 million.  It was called the Spanish flu because Spain, being a neutral country, was the first to admit to its existence when it first appeared back in 1918.  Even after the war ended, most of the Allies were refusing to acknowledge the flu’s existence, worried it would weaken their position at the negotiating table.  For his part, Woody never once mentioned the Spanish flu publicly, which makes the fact that he fell ill with it in April of 1919 kind of funny.

Woody had a bad time with the flu.  While ill, he became extremely paranoid about French spies, and when he recovered he was a weakened wreck of a man.  With the fight almost completely knocked out of him, Woody pretty much just let Georges have his way, which mostly involved kicking Germany in the nuts until they started puking up blood, metaphorically of course.  On threat of renewed war, Germany was forced to agree to pay some $33 billion in reparations, allow some of their territories to be occupied by French troops, and openly declare that the whole war was entirely their fault.  The Treaty of Versailles was signed by Germany in July of 1919.  The only thing Woody got was an agreement to form the League of Nations.

Woody returned to the United States soon after, but he never recovered his health.  The U.S. Senate refused to ratify the treaty, largely due to opposition by German and Irish immigrants and their decedents.  Woody tried to go on a speaking tour to promote the treaty, but had a debilitating stroke soon after.  He spent the rest of his presidency as an invalid, his wife refusing to let anyone but herself see him, which likely had nothing to do with Woody’s sudden change of heart regarding woman’s suffrage.  The U.S. never signed the Treaty of Versailles or joined the League of Nations, instead signing its own separate peace treaty in 1921.  As for Germany, the high cost of the reparations caused a significant economic recession and hyperinflation, which combined with Germany being forced to take all the blame for the war led to the growth of far right nationalist groups, which eventually culminated in Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party coming to power in 1933.  Hopefully everyone knows how well that turned out.

Back Cracker

Daniel David Palmer was a Canadian nitwit who never seemed to have much luck with anything.  Born in 1845, he emigrated to Iowa soon after reaching adulthood and involved himself in several failed ventures; including being a school teacher, beekeeper, and grocery store owner.  However, none of these jobs really worked out, mostly because DD had the business acumen of a three day old ham sandwich.  Like many such idiots of his day, DD often got himself involved into the various strange fads that sprung up at the time.  The first of these was spiritualism, the belief that via mediums people are able to talk with the dead.  However, this didn’t prove to be a very lucrative avenue for DD, since he wasn’t even talented enough to pull off the trickery of the spiritualists, so instead he got into magnetic healing, a quack form of alternative medicine which claimed that diseases could be cured by running magnetic fields over parts of the body.  This was of course complete bullshit, but it didn’t stop health conscious idiots from paying out the nose for totally worthless treatments.

DD ran a magnetic healing clinic for nearly a decade, gaining a reputation around town as a charlatan taking advantage of the stupid.  This might have been his entire career if not for a chance encounter with his office building’s janitor, a man who liked a good joke.  After hearing a real zinger one day in 1896, DD gave the man a hearty slap on the back, a few days after which the janitor claimed his impaired hearing had improved.  While most people would’ve just laughed politely at the janitor, DD instead utilized this experience to create his own quack theory that the body runs off magical energy flowing through its nervous system, and that the cause of all disease was the disruption of this energy via kinks in the spinal cord.  Therefore the cure to all disease was realigning the spine.  However, not finding the slapping a janitor origin story enticing enough, DD made up some spiritualist bullshit about some long dead doctor telling him how to cure people.  So it was that DD became the first chiropractor.

Initially, DD kept his so-called chiropractic secrets to himself, but after a few years of idiots flocking to him, he decided the real money was to be made training others how to do it so he founded the Palmer School of Chiropractic.  Amongst his earliest students was his son B.J. Palmer.  DD and BJ did not really get along all that well, probably because DD was a rather distant father who mostly showed his love by hitting his children with leather straps.  However, they did work together for several years, mostly denouncing vaccines as hogwash and considering whether or not to turn chiropratic into a religion, eventually deciding against it because they didn’t want to risk being confused with the various other weird cults popular at the time. Eventually in 1906, DD was arrested for practicing medicine without a license.  By the time he got out, BJ had seized control of the college.  Forcing his father to sign over ownership, he sent the old man packing.

DD traveled west after losing his college, founding several new chiropractic colleges, much to the chagrin of his son.  They did not see each other again until 1913, when DD returned to Iowa and BJ hit him with his car.  DD died a few weeks later of typhoid, but rumors quickly began circulating that BJ had killed him.  For his part, BJ spent the next several decades promoting his father’s pseudo-science treatments and defending them from attacks by legitimate doctors and the American Medical Association (AMA).  Thousands of chiropractors were imprisoned for illegally practicing medicine, which BJ combated via clever word play, such as stating that chiropractors analyzed patients rather than diagnosing them.  He also began political campaigns to legalize chiropractic in all fifty states, began traveling the world to spread his ideas, and bought a radio station from which he espoused his nutty ideas and raved against vaccinations and water fluoridation.  Though he feuded with his son, David Daniel Palmer, for a time over the younger man’s decision to go to business school, the two later made up, and when BJ died in 1961 the college was handed off to the new DD.

As for the ever growing mass of chiropractors, the AMA continued to pushback against them, even labeling the practice as an unscientific cult in 1966, advising its members that it was unethical to be in anyway associated with it.  Despite this, Louisiana became the 50th state to legalize chiropractors in 1974.  The battle with the AMA continued until 1987, when a federal judge ruled that such declarations violated the Sherman anti-trust act, because by god, this was America and Americans are allowed to believe whatever bullshit they please.  This made it possible for chiropractic care to be covered by health insurance.  Today, chiropractic is a $12.3 billion industry, with many practitioners also delving into other bullshit medical practices, such as shoving crystals in places where crystals really shouldn’t go.  Despite absolutely zero scientific proof, the majority of practitioners still believe in DD’s original theories regarding magical nerve energy.