The First World War led to a drop in recruitment of new volunteers, but the months immediately following the armistice brought a phenomenal increase in new missionaries sent overseas. The peak year for enlistment of new volunteers was 1921. The high idealism of the war years still reigned, and mission work seemed to fit clearly with hopeful expectations for international democracy. The Interchurch World Movement symbolized the crusading idealism of the times with its aim of gathering all American benevolent and missionary societies into a grand campaign for the spread of Christianity. The devastating collapse of the Interchurch World Movement due to lack of financial support shocked American Protestant leaders into the realization that a new era had arrived. With the "return to normalcy", post-War economic disruption and an altered psychological mood, there was a rapid descent into what Robert Handy has called the "American religious depression" of 1925 to 1935. This religious depression, in force well before the great economic depression of the era, was grounded in the realization that American Protestantism could no longer identify itself with American culture and civilization.