Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945

The Oxford History of the United States #9

by David M. Kennedy

Between 1929 and 1945, two great travails were visited upon the American people: the Great Depression and World War II. This book tells the story of how Americans endured, and eventually prevailed, in the face of those unprecedented calamities.

The Depression was both a disaster and an opportunity. As David Kennedy vividly demonstrates, the economic crisis of the 1930s was far more than a simple reaction to the alleged excesses of the 1920s. For more than a century before 1929, America's unbridled industrial revolution had gyrated through repeated boom and bust cycles, wastefully consuming capital and inflicting untold misery on city and countryside alike.

Freedom From Fear explores how the nation agonized over its role in World War II, how it fought the war, why the United States won, and why the consequences of victory were sometimes sweet, sometimes ironic. In a compelling narrative, Kennedy analyzes the determinants of American strategy, the painful choices faced by commanders and statesmen, and the agonies inflicted on the millions of ordinary Americans who were compelled to swallow their fears and face battle as best they could.

Both comprehensive and colorful, this account of the most convulsive period in American history, excepting only the Civil War, reveals a period that formed the crucible in which modern America was formed.

Genres: History, American History, Nonfiction, Politics, World War II, Economics, American

936 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

David Michael Kennedy is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning historian specializing in American history. He is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus at Stanford University[1] and the Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. Professor Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic analysis and cultural analysis with social history and political history.

Kennedy is responsible for the recent editions of the popular history textbook The American Pageant. He is also the current editor of the Oxford History of United States series. This position was held previously by C. Vann Woodward. Earlier in his career, Kennedy won the Bancroft Prize for his Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (1970) and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for World War I, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980). He won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for History for Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (1999).

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Jobs were plentiful for the moment and paid good wages. With hard work [the average white American male] was making a little more than a hundred dollars a month. He had been laid off several times in the preceding years but had built a small cushion of savings at his bank to tide him over when unemployment hit again, as he knew it must. The stock market had just crashed, but it seemed to be recovering, and in any case he owned no stocks…Evenings he ‘radioed.’ Weekends he went to the movies, better now that they had sound. Sometimes he broke the law and lifted a glass…He was living better than his parents had ever dreamed of living. He was young and vigorous; times were good, and the future promised to be still better. He had just cast his first presidential vote, in 1928, for Herbert Hoover, the most competent man in America, maybe in the world. In that same year he married a girl three years younger than he. She gave up her job to have their first baby. They started to think of buying a house, perhaps in one of the new suburbs. Life was just beginning. And their world was about to come apart…”
- David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945

“There is a mysterious cycle in human events,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in 1936, in a speech accepting his renomination for the presidency. “To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.” As he did so often during the tumultuous years of the early-mid twentieth century, Roosevelt found that balance between acknowledging that times were hard, but suggesting there were better days – and perhaps even greatness – just up ahead.

If nothing else, he was absolutely right about one thing: for Americans living between 1929 and 1945, much was asked. They endured a dramatic stock market crash; an exceptionally long economic depression; climate shifts and mass internal migration; a bitter political fight about America’s role in the world; and finally, entry into the biggest conflict mankind has yet seen.

In the United States, if you were just a kid in 1929, there was a good chance your parents were unemployed, or barely employed, and that you felt hunger’s pinch. By the time you were a young adult, the draft loomed, and any plans you made were about to be put on hold. But if you survived that experience – and the vast majority did – you were just the right age to catch economic lighting. Subject to the strictures of race and gender, of course.

This epic tale of a massive shift in national fortune is beautifully detailed in David M. Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear. In nearly nine-hundred effortlessly readable pages, he takes us from the depths of the dust bowl, to the heights of a global superpower, and does so with an expert balance of biographical sketches, narrative arcs, and detailed analysis.

***

Freedom from Fear is really two books in one. Indeed, later editions have broken this into separate volumes, either in the belief that Americans can’t read long books, or in the hopes of making more money, or a combination of both. In any event, you want the original, because this is one huge story that is best told together.

Kennedy does not formally break the material into two distinct parts, but overall, roughly half the pages cover the Depression, and half the American experience in the Second World War. As in other entries in the estimable Oxford History of the United States, Kennedy tries to cover a huge number of topics, from an equally large number of perspectives. He can range quite far afield, but the crashing financial system and the rising war provide a strong dramatic backbone.

***

In picking this up, my chief interest was in the Great Depression. I have read plenty of books on World War II – my wife and psychologist argue that it’s too many – but not nearly as much about the economic doldrums that preceded it. If I’m being honest, most of what I know about the Depression comes from Hollywood. That’s why I went into this believing that the Depression ended when boxer James J. Braddock rode Seabiscuit to victory.

Kennedy’s presentation of the Depression did not disappoint. Approaching without a clear ideological agenda, he finds plenty of nice things to say about the much-maligned Herbert Hoover, and many sharp things about Franklin Roosevelt. Given that this starts in 1929, though, Hoover does not hold the stage for long. Instead, much of the Depression coverage revolves around the agonies and the ecstasies of the New Deal.

It is hard to overestimate the impact of the New Deal. As Kennedy notes, much of it withered and died even before Pearl Harbor, with famous agencies like the Works Progress Administration blown away like dust in an Oklahoma wind. Nevertheless, certain components become part of the fabric of American life, an expected part of the people’s compact with their government, despite attacks against it that remain ongoing in the twenty-first century.

In Kennedy’s telling, the New Deal did not do much, if anything, to end the Great Depression. There are some indicators, such as an immovably high unemployment rate, that support his contention. There is also a good deal of evidence that Roosevelt undercut his own success by withdrawing helpful measures too early. For instance, there is an argument that his fiscal conservatism – especially the adherence to the gold standard, and the belief that budgets must be balanced – wrecked the positive Keynesian impact of mass spending. In any event, I think that Kennedy is a little bearish on the New Deal, if only because it ignores the palliative effects. In other words, every person who got put to work was a person no longer unemployed. This meant a lot to people. At least, it did to my grandparents.

Overall, Kennedy’s conclusion is that the New Deal’s success came in a different arena: that of “security.” Taking its title from Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union, in which he delivered his “four freedoms,” Freedom from Fear suggests that security is the New Deal’s lasting legacy. It succeeded not in economic recovery, but in structural reform. This included the Federal Depositors Insurance Corporation, which has helped end bank runs; the Securities and Exchange Commission, which gives investors at least a fighting chance of knowing where their investment dollars are going; and the Social Security Administration, which provides old age and disability pensions.

***

Despite being quite pleased with the first half of Freedom from Fear, I did not expect all too much from the second, mainly because the Second World War has been done before, many times over. Nevertheless, Kennedy exceeds expectations here as well. With limited space – even in a pug-sized tome – he nicely summarizes the strategic issues of fighting a two-front war on different sides of the globe with very prickly allies. He also dips into important battles now and then to give a flavor of what Depression survivors had to face in Europe and the Pacific.

The best part of Freedom from Fear’s war coverage, however, is in its look at the American home front. Here we see the consequences of mass mobilization on a scale never equaled before or since. Kennedy accurately notes many difficulties that attended the war economy, including those three related words: fraud, waste, and abuse. But the proof is in the results. The industrial base of the United States – valuing quantity over quality – turned out thousands of ships, planes, and tanks; shipped them all over the world; created an atomic bomb; and carefully built-up consumer demand, so that when the fighting ended, those wartime factories could give us all the products we can no longer live without.

As expected from this series, Kennedy plays close attention to marginalized voices. Women surged into the workforce, though this was mostly temporary. When Germany and Japan surrendered, female factory workers – as opposed to those who’d taken white collar positions – returned home in droves, seemingly by choice. For black Americans, Franklin Roosevelt did not do half as much as he should have done, refusing – for instance – to desegregate the military. Yet his executive order prohibiting discrimination of workers in the war industry markedly raised their standards of living, and set the stage for the civil rights battles to come.

***

Freedom from Fear is really a masterpiece. It is engaging, even riveting, and despite its density, I looked forward to picking it up as soon as I set it down. It has scholarly credentials, and puts forth sophisticated takes, but it always maintains the momentum of a Homeric saga.

[William2 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Notes
This is a survey text which is not to say it can't deal with familiar material in a fresh and innovative way. It's extremely well done. I learned some new things and had my knowledge enhanced in other areas:

1. The government Hoover presided over represented 3% of the GDP. According to Kennedy, it was largely the puny size of the federal government that limited Hoover's attempts to effect change. That and the fact that he was too wedded to the gold standard, which FDR abandoned, and he saw recovery largely as a function of balance of payments, i.e. international diplomacy.

2. Hoover's tiny government didn't have much statistical information about itself. Housing starts, business inventories, retail sales, CPI, etc. --most of these were a result of the New Deal.

3. In the 1930s, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party both had members with political positions ranging from liberal to conservative. (This I find mind-boggling.)

4. In the late 1930s some 80% of the federal judiciary, and seven of the nine sitting Supreme Court justices, had been appointed by Republican presidents. This highly activist judiciary frustrated Roosevelt and overturned much of his legislation. A New Yorker writer, remarking in 1936 on the Supreme Court's new classical revival temple on Capitol Hill, said "it is a magnificent structure with fine big windows to throw the New Deal out of."

5. The New Deal did not create economic recovery in the short term. But the regulatory agencies it put in place -- SEC, FDIC, FHA, NLRB, etc. -- and the new forms of financial disclosure these institutions required from businesses, served to create greater transparency and thus for a while a lower-risk form of American capitalism. (NOTE: It was the Clinton Administration's invalidation of the Glass-Steagall Act, a piece of New Deal legislation which separated investment banks from commercial banks, that led directly to the 2008 global financial crash.)

6. There's excellent coverage here of the isolationism America indulged in during the Nazi agressions and Spanish Civil War. This has always been only briefly glossed over in accounts by European writers. Winston Churchill's foreboding memos to Roosevelt during the time that FDR was trying to extricate the U.S. from statutory neutrality chill the bones: "If Britain were defeated, Churchhill ominously intoned, "'then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we've known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age.'" For more see his 6-volume The Second World War.

7. The complexities and backstory of the Lend-Lease Program are nicely elucidated. This includes a detailed recapitulation of the U.S. in-house puzzlement with regard to productions quotas as the war ramped up. How much production was to go to Britain, how much to Russia? How much was to remain at home to train our own newly conscripted army? How quickly could civilian businesses, say, the car industry, be retooled to produce war materiel? At the same time new wartime expenditures were finally pulling the depressed economy out of its long torpor and lowering the unemployment rate to 10% for the first time in a decade.

8. Astonishingly, the naval strategies of both Japan and America were the product of one man's thinking: American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan. Mahan was both a naval officer and president of the Newport War College. His 1890 work The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660 1783 argued that "command of the sea was the key to success in war and that the way to secure the sea was to engage the enemy's main force in overwhelming stength and thus destroy it." Upon this strategy Japan built what was, "with six large carriers, the largest naval air force in the world...embarking some 500 high-performance aircraft flown by magnificently trained pilots."

9. I like the way each stage of the battles -- Corregidor and Bataan, Coral Sea, Midway, Guadalcanal, etc. -- is handled briefly and cogently. However, this may be where the one-volume structure of the book becomes creakiest. Or perhaps it's simply that the compromises involved in such a format become more obvious here. Still, the writing remains strong, vivid.

10. Well, you can't accuse Kennedy of faux triumphalism with regard to the early air war over Germany. Specifically, the early B-17 missions to Ploesti, Romania, and Regensburg and Schweinfurt, Germany in 1943. He's clearly appalled by the terrors inflicted on the flight crews, the appalling losses of men and materiel given the miniscule gains. The sheer suicidal confusion of getting these massive formations into the air, the frostbite the men suffered at operating altitude, the vomiting due to altitude sickness, the inability to relieve oneself on long missions. Then at the targets, flak, the fire of the enemy's oncoming Messerschmitts, bits of B-17s blown up while still in formation falling on other B-17 and knocking them out of the sky, the debris which the remaining planes had to fly through. And the wretchedly poor accuracy with which the planes delivered their payloads. The horror, the horror.

[Dmitri · Rating 4 out of 5]

“In the future days we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression, everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way, everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want, which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants, everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear, which means a world wide reduction of armaments so that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of aggression against any neighbor, everywhere in the world. That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for the kind of world attainable in our own time and our own generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create.”
- Franklin D. Roosevelt, excerpted from the State of the Union Address to the Congress, January 6, 1941

“Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. The United States was at peace with that nation and was still in conversation with its government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. Indeed one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American Island of Oahu, the Japanese Ambassador to the United States delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. While this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat, hint of war or attack.”
- Franklin D. Roosevelt, excerpted from a joint session of Congress, December 8, 1941

“Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, and emerges ahead of his accomplishments.”
- John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath (1939)

“If you ain't got the do re mi boys,
You ain't got the do re mi
Why, you better go back to beautiful Texas
Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee
California is a Garden of Eden
A paradise to live in or see
But believe it or not, you won't find it so hot
If you ain't got the do re mi”
- Woody Guthrie, Dust Bowl Ballads (1940)

************

David M. Kennedy begins his 1999 Pulitzer Prize winning history of the Depression and World War II with thumbnail sketches of FDR, Churchill, Hitler and Stalin, noting how their historical trajectories crossed during World War I. From there the clock is turned forward to the eve of the 1929 stock market crash, with recently elected President Hoover in the White House. Kennedy is a Stanford graduate and professor of history, and now the editor of the ‘Oxford History of the United States’ published since 1982. When it will be finished is anyone’s guess but after nine volumes there are three left.

The Great Migration
Kennedy traces the mass immigration from 1890 to 1920 where the population of the US had almost doubled from 63 million, mostly eastern and southern Europeans bringing new religions and languages. The vast majority settled in populated cities in the northeast and midwest that offered opportunities in industry. The rural south saw little change from postbellum poverty following the Civil War. Millions of farmers, sharecroppers and blacks also moved to urban areas to take part in the expansion of factories. Nativist anxieties led to a severe curtailing of the immigrant influx in 1924.

The Great Crash
A central cause of the 1929 stock market crash was the 1927 federal lending rates of 3.5% combined with bank relending rates of over 10% for margin purchases. Stock market values soared during 1928 and banks borrowed money to invest in stock shares themselves. When the market began to fall it triggered a landslide of margin calls and sell orders. The rout continued for three weeks until a third of US stock value had been erased. The 1933 Glass-Steagall Act created a firewall between commercial and investment banking until its repeal in 1999, leading to the 2008 subprime global financial crisis.

The Great Depression (Hoover 1929-30)
The stock crisis was not the only cause for depression. The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act of 1930 raised import taxes to the highest in US history. A saturation of consumer goods, a farm crisis where overproduction led to price deflation and income inequality were also factors. Hoover approached the challenges with a philosophy of ‘voluntary cooperation’, that businesses could correct the economy without government intervention. Kennedy defends Hoover’s reliance on minimal regulation where others at the time and after saw it as an extension of the laissez-faire policies of his predecessors.

The Great Depression (Hoover 1931-32)
Historians would later realize the primary cause of the Great Depression was the aftermath of WWI. Germany owed huge reparations to France and Britain, who in turn owed large loan repayments to the US. The international system was tied to the gold standard which tethered each nation to the others. Gold payments to a country increased currency and liquidity. The solution was to forgive or postpone payments but it was politically unpalatable. When Britain chose to default on gold payments to foreigners in 1932 it caused a chain reaction in two dozen countries who followed suite.

The Great Depression (Hoover-Roosevelt 1933-34)
By 1933 global business had shrunk by two thirds as a result of protectionism. Foreign depositors began to withdraw US assets causing a run on the banks far exceeding the ones in 1930. To stop the outflow the Federal Reserve raised interest rates during a liquidity crisis, further tightening credit. In 18 months FDR would untie the dollar from gold, allowing the Fed to manage currency without this restriction. Kennedy sees Hoover’s late initiatives such as Glass-Steagall, home loan banks and Reconstruction Financing Corp. to shore up private owners and business as a precursor to FDR’s policies.

The Great Depression (Roosevelt 1935-36)
Hoover and the conservatives had resisted public welfare programs for fear of a moral hazard and lobbied to continue with their fiscal plans without success. Although Democrats had a majority in Congress many were limited government and balanced budget advocates. FDR found his support in northern Democrats and progressive Republicans for the public works and unemployment relief that later would became cornerstones of the New Deal. In the first 100 days FDR passed the Emergency Banking Act, amid a tidal wave of private bank foreclosures, with broad bipartisan support.

The Great Depression (Roosevelt 1937-39)
By slashing the federal budget, Prohibition repeal, creating new revenue FDR had co-opted conservatives allowing him to pass farm subsidies, introduce floating currency, social security, fair labor and housing acts, innovations that were to appeal alternately to different factions. Although some of these ideas echoed Hoover’s earlier initiatives the former president was unable to gather a consensus where FDR was spectacularly successful and innovative. He was a man of action who inspired confidence in others. It is amazing to realize all he accomplished paralyzed from the waist down.

The Great War (Roosevelt 1941-45)
Kennedy also provides extensive political and economic coverage of the Second World War which spans over half of the 850 page text. History surveys can be dry reading but he livens things up with perceptive character sketches of FDR, Churchill and many of the other politicians and military men of the period. From the time of his governorship in New York Roosevelt had come to believe in a moral and social duty of the government, a compass he carried to the White House. For Secretary of Labor he appointed Frances Perkins, a labor activist and the first woman to ever serve in a US Cabinet.

Kennedy likes Hoover a lot and includes quotes from his own commissioned report in 1929, such as: “Hoover, the most competent man in America, maybe the world…” Hoover was also a graduate of Stanford in 1895. Kennedy’s evaluation as a member of Stanford’s Hoover Institution (which includes conservative ideologues like Kissinger, Reagan, Thatcher, Gingrich, Rice and Rumsfeld) is cause for pause. FDR seems to be treated fairly except in comparison with Hoover. FDR is consistently ranked in the top three US presidents, Hoover in the bottom quintile, both rich men with different outlooks.

[Jay Schutt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This epic effort, by author David Kennedy, was a daunting read at over 850 pages of very in-depth and detailed accounts of major events from 1929 to 1945.
The first half of the book was dedicated to the stock market crash, the resulting Great Depression and New Deal efforts by President Franklin Roosevelt to help the American people recover economically.
The second half pertained to World War II and a myriad of related subjects.
This was a very educational read and I learned much including some little-known facts.
I could go on and on, but I will let the book speak for itself.
To put it in a nutshell, I highly recommend this nostalgic look back at a devastating period in American history. It was very well put together and had great flow.

[Ted · Rating 5 out of 5]

enlarged review (Aug. '18)

Probably the best historical narrative I've ever read. Why do I say that, I wonder.

Perhaps because this tells a story of the time and place that I entered the world. I was frankly astounded that I learned so much that seemed so significant, yet which I apparently had not the slightest idea. What I had had, perhaps, was a hazy conception of events not known, not remembered, but reflected to me through a mythology passed down to me by the off-hand remarks, overheard conversations, even serious discussions I'd heard, listened to, even asked questions and received answers in as I passed along life's way, from a young child to an older man.


David M Kennedy (1941 - ) is an American historian, and a Professor of History Emeritus at Stanford University. His writings have been noted for an integration of economic analysis and cultural analysis with social history and political history. He is the current editor of the Oxford History of the United States series. In 1970 Kennedy won the Bancroft Prize for his first book Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger. The book reviewed here won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for History. [Wiki]

This passage from the Introduction gives a good indication of the sort of information that I found both new and fascinating in Kennedy's book.

It was the people who suffered in the Great Depression that receive [the author's] primary attention, and more of them did suffer, and more deeply, and longer, than has been generally assumed. Southern white sharecroppers averaged an annual cash income of $350, black sharecroppers $294. At wages of $1 a day miners subsisted on a diet suggesting that of domestic animals. Emaciated children who never tasted milk wandered the streets, some shoeless in winter, too poorly clad to go to school … More surprising than the people's despair was their prevailing submissiveness … Much more common than rebellion among Americans of those years was a sense of shame and loss of self-respect. Year after year of depression went by with little or no sign of the recovery promised by politicians.

Chapters

The chapter titles give an idea of the material that Kennedy covers. The narrative is primarily a chronological story, with slight overlapping for purposes of subject cohesiveness.

1. The American People on the Eve of the Great Depression.
2. Panic
3. The Ordeal of Herbert hoover
4. Interregnum
5. The Hundred Days
6. The Ordeal of the American People
7. Chasing the Phantom of Recovery
8. The Rumble of Discontent
9. A Season for Reform
10. Strike!
11. The Ordeal of Franklin Roosevelt
12. What the New Deal Did
13. The Gathering Storm
14. The Agony of Neutrality
15. To the Brink
16. War in the Pacific
17. Unready Ally, Uneasy Alliance
18. The War of Machines
19. The Struggle for a Second Front
20. The Battle for Northwest Europe
21. The Cauldron of the Home Front
22. Endgame
23. Epilogue: The World the War Made



The labor/capital divide

As an example of the info that Kennedy includes, take chapter 10, "Strike!". The chapter begins with a statement of how the economy seemed to be modestly recovering in early 1935. But,

"This modest revival, however tenuous, set the stage for the American labor movement's crusade to realize its most elusive goal: organizing the millions of unskilled workers in the great mass-production sectors, especially steel and automaking, into powerful industrial unions."

Thus the chapter's title is explained, it will be about labor unrest and labor organization during the latter half of the 1930s. The spoiler following has several quotations from this exceedingly interesting narrative.


"Together with the favorable political climate and the vulnerability of the steel manufacturers and automakers to any disruption of their first prospective profits in years, the [Wagner National Labor Relations Act of 1935] helped initiate a historic organizing drive that rearranged the balance of power between American capital and labor. Labor's awakening also secured a broad working-class constituent base that would help to make the Democrats the majority party for a long time to come."

"Minneapolis had long teetered on the edge of violent class confrontation… Old-stock Yankee grandees controlled the giant flour mills that processed the northern prairie's great grain harvests. They owned the railroads, they ran the banks … Those same pillars of the community also bankrolled the Citizen's Alliance… The alliance was a pugnaciously anti-labor body. In 1934 it outfitted what amounted to a private army to keep the predominantly Scandinavian and Irish working class in place."

"Led by the radical Dunne brothers, founding members of the Trotskyist Communist League of America, Teamster Local 574 demanded better wages and union recognition for its truck drivers… In the spring of 1934 the Dunnes vowed to stop every wheel in the city. They issued lengths of galvanized pipe and baseball bats to the striking teamsters. For its part, the Citizens Alliance organized a posse of vigilantes called the Citizens Army and armed it to the teeth."

"Franklin Roosevelt was widely perceived as the patron of labor's awakening, and for a long season he was surely the political beneficiary of labor's growing assertiveness… Millions of working-class Americans came to see Roosevelt not simply as their president but as their special advocate… But Roosevelt was in fact a rather diffident champion of labor, and especially of organized labor unions… his fundamental attitude toward labor was somewhat patronizing… he was more interested in giving workers purchasing power than in granting them political power."

"Many radicals, peering into the gloom of Depression America, glimpsed the approaching socialist millennium amidst the social and economic wreckage that cluttered the national landscape… John L. Lewis had more modest aims. Asked by a reporter in 1937 what labor should have, the United Mine Workers chief quickly replied, 'The right to organize.' … As Lewis and Roosevelt both saw things, capitalism need not be uprooted, but its fruits must be more equitably distributed." Well, one or the other, that's for sure.

"The CIO's first objective was steel, a historically impregnable citadel of antiunionism. "CIO" originally stood for "Committee for Industrial Organization". In 1938 it changed its name to the "Congress of Industrial Organizations" Lewis called steel the "Hindenburg Line" of American industry."

"Two monumental trilogies instructed large reading audiences about the stark realities of workers' culture: James T. Farrell's unsparing chronicle of an Irish immigrant family in Chicago, Studs Lonigan (1932-35) and John Dos Passos's phenomenally comprehensive and inventive contraption, USA (1930-36). Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road (1932) and John Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat (1935) and In Dubious Battle (1936) etched indelible portraits of the wretched lives of agricultural workers, still more than 20 percent of the work force."

"In 1936 David Dubinsky and Sidney Hillman [leaders of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and Amalgamated Clothing Workers], favoring practical results over doctrinal purity, organized a mass defection from Norman Thomas's Socialist Party to Roosevelt's Democrats, effectively destroying the Socialists as a political force."

"Each of these men [Philip Murray, Robert Wagner, Dubinsky, Hillman, and John L. Lewis] knew in his own marrow the disquiet of impermanency, the dread of tomorrow, and above all the yearning for security that daily squeezed at the hearts of the men and women in America's factories, mills, and mines. The "quest for security", Hillman declared in 1934, was "the central issue in this life of modern man."

"The CIO's inclusionary policy was driven by … the organization's own sense of racial justice and of effective industrial unionizing strategies. Not all CIO unions consistently followed inclusionary policies; in future years, unions themselves would be major battlegrounds in the struggle for racial equality."

"The fateful eruption came not in the steel towns around Pittsburgh, but in Flint, Michigan – in autos, not in steel. It began on the evening of December 30, 1936, when a young woman at the United Auto Workers' Flint office switched on a two-hundred-watt red bulb, the signal for a meeting. The simple flick of that light switch set of a chain of events that forever altered the place of labor in American society." well… still? or have we come full circle now?

"In 1934 and 1935 General Motors spent nearly $1 million to field a force of wiretappers, infiltrators, and finks that the La Follette Committee condemned as "a far-flung industrial Cheka … the most colossal supersystem of spies yet devised in any American corporation."

"The Flint sit-down strike amounted to nothing less than the forcible seizure by workers of the means of production – a recognizable enactment of a core tenet of socialism or anarchism, though the Flint strikers stopped well short of demanding permanent ownership of the seized plant. What they did demand was that the General Motors Corporation recognize the United Auto Workers as the sole legitimate bargaining agent for GM employees."

"General Motors, watching its market share shrink as rivals Chrysler and Ford boosted production, desperately needed a resolution… after forty-four days of dramatic standoff, John L. Lewis walked into the GM building …and signed the agreement [showing that the strikers central demand had been won]… The men marched out of the shut plants to an uproarious celebration. Industrial unionism had established a major beachhead in a core American industry."

Kennedy ends the chapter:

"A heightened sense of class consciousness did emerge in the United States in the Depression years, but it was of a stubbornly characteristic American type … A poll in 1939 revealed that workers had few illusions about their situation. Fully half of the respondents identified themselves as belonging to the lower or lower-middle income categories. But when asked to which social class they belonged, 88 percent replied "middle". Those opinions suggested that workers realistically appraised their economic circumstance but also clung to their faith in an inclusive, egalitarian democracy and to the hope for social mobility. Even in the midst of the country's greatest depression, for millions of working-class citizens the American dream had survived."

I must admit that much of the final 40% of the book did not strike me as so informative as what had gone before. I suppose this was the inevitable result of having read so much about the history of World War II prior to this book. Kennedy does indeed include information about the home front and the politics of the war years that was new … but it wasn't enough to keep me so enthusiastic. Despite this, I have no reservations about the five star rating - or call it 4 1/2 if you want.


Recommended to any American - really, to anyone at all - with an interest in the American people in Depression and War, 1929-1945.




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[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kennedy’s excellent summary of the Great Depression, the New Deal and WWII covers so much that its 850 pages are barely sufficient. Kennedy’s recounting of WWII is primarily useful for someone looking for a concise overview. My notes here focus on the depression and attempts at economic recovery finding it relevant to today’s discourse regarding the financial crisis of 2008 and the struggle to return to full employment and robust growth.

As America approached the end of the 1920’s, many contributing factors to the Great Depression were already in play. Farmers were already in a depression. They were not participating in the prosperity at all. Prices didn’t cover their costs and they often lived in or near poverty without electricity, running water, adequate heating, a decent education, and access to medical care. Many moved to the city where all these things were available, but increasing productivity kept farm prices low. Farmers were on a tread mill, raising more to make ends meet and in turn further driving down prices.

New 1924 laws essentially shut down immigration stifling population growth that had been an important element of increasing demand which supported economic growth. Corporate profits soared but so did income inequality and most consumers could not keep up thus neither could demand. Credit which had become available in 1919 for automobiles with the advent of GMAC was now tapped out for most people. It all sounds familiar. The 1929 stock market crash was not initially a major factor, but it did dry up commercial credit which most importantly impacted the payment of German, French and English WWI debt to the US which later would greatly increase the severity of the downturn. The immediate problem was unemployment as industry curtailed production in response to falling demand, in turn credit dried up, and banks failed as loans could not be repaid in a relentless cycle.

Exacerbating this downward spiral was the limited information the government had about the economy, a lack of understanding of the impact of government policies on the economy and the gold standard which hamstrung the Federal Reserve forcing it to reduce the money supply and induce deflation. Even in late 1930 few comprehended the severity of the downturn. Many looked upon it as a normal business cycle blip similar to the short lived one in 1921.

Government actions were counterproductive. The Hawley Smoot tariff was enacted which not only raised prices in the US but led to worldwide nationalism and reduced trade. With Europe unable to pay its debts and its banks failing, Hoover engineered a “standstill agreement” which put more pressure on the creditors, US banks, contributing to an escalating cycle of bank runs and failures. The Fed then raised interest rates to support the Gold standard, considered sacrosanct in the prevalent conservative thinking. This further tightened credit and damaged the economy. Hoover then chimed in raising taxes to again support gold and the currency thinking this would enable businesses to borrow, but without demand there was no reason to borrow. His action was another example of the failure of supply-side trickledown economics.

Hoover did take some positive action. The Banking Act of 1932 increased acceptable collateral for Federal Reserve Loans and notes. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation made credit available to banks, railroads and agricultural stabilization corporations that Hoover had established in 1929 in an attempt to stabilize farm prices. Unfortunately even when Hoover had the right ideas he was too slow to implement and his initiatives were underfunded. His refusal as a matter of principle to provide direct relief was immoral amidst the widespread hardship which left people helpless and hopeless.

Unemployment reached a high of 25% in 1933 when FDR became president. He immediately announced a bank holiday and then held a special session of Congress with the Emergency Banking Act ready to go to restore liquidity to the banking system. FDR’s first fireside chat was very important in generating the confidence people needed to start again depositing money in the banks. FDR was quickly a hero. His next two steps were to pay farmers not to grow crops (AAA) thus curtailing supply and supporting farm prices and to go off of the gold standard inducing inflation which would help those in debt. FDR put youth to work in the CCC, provided unemployment assistance to states through FERA, funded new construction through the PWA and established an emergency relief fund outside of the regular budget. He started the TVA bringing jobs, development and electricity to the impoverished Tennessee Valley. The NRA, a program that became synonymous with the New Deal, was established to control production, wages and prices setting aside anti-trust laws. The FDIC was passed by congress. FDR’s “First Hundred Days” ended on June 16 with 15 bills passed and a new feeling that something is being done.

But in 1935, unemployment was still at 20% and despite all FDR’s actions people were still suffering and losing confidence. FDR kept at it, now with a more controversial “Second New Deal”, programs designed not to be temporary and to be large enough make a difference. The ERAA authorized the WPA which put 250,000 men to work by 1936 building bridges roads and other significant infrastructure projects. He got passed the REA which brought electricity to farms across the country. Projects were also financed to employ artists and writers. Social Security providing old age pensions and unemployment insurance was the other big part of this second new deal although it would not pay old age benefits until 1940. ADC was included to help the many women with children abandoned by their fathers. The Fair Labor Standards Act setting a 40 cent minimum wage and 40 hour work week was the last New Deal legislation to pass.

Things got better but in 1937 the economy again turned sharply down. The cause was the sharp drop in federal spending after the prior year’s speeded up payment of WWI veterans’ bonuses, increased social security taxes and reductions in WPA projects. The federal government was now running a surplus. Somehow FDR still seemed to think a balanced budget was important. Also the Fed tightened the money supply. These factors quickly reversed the recovery. Keynes game changing The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money came out in 1936 espousing deficit spending to stimulate the economy. Keynes wrote FDR to try this. He did so but far too little to make a difference. In 1938 10 million were still unemployed, only the spending for the war in 1941 would pull the country out of depression.

The New Deal did not redistribute income nor did it nationalize assets. It did provide security and transparency. The SEC now required reporting and auditing to limit speculation in stocks. The Glass-Steagle Act of 1933 separated investment banking from retail banking limiting risk. Sadly, this protection was eliminated in the 1990’s contributing to the severity of the 2008 financial crisis. The FHA and Fanny Mae insured loans and provided a market place for loans to lubricate mortgage placement and home ownership. The stated goal of economic recovery was not the goal represented by the actions FDR took. Rather his actions restructured the economic system providing stability and security.

The new idea was that the government had to step in if full employment and equitable distribution of resources was to be achieved. This idea was driven by the notion that the age of entrepreneurial growth was over. No longer would the titans of industry alone be able to provide growth and never had they provided fairness. That private industry alone cannot provide steady full employment and an equitable distribution of income is an idea still relevant today. In support of Keynes theory, after WWII Americans went on to great prosperity as the war had driven so much investment in the economy. Companies were left with extensive new plants and equipment. Through service in the armed forces and as workers in industry many had benefited from education, training and new skills. Now as consumers they had money to purchase the goods they produced in a modernized industrial America.

[CoachJim · Rating 5 out of 5]

The period covered in this book begins with many people living with outhouses and kerosene lamps, and ends with most people living in suburban houses with indoor plumbing, electricity and modern conveniences. This period saw a nation that refused to forgive the war debts owed to the United States by countries that fought in World War I, and ended with a country that financed the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe. This period started with a country dominated by isolationists who wanted most to avoid foreign entanglements and ended with a country that helped form NATO and the United Nations, and led the wars in Korea and eventually Vietnam. This period saw people enduring unimaginable poverty and ended with them living in the most prosperous country in the history of the world. (Many of the descriptions in this paragraph come from the author’s epilogue to this book.)

This book is a well-written, interesting and informative history. As a survey of the history of the United States from 1929 to 1945 it is a chronological reporting of the events of the period, and although the Depression was a period of great social upheaval and World War II dominated its period this book focuses more on the political activities of the period. A thorough review of this book would be too long so I have chosen to select a few examples as an attempt to illustrate the quality of the author’s historical analysis. If this is a period of American History that you might be interested in and you feel like indulging yourself in 858 pages of text, then this is a book worth reading.

The history begins with an examination of the causes of the Great Depression. The author dismisses the Stock Market crash of 1929 as a cause due to the fact that few Americans owned shares of stock and there were no indirect investments in the Stock Market like pensions or other financial instruments popular today. Hoover was encouraged by his devotees to laissez-faire to do nothing and allow nature to take its course.

Hoover would have none of it. Despite Mellon’s towering prestige and imposing weight of the conventional wisdom that he represented, Hoover believed “that we should use the powers of government to cushion the situation.” (Page 52, and according to the footnote this is quoted from Hoover’s memoirs.)

The banking crisis is also dismissed as a system that was rotten to the core even in good times. It was the weakest link in the economic system and the thing most sensitive to fear. This is blamed on the lingering legacy of Andrew Jackson’s long-ago war on central banking.

What in 1931 was a depression, a calamity in Europe was about to make it the Great Depression. Up until this time it seemed a product of American causes: a decade of stagnation in agriculture, flattening sales of automobiles, the abuses of Wall Street, and the failure of the banking system. However, now it seems the major forces of the depression were from outside the United States. In Europe these forces were the consequences of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles. The reparation payments required of Germany paralyzed its economy and paved the way for Adolf Hitler. In an effort to hinder Hitler’s rise banks began withholding money, which led to a banking crisis in Europe. This crisis was then aggravated by the Stock Market crash in the United States which dried up available funds to everyone. The reparations issue was complicated by our own financial crisis which led Americans to object to paying for the bankers self-inflicted wounds. The sentiment of the time was “penny-pinching, isolationist, anti-European, and anti-Wall Street”.

All the fits and starts of the New Deal are described, but in 1938 it had demonstrated that it was not a recovery program, or at least a very effective one. However, at this time liberal democracy was in peril. Hitler and Mussolini were firmly in control in Germany and Italy. They soon began to march into other countries. In November 1938 Nazi thugs went on the rampage against German Jews—a night that became the infamous Kristallnacht. This marked the start of Roosevelts plan to become the Arsenal of Democracy.

By the spring of 1940 Nazi Germany had overrun and now controlled virtually all of Western Europe, The British were required to evacuate their troops at Dunkirk where they left behind a massive amount of their weapons. Britain now faced an imminent invasion without the necessary military equipment. Even prior to this time Churchill had begun to cultivate Roosevelt as Britain’s savior. Now with his nearly 40 years of diplomatic experience he used his considerable negotiating skills to acquire badly needed supplies from the United States. This included the threat that the British fleet could fall into the hands of Nazi Germany. Roosevelt, after the debacle of World War I, faced an extremely isolationist country with laws, embargoes and a cash-and-carry policy when dealing with foreign belligerents.

During a fireside chat in December of 1940 Roosevelt described the situation to Americans that if “Great Britain falls, the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the high seas.” That Americans would be living at the “point of a gun.” (Page 469) He advised his audience that they needed to become the Arsenal of Democracy. That America would provide the “implements of war” so that the other countries could fight the war. Thus Roosevelt unleashed the amazing capacity and efficiency of American industry. He watched as ships, planes and tanks rolled off production lines at an astonishing rate. An industry that included women as capable workers on the production lines.

When the war brought recovery at last, a recovery that inaugurated the most prosperous quarter century America has ever known, it brought it to an economy and a country that the New Deal had fundamentally altered. Indeed, the achievements of the New Deal years surely played a role in determining the degree and the duration of the postwar prosperity. (Page 363)

There is a lot of historical material in this book I left out of this review. Here you can read about the demagoguery of Huey Long, the anti-Semitism of Father Charles Coughlin, and the crazy economics of Dr. Francis Townsend of California. You can read about Winston Churchill rushing to the United States and spending a month in the White House following Pearl Harbor to make sure Roosevelt did not change his mind about a Germany first strategy, and how Churchill convinced an unprepared Roosevelt to wage war in the Mediterranean in order to preserve the Suez Canal and the British Empire.

The failures of the government are also revealed. The refusal to allow the immigration of Jewish refugees from Europe, or the internment of U.S. citizens on the West Coast, or the continued treatment of Black Americans as second-class citizens.

Most of the major military campaigns of the war are described, but this book focuses mainly on the domestic issues. There is a brief description of the decision to use the Atomic bombs.

But this period saw two dark chapters of our history, and I am thankful for a President Roosevelt who guided this country through those times so that when I was born in 1947 the country was still an intact, strong democracy.

This is perhaps the best history book I have read.

[Phrodrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

David M. Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear is a worthy addition to the estimable Oxford Histories of the United States. Over all this is academic writing written for the pleasure of the reader. There are some factual mistakes but given the skim of history they tend to get lost in the need to keep the narrative moving. Depending on how much you have already read about the Depression or World War II or of American presidential politics you may find portions of the book too shallow for your previous background. Kennedy argues that the the depression had forced government to directly address making economic policies to act to counter economic instability. He has definite opinions about leaders we may idolize and a historian’s disdain for the idea of national political heroes.

David Kennedy has attempted too much. While this is only 16 years of history; more like 20 given the need to provide background on the Depression, 860 pages should have been enough, but more so than other histories in this series this volume feels crowded. Against this is a well defended theory that this time period created in America, and especially in it leadership a determination that American should have some economic stability and by extension, international security.

Rarely have I seen it argued that what we call the Depression was actually a series of failures, beginning in the agricultural sector and brought on by the reduction in foreign dependence on the American farm after WWI. That another harbinger of the eventual melt down was felt in the Auto industry is also rarely mentioned. Finally Kennedy makes a good case that there was a depression and then much later what we call the Greater Depression.

That Hoover had had three years in which to address the original collapse is something easy to forget. Hoover had been a great humanitarian before entering national politics and he was sincere in his determination that working Americans should not suffer needlessly for the mistake made by capital. Historically boom and bust cycles had been the norm and the average working family planned to have just enough to tide them across the unavoidable bad year.

Hoover’s error was in the belief that in a free society, and a free market institutional decisions would be made on a voluntary basis to take on financial burdens without passing them onto employees and customers. Kennedy is sympathetic toward Hoover and his belief in what looked like a coherent policy process.

With the arrival of the Roosevelt administration. Kennedy is less impressed with a man of enormous political skills and what looks like a scattershot and contradictory approach to crises management. Kennedy describes Roosevelt's initial approach as more Hoover, but under the name of the new administration. Roosevelt however would attempt to go beyond Hoover. Some changes would become mandatory. That Roosevelt was able to force the free market to acknowledge the supremacy of government was somewhat new and in many cases successfully resisted.

Both Hoover and Roosevelt understood that 20th century, corporate capitalism was a dictatorship with no need to acknowledge human needs. Of the two, Roosevelt left behind a legacy, if incomplete of changes from child labor laws, to social security. More importantly Government regulation enforced things like reporting standards that would make for example the 35 year mortgage and minimum standards for corporate financial reporting happen.

The emergence of aggressive dictators was not enough to force America or Roosevelt to come to a serious knowledge of world affairs. In Kennedy’s version, America drifted into wart with Japan almost by neglect and defeated her in much the same off handed manner. War with Germany was something Roosevelt understood earl to be a matter of the existence of western civilization but America was not going back to Europe if that meant nothing more than another war over nothing which is how WWI had come to be understood. Parenthetically, this was not a bad conclusion. Despite aggressive action allowed by if not ordered by Roosevelt, Germany avoided forcing the issues of American involvement in Europe until in Dec. 1941. Hitler, almost inexplicable declared war on America and that problem solved itself.

Given my previous interest in World War two, it is in this section that Kennedy work began to feel particularly thin. Many of the important leaders to emerge worldwide are given scant if any notice. This is particularly true in the Pacific which receives barely a few chapters towards the end of the book. Actions proceeds in a blur. Given the attention given to the several Conferences in the Atlantic Theater, Casablanca, Potsdam, Tehran and on to Yalta; not enough thought is given to the world they helped to create nor is there sufficient thought given to how the end of the war would lead to the emergence of wars to end colonial powers form Algeria, to Vet Nam.

Freedom from Fear is a good history. If this is all you know about this period, you know a lot. My recommendation is that you do not end your studies with Freedom from Fear.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book covers U.S. history from the 1929 stock market crash, through the Great Depression until the end of WWII. The writing is excellent and even though this is a 900 page tome, it is still largely a summary of the events that unfolded in this historic era. Because the backdrop of WWII and the Great Depression are fairly well known by students of history, the author does not waste much time with context but marches ahead with the events and treats many lesser known events with equal coverage as the obvious menace of the Nazis for example.

Whether intentional or not, because of the time frame examined, this book focuses heavily on FDR since he was in the thick of it. I think this book is a shining example of how AP US History should be taught to high schoolers. Don’t get me started on the current AP textbooks. This book has a strong narrative voice with a deft touch to maintain the reader’s engagement.

4.5 stars. Arguably the most important period in American History and a period that posed the biggest threat to our nation’s unity and existence (economically and militarily) since the Civil War. The only obvious historical gap that I saw was little coverage of the Nazi atrocities.

[Sonny · Rating 5 out of 5]

The 1920s were sometimes known as the “Age of Prosperity.” It was a time when undreamed-of fortunes seemed within the grasp of anyone with capital, energy, and gumption. The nation's economy reached astounding production, consumption, and stock market records. But the speculative fever and easy money of the 20s were harbingers of more difficult times to come. The widespread prosperity of the 1920s ended abruptly when the stock market crashed in October 1929, precipitating the great economic depression that followed.

― “The Crash, still four weeks away, was unimagined and almost unimaginable. Nearly three decades of barely punctuated economic growth, capped by seven years of unprecedented prosperity, gave to the mood in the room, as in the entire country, an air of masterful confidence in the future. The president personified the national temper. Attired as always in starched high collar and immaculate business suit, he greeted his guests with stiff, double-breasted dignity. He exuded the laconic assurance of a highly successful executive. He was arguably the most respected man in America, a man, said the novelist Sherwood Anderson, who had 'never known failure.’”
― David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945

Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 was written by the American historian David M. Kennedy. Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus at Stanford University. The book was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for History. It's an ambitious work that retells the story of the United States during the Great Depression and the great war that followed, encapsulating the decision making and policy issues that shaped the New Deal. The book’s title, borrowed from a famous speech by Franklin D. Roosevelt, describes the sense of triumph most Americans felt after 16 years of pain were finally over: “So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

The United States faced serious economic and social problems throughout the 1920s. The depression threatened people's jobs, savings, and even their homes and farms. At the depths of the depression, more than one-quarter of the American workforce was out of work and millions more were on drastically reduced hours. Too few had financial security for the future. For most Americans, these were hard times. Rural America was particularly hard hit. Farm prices were too low to cover the cost of shipping goods to market; drought and dust storms added to the tragedy. Black Americans suffered terribly, often evicted from the land they cultivated as tenants or sharecroppers. The impact of Depression on the daily lives of Americans—farmers, women, industrial workers, Black Americans, and the unemployed—is thoroughly portrayed. Kennedy also covers the tangential problems of the era. Immigrants had difficulty in adjusting to American life. Black Americans were confronted with segregation and discrimination throughout the South.

Kennedy is gracious in his treatment of Herbert Hoover. The Hoover the author describes is imaginative and well intentioned, but ultimately “overwhelmed by events.” While he experimented with some new agencies, it seems clear that he underestimated the severity of the collapse, as did almost everyone. Rather than providing assistance for the poor, Hoover’s policies were primarily aimed at alleviating the problems of business.

Assuming office in March, 1933, Franklin Roosevelt was determined to lead and determined to act. He surrounded himself with capable, intelligent advisors. In his first one hundred days in office, he pledged himself to a “New Deal for the American people,” a plan designed to promote economic recovery and put Americans back to work. The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Roosevelt between 1933 and 1939. As FDR provided leadership, most Americans placed great confidence in him. Most of all, these programs restored a sense of economic security to Americans through the creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Home Owners Loan Corporation and Fannie Mae, the agricultural subsidies of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Acts. Americans gained a renewed sense of confidence, hope and optimism. Although complete recovery would not come until World War II, progress had been made.

Foreign affairs dominate the second half of the book. The worldwide economic instability of the 1930s led to political instability in many parts of the world, which in turn gave rise to totalitarian regimes in Germany and Japan. When war finally broke out in both Europe and Asia, the United States tried to avoid being drawn into the conflict. But FDR knew that a powerful a nation like the United States could hardly avoid involvement for long. Roosevelt realized that Hitler represented a threat, yet the country was becoming increasingly isolationist. In 1930s, Congress passed five neutrality acts that rendered the United States effectively powerless in the face of the global conflagration that was about to explode. In the years leading up to US involvement, FDR did his best to get aid to the British and French. The isolationists accused that the President of provoking a war. Wisely, Roosevelt did his best to aid Europe and steer his own country toward an inevitable war.

Amazingly, Kennedy manages to cover every aspect of the hostilities. He never allows the “just cause” to obscure the unpleasant realities. His narrative takes an expansive view of World War II. He includes brilliant strategies and tragic miscalculations, international teamwork and petty bickering, as well as the quarreling between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. He covers the Manhattan Project's development of the atomic bomb, and military construction. He doesn’t necessarily go easy on Americans; he indicts them for a long list of failings that includes barring Jewish refugees from Europe, the tragic internment of Japanese-Americans, as well as the appalling discrimination against Black Americans.

Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 is an ambitious work that does a good job of encapsulating the political and military history of the period. Kennedy covers the big political, economic and military questions, the significant decisions, and the key players. Most importantly, he provides a balanced review of one of the most fascinating eras in American history based on current scholarship. That he does all of this in 858 (without notes) demonstrates his considerable skills of compression.

[Erik Graff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Academic history books are too often dry. This 900-page history of the United States from the outset of the Great Depression until the Japanese surrender of World War Two is exceptionally well written. A plethora of facts punctuated by illustrative anecdotes, the text basically follows the career of Franklin Roosevelt and his administration(s). No hagiography, U.S. policy and practice is described critically and, it seems, objectively.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is part of the Oxford History of the United States. The book was very well written and very engaging and I would have given 5 stars, but I was expecting something slightly different.

The book is basically divided into 2 halves, the depression and WWII. I felt that the author did a really good job summarizing the important events of WWII and providing interesting insights into the conflict.

For the depression, this book does an excellent job covering the political, economic and some demographic and social aspects of the depression. I felt that the author was fairly objective in describing such controversial topics as The New Deal, Herbert Hoover, FDR, etc.

The problem was that I was expecting a book to inform me more about some of the important societal, demographic and technological events that occurred during the Depression Era (such as to rise of motion pictures, the Lindbergh baby, or Amelia Earhart). This book did not cover such aspects, but makes an excellent first read for a volatile and interesting era in American History.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid book. A wealth of information concerning the New Deal programs and the depths of the Depression. Kennedy seems to go out of his way to - if not exonerate - at least to try very hard to paint Herbert Hoover as a victim of circumstance more than anything else in regards to his (mis)handling of the Depression. While Hoover did make some valiant attempts to right the economy, I am not so sure that he deserves the pass that Kennedy gives him.

Kennedy does a superb job in deftly weaving together the positives and negatives of FDR's continuously shifting leadership style. I think more attention should have been paid to Harry Truman assuming the presidency upon FDR's death. Kennedy does not write much about that, but I think it was a huge moment in history.

[Jeremy Perron · Rating 5 out of 5]

The one thing that remains constant as I continue my march through the ages of history of the United States, is that America is a nation that continues to transform and change. The two extraordinary events of the Great Depression and World War II helped transform the nation its people. The leader though both of these great crises was Franklin D. Roosevelt. Not since George Washington led us through both the American Revolution and the early days of the national government had one leader impacted the nation's destiny by shaping the country's response to two great national events.

Economic 'depressions' had happened before in our country, in the late 1830s, late 1870s, and mid-1890s. However the event we now know as the 'Great Depression' lasted longer than any other and came as a great shock because the twenties had been such a boom time. Kennedy traces the source of the severity of this depression to the international factors that emerged from World War I. In this analysis, Herbert Hoover had been more of a victim of events than the cause of them. Nevertheless, Hoover no longer had the public's trust nor confidence and the electorate turned him out of office in 1932. What I learned from this book was how the Depression came in waves. That it was not right after the stock market crashed that things went bad, but a series of events that continued to torpedo the U.S. Economy until it collapsed.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor move into the White House, the President brought with them Harry Hopkins and Frances Perkins. While in Washington they begin to set up the New Deal. Kennedy spends a great deal of time discussing the New Deal and its impact. The New Deal benefited and continues to benefit the nation. Its immediate impact with programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps provided the unemployed temporary employment. The New Deal continues to impact us today with Social Security, banking reforms, a minimum wage, and safety regulations for workers. Kennedy explains clearly that the New Deal did not end the depression. What it did do however, was provide security for the American people from the rough waves of the market. The same reason levies are built to protect against floods, the New Deal gave security to so the common people were not completely left exposed to the economic forces beyond their control.

"Roosevelt had prepared the ground well. His transparent allusions to less responsible schemes helped convince congressional doubters that the president's measured radicalism was far preferable to the dread Long and Townsend alternatives--or the even more dread option of a bill introduced by Minnesota representative Ernest Lundeen, which called for unemployment compensation at full wages to all jobless workers, paid for out of general tax revenues and administered by local workers' councils. After lengthy hearings through an exceptionally crowed legislative season, the Social Security Act became law on August 14, 1935." (p.271)

Roosevelt was not without his faults however, and those faults were exposed with the Court-packing scheme. His fault was not an attempt to reform the Court, for the Court for the fifty years prior had been acquiring quite an infamous reputation as the enemy of reform. It would impose its own narrow view of the U.S. Constitution and use it to undermine progressive legislation that the people had been trying for years to achieve through their elected representatives. Roosevelt was able to get the Court to change its tune but the unwise manner in which he did it cost him a great deal of political capital.

Then of course comes World War II, with American isolationism at an all-time high, Roosevelt did what he could to aid the allies with the Land Lease deal, turning America into an 'arsenal for democracy'. However, with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, America could no longer turn its back on the war.

World War II had some of the history's most affective leaders. From the heroic Roosevelt, Churchill, and DeGalle on the allies; to the more villainous Stalin--who fought with the good guys--, Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo; no side in this conflict lacked for effective leadership. There was also a great deal of talented generals and admirals. Although having a great deal of talent is nice problem to have it, in part, made Roosevelt's job harder as he had to choose who would lead Operation Overlord and liberate Europe. Roosevelt felt that justice demanded that he use George Marshall, however, in the end he felt the right man for the job was Dwight D. Eisenhower.

"Eisenhower's studied geniality found an appreciative admired in Franklin Roosevelt, himself an adept scholar of the human psyche and virtuoso practitioner of the recondite craft of leadership. Now, flying from Tunis to Sicily for an inspection tour of American troops, Roosevelt the accomplished master instructed Eisenhower the sedulous apprentice in the arts that he must summon and home in his new assignment. Huddling in a seat alongside the general as their aircraft droned over the Mediterranean, the president dwelt on the teeming difficulties that awaited Eisenhower in London. There he would confront head-on, day in a day out, the full majesty of the British Government and the seductive personality of Winston Churchill. Churchill still believed, Roosevelt warned, that a failed Channel attack could cost the allies the war--and that the risk of failure was large. Despite his assurances at Quebec and his submission at Teheran, Churchill had not laid to rest his gnawing anxieties about Overlord. It would take all of Eisenhower's skill and resolution, Roosevelt advised, to keep Overlord on schedule." (p.690)

On the Pacific front Fleet Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur had their hands full with Japan. Kennedy describes the War in the Pacific as one brutal blood bath. The amount of blood and gore that went on in this side of the war played as a major factor for Harry S. Truman to use the Atomic Bomb.

"When the battle officially ended on June 22, only some 7,000 of the original 77,000 remained alive. The fighting had also killed over 100,000 Okianawan civilians. The Americans suffered 7,613 killed or missing, 31,807 wounded, and 26,211 non-battle casualties on the island, a nearly 35 percent casualty rate, in addition to the nearly 5,000 who dies and 4,824 who were wounded at sea. Among the dead were Buckner, his chest sundered by a Japanese shell fragment, as well as the celebrated war correspondent Ernie Pyle, felled by a sniper's bullet. The awful carnage on Okinawa, like that on Iwo Jima, weighed heavily on the minds of American policymakers as they now contemplated the war's endgame." (p.834)

This book is covers so much in under a thousand pages. One thousand seems like a lot, but for the amount of information the reader receives it is actually quite a low number. Kennedy does not go into a great deal about the Holocaust primarily because this book is about the United States, but he does discuss how the people in the United States had a difficult time in the absorbing what was actually happening to the Jews and other 'undesirables' of Germany. The book also covers the American home front, the status of African-Americans and other racial minorities, and the changing attitudes about the role of women as a result of the war. Kennedy goes over the horrible internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and the tragic case of Fred Korematsu. I really appreciate Kennedy's take on the 'average American' before and after these two events.

On a technical side note I would once again say that I appreciate the Oxford series for leaving the footnotes at the bottom of the pages they are on and not at the end of the book. It makes looking at sources easy and does not distract from the general narrative.

Freedom from Fear is a wonderful book which I highly recommend to anyone. Like the rest of this series I find its depth incredible without being overwhelming.

[Florence Buchholz · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's difficult to characterize a work of such epic, comprehensive American history. The book is massive, but it's no textbook. I was quickly turning pages. David Kennedy lays out the intimate details of a dramatic period from the Great Depression to the shocking denouement of World War II. The bewildering variety of New Deal agencies, the Gold Standard, the rise of American industrial power are not simply facts on the page. Each event has a political context, satisfyingly explored. In addition to filling in knowledge of events that I have not lived through, unexpectedly, the dramatic sweep of this history stirred my emotions. I visualized my parents, young, hopeful, separated by war. Our country with its allies, defeated a treacherous enemy at enormous cost. Freedom From Fear, published twenty years ago ends with an optimistic vision of a more unified post-cold war world. Unfortunately, that vision has not come to pass and seems more unattainable than ever.

[Katy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Detailed history without losing the story line. Took me quite a while to read, but well worth it.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a MASSIVE book and took me over 6 months to read. That being said, with books like this, I always read a fiction book between chapters. All that out of the way, this book is a masterpiece. I'm a history buff and I can say this is the definitive book of this time period. Sure, there are other books if you want to drill down on any specific event or person but if you want to understand the national story of America during this time, you CANNOT do any better.

I've read a lot of books about WW2 but felt like I never really understood the timeline or the battles until I read this. My mind usually glazes over with stuff like that but Kennedy did a great job of keeping me engaged and having the information really pop right off the page. I could see myself re-reading this down the road because it was just so wonderful and enjoyable of a read. I can see why it won the Pulitzer.

[Joe Stack · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a comprehensive, vividly written history of the Great Depression and WWII. I find that history books covering an era like this in such depth are often uneven and sometimes bog me down with the amount of details, but this did not happen with this book. The author’s writing held my interest throughout. I thought I knew this period, but I learned quite a lot more and some new perspectives.

[rmn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Freedom From Fear is David Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize winning 850+ page dense and detailed look at the United States during the years 1929-1945*. In the book, Kennedy does an admirable job of dissecting the 17 year period of American history in a lively and non-laborious manner for the reader. This is probably one of the two or three most important periods of American history and one where many details get somewhat glossed over in schools due its recentness and due to the fact that it is easier to focus on just a few major events.

Before I read this book, I basically knew 10 things about this time period (and for the record I got a 5 on the AP US History test in 1992, and yes it was out of 5)**:

1. The 1920s in the US was called the “Roaring 20s” because it featured profligate spending, a boom in consumer products, a spike in consumer lending, and apparently many lions.

2. In the Great Depression, people weren't just sad and depressed, they were also poor and had no jobs and apparently were forced to survive by eating dust out of bowls. This was a large percentage of the population and occurred because the stock market crashed due to speculators.

3. Herbert Hoover was a crappy president who lost money in real estate by building Hoovervilles during the Great Depression (hint: don't build real estate when no one can afford to live there).

4. FDR was elected due to his grand plan for a New Deal which was well thought out and well received and eventually led to him getting a statue. The New Deal helped get the US out of the Great Depression, though not as much as the upcoming war.

5. Hitler was a very, very bad person and tried to take over Europe (no jokes here, he was really bad, worse than Bill Laimbeer or the guy who created country music. Ok, maybe a couple of jokes.).

6. At some point the Japanese (and not the Germans, despite what John Belushi said) bombed Pearl Harbor and caused the US to attack them. The US eventually put Japanese Americans in internment camps (not a proud moment in US History, unlike the moon landing, despite 25% of people thinking that the moon landing was a hoax, and yes that figure is right). The US later dropped atomic bombs on Japan, even though the allied fire bombing in Germany was just as effective.

7. America entered the war in Europe and kicked some Nazi ass. The US was aided by the British and helped by Germany's attack on Russia. Attacking Russia in the winter is a bad idea, ask Napoleon.

8. Wartime production and mobilization was what really helped the US get out of the Great Depression, and not necessarily the programs of the New Deal. Women joined the workplace in mass, thanks to some lady named Rosie who liked to flex her muscles in a riveting way.

9. Sometime along the way FDR died and Harry S Truman took over. The "S" in Harry S Truman stands for S, which I guess is better than if it stood for "Shithead."

10. The soldiers came home and went to college and made a lot of babies, thus the moniker "baby boom" which has now led to an old people boom which is destroying social security, which was started in the New Deal.

Thanks to this book, I was able to fill in some gaps in my lagging knowledge and this is what I know now about the ten things I knew beforehand:

1. There were no lions.

2. The stock market was not the cause of the Great Depression, in fact less than 2.5% of the population owned stocks in 1928. The depression was caused by a multitude of factors stemming from the haggling over WWI reparations in the US and Europe, the reliance of the US on the gold standard, the lack of a centralized/stable banking system in the US, the natural ending of a growth cycle with US consumers, the overbuilding and overproduction of machinery (especially cars), and numerous other factors. Plus, many people were really really poor before the Great Depression and just overlooked by society since they lived in the rural west or the still Jim Crow South. The US economy was basically two different economies and the depression brought to light the issues of the very poor.

3. Herbert Hoover was actually thought to be the "most competent man in America" when he was elected president in 1928 and he had a lot of good and right ideas as to how the economy worked and how to spur the US out of the depression. Unfortunately, he was unable to implement them in time as he wasn't necessarily a great political manipulator and it was not clear the depths of the coming depression. This led Hoover to take the fall for the economic slump. He did try to meet with FDR many times after the election and before the inauguration (there used to be a four month period between election and inauguration) to help stem the falling economy, but FDR blew him off, since FDR would look better if he came into office when the economy was worse. FDR was a master politician.

4. FDR had no grand "New Deal" plan when elected. In fact, his ideas over the first 100 days were at times conflicting and scattershot where he would have people working on two opposite solutions to the same problem, often without either knowing. Through his political savvy he was able to get emergency measures passed and cobble together a number of relief plans to try to help the economy. The plans wound up being very progressive, often championed by his "Brain Trust" of young aides (though they perhaps get too much credit), but it is difficult to find one central theme. The author argues that the New Deal was really about security: Security of job, home, and country. Eventually though, the Supreme Court banned many of the New Deal policies, leaving only social security and unemployment insurance. FDR had to actually plan around the Supreme Court to pass many of the New Deal policies (Things were so contentious that at one point FDR sought to get rid of Supreme Court members in a political failure in 1937). While the economy began to show signs of recovery in 1934, there was another recession in 1937 and 1938 which was due to a lack of capital spend by businesses. So six years post New Deal, the economy was still in shambles. That said, the programs of the New Deal did put in circuit breakers for the economy to keep it from completely eroding in times of stress.

5. Hitler was a very very bad person. This book though has very little on Hitler and his atrocities. Rather it focuses on the US and US policies towards Hitler.

6. The Japanese did in fact bomb Pearl Harbor after the US put an embargo and freeze on Japanese assets in 1941. The hostility between the two had escalated with Japan’s war in China and Japan’s signing of a pact with Germany and Italy. The war in the Pacific lasted until the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki leading to Japan’s unconditional surrender (a term FDR insisted on earlier in the war). The atomic bomb took >$2B and >3 years to build and was top secret. The Japanese internment was based on completely fabricated information by General John Dewitt, even the Justice Department eventually dismissed his information, but of course, that was after the internment camps had already been up and running thanks to the War Relocation Authority signed by FDR.

7. It took a long time for the US to enter the war as for years most of the country believed in isolation. Then the US had to spend time building up an incredible inventory of fighting equipment. Time and resources were on the US’s side. Britain and the Russians fought off the Germans while the US supplied materials and artillery. It was not until D-Day 6/6/44 that the US finally landed ground troops in Europe, despite promising Stalin for almost two years they would enter. The allied forces had too much firepower for Germany, thanks to the US. Hitler killed himself in April 1945, after Germany had been almost completely defeated.

8. The war mobilization effort both got the US out of the depression and won the war. This effort worked with big business and took over factories, and produced copious amounts of ships, airplanes, artillery, etc.. While there may have been someone named Rosie who did in fact rivet, women mostly worked unskilled jobs in the defense industry (riveting was considered skilled labor). Blacks also sought to leave their sheltered lives on the fields in the South to join the defense industry but they were shunned. It was not until they threatened to march on DC (Led by Asa Philip Robinson) that FDR created the Fair Practices Employment Committee to ensure blacks had more chances. Interestingly enough, blacks were relegated to menial roles in the military and military units were segregated. Very few black units were allowed to be on the front line, most blacks served as cooks, laborers, etc.. In the big picture though, the war economy is what boosted the US out of the depression and while it wasn’t easy or immediate, all parts of US society benefited.

9. FDR died shortly after his 4th inauguration in April of 1945 (he gave the shortest inauguration speech in history as he was very sick). Harry S Truman took over and it was his decision to drop the atomic bombs, though it was pretty much a foregone conclusion.

10. Social security is one of the few lasting New Deal programs.

That just scratches the surface of the 850+ pages in this book. Kennedy has detailed accounts of war strategy, the Yalta, Teheran, and Potsdam conferences, specific programs within the New Deal, the politics behind the New Deal, FDR’s machinations and bargaining, and most importantly, the socio-economic effects of all of this on the US and the labor movement. The country went through important changes and while it didn’t always act in respectable ways (FDR refused to sign an anti-lynching bill so he could keep southern support, there were Japanese internment camps, US pilots eventually terror bombed enemy cities, the US dropped atomic bombs, etc.), the Nazis were defeated, poor people received benefits to vastly improve their way of life, and the country remained intact.

*This book was initially written in two volumes by David Kennedy. One called The American People in the Great Depression: Freedom from Fear, Part One and the other called The American People in World War II: Freedom from Fear, Part Two. I only wanted to read the first one on the Great Depression but the Philadelphia library system only has the combined book with both volumes. While I initially wasn’t particularly thrilled with the prospect of 850 pages on this era, I found the parts on World War II to be more interesting than the first volume on the Great Depression, so I guess it worked out ok.

**My apologies to Dave Barry for the initial list http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10... .

[Darren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another terrific entry in the Oxford History of the United States. My only quibble is that I thought he got into too much detail about the Pacific battles, and not enough time spent on the actual American people at home during those years. I would have liked to see that balance flipped.

[Austin Barselau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (1999) is the Pulitzer Prize-winning ninth volume of The Oxford History of the United States, written by David M. Kennedy, professor of history emeritus at Stanford University. Kennedy, who also co-authored the popular high school history textbook The American Pageant, has undertaken a monumental work that comprehensively covers one of the most transformative periods in American history—the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Second World War—in a single-volume behemoth synthesizing political, diplomatic, economic, and military history. Spanning more than 850 pages, Freedom From Fear can otherwise be understood as two books—the Depression and the war—welded into an overarching narrative of how Americans confronted and responded to periods of profound crisis, first economic insecurity and then international military danger. Allergic to overly simplistic explanations and the familiar yarns of popular history, Kennedy reveals the sources of American discontent and the means by which those conditions were ameliorated by the end of the period.

The narrative commences on the eve of the Depression during the latter months of the Hoover administration, toward which Kennedy is remarkably—and perhaps surprisingly—charitable. Rejecting blanket notions of Hoover as inert and aloof, Kennedy argues that Hoover, who embodied a philosophy of “communal and cooperative” individualism, met the onset of the economic downturn with surprising vigor and executive creativity. Hoover’s promotion of trade associations to stabilize prices and employment, and his efforts to rationalize production through voluntary cooperation, were significant reforms reminiscent of the “reform spirit of the progressive era.” Hoover had “masterfully shepherded” through Congress the Agricultural Marketing Act, which sought to arrest the sharp downward spiral in crop prices by empowering the government to buy, sell, and store agricultural surpluses. He understood—“better than anyone,” Kennedy writes—the conditions underlying the emerging banking crisis and, despite his laissez-faire philosophy, begrudgingly supported federal initiatives to shore up the financial system. These included the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which turned the federal government into a lender of last resort, a doubling of federal public-works spending within three years, and the Glass-Steagall Act, which helped stabilize commercial banking. Moreover, Kennedy labors to rationalize Hoover’s insistence on fiscal rectitude during the crisis—including higher taxes and strict adherence to the gold standard—as an expression of “practical realism” rather than mere timidity, intended to reassure foreign creditors and stem the flight of gold. “No previous administration had moved so purposefully and so creatively in the face of an economic downturn,” Kennedy writes, rebutting the familiar notion that Hoover simply failed to act as the crisis deepened.

Hoover’s incorrigible temperament, however, combined with a series of policy blunders and the loss of Republican congressional majorities in late 1930, brought his political fortunes crashing down. Here Kennedy unleashes his more trenchant criticisms of the thirty-first president. Hoover’s capitulation to Congress in signing the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, one of the largest tariff increases in American history, worsened the global economic slump and revealed him, in Kennedy’s estimation, to be a “peculiarly artless politician.” His staunch opposition to federal unemployment insurance, coupled with his apparent insensitivity toward the plight of the working class, provoked widespread criticism and isolated him both politically and personally. The economic crisis soon became known as the “Hoover Depression,” while shantytowns populated by the homeless acquired the bitter sobriquet “Hoovervilles.” The country appeared rudderless in the face of a historic crisis, led by a president who increasingly seemed incapable of meeting the moment.

Straining under the crisis, a nation seeking fresh leadership swept Franklin Roosevelt into office in 1932. The chapters recounting Roosevelt’s vigorous campaign to reimagine the scope of government are among the most richly rendered in the entire work. Compared with Hoover’s corporate-executive sensibility, Roosevelt possessed a politician’s instinct for reconciling disparate coalitions and soothing a despairing nation. Roosevelt’s First Hundred Days staunched the banking crisis almost at once, while the president, “in a voice at once commanding and avuncular, masterful yet intimate,” calmed the nervous nation and helped bring deposits and gold back into the banking system. Wasting no time, Roosevelt and a compliant Congress ushered in the New Deal, which restructured the nation’s economy, authorized massive public-works programs, relieved the unemployed, stabilized agricultural markets, promoted collective bargaining, and encouraged planned regional development, most notably through the Tennessee Valley Authority. The alphabet soup of initiatives flowing from the New Deal sought to expand the scope of government in order to distribute wealth and economic surpluses more equitably and to provide security to virtually every constituency: capitalists and consumers, workers and employers, corporations and farmers, homeowners and bankers. As Richard Hofstadter later observed, the New Deal was more than a philosophy; it was a temperament—a determination to empower government to live in a “spirit of charity” rather than in the “ice of its own indifference,” as Roosevelt articulated at the 1936 Democratic National Convention.

Kennedy’s praise of Roosevelt’s leadership and the impressive scope of the New Deal is frequently effusive. “Here at last was a leader who could lead, and a Congress that could be made to follow,” he writes. The Hundred Days amounted to “a masterpiece of presidential leadership unexampled then and unmatched since.” Efforts to empower workers through the National Recovery Administration and the Wagner Act represented “historic” attempts to redefine the relationship between American capital and labor and dramatically improved the living standards of much of the American working class. The establishment of unemployment insurance and old-age pensions became “cornerstones” of the New Deal philosophy, extending a measure of security to millions who had previously known little of it. Moreover, the New Deal proved an extraordinary coalition-building enterprise, expanding and transforming the Democratic Party by incorporating constituencies such as industrial workers and immigrants. As Kennedy writes, “Roosevelt had changed the nation’s political mind and its institutional structure to a degree that few leaders before him had dared to dream, let alone try, and that few leaders thereafter dared to challenge.”

Yet Kennedy, characteristically resistant to sweeping generalizations, also underscores Roosevelt’s shortcomings. While inaugurating a new era of economic security underwritten by a more robust federal government, Roosevelt’s New Deal initiatives did not by themselves end the Depression. In 1937, the recovery that had been budding since Roosevelt’s earliest days in office suddenly reversed. Within weeks, the stock market plunged by more than one-third, corporate profits fell nearly 80 percent, steel output declined 40 percent, and more than two million workers lost their jobs. Conditions deteriorated at a speed that, Kennedy argues, eclipsed even the decline under Hoover. With critics dubbing the slump the “Roosevelt Recession,” this “depression within a depression” crippled the momentum of Roosevelt’s domestic program. By the end of 1938, liberal reformers were in retreat and the New Deal had become untethered from sustained political leadership. Roosevelt, Kennedy writes, was now “a badly weakened leader, unable to summon the imagination or to secure the political strength to cure his own country’s apparently endless economic crisis.” Kennedy also knocks Roosevelt for his record on racial equality. He provided little more than modest support for efforts to advance Black civil rights, overriding the exhortations of Black leaders and even his own wife by offering only tepid support for federal anti-lynching legislation. Roosevelt, Kennedy argues, was effectively cowed by the powerful Southern conservative bloc of his own party.

The second half of Freedom From Fear describes how the escalating drumbeat of war in Europe and the Pacific progressively shook the nation out of its isolationist slumber. Initially, Nazi mobilization was met with considerable indifference in the United States, where many regarded American participation in the Great War as a mistake never to be repeated. Kennedy argues—setting the stage for one of the great philosophical reversals of the era—that Roosevelt himself initially reflected some of this sentiment, disavowing his earlier support for the League of Nations and moving to shrink the size of the Army. In his 1937 “Quarantine Speech,” Roosevelt articulated a case for containing the spread of “world lawlessness,” but failed to follow his rhetoric with decisive action. Hitler’s absorption of Austria and the Sudetenland was met with relative indifference, with Roosevelt assuring Hitler that the United States had no political commitments or obligations in Europe. Congress went further, codifying isolationist sentiment in a succession of neutrality laws that remained in force as late as November 1939, including restrictions on arms shipments to belligerents. “Letting things rip and seeing what happened,” Kennedy writes, captured much of the American zeitgeist of the 1930s.

The exigencies of an escalating European war and Churchill’s increasingly urgent appeals for American assistance proved decisive. Churchill, Kennedy writes, soon found in Roosevelt a “resonant soulmate.” As Britain endured the German onslaught, Roosevelt gradually shed the cloak of isolationism and requested from Congress more than a billion dollars in supplemental defense appropriations. Included was a request to begin building a “two-ocean navy” and producing “at least 50,000 planes a year.” In a risky undertaking that Kennedy argues “stretched his constitutional prerogatives to their outermost boundaries,” Roosevelt threw his full weight behind supporting Britain, even prodding reluctant subordinates to participate in his high-stakes gamble. He determined that new American aircraft production would increasingly flow to the Allies, facilitated the transfer of American military matériel to Britain, and released the destroyers Churchill desperately sought. In December 1940, Roosevelt delivered his renowned fireside chat calling upon Americans to accelerate industrial production in support of the Allies and transform the United States into “the great arsenal of democracy.” “We must have more ships, more guns, more planes—more of everything,” Roosevelt exhorted. Here emerged what Kennedy calls a “newly potent, decisive” president who had licked his political wounds and was once again ready to play the lion.

After the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, America moved firmly onto a war footing. In January 1942, Roosevelt reinforced the necessity of achieving the overwhelming material superiority required for victory. Roughly a year and a half after the Japanese attack, the nation’s industrial mobilization was effectively complete. America’s decisive advantage, Kennedy writes, rested upon its extraordinary capacity for resource mobilization, the diversion of those resources toward more productive uses, and dramatic increases in productivity itself. By 1944, the United States was producing three-fifths of the Allies’ munitions and two-fifths of the world’s armaments, while supplying approximately one-quarter of Britain’s and one-tenth of the Soviet Union’s military resources. The Americans soon enjoyed roughly a three-to-one munitions advantage, with the disparity even greater in the Pacific. For every pound of supplies Japan could deliver to its soldiers, the United States could deliver two tons. Stalin famously described America as a “country of machines,” without whose productive capacity the Allies could not have won the war.

Abundance did not define only the fruits of America’s rapid military mobilization. Kennedy argues that the United States was unique among the major belligerents in simultaneously enjoying a burgeoning consumer society. Average weekly wages increased by 65 percent in 1942. By the end of the war, industrial workers enjoyed real incomes more than one-quarter higher than in 1940, while corporate profits had doubled. Civilian purchases of goods and services grew by 12 percent between 1940 and 1944, as Americans consumed movies, books, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, jewelry, and liquor in record quantities. Kennedy notes that the war even narrowed the longstanding gulf between rural and urban living standards—a feat not accomplished in nearly half a century. “Most Americans,” he writes, “never had it so good.” Compared with the deteriorating home-front conditions of other combatant nations, the United States “enjoyed guns and butter too—and both of them in unrivaled quantities.”

Yet while Kennedy argues that Roosevelt’s harnessing of American productive power helped propel the Allies to victory, he again makes room for sharp criticism of Roosevelt’s wartime social policies. Over the objections of some within his inner circle, Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 authorized the military removal and mass incarceration of tens of thousands of people of Japanese ancestry, many of them American citizens, from the West Coast into inland concentration camps. Kennedy argues that this action “profaned” the Constitution. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802 prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, creed, color, or national origin in the defense industry and federal agencies, but its enforcement mechanisms remained too weak to effectively punish companies that violated its provisions. As with his earlier position on anti-lynching legislation, Roosevelt, Kennedy argues, remained “studiously aloof,” excessively sensitive to political considerations and reluctant to enforce the spirit of his own policies.

On the international front, Kennedy criticizes Roosevelt for lacking both the will and the practical means to challenge Stalin’s determination to dominate Eastern Europe, leaving American pledges to support democratic elections in the region increasingly hollow. Kennedy also finds it “striking” how broad the consensus was within the Roosevelt and later Truman administrations regarding the use of the atomic bomb. Given the overriding desire to end the conflict as quickly as possible, an alternative interpretation of the war’s endgame raises the question of whether the Allies’ insistence upon unconditional surrender contributed to the devastating destruction inflicted upon Japanese cities, first through conventional and incendiary bombing and ultimately through atomic warfare.

Freedom From Fear culminates with America at the summit of its transformation into a world power, leaving the reader to marvel at the distance traveled since the isolationist torpor of the prewar decades. Kennedy’s concluding paragraphs elucidate a history whose outcome had been anything but inevitable:

“Who could have predicted that the nation that had repudiated the League of Nations in 1920 would emerge as the foremost champion of the United Nations a generation later? That the Congress that had passed five neutrality statutes in the 1930s would vote overwhelmingly to make the United States a charter member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949? That the country that had so reluctantly armed itself in 1941 would become a virtual garrison state in the postwar decades? ... Who could have foretold that the nation that had flintily refused to cancel the Europeans’ war debts in the 1920s would establish the World Bank in 1945 and commit $17 billion to the Marshall Plan in 1948? That the country that had embraced the Fordney-McCumber and Smoot-Hawley tariffs would take the lead in establishing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and later the World Trade Organization? That the government that had torpedoed the London Economic Conference in 1933 would create the International Monetary Fund in 1944? That isolationist America would step forward to midwife the European Union, another war baby whose maturation muted centuries of old-world rivalries and symbolized the international regime that by the century’s end came to be called ‘globalization’?”

From the depths of the Depression to the heights of victory in the Second World War, the American people endured a remarkable sequence of transformations. Out of Hoover’s inability to stem the gathering economic calamity emerged Roosevelt’s New Deal, at the center of which, Kennedy argues, lay a pledge to extend security to those who had previously known little of it. Out of the isolationist slumber of the 1930s came the clarion call for mobilization, to which the country responded with extraordinary productive force. Delivering the goods both abroad and at home, the United States emerged from the war virtually alone among the great powers with its homeland intact, its economy strengthened, and its international influence vastly enlarged. Freedom From Fear captures these pivotal transformations in lucid and impressive detail while repeatedly undermining any temptation to regard their outcomes as historically inevitable. Kennedy leaves the reader with a powerful sense that the America of 1945 was not the inevitable culmination of the America of 1929, but the unexpected product of sixteen years of crisis, experimentation, and war.

[J Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Time’s Man of the Year edition, they outlined some works in Ben Bernanke’s library. I picked up several of them, including this one on the Great Depression. This work is yet another tome, 900 pages or so… but well worth the read. The first half is devoted to the causes and results of the Great Depression.

Sadly, since Reagan took office, there has been a wholesale dismantling of the protections put in place in reaction to the Depression. I literally covered the first half of the book with highlighted sections. You could just as easily replaced 1920s with 2000s. The similarities were absurd. Our nation literally walked into this mess with volumes of information that could have prevented this fall, if only the warnings were headed. Unfortunately, the modern society we’ve created no longer has the ability to put effort into studying the past. So we basically deserve the predicament we’re currently in, as we will be the next time a situation like this arises.

The second half of the book presents the war that helped pull us from the economic decline. The work provides an in depth analysis of the situation, and moves forward with a quick pace that easily settles any issue one would have with the volume of the work. A realistic assessment as to the how and why of victory appear came into focus. The optimist will see a great future for our country, considering the work and effort that went into the war. The pessimist will note that our country no longer possesses the strategic advantages the U.S. had in the 1940s. Either way, the read will ultimately be rewarding and enjoyable. The knowledge gained will be invaluable.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 4 out of 5]

As far as one-volume histories of this period go, you probably won't find anything better than this one, part of the Oxford history of American series. I've been reading them all, and this one does the job well. Of course, WW2 is a topic that has been rammed down the face of every American child from the fetal stage, so some might find that Kennedy has little to offer here, especially if you're well read, but his summation is good and he weaves it well into domestic politics and goings-on, focusing less on the military crap.
I would like to point out that the periodization here matters a lot for the potential reader and your particular interests might make this a must-read or not. The massive bulk of this work is about the Depression and the New Deal. Pearl Harbor doesn't happen until page 519 out of 858. Domestic politics and FDR's machinations and vagaries constitute the bulk of the analysis, which is still fascinating stuff. Some might find that daunting, but keep in mind that this is a history of the period not WW2. WW2 as an American event arguably wasn't even that significant at the time since isolationism and even home-grown fascism were popular while shit was going south in Europe. American contributions to the war in Europe might surprise you for their paucity and shocking lateness. The Pacific is a different story, for different reasons.
All around, an excellent contribution to the series.

[Reagan Kuennen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall a good book, my brain just couldn’t handle how long the chapters were at all and I read it for class which probably made it worse for me.

[Justin Tapp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Freedom from Fear won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in history. It is a 900+ page tome that is essentially two books, The Depression and The War. I decided to read it as a comparison to Amity Schlaes' The Forgotten Man (my review).

As far as The Depression goes, Schlaes' treatment is much deeper and more detailed, including the 1920s context and the personal histories and travels to the USSR of FDR's "braintrust." Kennedy skips or glosses over certain crucial details of the New Deal that Schlae's emphasizes, like the critical Schechter case. However, Kennedy does a good job explaining how the New Deal had to be mostly undone to fight World War II. He also does a better job integrating the important of international events on FDR's decision-making in the later 30's.

Overall, I don't find many contradictions to Schlaes' treatment of FDR and the New Deal, which is remarkable given how much the Left has poo-poohed Schlaes' account. FDR comes across as inexperienced, contradictory, weak in negotiations, and not very literate ("None of his advisers ever knew him to read a book) in both accounts-- quite different from the adoration he receives today. The New Deal was more about more fair redistribution than economic stimulation, which is why the restrictions it put on free enterprise had to be let go to allow businesses to produce the war machine.

FDR's decision to take the U.S. off the gold standard was the greatest economic boost. His sudden determination to raise taxes and reduce the deficit helped cause the 1938 recession for which he almost faced a tough re-election.

Kennedy does a good job giving a play-by-play overview of World War II, including many details revealed by recent research; that's quite laudable. FDR's ill health and failings at Yalta are detailed. Kennedy does a decent job giving some home-front industrial policy and statistics throughout the book, including WWII, but I think fails to capture the sociology of the American people during the War years. He does look at certain aspects, such as internment camps, and the role of women (and their eagerness to get back to homemaking according to multiple surveys-- something that is forgotten about the 1940s by many modern talking heads).

In all, I give this book 4 stars out of 5. It's not great as a detailed account of both periods, but is a very good overview of both.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

A history of FDR moreso than America. The 9th volume in the Oxford History of the United States tackles the shortest time period of any of the other volumes -- beginning in 1929 and ending immediately with the end of of WWII in 1945. McPherson's Civil War history Battle Cry of Freedom covered a shorter war but devoted more attention to the years leading up to the war.

It's hard to read this book without comparing it to Battle Cry of Freedom and on balance, McPherson's classic holds up better. That's not for any lack of skill by Kennedy but as a history of the United States, the Civil War is *the* quintessentially American conflict and its transformative impact on the nation can't be understated. As such McPherson's ability to delve into the Civil War, its buildup, and its impact feels more substantial.

The international aspect of WWII is necessarily less "American" in totality and Kennedy does a good job of exploring just how insulated America and Americans were in many respects from the impact of the war.

WWII covers the second half of the book while the first half focuses on the Great Depression and the New Deal. Kennedy gives a generally fair, and critical, reading of the New Deal and its rather ineffective results. He can't help but still laud FDR and the New Dealers for their good intentions but the evidence consistently establishes that the New Deal failed to do what it set out to do and likely prolonged the Depression. But hey, people meant well.

Overall, this is much more a history of FDR than it is of "the American people." While FDR was obviously the single most important figure during this period, the book feels oddly limited in scope given that it focuses so intently on FDR and everyone else just rotates around him.

[Joshua · Rating 5 out of 5]

How do you give a history of the Great Depression and World War II without falling into the myths and generic tropes that have come to dominate the popular memory of this period? How do you discuss into the events, ideologies, cultural, and economic expereinces of millions of people that are the subject of thousands of movies, TV shows, musicals, video games, and novels? David M. Kennedy shows us how in one of the Oxford History of the United States volumes that I have most enjoyed. Kennedy is able to tell the story of the Depression, the march to war, and the main events of the Pacific and European theatres of World War II, all while bringing in the academic backdrop that gives larger insight into what many Americans felt, believed, and experienced. Kennedy allows the pride in American accomplishments in economy and scientific advancement be felt, while also allowing the reader to confront the realities that race, gender, and socioeconomic status played a central role to have different Americans would have experienced this era. His final conclusion is a great sum up of all American history where he focuses on the gains that were made for many, while noting that there were costs associated that we don't often focus on in "The Grand History".
Central to Kennedy's story is President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose relationships with the American people, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premiere Josef Stalin underlay the entire narrative. I have always respected FDR and his accomplishments and I enjoyed how Kennedy looked at FDR. Kennedy reveals the master politician who has moments of triumph and moments of shame.

[Robert Morrow · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are two things you should know before reading this book. The first is that it is a very thorough history of the period, and as such, a fairly long book that requires a serious commitment. The second is, as other reviewers have noted, there is very little about the people beyond statistics and a few anecdotes. Rather, this is a comprehensive textbook of American history from the Great Depression to the end of World War II, and as such, FDR gets a lot of air time.

That said, it is an excellent history that can serve both as a reference work and a debate-sparker. Certain passages are simply outstanding, such as the Japanese resettlement; a few are boring, such as the two barrages of economic statistics that appear in the early and late parts of the book. Much of the story has been told in many other works; still, Kennedy has to be given credit for writing some of the events in a way that makes them seem fresh and interesting (Pearl Harbor, for instance). There are of course new facts from the research, but what makes the book special is Kennedy's ability to synthesize fact, event and human impulse into valid interpretations of truth.

So, if you are entirely unschooled in the period, this is a must-read. If you have read a great deal of American history, you may find yourself wanting to skip certain passages that reveal little anything you do not already know. I fall into the latter category, but I still enjoyed the book as a masterpiece of a fine historian.

[Ron Tenney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review of Freedom From Fear

It is hard to review a book that is so comprehensive in nature. What can I add to the fact that this was a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography from the Oxford History of the United States?
If you decide to read this, you will come away with a complicated view of the United States from 1929 through 1945. The central figure of this biography is surely Franklin D. Roosevelt. He deserves top billing. He is one of the most consequential Presidents in our history. His imagination, his determination, and his personality, all play key parts in overcoming the Great Depression as well as our entering into and waging war.
There are obviously many biographies of key characters from Labor, Unions, Government, and the halls of Congress that would tell this story differently.
There are war histories that would dive more deeply and with greater detail into the battles that have become legendary.
There are many social histories of the United States that would dissect immigration, migration, farm policies, race relations, etc. in great detail.
But if you would like to understand all of this in sufficient detail, I can’t recommend this book more strongly.
I have looked at this book for years, as it sat on my bookshelf. I think its size was a bit intimidating. I am so glad to have read and listened to this great history book.
Ron Tenney

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this when I realized I knew basically jack squat about the Depression and the New Deal. Kennedy's segment of the Oxford History of the US is incredibly in depth but pretty easy to follow. Like most of the Oxford histories, it's pretty top down history, but you get a great sense for the reasons behind choices and policies made by the leaders of this definitive time period. Most of the Oxford histories claim to be about decisive times in American history, but these 16 years were close to exceptional in their importance (The Civil War and the Revolution-Constitution Periods being the other two most crucial and transformative period). Kennedy argues that the New Deal did not help the US recover from WWII; that required WWII's massive mobilization of people and materials. Nevertheless, he shows that the New Deal fundamentally reshaped American society and politics, offered key relief from the worst of the Depression, and set the stage for postwar changes. Finally, he shows that the US advantage in material production was the decisive factor in American victory in WWII.

This book should prove invaluable for both my comps and my teaching of this era. If you want an excellent if extremely detailed overview of this period, there's no better place to go.