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The Glory and the Dream - A Narrative History of America - 1932-1972
1398 pages - A Narrative History of America 1932 - 1972
1400 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1974
About the author
William Manchester
83 books576 followersWilliam Raymond Manchester was an American author and biographer, notable as the bestselling author of 18 books that have been translated into 20 languages.He was awarded the National Humanities Medal and the Abraham Lincoln Literary Award.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 192 reviews
January 10, 2009
This two-volume book was one of my first non-fiction reads. I read everything written by William Manchester for the next six months.
Up to that point, I had read only historical fiction. I had not had any formal education since the sixth grade, and because of books, such as this, I have been able to educate myself. I am a mother of grown children and I am currently a freshman attending University. Life!!!
Up to that point, I had read only historical fiction. I had not had any formal education since the sixth grade, and because of books, such as this, I have been able to educate myself. I am a mother of grown children and I am currently a freshman attending University. Life!!!
June 15, 2010
WHAT IT IS: A left-leaning "narrative history" of the United States from 1932-72.
WHAT I LEARNED: I learned what I already knew from the Preacher in Ecclesiastes: "... there is nothing new under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 1:9). The "National Indignation Conventions" in Dallas in 1961 and 1963 sound a lot like this year's Tea Parties. The opening year of the FDR and Kennedy administrations have unmistakable parallels to the opening year of the Obama administration. An oil spill off of Santa Barbara in 1969 could be this year's Gulf of Mexico oil spill -- along with the determination that this is going to change the way we do things. (From the book: "... drilling leases in the Santa Barbara Channel were suspended. Then the petroleum industry began applying pressure.")
WHAT I LIKED (WITH RESERVATIONS): William Manchester uses details to bring history to life, particularly the major events. Sometime, in describing lifestyles from various years, he goes into too much detail for my taste. And I wish there had been pictures. I don't think I enjoy any writer of history and biography more than I enjoy Manchester. I only wish he were around to write a narrative history of the United States from 1972-2012.
WHAT I LEARNED: I learned what I already knew from the Preacher in Ecclesiastes: "... there is nothing new under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 1:9). The "National Indignation Conventions" in Dallas in 1961 and 1963 sound a lot like this year's Tea Parties. The opening year of the FDR and Kennedy administrations have unmistakable parallels to the opening year of the Obama administration. An oil spill off of Santa Barbara in 1969 could be this year's Gulf of Mexico oil spill -- along with the determination that this is going to change the way we do things. (From the book: "... drilling leases in the Santa Barbara Channel were suspended. Then the petroleum industry began applying pressure.")
WHAT I LIKED (WITH RESERVATIONS): William Manchester uses details to bring history to life, particularly the major events. Sometime, in describing lifestyles from various years, he goes into too much detail for my taste. And I wish there had been pictures. I don't think I enjoy any writer of history and biography more than I enjoy Manchester. I only wish he were around to write a narrative history of the United States from 1972-2012.
February 12, 2022
An entertaining and a comprehensive history of the years 1932 to 1972 by one of the important historians and biographers of the twentieth century. It is a very long book, over 1300 pages but the years covered are usually explored in a chapter so the book can be read over a long period of time which was certainly the case with me.
It was especially interesting to have these four decades explained by someone who lived through them as Manchester certainly has his preferences of the personalities he writes about and the era of the Depression to Watergate. I did not always agree with some of his conclusions but his take on the 1960s written in the early 1970s make for fun reading, with many decades of reflection the world of that decade has a different hue.
Recommended for those interested in good writing and patience to read a very long book.
It was especially interesting to have these four decades explained by someone who lived through them as Manchester certainly has his preferences of the personalities he writes about and the era of the Depression to Watergate. I did not always agree with some of his conclusions but his take on the 1960s written in the early 1970s make for fun reading, with many decades of reflection the world of that decade has a different hue.
Recommended for those interested in good writing and patience to read a very long book.
August 18, 2010
This is history that reads like a novel. Beginning with the advent of the Roosevelt administration in 1932 William Manchester chronicles the cultural history of America through the subsequent four decades ending with the beginning of the second Nixon administration. Through all those years Manchester highlights the events that animated the American people and had a profound impact on life in America. Whether it was life during the depression, the home front of WWII, the rise of corporate America, or the turbulent sixties with protest and more war the book provides a clear if breathtaking narrative of the immensity of change. His coverage includes the famous whether they are political like Truman and McCarthy or cultural icons like Hepburn and Tracy. Fads are not neglected as evidenced by discussions of Swing music, victory gardens, and hula hoops. The major social movements range from the bonus marchers to The Silent Generation to the Woodstock Generation. For those readers, like myself, who experienced some of those events (the fifties and sixties in my case) the book becomes an interesting blend of history and nostalgia. But no matter what your age, Manchester is a good historian and writer who is a joy to read.
September 18, 2014
I'm not sure it's possible to adequately review a 1300+ page narrative history of the middle of the 20th Century. So I'm not sure I'm going to try.
This book however is a beautiful skeleton.
On it I will hang Atkinson's "Liberation" trilogy, Halberstam's "The Fifties," "The Children," and "The Best and the Brightest," "All the King's Men," and "All the President's Men."
If you want to know what happened in America from 1932 to 1972, this is the place to start.
This book however is a beautiful skeleton.
On it I will hang Atkinson's "Liberation" trilogy, Halberstam's "The Fifties," "The Children," and "The Best and the Brightest," "All the King's Men," and "All the President's Men."
If you want to know what happened in America from 1932 to 1972, this is the place to start.
April 13, 2016
Time for some non-fiction and judging from the ratings this was a good choice. This is another found/rescued book - from where I don't know. I've read into it a bit - last night - and it's pretty damned good so far. The Depression, The New Deal, World War II, post-war prosperity and growth, Korea, Civil Rights, Vietnam, the 60's ... YIKES! Only 40 years and so much going on... So far my main impression is of how much 1932 looks like today. The Republican Party still wants to blame the victims of capitalist predation and excess, and that old American exceptionalism(?) and mythology is still going strong - love the rich - hate the poor. Ugh! Thank God for F.D.R. - and how interesting and pitiful(for us) is it that so many righties still vilify him! As for me, I was born in 1946 and "came of age" in the 60's. I'm a baby boomer 60's guy all the way!
Inching along as the war goes better and the cranked up US economy is "leading" the way to an unprecedented posterity post-war. Why did the USA win the war? Production, baby ... Meanwhile, FDR is fading fast health-wise.
- This is not the correct cover image for the book I have but that one does not appear on G'reads. Close enough...
Reading about the 100 days of Roosevelt and his brain trust as they literally save the USA from chaos. Soon the business-conservative push-back will begin. The republican Party(Harding-Coolidge-Hoover - oh my!) was as much of a horror show back then as it is now. Also - Eleanor Roosevelt - great human being!
- Not a great human being? Westbrook Pegler, the Rush Limbaugh of his time.
Moving on a bit as the Depression persists and is exacerbated by the Dust Bowl. What a pile of woes! Then there's the inevitable push-back from "business interests" to the "socialist-communist" remedies being proposed by Roosevelt. Still goin' on today of course. Bernie Sanders is the new FDR and we do need him, but I'm not sure he'd be able to get much done given the divided and fractious state of American political culture.
- Wow - seems like Walmart would have been right at home in the economy of the 1930's!
- The Republican Right vs FDR was like the Tea Party vs Obama ... ever the cynical lying bastards.
Still creeping along - still very readable and fascinating. So many parallels to today's political world, including FDR's battles with a VERY conservative Supreme Court, even worse than today's.
Didn't get too far in last night as I focused on Le Carre' instead. This is going to take a while no matter what. Don't want to get into info overload.
And another night passes with minimal "progress" page-wise. Each page has so much to pay attention to that the go-slow method is required. Last night it was labor troubles and triumphs of the mid-30's. One of those Chicago police riot thingees happened back then. People were killed. Sound familiar? 1968!
This is my only book right now so perhaps I'll try to focus on it exclusively. Right now we're in the approach to WWII - already raging in Europe and the Western Pacific. Isolationist sentiments are waning a bit but are still a problem for Roosevelt -holding him back, though he's doing everything he can short of declaring war to help the allies, especially Britain. The war will temporarily hold back the right-wing/anti progress crowd but of course they'll be back in spades after the war ends.
- The right-wingers = viciously anti-Roosevelt, anti-Obama, anti-Clinton. The beat goes on ... American insanity!
So now the war is on and the right v. left political stuff takes a back seat. The author is shifting from one setting to another for an overview. First came the Pacific War, about which he had some seriously personal experience type knowledge. I was looking at some family home movies that my nephew has very kindly put up on line and the earliest go back to the early 40's - and then came WWII and there're my mother, father and older siblings living in Florida while he got trained as a Naval officer. He eventually wound up in the Pacific along with Mr. Manchester. The book and the family movies are side-by-side right now!
Last night my reading covered the death of FDR and it had me in tears. A VERY great American, though not thought well of by the tighty-righties. A few years ago an internet poll anointed R. Reagan as the greatest of American presidents! People are idiots ... Anyway, the war grinds on though the Germans are about done for. Eisenhower is too trusting of the Russians and the Cold War was the result. Would've happened anyway, I suppose. The war in the Pacific is also winding down but the slaughter of Okinawa and Iwo Jima will lead to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Alternative ways of ending the war and of dealing with the bomb were discussed and presented to Roosevelt, but then he died ... Except for Teller, most of the physicists(i.e. Oppenheimer) involved did NOT want it used, at least not on civilians.
1945 - The war(s) end with a bang - literally - two of them, in Japan. Incredibly, it was not a sure thing that Japan would surrender after that. The super-wacko militarists wanted to fight to oblivion! So now the boys are coming home, the atomic cat is out of the bag(Stalin probably knew more about it than Truman thanks to effective spying) and will be born soon. That probably won't be mentioned by the author! Meanwhile, Europe is in ruins and millions are dead. Fascinating ...
The wars are over and it's back to the home front for all kinds of economic troubles for Harry Truman to deal with. Labor strife was a big one, with the newly powerful unions flexing their muscles. Meanwhile the possibly too-rapid demobilization of the draftee military is causing a lot of problems as well, especially since Russia wasn't really demobilizing at all! Troubles ahead. Truman is struggling but will come back strong upon re-election time.
So now it's peace time but it's not very peaceful as Europe struggles to get back on its feet and the Russian presence looms. The U.S. comes to the rescue(of course) with the Berlin airlift and the Marshall Plan. It's all about our VERY productive economy. With so much wealth it was possible to share and a good thing we did too. Americans abroad are generating so backlash due to boorish American swagger while at home the prelude to the 60's begins as teenagers become more and more "owned" by themselves and their own culture. People get ready ...
We're almost to the '50's now: McCarthyism, Korea, Eisenhower and the Cold War. Meanwhile, Harry T. has decisively beaten the winner of the foregone-conclusion-according-to-the-pollsters Presidential election of 1948. THAT was amazing! I find it just as easy to dislike whitey-white Republicans and southern racists(like Strom Thurmond - who ran as a Dixiecrat Independent in'48) as I do these days. Thank God for "The Late George Apley," which helps me to cut them some slack ...
And now on to the end of the Truman years, McCarthyism and Korea. NOT a happy time in American history. Once again, the Republican Party can be easily cited for its villainy in supporting McCarthy. While the author does try to give some feel for the evolving culture, his main theme is political history. Lots to learn here!
- The description of the post-war suburban culture reminded me of my Aunt and Uncle in their little 1950's development in a former peach orchard in Glastonbury, Ct - Uncle Bob(an Army pilot , I think) worked at Pratt and Whitney, I think - a junior executive. Later they moved on and up. My parents and older siblings already had a house near downtown Shrewsbury, Ma on Brightside Ave. and didn't need to look for a house. Lucky ...
The political mire of the early 50's now is giving way to the election of 1952. A weakened Truman decides not to run and asks Stevenson, who finally accepts. Eisenhower is likewise reluctant but answers the call after Bob Taft comes oh so close in his final try. Then there's the Nixon thing ... the Checkers speech is coming up. Stevenson gets labeled an "egghead" for being smart and funny. Apparently there's such a thing as too smart for the American voter. The level of campaign discourse drops as Ike gains ground and the era of my beginning awareness of outside "things" begins. Mainly it's television: Howdy Doody, Wild Bill Hickok, Search for Tomorrow, The Secret Storm, Roy Rogers, The Lone Ranger, Arthur Godfrey, Bob Crosby, Dinah Shore, Andy's Gang, Mighty Mouse and on and on...
The Republican Party - ever ready to take the low road. The whole "Democrat Party" thing started back in the 50's - I didn't realize that.
Adlai Stevenson - a smart and funny guy but TOO sarcastic to be a national politician. It's not politically nice to make fun of dumb-ass Republicans I guess. Boo-Hoo!
And now Ike's been elected and the true 1950's will kick in. By the way, the Republicans accusing the Democrats with being "traitors" is nothing new. One does get weary of it, however. I love that Bernie Sanders has attracted so many young folks to the political fray. All that Republican/ "conservative" B.S. is new to them!
And now for the peaceful mid-fifties after Joe McCarthy has been brought low by Joseph Welch. What a shame for the Republican Party that they feared, tolerated and even supported that bat-shit crazy McCarthy. A sad period for our country and its legacy is still with us to some extent. Some people on the right still think it's a relevant criticism to call someone a "communist" ... sheesh. Grow up dudes!
The mid-1950's: Eisenhower has TWO serious medical issues but runs again in 1956 and wins easily. The cold war goes on as Khrushchev takes over in Russia and disarmament talks go nowhere. You can see that Reagan might have copied Ike's personality - very winning and engaging. This book is huge but it could've been MUCH larger -so much is left out or glossed over. On the home front my family is in it's death throes as constituted coming out of the 40's. My father can't-won't stop drinking and my mother's at her wit's end. Divorce and relocation from Massachusetts to Colorado in 1957 ...
- I'm not so sure that all that many people were ever convinced that smoking was harmless!
- a boo-boo: Jean-Paul Aumont s.b. Jean-Pierre Aumont
- As the 50's edge towards the 60's the author begins to sound increasingly like a fuddy-duddy when it comes to culture.
Last night - the culture of the late 1950's = all about being white, middle class, consumerist, Republican, conformist and fearful(of the bomb). Look out ... here come the sixties!
The 50's roll onward and Ike's administration is soiled by the Goldfine-Adams scandal. Again ... the names do ring a bell but I really didn't know what was going on. The Marine recruits dying in a swamp - I remember that one. Nixon getting almost killed in S. America - don't remember that. Anti-Americanism ... The Suez thing rings a vague bell. And of course Sputnik and the Edsel and it's lemon-sucking mouth of a grille. I well remember watching that blinking light pass overhead in the skies above Boulder - late 1950's. And then the failed launch on the first U. S. attempt - boom! NASA created in 1958 and the Space Races is on. I didn't recall that Ike had so many health problems after that first big one. Poor guy - he did his best and really spoke prophetically and with prescience near the end of his administration.
Now on to the final section: "Reaping the Whirlwind" after the U-2 fiasco, Castro and the oh-so-close-was-it-a-steal(Texas and Illinois???) 1960 election. I'm paying more attention now that I'm a grown up 14 years old and in a Connecticut boarding school. Still a bit more protected/isolated than being in a Denver High School - probably TJ. And out of my mother's hair... So, now it's time to go as the Civil Rights movement will bring on the sixties. My brother was one of those Freedom Riders and did a bit of jail time in Mississippi. Yale Divinity School marchers in New Haven get a shout out. College kids in Berkeley start pushing ... payola, Charles Van Doren, the Congo, Caryl Chessman, the Clutter family, Metrecal, Dulles dies, that Mikoyan mustache, Chris Herter, Castro and Batista - just like that Billy Joel song.
And now the 1,000 days of JFK. His "reign" didn't last long but it was action-packed: The Bay of Pigs fiasco and CIA in competence and dishonesty. Civil Rights craziness in the South: Freedom Riders, death in destruction in Mississippi as James Meredith tries to enroll at Ole Miss in Oxford. Walker Percy covered this event in "The Last Gentleman"(gotta read that again) and even named his protagonist after the incompetent governor(Barnett) of Mississippi at the time. And then comes the Cuban Missile Crisis. Sheesh - it's a wonder we're all still alive!
- The author says that the New left came to be a threat to democratic institution later in the 60's. Well ... let's see him show that. Convince me ...
- I remember watching the inaugural of JFK on TV. It was VERY cold an windy that day. I remember seeing JFK standing up trying to help Robert Frost read his poem in the glaring sunlight.
Now moving inexorably nearer the "end"(of THIS story). Much good about JFK is spoken of but also the not-so-good(NOT including his sexual addiction and the personality and physical changes wrought by his treatment for Addison's disease). Who knows if the author knew about these in 1972. Meanwhile, the far right persists endlessly with their fear of commies and nasty personalized political agendas. The only states won by Goldwater in 1964 outside of Arizona(his home) were in the deep south. Figures ... meanwhile, in his later years Mr. G. became considerably more mellow politically. So, Kennedy dies and Johnson takes over, misleading the public about Vietnam. I joined the Navy in late 1965 as the big and rapid military buildup was happening. By 1967 the war was raging ... I was there but only on the mainland(Saigon) for a few days. The rest of the time I was floating offshore on a spy ship.
Didn't read that much in here last night. The doo-doo is getting deeper for LBJ and the USA: Civil Rights and Vietnam continue to dominate...
Things are picking up now - Vietnam-wise - and the terms "escalation" and "credibility gap" come to the fore as Johnson takes to bullshitting while speaking to the public. One can have some sympathy for the guy. He KNEW that if he backed out that the right-wingers/hawks would crucifying him for wimping out in the face of Commie aggression and expansion. What to do????? As for me I got booted out of college for non-attendance at classes and wound up 1-A very quickly. I was told by my draft board(this is in 1965) that I'd be drafted in October, when I turned 19, so I enlisted in the Navy in September. I wound up in 'Nam in January of 1967. BUT ... generally pretty safe on a ship off-shore most of the time.
Still mired in Vietnam and Civil Rights - white backlash - "race rioting(Watts and many more) - Black Power - more escalation ... It's a bit breathtaking how fast the US went from sort of controlled involvement to (almost)all in in Vietnam. By the time I joined up in Sept./69 the draft rolls had doubled and by the time I got to Nam a bit more than a year later there were hundreds of thousands of Americans there. It was crazy AND awful and SO unnecessary and destructive in so many ways. Looking back from the present I was moved by the feeling of looking at an unfolding train wreck. Back in the day I was young and more detached - just surviving - going along. All for pretty much nothing ...
Getting close to the end now with the beginning of 1968 - a whopper of a year for sure. I was in a peaceful and far away place - Hawaii - but still in the Navy so ... Learning about drugs and the new rock 'n' roll. As the author talks about the culture of the 60's he begins to sound a bit like a fuddy-duddy. He was too old to "get" it I guess - he's overly negative about that whole "trip" for sure. I got it pretty well but never went all the way to hippie-hood. No LSD for me! Most everything else, though... He also brings up the Pueblo "disaster." The guys on that ship(it was much smaller than the one I was on - we were about the same as the Liberty - the one that got attacked by the Israelis during the '67 war) were in the same part of the (secret)Navy that I was. We all worked for NSA.
- The author's "look" at 60's counterculture lacks perspective but that's mostly because he was writing while it was still actually going on - into the 70's.
- Keeps writing "hippy" instead of "hippie" ...
The disastrous year of 1968... The author makes the unbelievable implication that the election of Nixon was a good thing. A stabilizing thing - Bullshit! As he describes sixties unrest and cultural craziness deepens he reveals his inner fuddy-duddy and a lack of historical objectivity. It was what it was - I don't care if he wants to turn his nose up at it. He's into the myth of American exceptionalism I guess - it's that "We're so special" thing. I guess he feels that young sixties people somehow soiled that image! He writes of Diahann Carroll starring in "Julia" as if it was a big advance for civil rights!
- Describes Sirhan Sirhan as "a swarthy little Arab" - sounds racist to me!
Now we're full on into the 1970's and the next chapter is titled "Nattering Nabobs." If that rings a bell you know how old you are! Nixon and Agnew - how I hated both of them and how low both assholes were brought! Unfortunately, resentful Republicans have been trying to exact revenge ever since. The politics of polarization = another legacy we have those two boobs to thank for(along with Haldeman, Erlichman, Mitchell etc.).
- Uh-oh, he's down on Irish patriots - maybe he needed to read more history!
- WTF is "acid" rock??? It's all just rock and roll ... expanded. I never took acid but loved the music.
- It's not "the" Iron Butterfly, just Iron Butterfly.
- It's unfair to label Manson's crew "a band of hippies" - it's a smear on flower children. There are going to be sleaze-balls and crazies in most any group if it's big enough. Read "Drop City" for a realistic look.
- Chappaquiddick - now I hate Ted Kennedy all over again! I worked in the kitchen of a restaurant(dishwasher) in Edgartown that was about 100 feet from the Chappaquiddick ferry landing in the summer of 1963. My boss was in a scene in "Jaws." TK came in one night with friends for dinner. I snuck a peek but only saw his back.
I suppose whoever edited this book got tired after a while - understandable I suppose. Angela Davis gets described as a "dusky twenty-six-year-old beauty"! and he writes "The Cream" instead of just "Cream." Like I said - dude was WAY over thirty!
Now we're rounding into the homestretch as Vietnamization will stagger to it's ignominious conclusion and the Nixon administration will eventually dissolve into the swamp of it's moral turpitude. The right-wingers these days rant idiotically about the "dictator" Obama and staunchly defend a President who REALLY took steps toward serious subversion of law and democracy. My aunt and uncleI(both deceased), wealthy upper-middle-classers in suburban Connecticut never stop defending Nixon and Agnew and the rest. According to them the were all "railroaded."
- Kent State showed the dark side of right wing patriotism and dishonesty. Denial of the the truth/reality leads to destruction. The righties keep wanting to live in a fairyland. Kent State should never have happened and blaming the dead students is sickening.
- More faux pas by grandpa Manchester: it's just Grand Funk Railroad, not "the" Grand Funk Railroad. He describes rock "jamborees" as "steeped in sin"! Calls drug dealers "pushers" - HEY! marijuana(mostly what they sold) is NOT heroin! That said, the one time I sold some pot to a guy as a favor to his sister(a friend) I DID feel uncomfortable about it.
Inching along as the war goes better and the cranked up US economy is "leading" the way to an unprecedented posterity post-war. Why did the USA win the war? Production, baby ... Meanwhile, FDR is fading fast health-wise.
- This is not the correct cover image for the book I have but that one does not appear on G'reads. Close enough...
Reading about the 100 days of Roosevelt and his brain trust as they literally save the USA from chaos. Soon the business-conservative push-back will begin. The republican Party(Harding-Coolidge-Hoover - oh my!) was as much of a horror show back then as it is now. Also - Eleanor Roosevelt - great human being!
- Not a great human being? Westbrook Pegler, the Rush Limbaugh of his time.
Moving on a bit as the Depression persists and is exacerbated by the Dust Bowl. What a pile of woes! Then there's the inevitable push-back from "business interests" to the "socialist-communist" remedies being proposed by Roosevelt. Still goin' on today of course. Bernie Sanders is the new FDR and we do need him, but I'm not sure he'd be able to get much done given the divided and fractious state of American political culture.
- Wow - seems like Walmart would have been right at home in the economy of the 1930's!
- The Republican Right vs FDR was like the Tea Party vs Obama ... ever the cynical lying bastards.
Still creeping along - still very readable and fascinating. So many parallels to today's political world, including FDR's battles with a VERY conservative Supreme Court, even worse than today's.
Didn't get too far in last night as I focused on Le Carre' instead. This is going to take a while no matter what. Don't want to get into info overload.
And another night passes with minimal "progress" page-wise. Each page has so much to pay attention to that the go-slow method is required. Last night it was labor troubles and triumphs of the mid-30's. One of those Chicago police riot thingees happened back then. People were killed. Sound familiar? 1968!
This is my only book right now so perhaps I'll try to focus on it exclusively. Right now we're in the approach to WWII - already raging in Europe and the Western Pacific. Isolationist sentiments are waning a bit but are still a problem for Roosevelt -holding him back, though he's doing everything he can short of declaring war to help the allies, especially Britain. The war will temporarily hold back the right-wing/anti progress crowd but of course they'll be back in spades after the war ends.
- The right-wingers = viciously anti-Roosevelt, anti-Obama, anti-Clinton. The beat goes on ... American insanity!
So now the war is on and the right v. left political stuff takes a back seat. The author is shifting from one setting to another for an overview. First came the Pacific War, about which he had some seriously personal experience type knowledge. I was looking at some family home movies that my nephew has very kindly put up on line and the earliest go back to the early 40's - and then came WWII and there're my mother, father and older siblings living in Florida while he got trained as a Naval officer. He eventually wound up in the Pacific along with Mr. Manchester. The book and the family movies are side-by-side right now!
Last night my reading covered the death of FDR and it had me in tears. A VERY great American, though not thought well of by the tighty-righties. A few years ago an internet poll anointed R. Reagan as the greatest of American presidents! People are idiots ... Anyway, the war grinds on though the Germans are about done for. Eisenhower is too trusting of the Russians and the Cold War was the result. Would've happened anyway, I suppose. The war in the Pacific is also winding down but the slaughter of Okinawa and Iwo Jima will lead to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Alternative ways of ending the war and of dealing with the bomb were discussed and presented to Roosevelt, but then he died ... Except for Teller, most of the physicists(i.e. Oppenheimer) involved did NOT want it used, at least not on civilians.
1945 - The war(s) end with a bang - literally - two of them, in Japan. Incredibly, it was not a sure thing that Japan would surrender after that. The super-wacko militarists wanted to fight to oblivion! So now the boys are coming home, the atomic cat is out of the bag(Stalin probably knew more about it than Truman thanks to effective spying) and will be born soon. That probably won't be mentioned by the author! Meanwhile, Europe is in ruins and millions are dead. Fascinating ...
The wars are over and it's back to the home front for all kinds of economic troubles for Harry Truman to deal with. Labor strife was a big one, with the newly powerful unions flexing their muscles. Meanwhile the possibly too-rapid demobilization of the draftee military is causing a lot of problems as well, especially since Russia wasn't really demobilizing at all! Troubles ahead. Truman is struggling but will come back strong upon re-election time.
So now it's peace time but it's not very peaceful as Europe struggles to get back on its feet and the Russian presence looms. The U.S. comes to the rescue(of course) with the Berlin airlift and the Marshall Plan. It's all about our VERY productive economy. With so much wealth it was possible to share and a good thing we did too. Americans abroad are generating so backlash due to boorish American swagger while at home the prelude to the 60's begins as teenagers become more and more "owned" by themselves and their own culture. People get ready ...
We're almost to the '50's now: McCarthyism, Korea, Eisenhower and the Cold War. Meanwhile, Harry T. has decisively beaten the winner of the foregone-conclusion-according-to-the-pollsters Presidential election of 1948. THAT was amazing! I find it just as easy to dislike whitey-white Republicans and southern racists(like Strom Thurmond - who ran as a Dixiecrat Independent in'48) as I do these days. Thank God for "The Late George Apley," which helps me to cut them some slack ...
And now on to the end of the Truman years, McCarthyism and Korea. NOT a happy time in American history. Once again, the Republican Party can be easily cited for its villainy in supporting McCarthy. While the author does try to give some feel for the evolving culture, his main theme is political history. Lots to learn here!
- The description of the post-war suburban culture reminded me of my Aunt and Uncle in their little 1950's development in a former peach orchard in Glastonbury, Ct - Uncle Bob(an Army pilot , I think) worked at Pratt and Whitney, I think - a junior executive. Later they moved on and up. My parents and older siblings already had a house near downtown Shrewsbury, Ma on Brightside Ave. and didn't need to look for a house. Lucky ...
The political mire of the early 50's now is giving way to the election of 1952. A weakened Truman decides not to run and asks Stevenson, who finally accepts. Eisenhower is likewise reluctant but answers the call after Bob Taft comes oh so close in his final try. Then there's the Nixon thing ... the Checkers speech is coming up. Stevenson gets labeled an "egghead" for being smart and funny. Apparently there's such a thing as too smart for the American voter. The level of campaign discourse drops as Ike gains ground and the era of my beginning awareness of outside "things" begins. Mainly it's television: Howdy Doody, Wild Bill Hickok, Search for Tomorrow, The Secret Storm, Roy Rogers, The Lone Ranger, Arthur Godfrey, Bob Crosby, Dinah Shore, Andy's Gang, Mighty Mouse and on and on...
The Republican Party - ever ready to take the low road. The whole "Democrat Party" thing started back in the 50's - I didn't realize that.
Adlai Stevenson - a smart and funny guy but TOO sarcastic to be a national politician. It's not politically nice to make fun of dumb-ass Republicans I guess. Boo-Hoo!
And now Ike's been elected and the true 1950's will kick in. By the way, the Republicans accusing the Democrats with being "traitors" is nothing new. One does get weary of it, however. I love that Bernie Sanders has attracted so many young folks to the political fray. All that Republican/ "conservative" B.S. is new to them!
And now for the peaceful mid-fifties after Joe McCarthy has been brought low by Joseph Welch. What a shame for the Republican Party that they feared, tolerated and even supported that bat-shit crazy McCarthy. A sad period for our country and its legacy is still with us to some extent. Some people on the right still think it's a relevant criticism to call someone a "communist" ... sheesh. Grow up dudes!
The mid-1950's: Eisenhower has TWO serious medical issues but runs again in 1956 and wins easily. The cold war goes on as Khrushchev takes over in Russia and disarmament talks go nowhere. You can see that Reagan might have copied Ike's personality - very winning and engaging. This book is huge but it could've been MUCH larger -so much is left out or glossed over. On the home front my family is in it's death throes as constituted coming out of the 40's. My father can't-won't stop drinking and my mother's at her wit's end. Divorce and relocation from Massachusetts to Colorado in 1957 ...
- I'm not so sure that all that many people were ever convinced that smoking was harmless!
- a boo-boo: Jean-Paul Aumont s.b. Jean-Pierre Aumont
- As the 50's edge towards the 60's the author begins to sound increasingly like a fuddy-duddy when it comes to culture.
Last night - the culture of the late 1950's = all about being white, middle class, consumerist, Republican, conformist and fearful(of the bomb). Look out ... here come the sixties!
The 50's roll onward and Ike's administration is soiled by the Goldfine-Adams scandal. Again ... the names do ring a bell but I really didn't know what was going on. The Marine recruits dying in a swamp - I remember that one. Nixon getting almost killed in S. America - don't remember that. Anti-Americanism ... The Suez thing rings a vague bell. And of course Sputnik and the Edsel and it's lemon-sucking mouth of a grille. I well remember watching that blinking light pass overhead in the skies above Boulder - late 1950's. And then the failed launch on the first U. S. attempt - boom! NASA created in 1958 and the Space Races is on. I didn't recall that Ike had so many health problems after that first big one. Poor guy - he did his best and really spoke prophetically and with prescience near the end of his administration.
Now on to the final section: "Reaping the Whirlwind" after the U-2 fiasco, Castro and the oh-so-close-was-it-a-steal(Texas and Illinois???) 1960 election. I'm paying more attention now that I'm a grown up 14 years old and in a Connecticut boarding school. Still a bit more protected/isolated than being in a Denver High School - probably TJ. And out of my mother's hair... So, now it's time to go as the Civil Rights movement will bring on the sixties. My brother was one of those Freedom Riders and did a bit of jail time in Mississippi. Yale Divinity School marchers in New Haven get a shout out. College kids in Berkeley start pushing ... payola, Charles Van Doren, the Congo, Caryl Chessman, the Clutter family, Metrecal, Dulles dies, that Mikoyan mustache, Chris Herter, Castro and Batista - just like that Billy Joel song.
And now the 1,000 days of JFK. His "reign" didn't last long but it was action-packed: The Bay of Pigs fiasco and CIA in competence and dishonesty. Civil Rights craziness in the South: Freedom Riders, death in destruction in Mississippi as James Meredith tries to enroll at Ole Miss in Oxford. Walker Percy covered this event in "The Last Gentleman"(gotta read that again) and even named his protagonist after the incompetent governor(Barnett) of Mississippi at the time. And then comes the Cuban Missile Crisis. Sheesh - it's a wonder we're all still alive!
- The author says that the New left came to be a threat to democratic institution later in the 60's. Well ... let's see him show that. Convince me ...
- I remember watching the inaugural of JFK on TV. It was VERY cold an windy that day. I remember seeing JFK standing up trying to help Robert Frost read his poem in the glaring sunlight.
Now moving inexorably nearer the "end"(of THIS story). Much good about JFK is spoken of but also the not-so-good(NOT including his sexual addiction and the personality and physical changes wrought by his treatment for Addison's disease). Who knows if the author knew about these in 1972. Meanwhile, the far right persists endlessly with their fear of commies and nasty personalized political agendas. The only states won by Goldwater in 1964 outside of Arizona(his home) were in the deep south. Figures ... meanwhile, in his later years Mr. G. became considerably more mellow politically. So, Kennedy dies and Johnson takes over, misleading the public about Vietnam. I joined the Navy in late 1965 as the big and rapid military buildup was happening. By 1967 the war was raging ... I was there but only on the mainland(Saigon) for a few days. The rest of the time I was floating offshore on a spy ship.
Didn't read that much in here last night. The doo-doo is getting deeper for LBJ and the USA: Civil Rights and Vietnam continue to dominate...
Things are picking up now - Vietnam-wise - and the terms "escalation" and "credibility gap" come to the fore as Johnson takes to bullshitting while speaking to the public. One can have some sympathy for the guy. He KNEW that if he backed out that the right-wingers/hawks would crucifying him for wimping out in the face of Commie aggression and expansion. What to do????? As for me I got booted out of college for non-attendance at classes and wound up 1-A very quickly. I was told by my draft board(this is in 1965) that I'd be drafted in October, when I turned 19, so I enlisted in the Navy in September. I wound up in 'Nam in January of 1967. BUT ... generally pretty safe on a ship off-shore most of the time.
Still mired in Vietnam and Civil Rights - white backlash - "race rioting(Watts and many more) - Black Power - more escalation ... It's a bit breathtaking how fast the US went from sort of controlled involvement to (almost)all in in Vietnam. By the time I joined up in Sept./69 the draft rolls had doubled and by the time I got to Nam a bit more than a year later there were hundreds of thousands of Americans there. It was crazy AND awful and SO unnecessary and destructive in so many ways. Looking back from the present I was moved by the feeling of looking at an unfolding train wreck. Back in the day I was young and more detached - just surviving - going along. All for pretty much nothing ...
Getting close to the end now with the beginning of 1968 - a whopper of a year for sure. I was in a peaceful and far away place - Hawaii - but still in the Navy so ... Learning about drugs and the new rock 'n' roll. As the author talks about the culture of the 60's he begins to sound a bit like a fuddy-duddy. He was too old to "get" it I guess - he's overly negative about that whole "trip" for sure. I got it pretty well but never went all the way to hippie-hood. No LSD for me! Most everything else, though... He also brings up the Pueblo "disaster." The guys on that ship(it was much smaller than the one I was on - we were about the same as the Liberty - the one that got attacked by the Israelis during the '67 war) were in the same part of the (secret)Navy that I was. We all worked for NSA.
- The author's "look" at 60's counterculture lacks perspective but that's mostly because he was writing while it was still actually going on - into the 70's.
- Keeps writing "hippy" instead of "hippie" ...
The disastrous year of 1968... The author makes the unbelievable implication that the election of Nixon was a good thing. A stabilizing thing - Bullshit! As he describes sixties unrest and cultural craziness deepens he reveals his inner fuddy-duddy and a lack of historical objectivity. It was what it was - I don't care if he wants to turn his nose up at it. He's into the myth of American exceptionalism I guess - it's that "We're so special" thing. I guess he feels that young sixties people somehow soiled that image! He writes of Diahann Carroll starring in "Julia" as if it was a big advance for civil rights!
- Describes Sirhan Sirhan as "a swarthy little Arab" - sounds racist to me!
Now we're full on into the 1970's and the next chapter is titled "Nattering Nabobs." If that rings a bell you know how old you are! Nixon and Agnew - how I hated both of them and how low both assholes were brought! Unfortunately, resentful Republicans have been trying to exact revenge ever since. The politics of polarization = another legacy we have those two boobs to thank for(along with Haldeman, Erlichman, Mitchell etc.).
- Uh-oh, he's down on Irish patriots - maybe he needed to read more history!
- WTF is "acid" rock??? It's all just rock and roll ... expanded. I never took acid but loved the music.
- It's not "the" Iron Butterfly, just Iron Butterfly.
- It's unfair to label Manson's crew "a band of hippies" - it's a smear on flower children. There are going to be sleaze-balls and crazies in most any group if it's big enough. Read "Drop City" for a realistic look.
- Chappaquiddick - now I hate Ted Kennedy all over again! I worked in the kitchen of a restaurant(dishwasher) in Edgartown that was about 100 feet from the Chappaquiddick ferry landing in the summer of 1963. My boss was in a scene in "Jaws." TK came in one night with friends for dinner. I snuck a peek but only saw his back.
I suppose whoever edited this book got tired after a while - understandable I suppose. Angela Davis gets described as a "dusky twenty-six-year-old beauty"! and he writes "The Cream" instead of just "Cream." Like I said - dude was WAY over thirty!
Now we're rounding into the homestretch as Vietnamization will stagger to it's ignominious conclusion and the Nixon administration will eventually dissolve into the swamp of it's moral turpitude. The right-wingers these days rant idiotically about the "dictator" Obama and staunchly defend a President who REALLY took steps toward serious subversion of law and democracy. My aunt and uncleI(both deceased), wealthy upper-middle-classers in suburban Connecticut never stop defending Nixon and Agnew and the rest. According to them the were all "railroaded."
- Kent State showed the dark side of right wing patriotism and dishonesty. Denial of the the truth/reality leads to destruction. The righties keep wanting to live in a fairyland. Kent State should never have happened and blaming the dead students is sickening.
- More faux pas by grandpa Manchester: it's just Grand Funk Railroad, not "the" Grand Funk Railroad. He describes rock "jamborees" as "steeped in sin"! Calls drug dealers "pushers" - HEY! marijuana(mostly what they sold) is NOT heroin! That said, the one time I sold some pot to a guy as a favor to his sister(a friend) I DID feel uncomfortable about it.
February 28, 2022
The Glory and the Dream is William Manchester's ambitious attempt to encapsulate four tumultuous decades of American history in one volume, a lofty goal even when one considers the mammoth size of the resulting work. With a few wrinkles -- inevitable for a book first published in 1974, two years after the narrative's cutoff point -- the attempt is a, well, glorious success. For a book of around 1400 pages, the narrative progresses at an impressive clip, hitting all the requisite touchpoints of the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s (the Great Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, the Great Society, the Vietman War, the Watergate scandal) without losing steam or committing any particularly grievous historical errors. Along the way heroes (FDR, Eisenhower, JFK) and villains (Hoover, Joseph McCarthy, Nixon) emerge. Triumphs (Allied victory in WWII, Civil Rights gains in the 50s and 60s, America winning the space race) and tragedies (the Kennedy assassinations, My Lai, Kent State) are vividly described. I also enjoyed the "Portrait of an American" entries dotted throughout the book, which focus on a variety of figures, such as Marilyn Monroe, Ralph Nader, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Ford Edsel. If you're looking for an overview of early-to-mid 20th century America that's as entertaining as it is informative, The Glory and the Dream would be an excellent choice.
April 28, 2010
This is probably the best social history of the United States of America I have ever encountered. It begins with the radio listings for a typical evening in 1932, proceeds to the Bonus Marchers and through the Depression and the wars, hot and cold, until 1972, its time of composition. So impressed have I been with this book that I've given it as a gift to several people and will pick up copies of it whenever I chance upon them. Most particularly this is a great thing to give to anyone over sixty as so much of it will remind them of their own experiences, both private and public.
Note that while a two volume edition is pictured here, the same ISBN applies to a one volume edition as well.
Note that while a two volume edition is pictured here, the same ISBN applies to a one volume edition as well.
November 23, 2014
Wonderful. Just wonderful.
Having been born in the 1980s it is nice to read a narrative history of the generations who came before me.
This is an engrossing history beginning with the start of the Great Depression and ending with Watergate. The histories enclosed in the chapters include military, economic, political, and social events.
*This section may require a spoiler alert*
This (semi-leftist) narrative turns over a lot of stones and uncovers some ugly truths about the past American ages. I think it is written with an overall cynical tone. Manchester seems to hold the Roosevelt and Kennedy administrations in a very high regard. Truman and Eisenhower sometimes take a beating but the reader is left with an overall "meh" impression of their presidencies. LBJ and Nixon are scathingly described.
I personally think the presidential campaigns were the best parts of this tome. The military sections were interesting and often critical of military leaders (especially those of the Vietnam War). After reading the sections dedicated to the social histories I would call my parents and ask them about "steelies", "...and little lambs eat ivy", "coonskin hats", etc.
The American portraits and period montages were also wonderful additions. They helped put the writing in perspective with the people and times.
I found a couple of passages exceptionally interesting. William Manchester's views at the time of writing this history are now being challenged by modern historical viewpoints.
1. Manchester's view of Douglas Macarthur is almost sympathetic. Macarthur now carries controversy even those who view him in high regard.
2. During the LBJ years the Gulf of Tonkin incident/resolution receive more space than the Civil Rights Act of 1964. LBJ's legacy appears to be going through a little renaissance today whereas Manchester views are not flattering.
3. He describes the roles of automation and computers in the late 60s and early 70s as mechanisms of slot. The reader gets the impression these devices make American society lazy and could lead to a Bradbury type downfall. (As I write this on a laptop.)
I just loved this work. The history of these 40 years is almost written as the life of a star. A bright beginning with the birth of the Roosevelt administration, a violent supernova type rupture of society through 1966-1968, and the burnout decay through the Watergate years during the Nixon administration.
I can't wait to read more of Manchester's work.
Having been born in the 1980s it is nice to read a narrative history of the generations who came before me.
This is an engrossing history beginning with the start of the Great Depression and ending with Watergate. The histories enclosed in the chapters include military, economic, political, and social events.
*This section may require a spoiler alert*
This (semi-leftist) narrative turns over a lot of stones and uncovers some ugly truths about the past American ages. I think it is written with an overall cynical tone. Manchester seems to hold the Roosevelt and Kennedy administrations in a very high regard. Truman and Eisenhower sometimes take a beating but the reader is left with an overall "meh" impression of their presidencies. LBJ and Nixon are scathingly described.
I personally think the presidential campaigns were the best parts of this tome. The military sections were interesting and often critical of military leaders (especially those of the Vietnam War). After reading the sections dedicated to the social histories I would call my parents and ask them about "steelies", "...and little lambs eat ivy", "coonskin hats", etc.
The American portraits and period montages were also wonderful additions. They helped put the writing in perspective with the people and times.
I found a couple of passages exceptionally interesting. William Manchester's views at the time of writing this history are now being challenged by modern historical viewpoints.
1. Manchester's view of Douglas Macarthur is almost sympathetic. Macarthur now carries controversy even those who view him in high regard.
2. During the LBJ years the Gulf of Tonkin incident/resolution receive more space than the Civil Rights Act of 1964. LBJ's legacy appears to be going through a little renaissance today whereas Manchester views are not flattering.
3. He describes the roles of automation and computers in the late 60s and early 70s as mechanisms of slot. The reader gets the impression these devices make American society lazy and could lead to a Bradbury type downfall. (As I write this on a laptop.)
I just loved this work. The history of these 40 years is almost written as the life of a star. A bright beginning with the birth of the Roosevelt administration, a violent supernova type rupture of society through 1966-1968, and the burnout decay through the Watergate years during the Nixon administration.
I can't wait to read more of Manchester's work.
June 8, 2016
I have to move over to this edition to finish my review as I've used up all my allotted characters in the one I was reviewing under! Well, it IS a long book crammed full of interesting stuff.
So, we're headed for the election of 1972 and Watergate as the semi-insane Nixon heads for China before he returns to subvert our democracy. Screw him ... and Kissinger too!
- Why so much space devoted to the exploits of Clifford Irving? Low blow: he calls Nina van Pallandt the "most distinguished fornicatrix of 1972"!
- By "Poland water" does he mean "Poland Spring" water(a Maine product)?
The end arrived rather abruptly last night as I failed to include in my endgame calculations the fact that this book has about a hundred pages of notes and index! DUH! Anyway, it had to end somewhere so the whole unfolding endless Watergate saga is only getting started in this book. As the book was being rounded into shape the saga continued but Manchester really couldn't into except to refer to the outcome sort of vaguely. His story of the 1972 Presidential race was interesting. I voted for McGovern - the first public election vote I ever cast I think. Poor George was snake-bit by circumstance and his own poor judgment. Nevertheless, it's a testimony to how clueless American voters can be that the odious Nixon did so well. But - the turn-out was quite low also.
Hard to give any overall impressions - history is a muddle from too-close up. One thing about American history is pretty clear, however, and that is that we are CONSTANTLY at war with the outside world and with each other. So ... much ... violence ...
- BTW, Goodreads says I've read this twice - NOPE!
4.75* rounds up to 5*.
So, we're headed for the election of 1972 and Watergate as the semi-insane Nixon heads for China before he returns to subvert our democracy. Screw him ... and Kissinger too!
- Why so much space devoted to the exploits of Clifford Irving? Low blow: he calls Nina van Pallandt the "most distinguished fornicatrix of 1972"!
- By "Poland water" does he mean "Poland Spring" water(a Maine product)?
The end arrived rather abruptly last night as I failed to include in my endgame calculations the fact that this book has about a hundred pages of notes and index! DUH! Anyway, it had to end somewhere so the whole unfolding endless Watergate saga is only getting started in this book. As the book was being rounded into shape the saga continued but Manchester really couldn't into except to refer to the outcome sort of vaguely. His story of the 1972 Presidential race was interesting. I voted for McGovern - the first public election vote I ever cast I think. Poor George was snake-bit by circumstance and his own poor judgment. Nevertheless, it's a testimony to how clueless American voters can be that the odious Nixon did so well. But - the turn-out was quite low also.
Hard to give any overall impressions - history is a muddle from too-close up. One thing about American history is pretty clear, however, and that is that we are CONSTANTLY at war with the outside world and with each other. So ... much ... violence ...
- BTW, Goodreads says I've read this twice - NOPE!
4.75* rounds up to 5*.
August 29, 2015
This is anecdote as history -- in this case the history of the US from 1930 to 1972. As such, it is the most evocative history I have read. Starting with the most vivid, visceral description of the depression and continuing through Watergate, Manchester delivers the zeitgeist of the United States through an incredibly tumultuous period in its history. He reports not only on historical events, but on the slang, the culture, the fashion, and the emotion of the time. He loves to tell a good story, and tells it well. And he picks some great bits, like the time Nixon stopped Joe McCarthy from beating up Drew Pearson in the men's room. This is a charming read, but I am not convinced it is an insightful or even accurate history. The book is an immense 1400 pages, and there are more of those pages devoted to Clifford Irving's hoax about Howard Hughes than about the King assassination, or about Johnson's first 100 days in office, for example. And there were several events which I have read about elsewhere which were either inaccurate or incomplete. Nonetheless, the book is reasonably balanced in its outlook, a lot of fun to read, and evocative in its prose. In short, for most of those years, a lot better than the country it reports on.
February 1, 2010
Manchester was a superb historian, and this book was his magnum opus - despite its formidable length, Manchester's storytelling powers never flag, and it's completely engrossing - I recall sitting in a restaurant with tears streaming down my face as he described the reaction to FDR's death, and the funeral.
It's hard to believe that the Pulitzer Prize for history went elsewhere for 1974, or for 1968, when Manchester's THE ARMS OF KRUPP was published. Along with David McCullough, the late William Manchester is my favorite popular historian/biographer.
It's hard to believe that the Pulitzer Prize for history went elsewhere for 1974, or for 1968, when Manchester's THE ARMS OF KRUPP was published. Along with David McCullough, the late William Manchester is my favorite popular historian/biographer.
September 18, 2007
A two volume history of the U.S. from 1932 to 1974. Manchester confesses to being a “generational chauvinist”; the generation in question being the World War II generation. These volumes are very readable, and while some of the information has been contradicted or made more complete by subsequent findings, overall it is very useful. What seems weird to me, as a man a generation or two younger than Manchester, is his emphasis. He gives a lot of ink to sixties radical personages like Angela Davis, and the events surrounding their lives. I think a man writing in the mid-70s of his generation must have seen these people as really important, in the same way, say, that Barry Goldwater or Adlai Stevenson were important. But it’s hard to see that today—the 60s radicals were interesting, and in some parts of the world (France and Germany, for instance) important figures then and in the future. But unlike the leaders of the Civil Rights movement, 60s radical didn’t actually succeed in changing our society in any major way (except the feminist movement), nor did they gain temporal power. In this case, he overestimates the 60s and the baby boomers (some of their representatives of them). But he misunderstands the cultural changes wrought by this generation—the importance of music to them (he can’t quite see the importance of Elvis, for whom he has an irrational loathing, and of rock in general), the way they greatly relaxed generations of rigid taboos, whether consequential (the role of women and non-white persons in society) or trivial (the idea that men don’t have to wear a tie). These are minor and slightly unfair criticisms of a highly engrossing book. Reading about the Roosevelt administration here is especially interesting—probably the best part of the book. His attempt to write an encyclopedic book about everything that happened in America is an overreach, but an honorable one.
November 7, 2007
I used to work in this call center on Northwestern's campus. Everyone there was some PhD or grad student making $10 an hour calling people up and conducting surveys. Needless to say, everyone was a self-important blowhard (including me).
One guy, who never talked, gave me this book and said, "You'll like this." Man, did I ever. This is the most interesting history book I've ever read. It's breadth and scope are enormous and it carries the interesting prejudices and opinions (which are hardly cliche) of it's author.
One guy, who never talked, gave me this book and said, "You'll like this." Man, did I ever. This is the most interesting history book I've ever read. It's breadth and scope are enormous and it carries the interesting prejudices and opinions (which are hardly cliche) of it's author.
April 20, 2015
Enjoyable social and political history of USA from depression to Nixon. I don't agree with all of his conclusions but no two people will IMHO. Good, long read.
February 3, 2015
As is often the case, it is good to know the source of a book's title, which in this case is taken from William Wordsworth's poem "Ode: Intimations of Immortality": "Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?"
So if you are looking for a star-spangled history of the mid-twentieth century (1932-1972), go elsewhere. One gets a distinct sense that Manchester wrote the book for the sake of catharsis, having just lived through the disaster that was Richard Nixon's presidency, on top of the pain and agony that was the nineteen sixties in America.
Manchester, as he often does, starts off like the proverbial house afire, and then eventually bogs down. His portrait of the Great Depression should be required reading for anyone who did not experience the era first-hand--and that's almost all of us these days. World War two was another extreme challenge. Manchester himself fought in it and was wounded at Okinawa. But somehow that war comes across as mostly a triumph. Then we are off to Truman, Korea, Eisenhower, the Fifties, Joe McCarthy, and the dubious rise of Richard Nixon.
Manchester's moment-by-moment account of the Cuban Missile Crisis is the most riveting and insightful episode of the book. He treads lightly on the JFK assassination, about which he has already devoted many hundreds of pages in another book. But overall, his account of the sixties presents it as what it was in one of its most enduring terms, a "bummer." Yes, the outcomes of the civil rights struggles, the women's movement, the beginnings of gay liberation, and LBJ's Great Society legislation, brought very positive changes for the country. But the agony of what we went through to achieve them, combined with the tragedy of Viet Nam, brought back memories of a very tough and depressing time indeed.
And finally Nixon. Watergate must have been unfolding right before Manchester's eyes as he completed this book, published in 1974. The administration's descent into raw immorality and crime is about as ugly a picture as any American would want to face. Still, Manchester credits fully Nixon's achievements in opening China and reaching detente with the Soviet Union. And he leaves us with Wordsworth's question as an open one. Where indeed is the "visionary gleam?" Can we regain it.
Ironically--and one of Manchester's chief virtues is his eye for irony almost everywhere he looks, the book could almost have been written today. The names have changed, but many visions and dreams are just as powerful now, as are many disappointing aspects of the American character.
So if you are looking for a star-spangled history of the mid-twentieth century (1932-1972), go elsewhere. One gets a distinct sense that Manchester wrote the book for the sake of catharsis, having just lived through the disaster that was Richard Nixon's presidency, on top of the pain and agony that was the nineteen sixties in America.
Manchester, as he often does, starts off like the proverbial house afire, and then eventually bogs down. His portrait of the Great Depression should be required reading for anyone who did not experience the era first-hand--and that's almost all of us these days. World War two was another extreme challenge. Manchester himself fought in it and was wounded at Okinawa. But somehow that war comes across as mostly a triumph. Then we are off to Truman, Korea, Eisenhower, the Fifties, Joe McCarthy, and the dubious rise of Richard Nixon.
Manchester's moment-by-moment account of the Cuban Missile Crisis is the most riveting and insightful episode of the book. He treads lightly on the JFK assassination, about which he has already devoted many hundreds of pages in another book. But overall, his account of the sixties presents it as what it was in one of its most enduring terms, a "bummer." Yes, the outcomes of the civil rights struggles, the women's movement, the beginnings of gay liberation, and LBJ's Great Society legislation, brought very positive changes for the country. But the agony of what we went through to achieve them, combined with the tragedy of Viet Nam, brought back memories of a very tough and depressing time indeed.
And finally Nixon. Watergate must have been unfolding right before Manchester's eyes as he completed this book, published in 1974. The administration's descent into raw immorality and crime is about as ugly a picture as any American would want to face. Still, Manchester credits fully Nixon's achievements in opening China and reaching detente with the Soviet Union. And he leaves us with Wordsworth's question as an open one. Where indeed is the "visionary gleam?" Can we regain it.
Ironically--and one of Manchester's chief virtues is his eye for irony almost everywhere he looks, the book could almost have been written today. The names have changed, but many visions and dreams are just as powerful now, as are many disappointing aspects of the American character.
August 28, 2017
Really compelling history, from the very beginning. Manchester excels at detailed descriptions of selected events that give the flavor of the times and identify the turning points of history. The book begins with the Bonus March on Washington where Patton and MacArthur led U.S troops against destitute World War I veterans and their families who were seeking early payment of military bonuses. The sharp contrast between the poverty of the people during the Depression and Herbert Hoover's elaborate, formal seven-course family meals in the White House vividly illustrates the failure of government to recognize, let alone respond to, the suffering of the people. So often history appears to repeat itself but we never seem to learn its lessons. In both the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and the anti-Communist attacks of the McCarthy Era, the government, pushed by extremists, violated the civil rights of innocent people in a witch hunt that in the end did nothing to protect against the admittedly real threats to U.S. security. The book kept my attention throughout (which is saying a lot for a 1400 page book!) and brought back many memories from my distant childhood (school bomb drills, Sputnik, the moon shot, the contraceptive pill, the Vietnam war.) The American story unfolds almost cinematically, each significant event or policy logically leading to the next. It strikes me how different that is from watching the daily news, a cacophony of voices vying for attention, impossible to tell which developments are significant and which are entirely transitory. We require distance to see things clearly (how much distance? On reflection, I'd guess at least 20 years), which leaves observers of contemporary world events (and politicians themselves) stumbling in the dark. As this book was published in 1984, the coverage of the later years (Vietnam, protests, Watergate) lacks the benefit of historical perspective. But current politics validates his conclusion, that America vacillates between a love affair with change and a nostalgic desire to return to a better past that has been lost. A thoroughly enjoyable read.
June 23, 2013
Manchester's book is a massive tome - 1300 pages - that provides a narrative history of 1932 to 1972. He starts with the Depression and ends with Watergate. It is worth the workout; however, if you can get the two volume version that is much easier to physically handle.
He does a fantastic job of putting each ear into perspective and getting behind the scenes into what made the country tick at each point in our history. For example, you get a rundown on what people were reading, wearing, watching at the movies of TV and listening to on the radio. Beyond the breadth of topic, the amazing part of his writing is how he is able to offer this kind of depth on a consistent basis over the 40 year span.
He does a fantastic job of putting each ear into perspective and getting behind the scenes into what made the country tick at each point in our history. For example, you get a rundown on what people were reading, wearing, watching at the movies of TV and listening to on the radio. Beyond the breadth of topic, the amazing part of his writing is how he is able to offer this kind of depth on a consistent basis over the 40 year span.
February 21, 2016
Un tour de force. Manchester nous mène des émeutes de Washington en 1932 jusqu'aux années 70. Plus qu'une histoire politique américaine, Glory est un voyage dans la société américaine toute entière, ses moeurs, sa culture, son attitude. On est porté par la force du récit, ébloui par la richesse de la recherche, toujours fasciné par cette Amérique qui n'en finit plus de se réinventer.
October 1, 2019
I listened (at 1.5x speed) to this 57+ hour audio book over many months, much of it on a cross-country trip from Indiana to Texas - and was enthralled every step of the way. Manchester is a masterful story-teller, and his chronicle of US history from the Great Depression to Watergate did not disappoint. Highly recommended.
August 10, 2012
Read this when it first was published - at a time when our country seemed to be coming apart (or so I naively thought then). Really put things in perspective for me - and I've always been thankful for that.
July 4, 2021
I will definitely be rereading this.
September 27, 2022
As a student of history, Manchester is familiar to me. His vast works loom large if rather bulky on the horizon of various subjects. This one is no different, though since it has a wider scope it is slightly less dense. Yeah, funny to call a 1400 page book not as dense as his other work, but he does a relatively good job of avoiding the quagmire here. In a sense, he reminds me of some of Will Durant in attempting to cast a wide net over an era, and write a history of absolutely everything that happened in the designated time frame.
In a real sense, he succeeds. Released in 1975, it became a bestseller that year for good reason. Beginning with the Depression and Roosevelt, continuing through WWII, the post-Roosevelt White House, the Korean War, the not as tranquil as we remember 50s, the upheaval of the 60s, and the Vietnam War, he ends with Watergate. Along the way he dissects the vast changes in American culture and morals during the era.
It's not a perfect book. For a book of this length/breadth, he pays entirely too little attention to the economy and economic drivers, and entirely too much attention to the radical fringes of the counter-cultural movement in the 60s. He practically ignores the vast majority of the America in the middle, an America that resisted these great changes, or at least didn't embrace them. He also is too graphic in his discussion of sexuality becoming practically pornographic in places. Worst of all, he makes the almost fatal error of passing judgment on the previous forty years in light of the accepted wisdom of 1974. It is almost quaint now, fifty years later, and unnecessarily dates/pigeonholes his book.
In summation, though this is not a great book it is one of the better Manchester books I have read.
In a real sense, he succeeds. Released in 1975, it became a bestseller that year for good reason. Beginning with the Depression and Roosevelt, continuing through WWII, the post-Roosevelt White House, the Korean War, the not as tranquil as we remember 50s, the upheaval of the 60s, and the Vietnam War, he ends with Watergate. Along the way he dissects the vast changes in American culture and morals during the era.
It's not a perfect book. For a book of this length/breadth, he pays entirely too little attention to the economy and economic drivers, and entirely too much attention to the radical fringes of the counter-cultural movement in the 60s. He practically ignores the vast majority of the America in the middle, an America that resisted these great changes, or at least didn't embrace them. He also is too graphic in his discussion of sexuality becoming practically pornographic in places. Worst of all, he makes the almost fatal error of passing judgment on the previous forty years in light of the accepted wisdom of 1974. It is almost quaint now, fifty years later, and unnecessarily dates/pigeonholes his book.
In summation, though this is not a great book it is one of the better Manchester books I have read.
March 18, 2025
3.5 Stars
This endlessly fascinating book is neither a biography ( although Presidents are lead actors) nor is it a standard history, explaining past events with context. Rather, author Manchester takes a look at a wide range of American culture between 1932 and 1952.
The narrative moves quickly over hundreds of observations and anecdotes, full of wit, irony, and sarcasm: Movies, politics, advertising, sex, business,TV, medicine, military , law, sports, space, etc.
The problem I have with this book is the author’s observations frequently sound like one sided op-eds. Perhaps this is necessary given the overview nature of the book, nevertheless I believe it is a weakness. There are numerous footnotes but they are mere citations with no additional insight.
Also, I question the author’s accuracy at times. (no, Hitler did not design the original Volkswagen ‘beetle’, a Porsche engineer did)
This endlessly fascinating book is neither a biography ( although Presidents are lead actors) nor is it a standard history, explaining past events with context. Rather, author Manchester takes a look at a wide range of American culture between 1932 and 1952.
The narrative moves quickly over hundreds of observations and anecdotes, full of wit, irony, and sarcasm: Movies, politics, advertising, sex, business,TV, medicine, military , law, sports, space, etc.
The problem I have with this book is the author’s observations frequently sound like one sided op-eds. Perhaps this is necessary given the overview nature of the book, nevertheless I believe it is a weakness. There are numerous footnotes but they are mere citations with no additional insight.
Also, I question the author’s accuracy at times. (no, Hitler did not design the original Volkswagen ‘beetle’, a Porsche engineer did)
Read
May 27, 2024It gets increasingly center to right as we get into the 60s, to the point where it felt like Manchester was rolling his eyes as he wrote about the many countercultural movements going on at the time, but this is a pretty good primer on the United States politically and culturally in the middle of the 20th century.
Wild to say about a 1400 page book but it'll teach you the basics at least.
Wild to say about a 1400 page book but it'll teach you the basics at least.
June 21, 2022
A gripping and entertaining narrative history of the United States from 1932 to 1972, moving from depression toward better times.
Manchester's writing is superb, and I found something thrilling, enlightening, and surprisingly intimate on nearly every page. His approach is similar to popular historian Frederick Lewis Allen, who covered five decades of American history (1900 to 1950) in The Big Change, and novelist John Dos Passos, whose newsreel-like montages from the U.S.A. trilogy Manchester reproduces. This weighty tome, which was originally published in two volumes, is not nearly as breezy as Allen's, which is less than 400 pages. I read the one-volume ebook, which is the perfect format for this 1357-page book.
This is history with a liberal slant, so Eisenhower and Nixon come off as a dullard and a villain, respectively, compared to the sympathetic portrayals of F.D.R. and J.F.K. That's fine with me, and it explains why my interest waned a bit during the book's coverage of the Fifties, a period that David Halberstam covered with more vigor in The Fifties. Manchester doesn't find much to praise about Truman, so I'm inclined to skip David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning, 1120-page biography of him.
Manchester occasionally pauses the historical narrative to profile a prominent person or thing:
- Eleanor Roosevelt: first lady and political activist
- Richard Whitney: Wall Street speculator
- Norman Thomas: socialist
- Walter Reuther: labor leader
- Edward R. Murrow: broadcast journalist
- Marilyn Monroe: movie star
- The Edsel: car (!)
- Peter Goldmark: physicist and inventor of the LP record
- Karl Hess III: libertarian
- Benjamin Spock: doctor and political activist
- Ralph Nader: political and consumer activist
That's an eclectic assortment of Americans, and hardly the most representative for these four decades, IMHO. I would have preferred profiles of Frances Perkins, Superman, John Steinbeck, Woody Guthrie, Lena Horne, Joe McCarthy, Orson Welles, Lucille Ball, Jackie Robinson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert Oppenheimer, Joe Lewis, Barbie, Marlon Brando, Jonas Salk, Allen Ginsberg, Elvis Presley, Mickey Spillane, Edward Teller, Bob Dylan, James Baldwin, George Wallace, Harper Lee, Jim Brown, Rosa Parks, Ken Kesey, Theodor Geisel (Doctor Seuss), The Beatles, Robert McNamara, Muhammed Ali, and Katharine Graham.
Manchester's coverage of political, military, and international events is exceptional, but he gives short shrift to social history, relying principally on brief montages. Strangely, Manchester devotes several pages to the Watergate scandal but never mentions the names of the intrepid Washington Post reporters who broke the story, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. There are other puzzling omissions: Why is there almost nothing on the Hollywood blacklist, native Americans, sports, supermarkets, drive-ins, fast food (McDonalds) and TV dinners, medical advances, literature, or popular fiction? In hindsight, these are unbelievable gaps for such a comprehensive narrative.
We’re already 50 years past the timeframe of Manchester’s ambitious narrative. Although The Glory and the Dream is a fascinating look back, I hope another historian will use the Allen/Manchester approach to catch up with our nation’s history over the last five decades.
Manchester's writing is superb, and I found something thrilling, enlightening, and surprisingly intimate on nearly every page. His approach is similar to popular historian Frederick Lewis Allen, who covered five decades of American history (1900 to 1950) in The Big Change, and novelist John Dos Passos, whose newsreel-like montages from the U.S.A. trilogy Manchester reproduces. This weighty tome, which was originally published in two volumes, is not nearly as breezy as Allen's, which is less than 400 pages. I read the one-volume ebook, which is the perfect format for this 1357-page book.
This is history with a liberal slant, so Eisenhower and Nixon come off as a dullard and a villain, respectively, compared to the sympathetic portrayals of F.D.R. and J.F.K. That's fine with me, and it explains why my interest waned a bit during the book's coverage of the Fifties, a period that David Halberstam covered with more vigor in The Fifties. Manchester doesn't find much to praise about Truman, so I'm inclined to skip David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning, 1120-page biography of him.
Manchester occasionally pauses the historical narrative to profile a prominent person or thing:
- Eleanor Roosevelt: first lady and political activist
- Richard Whitney: Wall Street speculator
- Norman Thomas: socialist
- Walter Reuther: labor leader
- Edward R. Murrow: broadcast journalist
- Marilyn Monroe: movie star
- The Edsel: car (!)
- Peter Goldmark: physicist and inventor of the LP record
- Karl Hess III: libertarian
- Benjamin Spock: doctor and political activist
- Ralph Nader: political and consumer activist
That's an eclectic assortment of Americans, and hardly the most representative for these four decades, IMHO. I would have preferred profiles of Frances Perkins, Superman, John Steinbeck, Woody Guthrie, Lena Horne, Joe McCarthy, Orson Welles, Lucille Ball, Jackie Robinson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert Oppenheimer, Joe Lewis, Barbie, Marlon Brando, Jonas Salk, Allen Ginsberg, Elvis Presley, Mickey Spillane, Edward Teller, Bob Dylan, James Baldwin, George Wallace, Harper Lee, Jim Brown, Rosa Parks, Ken Kesey, Theodor Geisel (Doctor Seuss), The Beatles, Robert McNamara, Muhammed Ali, and Katharine Graham.
Manchester's coverage of political, military, and international events is exceptional, but he gives short shrift to social history, relying principally on brief montages. Strangely, Manchester devotes several pages to the Watergate scandal but never mentions the names of the intrepid Washington Post reporters who broke the story, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. There are other puzzling omissions: Why is there almost nothing on the Hollywood blacklist, native Americans, sports, supermarkets, drive-ins, fast food (McDonalds) and TV dinners, medical advances, literature, or popular fiction? In hindsight, these are unbelievable gaps for such a comprehensive narrative.
We’re already 50 years past the timeframe of Manchester’s ambitious narrative. Although The Glory and the Dream is a fascinating look back, I hope another historian will use the Allen/Manchester approach to catch up with our nation’s history over the last five decades.
June 18, 2025
Jam packed with history and culture of the period. Slightly repetitive.
July 18, 2026
The Glory and the Dream
by William Manchester, ©1972, 845 pages
a Book Report by Ron Housley, 18 July 2026
Here is a book I purchased in 1975 and waited over 50 years to actually read. This is Volume One of Two. Volume One is 845 pages.
Here is a book long touted to be some remarkable narration of the FDR years, extolling the supposed virtues of the New Deal. Manchester launches into a vivid portrait of desperate poverty wrecking its havoc on both average down-and-out Americans and on tycoons of industry and banking — both sides painted as desperate, as hungry, as barely holding on. The portrait, as I read it in 2025, beckons me to ask: is he serious? Was 1932 that bad?
I've read other books that seemed more objective in showing us the industrial juggernaut which propelled the country forward through the Depression and into winning World War Two. So it's only natural that I would be skeptical of Manchester's extreme slant here: painting the picture of utter despair in every nook and cranny of the country. Page after page, I find myself asking: were things this bleak, or was there actually an underlying core of economic strength — one that a different set of policies might have let recover on its own, faster, and without the price that got paid?
Manchester floods us with concrete descriptions of people trying to cope with the Depression, cleverly mixed together with "statistical" data suggesting that the rich are exploiting the poor. I saw nary a hint that ineptness or shenanigans at the Fed or in Congress might explain the economic mess which these institutions probably created — and then deepened into "The Great Depression." Manchester never quite says it, but his own material makes the case better than he seems to realize: the controls that followed didn't cure the sickness, they prolonged it. That's a fact his narrative contains without ever naming.
Then we are treated to an accounting of FDR's ascendency, with tales of economic woe leading up to the March 1933 inauguration. Banks are failing nationwide; depositors are withdrawing their gold in a nick of time; the entire country is in a panic. Then in FDR's first days in office, he secures from Congress unprecedented "emergency" powers, amounting to dictatorial control over regular citizens.
He orders those regular citizens to bring their withdrawn gold back to the bank under threat of prison terms. He makes it suddenly illegal to own and store your own money. And he orders the Fed to print the names of all depositors who withdrew gold in the last two years and indicates that hoarders will be spared no mercy. Prison terms for hoarders(!). What Manchester is describing, without ever quite framing it this way, is the founding move of the whole era: a government deciding that a declared emergency licenses the suspension of the very rights it exists to protect. Once that premise is accepted — that rights hold only until an emergency is declared inconvenient — everything that follows in this volume is just that premise working itself out in a hundred different agencies and a hundred different Tuesdays.
The New Deal is off and running; and the throttling of individual rights is off and running right along with it. But there is very little public complaint at the time. FDR apparently has nearly everybody paralyzed with fear.
This is not the way the history of that period has always been reported to me: not by my high school history classes, not by the many books I've already digested on the subject, not by all the documentary films I've watched. Manchester is putting a strong "bite" into his reportage. He never announces he's making an argument — and that turns out to be exactly the method. He doesn't need to argue for the New Deal; he just needs to keep showing you the breadlines and let the reader supply the conclusion.
FLOODING THE ZONE
FDR makes Trump look like a piker in how he "flooded the zone" with never-ending orders, the difference being that FDR's orders had the backing of at least some new authorizing legislation. He took from Peter — the depositor with gold in a strongbox — to pay Paul — the government program of the week. He trampled on the very individual rights that Presidents are sworn to protect. And as he turned the country away from its hard-fought freedoms, he assured everyone that it was in the name of preserving freedom. Nobody in these pages seemed to see the perversion at play. Even FDR himself said about it: "I think I am a bit shell-shocked." (p. 95)
The new onslaught of orders, rules, and laws became an enhanced version of "never let a crisis go to waste." FDR's Congress willingly helped. He had figured out how to subvert the law, and the people cheered him on. Higher-level abstractions like "Limited Constitutional Republic" were of little concern. One Maine Congressman (C. Beedy) lamented: "God save the people of the United States!" (p. 102) as the alphabet agencies exploded into our lives.
(SIDE NOTE: I was personally saddened to find out that electrification of the Pennsylvania Railroad was a WPA project, since I had always assumed it was one of the achievements of a great private company.)
FDR's New Deal had plenty of pushback, vows to repeal every shred of it. Yet when Republicans finally regained the majority in Congress, they never repealed any of it — just like modern-day Republicans never repealed Obamacare, even after years of pushback saying they would do so at the first opportunity. In both cases, unwinding the program meant standing up publicly against the idea that the strong owe the weak their sacrifice — an idea dressed as Christian charity but enforced by statute rather than left to conscience. Repeal, in both eras, meant being cast as the villain who wanted to take something away from someone in need, and no party in power wanted to wear that. So the programs stayed, and grew.
MONTAGE AFTER MONTAGE
What we have here in The Glory and the Dream is a long series of montages, stitched together like one of those highlight reels we used to see of the Year in Review. I had many of those "Oh, I remember that" moments as the pages flew by. Or, in the case of the years before I was alive, "I remembered hearing about that."
In each montage, Manchester gives us stories, some new to me, some well known. But the stories he selected always aimed at showing the profligacy of the rich as against the oppression of the struggling "little guy." He was always sympathetic to FDR's supposed fight for the little guy, and entirely forgiving of any Constitutional trampling such sympathy might require. It was not so different from modern attempts to justify Presidential overreach — the sympathetic cause changes, the license it grants the executive doesn't.
REXFORD TUGWELL
Much has been written about Tugwell, including his role as the leading member of FDR's "Brain Trust," who became known as "Rex the Red" due to the pro-Communist perspective he brought to policy creation within the White House. He was among the intellectual architects of the New Deal's expansion into citizens' economic lives, and it was in that same circle that John Maynard Keynes found an audience willing to advise deficit spending as a guiding doctrine.
In 1939, Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau said: "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. ... I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started and an enormous debt to boot!" Manchester includes the line and moves past it — a momentary embarrassment in his telling, not the verdict it actually is. Eight years, and the thing the whole program promised to fix was unfixed, with a debt added on top. That deserved to be the hinge of the book. Instead it's a quote on a page, gone by the next paragraph.
There was always a powerful faction in the background, somehow certain there would never be a reckoning to deficit spending — even though once the government borrows and then never pays back, the damage is hardened into place.
ALPHABET AGENCIES, BUREAUS, COMMISSIONS
Manchester tells us about the mid-1930s as a time when American culture became infected with institutional controls and regulations, agencies too numerous to list, with alphabet-soup names — stirring up contempt from only a very small opposition in Congress. He narrates this proliferation the way you'd narrate weather moving in: something that simply arrived, the natural next stage in a modernizing economy, rather than what it actually was — the accumulated result of specific people with specific anti-freedom, pro-statist convictions making specific choices they could have made differently. Regulation isn't a season. It's a policy, chosen by men with names, and Manchester's prose lets them off the hook by making their choices sound like maturation instead of ideology.
Only a handful of opponents tried to engage with abstractions like freedom, or liberty, or individualism in their attempt to oppose the flood of collectivist controls over their lives. The majority was enthusiastic to allow a certain degradation of the institutions protecting their liberties — they had little insight about how it might all play out in the end. And this is really the volume's quiet thesis, whether Manchester means it to be or not: you can watch, across these chapters, a government built to protect liberty gradually redefine its job as distributing security instead — to depositors, to farmers, to the unemployed, to whichever constituency needed showing that Washington cared. That's not a conclusion I'm importing from outside the book. It's what 845 pages of alphabet agencies actually documents, chapter after chapter, whether or not Manchester ever stops to say so himself.
THE PICTURE OF RUSSIA
Throughout this volume, William Manchester treats Russia as some "great power," which many people were tricked into believing it to be, rather than seeing Russia as a second- or third-rate world power which happened to have nuclear weapons — thanks in no small part to the espionage success of its extensive spy networks.
Millions of Europeans were "sold" into Communist slavery after World War II, kept behind the Iron Curtain at gunpoint, largely on the belief that Russia was strong. The Berlin Wall didn't fall until a decade and a half after Manchester's book was published.
Meanwhile, the book gives us, over the span of about 50 pages, the tale of the Marshall Plan as a massive welfare give-away scheme to supposedly rebuild Europe. What's worth sitting with is the German case: postwar Germany's recovery was swift and thorough, and a good number of economists trace that recovery less to the dollar volume of aid it received than to Ludwig Erhard's currency reform and rapid dismantling of wartime price and production controls — a return, in other words, to something closer to free exchange, right at the moment Britain and France were extending rationing and expanding their own state planning. If that's a fair reading, it's a striking case study sitting right inside Manchester's own account: the country that leaned back toward economic freedom fastest recovered fastest, and the book doesn't pause long enough to ask why.
EISENHOWER IN 1952
Manchester's Volume One wraps up with behind-the-scenes detail of the 1952 Presidential contest. The Republicans had been out of the White House for over two solid decades by this time. The Democrat campaign song, "Don't Let Them Take It Away," was a response to chronic Republican threats and promises to unwind the coercive regulations of the New Deal.
The Republicans had long voiced their wish to restore the individual freedoms quashed by many New Deal policies, but those policies were good for buying votes. The voters could be showered with manna as if from heaven, and the bounty bought votes for whomever was in power. Two decades in, the transition was basically complete: a government once understood to exist for protecting what citizens already had had become, in the public's expectation, an entity that exists to distribute what citizens are owed — and no party that wanted to keep winning elections was going to be the one to say otherwise.
THE DIENBIENPHU DEBACLE
Volume One wraps up with the French annihilation in Vietnam, one more in a line of French military defeats. Manchester crafts this telling just as he does the others that preceded it — by never actually telling us that he's making an argument or taking sides.
He never did claim to be objectively praising the New Deal earlier in the volume, yet his praise was all over those pages. Likewise, he never outright stated his contempt for John Foster Dulles's "domino theory" of Communist domination in Southeast Asia, yet his contempt was all over those pages as well. That's the method, start to finish: no stated thesis, just 845 pages of selection that adds up to one.
MANCHESTER’S TOME
In spite of Manchester's liberal-consensus sympathies, I was drawn into his narrative of how things unfolded from FDR to Eisenhower. There was no hint in all these pages that Manchester was able to judge political events in terms of whose rights were being violated, or in terms of which political position was objectively justified — and thus he never positioned himself as an authoritative voice able to impart meaning to the events he was describing. He simply arranged the facts so the meaning would arrive on its own, and for a lot of readers, it probably has.
Over all, Volume One was a nice trip down memory lane, colored in with an abundance of detail I had not previously encountered — but without the accompanying moral judgment I need in order to have closure in my thinking about a historical era. Manchester's storytelling did inject his biases, but he never attempted any actual argumentation to support them. For that, the reader is left to his own devices. I'm pretty much expecting the same thing for Volume Two.
by William Manchester, ©1972, 845 pages
a Book Report by Ron Housley, 18 July 2026
Here is a book I purchased in 1975 and waited over 50 years to actually read. This is Volume One of Two. Volume One is 845 pages.
Here is a book long touted to be some remarkable narration of the FDR years, extolling the supposed virtues of the New Deal. Manchester launches into a vivid portrait of desperate poverty wrecking its havoc on both average down-and-out Americans and on tycoons of industry and banking — both sides painted as desperate, as hungry, as barely holding on. The portrait, as I read it in 2025, beckons me to ask: is he serious? Was 1932 that bad?
I've read other books that seemed more objective in showing us the industrial juggernaut which propelled the country forward through the Depression and into winning World War Two. So it's only natural that I would be skeptical of Manchester's extreme slant here: painting the picture of utter despair in every nook and cranny of the country. Page after page, I find myself asking: were things this bleak, or was there actually an underlying core of economic strength — one that a different set of policies might have let recover on its own, faster, and without the price that got paid?
Manchester floods us with concrete descriptions of people trying to cope with the Depression, cleverly mixed together with "statistical" data suggesting that the rich are exploiting the poor. I saw nary a hint that ineptness or shenanigans at the Fed or in Congress might explain the economic mess which these institutions probably created — and then deepened into "The Great Depression." Manchester never quite says it, but his own material makes the case better than he seems to realize: the controls that followed didn't cure the sickness, they prolonged it. That's a fact his narrative contains without ever naming.
Then we are treated to an accounting of FDR's ascendency, with tales of economic woe leading up to the March 1933 inauguration. Banks are failing nationwide; depositors are withdrawing their gold in a nick of time; the entire country is in a panic. Then in FDR's first days in office, he secures from Congress unprecedented "emergency" powers, amounting to dictatorial control over regular citizens.
He orders those regular citizens to bring their withdrawn gold back to the bank under threat of prison terms. He makes it suddenly illegal to own and store your own money. And he orders the Fed to print the names of all depositors who withdrew gold in the last two years and indicates that hoarders will be spared no mercy. Prison terms for hoarders(!). What Manchester is describing, without ever quite framing it this way, is the founding move of the whole era: a government deciding that a declared emergency licenses the suspension of the very rights it exists to protect. Once that premise is accepted — that rights hold only until an emergency is declared inconvenient — everything that follows in this volume is just that premise working itself out in a hundred different agencies and a hundred different Tuesdays.
The New Deal is off and running; and the throttling of individual rights is off and running right along with it. But there is very little public complaint at the time. FDR apparently has nearly everybody paralyzed with fear.
This is not the way the history of that period has always been reported to me: not by my high school history classes, not by the many books I've already digested on the subject, not by all the documentary films I've watched. Manchester is putting a strong "bite" into his reportage. He never announces he's making an argument — and that turns out to be exactly the method. He doesn't need to argue for the New Deal; he just needs to keep showing you the breadlines and let the reader supply the conclusion.
FLOODING THE ZONE
FDR makes Trump look like a piker in how he "flooded the zone" with never-ending orders, the difference being that FDR's orders had the backing of at least some new authorizing legislation. He took from Peter — the depositor with gold in a strongbox — to pay Paul — the government program of the week. He trampled on the very individual rights that Presidents are sworn to protect. And as he turned the country away from its hard-fought freedoms, he assured everyone that it was in the name of preserving freedom. Nobody in these pages seemed to see the perversion at play. Even FDR himself said about it: "I think I am a bit shell-shocked." (p. 95)
The new onslaught of orders, rules, and laws became an enhanced version of "never let a crisis go to waste." FDR's Congress willingly helped. He had figured out how to subvert the law, and the people cheered him on. Higher-level abstractions like "Limited Constitutional Republic" were of little concern. One Maine Congressman (C. Beedy) lamented: "God save the people of the United States!" (p. 102) as the alphabet agencies exploded into our lives.
(SIDE NOTE: I was personally saddened to find out that electrification of the Pennsylvania Railroad was a WPA project, since I had always assumed it was one of the achievements of a great private company.)
FDR's New Deal had plenty of pushback, vows to repeal every shred of it. Yet when Republicans finally regained the majority in Congress, they never repealed any of it — just like modern-day Republicans never repealed Obamacare, even after years of pushback saying they would do so at the first opportunity. In both cases, unwinding the program meant standing up publicly against the idea that the strong owe the weak their sacrifice — an idea dressed as Christian charity but enforced by statute rather than left to conscience. Repeal, in both eras, meant being cast as the villain who wanted to take something away from someone in need, and no party in power wanted to wear that. So the programs stayed, and grew.
MONTAGE AFTER MONTAGE
What we have here in The Glory and the Dream is a long series of montages, stitched together like one of those highlight reels we used to see of the Year in Review. I had many of those "Oh, I remember that" moments as the pages flew by. Or, in the case of the years before I was alive, "I remembered hearing about that."
In each montage, Manchester gives us stories, some new to me, some well known. But the stories he selected always aimed at showing the profligacy of the rich as against the oppression of the struggling "little guy." He was always sympathetic to FDR's supposed fight for the little guy, and entirely forgiving of any Constitutional trampling such sympathy might require. It was not so different from modern attempts to justify Presidential overreach — the sympathetic cause changes, the license it grants the executive doesn't.
REXFORD TUGWELL
Much has been written about Tugwell, including his role as the leading member of FDR's "Brain Trust," who became known as "Rex the Red" due to the pro-Communist perspective he brought to policy creation within the White House. He was among the intellectual architects of the New Deal's expansion into citizens' economic lives, and it was in that same circle that John Maynard Keynes found an audience willing to advise deficit spending as a guiding doctrine.
In 1939, Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau said: "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. ... I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started and an enormous debt to boot!" Manchester includes the line and moves past it — a momentary embarrassment in his telling, not the verdict it actually is. Eight years, and the thing the whole program promised to fix was unfixed, with a debt added on top. That deserved to be the hinge of the book. Instead it's a quote on a page, gone by the next paragraph.
There was always a powerful faction in the background, somehow certain there would never be a reckoning to deficit spending — even though once the government borrows and then never pays back, the damage is hardened into place.
ALPHABET AGENCIES, BUREAUS, COMMISSIONS
Manchester tells us about the mid-1930s as a time when American culture became infected with institutional controls and regulations, agencies too numerous to list, with alphabet-soup names — stirring up contempt from only a very small opposition in Congress. He narrates this proliferation the way you'd narrate weather moving in: something that simply arrived, the natural next stage in a modernizing economy, rather than what it actually was — the accumulated result of specific people with specific anti-freedom, pro-statist convictions making specific choices they could have made differently. Regulation isn't a season. It's a policy, chosen by men with names, and Manchester's prose lets them off the hook by making their choices sound like maturation instead of ideology.
Only a handful of opponents tried to engage with abstractions like freedom, or liberty, or individualism in their attempt to oppose the flood of collectivist controls over their lives. The majority was enthusiastic to allow a certain degradation of the institutions protecting their liberties — they had little insight about how it might all play out in the end. And this is really the volume's quiet thesis, whether Manchester means it to be or not: you can watch, across these chapters, a government built to protect liberty gradually redefine its job as distributing security instead — to depositors, to farmers, to the unemployed, to whichever constituency needed showing that Washington cared. That's not a conclusion I'm importing from outside the book. It's what 845 pages of alphabet agencies actually documents, chapter after chapter, whether or not Manchester ever stops to say so himself.
THE PICTURE OF RUSSIA
Throughout this volume, William Manchester treats Russia as some "great power," which many people were tricked into believing it to be, rather than seeing Russia as a second- or third-rate world power which happened to have nuclear weapons — thanks in no small part to the espionage success of its extensive spy networks.
Millions of Europeans were "sold" into Communist slavery after World War II, kept behind the Iron Curtain at gunpoint, largely on the belief that Russia was strong. The Berlin Wall didn't fall until a decade and a half after Manchester's book was published.
Meanwhile, the book gives us, over the span of about 50 pages, the tale of the Marshall Plan as a massive welfare give-away scheme to supposedly rebuild Europe. What's worth sitting with is the German case: postwar Germany's recovery was swift and thorough, and a good number of economists trace that recovery less to the dollar volume of aid it received than to Ludwig Erhard's currency reform and rapid dismantling of wartime price and production controls — a return, in other words, to something closer to free exchange, right at the moment Britain and France were extending rationing and expanding their own state planning. If that's a fair reading, it's a striking case study sitting right inside Manchester's own account: the country that leaned back toward economic freedom fastest recovered fastest, and the book doesn't pause long enough to ask why.
EISENHOWER IN 1952
Manchester's Volume One wraps up with behind-the-scenes detail of the 1952 Presidential contest. The Republicans had been out of the White House for over two solid decades by this time. The Democrat campaign song, "Don't Let Them Take It Away," was a response to chronic Republican threats and promises to unwind the coercive regulations of the New Deal.
The Republicans had long voiced their wish to restore the individual freedoms quashed by many New Deal policies, but those policies were good for buying votes. The voters could be showered with manna as if from heaven, and the bounty bought votes for whomever was in power. Two decades in, the transition was basically complete: a government once understood to exist for protecting what citizens already had had become, in the public's expectation, an entity that exists to distribute what citizens are owed — and no party that wanted to keep winning elections was going to be the one to say otherwise.
THE DIENBIENPHU DEBACLE
Volume One wraps up with the French annihilation in Vietnam, one more in a line of French military defeats. Manchester crafts this telling just as he does the others that preceded it — by never actually telling us that he's making an argument or taking sides.
He never did claim to be objectively praising the New Deal earlier in the volume, yet his praise was all over those pages. Likewise, he never outright stated his contempt for John Foster Dulles's "domino theory" of Communist domination in Southeast Asia, yet his contempt was all over those pages as well. That's the method, start to finish: no stated thesis, just 845 pages of selection that adds up to one.
MANCHESTER’S TOME
In spite of Manchester's liberal-consensus sympathies, I was drawn into his narrative of how things unfolded from FDR to Eisenhower. There was no hint in all these pages that Manchester was able to judge political events in terms of whose rights were being violated, or in terms of which political position was objectively justified — and thus he never positioned himself as an authoritative voice able to impart meaning to the events he was describing. He simply arranged the facts so the meaning would arrive on its own, and for a lot of readers, it probably has.
Over all, Volume One was a nice trip down memory lane, colored in with an abundance of detail I had not previously encountered — but without the accompanying moral judgment I need in order to have closure in my thinking about a historical era. Manchester's storytelling did inject his biases, but he never attempted any actual argumentation to support them. For that, the reader is left to his own devices. I'm pretty much expecting the same thing for Volume Two.
Want to Read
August 21, 2026(David's favourite; forty years, huh? I think essential for understanding him. And man, I read 200-page books xD)
May 9, 2021
This is one of the best books I have ever read, and Manchester is definitely one of my favorite authors. I've read his 3-volume seminal biography of Churchill, which is terrific, and also Death of a President, which is also excellent. The Glory and the Dream is even better. In its 1600 pages I was never bored and never wanted to take a break and start another book. Manchester covers everything that is important in this crucial 40-year period of American history: Presidents, Congress, the Supreme Court, foreign affairs, cultural history, the economy, protest movements, and of course the Depression, WWII, Korea, McCarthyism, Vietnam and Watergate, all with great detail. And it is amazing how so much that he describes has been repeated since. His portrayal of McCarthy is eerily similar to Trump. Racial tensions of the 60's are front and center again today. I heartily recommend it to any Americans interested in our recent past.
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