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The American People in the Great Depression: Freedom from Fear, Part One
On October 24, 1929, America met the greatest economic devastation it had ever known. In this first installment of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Freedom from Fear , Kennedy tells how America endured, and eventually prevailed, in the face of that unprecedented calamity.
Kennedy vividly demonstrates that the economic crisis of the 1930s was more than a reaction to the excesses of the 1920s. For more than a century before the Crash, America's unbridled industrial revolution had gyrated through repeated boom and bust cycles, consuming capital and inflicting misery on city and countryside alike. Nor was the alleged prosperity of the 1920s as uniformly shared as legend portrays. Countless Americans eked out threadbare lives on the margins of national life.
Roosevelt's New Deal wrenched opportunity from the trauma of the 1930s and created a lasting legacy of economic and social reform, but it was afflicted with shortcomings and contradictions as well. With an even hand Kennedy details the New Deal's problems and defeats, as well as its achievements. He also sheds fresh light on its incandescent but enigmatic author, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Marshalling unforgettable narratives that feature prominent leaders as well as lesser-known citizens, The American People in the Great Depression tells the story of a resilient nation finding courage in an unrelenting storm.
Kennedy vividly demonstrates that the economic crisis of the 1930s was more than a reaction to the excesses of the 1920s. For more than a century before the Crash, America's unbridled industrial revolution had gyrated through repeated boom and bust cycles, consuming capital and inflicting misery on city and countryside alike. Nor was the alleged prosperity of the 1920s as uniformly shared as legend portrays. Countless Americans eked out threadbare lives on the margins of national life.
Roosevelt's New Deal wrenched opportunity from the trauma of the 1930s and created a lasting legacy of economic and social reform, but it was afflicted with shortcomings and contradictions as well. With an even hand Kennedy details the New Deal's problems and defeats, as well as its achievements. He also sheds fresh light on its incandescent but enigmatic author, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Marshalling unforgettable narratives that feature prominent leaders as well as lesser-known citizens, The American People in the Great Depression tells the story of a resilient nation finding courage in an unrelenting storm.
504 pages, Paperback
Published November 20, 2003
69 people are currently reading
284 people want to read
About the author
David M. Kennedy
291 books66 followersDavid Michael Kennedy is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning historian specializing in American history. He is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus at Stanford University[1] and the Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. Professor Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic analysis and cultural analysis with social history and political history.
Kennedy is responsible for the recent editions of the popular history textbook The American Pageant. He is also the current editor of the Oxford History of United States series. This position was held previously by C. Vann Woodward. Earlier in his career, Kennedy won the Bancroft Prize for his Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (1970) and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for World War I, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980). He won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for History for Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (1999).
Kennedy is responsible for the recent editions of the popular history textbook The American Pageant. He is also the current editor of the Oxford History of United States series. This position was held previously by C. Vann Woodward. Earlier in his career, Kennedy won the Bancroft Prize for his Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (1970) and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for World War I, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980). He won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for History for Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (1999).
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
April 13, 2020
A book which tackles American history in the globally tumultuous decade of the 1930s, The American People in the Great Depression is a wonderfully clear and engaging read. What follows is my summary of that history, in an attempt to gather my thoughts. It will be long.
The Great Depression, as it came to be known from some time in the middle of that decade, was an economic disaster the likes of which the world had never seen. Its precise sources and causes are still, nearly a hundred years later, not at all clear. But the circumstances surrounding it bear frightening parallels to life today: a society grappling with huge and sudden social and economic changes over the preceding decades (with the advent of "modernity" and all that it entailed then, and the internet today); an extreme degree of economic inequality built up over the preceding decades, on top of the ever-persistent political inequality marked by the lines of race and gender; and the rise of right-wing and fascist regimes the world over, partly in response to these changes, and partly following the flow of larger currents too deep for us to fully understand.
The US federal government was wholly unprepared for these events. At the time, the federal government played virtually no role in the lives of the people: in the words of Calvin Coolidge, "If the Federal Government should go out of existence, the common run of people would not detect the difference in the affairs of their daily life for a considerable length of time." Herbert Hoover, the unfortunate president presiding over the start of the Depression in 1929, was constrained by the heretical nature of suggesting that the federal government play an outsize role in recovery, as well as the then-orthodox economic thinking that urged action in precisely the opposite direction: the markets will take care of it. Hoover slowly came around to a different approach, but it was too little, too late, and his reputation was ruined permanently.
And so the gauntlet fell to the next president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His now near-mythical reputation suggests that he is the hero of this story, but in truth, there is no hero. And in my opinion to the contrary, if a character must take on that cape, it would be not FDR but his equally hallowed program, the New Deal.
We accordingly have a terrible villain in the Depression, and an enigmatic, mysterious hero in the New Deal. So what was it? What did it do, what were its aims and its philosophical underpinnings, and did it succeed? These are the questions whose answers occupy much of the book.
From the point of view of today, or, really, any point in the history of the US outside of the 1930s, the New Deal introduced a dizzying number of changes into American life and political thought.
Let's list them out to experience it ourselves. It legislated Social security, federal unemployment benefits, labor laws outlawing child labor and setting working hours, federally mandated minimum wages, and a legal system supporting the creation of labor unions. It created new institutions that have become a staple of American life: the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate Wall Street, the FDIC to insure bank deposits of ordinary citizens, new institutions to regulate and provide credit for the housing market (such as Fannie Mae), institutions to regulate trade (the FTC), broadcast communication (the FCC), and more. And it constructed enormous amounts of infrastructure through government funded public works programs: living in Berkeley, the closest one for me, literally, is the Bay Bridge.
An especially important tangible from that list was the growth and strengthening of labor unions. It was in this decade that the well-known industrial unions of today, such as the United Auto Workers (UAW), were formed. This struggle occurred in the face of violent aggression and death at the hands of the industrial managers, and succeeded both because of talented leftist and communist organizers and the direction of the political headwinds orchestrated by FDR. For many citizens, the newfound power of the unions gave the quickest change in their everyday lives, with increased wages and safety at the workplace being the primary markers---no small achievement.
Those were the tangibles. More broadly, the New Deal created a new conception of the role of government in American life, a view that has largely lived on till today. Thus the people of the country found themselves in a new social contract with the government. And of course, from the New Deal bubbled the polarized streams of political thought that pool themselves in the Democratic and Republican parties today. (The degree of difference of the political parties then to now can be seen by the fact that there were many liberal Republicans who supported the New Deal, and many conservative Democrats, often from the South, who opposed it. FDR began the identification of the liberals with the Democrats, though it would take much more time to crystallize.) There are also hints is that it was at this juncture that the idea that the government should pursue growth, that that is the measure of economic and political success, first took root.
But did it work? Answering that depends on what it was supposed to do, and the book argues that the unifying principle of the New Deal was not recovery, but reform. Recovery from the Depression is not something that the New Deal achieved, in spite of FDR publicly proclaiming this as the reason for its existence. But reform it most decidedly did achieve, and the guiding theme for FDR, the book argues, was to bring a degree of security to the lives of the public, a sense of security which the rich and powerful such as himself had always taken for granted. Take a look back at the tangible changes it brought and the theme becomes clear.
But look more closely and another viewpoint is that, in spite of having something of an underlying theme, the administration was also experimenting with a variety of ideas, many completely contradictory, in an effort to find a solution. For instance, there were subtleties forced by the very urgency of providing immediate relief from the Depression. You might think that child labor laws, minimum wages, and working hours were legislated out of a desire to bring some humanity to the lives of the exploited workers; a strongly leftist sensibility. But in fact, along with this, other purely economic factors also played a role: a need to reduce competition and overproduction in the markets, and to reduce the supply of labor to increase wages, to increase consumer demand. Thus by a happy coincidence the immediate needs of capital and long-term humanity somehow dovetailed.
If this all seems highly US-centric to you, when there were such world-shaking events occurring elsewhere, that's not a coincidence. American society at this time was disgusted with Europe and the way World War I had played out, and wanted nothing to do with the affairs across the Atlantic. FDR himself viewed the Great Depression as largely a domestic phenomenon that needed domestic solutions. And so both politically and publicly, the US isolated itself, sending a clear message to the fascist regimes rising up elsewhere that the US would not cause them difficulty. These American decisions had lasting and terrible repercussions on the history that was soon to be made.
That was then; this is now. The most immediately ominous parallel of then to now is, perhaps, the possibility of another depression arising as a result of the economic lockdowns from COVID-19. But there are differences. The COVID crisis has a clear and tangible cause, and an eventual way to address it; in the Depression policymakers were largely lost for years in a forest of possible causes, each with its own path out that was at logjams with the others. Maybe most distinctly, the US government then was unused to the idea of intervening in any substantial way during a crisis, while today it is almost standard policy.
Still, the feeling that the years ahead will be of enormous historical importance and change is hard to shake. Looking back at the events of the 1930s, the lesson to be drawn, I think, is to take this opportunity to remake life again and provide an even greater sense of security and control over their lives to the common people, ourselves--be it through universal health care, tuition-free college, a voice in the governance of the workplace, or anything else--as the requirement may be in the society in question.
The Great Depression, as it came to be known from some time in the middle of that decade, was an economic disaster the likes of which the world had never seen. Its precise sources and causes are still, nearly a hundred years later, not at all clear. But the circumstances surrounding it bear frightening parallels to life today: a society grappling with huge and sudden social and economic changes over the preceding decades (with the advent of "modernity" and all that it entailed then, and the internet today); an extreme degree of economic inequality built up over the preceding decades, on top of the ever-persistent political inequality marked by the lines of race and gender; and the rise of right-wing and fascist regimes the world over, partly in response to these changes, and partly following the flow of larger currents too deep for us to fully understand.
The US federal government was wholly unprepared for these events. At the time, the federal government played virtually no role in the lives of the people: in the words of Calvin Coolidge, "If the Federal Government should go out of existence, the common run of people would not detect the difference in the affairs of their daily life for a considerable length of time." Herbert Hoover, the unfortunate president presiding over the start of the Depression in 1929, was constrained by the heretical nature of suggesting that the federal government play an outsize role in recovery, as well as the then-orthodox economic thinking that urged action in precisely the opposite direction: the markets will take care of it. Hoover slowly came around to a different approach, but it was too little, too late, and his reputation was ruined permanently.
And so the gauntlet fell to the next president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His now near-mythical reputation suggests that he is the hero of this story, but in truth, there is no hero. And in my opinion to the contrary, if a character must take on that cape, it would be not FDR but his equally hallowed program, the New Deal.
We accordingly have a terrible villain in the Depression, and an enigmatic, mysterious hero in the New Deal. So what was it? What did it do, what were its aims and its philosophical underpinnings, and did it succeed? These are the questions whose answers occupy much of the book.
From the point of view of today, or, really, any point in the history of the US outside of the 1930s, the New Deal introduced a dizzying number of changes into American life and political thought.
Let's list them out to experience it ourselves. It legislated Social security, federal unemployment benefits, labor laws outlawing child labor and setting working hours, federally mandated minimum wages, and a legal system supporting the creation of labor unions. It created new institutions that have become a staple of American life: the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate Wall Street, the FDIC to insure bank deposits of ordinary citizens, new institutions to regulate and provide credit for the housing market (such as Fannie Mae), institutions to regulate trade (the FTC), broadcast communication (the FCC), and more. And it constructed enormous amounts of infrastructure through government funded public works programs: living in Berkeley, the closest one for me, literally, is the Bay Bridge.
An especially important tangible from that list was the growth and strengthening of labor unions. It was in this decade that the well-known industrial unions of today, such as the United Auto Workers (UAW), were formed. This struggle occurred in the face of violent aggression and death at the hands of the industrial managers, and succeeded both because of talented leftist and communist organizers and the direction of the political headwinds orchestrated by FDR. For many citizens, the newfound power of the unions gave the quickest change in their everyday lives, with increased wages and safety at the workplace being the primary markers---no small achievement.
Those were the tangibles. More broadly, the New Deal created a new conception of the role of government in American life, a view that has largely lived on till today. Thus the people of the country found themselves in a new social contract with the government. And of course, from the New Deal bubbled the polarized streams of political thought that pool themselves in the Democratic and Republican parties today. (The degree of difference of the political parties then to now can be seen by the fact that there were many liberal Republicans who supported the New Deal, and many conservative Democrats, often from the South, who opposed it. FDR began the identification of the liberals with the Democrats, though it would take much more time to crystallize.) There are also hints is that it was at this juncture that the idea that the government should pursue growth, that that is the measure of economic and political success, first took root.
But did it work? Answering that depends on what it was supposed to do, and the book argues that the unifying principle of the New Deal was not recovery, but reform. Recovery from the Depression is not something that the New Deal achieved, in spite of FDR publicly proclaiming this as the reason for its existence. But reform it most decidedly did achieve, and the guiding theme for FDR, the book argues, was to bring a degree of security to the lives of the public, a sense of security which the rich and powerful such as himself had always taken for granted. Take a look back at the tangible changes it brought and the theme becomes clear.
But look more closely and another viewpoint is that, in spite of having something of an underlying theme, the administration was also experimenting with a variety of ideas, many completely contradictory, in an effort to find a solution. For instance, there were subtleties forced by the very urgency of providing immediate relief from the Depression. You might think that child labor laws, minimum wages, and working hours were legislated out of a desire to bring some humanity to the lives of the exploited workers; a strongly leftist sensibility. But in fact, along with this, other purely economic factors also played a role: a need to reduce competition and overproduction in the markets, and to reduce the supply of labor to increase wages, to increase consumer demand. Thus by a happy coincidence the immediate needs of capital and long-term humanity somehow dovetailed.
If this all seems highly US-centric to you, when there were such world-shaking events occurring elsewhere, that's not a coincidence. American society at this time was disgusted with Europe and the way World War I had played out, and wanted nothing to do with the affairs across the Atlantic. FDR himself viewed the Great Depression as largely a domestic phenomenon that needed domestic solutions. And so both politically and publicly, the US isolated itself, sending a clear message to the fascist regimes rising up elsewhere that the US would not cause them difficulty. These American decisions had lasting and terrible repercussions on the history that was soon to be made.
That was then; this is now. The most immediately ominous parallel of then to now is, perhaps, the possibility of another depression arising as a result of the economic lockdowns from COVID-19. But there are differences. The COVID crisis has a clear and tangible cause, and an eventual way to address it; in the Depression policymakers were largely lost for years in a forest of possible causes, each with its own path out that was at logjams with the others. Maybe most distinctly, the US government then was unused to the idea of intervening in any substantial way during a crisis, while today it is almost standard policy.
Still, the feeling that the years ahead will be of enormous historical importance and change is hard to shake. Looking back at the events of the 1930s, the lesson to be drawn, I think, is to take this opportunity to remake life again and provide an even greater sense of security and control over their lives to the common people, ourselves--be it through universal health care, tuition-free college, a voice in the governance of the workplace, or anything else--as the requirement may be in the society in question.
June 24, 2020
Kennedy tries too hard at rehabilitating the reputation of Hoover while failing to provide new insights into Roosevelt. This is an adequate survey treatment that is outclassed by prior literature. Kennedy is too much the centrist and fails to see the nuances of the right and left wing factions in the US.
Where is the Businessman Plot? Where is discussion of serious US corporate involvement with NAZI Germany? The German bund movement?
Kennedy´s treatment of the Left overemphasizes and demonizes the communists while ignoring socialist elements in the political and labor movements. What about the role of progressives like LaGuardia?
Where is the Businessman Plot? Where is discussion of serious US corporate involvement with NAZI Germany? The German bund movement?
Kennedy´s treatment of the Left overemphasizes and demonizes the communists while ignoring socialist elements in the political and labor movements. What about the role of progressives like LaGuardia?
September 17, 2011
This is a fascinating look at the late 1920 and 1930s. It shows how the lives of the people who lived through the great depression differ from the lives of people in the 21st century. It shows how the actions of leaders of that time changed the lives of their children and grandchildren in good ways. This book, along with other about this period, should be required reading for anyone who calls herself an American.
February 1, 2016
I went into Freedom From Fear knowing that the book was written for a broader audience, but even if I hadn’t, it would’ve been immediately apparent. The fact that Kennedy is writing for both professionals and the public forms most of the book’s weaknesses and strengths.
This first portion of Freedom From Fear rarely ventures outside of the history of the New Deal, the Great Depression, and the looming cloud of World War II that we all learned in high school. While we might not have delved into the exact details, Hoover’s reputation as an uppity businessman and a struggling politician is well-documented in any ninth grade American history course, as is FDR’s sterling reputation as a successful president; Kennedy rarely ventures outside of these characterizations.
Kennedy’s organizational strategies affect the book both negatively and positively. Jumping from discontent, to an entire section on reform organizations and their successes and failures, to labor strife (a particularly weak and forgettable chapter that seems somewhat shoehorned into the book) turns this book into a whirlwind tour that’s guided by florid, slow-moving prose. I remember a particular sentence—either in the introduction or the first chapter—where Kennedy likens a certain aspect of the depression to kudzu, and then proceeds to defeat the purpose of a simplifying simile by bluntly explaining what kudzu is. However, this prose often works, especially in the New Deal semi-conclusion, where an extremely complex micro- and macroeconomic issue is smoothly dismantled for the reader. Also, if one reads the book as a succession of ordeals—from Herbert Hoover, to Americans, to FDR—it becomes a surprisingly tight argument in favor of the various leaders who take charge throughout the Great Depression.
To dispel any notion that I’m attacking Kennedy for writing a conventional narrative, I need to note how successfully Kennedy gives the story of the Great Depression and the New Deal color and depth, how easily he weaves each happening into an international context, and how effectively he breaks down the New Deal in the penultimate chapter. Though it isn’t intended as a conclusion, “What the New Deal Did” breaks down each element of the New Deal just as effectively as McPherson broke down the imperialist situation in Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic in his conclusion—without extra-large PowerPoint headings. The first few chapters are brilliantly organized. The prologue establishes Kennedy as a strong creative writer as he uses artful portraits of future world leaders—Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin—to communicate what happened at the end of WWI, transitioning seamlessly into the Great Depression. In the first chapter, Kennedy crafts a powerful symbol by describing both the hubris of President Hoover and the hubris of the American people on the eve of the Depression; he follows this up with sympathetic, detailed character studies of Hoover in the next two chapters. These introspective takes on broad, conventional topics make the book both easier to digest and more informative than a concise monograph on, say, the specific effects of a specific New Deal program.
This first volume is subtitled “The American People in the Great Depression.” Has Kennedy effectively written a “People’s History” in this first volume? If so, what examples from the book support this perspective? Does his focus on individual leaders downplay this interpretation of “the American people”?
Secondly, is Kennedy’s summation of the New Deal in “What the New Deal Did” effective? How does it take into account or fail to take into account (returning to the previous question a bit here) the roles the American people played and how they were affected by FDR’s policies?
This first portion of Freedom From Fear rarely ventures outside of the history of the New Deal, the Great Depression, and the looming cloud of World War II that we all learned in high school. While we might not have delved into the exact details, Hoover’s reputation as an uppity businessman and a struggling politician is well-documented in any ninth grade American history course, as is FDR’s sterling reputation as a successful president; Kennedy rarely ventures outside of these characterizations.
Kennedy’s organizational strategies affect the book both negatively and positively. Jumping from discontent, to an entire section on reform organizations and their successes and failures, to labor strife (a particularly weak and forgettable chapter that seems somewhat shoehorned into the book) turns this book into a whirlwind tour that’s guided by florid, slow-moving prose. I remember a particular sentence—either in the introduction or the first chapter—where Kennedy likens a certain aspect of the depression to kudzu, and then proceeds to defeat the purpose of a simplifying simile by bluntly explaining what kudzu is. However, this prose often works, especially in the New Deal semi-conclusion, where an extremely complex micro- and macroeconomic issue is smoothly dismantled for the reader. Also, if one reads the book as a succession of ordeals—from Herbert Hoover, to Americans, to FDR—it becomes a surprisingly tight argument in favor of the various leaders who take charge throughout the Great Depression.
To dispel any notion that I’m attacking Kennedy for writing a conventional narrative, I need to note how successfully Kennedy gives the story of the Great Depression and the New Deal color and depth, how easily he weaves each happening into an international context, and how effectively he breaks down the New Deal in the penultimate chapter. Though it isn’t intended as a conclusion, “What the New Deal Did” breaks down each element of the New Deal just as effectively as McPherson broke down the imperialist situation in Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic in his conclusion—without extra-large PowerPoint headings. The first few chapters are brilliantly organized. The prologue establishes Kennedy as a strong creative writer as he uses artful portraits of future world leaders—Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin—to communicate what happened at the end of WWI, transitioning seamlessly into the Great Depression. In the first chapter, Kennedy crafts a powerful symbol by describing both the hubris of President Hoover and the hubris of the American people on the eve of the Depression; he follows this up with sympathetic, detailed character studies of Hoover in the next two chapters. These introspective takes on broad, conventional topics make the book both easier to digest and more informative than a concise monograph on, say, the specific effects of a specific New Deal program.
This first volume is subtitled “The American People in the Great Depression.” Has Kennedy effectively written a “People’s History” in this first volume? If so, what examples from the book support this perspective? Does his focus on individual leaders downplay this interpretation of “the American people”?
Secondly, is Kennedy’s summation of the New Deal in “What the New Deal Did” effective? How does it take into account or fail to take into account (returning to the previous question a bit here) the roles the American people played and how they were affected by FDR’s policies?
January 15, 2017
Kenney covers the New Deal with skill and avoids the dryness of traditional political histories. His unraveling of the personal character of important leaders of the New Deal was captivating and instructive. It is somewhat clear his grasp of the economics behind the Great Depression was less than fortified, though that is excusable due to the intent of the novel. It is, however, hard to forgive his one-dimensional treatment of the international situation (including the consequences of the Treaty of Versailles in the prologue). The last chapter "The Gathering Storm," is also a superficial exposition of Hitler, his aims, and his political strategy. I was left shaking my head while reading the sweeping conclusions made by Kennedy -- (a) there is significant scholarship that illustrates Hitler was an opportunist rather than a mastermind of European politics (b) he hoped for war to be stalled until 1942 [not 1938/9] (c) Hitler was surprised by the declarations of war by France and Britain, and was not expecting as much resistance over Czechoslovakia. All in all, Kennedy presents a highly deterministic view of Hitler's rise - starting from the Treaty of Versailles - which is inherently dubious. I was surprised by this very superficial, and traditional American perspective of the events leading up to World War II.
April 13, 2013
I lived with my grandparents as a teenager, and I still remember all of the Depression stories that I heard at the dinner table. This book is overall a great historical description of that era, painting a very accurate picture of an America reduced to what we would today call third-world status. 25% unemployment, hordes of starving children, men with advanced degrees digging ditches for a living if they were lucky enough to find a job at all. Reading this book not only makes one reflect on how good we Americans have it today, but also on the resilience for which the "Greatest Generation" came to be known. The only shortcomings in the book are what I see as flawed economic thinking on the part of the author, mainly that 'overproduction' was a significant factor in the crisis. As any economics student should be able to tell you, the concept of overproduction is contrary to Say's Law, one of the most basic principles of economic theory. I also would have enjoyed the book to a greater degree if the author would have focused more on the experiences of average Americans and less on the political dynamics of the New Deal. Overall though, well worth the read. 4 stars.
September 7, 2013
Fascinating book - must read overview of the Great Depression. Kennedy's volume focuses primarily on FDR's implementation of the New Deal and its affect on the federal government in the 1930s and beyond and the impact of the Depression on the American people (agricultural, industrial and business classes). There are also chapters on how US policies and attitudes shaped by the Depression affected the build-up of international events to World War I and how the reality of the Depression impacted the idealism of President Herbert Hoover.
May 6, 2008
I cheated in that I had to read this for my Between the Wars class. However it IS a book and I DID read it...Anyway, it was pretty good and I might have given it more stars if it wasn't assigned to me. We had to do reading questions after every chapter so my relationship with this book was a love/hate one. (Does anyone else have relationships with books?) Interesting, but a little dry is a good description.
January 10, 2012
The first part of David M. Kennedy's Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, from the Oxford U.S. history series. The advantage of splitting the book into two volumes for the author and publisher is that they get to sell two books instead of one. For the reader, it's just easier to lug around than the original tome.
December 9, 2015
An extensive study of the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations and their economic policies toward the depression of the 1930s. Freedom From Fear Part I involves a surprisingly even treatment of the Hoover Administration and a very interesting chapter on the labor movement. I would describe this as more academic treatment of the first half of William Manchester's The Glory and the Dream.
August 11, 2017
I liked the way this book was organized. It gave me a deep compehensive understanding of living during the Depression. Qualitative accounts of daily life and life stages of development. Wish Kennedy had reviewed the lives of the black community during this time as well though.
December 30, 2007
Pulitzer Schmulitzer, a student knows a book she would actually read if assigned.
April 3, 2008
Good book that really gives the details on the time Between WWI and WW2 and really discusses why the Great Depression happened. I liked it, thought it was interesting, and it was easy to read.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews