Book Review
Freedom From Fear: The American People In Depression And War; 1929-1945, The Oxford History Of The United States, David M. Kennedy, Oxford University Press, New York, 1999
Over the course of the past several years I have mentioned many things about both my own generation, the Generation of ’68 (read: the beginning of the baby-boomer curve), and that of my parents. Probably more readers today are familiar with the political turmoil churned up by my generation, have seen or read about the 1960s and the “hippie counterculture, or have been thrust into the center of various “culture wars” that have been fought in reaction to those times for the last forty years or so. As my parents’ generation, the generation who lived through the hard times of the Great Depression of the 1930s, a period that has been the subject of many comparisons with today’s economic mess, and who fought a war, a “good” war in their eyes, have begun to pass away in great numbers that story may not be as fresh to today’s reader.
Needless to say as part of a generic Oxford History of The United States this volume , Freedom From Fear, by David Kennedy is heavy on the macro-history of the period in its eight hundred plus pages. While that may not be enough, not nearly enough for those who want to learn the lessons of the history of this period I believe that as a general primer in order to get the flavor of the periods explored that this is an excellent primer, for the general reader and budding specialist. I might add here that Professor Kennedy has aided the reader’s cause by keeping a light hand on the story line and in keeping the sometimes bewildering mass of material in an orderly manner. And always appreciated, especially in eight hundred page tomes, the footnotes are on the same page as they are cited, a practice that a great many scholarly works could benefit from.
No one, historian or lay reader, can speak of the period from 1929-1945 in America without recognizing the central figure of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In my household for my parents’ generation, and their parents’ generation, the name evoked a living god. Although this book bring FDR back to earth a little, especially over some of his more bureaucratic moves, like trying to pack the Supreme Court, he still mainly comes off as the hero of my family household remembrances.
Professor Kennedy takes us through the reasons for that positive image as he starts with the economic and political atmosphere in America in the late 1920s, the great Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the policies of FDR’s predecessor, Herbert Hoover, that were either too little too late or too benign to be effective. After a few years of the Hoover policy FDR (read: non-Hoover) looked pretty good. At least his ideas for putting a massively unemployed nation back to work held out promise. Kennedy also spends much time on the general condition of the country, who was being listened to, who had the ear of the people and who was just spinning wheels, as FDR entered office.
Then we are taken on a long stretch through the various alphabet soups of agencies and programs that FDR and his cohorts tried to implement in order to get things moving and that is the theme that carries the book through most of the 1930s up until the war rumblings from Europe started. The most central proposition that Professor Kennedy (and not he alone) pushes forth, and he is basically correct, is that no amount of tinkering to save the capitalist system by FDR and his programs really broke the back of unemployment and resolved the central problem of economic turmoil in America. That was not resolved until the massive buildup of armaments for World War II put people back to work.
FDR’s domestic program takes up about one half of the book, the other half, and to my mind the less fruitful part takes up the struggle for America’s entry into World War II against the very strong isolationist tendencies here and then, once war was inevitable, the various strategies to win the European and Pacific component of the war. Professor Kennedy does a good job of running through the various controversies, at home and with foreign allies, and the order of battles on each front up to the decisive one of using the atomic bomb against the Japanese.
For the most part reading through this broad history of the period reminded me of my high school readings from this period. But history is a moving target and thus Professor Kennedy, as befits later research and a tip of the hat to the modern trend toward the concerns of micro-history, addresses several issues that never saw the light of day back then. Among them the controversy over the “wisdom” of using the atomic bomb, the placing of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps (along with a legal imprimatur from the Supreme Court) , the segregation of blacks soldiers in the military, the role of women in war production and the governmental bureaucracy and the labor movement’s attitude toward the war. I do wish that Professor Kennedy had spent a little more time on life at the base of society during this whole period (as opposed to reports about what some government official thought was happening at the base). But for that kind of thing you can run over to Studs Terkel’s The Good War or other such compilation. For an outstanding primer on the period though, this is your stop,
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