Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (Oxford History of the United States, Vol 9)

Rating:
Summary: Professor Kennedy
Review: "Freedom From fear" by David Kennedy is a highly respectable history book for the Great Depression and WWII era. Professor Kennedy filled this book with lots of quality research, as well as his own opinions on the Great Depression. In the beginning of this book, Kennedy begins with Herbert Hoover and how he did things "wrong", but then he turned to FDR who kept up with the changing economy at that time. Kennedy portrays FDR as powerful and willing for change. He was an inspiring character for those during the Depression. Further into the book, Kennedy devotes his research to the New Deal and the effects it had on the Depression. Kennedy did go into detail about the effects, but he should have researched more about the causes of the Depression. Even though this book seems to drag on at parts because of all the information thrown at the reader, it was Kennedy's writing style that made the book hard to put down. It was very enjoyable to read and we recommend it to any history lovers who want to learn more about the Depression.

Rating:
Summary: A Superb treatment of the seminal event of the20th century
Review: David Kennedy has written a superb book that is definitely worthy of the Pulitzer prize it has recieved. Professor Kennedy treats the Great Depression and the second World War as unified events that constitute the seminal event of the twentieth century.Kennedy gives a lucid account of the causes of the Depression and gives one of the most accurate accounts of the career of one of our most misunderstood Presidents, Herbert Hoover. Hoover was in fact a Progressive Republican in the

tradition of Theodore Roosevelt.Hoover very much believed in using government to fight the depression. A case can be made that the New Deal was simply the logical conclusion of Hoover's policies.The author is clearly a great admirer of Franklin Roosevelt who He believes saved America twice.But at the same time He is not blind to FDR's shortcomings. He readily concedes that the New Deal, which ended around 1938, failed to end the Depression.The New Deal's primary achieve- ment was a series of economic reforms which gave the American people real security against future economic downturns.The book also shows us the treacherous political minefield that Roosevelt led the nation through in the runup to our entry into World War II. This book is a very lengthy one but well worth the time it would take to read it. Professor Kennedy's achievement is an awesome one and deserves to take it's place alongside the Historical literature of this crucial period. I highly reccomend it.

Rating:
Summary: "Just the facts, ma'am"
Review: David M. Kennedy's Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 is simply not a very good book. On one level, it is a meticulous, informative accounting largely of the political history of the New Deal. It is full of facts, details, observations, quotations. (Don't be misled by its title-the book makes feints and gestures toward social and popular history, but it is a rather old-fashioned political narrative, focused, in fact, mightily on the legislative record.) On another level, that of author's overall framework, the book is really a conceptual mess-internally contradictory, biased against Roosevelt under the guise of dispassionate assessment, trite, and more than a little smug. It brings to mind Joe Friday's admonition: this thing can be mined for evidence, but it doesn't offer much in the way of novel interpretation.

Kennedy offers the truism that scholars of the period, down to the present, have not adequately understood and explained the economic causes of the Great Depression. But his pro-Hoover sympathies cause Kennedy to valorize Hoover's international thesis and almost to mock FDR's focus on domestic structural problems. Nowhere does he make anything of the fact that the "sick industries" and impoverished regions, in deep depression certainly since the end of World War I, were Hoover failures, as much as anything, and, in this sense, Hoover himself may have been one of the architects of the economic collapse of the 'thirties. Certainly, the structural imbalances with which the New Deal wrestled were a crushing bequest of the Hoover era-and while Kennedy blames FDR for much, time and again he lets the GOP off the hook. The volume is, in fact, filled with solicitude for business-the blinkered, short-sighted, tyrannical, and actually rapacious business of the 'twenties and 'thirties. In this vein, serious efforts by the Roosevelt administration to understand the economic catastrophe that hit during the end of the era of the Republican ascendancy are written off as "prolabor propaganda" and the like.

Kennedy is no fan of the New Deal. His treatment of FDR in the New Deal years is like that of a baseball writer, confronted with the spectacle of a .400 hitter, who concentrates on finding fault for the six times out of ten the batter does not reach base. In fact, this sort of scholarship-people who write these sorts of books regularly gather to give one another Pulitzer Prizes and such-is to the real world as sports writing is to playing a sport. There are strange, almost fun moments: Kennedy makes the dubious accusation that, by 1937 and 1938, Roosevelt opted for a policy in favor of economic sabotage and continued depression lest the economic impetus for reform be lost. The evidence for this charge is scant and impressionistic, yet the argument is intoned repeatedly (one of Kennedy's favorite rhetorical devices, by the way, is to have FDR "intone" and the business leadership or Hoover "explain"). I guess we are all at the Trans-Lux hissing Roosevelt after all. But one needn't be an acolyte of FDR, or the New Deal for that matter, to feel somewhat put upon by the carping tone of the writing, often flying in the face of the content, all presented under the guise of even-handedness.

Time and again, targeting ancient, cobwebbed tomes from the likes of Schlesinger and Leuchtenberg, Kennedy debunks myths no one has held for four decades. There is the shocking discovery that politicians are political-and in FDR's case, it is a "political jihad," of all things, that has been launched. Kennedy trumpets, as well, what have been since the 'seventies fairly commonplace observations-Hoover was not Harding, FDR came to office a tinkerer without a program, WWII rescued the economy, FDR was at best a reluctant Keynsian, etc.-as breakthrough discoveries. I kept checking the copyright date to make sure I wasn't reading a book written in the late 'seventies or early 'eighties. Further, Kennedy makes far more of small points and quibbles, minor shortcomings, blind alleys than is warranted, magnifying into broad failures interesting instances of trial and error or hopeful experiments. There is a strange tone of expectations unmet, as though in a season or two the oppressive weight of a generation of business excess and parochialism should have been cancelled overnight, by a few strokes of the legislative pen, by the New Deal.

Relying heavily on a single source, the reportage of Lorena Hickok, Kennedy paints a portrait of an American population that is docile and passive. From his perspective-what we now call "inside the Beltway"-Kennedy's portrait might make sense. But, had he ventured with other witnesses into the cities and countryside, he would surely have found a more complex situation. In fact, the narrative's organization itself-in which Kennedy first announces his passive populace thesis early into FDR's first term, then several chapters later reaches into some of the social, political, and labor developments of the same period-is used to create the lingering impression that during 1932-1935 Americans fell silent in a cowed mass. But the roots of political and labor agitation, as described by Kennedy himself in these later chapters (even he cannot ignore "the labor eruptions of Roosevelt's first term"), reach in fact back to the early years of the New Deal-and Kennedy ignores a lot that would have broadened and deepened his treatment of this period. Even so, the account is rather bizarre: we read that Father Coughlin, Gerald L.K. Smith, and the Townsend movement, for example, are part of the "left." Nor is Kennedy above using the familiar device of the Communist and radical bogeyman to marginalize labor and social stirrings, which he characterizes as "open class warfare . . . orchestrated by bellicose radicals [which] erupted in . . . 1933 and 1934"; with this neat trick, Kennedy preserves his dubious thesis of a people shocked into bewildered apathy and acceptance, were it not for random outbursts caused bellicose charlatans.

Scholarly, almost pedantic, inbred, cloistered, Freedom from Fear is a massive work-and a massive disappointment. It serves as a kind of indictment of an entire school of historiography, a reminder of why we read the likes of Bourdieu and Levi-Strauss, Baudrillard and Hunter Thompson, Faulkner and Dos Passos.

Rating:
Summary: Professor Kennedy
Review: "Freedom From fear" by David Kennedy is a highly respectable history book for the Great Depression and WWII era. Professor Kennedy filled this book with lots of quality research, as well as his own opinions on the Great Depression. In the beginning of this book, Kennedy begins with Herbert Hoover and how he did things "wrong", but then he turned to FDR who kept up with the changing economy at that time. Kennedy portrays FDR as powerful and willing for change. He was an inspiring character for those during the Depression. Further into the book, Kennedy devotes his research to the New Deal and the effects it had on the Depression. Kennedy did go into detail about the effects, but he should have researched more about the causes of the Depression. Even though this book seems to drag on at parts because of all the information thrown at the reader, it was Kennedy's writing style that made the book hard to put down. It was very enjoyable to read and we recommend it to any history lovers who want to learn more about the Depression.

Rating:
Summary: Admirably done.......
Review: Freedom From Fear is a bountiful and hugely enjoyable look at America from the onset of the Great Depression to the conclusion of the Second World War. Typically used to books which concentrate solely on the former or the latter period of time, I found this seamless and comprehensive look at both world-altering events to provide an intellectual continuity heretofore unexperienced.

Kennedy certainly devotes more time and detail to the New Deal bureaucracy of FDR than his WWII narrative, but this shouldn't dissuade the purely military reader. Kennedy's WWII narrative may lack the scope of books focusing solely on the war, but it compensates by clipping along at a highly compelling pace.

Freedom From Fear, though covering well traveled ground, manages to inform, entertain, grip, and provoke. It is an excellent book deserving the attention of any serious consumer of history. Accordingly, I recommend it highly.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful with one exception
Review: This is a remarkable, evocative look at the United States during the Great Depression and World War II. A great deal of attention is paid to political leaders, but ordinary Americans are also described in vivid, unforgettable detail. There is, however, one problem with the book. Kennedy tries very hard to describe complex economic problems in plain English, but he fails. Unless you know a lot about economics, certain passages of this book will go completely over your head. Besides that, the book is flawless.

Rating:
Summary: An informative representation
Review: Freedom From Fear is David M. Kennedy's prodigious volume in the Oxford History of the United States that covers America during the Depression and World War two. It begins and ends with a bang (the stock market crash of 1929 and the dropping of the atomic bomb to end the war in the pacific). Freedom From Fear is also a most fitting title. Franklin D. Roosevelt's words of inspiration characterize the American people and their ability to persevere the depression and a second and even more deadly world war.
Kennedy is an extremely good writer and that quality makes this book enjoyable to read as you gain a tremendous amount of knowledge and information from it. Kennedy does not miss a single pivotal moment within the time period making his book the best general (yet probing) history of the period. In conclusion, whether you are cramming for your oral examinations or are simply pursuing knowledge of this important era in American history Freedom From Fear is a more than adequate book.

Rating:
Summary: History told with slant of speculation and opinions
Review: I purchased this book because of the other glowing reviews and because it won a Pulitzer. I was terribly disappointed. Sections of the book are interesting and helpful to understanding history. However, there are glaring oversights in the section that deals with WWII, and Kennedy is constantly inserting his personal opinions. He doesn't trust his readers to draw their own conclusions. For example, in the battle of Iwo Jima, Kennedy mentions that many of the poor Japanese soldiers were forced to commit suicide and a large number died from barbaric flame throwers. Yet, he doesn't even mention the American Marines who were captured and brutally tortured in caves on the island. Other similiar omissions exist throughout. Don't get me wrong. I'm not a racist, but anyone who has studied the Pacific theater of the war knows the Japanese Empirial Army was notorious for committing war crimes against civilians and Allied soldiers/sailors. It seems Kennedy has the knowledge to write a factual account of US history during this time period, but he didn't deliver. If you are looking for an objective account of the war, look elsewhere!

Rating:
Summary: The Hinge of Fate, Or How America Became America
Review: David Kennedy provides timely reading for a country whose people pull in a hundred different directions as they seek to (re)discover their collective identity in a rapidly changing world. Kennedy is a brilliant storyteller and thumbnail biographer, and the story he tells is nothing less than the monumental tale of Franklin Roosevelt's "rendezvous with destiny" and how that encounter made us, in most significant dimensions, what we are today. The categories that defined the political debate over the New Deal are with us today, but the United States of 1929, where this narrative begins, although well within living memory, is scarcely recognizable for the revolution that Roosevelt and the 20th century's "thirty years war" wrought.

Here is the dramatic story of the "southern problem" -- the proud, intransigent backwardness of the American "mezzogiorno" -- Hoover's and Roosevelt's dogged efforts to remedy the rural woes that are the backdrop for the Great Depression, Hoover's heroic but doomed struggle to cope with economic collapse from within a confining conceptual box out of which he could not imagine his way, the brilliant Hundred Days of inaugural New Deal legislation, the labor wars of the mid-1930s and the rise of homegrown radicalism, the first stirrings of a proto-Civil Rights movement (and the appointment by Roosevelt of the first African-American judges to the Federal bench), the "Court-packing" controversy of 1937 that marked -- but did not cause -- the New Deal's grinding halt, and a brilliant summation of "What the New Deal Meant." The excellent chapters on WWII, and particularly on the home front, are in my view a solid and useful bonus (and provide an overview of material that many readers are likely to know much better than the 1930s story): the thrilling first half of this book is by itself worth the purchase price.

Kennedy writes sparkling prose, is a master of compression and synthesis, gives all significant sides their due (however briefly), offers balanced judgments, and has given us an excellent survey of a time when many roads and options were open, when the stakes were monumental, and when America truly might have become something very diffent from what it ultimately became. Read this, and press it into the hands of your children, and then thank whichever God you may pray to for the events that transpired from 1929 to 1945 and the way they worked out in US history. And if you are an American, Kennedy's monumental work will give you additional grist to invoke come Thanksgiving Day.

Rating:
Summary: Almost a Classic.
Review: Freedom From Fear starts strong with great prose and passion as we read about "destroyed dynasties" and the "strange stillness settled over the fighting fronts" at the end of WWI. The author, David Kennedy, has a great sense of style and drama but, at the same time, is still historically accurate. With an interesting parallel writing style, he briefly examines the reactions of Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt to end of WWI, which was also can be seen as the beginning of WWII.

And, if this book continued in this vein, it would deservedly be ranked as a classic and be worthy of the overwhelming praise it has received. It does not. Instead it ebbs and flows as parts of this book make quick and interesting reading, while other parts drag on and stray from history into gossip generally only found in crude gossip magazines.

First the good. After opening at the end of WWI, Mr. Kennedy skips forward to the Eve of the Depression Years. America is described in detail, then her people, their problems, and the different ways their leaders tried to solve them. We learn that much of America lived then like the forefathers of 100, 200, or even 300 years before them.

For example, in 1930 electricity, plumbing, even indoor toilets were unknown to much of the country. The difference was that now that people had options, now that they could have plumbing, their previous way of life was considered to be a life of poverty. Additionally, many new problems did exist, ironically much of them as a result of America's technical successes.

For example, Farmers could grow more crops because they could use tractors instead of oxen or horses. More crops generally meant more money, in the past. In 1930s America more crops meant lower prices, which meant less money. Farmers would then borrow money and plant even more crops, lower the prices further, causing more borrowing and impoverishment. It was a sad cycle which could only end when enough farmers stopped planting and went onto a different way of life.

In other words, it could only end when enough farmers went broke, abandoned their father traditional lives and went to the cities. But even the cities had a limited amount of jobs. As more people arrived from the farms, for a variety of reasons, there weren't enough jobs for them. Labor was plentiful, labor's power was weak. Thus, the roots of the depression planted in the countryside, began to bloom into a devestating crop of employment, misery and poverty in American Cities.

In addition to the farming problems, WWI created a variety of other problems. America experience a massive influx of immigration as, in addition to the traditional reasons for travel, many new immigrants decided to flee the old world still recovering from four years of war. Resultantly, a larger percentage of America was compromised of immigrants at this time, then at any other point before or since in American History. Interestingly Mr. Kennedy states that ½ to 1/3 of these immigrants, after coming to America, more or less looked around and then returned to their homes.

There were also loans due from WWI. The Allies would pay America with reparations from Germany - who would borrow money from America to pay off these amounts due. Thus America was loaning money to Germany so that Germany could pay England and France who would then pay back a different American loan. Such a system can never sustain itself.

Finally, there was the growing isolationist tendency of America. Stung by WWI, shocked by the Nye Committee's conclusion that America fought to protect bankers, not Democracy, many Americans started to turn away from Europe and begin to construct immigration and trade barriers. The house of cards was ready to collapse.

Enter Hoover. I never know much about Herbert Hoover, but Mr. Kennedy has shown us that there is a lot about him that we can all admire. Basically an orphan, he first became a millionaire, later he was a great humanitarian feeding Europe after WWI, later still he was elected as President, his first elected office. Herbert Hoover, to me, seemed like an early Jimmy Carter. Smart, capable, caring- but probably not a very good politician. When the depression came on, it was Hoover who started to expand government to help the people, but he didn't appear to care enough.

FDR spoke well, promised everything, and seemed to care. In the next election, FDR was thus elected president. As Kennedy takes us through these years, he ultimately seems to conclude that FDR basically did most of the same things that Hoover was doing, he just did them more often and to a greater extent.

It is at this point that Freedom From Fear also starts to veer off track. Kennedy goes into explicit detail, for example, about a reporter hired by FDR to keep him "in touch" with the America People. We learn about her history, her appearance and her sexual preferences - none of which would, normally, be considered important. However, because this report may have been a lesbian, may have a relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt, maybe she is important? For me, this is nonsense. It probably can never be proven, one way or another. If we don't even know it happened, how can Mr. Kennedy argue that it impacted on American History?

Then Mr. Kennedy starts to go into a lot of maybes, could have, and what ifs. Not content to only talk about possible affairs of Eleanor, he talks about alleged affairs of FDR. Why? Again, these were unproven matters, based on speculation, which have no apparent historical value. Titillating? Maybe. Maybe it is an attempt to make other presidents look better. I don't know. I don't see any good reason to keep them here.

Also after giving actual numbers, he grossly exaggerates the effect of the communist movement in America. He spends a lot of time talking about Unions, but he contributes very little insight. And then he spends cursory times on a variety of other social issues. In other words, rather then be a book on political history, or social history, this book tries to be both. I think the nature of such an effort took away from the impact which could have been stronger if, for example, two books were written, or even three.

The book also starts to emphasis more opinion, at this point in time, and a little less history. As such chapter like "What the New Deal Did" started to stray, somewhat, into commentary, and away from the historical perspective in the book's beginnings. Then the Chapters on World War II begin.

I didn't learn much during this portion of the read. The most interesting parts for me were based on simple speculation, even if it was a well-reasoned opinion. For examples, Kennedy claims that the American insistence on unconditional surrender was a political move to keep the Russian in the war and prevent them from making a separate peace. Not a new theory, but it was well presented here.

The history of the campaigns also is well documented and clear. As with most of the second half of this book, Kennedy intermixes his opinions with the presentation of his history. So, for example, he explains why FDR probably didn't know that the sneak attack was going to be launched on Pearl Harbor. He also tells you which generals he believed did a better job, and which ones deserved to be replaced. I can't be sure, but I think Kennedy was arguing with other books and opinions, but he doesn't name directly.

In the end, I found myself wondering what happened to this book, which was so wonderful in the beginning. I still think it was well done, I guess I just feel a little let down because it could started so strong and ended rather weak. It coud have been a classic. Still, overall it is a very solid read and worthy of consideration for your history collection.