Customer Reviews

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

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4 star:		(10)
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2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

"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.

After looking at all the extremely positive views of Freedom From Fear, it is with some trepidation that I offer some negative comments. This is a book that I really looked forward to reading and wanted very much to like. On the positive side, I must state that I learned a great deal, particularly about the depression, that I did not know. And I also certainly admire Dr. Kennedy for tackling such a massive project and condensing the results into a single volume. But therein, I think, lay the seeds of some of the difficulties. Specifically, I have three problems with it.

First, because he is trying to cover so much, the book ends up being just a broad survey and, of necessity, omits too much, and places too much reliance on secondary sources. This is probably inevitable considering the scope of the project and the vast literature available. Each chapter covers a particular theme, which makes the book look like a series of lectures or articles, rather than a unified whole.

Second, the book badly needed a good editing before publication. There are two problems here. The first is that stories are repeated, almost verbatim, in different chapters, and occasionally even within a single chapter. The second is that, in the areas with which I am familiar, I found numerous factual errors. To cite just three, at the battle of the Philippine Sea it was not Raymond Spruance, commander of the Fifth Fleet, who ordered the lights turned on for the returning aircraft, but Marc Mitscher, commander of the carrier groups. Again, it was not Thomas Kinkaid, commander of the Seventh Fleet, who "crossed the T" at Surigao Strait, but rather Jesse Oldendorf, who commanded the battleships and other fire support ships. But my favorite is the photo caption which refers to the horizontal stabilizer in the tail assembly of a B-17 as its "rear wing". If I'm able to spot these errors in areas with which I'm familiar, it makes me wonder about how many there may be in areas with which I'm not familiar.

My last criticism is the most important, and that deals with the tone of the book. As a couple of reviewers have mentioned, the author is negative about nearly everyone in the cast of characters, most especially about Roosevelt and Churchill. (Among the exceptions are Truman (who comes in only at the very end), Hopkins, and, most peculiarly, Stalin.) I suspect the problem may be that Dr. Kennedy is just too far removed from the events he describes. Everyone knew that Roosevelt and Churchill had faults and made mistakes. But they have to be viewed in the true context in which they lived and operated. They were both heroic figures who did the best they could in situations that few have ever experienced or could handle. ...

I am making my way through the Oxford Series and approached this one with some trepidation given the period it covers. Having one book span the Great Depression and the Second World War is interesting as it covers the economic implications of fighting to very different types of conflicts. Accurately stated upfront in the book is the fact that the generation who lived through the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Second World War experienced more change in such a short period of time than any previous generation. This is a whole lot of ground to cover and Kennedy pulls it off.

Being a military history buff, I greatly appreciated the first part of the book having been less exposed to the depression. It was illuminating to learn that it was not solely the stock market crash of 1929 that initiated the Great Depression. In fact, times had been tough in many aspects of the economy through the 1920's and though speculation was a factor it is inaccurate and an oversimplification to credit it alone. Indeed, some say it played no role whatsoever and given only 2.5% of the population owned any stock the theory may be sound.

The battle to save the economy by Hoover and Roosevelt is truly incredible. Through the New Deal and its related stimulus initiatives, America built a more powerful central government. Like today, the issues were largely in the banking and investment industries which called for more regulation - also like present day. Investors lost three quarters of the value of their assets and there were 600,000 mortgage defaults just from 1930-32. Teachers went without pay and businessmen out of work dug ditches wearing their suits. The government feared a revolution from the impacted masses.

America was incredibly backward in the 1930's with over 45 million without indoor plumbing and it seemed to be taking more backward steps as the decade went on. The New Deal and its successor program did not have immediate or lasting impact. And as war loomed in other parts of the world, Roosevelt could not garner America's interest as most believed that the Great War was a costly mistake not to be repeated. He was remarkable in his maneuvering prior to Pearl Harbor to position the country for eventual leadership in the conflict and beyond.

Soon, the 'arsenal of democracy', lend-lease, and America's own re-armament did wake a sleeping giant - an economic giant. This too, is a fascinating part of history, how America, in an incredibly short period of time mobilized economically and militarily (thanks to a great extent by individual income taxes). This enabled America not only to support their Allies but also to field the best equipped military in the world with a three-to-one munitions advantage. In the Pacific the disparity was amazing, in the last 18 months of the war every American combatant could draw on four tons of supplies while his Japanese opponent drew on just four pounds.

Kennedy does a very credible job taking the reader through an abridged history of the Second World War. Being more familiar than most of the military history, I enjoyed the political and economic backdrop that steered the war. I must admit his coverage of both Guadal-canal and the Atlantic U-boat conflict are particularly strong. He also provides succinct and engaging profiles of Marshall, Eisenhower, MacArthur, Montgomery, Rommel, Patton and others.

Almost 16 million men and 500,000 women served on behalf of the U.S. and over 400,000 were killed, another 100,000+ succumbed to accident or disease, and nearly a million more were wounded. But as stark as those statistics are they do not tell the whole story. Thankfully, Kennedy does by writing a history that weaves together the political, economic, social, cultural and military aspects that give context to the Great Depression, the Second World War, and their lasting impact. I look forward to his follow-up, The American People in World War Two: Freedom from Fear which won the Pulitzer Prize.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The book is exactly what it says it is, a general history of the United Stated during the Depression and WWII. I found myself wanting to know more about many topics than author wrote. This should be expected though as the nature of a book of this type though is that some topics must be treated in a rather cursory manner or left out all together. The book does provide a vivid portrait of the era and of the events and personalities that shaped it. After reading it, I can see why it won the Pulitzer prize!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.