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Title: Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (Oxford History of the United States, Vol 9) by David M. Kennedy ISBN: 0-19-514403-1 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: April, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.37 (49 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: An informative representation
Comment: 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: 4
Summary: Professor Kennedy
Comment: "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: 2
Summary: "Just the facts, ma'am"
Comment: 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.
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Title: Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (OXFORD HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES) by James T. Patterson ISBN: 0195117972 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: November, 1997 List Price(USD): $21.50 |
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Title: The Perils of Prosperity 1914-1932 (Chicago History of American Civilization) by William E. Leuchtenburg, Daniel J. Boorstin ISBN: 0226473716 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: September, 1993 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 by Robert Middlekauff ISBN: 0195035755 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: February, 1985 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Pivotal Decades: The United States, 1900-1920 by John Milton Cooper, John J. Cooper ISBN: 0393956555 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: August, 1992 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The End Of Reform : New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War by Alan Brinkley ISBN: 0679753141 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 30 January, 1996 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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