History from the Top Down
OSHINSKY, DAVID M.
History from the Top Down Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 By David M. Kennedy Oxford. 936 pp. $39.95. Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Chair,...
...Industrial production was booming, but consumption lagged behind...
...What did ordinary people do for entertainment...
...Kennedy carefully describes the programs and policies that shaped the New Deal...
...It is common sense to take a method and try it," FDR explained to a college audience in 1932...
...Somehow," Kennedy concludes, "the good war had not settled things to the degree that Roosevelt had promised...
...Standing erect in his cumbersome leg braces, he stressed three major themes: sacrifice, discipline and hope...
...A growing inequality of wealth eroded buying power, as too much money fell into too few hands...
...The following decade produced even greater dangers, as Americans faced the twin evils of Japanese militarism and fascist aggression...
...Like all worlds, it held its share of peril as well as promise...
...And he is the one who died with victory in sight, taking his vaguely focused plans for the future with him to the grave...
...the fear of disgrace is consuming...
...I am a Christian and a Democrat—that's all...
...In the realm of narrative history, as the saying goes, it doesn't get any better than this...
...The Roosevelt Administration also attracted thousands of young people drawn by the opportunity to do something meaningful—and perhaps historic—with their lives...
...But above all, try something...
...Philosophy...
...Philosophy...
...Add in a wildly overheated stock market, a rigid tariff policy that strangled world trade, an absurdly punitive reparations strategy from World War I—and, bingo, the Great Depression...
...That project, he writes, is the "single best illustration of the American way of war— not so much for the technological novelty of the bombs, or the moral issues they inevitably raised, but because only the Americans had the margins of money, material and manpower, as well as the undisturbed space and time to bring an enterprise of [this] scale to successful completion...
...As Kennedy makes clear, Roosevelt possessed neither a comprehensive plan to end the Depression nor a rigid set of economic beliefs...
...The 1930s saw the worst economic catastrophe in modern history...
...His closest advisers included Republicans and Democrats, agricultural theorists and urban planners, college professors and political pros...
...Hoover lost the White House in a landslide...
...He is the one who insisted that America assume its rightful role as the world's leading power...
...David M. Kennedy takes a rather different view...
...Kennedy reminds us, though, that the New Deal did not restore prosperity at home...
...For all the complaining, moreover, civilian consumption in the U.S...
...There are good reasons for such praise...
...The impact of radical critics such as Senator Huey Long of Louisiana, Father Charles Coughlin, writer Upton Sinclair, and Dr...
...Like previous volumes in the Oxford History of the United States, this is a work of synthesis based on a vast array of secondary sources...
...author...
...What did they read...
...In Depression-era Washington, ambition and idealism went hand in hand...
...A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy," "Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice" Americans who grew up in the Depression, served their country during World War II, and ushered in the enormous prosperityof the 1950s and beyond, have been celebrated in recent books and movies as the "greatest generation...
...The American economy was already in trouble by the 1920s...
...On March 4, 1933, Franklin Roosevelt took the Presidential oath of office in steady, drenching rain...
...Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Chair, Department of History...
...The battles over Social Security, labor policy and court-packing are covered in depth...
...One gets the impression that there would have been no thought of a welfare state without FDR, and no industrial labor movement without John L. Lewis...
...Respected commentators were predicting the end of capitalism if the Depression hung on much longer...
...In his excellent discussion of the Manhattan Project that gave birth to the atomic bomb, Kennedy describes the unique advantages of America's wealth, industrial power and geographic isolation...
...And that meant almost any initiative designed to revive the economy, feed the hungry and put people back to work...
...No peacetime President ever faced a tougher challenge—or a greater opportunity...
...Orson Welles gets a peripheral sentence...
...He is the one who gave Americans the courage to face their economic fears...
...At the very least, Americans seemed desperate for change...
...actually increased during World War II—a unique national achievement...
...They are curiously muted folk who exhibit "mysterious patience in the face of adversity...
...Banks collapsed, farms failed, factories closed, bread lines formed in the cities...
...Joe Louis is ignored...
...For large companies, overproduction meant warehouses filled with unsold goods...
...America became the "arsenal of democracy," supplying England and Russia with the military supplies that kept them afloat...
...how it stabilized the banking system, protected farmers with price supports, championed the rights of organized labor, built a vast physical infrastructure through public works projects, and made government responsible for the wellbeing of Americans who could no longer help themselves...
...There are superb capsule histories of the National Recovery Act, Civilian Conservation Corps, Tennessee Valley Authority, and Agricultural Adjustment Administration...
...Rutgers...
...On a poignantly symbolic date, December 7,1944, the third anniversary of Pearl Harbor," writes Kennedy, "the thousands of cash registers in the Macy's department store chain rang up the highest volume of sales in the giant retailer's history...
...They were never invaded or even threatened by their enemies...
...The same is true of popular culture...
...by 1932, unemployment in the United States had reached a staggering 25 per cent and 5,000 banks had closed their doors...
...How were their opinions formed...
...With courage and dedication, the nation managed to prevail on all fronts...
...Yet Hoover could do no more...
...Freedom From Fear is a "top down" production in which towering figures like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler dominate center stage...
...It also is an elegant book, beautifully written and remarkably quick to read...
...After pleading unsuccessfully with business leaders not to lay off workers or to slash wages, he instituted a modest Federal public works program for the unemployed and then created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to bail out failing corporations and banks...
...Yet amazingly, observes Kennedy, the rhythms of everyday life in the United States went largely undisturbed...
...With remarkable clarity, Freedom From Fear demonstrates how the New Deal made government bigger, costlier and more attentive to the needs of forgotten groups...
...Kennedy views Herbert Hoover, America's most maligned President after Richard M. Nixon and Andrew Johnson, as a tragic figure who bears little blame for the Depression...
...What he did have, aside from an overwhelming popular mandate, was the willingness to experiment, to act decisively, and to use government as a powerful weapon in the struggle for industrial recovery...
...What is missing from these pages is the input of ordinary Americans, who too often appear as passive victims of injustice, poverty and pain...
...Leaders lead in Freedom From Fear, and others dutifully follow...
...Art is limited to a paragraph about mural painting for the WPA...
...With the nation collapsing around him, he became, in the words of journalist William Allen White, the "greatest innocent bystander in history, a brave man fighting valiantly, futilely to the end...
...To his thinking, the march of history in those years had little to do with the mass of common people, and everything to do with a handful of special people...
...It is Franklin Roosevelt, however, who dominates this book...
...It would take a world war, and the filli mobilization that followed, to put them permanently back to work...
...Americans] had inherited a new world, and a brave one too...
...His massive book largely ignores the "greatest generation" as a collective force in favor of key political leaders and policymakers who, he believes, almost singlehandedly shaped the important events and decisions between 1930 and 1945...
...In no other era except the Civil War and Reconstruction was the United States as severely tested, its direction as radically changed...
...On Guadalcanal, a Japanese officer calculates the grim mortality facing his troops, who are starving and surrounded, but who will not surrender: "Those who can stand—30 days "Those who can sit up—3 weeks "Those who cannot sit up—1 week "Those who urinate lying down—3 days "Those who have stopped speaking— 2 days "Those who have stopped blinking— tomorrow...
...the new President sneered...
...and survival is triumphant...
...He is the one who prepared them for the coming war with fascism, ending their isolationist slumber, He is the one who concentrated the military effort against Germany when maj ority sentiment in the United States viewed Japan as the primary enemy...
...Roosevelt surrounded himself with men and women of talent, accomplishment and wide-ranging progressive views: Harry Hopkins, Harold Ickes, Rexford G. Tugwell, Henry A. Wallace, Frances Perkins—the list goes on...
...The only tiling we have to fear," Roosevelt famously assured the huge crowd and the millions who listened on radio, "is fear itself...
...A compassionate man, a successful engineer, a believer in cooperation among business, labor and the government, Hoover did what he could do, within the limits of a 19th century philosophy that stressed self-help and individual responsibility, to stimulate the economy through voluntary means...
...The author is both a master at guiding the reader through the diplomatic thicket of that era and a first-rate chronicler of the invasions, land campaigns, sea battles, and air strikes in every theater of the War...
...He has a great ear for the telling quote —from General Curtis LeMay giving his endgame strategy ("You've got to kill people, and when you've killed enough they stop fighting") to Ben Bradlee comparing his first combat mission to his first sexual encounter ("The anticipation is overpowering...
...Radio is mentioned only as it pertains to political figures like Father Coughlin and President Roosevelt...
...Francis Townsend are carefully considered...
...That mobilization made the difference between victory and defeat...
...The basic story it tells is familiar...
...Kennedy notes, for example, that the Great Crash did not cause the Depression, although it did sap the nation's confidence...
...Jesse Owens is given a footnote for his four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics...
...It is hard to tell in Freedom From Fear because mass attractions—sports, movies, fiction—are nowhere to be found...
...Homefront Americans could barely comprehend the suffering and sacrifice experienced by other populations in this global bloodbath...
...In the farmbelt, it led to the collapse of food prices...
...It is an old-fashioned work, heavy on electoral politics, economic strategy, diplomatic maneuvering, and military fare...
...Best of all, perhaps, are the examples provided of the conditions endured by those who fought the War...
...Afraid of mounting budget deficits and ever-growing relief rolls, Roosevelt never committed himself to the level of consistent Federal spending urged by economists like John Maynard Keynes...
...If it fails, admit it frankly and try another...
...Thus began the American Century...
...These were drops in the bucket, of course...
...When the New Deal ended in 1939, more than 8 million Americans were still unemployed...
...the ignorance is obstructive...
Vol. 82 • June 1999 • No. 7
