Political Science Quarterly
Volume 115 No. 3 (Fall 2000)

 

Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945
By David M. Kennedy. New York, Oxford University Press, 1999.
Reviewed by Clarence Lang

 

At the turn of the century, the Great Depression and World War II still weigh heavily on the U.S. national consciousness. Discussions about a tax credit for World War II veterans, a recent spate of World War II films, and current debates about Nazi and Japanese war atrocities attest to the lingering popularity and controversies of the "Good War." Likewise, the New Deal's achievements—the growth in the size and duties of the federal state, the expansion of the meaning of citizenship—have become heightened points of contention. David M. Kennedy's book, which recently won the Pulitzer Prize, is therefore well timed. The author's central argument is that the years 1929-1945 are best understood as a single period in which the U.S. economy made a transition from paralysis to prosperity, while statesmen extended a sense of "security" to the whole of society. In the process of waging another world war, policy makers also repudiated a century and a half of isolationism.

For Kennedy, professor of history at Stanford University, the notable aspect of this period was not the cold war that followed, but rather the advent of globalization. He states that "America's half-century-long ideological, political, and military face-off with the Soviet Union may appear far less consequential than America's leadership in inaugurating an era of global economic interdependence" (p. 855). In his arguments, Kennedy contributes to existing literature linking New Deal legislation to the unintended legacies of the Herbert Hoover administration. Like other historians on the subject, he argues that just as the Depression proved an ironic asset in mobilizing for war, the war itself highlighted how the state could promote economic growth. Kennedy concludes that the U.S. victory did not stem from exceptional American sacrifices (the Russian people suffered far more) but rather from American industry's ability to out-produce its enemies.

Like other volumes in the Oxford history series, this work is broad in scope, yet detailed and informative. The author's discussion of the Great Depression's causes is at once complex and accessible. Further, the chapters in which Kennedy restages the war are sure to appeal to military history readers. The book has a literary quality, and like a novel revolves around the characters of Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, and Winston Churchill. Still, it is highly scholarly. While its length might hamper usage in the classroom, its subject matter and Kennedy's breezy writing style will secure a mass audience.

However, for a work claiming to be about the "American people," the book contains surprisingly little about them. Race and gender, for instance, are dealt with substantively in only one chapter, as is labor. This lack of social and cultural history may confirm for many such historians the dangers of grand narrative history. Social historians might also criticize as old-fashioned Kennedy's overemphasis on the various "great men" of the period and object to his almost exclusive focus on statecraft. In these respects, the book is a decidedly traditional political history.

Yet, unlike the consensus scholarship of the past, this work acknowledges the pervasive social conflicts and inequalities during depression and war. Similarly, Kennedy forthrightly discusses how anti-Japanese sentiments infused the Pacific war with a barbarism absent in the European theater. Details like these [End Page 450] weigh against the book's limitations and allow one to readily appreciate the truly magisterial work Kennedy has written.

Clarence Lang
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign