Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (Oxford History of the United States)
David M. Kennedy
Language: English
Pages: 936
ISBN: 0195144031
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Between 1929 and 1945, two great travails were visited upon the American people: the Great Depression and World War II. This book tells the story of how Americans endured, and eventually prevailed, in the face of those unprecedented calamities.
The Depression was both a disaster and an opportunity. As David Kennedy vividly demonstrates, the economic crisis of the 1930s was far more than a simple reaction to the alleged excesses of the 1920s. For more than a century before 1929, America's unbridled industrial revolution had gyrated through repeated boom and bust cycles, wastefully consuming capital and inflicting untold misery on city and countryside alike.
Freedom From Fear explores how the nation agonized over its role in World War II, how it fought the war, why the United States won, and why the consequences of victory were sometimes sweet, sometimes ironic. In a compelling narrative, Kennedy analyzes the determinants of American strategy, the painful choices faced by commanders and statesmen, and the agonies inflicted on the millions of ordinary Americans who were compelled to swallow their fears and face battle as best they could.
Both comprehensive and colorful, this account of the most convulsive period in American history, excepting only the Civil War, reveals a period that formed the crucible in which modern America was formed.
The Oxford History of the United States
The Atlantic Monthly has praised The Oxford History of the United States as "the most distinguished series in American historical scholarship," a series that "synthesizes a generation's worth of historical inquiry and knowledge into one literally state-of-the-art book. Who touches these books touches a profession."
Conceived under the general editorship of one of the leading American historians of our time, C. Vann Woodward, The Oxford History of the United States blends social, political, economic, cultural, diplomatic, and military history into coherent and vividly written narrative. Previous volumes are Robert Middlekauff's The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution; James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (which won a Pulitzer Prize and was a New York Times Best Seller); and James T. Patterson's Grand Expectations: The United States 1945-1974 (which won a Bancroft Prize).
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voids through which they had recently and so wondrously ascended. The stark truth was now revealed that leverage worked two ways. The multiplication of values that buying on margin made possible in a rising market worked with impartial and fearful symmetry when values were on the way down. Slippage of even a few points in a stock’s price compelled margin loans to be called. The borrower then had to put up more cash or accept forced sale of the security. Millions of such sales occurring
product of stupidity and greed.’’ In this direct confrontation with a contrary-minded Congress, Hoover had failed the first great test of his capacity for political leadership. Now even supporters like Lippmann, who had praised Hoover in 1928 as ‘‘a reformer who is probably more vividly conscious of the defects of American capitalism than any man in public life today,’’ began to doubt him. ‘‘He has the peculiarly modern, in fact, the contemporary American, faith in the power of the human mind and
Underlying and complicating this alarming chain of events was the tangled issue of international debts and reparations payments stemming from the war of 1914–18. One obvious way to relieve the pressure on the beleaguered Germans and Austrians was to break the chain by repudiating or suspending those obligations. The United States might lead the way by forgiving or rescheduling the $10 billion it was owed by the Allies, chiefly Britain and France, as a result of loans made from the U.S. Treasury
Second, they all considered themselves inheritors of that tradition of progressive thought best expressed in Charles Van Hise’s classic work of 1912, Concentration and Control: A Solution of the Trust Problem in the United States. Both Berle and Tugwell in 1932 were in the process of making important contributions to that intellectual tradition with works of their own. Berle, together with Gardiner C. Means, published The Modern Corporation and Private Property in 1932, a book that argued for a
Roosevelt felt obliged to oppose the Black bill, despite his sympathy with its goal of reducing unemployment. But he had, at first, nothing to put in its place. In what was fast becoming notorious as a standard Rooseveltian practice, he assigned several different people, none of whom had much knowledge of the others’ activity, to draft proposals for an industrial recovery bill. Through the month of April they worked feverishly. In the end Roosevelt ordered the advocates for the several competing
