Freedom From Fear

Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945
Author: David M Kennedy 1999 858 pp
My rating: 4.5*
Started January 9 2009, Finished January 15 2009.

Another excellent volume in the Oxford History of the United States, this work is essentially a history of the Roosevelt years with a surprisingly sympathetic prelude on Herbert Hoover’s failed administration, which despite its length could well have been much longer -- perhaps even two volumes one covering the depression years and the other World War II -- as it leaves the reader wanting to know more about FDR. While Freedom From Fear clearly depicts the enormous struggles and accomplishments of FDR’s presidency, the man himself remains something of a cipher as when in describing Roosevelt’s death, the author mentions in passing that he was attended by the mistress he had renounced 27 years earlier. The book’s greatest strength is its straightforward clarity but I docked it half a star for some editorial sloppiness such as incorrect diction e.g. immanent used where imminent was meant and the dubious claim that the Hood was larger than the Bismarck.

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Recent Social Trends, a scholarly report on social conditions commissioned by Hoover and published in 1933 “feared that the old-stock, white, urban middle class would be demographically swamped by the proliferation of the rural and immigrant poor, as well as blacks.” (28)

Together with expenditures for veteran’s benefits … interest payments composed more than half the federal budget through the postwar decade. Expenses for a modest army of 139,000 men and a navy of about 96,000 sailors accounted for virtually all the rest. (30)

Hoover on 25 Oct 1929: “the fundamental business of the country, that is, production and distribution of commodities , is on a sound and prosperous basis” (39)

As the depression thickened in 1931 and 1932, the main purpose of Garner, Robinson, and Raskob [leaders of the opposition Democrats] was to obstruct the president and prepare to reap the political reward in the upcoming presidential election. (62)

Talk was Roosevelt’s passion and his weapon. None of his associates ever knew him to read a book. It was in conversation that he gained his prodigious, if disorderly store of information about the world. (112)

Gross national product had fallen by 1933 to half its 1929 level. (163)

Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1930, Long refused to vacate the governorship for nearly two more years, holding both offices simultaneously. (236)

Roosevelt’s dream was the old progressive dream of wringing order out of chaos, seeking mastery rather than accepting drift, imparting to ordinary Americans at least some measure of the kind of predictability to their lives that was the birthright of the Roosevelts … (247)

[In 1938] Louisiana’s Allen J. Ellender declared: “I believe in white supremacy and as long as I am in the Senate I expect to fight for white supremacy.” (343)

[The New Deal’s] cardinal aim was not to destroy capitalism but to devolatilize it, and at the same time to distribute its benefits more evenly. (372)

“Let us turn our eyes inward,” declared Pennsylvania’s liberal Democratic governor George Earle in 1935. “If the world is to become a wilderness of waste, hatred and bitterness, let us all the more earnestly protect and preserve our own oasis of liberty.” (386)

P430 Refers to 1935 Army Chief of Staff Malin Craig as Malin.

Re US strategic bombing of Germany: Accidents claimed nearly as many airmen’s lives (approximately thirty-six thousand) as did combat (approximately forty-nine thousand) (606)

Only 18.1 percent of American families contributed at least one member to the armed forces. (636)

All told, American war plants delivered some 18,000 B-24s … while building 12,692 B-17s and 3,763 B-29s … (654)

Every American combatant in the last year and a half of war in the Pacific islands could draw on four tons of supplies; his Japanese opponent, just two pounds. (668)

(703) Incorrect diction: use of immanent where imminent is the correct word. “… sensing the immanent vindication of the airmen’s cherished strategic doctrine …”

Wartime cartoons and posters routinely depicted the Japanese as murderous savages, immature children, wild beasts or bucktoothed, bespectacled lunatics. (811)

The Japanese army’s Field Service Code [1941]: “Never give up a position but rather die.” (812)

Okinawa: In early June what was left of the Japanese garrison tried to mount a counterattack. Some six thousand men, armed only with sidearms and bamboo spears, Banzaied forwards. They encountered “millions of shells from the enemy’s formidable fleet, planes, and tanks,” Yahara recorded. “All vanished like the morning dew.” (834)

[Upon notification of final Japanese surrender] Among the American troops on Okinawa, unconditional jubilation broke out. The fired every available weapon skywards. The subsequent rain of shell fragments killed seven men. (851)