Roy Lotz's Reviews > Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945

As I read Battle Cry of Freedom, the Oxford volume on the Civil War, I was constantly struck by how little I knew about the conflict. This was not the case with the installment on the Second World War, Freedom from Fear. Having watched approximately 10,000 documentaries about the time period in high school, I am permanently overexposed to the monumental struggle. The number of facts and figures lodged deeply in my brain has probably stunted my development.

Regardless, Kennedy (unrelated to the political dynasty) has written an artful, thoughtful book about one of the most consequential times in the history of the United States—and the world. What is novel is not the information he presents but his interpretations. His conclusions at times differ markedly from the standard, received interpretations familiar to products of the American school system.

For one, he considers the stock market crash of 1929 to be only a contributing factor of the Great Depression, and not its primary cause. He is surprisingly sympathetic to the much-vilified Herbert Hoover—viewing him as quite progressive by the standards of his day—and, by contrast, he refuses to deify FDR, viewing him as a great but still limited president. He portrays the New Deal as a scattershot, scatterbrained response to the economic downturn, which helped alleviate suffering, but which did not end the crisis; and although Keynes is often connected to the New Deal, Kennedy views FDR as a highly reluctant Keynesian.

Kennedy also pops a few bubbles regarding America’s role in World War II. In spite of our Saving Private Ryan mythology, Kennedy is clear that Russia did the lion’s share of the fighting, and that Stalin consequently “held all of the high cards” in the postwar world. In his memoirs, Churchill insists that delaying D-Day to 1944 was simple military necessity, but Kennedy portrays Churchill as following the traditional English policy of avoiding major land conflicts in Europe until the warring parties have exhausted themselves; and contrary to Churchill, he views the campaigns in North Africa and Italy as bloody distractions of minor importance.

This is only a taste of Kennedy’s conclusions—which, I should note, he justifies rather than simply asserts—and it gives the book a freshness that another book on the oft-studied period might lack. I should also note that Kennedy is a fine writer who somehow manages to write about economic policy and military strategy with equal fluency and vigor. As regards to the book’s subject-matter, Kennedy divides his attention nearly equally between the Great Depression and the Second World War, making a sharp transition between the two, giving the book an odd bipartite quality.

My only major criticism is that Kennedy’s attention is too riveted to the political and military stories, and the “American People” are often a mere background to the decisions of Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Truman. We get a few sections on unions, women, black and Japanese Americans, but close to nothing on art, music, literature, religion, or culture generally. This was especially frustrating for me, as I thought that the economics of the depression and the battles of the war were already over-investigated.

Nevertheless, it is too easy to lob criticisms at general histories. And when a book already clocks in at nearly 1,000 pages, it is especially cheap to focus on everything that was excluded. By any standard, this is an excellent book about a moment in history which involved every extreme imaginable. That Kennedy manages to weave a tight story out of this worldwide disaster is no small merit.