Freedom From Fear explains 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. The same generation of Americans who battled the Depression eventually had to shoulder arms in another conflict that wreaked world wide destruction, ushered in the nuclear age, and forever changed their own way of life and their country's relationship to the rest of the world. It is a story rich in drama and peopled with unforgettable personalities, including the incandescent but enigmatic figure of Roosevelt himself.Įven as the New Deal was coping with the Depression, a still more fearsome menace was developing abroad-Hitler's thirst for war in Europe, coupled with the imperial ambitions of Japan in Asia. Taken together, those reforms gave a measure of security to millions of Americans who had never had much of it, and with it a fresh sense of having a stake in their country.įreedom From Fear tells the story of the New Deal's achievements, without slighting its shortcomings, contradictions, and failures. For them, the Depression was but another of the ordeals of fear and insecurity with which they were sadly familiar.įranklin Roosevelt's New Deal wrung from the trauma of the 1930s a lasting legacy of economic and social reform, including the Social Security Act, new banking and financial laws, regulatory legislation, and new opportunities for organized labor. Countless Americans, especially if they were farmers, African Americans, or recent immigrants, eked out thread bare lives on the margins of national life. Nor was the fabled prosperity of the 1920s as uniformly shared as legend portrays. 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. 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. The Depression was both a disaster and an opportunity.

Freedom From Fear tells the story of how Americans endured, and eventually prevailed, in the face of those unprecedented calamities. Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Global Public Healthīetween 19, two great travails were visited upon the American people: the Great Depression and World War II.The European Society of Cardiology Series.Oxford Commentaries on International Law.

Over Here by David M. Kennedy