Freedom from Fear

Between 1929 and 1945, two great travails were visited upon the American people: the Great Depression and World War II. Freedom from Fear 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, wastefullly consuming capital and inflicting untold misery on city and countryside alike. Nor was the fabled prosperity of the 1920s as uniformly shared ag legend
portrays. Countless Americans, especially if they were farmers, African Americans, or recent immigrants, eked out thread bare lives on the margins of national life. For them the Depression was but another of the ordeals of fear and insecurity with which they were sadly familiar.
Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal wrung from the trauma of the 1930s a lasting legacy of economic and social reform, in cluding the Social Security Act, new banking and financial laws, regulatory legistlation, and new opportunities for organized labour. Taken together, those reforms gave a measure of security to millons of Americans who had never had much of it, and with a fresh sense of having a stake in their country.
Freedom from Fear tells the story of the New Deal's achievments, without slighting its shortcomings, contraditions and failures. It is a story rinch in drama and peopled with unforgettable personalities, including the incandescent but enigmatic figure of Roosevelt himself.

Even 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. The same generation of Americans who battled the Depression evenutally had to