The Trial of the Century

Even as the American generation that survived the Great Depression and fought World War II recedes, books about it and books by its members seem to surge. It is as if those who made it through these arduous years want to tell their stories one more time and those who grew up in the aftermath want to capture the moments their elders experienced before those memories are gone. Stephen E. Ambrose’s “D-Day” and “Citizen Soldiers” recapture the war in Europe and have sold briskly (he is now writing a book about the war in the Pacific), and Tom Brokaw’s “The Greatest Generation,” the story of the men and women of the ‘30s and ‘40s, did so well that he has produced a sequel, “The Greatest Generation Speaks.” The books of Ambrose and Brokaw, both bighearted and sentimental, treated the Americans of that generation--raised in the Depression, sent by the millions into war--as heroes. (So it stands to reason that many Americans came to regard the president who presided over the Depression and the war as the greatest hero of all. Though Franklin D. Roosevelt was thoroughly hated to the end of his days by a vigorous minority of Americans, a substantial number felt a resounding respect and affection for him not given any other president since the Union so honored Abraham Lincoln.) Though Ambrose and Brokaw salute the largely unheralded men and women of the Depression and the war, David M. Kennedy and T.H. Watkins take a look at the major actors and the important trends in American life during those years of upheaval and change. A professor of history at Stan- Anthony Day is a contributing writer to Book Review. ford University, Kennedy brings a sound perspective to the 16 years, 1929 to 1945, that profoundly changed America and made the country what it is today. “Freedom From Fear,” which earlier this month won a Pulitzer Prize in history, is the ninth volume in the fine “Oxford History of the United States,” launched by its late general editor, C. Vann Woodward, who wrote the introduction. Watkins, who died last February, wrote “Righteous Pilgrim,” a biography of the New Dealer Harold Ickes, which won the 1991 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography. Kennedy skillfully weaves together the era’s social, economic and political strands. Even those who thought they knew it all, or who indeed lived through all or most of those years, will find illuminating information and insights on almost every page, beginning with Kennedy’s use of “Recent Social Trends,” a 1,500-page document commissioned by President Herbert Hoover four weeks before the October 1929 crash of the stock market. Hoover was a thinking Republican firmly in the party’s progressive wing. He believed, in Kennedy’s words, in “actively managing social change through informed, though scrupulously limited, government action.” Hoover believed that the research he commissioned would help him govern to that end. Published in 1933, the report had been swept away by the crash and the onset of the Great Depression, but for historians, Kennedy notes, its findings are a rich mine, as were the observations in Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd’s 1929 look at Muncie, Ind., in “Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture.” Both works focused on the rapid and sweeping changes that had so altered American society. “[W]e today,” the Lynds concluded, “are probably living in one of the eras of greatest rapidity of change in the history of human institutions.” The authors of “Recent Social Trends,” Kennedy writes, called the first third of the 20th century “one of the most eventful periods in our history”--noting the Great War; the emergence of giant industrial firms like Ford and General Motors; new technologies like electric power, the automobile, radio and motion pictures; new frankness about sex; the vote for women; the experiment of Prohibition; mass-market advertising; and consumer credit. The typical young American family in 1929 was living better than their parents had dreamed of. They had running water and electricity in their house; the husband looked forward to a better job. They were pleased to believe that the man in the White House, a self-made millionaire and mining engineer, who organized European relief after World War I, was “the most competent man in America.” “And their world,” Kennedy writes, “was about to come apart.” The end began with the October 1929 stock market crash. It spread to a weakening industrial sector. It spread to rural banks, which, already hard-hit by the farm slump of the 1920s, began to close. Then, at the end of 1930, New York’s Bank of the United States closed its doors. It was the biggest American bank failure in history, and nervousness spread throughout the country. Kennedy writes that he is inclined to believe the theory that World War I so undermined Europe that the war can be called, as Hoover did, the “primary cause” of the depression that gripped the world from mid-1931 on. The punishing reparations demanded of Germany were a prime factor in the deepening slump and certainly assisted the rise of Adolf Hitler. Kennedy begins a chapter titled “The Ordeal of Herbert Hoover” with a 1932 quotation from Kansas Republican Editor William Allen White: “Hoover will be known as the greatest innocent bystander in history . . . a brave man fighting valiantly, futilely to the end.” Kennedy is more sympathetic to Hoover than some earlier historians, but he makes it clear that Hoover was not up to the job of coping with a crisis the country had never faced before. At the end of his chapter on Hoover, Kennedy uses another quotation from White to introduce a man who would prove equal to the task. “Your distant cousin,” White wrote presciently to former president Theodore Roosevelt Jr. on Feb. 1, 1933, “ . . . may develop his stubbornness into courage, his amiability into wisdom, his sense of superiority into statesmanship. . . . Responsibility,” White concluded--”prophetically,” Kennedy says--”is a winepress that brings strange juices out of men.” How that wine press worked on Franklin D. Roosevelt to produce the leadership that saw the American people through the next 12 years of Depression and war is much of the burden of “Freedom From Fear.” Its title is drawn from Roosevelt’s annual message to Congress on Jan. 6, 1941, when he said his policies were designed to secure the “four essential freedoms”: freedom of speech and religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear. Kennedy is candid about Roose- velt’s weaknesses--stubbornness, amiability, arrogance--so at the end, his assessment of the president as a man who grew into greatness on the job is all the more persuasive. For most Americans, Roosevelt and the country became one, and most Americans who lived during this time could not imagine the nation without him, as he inaugurated the New Deal, trying one approach, then another, to bring the nation back to economic health. Kennedy is excellent on how the Roosevelt Administration “erected an institutional scaffolding designed to provide unprecedented stability and predictability for the American economy.” Roosevelt’s great achievement with the New Deal, Kennedy writes, was to “mend the evils of the Depression by reasoned experiment within the framework of the existing social system. He did prevent a naked confrontation between orthodoxy and revolution,” and that, Kennedy says, had “priceless value.” Roosevelt’s oneness with the American people became even more pronounced when war arrived. Most Americans wanted to stay out of it, but when it came, the country united as never before in the 20th century. More than half of “Freedom From Fear” is devoted to the approach to the war and its conduct after it burst upon America on Dec. 7, 1941. No one who heard over the radio the clear, calm voice of the president asking Congress for a declaration of war against the empire of Japan can ever forget the occasion. The story of the war has been told thousands of times. The virtue of Kennedy’s treatment is its measured balance of the Pacific and Atlantic wars; the mobilization of American industry to fight what he aptly calls, after Stalin, “the war of machines”; and the “caldron of the home front,” where the shame of the internment of the Japanese was matched by the continued isolation of black Americans, who during the war began the long march that would eventually culminate in the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. Along the way, Kennedy addresses the mass introduction of women into the labor force, the struggles of labor to assert its newly won power and the introduction of the GI Bill of Rights that would revolutionize college education and change forever the shape of America, from ill-educated to much better schooled. “The war,” Kennedy writes, “had shaken the American people loose and shaken them up, freed them from a decade of economic and social paralysis and flung them around their country into new regions and new ways of life. . . . They had,” he concludes, “inherited a new world. . . .” “Freedom From Fear” is a strikingly comprehensive achievement. Kennedy’s deep engagement with this crucial period of American history infuses his book with a vigor and freshness that will make it the standard account for many years to come. Watkins’ “The Hungry Years” serves as a valuable companion piece to the chapters of “Freedom From Fear” devoted to the Depression. Watkins tells the story of the people and the politics of the time through the eyes and ears of men and women who experienced day-to-day hardships and strove to make life better in the years before the war. He covers the Bonus Expeditionary Force, which had stationed itself on Washington’s Anacostia Flats and demanded immediate payment of promised veterans’ bonuses of about $1,000 a man payable in 1945 but was routed by troops under Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Army chief of staff, an action that riveted Americans whether they sympathized with the marchers or not. Watkins is especially good on the American Communist Party, which in his assessment never amounted to much, and he helps explain labor’s successful efforts to organize a long and sometimes bloody campaign that changed the face of American industry in the 1930s. There is a valuable section on efforts to unionize farm workers in California and in the South. Though “Freedom From Fear” and “The Hungry Years” are about a world long gone, Kennedy and Watkins present that world in strikingly familiar and relevant terms. The reforms of the New Deal fundamentally changed the economic structure of the country and gave its citizens protections they had never before enjoyed, and the war propelled the United States into the position of world leadership that, like it or not, it has held for more than 50 years.