The tumultuous period from 1929 to 1945 has been exhaustively covered in scholarly monographs and popular histories alike, yet as two recent books attest, there is always room for a fresh look at what we thought we knew. With both vividness and grace, Stanford historian David M. Kennedy covers this era in his volume in the Oxford History of the United States, a series designed to acquaint the broad public with fresh research. At first sight, the 858 pages of text can appear intimidating to the general reader, while to the specialist the narrative format and capsule biographies might seem somewhat old-fashioned. But lively prose does not necessarily connote intellectual shoddiness. Kennedy’s account is superbly written, and even readers quite familiar with the major events of the Great Depression and World War II can learn much from it.
Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (Oxford History of the United States)
Oxford University Press
936 pages
$15.71
For the Survival of Democracy: Franklin Roosevelt and the World Crisis of the 1930s
Free Press
512 pages
$14.90
In For the Survival of Democracy: Franklin Roosevelt and the World Crisis of the 1930s, Alonzo J. Hamby of the Ohio University ably covers some of the same ground. He ends his account with 1939, but he widens his scope to include the economic policies of Britain and Germany. Indeed, much of his account involves a comparison of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s measures to those of Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, and Adolf Hitler.
Both authors offer some surprising material. They note, for example, that during the “prosperity decade” of the 1920s, a significant number of immigrants to the United States were disillusioned by the lack of opportunity and hence returned to their homelands. Included were nearly a third of the Poles, Slovaks, and Croatians; about half the Italians; and over 50 percent of the Greeks, Russians, Rumanians, and Bulgarians. Furthermore, many Americans remained impoverished longer than is often supposed—in particular farmers, who did not fully recover until 1939. In other countries as well, the depression of 1929 hit hardest where the economy was already in decline, not just agriculture but textiles, petroleum, and coal.
The demythologizing continues with the 1928 presidential election. Kennedy takes issue with the long-held assertion that Al Smith’s presidential candidacy of 1928 created the urban ethnic bloc that kept the Democrats in power for more than 20 years. The majorities of the New York governor were paper thin, Kennedy notes; it took the New Deal to realign the nation’s politics.
Disputing the frequently made claim that the Great Crash of 1929 triggered the lengthy depression, Kennedy finds that most scholars are unable to trace a cause-and-effect linkage. And those cab-driving market speculators of pop histories and textbooks are largely fictional: in 1929, some 97.5 percent of the American public did not own a single share of stock. Moreover, and once again contrary to received opinion, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 did not have to be an economic disaster, for it provided the president with a mechanism by which he could lower rates without permission of Congress.
Kennedy and Hamby also present a highly revisionist treatment of Herbert Hoover’s presidency. True, for years historians have debunked the notion that Hoover was a “do-nothing” executive, sitting icily in the White House while the nation sank into poverty. But now Hoover’s many initiatives are stressed. Hamby sees Hoover embodying “a democratic version of the fascist corporatism emerging from Mussolini’s Italy”; the 31st president envisioned a government that strongly fostered cooperation among business, labor, and agriculture, though unlike Il Duce he always adhered to voluntarism, not coercion. If pro-Roosevelt partisans found Hoover’s conferences with business leaders in the fall of 1929 mere therapy, Kennedy says the president had few options, for the federal government had neither the size nor the power to cope with the growing panic.
Furthermore, the Federal Reserve Board, which determined so much financial policy, was not only legally independent of the executive branch; it would never sanction massive deficits in the face of prevailing economic orthodoxy. In fact, all during the 1932 presidential race, Franklin D. Roosevelt assailed Hoover for driving the nation into bankruptcy. Given such constraints, it made perfect sense for Hoover to stress the role of private business and local government.
Still, Kennedy suggests that Hoover’s optimism about prospects for a reasonably quick recovery was not unjustified at the time. By April 1930, the stock market had recovered about one-fifth of its slippage, and the banking system had developed surprising resilience. It was the failure of Austria’s central bank, Vienna’s Kreditanstalt, that triggered the depression in Europe and thereby greatly lengthened its counterpart in the United States. Certainly, no Democratic party leader then electable would have done more than Hoover, who established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to aid failing banks and businesses, set up the Federal Farm Board to raise farm prices, and courageously issued a one-year moratorium on reparations and war debts. The Democratic House speaker John Nance Garner, whose solution was limited to a balanced budget and a sales tax, remarked in 1931, “The trouble today is that we have too many laws.”
Of course, neither author holds Hoover up for canonization. Presidential relief policies could be summed up in the phrase “too little too late.” Both writers show how the politically inept president appeared increasingly as the “Great Scrooge,” acquiescing in federal support to banks but unwilling to provide direct aid to the unemployed. In emphasizing business recovery at the expense of individual relief, Hoover naÏvely assumed that private charities and state and local agencies could take up the slack.
Furthermore, Hamby notes, only strong American overtures on the international front—canceling war debts, liberalizing international trade, pegging currency exchange rates, and other such initiatives—had any chance of promoting general Western recovery. By the end of 1932 these opportunities had vanished. Pre-Hitler Germany was already going its own way. The British Empire had established an Imperial Preference System that gave major commercial advantages to Commonwealth nations. Hoover would never countenance adjusting the gold value of the dollar. If Josef Stalin pushed “Socialism in One Country,” other world leaders took as their watchword “Recovery in One Country.”
In all fairness to Hoover, in the 1932 presidential campaign FDR presented his program in the vaguest of terms. His much-touted Brains Trust, as Kennedy notes, was in reality a transient body, offering contradictory advice and exercising little lasting impact on policy. The Hoover-Roosevelt “interregnum” meetings, held in November 1932 and January 1933, involved a “dangerous political dance,” as both men revealed themselves more focused on personal justification than on their nation’s welfare.
Not surprisingly, the two historians express strong appreciation of much New Deal legislation, particularly in the familiar realms of social security, labor laws, and banking reform. Hamby in particular praises Harry Hopkins’ Works Progress Administration (WPA), which employed ten million people between 1935 and 1943, although he concedes that the WPA could coerce campaign contributions and hire unemployed on the basis of political affiliation.
Indeed, neither author is uncritical of FDR. Both note how Roosevelt so desired increased inflation that he “torpedoed” the London Economic Conference of 1933, thereby killing any further prospect of international cooperation in the fight against global depression. Hamby sees the president acting at his absolute worst, behaving both impetuously and irresponsibly. Hard negotiating, Hamby claims, might just have set the democracies on a course of mutual prosperity.
Both historians see the initial linchpin of FDR’s program, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), as a jerrybuilt entity that had disaster built into its very structure. Had the NRA limited itself to regulating the top 25 corporations, Hamby argues, it might have had a chance. By attempting to impose codes everywhere, it established a regulatory empire it could not handle. Worse yet, it retarded recovery for a full two years. Similarly FDR’s, farm bills were based upon an anachronistic assumption, namely that general prosperity depended upon agricultural production, a scheme that caused the expulsion of tenants and sharecroppers from land they had worked for decades.
More drastic breaks are made with the conventional wisdom. At no time, Kennedy and Hamby show, was national income substantially redistributed. Roosevelt fostered the Wagner Act of 1935 not so much to promote mass unionism but to suppress repeated labor disturbances and increase the worker’s purchasing power. FDR’s court-packing plan was no wanton blunder but a carefully calculated risk that, according to Kennedy, defined no new role for the Supreme Court and left checks-and-balances undisturbed. Proposed, however, at the very time when sit-down strikes had antagonized much of the public, it conveyed the impression that Roosevelt was indulgent toward labor while brazenly assaulting the constitutional order. Hamby challenges the notion that FDR’s scheme really liberalized the Court at all; the crucial Washington minimum wage ruling (West Coast Hotel Company v. Parrish, 1937) had been decided before FDR announced his plan.
Even without the Court fight, by 1937 the president’s domestic agenda was already in trouble. The business community, however, was less shaken by the regulations the New Deal had already imposed than by anxieties over possible future initiatives. The recession of 1938, Kennedy notes, was in reality “a depression within a depression,” resulting in ten million unemployed and exceeding the economic decline of the Hoover years. Moreover, FDR’s response—a renewal of antitrust suits and an emergency appropriation of $3 billion for relief—was far too weak, so much so that after 1938 the New Deal was “a walking corpse.” Kennedy’s verdict? “Recovery awaited not the release of more New Deal energies but the unleashing of the dogs of war.”
While Hamby stops short of World War II, he sets the context for it, concluding that after six years of Roosevelt, the United States remained “deeply mired in economic distress.” As far as recovery was concerned, both Nazi Germany and Communist Russia outpaced the United States. Moreover, Britain recovered from the depression at the same time as Germany, being able to institute major social programs while keeping its middle class intact.
Though Hamby’s account offers few surprises to those who have studied the Nazi dictatorship, he makes some telling points. Hitler, he notes, avoided clear delegating of power, setting subordinates against each other and only deciding matters after continual delay. Nazi officials ruled in ad hoc fashion, as they lacked clear direction from the F?hrer. Even in 1936, as Germany recovered economically, life for the ordinary German stayed drab. Wages were low, consumer goods shoddy. Though differences between National Socialism and the New Deal were obvious, they shared a belief in a managed economy, unorthodox monetary policies, deficit spending, public works projects, and a “go it alone” attitude towards the rest of the world.
Kennedy, more than Hamby, directs his attention towards foreign policy, though some matters need more development than he allows. It is difficult to understand the Manchurian crisis of 1931-33, for example, without reference to certain crucial factors Kennedy neglects: the international system created in the Pacific by the Washington Conference of 1931-32, the Japanese bombardment of Shanghai in late January 1932, and the ensuing open letter of Henry L. Stimson to Senator William E. Borah, in which the secretary of state threatened American rearmament if Japan did not mend its ways. There is more to Senate defeat of American entry into the World Court in 1935 than the fulmination of Father Charles E. Coughlin, Senator Huey Long, and the Hearst press. The Roosevelt administration had neither presented a strong case nor rallied its forces.
In much of his foreign policy analysis, however, Kennedy is very much on target. He links Roosevelt’s acquiescence in the neutrality acts to his desire to retain congressional support for New Deal programs strongly under fire. The much-touted Quarantine Speech of October 1937 lacked any follow-through, in part because the president himself had no plan. Roosevelt, Kennedy emphasizes, could exhibit both indecision and duplicity. In late 1941, for example, FDR misrepresented essential facts concerning a German U-boat firing on an American destroyer, not to mention fabricating “documentation” concerning Hitler’s “plot” to abolish the world’s great religions and divide Latin America into five vassal states.
In Kennedy’s judgment, relations with Japan marked Roosevelt’s deepest failure, and the Stanford scholar goes so far as to claim that the entire Pacific war could have been avoided. Certainly the United States possessed few major interests in the entire Asian region. FDR was casual to the point of recklessness in his diplomacy, as seen by the irresponsible execution of the ambiguous freezing orders of July 1941. Furthermore, had Hitler failed to declare war just after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States would have been forced to focus its energies upon the Pacific, in the process risking permanent German rule of the European continent.
As far as wartime leadership is concerned, Kennedy sees the Roosevelt administration wisely using its massive production capabilities to ensure that its major contribution would lie in machines, not men. In other words, it stressed mechanization and mobility rather than the creation of overwhelming ground forces. At the same time, Kennedy gives the nation as a whole low marks for interning tens of thousands of Japanese Americans, closing its doors to refugees from Hitler, and denying to most blacks a chance to fight for their country. Kennedy describes the chaos of the initial defense mobilization of 1941, though he could do more with FDR’s incredibly poor administrative techniques. What could work in advancing domestic reform could be most risky in foreign policy.
By November 1943, when the Tehran Conference convened, Roosevelt realized that major postwar expansion of Stalin’s empire was inevitable. Goodwill and personal charm were insufficient to reconcile fundamental geopolitical conflicts though, given the lack of U.S. military presence in Western Europe, the president had little choice. If the Yalta Conference was a diplomatic failure, by February 1945 the president had few means by which to parry Soviet advances in such areas as China, Poland, and southeastern Europe. True, FDR was gravely ill, but—so Kennedy claims—no American leader could have acted differently. Kennedy does fault FDR, however, for failing to take his countrymen into his confidence concerning the forthcoming peace. By remaining silent about his need to acquiesce in such matters as Soviet aggrandizement, he laid up future trouble for both the Russians and his own people.
Kennedy is at his best describing the battles of World War II, conveying an immediacy seldom found in combat accounts. In the process, he describes the brutal conduct of both sides in the Pacific, not to mention the sullying of American moral standards by terror-bombing Japan. Even the unconditional surrender policy remained a mixed blessing, for it “led to the incineration of hundreds of thousands of already defeated Japanese.”
In covering American military leaders, Kennedy deflates certain reputations, both major and minor. Douglas MacArthur, whose star has long since fallen, comes off as an unvarnished egoist who thoroughly bungled the defense of the Philippines. During the battle of the Coral Sea, Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher not only exercised bad judgment but also showed a conspicuous lack of courage. In the Leyte Gulf confrontation, Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey fell for a Japanese decoy that almost cost the United States the largest naval engagement in history.
Errors were made in the Atlantic theater as well. At the outset of hostilities, Admiral Ernest J. King opposed convoys, thereby exposing American merchant craft to continual U-boat sinkings off New York harbor and the Virginia coast. An overconfident Dwight David Eisenhower bears major responsibility for the surprise German attack of December 1944 known as the Battle of the Bulge.
In some areas Kennedy could treat Roosevelt far more critically. Administration spokesmen often questioned the loyalty of the opposition. FDR personally used the Federal Bureau of Investigation against such prominent anti-interventionist opponents as Charles Lindbergh. At one point, even Herbert Hoover was under government scrutiny. During the war, the administration instituted sedition proceedings against extremist and pro-fascist opponents who, regardless of the repellent nature of their views, were innocent of any federal crime. Roosevelt also considered prosecution of such hostile newspapers as the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News because of their editorial policies. At the same time, one could argue that by such unilateral moves as the occupation of Greenland and Iceland and his shoot-on-sight orders, Roosevelt pushed some of the more moderate anti-interventionists, such as Senator Arthur Vandenberg, into rigid opposition. The same would hold true concerning his lack of candor during the evolution of the lend-lease act and his mobilization policy.
And again, when it comes to Roosevelt’s diplomacy, Kennedy’s indictment could be stronger. It certainly remains doubtful whether, to use Kennedy’s phrasing, FDR possessed “an intuitive understanding of foreign affairs rivaled among modern presidents only by his cousin Theodore.” Take, for instance, Roosevelt’s ambassadorial appointments to sensitive areas. Certainly the sending of Joseph P. Kennedy to Britain, Patrick Hurley to China, and Joseph Davies to the Soviet Union revealed an absolute reveling in amateurism. Even more destructive was Roosevelt’s tolerating, indeed possibly encouraging, the highly destructive rivalry between Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Undersecretary Sumner Welles. Not only did the president underrate Japan as a great power; he overrated Mussolini, believed he could handle Stalin, and played a cynical and dangerous game in China, as seen by his abrupt dismissal of General Joseph Stilwell at the request of Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. He was arrogantly confident about his health, not even leveling with himself, and withheld vital information concerning the Manhattan project from his own vice president. Only twice between FDR’s fourth inauguration and his death did Harry Truman personally meet with him.
But such criticisms shouldn’t obscure the great virtues of Kennedy’s book. All in all, both Kennedy and Hamby have made superb contributions, offering high standards for other scholars to meet and challenging readers to test their assumptions about a critical period in American history.
Justus D. Doenecke is Professor of History at New College of Florida. His latest book is The New Deal (2003).
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