Publication Date: Wednesday May 5, 1999

Challenge and victory

For most Americans, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a name from history books or, possibly, a voice intoning on a scratchy tape about "a date that will live in infamy," his speech following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

But for Americans old enough to remember the Great Depression, Roosevelt was also a soothing presence in his radio addresses when he spoke directly to the nation and touched its collective heart at a time when there was great hardship and little hope.

Roosevelt looms large in "Freedom From Fear," David Kennedy's examination of the years between the stock market crash of 1929 and the end of World War II in 1945.

Kennedy, a Stanford history professor, has taken something long familiar in broad outline and, from the distance of time and with great insight, sharpened our understanding of one of the most turbulent eras in U.S. history.

It's easy to forget that, at the time, Roosevelt was vilified both by Republicans, who thought he was going too far in his measures to deal with the Depression, and by the left, who thought he wasn't going far enough. Roosevelt did, in fact, attempt to go far when he proposed expanding the U.S. Supreme Court, which kept knocking down the laws his Congress passed.

That constitutional crisis passed quietly, however, when the high court had a change in heart and supported the legality of his legislation.

Roosevelt weathered the storms of the Supreme Court, conservative newspaper publishers and populists like Huey Long to be re-elected in 1936 by the greatest margin of victory since James Monroe's 1820 election: Roosevelt won a 523-8 electoral college victory over his opponent, Alf Landon.

The Democrats won 331 seats in the House and 76 seats in the Senate, a margin so lopsided that 12 Democrats had to sit on the Republican side of the Senate aisle because they couldn't all fit on the Democratic side.

Roosevelt's legislation transformed America forever, making the government a significant player and presence in people's lives in ways it never had been before. Social Security and labor, banking and stock market reforms all were part of the New Deal, which redefined America and the role of its government.

It is worth quoting Kennedy at length in his summation of Roosevelt's impact upon America:

"He gave the nation a presidential civics lesson that defined nothing less than the ideology of modern liberalism. He breathed new meaning into ideas like liberty and freedom. He bestowed new legitimacy on the idea of government. He introduced new political ideas, like Social Security. He transformed the country's very sense of itself, and of what was politically possible, in enduring ways.

"Before he was finished, Franklin Roosevelt had changed the nation's political mind and institutional structure to a degree that few leaders before him had dared to dream, let alone try, and that few leaders thereafter dared to challenge."

Roosevelt was treading in territory that had no map, so it is remarkable, in retrospect, that so many right choices were made. Kennedy, in revisiting this vast history, also revises it in important ways.

For instance, most of us likely think that the Great Depression was caused by the momentous 1929 stock market crash. But Kennedy picks over the details and comes to the conclusion that, popular mythology notwithstanding, the stock market crash had no relation to the economic depression that followed. For one thing, the stock market crash was an American event, while the Great Depression was a global calamity of great complexity.

The statistics from the Depression are numbing: 5,000 bank failures between 1929 and 1933; 600,000 homeowner foreclosures in 1930-32; the 1933 gross national product was half that of the 1929 GNP; only one-third as many cars were built in 1933 as in 1929.

It was also a time of great dislocation. Americans not only lost their jobs, their homes and their life savings, but farmers lost their land, and the very ground that grew their crops was blown away when topsoil was lost through poor farming techniques.

America didn't really recover from the Depression until World War II forced its industrial might back to full capacity. Despite the Depression, America was by far the most industrialized nation in the world at the outbreak of World War II. As Kennedy notes, one estimate put American production per worker at twice that of German workers and five times that of Japanese workers.

In the two years after the 1942 battle of Midway, the Japanese were able to build six additional fleet aircraft carriers. The Americans in that time built 17 fleet carriers, 10 medium carriers and 86 escort carriers.

The end result of the war was inevitable, given U.S. industrial capacity, although most Americans wanted no part of the conflict until Dec. 7, 1941. And even then, U.S. participation might have been limited to a war against Japan had not Hitler, in a fit of idiocy four days later, declared war against the United States.

The war, as much as the Depression, changed America and Americans. The great distance between 1929 and 1945 isn't measured just in years but in a new country that was formed by the Depression and Roosevelt and then marched off to beat the Japanese and Germans.

Kennedy speaks of the archetypical young American couple after the war:

"They bought a freshly built suburban tract home with enough room for their three children. Their parents talked about the days of outhouses and kerosene lanterns, but their place was plumbed and wired and fitted out with every kind of modern appliance: telephone, radio, refrigerator, washing machine and the newest gadget of all, television.

"They had cast their first presidential ballot for Franklin Roosevelt in 1944 and their second for his scrappy little successor, Harry Truman, in 1948, though they were uneasy that Truman's party was promising at last to secure full civil rights for Negroes.

"The Russians had just exploded their own atomic bomb, and the communists had recently taken power in China. Somehow, the good war had not settled things to the degree that Roosevelt had promised. They had inherited a new world, and a brave one, too. Like all worlds, it held its share of peril as well as promise."

There are famous news photos and newsreel footage of the great jubilation in America when the war in Europe was finally over. The streets are crowded with people celebrating, of servicemen kissing women.

They had endured a worldwide depression and a global war so destructive that most or us have little real concept today of what it must have felt like to have lived through it and survived.

A new era had begun, built on those triumphs.

"Freedom from Fear" does a masterful job of sifting through the record of those trying years and making new sense out of what happened, and why.

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