nickc5's review against another edition
3.0
Kenney covers the New Deal with skill and avoids the dryness of traditional political histories. His unraveling of the personal character of important leaders of the New Deal was captivating and instructive. It is somewhat clear his grasp of the economics behind the Great Depression was less than fortified, though that is excusable due to the intent of the novel. It is, however, hard to forgive his one-dimensional treatment of the international situation (including the consequences of the Treaty of Versailles in the prologue). The last chapter "The Gathering Storm," is also a superficial exposition of Hitler, his aims, and his political strategy. I was left shaking my head while reading the sweeping conclusions made by Kennedy -- (a) there is significant scholarship that illustrates Hitler was an opportunist rather than a mastermind of European politics (b) he hoped for war to be stalled until 1942 [not 1938/9] (c) Hitler was surprised by the declarations of war by France and Britain, and was not expecting as much resistance over Czechoslovakia. All in all, Kennedy presents a highly deterministic view of Hitler's rise - starting from the Treaty of Versailles - which is inherently dubious. I was surprised by this very superficial, and traditional American perspective of the events leading up to World War II.
yellowtypophile's review against another edition
5.0
A book which tackles American history in the globally tumultuous decade of the 1930s, The American People in the Great Depression is a wonderfully clear and engaging read. What follows is my summary of that history, in an attempt to gather my thoughts. It will be long.
The Great Depression, as it came to be known from some time in the middle of that decade, was an economic disaster the likes of which the world had never seen. Its precise sources and causes are still, nearly a hundred years later, not at all clear. But the circumstances surrounding it bear frightening parallels to life today: a society grappling with huge and sudden social and economic changes over the preceding decades (with the advent of "modernity" and all that it entailed then, and the internet today); an extreme degree of economic inequality built up over the preceding decades, on top of the ever-persistent political inequality marked by the lines of race and gender; and the rise of right-wing and fascist regimes the world over, partly in response to these changes, and partly following the flow of larger currents too deep for us to fully understand.
The US federal government was wholly unprepared for these events. At the time, the federal government played virtually no role in the lives of the people: in the words of Calvin Coolidge, "If the Federal Government should go out of existence, the common run of people would not detect the difference in the affairs of their daily life for a considerable length of time." Herbert Hoover, the unfortunate president presiding over the start of the Depression in 1929, was constrained by the heretical nature of suggesting that the federal government play an outsize role in recovery, as well as the then-orthodox economic thinking that urged action in precisely the opposite direction: the markets will take care of it. Hoover slowly came around to a different approach, but it was too little, too late, and his reputation was ruined permanently.
And so the gauntlet fell to the next president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His now near-mythical reputation suggests that he is the hero of this story, but in truth, there is no hero. And in my opinion to the contrary, if a character must take on that cape, it would be not FDR but his equally hallowed program, the New Deal.
We accordingly have a terrible villain in the Depression, and an enigmatic, mysterious hero in the New Deal. So what was it? What did it do, what were its aims and its philosophical underpinnings, and did it succeed? These are the questions whose answers occupy much of the book.
From the point of view of today, or, really, any point in the history of the US outside of the 1930s, the New Deal introduced a dizzying number of changes into American life and political thought.
Let's list them out to experience it ourselves. It legislated Social security, federal unemployment benefits, labor laws outlawing child labor and setting working hours, federally mandated minimum wages, and a legal system supporting the creation of labor unions. It created new institutions that have become a staple of American life: the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate Wall Street, the FDIC to insure bank deposits of ordinary citizens, new institutions to regulate and provide credit for the housing market (such as Fannie Mae), institutions to regulate trade (the FTC), broadcast communication (the FCC), and more. And it constructed enormous amounts of infrastructure through government funded public works programs: living in Berkeley, the closest one for me, literally, is the Bay Bridge.
An especially important tangible from that list was the growth and strengthening of labor unions. It was in this decade that the well-known industrial unions of today, such as the United Auto Workers (UAW), were formed. This struggle occurred in the face of violent aggression and death at the hands of the industrial managers, and succeeded both because of talented leftist and communist organizers and the direction of the political headwinds orchestrated by FDR. For many citizens, the newfound power of the unions gave the quickest change in their everyday lives, with increased wages and safety at the workplace being the primary markers---no small achievement.
Those were the tangibles. More broadly, the New Deal created a new conception of the role of government in American life, a view that has largely lived on till today. Thus the people of the country found themselves in a new social contract with the government. And of course, from the New Deal bubbled the polarized streams of political thought that pool themselves in the Democratic and Republican parties today. (The degree of difference of the political parties then to now can be seen by the fact that there were many liberal Republicans who supported the New Deal, and many conservative Democrats, often from the South, who opposed it. FDR began the identification of the liberals with the Democrats, though it would take much more time to crystallize.) There are also hints is that it was at this juncture that the idea that the government should pursue growth, that that is the measure of economic and political success, first took root.
But did it work? Answering that depends on what it was supposed to do, and the book argues that the unifying principle of the New Deal was not recovery, but reform. Recovery from the Depression is not something that the New Deal achieved, in spite of FDR publicly proclaiming this as the reason for its existence. But reform it most decidedly did achieve, and the guiding theme for FDR, the book argues, was to bring a degree of security to the lives of the public, a sense of security which the rich and powerful such as himself had always taken for granted. Take a look back at the tangible changes it brought and the theme becomes clear.
But look more closely and another viewpoint is that, in spite of having something of an underlying theme, the administration was also experimenting with a variety of ideas, many completely contradictory, in an effort to find a solution. For instance, there were subtleties forced by the very urgency of providing immediate relief from the Depression. You might think that child labor laws, minimum wages, and working hours were legislated out of a desire to bring some humanity to the lives of the exploited workers; a strongly leftist sensibility. But in fact, along with this, other purely economic factors also played a role: a need to reduce competition and overproduction in the markets, and to reduce the supply of labor to increase wages, to increase consumer demand. Thus by a happy coincidence the immediate needs of capital and long-term humanity somehow dovetailed.
If this all seems highly US-centric to you, when there were such world-shaking events occurring elsewhere, that's not a coincidence. American society at this time was disgusted with Europe and the way World War I had played out, and wanted nothing to do with the affairs across the Atlantic. FDR himself viewed the Great Depression as largely a domestic phenomenon that needed domestic solutions. And so both politically and publicly, the US isolated itself, sending a clear message to the fascist regimes rising up elsewhere that the US would not cause them difficulty. These American decisions had lasting and terrible repercussions on the history that was soon to be made.
That was then; this is now. The most immediately ominous parallel of then to now is, perhaps, the possibility of another depression arising as a result of the economic lockdowns from COVID-19. But there are differences. The COVID crisis has a clear and tangible cause, and an eventual way to address it; in the Depression policymakers were largely lost for years in a forest of possible causes, each with its own path out that was at logjams with the others. Maybe most distinctly, the US government then was unused to the idea of intervening in any substantial way during a crisis, while today it is almost standard policy.
Still, the feeling that the years ahead will be of enormous historical importance and change is hard to shake. Looking back at the events of the 1930s, the lesson to be drawn, I think, is to take this opportunity to remake life again and provide an even greater sense of security and control over their lives to the common people, ourselves--be it through universal health care, tuition-free college, a voice in the governance of the workplace, or anything else--as the requirement may be in the society in question.
The Great Depression, as it came to be known from some time in the middle of that decade, was an economic disaster the likes of which the world had never seen. Its precise sources and causes are still, nearly a hundred years later, not at all clear. But the circumstances surrounding it bear frightening parallels to life today: a society grappling with huge and sudden social and economic changes over the preceding decades (with the advent of "modernity" and all that it entailed then, and the internet today); an extreme degree of economic inequality built up over the preceding decades, on top of the ever-persistent political inequality marked by the lines of race and gender; and the rise of right-wing and fascist regimes the world over, partly in response to these changes, and partly following the flow of larger currents too deep for us to fully understand.
The US federal government was wholly unprepared for these events. At the time, the federal government played virtually no role in the lives of the people: in the words of Calvin Coolidge, "If the Federal Government should go out of existence, the common run of people would not detect the difference in the affairs of their daily life for a considerable length of time." Herbert Hoover, the unfortunate president presiding over the start of the Depression in 1929, was constrained by the heretical nature of suggesting that the federal government play an outsize role in recovery, as well as the then-orthodox economic thinking that urged action in precisely the opposite direction: the markets will take care of it. Hoover slowly came around to a different approach, but it was too little, too late, and his reputation was ruined permanently.
And so the gauntlet fell to the next president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His now near-mythical reputation suggests that he is the hero of this story, but in truth, there is no hero. And in my opinion to the contrary, if a character must take on that cape, it would be not FDR but his equally hallowed program, the New Deal.
We accordingly have a terrible villain in the Depression, and an enigmatic, mysterious hero in the New Deal. So what was it? What did it do, what were its aims and its philosophical underpinnings, and did it succeed? These are the questions whose answers occupy much of the book.
From the point of view of today, or, really, any point in the history of the US outside of the 1930s, the New Deal introduced a dizzying number of changes into American life and political thought.
Let's list them out to experience it ourselves. It legislated Social security, federal unemployment benefits, labor laws outlawing child labor and setting working hours, federally mandated minimum wages, and a legal system supporting the creation of labor unions. It created new institutions that have become a staple of American life: the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate Wall Street, the FDIC to insure bank deposits of ordinary citizens, new institutions to regulate and provide credit for the housing market (such as Fannie Mae), institutions to regulate trade (the FTC), broadcast communication (the FCC), and more. And it constructed enormous amounts of infrastructure through government funded public works programs: living in Berkeley, the closest one for me, literally, is the Bay Bridge.
An especially important tangible from that list was the growth and strengthening of labor unions. It was in this decade that the well-known industrial unions of today, such as the United Auto Workers (UAW), were formed. This struggle occurred in the face of violent aggression and death at the hands of the industrial managers, and succeeded both because of talented leftist and communist organizers and the direction of the political headwinds orchestrated by FDR. For many citizens, the newfound power of the unions gave the quickest change in their everyday lives, with increased wages and safety at the workplace being the primary markers---no small achievement.
Those were the tangibles. More broadly, the New Deal created a new conception of the role of government in American life, a view that has largely lived on till today. Thus the people of the country found themselves in a new social contract with the government. And of course, from the New Deal bubbled the polarized streams of political thought that pool themselves in the Democratic and Republican parties today. (The degree of difference of the political parties then to now can be seen by the fact that there were many liberal Republicans who supported the New Deal, and many conservative Democrats, often from the South, who opposed it. FDR began the identification of the liberals with the Democrats, though it would take much more time to crystallize.) There are also hints is that it was at this juncture that the idea that the government should pursue growth, that that is the measure of economic and political success, first took root.
But did it work? Answering that depends on what it was supposed to do, and the book argues that the unifying principle of the New Deal was not recovery, but reform. Recovery from the Depression is not something that the New Deal achieved, in spite of FDR publicly proclaiming this as the reason for its existence. But reform it most decidedly did achieve, and the guiding theme for FDR, the book argues, was to bring a degree of security to the lives of the public, a sense of security which the rich and powerful such as himself had always taken for granted. Take a look back at the tangible changes it brought and the theme becomes clear.
But look more closely and another viewpoint is that, in spite of having something of an underlying theme, the administration was also experimenting with a variety of ideas, many completely contradictory, in an effort to find a solution. For instance, there were subtleties forced by the very urgency of providing immediate relief from the Depression. You might think that child labor laws, minimum wages, and working hours were legislated out of a desire to bring some humanity to the lives of the exploited workers; a strongly leftist sensibility. But in fact, along with this, other purely economic factors also played a role: a need to reduce competition and overproduction in the markets, and to reduce the supply of labor to increase wages, to increase consumer demand. Thus by a happy coincidence the immediate needs of capital and long-term humanity somehow dovetailed.
If this all seems highly US-centric to you, when there were such world-shaking events occurring elsewhere, that's not a coincidence. American society at this time was disgusted with Europe and the way World War I had played out, and wanted nothing to do with the affairs across the Atlantic. FDR himself viewed the Great Depression as largely a domestic phenomenon that needed domestic solutions. And so both politically and publicly, the US isolated itself, sending a clear message to the fascist regimes rising up elsewhere that the US would not cause them difficulty. These American decisions had lasting and terrible repercussions on the history that was soon to be made.
That was then; this is now. The most immediately ominous parallel of then to now is, perhaps, the possibility of another depression arising as a result of the economic lockdowns from COVID-19. But there are differences. The COVID crisis has a clear and tangible cause, and an eventual way to address it; in the Depression policymakers were largely lost for years in a forest of possible causes, each with its own path out that was at logjams with the others. Maybe most distinctly, the US government then was unused to the idea of intervening in any substantial way during a crisis, while today it is almost standard policy.
Still, the feeling that the years ahead will be of enormous historical importance and change is hard to shake. Looking back at the events of the 1930s, the lesson to be drawn, I think, is to take this opportunity to remake life again and provide an even greater sense of security and control over their lives to the common people, ourselves--be it through universal health care, tuition-free college, a voice in the governance of the workplace, or anything else--as the requirement may be in the society in question.
jodilynclayton's review
3.0
I cheated in that I had to read this for my Between the Wars class. However it IS a book and I DID read it...Anyway, it was pretty good and I might have given it more stars if it wasn't assigned to me. We had to do reading questions after every chapter so my relationship with this book was a love/hate one. (Does anyone else have relationships with books?) Interesting, but a little dry is a good description.
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