Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945

Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 is a 1999 nonfiction book by the American historian David M. Kennedy. Published as part of the Oxford History of the United States, Freedom from Fear covers the history of the United States during the Great Depression and World War II. It won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for History.

Development
Book publisher Oxford University Press produces "Oxford histories", a line of book series usually intended to broadly synthesize historical topics. In 1961, historians Richard Hofstadter and C. Vann Woodward began co-editing the Oxford History of the United States. Their goal for the series was to produce a line of academically credible books that non-academic audiences would also find readable, and The Baltimore Sun anticipated the series would be affordable for "the family budget". Hofstadter died in 1970, before the series published any books. The press publicly announced in 1970 that the Oxford History of the United States series was forthcoming and that a series volume about the New Deal would be written by historian Ernest R. May.

By 1982, when the series published its first volume—The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789—and issued another list of projected titles with their authors, historian David M. Kennedy had replaced May. At the time, Kennedy was a professor of history at Stanford University and had authored the 1980 Over Here: The First World War and American Society. Kennedy's own parents had lived through the Great Depression. Growing up, his family had attributed the Depression to United States president Herbert Hoover, calling it the "Hoover Depression".

In an interview, Kennedy explained that in writing Freedom from Fear he focused on synthesizing existing scholarship and did not travel to archives for research. Chapter manuscripts for Kennedy's volume met Woodward's resounding approval, though in July 1998 he advised Kennedy to shorten certain portions of the nearly 1,000-page manuscript.

Publication
Oxford University Press published Freedom from Fear as part of the Oxford History of the United States in May 1999. The book is 954 pages long, and it weighs approximately six pounds. There are 24 maps of battles, 48 halftone images, a bibliographic essay, and a 59-page index. On release, Freedom from Fear sold for $39.95 (USD, ) or £30 (GBP, ). In 2001, Oxford University Press published a one-volume paperback edition that is 992 pages long and upon release sold for $22.50 (USD, ).

Content
Freedom from Fear is a narrative history of the United States during the Great Depression and World War II. It opens on a vignette of Adolf Hitler as a lance corporal at the end of World War I and ends by narrating a nuclear weapons test in the Soviet Union and Maoism's ascent to political power in China. The book is split across two halves: the first 400 pages cover the Great Depression in the United States and the New Deal, from 1929 to 1939, and the second half covers United States history during World War II across about 500 pages. In historian Mark Leff's words, Freedom from Fear is "essentially... two books, each of which would require almost no revision to stand alone". The book mostly focuses on high politics, statecraft, military history, and diplomacy. There is one chapter about race and one chapter about labor history. Freedom from Fear contains little content about social history, cultural history, or the history of religion.

In Freedom from Fear, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 marked the Great Depression's beginning but did not cause it, as according to Kennedy international economic conditions were more responsible for the economic depression. Kennedy's depiction of United States president Herbert Hoover's handling of the early depression is sympathetic. Freedom from Fear casts his belief that the American economy would recover without intervention as plausible given available information at the time and emphasizing the interventions of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and Federal Farm Board during his presidency. In Kennedy's portrayal, Hoover's policies foreshadowed those of subsequent president Franklin D. Roosevelt but were insufficient to alleviate the Great Depression's humanitarian crisis.

Roosevelt himself predominates as the lead figure and protagonist of Freedom from Fear. In the book, Roosevelt appears as an active president meaningfully responsible for pulling the United States out of the Depression. Kennedy depicts Roosevelt as having laid the foundations of modern liberalism in the United States and having been "a truly brilliant politician with the skills to inspire, manipulate, and bend people", Booklist summarizes. Freedom from Fear is more ambiguous in its depiction of Roosevelt's establishment of the New Deal. Kennedy claims the concept of the New Deal was unclear to voters in 1932 and that Roosevelt's approach as president was initially improvisational, producing a "ramshackle, hastily assembled" array of programs, in Kennedy's words, that did not stabilize until 1935.

Freedom from Fear 's latter half focuses on international relations, including the context for and prosecution of World War II. It portrays both the Pacific War and the European theatre of World War II as well as home front events like industrial mobilization, women entering the workforce, and racism. According to Freedom from Fear, the American war experience was relatively prosperous compared to most other countries participating in World War II, as military Keynesianism—high federal spending on military industrialization—ended the Great Depression. Kennedy uses the Manhattan Project as an example of this that highlights how "uniquely privileged" the United States was as the only belligerent with "the margins of money, material, and manpower, as well as the undisturbed space and time" necessary to create nuclear weapons.

Storytelling
Freedom from Fear received acclaim upon its release. According to historian William Rubinstein, the book is "a highly successful, vivid, and fair narrative account". Journalist Rick Perlstein praised its "colorful details and the clanking, large-geared narrative engine" and argued that one "could even call it beach reading". The Los Angeles Times averred that "[e]ven 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" of Freedom from Fear. The New York Times Book Review declared it "the best one-volume account of the Roosevelt era currently available". Historian Thomas Blantz considered it a "book for all readers", arguing lay audiences would appreciate the "absorbing story". The Library Journal complimented Kennedy for "[d]isplaying a literary craft uncommon in survey works" like Freedom from Fear. According to The Boston Globe, in Freedom from Fear Kennedy "makes [the history] his story in a way no one has ever before".

Coverage
Historian Blantz believed that scholars would "find [Freedom from Fear] a balanced review" of research on the era, writing that "the impact of Depression and war in the daily lives of Americans—farmers, soldiers, women, industrial workers, Nisei, Black Americans, the unemployed—is thoroughly portrayed". According to Foreign Affairs, the book "had breadth and depth, fully comprehended political, military, economic, and social developments, and integrated a wealth of specialized scholarship". Publishers Weekly 's book review called Freedom from Fear "the definitive history of the most important decades of the American century", and Booklist considered it "comprehensive".

There were reviewers who criticized the selectiveness of Freedom from Fear 's coverage. The Journal of American History called the subtitle, The American People, a "curious choice" because "the 'American people' appear with conspicuous infrequency", as Freedom from Fear has "a traditional cast" and although Kennedy includes women and Americans of diverse ethnic background, he does not analyze gender or ethnicity as such. Writing for The New Leader, historian David Oshinsky wrote that "ordinary Americans... too often appear as passive victims of injustice, poverty and pain", leaving the impression that social change happened only because of leaders, without the input of the public. According to historian Harvard Sitkoff, "women are all but invisible" in the book, with only twenty women named in the entire index. The New York Times Book Review reported that although Kennedy does "consider minorities and women" in the book, they are "decidedly secondary" and "[d]ead white males predominate". Oshinsky criticized the book's inattention to popular culture, and the Book Review stated that "American culture, particularly popular culture, is all but ignored".

Reviewers noted Freedom from Fear 's coverage of the military history of the United States during World War II. Parameters called the coverage of the war a "comprehensive treatment" that "artfully weaves battlefront and homefront". Historian Kevin Boyle wrote Freedom from Fear covered wartime diplomacy and battles with "compelling detail". According to historian Justus Drew Doenecke, Kennedy "is at his best describing the battles of World War II, conveying an immediacy seldom found in combat accounts".

Blantz complimented Freedom from Fear 's depiction of the United States home front during World War II. Boyle called Freedom from Fear "a forceful reminder that for the millions of Americans who suffered through a generation of depression and war, the costs of the postwar era were well worth bearing". Doenecke averred the book "could do more" to analyze Roosevelt's "incredibly poor" domestic administration during the war, such as presiding over the incarceration of Japanese Americans and barring the United States to refugees from Nazi Germany.

Honors
Freedom from Fear received four book prizes in 2000. These were the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Francis Parkman Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the Commonwealth Club of California's Gold Medal. In a 2022 interview with Five Books, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Foundation historical programming director Cynthia Koch included Freedom from Fear in a list of what she considered the five "best books on Franklin D. Roosevelt".