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Teaching 1917-1945 in the U.S. History Survey
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by David M. Kennedy
Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History
Stanford University
Stanford, California
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Between Two Wars
Bracketed by the two world wars, the period from 1917 to 1945 produced some of the most convulsive, consequential, and controversial developments in American history. These years witnessed the beginnings of our mass-consumption society, with all its attendant economic and cultural upheavals; the Great Depression and its revelations about the liabilities of an unbridled free-market economy; the New Deal's transformation of American political institutions, ideas, and behavior; and the revolution in international affairs caused by World War II. For all these reasons, students perennially find the period intriguing, and teachers are well advised to give it special emphasis in the context of the survey course.
The First World War and the End of the Progressive Era
The 1920s: Portrait of a Decade
The Depression and the New Deal
The Second World War and Its Legacy
The First World War and the End of the Progressive Era
It's a truism that the First World War marked a major turning point in European history. Too often that assumption uncritically informs the American side of the story as well. But the United States entered that conflict well beyond its halfway point, was a formal belligerent for just 19 months, saw combat only in the final few weeks of the war, and thereafter retreated with unseemly haste from the tentative promises of Wilsonian internationalism, as Margaret Macmillan's Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (2002) has vividly reminded us.
It's therefore inappropriate to give the First World War the centrality in the American narrative that it rightly occupies on the European side. My own treatment of this topic in the classroom mirrors the approach I took in Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980), which is to use the war experience as a lens through which to examine some of the major themes of the Progressive Era, especially concerning the role of the state, immigration, and foreign relations. In my own course at Stanford, the First World War thus serves more of a retrospective than prospective purpose -- with one conspicuous exception, discussed below.
The 1920s: Portrait of a Decade
Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday (1931) rendered the 1920s as an overture to the great drama of the Depression decade -- indeed, as a cautionary tale about the shortcomings of pre-New Deal American society. Almost all writers since have followed suit. I discussed some of the limitations of this approach in "In Retrospect: Revisiting Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday" (Reviews in American History, June 1986: 309-318). Yet it remains true that understanding the major social and economic developments of the 1920s is indispensable to assessing the human impact of the Great Depression, as well as the New Deal's political logic.
The major themes of the 1920s include chronic job insecurity; the aggressive commercialization of popular culture; the proliferation of new technologies like the automobile, radio, and motion pictures; the effects of the massive immigration of the preceding generation; the post-Nineteenth Amendment debates about women's role in American society; the persistence of Jim Crow in the South; and the chronic agricultural depression occasioned by the end of the First World War. Lizabeth Cohen's Making a New Deal (1990) expertly explores many of those themes, as does William Leuchtenburg's The Perils of Prosperity (1958). Nearly half a century on, Leuchtenburg's work remains the best synthetic treatment of the decade -- powerful testimony both to Leuchtenburg's craftsmanship and, as his very title suggests, to the robustness of the paradigm that Allen established.
Another useful approach in the classroom is to guide students into the volumes originally commissioned by Herbert Hoover, Recent Social Trends (1933), which offer extraordinarily rich descriptive data about virtually every sector of American society in the 1920s. Supplementing them with selections from Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd's sociological classic, Middletown (1929), and excerpts from Historical Statistics of the United States allows students to piece together their own portrait of the decade.
The Depression and the New Deal
Teaching the Depression to students who have never experienced anything remotely comparable to its economic and social dislocations is a particular challenge. Of all the compilations of Depression-era testimony, I've found the most vivid to be the reports that Lorena Hickok wrote during her travels around the stricken country from 1933 to 1935. These reports, found in One Third of a Nation: Lorena Hickok Reports on the Great Depression, edited by Richard Lowitt and Maurine Beasley (1981), also help to dispel two troublesome misunderstandings: that the Depression happened on Herbert Hoover's watch and was effectively dispelled after Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933 and that the Depression was a protracted but transient crisis that afflicted a normally prosperous and stable society. As Hickok makes clear, the Depression stubbornly endured for years after 1933. Moreover, Hickok's travels taught her that the Depression was not just a passing problem for an otherwise healthy society, but a stunning demonstration of that society's long-accumulating economic and social defects.
This point is crucial to understanding the meaning and historical significance of the New Deal. When Roosevelt spoke in his Second Inaugural Address in 1937 of that "one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished," he was not talking about the immediate victims of the Depression. In fact, he was convinced on that occasion that "our progress out of the depression is obvious." He warned, however, that "symptoms of prosperity may become portents of disaster!"
To put it mildly, this was not the usual sentiment of politicians about prosperity. But FDR's speech (widely anthologized and easily accessible to students) can be read as striking evidence of the New Deal's highest strategic ambition -- not simply to lift the pall of Depression, but to find lasting remedies for the structural problems that had left one-third of Americans permanently insecure in their livelihoods and lives. Extending the security that the patrician Roosevelts had long enjoyed as a birthright to millions of less fortunate Americans is by far the largest legacy of the New Deal, as I argue in Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (1999).
The Second World War and Its Legacy
Security of a somewhat different sort is, of course, the great issue of World War II. Here is where the effects of the war that opened this period prove relevant to understanding the nature of the war that closed it. Various revisionist efforts have done little to alter the conventional picture: that World War I fatally destabilized the international system and hugely disrupted the internal workings of several key states; that America's effective withdrawal from that system after 1918 frustrated efforts to reconstitute a peaceful and secure international order; that Franklin Roosevelt became convinced earlier than most of his isolationist countrymen that the United States had somehow to find a way to contribute to international stabilization; and that Nazi and Japanese aggression eventually became intolerable, compelling the United States to take up arms.
Those considerations underscore the obvious: that the coming of World War II cannot be understood in anything other than an international context. Somewhat less conventional is the picture that emerges if we keep that context in focus throughout the conflict. American folklore has it that the "greatest generation" won the war almost single-handedly. But as R. J. Overy impressively demonstrates in Why the Allies Won (1995), America's World War II did not remotely resemble the war that all other combatants were forced to fight. The United States, for example, lost some 400,000 military dead and a handful of civilians; the Soviet Union, which bore the brunt of the fighting against Germany, lost 24 million people, 16 million of them civilians. Compared to all the other major belligerents, America fielded a relatively small fighting force, had far fewer casualties proportionate to population, never felt the scourge of combat in its heartland, and was the only country that managed to grow its civilian economy even while waging war.
The United States meanwhile developed fearsome new weapons systems, not least the long-range strategic bombers and atomic bombs that revolutionized warfare and defined American war-fighting doctrines right down to the present day. These and other matters, including allegations of a conspiracy to bait the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor, the internment of Japanese aliens and Japanese-American citizens on the West Coast, the war's effects on women on the home front, the second-front and "unconditional surrender" controversies, America's relation to the Holocaust, and the lingering controversy about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, are treated at considerable length in Freedom from Fear.
Especially in this era of globalization, it is important for students of American history to understand the peculiar relationship of the United States to this most disruptive and formative event in modern world history. Not the least of its consequences was to set in train the trade-liberating and investment-enhancing processes that produced globalization itself -- significantly advancing the goals of international cooperation and widely shared prosperity that had long informed the "idealist" strain in American foreign policy. Conspicuous in this regard were the institutions that the United States helped to create at war's end: the United Nations, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (which morphed into the World Trade Organization in the 1990s). In the long run, the historical forces that those institutions represented and catalyzed are likely to prove even more consequential than the Cold War in shaping the lives of Americans and of virtually all the rest of the world's peoples.
David M. Kennedy is Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford University. His books include Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War (1999) and Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980).
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