PULITZER PRIZE WINNER-HISTORY

	April 17 , 2000
	We continue our conversations with this year's winners of the Pulitzer Prizes in the arts, and to Elizabeth Farnsworth.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: The winner in history this year is David Kennedy for his book "Freedom From Fear, the American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945." In telling his story, Kennedy combines grand narrative sweep with revealing details that remain in the mind long after book has been read. It is volume nine of the Oxford History of the United States, of which Kennedy is general editor. He is a professor of history at Stanford university and has also written books about World War I and the history of the birth control movement in the United States. Thanks for being with us and congratulations. DAVID KENNEDY, Pulitzer Prize, History: Thank you, Elizabeth. It's a pleasure to be here. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: I can't get some of the details, the stories out of my mind: The poverty of rural America before and during the Depression, for example. DAVID KENNEDY: Well, that's right. Even before what we know as the Great Depression happened, people lived in the American countryside, lived in what we would regard in wretched and primitive, preindustrial, pre-modern conditions. That's about 50 million people in 1930, it's a big fraction of the American public. Most of the homes in the countryside had no indoor plumbing, no electricity. In fact, about nine out of ten had no electricity, eight out of ten no plumbing. So that eventually when Franklin Roosevelt, as he famously did in 1937, talked about seeing one-third of the nation ill housed, ill clad, ill nourished and so on, he wasn't just talking about the victims of the Depression. He was talking about a big fraction of the American public who had been chronically deprived of all the benefits of modern life. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And you give us such specific stories about them and the other story I can't get out of my mind is the radar operator in North Oahu who actually reported that the Japanese planes were... he didn't know what they were, but a huge number of planes were on their way in 19 41. Tell us what happened then. DAVID KENNEDY: Yes. On December 7, 1941, the pearl harbor attackers were incoming to Pearl Harbor and they were spotted on a radar screen, but the operator and his supervisor concluded this was a flight of American bombers that were being ferried in from the California mainland to Hawaii for transshipment to the Philippines -- very easily made a mistake, but it was one of the several warnings that the attack was on s way that were ignored until it was too late. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And you take the specifics, but then you have this overall theme, which is the title, "Freedom From Fear," and that drives the whole book, so that it's always there. Tell us about that. Why freedom from fear? DAVID KENNEDY: The phrase "freedom from fear" comes from a famous speech Franklin Roosevelt gave in January of 1941 in which... it was a speech that was part of a campaign by that time was years old in which he was trying to educate the American public about what was at stake out there in the world which was at war. And he said there are at least four things worth fighting for, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. And I take freedom from fear to be the most inclusive of those freedoms. And the phrase trade catches an echo in my mind, at least, and I think with readers, too, I hope. Another famous Roosevelt's speech, his first inaugural, all we have to fear is fear itself. And I do think in the last analysis, as I tell the story, the great accomplishment of this generation is that they did free themselves from fear and freed rater generations from a lot of the fear and uncertainty of life at home and life in the broader international environment. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You're talking about - I mean, it's security really that you in the story you tell that the New Deal helped provide. And your own family... I wonder how much your own family's experience influenced your interest in this. DAVID KENNEDY: Well, in a peculiar way of speaking, I'm a Depression baby, even though I was born in 1914; after the Depression was thought to have concluded. But my parents were married in 1930, and my father almost immediately went unemployed. He had no reliable income for the next eight years -- until 1938. He finally got a job on a PWA, Public Works Administration project on Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State, and then eventually became a contract monitor for defense contracts in the Puget Sound Naval shipyard as World War II cranked up. The Depression made a deep impact on him, and through him on me. I grew up on a lot of the stories of the kind of depravation and hopelessness and despair that that decade inflicted on all kinds of people, my mother and father not least of all. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: One of your goals, as I understand it, in this Oxford series, is to write history which is easily read by people that are not specialists. I wonder if you'd read something that gives us an idea of the style of this book, please. DAVID KENNEDY: Well, there's a passage that describes the moment when Franklin Roosevelt heard the news that the Germans had invaded Poland, commencing thereby World War II or what we know as World War II in Europe. So it says, "at 3:00 AM, on September 1, 1939, the telephone rang at Franklin Roosevelt's bedside in the White House. It was Ambassador William Bullet calling from Paris. "Mr. President, bullet said, several German divisions are deep in Polish territory. There are reports of bombers over the city of Warsaw. Well, Bill, Roosevelt replied, it has come at least. God help us all." ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And in your depiction of the war, I was very interested in the way you wrote about the war, and this is not the good war that has been treated with so much nostalgia recently in this country. DAVID KENNEDY: Well, in some ways it was a good war. We won, after all. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: We were fighting... It was a good cause. DAVID KENNEDY: And it was a good cause. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: But there's nothing nostalgic about this book. DAVID KENNEDY: Well, I hope not. I intended to write an objective analysis of the whole period, including the war, not simply to send a valentine to that era. So it does... It was part of my intention was to tell the story in an objective way, and in a way that would sound to scholarship but would also be accessible to a general reader. I did in the write the book primarily for my academic colleagues or certainly not for captive student audiences. It's not a textbook. In fact, the whole series, the Oxford History of the United States, which this but one volume, was conceived originally by its original general editors, two wonderful historians, C. Van Woodward and Richard Hoffstader. They conceived of this idea many years ago as a series that would carry knowledge to a general reading public. I tried to be faithful to that brief. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Let's talk about some of the conclusions. Are there conclusions in your mind for us now, the current gilded age we're in, from the stock market crash and the Depression, which were two very different things in the way that you write about them in this book? DAVID KENNEDY: Well, I'd say two things. Number one, one of the lessons of this book and indeed all historical study, is that history is full of surprises. When we least expect it, it can deliver a sucker punch. The Great Depression was that kind of thing. No one saw it coming. It was a crisis on a scale, a magnitude that was overwhelming in the 19 30's. So that's one thing to keep in mind. We should inner get to smug and cocky that we've got the key to the future. The other, as you just mentioned, the other point that may be worth remembering in these tumultuous times is this great stock market crash of 1929 was no kind of direct cause of the Great Depression that followed. And, indeed, there was considerable recovery on the stock market in the months after October of 1929. The Depression is a much more complicated affair. It's roots lay deeply in the legacy of World War I and the disruption that worked in international commerce and international financial flows and so on. So we should take some comfort in the fact that the stock market's volatility is not necessarily a harbinger of a complete, calamitous Depression of the sort that we saw in the 1930's. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Briefly, how about conclusions about the New Deal? DAVID KENNEDY: Well, again, I think the title... ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: The role of government, for instance. DAVID KENNEDY: Well, yes, the New Deal is a great turning point in American history, because it's the moment in which we create the modern American state and in which people's attitudes about government change quite dramatically. It became legitimate for the government to play a role in in overseeing the economy and intervening in society in certain ways. That role remains controversial even down to our own day. But there are a few people today, I think, certainly not a majority, who would advocate repealing some of the great new deal reforms such as Social Security, the existence of the Securities and Exchange Commission, for example, an array of reforms that in the end freed big sectors of this so it from elements of fear, or to put it more clinically, that freed this society from certain elements of risk. The American economy became a less risky plates after the New Deal had instituted these reforms. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Well, David Kennedy, congratulations again, and thanks for being with us. DAVID KENNEDY: Thank you very much.

REGIONS TOPICS RECENT PROGRAMS ABOUT US FEEDBACK SUBSCRIPTIONS / FEEDS:

Support the kind of journalism done by the NewsHour...Become a member of your local PBS station.
PBS Online Privacy Policy Copyright ©1996- MacNeil/Lehrer Productions. All Rights Reserved.