This article is adapted from an essay that will appear
in David M. Kennedy and Lizabeth Cohen, The
American Pageant, Fourteenth Edition.
The Great Depression and World War II were events in
world history, but they touched different countries
in sometimes dramatically different ways. To paraphrase
Tolstoy, many peoples suffered, but every unhappy people
was unhappy in its own way — and understanding
the particularities of the individual cases can do much
to illuminate questions of national character and the
role of contingency in history.
The Depression was a monstrous, planetary-scale economic
hurricane that wreaked havoc around the globe. All nations
were walloped by its destructive force, but two were
especially hard-hit: the United States and Germany.
In both countries production sank by nearly half, while
unemployment approached twenty-five percent —
levels of economic collapse and human misery unmatched
elsewhere.
In the United States and Germany alike the Depression
badly discredited existing political regimes and created
opportunities for new leaders to emerge. In a striking
contrast that speaks volumes about the different political
cultures that spawned them, Germany got Adolf Hitler,
and the United States got Franklin D. Roosevelt. At
the outset, both asked to be judged on their records
of success or failure in doing battle against the Depression.
Both were ultimately judged on other grounds altogether
— the one universally condemned in the history
books, the other almost universally praised.
The two men never met —though their lives uncannily
paralleled one another’s and at last fatefully
intersected in the gargantuan conflict of World War
II. Roosevelt, born in 1882, and Hitler, born in 1889,
were men of the same generation. Eerily, as if conforming
to the plot of a Gothic novel, they died with days of
one another —Roosevelt on April 12, 1945, Hitler
just eighteen days later. Each in his respective country
came to supreme power within the span of a few weeks.
Hitler was installed as Germany’s Chancellor on
January 30, 1933; Roosevelt was inaugurated as President
of the United States just thirty-five days later, on
March 4. Both headed advanced industrial states deeply
afflicted by the Depression. Both had achieved office
by means of democratic elections, though democracy soon
withered under one’s hand and flourished under
that of the other.
Roosevelt’s entire presidency unfolded under the
shadow of Hitler’s tyrannical fanaticism. Of the
events that compose the great chapters of Roosevelt’s
political biography—the drama of the “Hundred
Days,” the battle against the Depression, the
landmark social and economic reforms of the New Deal,
and later the agony of uncertainty about Europe’s
fate and America’s relation to it, the struggle
against isolationism and the waging of World War II—all
played out against the looming threat and eventually
the armed challenge of Hitler’s Nazi regime. Roosevelt’s
trials and achievements, as well as the very character
of American democracy in the mid-twentieth century,
can only be properly understood in that larger context.
But if the parallels in these two lives are instructive,
so are the contrasts, and even more tellingly. In the
spring of 1933, Roosevelt was coaxing the Hundred Days’
legislation out of the American Congress, wooing the
labor unions and the ethnic and racial minorities with
which he would build a long-lasting Democratic Party
electoral majority, and making highly innovative use
of the radio to reach beyond the hostile media magnates
who controlled the nation’s newspapers. In those
same months, Hitler was turning the Reichstag (the German
legislature) into his personal instrument, dissolving
the German labor unions, and ruthlessly purging all
criticism of his policies from the German press. Soon
he declared the Nazis the only legal party in Germany,
and proceeded to impose a reign of terror on the German
people, cruelly enforced by the Geheime Staatspolizei,
or “Gestapo,” the Nazis’ brutally
efficient secret police, the likes of which has no parallel
in the entire history of the United States.
A year later, while Roosevelt was worrying about a possible
political challenge from within his own party by the
swashbuckling Louisiana Senator Huey P. Long, Hitler
dispatched with his main Nazi rival, Sturm Abteilung
leader Ernst Röhm, by having him summarily executed.
The following year, 1935, Roosevelt shepherded his sweeping
reform program through Congress, notably including the
Social Security Act and the Wagner National Labor Relations
Act, initiatives that made life far safer for millions
of Americans and helped to usher them into the mainstream
of American life, including especially members of the
great immigrant communities that had arrived a generation
or so earlier. “We are going to make a country,”
Roosevelt said, “in which no one is left out.”
In that same year, Hitler codified the Nazis’
viciously anti-Semitic policies in the notorious Nuremberg
Decrees, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship,
barred them from the professions and military service,
and prohibited marriage between Jews and “Aryans”
— all gruesome steps on the road to the genocidal
war-time Holocaust that would eventually decimate European
Jewry.
Hitler and Roosevelt were men of the same era, of the
same generation, leaders of comparably developed countries
with a largely shared heritage of beliefs and values,
facing the same economic crisis – but yielding
two entirely different political results, and two entirely
different legacies for their peoples.
In the great conflict of World War II, Hitler’s
Germany and Roosevelt’s America also fought very
different wars —and not just because Germany went
down to defeat and America emerged triumphant. Indeed,
America’s experience in World War II stands in
vivid contrast with the experience of all other combatants,
including not only Germany but America’s allies
in the “Grand Alliance” as well.
Hitler’s vaunted “1,000-year Reich”
lay in smoldering ruins at war’s end, his people
dazed, demoralized, and starving. The strutting Fuhrer
had brewed a catastrophe so vast that its conclusion
seemed to sunder the web of time itself. Germans remember
the moment of their surrender on May 8, 1945 as Stunde
null, or “zero hour,” when history’s
clock came to a fearful halt. For generations thereafter
they have lived with a burden of guilt for their country’s
role in precipitating and waging the war. America, meanwhile,
in the words of Winston Churchill, stood at that same
moment “at the summit of the world,” and
Americans have ever after recollected World War II as
“the good war,” fought and won by the “greatest
generation.”
Elsewhere, even Roosevelt’s wartime partners—Britain
and the Soviet Union—had paid a far greater price
in blood and treasure than their fortunate American
ally.
Uniquely among all the belligerent countries in World
War II—perhaps uniquely in the history of warfare—the
United States alone had managed to grow its civilian
economy even while waging a hugely costly war. In Britain
and the Soviet Union, as well as Germany, the civilian
standard of living went down by approximately one-third,
exacting a huge price in terms of mundane, daily deprivation
from peoples already afflicted by wholesale destruction
and death. In the United States, on the other hand,
the civilian economy actually expanded by fifteen percent,
preparing the way for phenomenal prosperity in the post-war
decades.
And though it is true that 405,399 brave American servicemen
died in World War II, proportionate to population, American
losses were about one-third of Britain’s, and
about one-sixtieth of those in the Soviet Union—where
some eight million soldiers and a staggering sixteen
million civilians lost their lives. And as for those
civilian casualties: in the forty-eight continental
American states, the ones that had a star on the flag
in 1945, the US civilian death toll due to enemy action
was just six persons, a twenty-five-year-old minister’s
wife and five children from her church, all of them
the victims of a crude Japanese balloon-borne fire-bomb
that exploded in their faces on May 5, 1945 on the slopes
of Gearhart Mountain, near the hamlet of Bly, Oregon.
Our national mythology has enshrined the Depression
as a time of unparalleled suffering, and World War II
as a monument to patriotic sacrifice and unselfish service
to the cause of freedom. Without denying those stories,
a comparison with other people’s experience can
serve as a reminder that for all the misery that Depression
and war visited upon the United States, Americans could
count their blessings that fortune—and wise leadership—had
spared them the enormously more ghastly deprivations
and horrors that were all too common elsewhere.
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