Fear Itself (78 page)

81
D. W. Brogan, “American Liberalism Today,” in
British Essays in American History
, ed. H. C. Allen and C. P. Hill
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1957), p. 326.

82
Ira Katznelson,
When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America
(New York: W. W, Norton, 2005).

83
Anthony J. Badger,
FDR: The Hundred Days
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), p. 161.

84
Ackerman,
We the People
, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991–1998).

CHAPTER 1
A JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

1
Donald M. Frame, ed.,
The Complete Essays of Montaigne
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), pp. 52–53.

2
Edmund Burke,
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
(1757; reprint, South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), p. 57; Francis Bacon,
De Augmentis Scientiarum,
Book II (1623); Henry David Thoreau’s journal entry
for September 7, 1851. Henry David Thoreau,
Writings of Henry David Thoreau
, vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), p. 468.

3
Kenneth Finegold and Theda Skocpol,
State and Party in America’s New Deal
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); Michael Goldfield, “Worker Insurgency, Radical Organization, and New Deal Labor Legislation,”
American Political Science Review
83 (1989): 1257–82; Theda Skocpol, Kenneth Finegold, and Michael Goldfield, “Explaining New Deal Labor Policy,” ibid., 84 (1990): 1297–315; Alan Brinkley,
The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995); Thomas Ferguson, “From Normalcy to New Deal: Industrial Structure, Party Competition, and American Public Policy in the Great Depression,”
International Organization
1 (1984): 41–94.

4
I take the title of this chapter from Graham Greene,
Journey without Maps
(London: William Heinemann, 1936).

5
For the distinctions between acute fear and chronic fear, and between “the direct object of the fear and the effects of being frightened by it,” see John Hollander, “Fear Itself,”
Social Research
71 (2004): 865, 868.

6
Paul Berben,
Dachau: 1933–1945, the Official History
(London: Norfolk Press, 1975); Nikolaus Wachsmann, “Looking into the Abyss: Historians and the Nazi Concentration Camps,”
European History Quarterly
36 (2006): 247–78.

7
Walter Lippmann,
A New Social Order
(New York: John Day, 1933), pp. 7–8, 9–10. Lippmann’s description of modern politics as defined by the emergence of the mass state heralded an account of masses and groups in the dictatorships by the sociologist Emil Lederer, who served as the first dean of the Graduate Faculty at the New School for Social Research. His book
State of the Masses: The Threat of the Classless Society
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1940) contrasts the enforced unity of the masses in the Soviet, Italian, and German dictatorships with the heterogeneous plurality of persons and interests in the mass democracies.

8
Lippmann,
A New Social Order,
pp. 10–11.

9
Albert Camus, “Speech of Acceptance upon the Award of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Delivered in Stockholm on the Tenth of December, 1957,” in
Fifty Years
, ed. Clifton Fadiman, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965, p. 723.

10
James W. Garner, “Proposed Rules for the Regulation of Aerial Warfare,”
American Journal of International Law
18 (1924): 56.

11
Greene,
Journey without Maps
, p. 11. Greene’s
Ministry of Fear
(London: William Heinemann, 1943), one critic has noted, invokes fear as “the terror that arises when ordinary men become murderers, when the world of organized destruction and murder on a massive scale begins to seem admirably fitted to the minds of men.” Robert Hoskins, “Greene and Wordsworth: ‘The Ministry of Fear,’”
South Atlantic Review
48 (1983): 34.

12
Karl Loewenstein, “Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights,”
American Political Science Review
31 (1937): 417.

13
William E. Dodd, “Can Democracy Be Preserved?,”
Public Opinion Quarterly
2 (1938): 26. Dodd’s diaries record how, when the phone rang in his University of Chicago Department of History office, Franklin Roosevelt recruited him, stating, “I want an American liberal in Germany as a standing example.” See William E. Dodd, Jr., and Martha Dodd, eds.,
Ambassador Dodd’s Diary, 1933–1938
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941), p. 3. A native of North Carolina and a scholar of the Old South, Dodd had just been selected president of the American Historical Association for 1934. A useful biography is Fred Arthur Baily,
William Edward Dodd: The South’s Yeoman Scholar
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997). For a treatment of the experience of the Dodd family in Berlin, one that focuses on daughter Martha’s affairs with Nazi officials, see Erik Larson,
In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin
(New York: Crown, 2011).

14
Pitirim A. Sorokin, “A Neglected Factor of War,”
American Sociological Review
3 (1938): 483.

15
Cited in David Mayers,
George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 53, 54. Kennan’s book was never completed or published, and he did not refer to it in his memoirs.

16
Frank Hyneman Knight,
Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921), pp. 225, 233; see also Paul Davidson, “Is Probability Theory Relevant for Uncertainty? A Post-Keynesian Perspective,”
Journal of Economic Perspectives
8, no. 1 (1991): 129–43. The theme of Knightian uncertainty is highlighted in Mark Blyth,
Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

17
An excellent overview of this scholarship is provided in Tom Pyszczynski et al., “Experimental Existential Psychology: Coping with the Facts of Life,” in ed. S. T. Fiske, D. T. Gilbert, and G. Lindzey,
Handbook of Social Psychology
, 5th ed. (New York: Wiley, 2010), pp. 724-57. On attempts to make estimates about uncertain and shifting parameters internal to choices, see Robert W. Klwein et al., “Decisions with Estimation Uncertainty,”
Econometrica
46 (1978): 1363–87.

18
Walter Lippmann,
Interpretations, 1933–1935,
ed. Allan Nevins (New York: Macmillan, 1936), p. 27.

19
This concern about the use, and misuse, of fear is a central theme in Corey Robin,
Fear: The History of a Political Idea
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

20
Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Acceptance for Renomination,” June 27, 1936, in
The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt
, vol. 5 (New York: Random House, 1938), p. 231. This speech is most remembered for its attack on “the economic royalists,” “the privileged princes of economic dynasties,” and for its famous statement of how “this generation has a rendezvous with destiny.” The swift movement from fear to faith is echoed by Leuchtenburg. His book ends before World War II, just after the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act established a minimum wage and set maximum hours of work. See William E. Leuchtenburg,
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932–1940
(New York: Harper & Row, 1963), pp. 345-346.

21
Alfred Kazin, “Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.: The Historian at the Center,” in
Alfred Kazin’s America: Critical and Personal Writings
, ed. Ted Solotaroff (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), pp. 223, 227, 224, 227-28. This is the “truth” that Kazin thought Schlesinger had sacrificed. But he does recognize that “Schlesinger’s book, which becomes thin in its complacent New Deal references, is actually exciting and moving whenever, in seeking to render the facts, it hints of the permanent crisis that is the truth of our times” (p. 228). This text, written in 1959, was first published in Alfred Kazin,
Contemporaries
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1962).

22
Arthur Meier Schlesinger,
The New Deal in Action: A Continuation of A. M. Schlesinger’s Political and Social Growth of the United States to the Special Session of the United States Congress, November 15, 1937
(New York: Macmillan, 1938).

23
A useful summary can be found in Theodore J. Lowi, “The Roosevelt Revolution and the New American State,” in
Comparative Theory and Political Experience
, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein, Theodore J. Lowi, and Sidney Tarrow (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 188–212.

24
Hubert H. Humphrey,
The Political Philosophy of the New Deal
(1940; reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970), p. v.

25
Harold Stearns,
Liberalism in America: Its Origin, Its Temporary Collapse, Its Future
(New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919).

26
Richard Hofstadter,
The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R.
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), pp. 319, 302.

27
It is important to give comparable status to both the reality and the representation of fear, and to assess their fit with each other. For a discussion of this relationship, see John Lewis Gaddis,
The Landscape of History
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 104, 123.

28
Leuchtenburg,
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940
, pp. 1–40.

29
Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,
The Age of Roosevelt
, 3 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957–1960).

30
Department of Commerce figures cited in Jean Edward Smith,
FDR
(New York: Random House, 2007), p. 241.

31
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.,
The Age of Roosevelt
, vol. 1,
The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1933
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), pp. 1, 3.

32
A partial exception is Alonzo Hamby,
For the Survival of Democracy: Franklin Roosevelt and the World Crisis of the 1930s
(New York: Free Press, 2004). This fine book firmly emplaces the New Deal within global affairs and the challenge to liberal democracy by the dictatorships, but its narrative structure is more traditional than its central theme projects.

33
An important example with a somewhat different time frame is James Patterson’s
Grand Expectations: The United States,
1945–1974
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). That book’s prologue introduces the reader to the explosion of joy on V-J Day in August 1945, when Japan surrendered, though tempered by the wartime experience of death and injury, and other grounds for concern—President Truman’s inexperience, the uncertain capacities of a peacetime economy, and atomic weapons. And yet, the dominant mood was upbeat, Patterson reports, vastly different from the agonies of early Depression uncertainties. “The enemies had been defeated; the soldiers would soon return; families would reunite; the future promised a great deal more than the past. In this optimistic mood millions of Americans plunged hopefully into the new post-war world” (p. 9).

34
Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,
The Age of Roosevelt,
vol. 3,
The Politics of Upheaval
:
1935–1936
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 656.

35
Schlesinger Jr.,
The Politics of Upheaval,
p. 656; Schlesinger Jr.,
Crisis of the Old Order,
p. 8. For the past half century, this portrayal of how an active presidency overcame hard times has set the tone, established the agenda, and defined the range of most New Deal histories, including William Leuchtenburg’s classic account of “Roosevelt’s Reconstruction,” and David Kennedy’s magisterial tale of how the New Deal liberated “freedom from fear.” “The Politics of Hard Times” and the “Winter of Despair” open Leuchtenburg’s
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal,
pp. 1–40. David M. Kennedy,
Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

36
See Louise Young,
Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). She traces the impact of colonization, including a massive settlement project, on Manchuria and on Japan.

37
Anne Applebaum, “A History of Horror,”
New York Review of Books,
October 18, 2001, p. 41; Applebaum was reviewing Joel Kotek and Pierre Rigoulot’s excellent book,
Le Siècle des camps
(Paris: J. C. Lattès, 2001).