It was a decade of extreme poverty for many, especially blacks, immigrants, and farmers, (who made up 30 percent of American workers in 1920). He casts Herbert Hoover (the man whom none other than a young FDR in 1919 judged as best suited to be president) as a "progressive" and discovers many New Deal qualifications when Hoover tried to manage the economic and social disaster.
In Freedom From Fear, Kennedy examines in detail America's greatest economic crisis ever, and explains all existing comparisons with that event. Kennedy also states the techniques of leadership Franklin Roosevelt (possibly the most effective and significant president of the century) showed and seriously discusses the nature of "FDR's great reform legacy". In terms of foreign relations, Kennedy describes the amazing change from isolationism to global engagement and dominance. Kennedy goes over the debate between 1935 and 1941 about American foreign policy, a debate that ended with American involvement in World War II and caused the end of a 150 years of isolationism. This debate still comes back in discussions for foreign policy today. Economically, he explains how the nation (whose citizens suffered 17 percent unemployment throughout the Depression decade and a third of whom FDR characterized as "ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished") accomplished the production miracle of World War II and placed itself at the greatest sustained material and consumer boom of all time. Kennedy focuses on a primary change in our political culture caused by the Depression and the war, our heightened expectations about the role of government in our lives.
Kennedy also provides an evaluation of the New Deal. He rejects the reviews from leftists who attack the "conservative achievements of liberal reform." What did FDR hope to accomplish with his New Deal? "We are going to make a country," he told Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, "in which no one is left out.