Nothing to FearBy ADAM COHEN

Reviewed by Adam Kirsch

Revisiting the magnitude of the crisis FDR faced can be both inspiring and overwhelming.

 The story of the Hundred Days has much less to do with Roosevelt than with his advisers, who plied him with improvised and contradictory plans of action. 

When Adam Cohen's publishers scheduled Nothing to Fear, his dramatic new history of the first hundred days of FDR's administration, to appear just before Inauguration Day, 2009, they could not have suspected just how disturbingly timely the book would be. Ever since the Wall Street meltdown last September, Americans have been wondering whether our current financial crisis is going to result, like the Crash of 1929, in another Great Depression. As unemployment figures rise and major industries demand government bailouts, the historical comparison looks more and more plausible. Certainly President-elect Obama is aware of it: he has already announced a plan to create 2.5 million public-works jobs, the biggest such program since the days of the Works Progress Administration.

Reading Nothing to Fear, however, helps to put our current economic woes in better perspective. People are worried enough today, but there is nothing like the sheer terror that afflicted the United States in March 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office. Since Black Friday, three and a half years before, the stock market had dropped 85 percent; but the country was facing more than a financial crisis. As Cohen effectively shows in his opening pages, the Depression was turning into a full-scale social collapse. Farm income had dropped by two-thirds, at a time when 40 percent of Americans still made their living by farming. Five thousand banks had failed, wiping out their depositors' life savings. Americans were literally starving in the streets: "There were great numbers of hospital cases of malnutrition reported, of babies dying, of men falling dead in parks, and frozen unemployed found in abandoned warehouses during the winter," recalled the journalist Matthew Josephson.