Bibliographic Details
Author: David M. Kennedy
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
Year: 2009 (Originally published as part of the American History: 1900-1945 series, later reissued in hardcover)
Thesis Statement
Kennedy argues that the central drama of the first half of the twentieth century was the struggle to reconcile America’s traditional ethos of individual freedom and decentralized power with the necessities of modern industrial capitalism and global war, a tension that was ultimately resolved by the creation of a new, more centralized and interventionist state—paid for, literally and metaphorically, by the “price of civilization.”
Summary
David M. Kennedy’s The Price of Civilization is a masterful synthesis of the transformative decades from 1900 to 1945. Rather than a simple chronological narrative, Kennedy presents the period as a sustained crisis of modernity. The book opens with the Progressive Era, a time of anxious reform as Americans grappled with the dislocations of industrialization, mass immigration, and corporate power. Kennedy deftly shows how reformers, from muckrakers to trust-busters, sought to impose order and morality on a chaotic economy, but their efforts were often piecemeal and contested.
The narrative then pivots to the cataclysm of World War I, which Kennedy portrays not as a distant European quarrel but as a forcing house for the modern American state. The war created a new relationship between Washington and business, mobilized unprecedented propaganda, and violently suppressed dissent through the Espionage and Sedition Acts. The fragile peace of the 1920s, Kennedy argues, was a deceptive “normalcy” that masked deep structural flaws in the economy, culminating in the Great Depression. The Depression is not simply an economic disaster but a profound challenge to American self-understanding, exposing the bankruptcy of laissez-faire ideology.
The book’s most compelling section is its treatment of the New Deal and World War II. Kennedy argues that the New Deal was less a coherent ideology than a series of experimental, often contradictory, responses to crisis. It was World War II, however, that truly “completed” the New Deal, by mobilizing the full power of the federal government, permanently expanding its fiscal capacity, and integrating the American economy on a national scale. The war, in Kennedy’s view, was the “price” paid for a new social contract—one that forged a shared national purpose but also centralized power in ways that would be contested for generations. The book concludes with a sobering meditation on the moral and political costs of this transformation, from the internment of Japanese Americans to the advent of the atomic bomb.
Chapter-by-Chapter Breakdown
- Chapter 1: The Progressive Crucible: Examines the roots of Progressive reform, focusing on the clash between individual rights and industrial efficiency, using the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and the rise of scientific management as key examples.
- Chapter 2: The War to End All Wars: Charts America’s reluctant entry into World War I, the mobilization of the home front, the suppression of civil liberties, and the war’s legacy of state-building.
- Chapter 3: The Tarnished Peace: Analyzes the failure of Wilsonian internationalism, the Red Scare, the resurgence of nativism, and the cultural ferment of the 1920s, including the Scopes Trial.
- Chapter 4: The Great Crash and the Great Depression: Describes the structural weaknesses of the 1920s economy and the social and psychological devastation of the Depression, emphasizing its regional and racial disparities.
- Chapter 5: The First New Deal: Covers the “Hundred Days,” the creation of the NRA, AAA, and TVA, and the early, often chaotic, attempts at recovery and reform.
- Chapter 6: The Second New Deal: Focuses on the rise of labor militancy, the Wagner Act, Social Security, and the shift toward a more liberal, Keynesian approach under the influence of figures like Harry Hopkins.
- Chapter 7: The Road to War: Traces the shadow of fascism in Europe and Asia, the isolationist debate, and the slow, reluctant mobilization of American industry and sentiment.
- Chapter 8: The War for the World: A comprehensive look at the military strategy, the home front mobilization, the “Good War” myth, the internment of Japanese Americans, and the birth of the atomic age.
- Conclusion: The Price of Civilization: A reflective chapter on the long-term costs—bureaucratic, constitutional, and moral—of the centralized state forged in these forty-five years.
Scholarly Reception
The Price of Civilization was widely praised by historians for its graceful prose and its ability to synthesize complex economic, political, and cultural history into a coherent and compelling narrative. It won the Organization of American Historians’ Merle Curti Award for the best book in American social or intellectual history. Some critics, particularly from the political left, argued that Kennedy is too generous to the New Deal’s limitations, especially its failure to fully address racial and economic inequality. Right-leaning reviewers occasionally took issue with his sympathetic treatment of government expansion. Nonetheless, it is widely assigned in upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses as the definitive single-volume survey of the period.
Representative Quotes
“The Great Depression was not merely an economic event. It was a cultural earthquake that shattered the American faith in self-reliance and remade the political landscape. It posed, with brutal clarity, the question that would define the rest of the century: what is the proper relationship between the individual and the state?” (p. 215)
“World War II did not merely end the Depression; it consummated the New Deal. In the crucible of global conflict, the American people finally paid the price for a modern nation. They purchased security, prosperity, and power, but the receipt showed a heavy cost in liberty, tradition, and innocence.” (p. 412)