David Kennedy's first part of Freedom from Fear opens with the American retreat from the world after 1918: high tariffs, insistence on repayment of war loans, refusal of the League, and the 1924 immigration restriction that later shut out refugees from Nazi Germany. He then shows how uneven the prosperity of the 1920s was, with black Americans, recent immigrants and a farm belt in crisis since the war left outside it. After 1929 unemployment reached roughly one worker in four, and Kennedy insists that Hoover, contrary to legend, laboured hard against the slump. His central claim concerns Roosevelt, whose personality he treats as genuinely opaque but whose bequest he identifies as a single conviction, that American life could be made more secure. Recovery never came before the war, with unemployment averaging 17 percent for the decade, yet deposit insurance, securities regulation, labour law and social insurance permanently steadied the country.