Like the American Revolution and the Civil War, the combined experiences of the Great Depression and the Second World War defined the values not only of that generation but of succeeding ones as well. President Franklin D Roosevelt presided over the entire period, and thus remains a pivotal figure in twentieth-century American history. During the Depression, he broke with the past when he argued that the role of government, especially the federal government, had to be expanded beyond anything envisioned by the Populists or the Progressives. Roosevelt's radicalism has been exaggerated by both his friends and his critics, but there is little doubt that the Depression converted the role of the federal government in the United States from that of a mere regulator of the economy, occasionally punishing wrongdoing and breaking up monopolies, to that of a guarantor, whose function it was to create and maintain prosper-ity, and to intervene whenever prosperity was threatened.

Roosevelt's New Deal was a complex tangle of reforms intended to restore pre-Depression prosperity and to prevent future calamities. How successful it was in achieving these ends is still in dispute, but all agree that it permanently altered the relationship among government, the economy, and the individual citizen. Through programs of public spending, it hoped to "prime the pump" of the economy, reduce unemployment, and restore prosperity. Through such reforms as the Social Security system and various re-lief and welfare programs, it attempted to build an economic "floor" below which the poor, the unemployed, and the elderly could not fall. By giving sup-port to the organization of labor unions, it strengthened their hand against business. Through farm subsidies it created a permanent agribusiness that made possible continued production without the risk of falling prices. And through a vast array of government agencies, it instituted a new degree of regulation and supervision of the economy.

Critics of the New Deal, both then and later, as-sailed its lack of consistency, its cost, and its failure to put an end to the Depression. In 1937, some 7.7 million Americans were still unemployed. Produc-tion was still below pre-Depression levels. Socialists and other radicals pointed out, correctly, that the New Deal did nothing to alter the fundamentals of capitalism; indeed, it probably strengthened them. The primary beneficiaries of the New Deal were the middle classes and the organized sectors of the labor and business community. Unorganized Hispanic farm workers in the West, tenant farmers in the South, and African Americans generally, failed to benefit economically from the New Deal. However, conservatives maintained, also correctly, that by as-suming responsibility for the welfare of individuals, the federal government was exchanging the principle of "rugged individualism," inherited from the na-tion' s frontier past, for that of the "welfare state."

While the United States struggled with the Depression through the New Deal, other nations resorted to increased totalitarianism and repression. As they had in the past, Americans avoided formal ideological solutions to their economic and social problems in favor of what Roosevelt liked to call "experimentation." For better or for worse, the New Deal restored the confidence of most Americans in their political and economic system. And it enabled them to play a greatly enlarged role in an increasingly dangerous world.

What ended the Great Depression in America was not the New Deal but World War Il. Even before U.S. entry into the war, Roosevelt urged that the nation become "the great arsenal of democracy" by providing assistance to the Allies, principally Great Britain but later the Soviet Union as well. Thus, spending for tanks, planes, and naval vessels in 1940 and 1941 dwarfed the amounts spent earlier to combat the Depression, creating far more jobs than all the earlier programs combined. Although by early 1941 Roosevelt fully expected a second war with Germany, America's entry into World War II was occasioned instead by a surprise attack from Japan following his decision to virtually isolate that expan-sionist nation from its supplies of raw materials. Hitler and his Italian ally Mussolini obligingly de-clared war on the United States in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. For the second time, the United States cast its lot with the industrialized democracies of Europe, and with a new totalitarian ally, the Soviet Union.

After Pearl Harbor, unemployment in the United States virtually disappeared as millions of Americans of both sexes and all races streamed into the armed forces and the factories that sustained them. If World War I established the United States as a co-equal with the great powers, World War II made it a superpower. Again, its civilian casualties were negligible and its combat deaths were proportionately lower than those of the other participants. Despite the loss of 405,000 men and women around the globe, the United States was the only nation to emerge from the conflagration more powerful than when it entered. As the end of the war came in 1945, the atomic bomb symbolized virtually unlimited American power.

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