The Crosswinds of Freedom: The American Experiment Vol.3 [Hardcover]

James Macgregor Burns (Author)

Book Description

Series: The American experiment | Publication Date: April 8, 1989

Beginning with Franklin Roosevelt's taking office in March of 1933, the author chronicles the most extraordinary period in American history--a time of depression, war, social and cultural upheaval, and incredible economic prosperity.He offers shrewd portraits of the nine presidents who seved over the 56 years.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Immensely readable, epic in scope yet intimately personal in detail, this sweeping 864-page history of the United States extends from FDR's nomination to the presidency in 1932 to the election of George Bush. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Burns sees the U.S. as a nation of hazy, undefined ends and shaky, pluralistic means. He admires Roosevelt but criticizes the New Deal because it "failed to fashion an effective economic strategy and stick with it." With 1950s' affluence, he notes, came widespread escapism, intertwining of government and the press, McCarthyism, conformity, compartmentalized work. Burns portrays JFK and LBJ as men who ultimately failed to respond to the cries for freedom emanating from the Third World. He is brief and equivocal on Reagan's rightist counterrevolution, though he recognizes Reagan's mandate to throw liberal elements out of the Republican Party and consolidate conservative power. Chapters broadly delineate the civil rights, feminist and student movements, Vietnam, cultural and technological ferment. This is the final volume of Burns's trilogy which includes The Vineyard of Liberty and The Workshop of Democracy.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The boundaries of this final book in Burns's lively history of the United States--the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan--frequently overlap with the many books written by Burns, the political scientist on his way to becoming a distinguished commentator on our recent leaders and institutions. The result is both strength and weakness. Strength, in that his political analyses and asides on the varying meanings of freedom are very good indeed. Weakness, in that his original works are necessarily richer statements than a survey can be, and in that his treatment of social and cultural matters is overmatched. Even so, his project is unquestionably a fine achievement. This book, which follows The Vineyard of Liberty ( LJ 12/15/81) and The Workshop of Democracy ( LJ 8/85) will be all but universally acquired by libraries.
- Robert F. Nardini, N. Chichester, N.H.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 864 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st trade ed edition (April 8, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394512766
• ISBN-13: 978-0394512761
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.9 x 2.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,806,437 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting history of Liberal America in the 20th Century, April 30, 2005

By 

David W. Nicholas (Van Nuys, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Crosswinds of Freedom: The American Experiment Vol.3 (Hardcover)

This book is billed as the third volume of James MacGregor Burns' magesterial history of the United States, collectively titled "The American Experiment." Burns is perhaps best known as a biographer of FDR (he won a Pulitzer for one volume of this bio) and he's definitely a New Deal Democrat, though he would probably insist he worked hard to make sure his history of the United States was balanced. It *does* criticize both liberals and conservatives, but the criticisms are nuanced and definitely different.

FDR, it turns out, wasn't liberal *enough* during the New Deal. Reagan turned the word liberty into a weapon of hate. The author is pretty ambiguous about presidents after Roosevelt (his hero, of course) and viscerally dislikes Reagan, especially. Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter the author deals with carefully, while Nixon, Ford, and of course Reagan are for the most part dismissed with varying degrees of contempt. Reagan turns out to have been "shallow" and anti-intellectual, while his opponents showed much promise but of course were outwitted by the actor who knew how to manipulate the public.

There's also an annoying thread running through the book which the author tacitly acknowledges but refuses to jettison. He's a rampant cultural relativist, and flaunts it whenever he's dealing with Foreign Policy. As a result, when comparing the Soviet Union, Communist China, and the United States, the author doesn't see much difference between the three nations morally. Either he's unaware of the Gulags and reeducation camps of the two Communist countries (and their lack in the USA) or he thinks such things are irrelevant. He certainly acts as if they don't/didn't exist.

Instead, every facet of liberal society in America gets exhaustive treatment. So various shades of radical feminism get paragraphs, even pages, devoted to them, and the socialist and Communist parties of America are treated as if they were important forces in American politics. Their progress is considered worth discussing even into the '80s, when they became completely irrelevant. By contrast, organizations such as the John Birch society or the Libertarian party (not that I'm a member or supporter of either; I'm not) are never even acknowledged. The art world gets volumes, literature is dissected in detail, but popular art and music are at best briefly alluded to. It's a rather one-sided portrait of America, to say the least.

I found this book to be biased, but of course it all depends on what biases you bring to the book yourself. The writing is generally serviceable, and if the subject matter tends to sometimes make things boring, he never spends more than 10 pages on any subject, anyway. If you're interested in this era of history, I suppose you could do worse, and if you're aware of the biases of the author, it's not a bad outline of the subject.