Fear Itself

The chapter begins with perhaps the most famous quotation to emerge from the Great Depression: Franklin Roosevelt’s assertion that the only thing Americans had to fear was fear itself, which sounds good in theory but may not have reflected reality. To test that reading, the chapter examines various sources of fear in the Great Depression: a serial murderer in Cleveland; the polio epidemic that broke out in New York City in the summer of 1931; and the nearly constant fear of unemployment that characterized life during the Great Depression and made its way into the fiction of the period, including Helen Hunt’s Hardy Perennial. The chapter argues that what these sources have in common is a concern for the purity and autonomy of being, the nature or essence of a person, and the dread that such being might be violated and despoiled by impersonal but malevolent forces.