The Great Depression: America in the 1930s

The Great Depression, as Watkins shows, was a scarring experience that forever changed the United States, instilling ubiquitous fear of job loss while also creating an activist federal government inextricably involved in the everyday life of ordinary Americans. This type of government, he adds, is precisely what most of us want. Augmented with reproductions of news clips, documentary stills and period photographs in both black-and-white and color, this lively, involving chronicle--companion to a PBS series--begins with the ``thoroughly repressive'' 1920s, then moves on to the Stock Market crash, the ascendancy of organized labor, mass migrations caused by drought, persistent racism within New Deal programs, the powerlessness of agricultural labor even as industrial unions got stronger, and the ugly domestic rise in intolerance and political confusion as Europe sank into a totalitarian quagmire. Watkins, biographer of New Dealer Harold Ickes, admires Franklin Roosevelt but calls him a ``most reluctant dragon'' who neither conceived nor vigorously pushed through Congress two of his administration's major pieces of legislation, Social Security and comprehensive labor reform. (Oct.)