This book examines the underlying causes of the tumult of the 1920s in America that has since captivated writers, readers, moviegoers, and television viewers. During the 1920s, Americans were aware of the momentous changes taking place in their lives. It was an introspective decade. Magazines and newspaper articles, books and anthologies explored the causes, nature, and implications of those changes. The impact of radio, and to a lesser extent motion pictures, rivaled the effects that the invention of printing had had on human society hundreds of years earlier. Add to these developments the effects of World War I and the popularization of Freud and Darwin, and the result was an America cast adrift on a sea of normlessness, treading water between two worlds: one of stability and tradition before the war, and one as yet dimly perceived in the mists of the future.

While Freud challenged notions of traditional behavior, Darwin challenged traditional religious beliefs. The arrival of the affordable automobile transformed human mobility on a scale not seen since the domestication of the horse and the invention of the wheel thousands of years before. But those previous changes had not ushered in so many cataclysmic changes in so short a time. The author maintains that only in this context can much of the behavior of the time be understood, from the popularity of the Ku Klux Klan to the excesses of the flappers and the jazz age.

This study shows that, despite numerous surface similarities, the popular culture of the 1930s was different from that of the 1920s in a variety of ways, and not only because of the Great Depression. It was a period of quiet desperation and shifting values, one in which nickels and dimes replaced dollars as the currency of popular culture, and in which the emphasis was on finding methods to occupy idle time and idle minds. Popular culture during the 1930s is important for understanding not only how Americans coped, but why they did so with such good humor and so little of the discontent visible elsewhere in the world. An appreciation of popular culture during the 1930s is essential to understanding other aspects of the decade.

The southwest Virginia murder trials of a young schoolteacher named Edith Maxwell made her a cause celebre of the 1930s. No newspaper reader or radio listener could avoid hearing of her case in 1935 or 1936, and few magazines neglected to run at least one story on the case. In the media attention that it received, the Maxwell case rivaled the Scopes monkey trial of the 1920s, and for some it seemed to involve many of the same sociological issues--the conflict between modernism and tradition, between urban and rural values, between the sexes, and between generations. Feminist organizations like the National Women's Party and other women's business and professional organizations rallied to Edith's defense because women were not allowed on criminal juries in Virginia in the 1930s.

During the 1930s, a battle was waged over both philosophy and policy between those who described themselves as liberals, both inside and outside the Roosevelt administration. On one side were those who viewed themselves as modern liberals, who saw capitalism as a failure and sought to replace it with a collectivist society and economy. On the other were more traditional American liberals or progressives who aimed merely to reform capitalism, in the belief that individual liberty and a free economy were synonymous. This study examines the role of each during this vital decade. Instead of reaching its high point in the New Deal years, Best argues, American liberalism retreated from most of its major tenets as a result of the popularity of collectivism.

Challenging existing stereotypes and conventional wisdom concerning the 1930s, this study delves into the controversy between the new liberals and the free enterprise group. Included in this latter category were the Brandeisians, who exercised considerable influence within the Roosevelt administration, as well as a variety of more traditional liberals who worked through other channels to achieve their goals. Many of those who called themselves liberals in the 1930s had, Best contends, actually abandoned their basic liberal tenets. This included the president as well.

This book challenges generally accepted views by concluding that the critical press, so often characterized by pro-New Deal historians as conservative or reactionary, was in fact a good deal more liberal than Roosevelt and his advisors. Without its opposition to Roosevelt's policies during the years before Congress began to reassert its constitutional responsibilities, the United States might well have deviated considerably from the path of constitutional and democractic government.

From 1933 to 1938 the critical press (both newspapers and journalists) fulfilled much of the function of (and perceived of itself as) the equivalent of a parliamentary opposition to Roosevelt's policies and programs, since this was a period when the Republican opposition was moribund and Congress was generally submissive to the executive branch. Best describes the reaction of the critical press to FDR's domestic policies toward enhancement of the power of the White House at the expense of Congress and the Supreme Court. This enhancement gradually led many in the press to conclude that the basis for dictatorial rule was being laid by Roosevelt and/or those around him. This study will be of interest to historians and students of history.

To Free A People describes the earliest beginnings of the influential Jewish lobby: the efforts of Jewish leaders to generate an American response to the oppression of Jews in Eastern Europe around the turn of the century. Proposals to relocate Russian Jews in America, and the efforts of the Jewish lobby to repeal the treaty of commerce between Russia and the United States are examined. Best's book is the story of the emergence of international human rights as a concern of U.S. foreign policy.

The Bonus Marcher incident of the summer of 1932 during the Hoover administration is one of the best known events of the 1930s. Historians and Roosevelt biographers have ever since contrasted the humane treatment of the Bonus Marchers under FDR with the apparent callousness of Hoover. Yet FDR experienced his own Bonus Marcher incident in 1935, one that goes unmentioned in histories of the New Deal years. Fearful of another incident, the Roosevelt administration shipped hundreds of bonus marchers to rehabilitation camps in the South. Many were sent to camps in the Florida Keys for work on the overseas highway project. Largely ignored by Washington, the men were housed in flimsy shacks barely above sea level. As the devastating hurricane of Labor Day 1935 approached the keys, the Bonus Marchers waited unprotected in its path for their supervisors to move them to safety. Confused, divided, and inexperienced leadership, however, prevented help from arriving in time. At least 256 perished.

This is an oral and documentary history of the tragedy and is designed for a general audience, as well as for those interested specifically in the 1930s and the Roosevelt administration. It finally balances the Hoover and FDR records on the Bonus Marchers and gives a valuable graphic description of a terrible human tragedy that could easily have been avoided.

The first sustained scholarly critique of the New Deal from the conservative perspective, this study argues that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was, himself, the primary obstacle to American recovery from the Great Depression of 1933-38. In developing his arguments, author Gary Dean Best focuses on the fact that the depression continued through eight years of the Roosevelt administration, despite unprecedented intervention by the federal government in the nation's economic life. Challenging conventional explanations that fault Roosevelt for not embracing Keynesian spending on a scale sufficient to produce recovery, Best finds the roots of America's slow return to economic health in Roosevelt's hostility to the very groups he should have been encouraging: the American business and financial communities.

Best provides one of the most careful and objective studies published to date on the actual effects of Roosevelt's policies and programs on American business operations and psychology. He reexamines the issue of why businessmen and bankers were so critical of the New Deal--criticisms that have been, until now, largely dismissed as motivated by greed and selfishness. He also asks how Roosevelt and his advisors could have hoped to produce an economic recovery when a state of near war existed between the administration and the employers and investors who, alone, could produce such a recovery. Using the letters and diaries of the New Deal's business and other critics during the decade as well as the writings in banking and business periodicals of the day and the criticisms of contemporary economists, including Keynes himself, Best offers a persuasive indictment of New Deal policies and a more realistic explanation of America's failure to recover from the depression before World War II than has yet been available. His work is an important counterweight to conventional evaluations of Roosevelt and the New Deal and should be required reading in any course dealing with the history and politics of the 1930s.