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1941.

The expanded role of the federal government came to be accepted by most

Americans by the end of the 1930s. Even Republicans who had bitterly opposed the New

Deal shifted their stance. Wendell Wilkkie, the Republican presidential nominee in 1940,

declared that he could not oppose reforms such as the regulation of the securities markets

and the utility holding companies, the legal recognition of unions, or Social Security and

unemployment allowances. What bothered him and other opponents of the New Deal,

however, was the extension of the federal bureaucracy. The depression caused much

questioning of inherited economic and political ideas. Sen. Huey P. Long of Louisiana

found a national following for his “Share the Wealth” program. The socialist writer

Upton Sinclair was nearly elected governor of California in 1934 with a similar program

for redistributing the state’s wealth. Many writers and other intellectuals swung even

further left, concluding that capitalism was on its way out; they were drawn to the

Communist party by what they supposed to be the accomplishments of the USSR. In other

countries the depression had even more profound effects. As world trade fell off, countries

turned to nationalist economic policies that only exacerbated their difficulties. In politics

the depression strengthened the extremes of right and left, helping Adolf Hitler to power

in Germany and swelling left-wing movements in other European countries. The

depression was thus a time of massive insecurity among peoples and governments,

contributing to the tensions that produced World War II. Ironically, however, the massive

military expenditures for that war provided the economic stimulus that finally ended the

depression in the United States and elsewhere.

Bernstein, Irving, A Caring Society: The New Deal, the Worker and the Great Depression

(1985).

Boardman, Fon W., Jr., The Thirties: America and the Great Depression (1967).

Davis, Joseph S., The World Between the Wars, 1919-39: An Economist’s View (1974).

Kindleberger, Charles P., The World in Depression, 1929-1939 (1975; repr. 1983).

Markowitz, Gerald, and Rosner, David, eds., Slaves of the Depression (1987).

Wecter, Dixon, Age of the Great Depression, 1929-1941 (1971).

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