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Title: Progressivism, Depression, New Deal 1901-1941 (The Drama of American History) by Christopher Collier, James Lincoln Collier ISBN: 0-7614-1054-6 Publisher: Benchmark Books Pub. Date: 30 October, 2000 Format: Library Binding Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $31.36

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: The Colliers explain the birth of big government in the U.S.
Comment: "Progressivism, the Great Depression, and the New Deal: 1901-1941," offers up a nice little dialectic about the birth of big government. This 19th volume (following the order on the back of the book) in The Drama of American History series by Christopher & James Lincoln Collier looks at how the Great Depression allowed the progressive ideas advanced by Theodore Roosevelt to become instantiated in the Federal Government during Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Consequently, this volume is ideal for highlighting the strengths of the series: the presidencies of the two Roosevelts would never be covered in this way in the same chapter of a standard American history textbook, and not only the Depression but the First World War would have covered in intervening chapters. With this "central core" approach the reasons for the Great Depression, as well as the attempted solutions by FDR, should be made very clear to young readers.

This book covers this broad area in seven chapters: (1) The Struggle to Come establishes how bad the Great Depression was and then lays out the key causes of the economic collapse, including the laissez-faire attitude government took towards business; (2) The Progressive Era looks at T.R. as a social reformer and the efforts of Taft and Wilson in that regard; (3) The Roaring Twenties looks not at the glamour of the decade but at the changes in economic and social conditions (there is a nice side bar on the failed Prohibition experiment as well); (4) The Incredible Bull Market of the 1920s explains in clear and simple terms the big boom that came right before the big bust; (5) The Hardest Times tries to quantify exactly how bad the situation was during the Great Depression; (6) The Hundred Days looks at the vigorous start of FDR's administration, as well as the limited efforts of Hoover in trying to mitigate the harms of the economic collapse; and (7) The Depression Rolls On looks at the political assault on Roosevelt's New Deal from both sides of the political spectrum and how, in the end, it was the war time economy that finally ended the Depression.

Without the, shall I say, distraction of World War I (which is dealt with in the volume "The United States Enters the World Stage," which also covers the Spanish-American War), the Colliers are able to keep the focus on the economic causes of political reform in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. The volume is illustrated with historic pictures and etchings, although there are not as many of those wonderful editorial cartoons from this period as I like to find in these volumes. The "problem," of course, is how to use this approach in a traditional American history course, which does not readily allow for this type of approach. But if the result is that students can get a much better understanding of how the Depression was caused and what massive political changes came in its wake, then that is certainly worth pursuing. The Great Depression is one of two cataclysmic events in the history of the United States, the other being the Civil War, where the course of the nation was radically changed. Understanding the relationship between what came before and what came afterwards is of no small importance.