The Great Depression People

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) was the 32nd President of the United States and the only chief executive to be elected to more than two terms in office. Roosevelt held the presidency from 1934-19...

Father Charles Coughlin (1891-1979) was a Roman Catholic priest who became a national celebrity during the 1930s by hosting a popular radio broadcast. By the middle of the 1930s, Coughlin attracted...

Huey P. Long (1893-1935) was a charismatic Louisiana politician who served as both Governor and U.S. Senator in the early 1930s. A popular—if also, in the eyes of his critics at least, corrup...

Fritz Kuhn (1896-1951), a German-born immigrant to the United States, was the head of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund in the late 1930s. The country's leading Nazi sympathizer, Kuhn called himsel...

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) was the wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and a world-renowned advocate of liberal causes in her own right. She became an early hero of the civil rights movemen...

Lorena Hickok (1893-1968) was one of America's most prominent female journalists during the 1930s. The only woman assigned to cover the Roosevelt campaign in 1932, Hickok struck up a very close rel...

Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) was an author and socialist political activist. His best known work is The Jungle, a 1906 muckraking assault on the unsanitary and inhumane conditions in the meatpacking...

Dr. Francis Townsend (1867-1960) was an American physician who devised the Townsend Plan, a popular proposal for state-funded old-age pensions. The plan promised to end the Great Depression by open...