The Great Depression

Huey P. Long, Louisiana populist and advocate of "Share The Wealth."

Charles Coughlin, "The Radio Priest," began as a backer of FDR's New Deal but eventually became a virulent critic and even a fascist sympathizer.

The Townsend Plan, which called for generous state-funded pensions for the aged in order to boost spending and open up jobs for younger workers, attracted enthusiastic support in the 1930s, and Townsend Clubs spread across the land.

While America's economy sputtered throughout the 1930s, Adolf Hitler's fascists seemed to have succeeded in rescuing Germany from economic collapse, encouraging Nazi sympathizers such as the German-American Bund to push for a fascist America.

The Communist Party failed to instigate a proletarian revolution during the Great Depression, but it did move a bit farther into the mainstream of American life.

The twenty thousand people who turned out for the German-American Bund's "Pro-American Rally" in February 1939 heard self-styled "American führer" Fritz Kuhn denounce "Frank Rosenfeld" and his "Jew Deal." Fortunately, the anti-Semitic Nazi sympathizers of the Bund remained a fringe minority throughout the 1930s.

A dust storm—known as a "black blizzard"—approaches Stratford, Texas, in 1935.

Dust Bowl refugees, bound for California