Popular Radicalism and the Unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression

Unemployed protesters

Liberal historians have long argued that even during the Great Depression, the allegedly Red Decade, most Americans remained broadly loyal to the capitalist political economy. Supposedly, even the mass popularity of figures like Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin (the latter before he went fascist in 1937-38) demonstrated Americans' hostility to left-wing radicalism. The book linked below challenges those arguments, showing that working and unemployed Americans were, indeed, generally very sympathetic to socialism and wanted PROFOUND changes in the distribution of power. Moreover, such radicalism remains, at the very least, implicit today, barely concealed beneath all the mainstream indoctrination to which everyone is subjected. Americans wanted, and still want, something like a revolution.

Submitted by ccwright on September 21, 2025