|
Bernstein, Irving, A CARING SOCIETY: The New Deal, the Worker, and the Great Depression -- A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941.
VG/VG. Houghton Mifflin, 1985. Photographs, tables, notes index, 338 pages.
~~~
"This brilliant book combines social history, labor history, and a history of the New Deal. A panoramic view of those 'Grapes of Wrath' days,
it makes clear how and why we created welfare, social security, unemployment insurance, and the rest of the safe guards we fight over so bitterly today.
~~~ In a fascinating tapestry of voices and events, Bernstein inteweaves the thoughts of migrant workers and cabinet officers, laborers and policy makers, to give us the New Deal years from a new perspective. We see the development of the welfare safeguards against the raw suffering and despair that brought them about.
~~~ A living social history of the Depression years, this important book focuses on the tragic impact of the Great Depression on people throughout the nation, and traces the creation of 'the caring society' to cope with social chaos."
$30.00
|
|
|
Grey, Michael R.,
NEW DEAL MEDICINE:
The Rural Health Programs of the Farm Security Aministration.
NEW copy, hardcover with dust jacket.
(Johns Hopkins, 1999). Illustrations, 264 pages.
~~~
In New Deal Medicine, physician and historian Michael Grey brings to light
the diversity, reach, and complexity of the medical care programs of the Farm
Security Administration. Drawing on oral histories, archival records, and
medical journals from the 1930s and 1940s, Grey finds the programs were both a
rehearsal for more modern forms of medical organization and a lightning rod for
critics of "socialized medicine." He assesses the compromises made to try to
preserve the programs' somewhat "secret objective" of providing the poor with
health care while not running afoul of conservative politicians and their
colleagues in the AMA. Acknowledging the effect of changing demographics
(doctors, nurses, and farmers alike marched off to war) and economics, Grey
contends that these factors do not fully explain the demise of the FSA
experiment in health care. Rather, the political winds shifted at the same time
that the medical profession acted to protect its authority over the practice of
medicine. ~~~ New Deal Medicine shows that, by the peculiarly American style of
"incrementalism," many of the FSA medical care structures and goals have been at
least partially realized in the United States and in Canada. The lessons learned
by the FSA personnel were transferred into health programs in Canada, in the
labor unions, and finally in Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society."
~~~ Hardcover originally
published at $44.50, now OUT OF PRINT. (Paperback currently in print at about $20).
$40.00
|
|
|
[Roosevelt] William E. Leuchtenburg,
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT AND THE NEW DEAL, 1932-1940.
NEW copy, trade PAPERBACK. (Harper Torch).
New American Nation Series.
~~~ Leuchtenburg has brilliantly and effectively brought together thousands of fascinating bits on the New Deal to form a striking mosaic. This is by all means the best one-volume synthesis of the New Deal that has yet appeared in print. The combination of intensive scholarship, level-headed interpretation, and lively writing make this an invaluable book.
$16.00
|
|
|
|
|
Steinbeck, John,
THE GRAPES OF WRATH.
NEW copy, TRADE PAPERBACK. Penguin Books (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century), 455 pages.
~~~ "One of the greatest and most socially significant novels of the twentieth century, Steinbeck's controversial masterpiece indelibly captured America during the Great Depression through the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads. Intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, tragic but ultimately stirring in its insistence on human dignity, The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is not only a landmark American novel, but it is as well an extraordinary moment in the history of our nation's conscience."
$15.00
|
|
|
Steinbeck, John,
THE GRAPES OF WRATH.
NEW copy, TRADE PAPERBACK. Penguin Books (Steinbeck Centennial Edition), 455 pages.
~~~ "John Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression follows the western movement of one family and a nation in search of work and human dignity."
$15.00
|
|
|
|
Terkel, Studs,
HARD TIMES: An Oral History of the Great Depression.
VG/VG--. Some wear and fraying to jacket, which is in mylar. Book itself is clean and tight.
Book Club Edition (Pantheon, 1970). 529 pages.
~~~ "In this unique re-creation of one of the most dramatic periods in modern
American history, Studs Terkel recaptures the Great Depression of the
1930s in all its complexity. The book is a mosaic of memories from those
who were richest to those who were most destitute: politicians like James
Farley and Raymond Moley; businessmen like Bill Benton and Clement Stone;
a six-day bicycle racer; artists and writers; racketeers; speakeasy
operators, strikers, and impoverished farmers; people who were just
kids; and those who remember losing a fortune. ~~ Hard Times is
not only a gold mine of information—much of it little known—but also a
fascinating interplay of memory and fact, showing how the Depression
affected the lives of those who experienced it firsthand, often
transforming the most bitter memories into a surprising nostalgia."
$25.00
|
|
|
|
Cresswell, Tim,
THE TRAMP IN AMERICA.
NEW copy, hardcover with dust jacket. Reaktion Books, 255 pages.
~~~ "This book provides the first account of the invention of the tramp as a social
type in the United States from the 1870s through the 1930s. Tim Cresswell
considers the ways in which the figure of the tramp was imagined and described
and how, by the Second World War, it was being reclassified, renamed and
rendered invisible. He describes the 'tramp scare' of the late nineteenth
century in terms of the major factors that influenced the tramps existence: the
political and economic climate, the technology of the railroad and the
after-effects of the Civil War. He then explores various stereotypes associated
with tramps."
$30.00
|
|
|
Crouse, Joan M.,
THE HOMELESS TRANSIENT IN THE GREAT DEPRESSION, New York State, 1929-1941.
NEW copy, hardcover, issued without dust jacket. SUNY Press, 1986. 319 pages.
~~~ "Years before the Dust Bowl exodus raised America's conscience to the plight of its migratory citzenry, an estimated one to two million homeless, unemployed Americans were traversing the country, searching for permanent community. Often mistaken for bums, tramps, hoboes or migratory laborers, these transients were a new breed of educated, highly employable men and women uprooted from their middle- and working-class homes by an unprecedented economic crisis. The Homeless Transient in the Great Depression investigates this population and the problems they faced in an America caught between a poor law past and a social welfare future. The story of the transient is told from the perspective of the federal, state, and local governments, and from the viewpoint of the social worker, the community, and the transient. In narrowing the focus of the study from the national to the state level, Joan Crouse offers a close and sensitive examination of each. The choice of New York as a focal point provides an important balance to previous literature on migrancy by shifting attention from the Southwest to the Northeast and from a preoccupation with rejection on the federal level to the concerted effort of the state to deal with the non-resident poor in a humane yet fiscally responsible manner."
~~~ Hardcover currently in print at $74.50.
$50.00
|
|
|
Uys, Errol Lincoln,
RIDING THE RAILS: Teenagers on the Move
During the Great Depression.
NEW copy, TRADE PAPERBACK.
Routledge, 2003. "There is no feeling in the world like
sitting in a side-door Pullman and
watching the world go by, listening to the clickety-clack
of the wheels, hearing
that old steam whistle blowing for crossings and towns." --George Phillips in
Riding the Rails. At the height of the Great
Depression, 250,000 teenage
hoboes were riding the rails and roaming America. Some left
home out of
desperation and went looking for work and a better life,
sometimes traveling
hundreds of miles on the rumor of a job waiting farther
down the line. Others
left out of boredom; still others with a wanderlust and
romantic idea of life on
the road. The restless youth of these boxcar boys and
girls, many who went
from "middle-class gentility to scrabble-ass poor"
overnight, is recaptured in
Riding the Rails. Based on the award-winning
documentary, this book dispels the
myths of a hobo existence and reveals the hard stories
of a daring generation of
American teenagers-forgotten heroes-who survived some of
the hardest times in
our nations' history. Whether you're a "gaycat"
(novice rider) or a "dingbat"
(seasoned hobo), Riding the Rails is entertaining
and inspiring, recapturing a
time when the country was "dying by inches."
$25.00
|
|
|
Gregory, James N.,
AMERICAN EXODUS: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie
Culture in California.
NEW copy, TRADE PAPERBACK.
Oxford University Press, 1989.
~~~ Fifty years ago, John Steinbeck's now classic novel The Grapes
of Wrath captured the epic story of an Oklahoma farm family driven west to
California by dust storms, drought, and economic hardship. It was a story that
generations of Americans have also come to know through Dorothea Lange's
unforgettable photos of migrant families struggling to make a living in
Depression-torn California. Now in James N. Gregory's path-breaking American
Exodus, there is at least an historical study that moves beyond the fiction
of the 1930s to uncover the full meaning of these events.
American
Exodus takes us back to the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and the war
boom influx of the 1940s to explore the experiences of the more than one million
Oklahomans, Arkansans, Texans, and Missourians who sought opportunities in
California. Gregory reaches into the migrant's lives to reveal not only their
economic trials but also their impact on California's culture and society. He
traces the development of an "Okie subculture" that over the years has grown
into an essential element in California's cultural landscape.
Gregory vividly depicts how Southwesterners brought with them on their journey
west an allegiance to evangelical Protestantism, "plain-folk American" values,
and a love of country music. These values gave Okies an expanding cultural
presence in their new home. In their neighborhoods, often called "Little
Oklahomas," they created a community of churches and saloons, of church-goers
and good-old-boys, mixing stern-minded religious thinking with hard-drinking
irreverence. Today, Baptist and Pentecostal churches abound in this region; and
from Gene Autry--"Oklahoma's Singing Cowboy"--to Woody Guthrie, Bob Wills, and
Merle Haggard, the special concerns of Southwesterners have long dominated the
country music industry in California. The legacy of the Dust Bowl migration can
also be measured in political terms. throughout California and especially in the
San Joaquin Valley, Okies have implanted their own brand of populist
conservatism.
~~~ The consequences reach far beyond
California. The Dust Bowl migration was part of a larger heartland diaspora that
has sent millions of Southerners and rural Midwesterners to the nation's
northern and western industrial perimeter. American Exodus is the first book to
examine the cultural implications of that massive 20th century population shift.
In this rich account of the experiences and impact of these migrant
heartlanders, Gregory fills an important gap in recent American social
history.
$11.95
|
|
|
|
Vachon, John, (Miles Orvell, ed),
JOHN VACHON'S AMERICA: Photographs and Letters from
the Depression to WWII.
NEW copy, oversized hardcover with dust jacket.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
354 pages.
~~~ From 1936 to 1943, John Vachon traveled across America as part of the Farm
Security Administration photography project, documenting the desperate world of
the Great Depression and also the efforts at resistance--from strikes to stoic
determination. This collection, the first to feature Vachon's work, offers a
stirring and elegant record of this extraordinary photographer's vision and of
America's land and people as the country moved from the depths of the Depression
to the dramatic mobilization for World War II. Vachon's portraits of white and
black Americans are among the most affecting that FSA photographers produced;
and his portrayals of the American landscape, from rural scenes to small towns
and urban centers, present a remarkable visual account of these pivotal years,
in a style that is transitional from Walker Evans to Robert Frank. ~~~ Vachon
nurtured a lifelong ambition to be a writer, and the intimate and revealing
letters he wrote from the field to his wife back home reflect vividly on
American conditions, on movies and jazz, on landscape, and on his job fulfilling
the directives from Washington to capture the heart of America. Together, these
letters and photographs, along with journal entries and other writings by
Vachon, constitute a multifaceted biography of this remarkable photographer and
a unique look at the years he captured in such unforgettable images.
~~~
Currently in print at $49.95.
$40.00
|
|
|
Worthen, James,
GOVERNOR JAMES ROLPH AND THE GREAT
DEPRESSION IN CALIFORNIA.
NEW copy, trade PAPERBACK. (McFarland, 2006).
Photos, notes, bibliography, index, 235 pp.
~~~~
In 1911, when businessman James Rolph first ran for mayor of San Francisco, he promised, “I will be mayor of the whole city, and not the mayor for any particular section.” This statement seemed to characterize Rolph’s political career. After serving an unprecedented five terms as mayor, he went on to win California’s 1930 gubernatorial election. Rolph, however, had severely underestimated the challenges he would be up against as a Depression-era governor. A genuine love of people and desire to help had gotten him as far as the governor’s office but could do little to help him solve the new problems he found. Lack of a firm agenda coupled with an unrealistic (or perhaps idealistic) governing style left him at odds with the legislature and found his chief lieutenants forming into warring cliques. Ultimately, Rolph—in spite of good intentions and a love of civil service—was unable to translate his mayoral triumph, with all its charm and style, into a gubernatorial success.
This biography relies heavily on primary sources such as contemporary newspaper articles and firsthand recollections. Beginning with Rolph’s mayoral career, the book enumerates the qualities which led to his phenomenal success as San Francisco’s top politician. The work then examines the criticisms levied against Rolph as governor and the ways in which these complaints were, and were not, justified. The unfortunate historical timing of Rolph’s governorship is also discussed. In many ways, Rolph’s attempt to translate from prosperous ’20s mayor to Depression-era ’30s governor was simply ill-fated from the very beginning. A detailed bibliography and index is also provided.
$40.00
|
|
|
|
