New York Times best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist Arthur Herman pens this fascinating look at how two businessmen turned the U.S. into a military powerhouse during World War II. In 1940, FDR asked General Motors CEO William Knudsen to oversee the production of guns, tanks, and planes needed for the war. Meanwhile, industrialist Henry J. Kaiser presided over the building of "Liberty ships"-vessels that came to symbolize America's great...

Class and Power in the New Deal provides a new perspective on the origins and implementation of the three most important policies that emerged during the New Deal-the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Social Security Act. It reveals how Northern corporate moderates, representing some of the largest fortunes and biggest companies of that era, proposed all three major initiatives and explores why there were no viable...

Presents contrasting viewpoints about the best remedies for the economic crisis of the 1930's, the implementation of President Roosevelt's New Deal, and the historical impact of both the Depression and the New Deal.

"President Franklin D. Roosevelt coined the slogan 'The Arsenal of Democracy' to describe American might during the grim years of World War II. The man who financed that arsenal was his Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr. This is the first book to focus on the wartime achievements of this unlikely hero-- a dyslexic college dropout who turned himself into a forceful and efficient administrator and then exceeded even Roosevelt in his determination...

The worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s was the most traumatic event of the twentieth century. It ushered in substantial expansions in the role of governments around the world, focused attention on social insurance, and for a time bolstered socialist economic ideas as a form of cure. Skepticism about the effectiveness of government withered as the free market failed, and it seems safe to say that Keynesian economics would not have flourished if...

The study of two demagogues, whose vast popularity explains much about Depression-era America. This is a book about two remarkable men-Huey P. Long, a first-term United States Senator from the red-clay, piney woods country of northern Louisiana; and Charles E. Coughlin, a Catholic priest from an industrial suburb near Detroit. From modest origins, they rose together in the early years of the Great Depression to become the two most successful leaders...

A fast-paced history of the organization of American institutional, economic, military, and governmental might for WWII and how this titanic effort determined the outcome of the war and transformed the American economy and society. "The colossal scale of World War II required a mobilization effort greater than anything attempted in all of the world's history. The United States had to fight a war across two oceans and three continents-and to do so...