Great Depression reading

My literary tour of the Great Depression continues. Over the weekend (thanks in part to Internet-connection problems that kept me off my laptop, blissfully as I now realize) I finished Edmund Wilson's The American Jitters: A Year of the Slump, a collection of magazine essays from 1930-31, when the "Great Depression" moniker hadn't been coined yet and the turnaround engineered by FDR (who took office in 1933) was still a few years off. Wilson surveys the national landscape, with particularly memorable pieces on labor strife in the West Virginia coal mines and the construction site of the Hoover Dam, making no effort to hide his Communist sympathies (which were admittedly more socially acceptable in those capitalist-backlash days) and his loyalties to the common laborer. As the book concludes, I was struck by how convinced the otherwise astute Wilson was then that the Communist revolution in America was imminent. Which makes me wonder why, despite conditions being so ripe, that revolution never happened - was it the success of FDR's New Deal? the preoccupation with the rise of Hitler and immersion in WWII? the emerging horrors of the totalitarian Soviet state that revealed that maybe Communism wasn't paradise after all? Interesting question, I think.

Next up is William Leuchtenburg's Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932-1940, which I'm seventy pages in to. Fresh from his resounding 1932 defeat of Hoover (electoral college margin: 472-59!) FDR has just completed his whirlwind first 100 days in office, during which time he managed to enact a truly mind-boggling mass of legislation designed to stauch the Depression bleeding and prod the country toward recovery. Good reading so far, though a bit heavy on detail.