Characters

The Little Flower who smashed machine politics, read Dick Tracy on the radio, and rebuilt New York with federal money and righteous fury.

The Kingfish — demagogue, champion of the poor, and the man whose Share Our Wealth movement genuinely terrified Franklin Roosevelt.

Thirty million listeners. A golden voice. And a descent from economic reform into antisemitism that showed what mass media could do to a democracy under pressure.

He lived in the Okie labor camps before writing a word of his novel. He believed a writer owed the truth that debt — and The Grapes of Wrath made Congress hold hearings.

Cambridge intellectual who demolished classical economics, coined the paradox of thrift, and wrote the theory governments reach for every time the economy falls apart.