With Good Reason

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

During and despite the Great Depression, the entertainment industry produced what some consider the greatest era of popular music.  Elliot Majerczyk (Virginia Foundation for the Humanities) looks at the songs that became the soundtrack of the ‘lost generation’ and helped pull America through hard times. Also: Nigel Sellars (Christopher Newport University) explains that Roosevelt’s New Deal originally focused on regulation and stimulating the industrial economy.  It was not until 1935, when the Second New Deal began putting millions of people to work, that most Americans felt relief from the Great Depression.