Sublime

If Perkins, the Progressive turned New Dealer, spent her life addressing problems left behind by Greeley’s Civil War generation—corporate power, exploited labor, political corruption, poverty—Rustin spent his battling injustices that the New Deal generation didn’t address: racism, segregation, and the threat of militarism to world peace. No one in

After the Civil War, African-Americans had remained loyal to the party that had freed them—the Republican Party of Lincoln—for more than half a century, from Reconstruction to Depression. When the Depression struck, however, the heartlessness of Republicans—and of another Republican President, Hoover—changed that, particularly after the arrival in

From the point of view of the declining class, both political parties were indifferent if not opposed, in varying degrees, to their interests.