University of Minnesota Law School Scholarship Repository Minnesota Law Review 1984 Roosevelt and the Protest of the 1930s Seymour Martin Lipset Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/mlr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Lipset, Seymour Martin, "Roosevelt and the Protest of the 1930s" (1984). Minnesota Law Review. 2317. https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/mlr/2317 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the University of Minnesota Law School. It has been accepted for inclusion in Minnesota Law Review collection by an authorized administrator of the Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Roosevelt and the Protest of the 1930s* Seymour Martin Lipset** INTRODUCTION The Great Depression sparked mass discontent and polit- ical crisis throughout the Western world. The economic break- down was most severe in the United States and Germany, yet the political outcome differed markedly in the two countries. In Germany the government collapsed, ushering the Nazis into power. In the United States, on the other hand, no sustained upheaval occurred and political change resulting from the eco- nomic crisis was apparently limited to the Democrats replacing the Republicans as the dominant party.' Why was the United States government able to survive intact the worst depression in modern times? Much of the answer lies in the social forces that have his- torically inhibited class conscious politics in the United States. Factors such as the unique character of the American class structure (the result of the absence of feudal hierarchical so- cial relations in its past), the great wealth of the country, the * This Article is part of a larger work dealing with the reasons why the United States is the only industrialized democratic country without a significant socialist or labor party.