When the Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and America's First Mass Student Movement, 1929-1941

The Depression era saw the first mass student movement in American history. The crusade, led in large part by young Communists, was both an anti-war campaign and a movement championing a broader and more egalitarian vision of the welfare state than that of the New Dealers. The movement arose from a massive political awakening on campus, caused by the economic crisis of the 1930s and the escalating international tensions and threat of world war wrought by fascism. This book makes an important contribution to the emerging portrait of political life in the 1930s.