It is unpleasantly hot and humid here on the Chicago L.

After another long day looking for work, it sure be nice to rest our feet that's not

going to happen on this cram-packed car the fetid air hardly breathable

redolent of human sweat and exhaust fumes rising from the autos below, moving like Model T Molasses on Michigan

Avenue.

Swaying and jerking with the motion of the train, we glimpse the day's headlines on other passengers papers. Gang raids

hotel kills three. Four beer barons shot by Chicago gunman in Summer Resort Massacre. 13.

Hurt by Northside Bomb.

And there's Al Capo, as always, on the front page.

10 years of prohibition,

speak easies, whiskey, gang wars that followed.

Crime has taken its whole this town.

But best to keep your head down and ignore it all, even while it closes in like rain clouds over the lake about to let loose.

The Great Depression has dragged this city and this country to its knees, and no coincidence,

criminal activity is at an all-time high. Good day glad to have you. This is American History Hit and I'm Don Wildman.

To understand the modern United States, particularly its large and complicated federal bureaucracy,

it is essential to understand the origin of so much of it, the New Deal of the 1930s, and what it was intended to accomplish.

Over the course of his first two terms as president, Franklin Roosevelt oversaw a giant expansion of the U.S. government,

one that would utterly transform its role in American life, what citizens expected their government

to do for this nation and for themselves.

For so many, this redefinition is characterized as an historic landmark creation of the modern

liberal state, one that provided social safety net Programs still enjoyed today, Social Security,

...