Chapter Eleven takes up Rogers’ engagment with the Great Depression of the 1930s, the economic disaster that marked the culmination of his influence as a commentator on American political life. The Oklahoman castigated Wall Street for foolish financial practices and criticized Americans for buying on credit, two practices in the 1920s he believed underlay the economic collapse. With typical good-humored civility, he initially sympathized with Herbert Hoover as a victim of circumstances but soon denounced the president’s refusal to promote relief programs and job-creation initiatives. Rogers became an enthusiastic supporter of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. The humorist became one of the biggest boosters of FDR’s programs as necessary to save the American system. While suspicious of federal government overreach and the encouragement of labor radicalism, he deemed the New Deal largely a success. Throughout the Depression, Rogers maintained his populist outlook, consistently criticizing economic and social elites while laboring to protect and uplife America’s common, working citizens. His acclaim for "the little fellow" further elevated his public stature in America.

How should the United States end the war with Japan? Secretary of War Stimson agonized over the use of the atomic bomb, knowing it would kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians. But he also recoiled at the thought of an invasion of Japan, which would likely cost many Allied soldiers’ lives. There had to be an alternative. He found a third option in conditional surrender: allowing the Japanese to retain their Emperor. If Japan’s leaders could be assured that the Emperor could remain on his throne safe from prosecution, then perhaps they might be induced to surrender. This chapter tracks the convoluted course by which high officials tried to maneuver President Truman toward conditional surrender and away from the other two costly options.

The Introduction lays out the principal arguments of the book, namely that the history of J.P. Morgan & Co. in the 1930s informs the reader about how the leading American financial institution coped with and participated in, the challenges of a crisis decade, while simultaneously making a case for a broader understanding of capitalism’s survival.

This chapter examines J.P. Morgan & Co., the Hoover administration, and the progress of the Depression in the United States between 1930 and 1933. It challenges the idea that banks were bystanders as the trauma of the Great Depression unfolded. Morgan activity took several forms. The first was acting selectively to aid private institutions in trouble in 1930–31. This policy ended with the last quarter of 1931 when heavy losses weakened the Morgan bank. While 1930–33 was devastating for the bank’s operations, two periods stand out as especially harmful: the last quarter of 1931 and the first quarter of 1933. The Morgan partners pushed the Hoover administration to adopt forceful measures to respond to deflation. Leffingwell and Parker Gilbert believed that deflation was imperilling capitalism’s existence. Attempts to shift Hoover were unsuccessful, in part because of the latter’s suspicion of the Morgan bank, in part because of the incoherence of the Morgan policy prescription. By the opening months of 1933 the Morgan partners had come to accept that suspension of the gold standard was necessary to save capitalism. Yet, the chapter suggests, by Roosevelt’s inauguration neither Hoover nor Roosevelt were listening to the partners.

Chapter 7 examines the mindset of Newton Minow, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman who summed up the regulator’s view of television by calling it a “vast wasteland.” Minow championed public interest regulation of the broadcast medium based on the theory that the electromagnetic spectrum is scarce and that the government must allocate broadcast licenses and regulate the content of programming.But the spectrum is no more scarce than any other economic good, and the events that led to federal control over broadcasting were contrived to extend government control over the medium. Minow and other like-minded regulators deny that this type of control is censorship, but their efforts caused diminished diversity in programming and dampened innovation. Further, the tenets of broadcast regulation were undermined as new technologies emerged, although that fact did not deter Minow and other like-minded regulators from advocating more government control. Since then, the law and the culture have moved on, rendering the positions that Minow espoused obsolete.