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[[File:Voices_of_Protest.jpg|left|250px|thumbnail|<i>Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression</i> by Alan Brinkley]]__NOTOC__

After visiting the United States in 1952, the Egyptian bacteriologist Zaki Khalid recalled an observation about the Great Depression he had read in a Parisian newspaper several years before. “If the same depression had taken place in France it would have reached catastrophic proportions,” he wrote. “Sheer terror everywhere, suicides, massive street demonstrations, strikes, government collapse, and all this would have taken place in the same day. But in America everything was calm.” The United States witnessed a good deal of unrest during the Depression, of course, and Khalid might have misunderstood how much other nations suffered economic crisis during the same time period. Nonetheless, his observations point to a common counterfactual question about the American experience of the 1930s: why did profound economic depression and political dissent fail to shake the foundations of government, producing reform rather than revolution? Where was the American Hitler or Mussolini?