Originally broadcast on PBS television in 1993.

Series creator, Henry Hampton ; series writer, Steve Fayer.

[v.4. We have a plan]: The story of socialist author Upton Sinclair's 1934 run for governor of California is told. Sinclair's epic plan to end poverty in California called for seizing unused factories and fields (and film studios) and turning them over to the unemployed to run as self-managing cooperatives. Sinclair won the Democratic nomination and received 900,000 votes against the Republican incumbent. In the process he scared the pants off California's business elites, and lit one very big fire under the seats of President Roosevelt and the New Dealers.

[v.5.] In "Mean Things Happening" we get the story of starvation and misery in the rural South, and of the inter-racial Southern Tenant Farmers Union that arose to combat it. Then the episode moves north to recount the bloody events around the birth of the Steel Workers union. This segment is especially distinguished by an interview with the son of a 1930s steel magnate. The son is himself still an unreconstructed economic royalist, and he inadvertently gives viewers a letter-perfect picture of what went wrong with America in the 1930s.

VHS format.

Closed captioned.