Trials and Triumphs · A Colorado Portrait of the Great Depression With FSA Photographs

From the time of the stock market crash of 1929 to the return of prosperity in 1940-1941, Colorado suffered and overcame an unparalleled economic collapse. As banks and businesses failed, Coloradans struggled to rebuild their lives and the state's economy, creating in the process a tumultuous and fascinating decade. In Trials and Triumphs historian Stephen Leonard blends exhaustive research and more than 150 photographs, including a striking selection from the Farm Security Administration (FSA) collection, to bring 1930s Colorado alive. Leonard tells the story of ordinary people under extraordinary circumstances fighting for food, shelter, and dignity: dry-land farmers coping with dust storms; miners attempting to unionize; Hispanic farm laborers struggling to survive; and thousands of people mailing chain letters filled with dimes. Trials and Triumphs also explores the decade's personalities, events, controversies, and accomplishments. Among them were powerful governor Big Ed Johnson's fight against the supporters of FDR's New Deal; the Works Progress Administration and the huge federal projects that provided thousands of jobs; Johnson's 1936 blockade of the state's southern border against aliens and indigents; the violent Green Mountain Dam strike; the floods of 1935; the origins of the ski industry; the football wizardry of Byron "Whizzer" White; the birth of the devil baby; and the death of Baby Doe Tabor. Trials and Triumphs is a masterful account of depression-racked Colorado and its people in the 1930s. It belongs in the library of every reader interested in Colorado and modern U.S. history.