ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of the book. The book examines the experiences with emergency government of four large modern democracies—the United States, Great Britain, France, and the German Republic of 1919-1933. It focuses on what sort of unusual powers and procedures these constitutional states saw fit to employ in their various periods of national trial. The book explores the actions of some of democracy's great crisis governments. It presents the personalities who sparked the governments and gave them leadership—Lloyd George, Clémenceau, Heinrich Brüning, Lincoln, Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill. Constitutional dictatorship is a rag-bag phrase, and into it can be tossed all sorts of different institutions and procedures of emergency government. The basic institution of constitutional dictatorship of an executive nature is martial rule; in one form or another it has existed in all constitutional countries.
