"Pre-eminent among historians of labor history." --Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr.
The textbook history of the 1920s is a story of Prohibition,
flappers, and unbounded prosperity. For millions of industrial
workers, however, the "roaring twenties" looked very different.
Working-class communities were already in crisis in the years
before the stock market crash of 1929. Strikes in the 1920s and
attempts to organize the unemployed and fight evictions in the
early 1930s often fell victim to police violence and
repression.
Here, Irving Bernstein recaptures the social history of the decade
leading up to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's inauguration, uncovers
its widespread inequality, and sheds light on the long-forgotten
struggles that form the prelude to the great labor victories of the
1930s.
"In other words, viewed from afar, most of the people who were
suffering the hardships of the Depression were depressed and even
ashamed, ready to blame themselves for their plight. But the train
of developments that connects changes in social conditions to a
changed consciousness is not simple. People, including ordinary
people, harbor somewhere in their memories the building blocks of
different and contradictory interpretations of what it is that is
happening to them, of who should be blamed, and what can be done
about it. Even the hangdog and ashamed unemployed worker who swings
his lunch box and strides down the street so the neighbors will
think he is going to a job can also have other ideas that only have
to be evoked, and when they are make it possible for him on another
day to rally with others and rise up in anger at his
condition.
--From the new introduction by Frances Fox Piven
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