Your question is rather broad, so I'd like to focus on
just one aspect of the way that poorer Americans acted in 1920 that is very
interesting. As the conditions deterioriated throughout the decade, gathering momentum
at the end, with the loss of farmland to drought, the loss of good jobs to a faltering
economy, the continuous concentration of capital into the hands of fewer and fewer
people through the de-regulation of wall street, Americans tended to blame
themselves.
The ethic of being able to pick yourself up by
your own bootstraps had been so effectively inculcated into American society that so
many people who found themselves without a job, without land to farm, without a home,
they blamed this entirely on themselves. There was no real welfare system so they had
nowhere to turn to and they tried to avoid bread lines and other things as long as
possible given the stigma that was attached to either of those
mechanisms.
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