The Lean Years
A History of the American Worker, 1920-1933
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.
Reviews
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"A lively, knowledgeable book about the state of labor in the years prior to the New Deal. The author has accomplished an expert blend of illustrative detail and meaningful summary reliable in scholarship and shorn of pedantry and pretense." --Industrial and Labor Relations Review "A skillful blending of economic activity, legislative inactivity, biographical sketches, and the increasing demoralization of the worker and labor organization." --The Journal of Economic History "An unusually perceptive dissection."
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