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A "chicken in every pot, and a car in every backyard." So ran a Republican slogan during Herbert Hoover's 1928 presidential campaign—the phrase that has come to symbolize the unparalleled prosperity of the 1920s.
In the 1920s, having a car was a grand sign of wealth, because they were new and expensive technology. In the Great Gatsby, Jay and Tom have cars, and have no reservations about losing them. After Daisy hits Myrtle, Gatsby simply leaves his car in a garage without a second thought. Tom then truly offers to give his car to George Wilson. It represents how the characters were so wealthy that they had no regard for the things the middle and lower classes were striving to attain.
In the 1920s, having a car was a grand sign of wealth, because they were new and expensive technology. In the Great Gatsby, Jay and Tom have cars, and have no reservations about losing them. After Daisy hits Myrtle, Gatsby simply leaves his car in a garage without a second thought. Tom then truly offers to give his car to George Wilson. It represents how the characters were so wealthy that they had no regard for the things the middle and lower classes were striving to attain.
Interview from Middletown: A Study in Contemporary Culture
"Do you think the man who runs a complicated machine takes pride in his work and gets a feeling of proprietorship in his ma¬chine?" a responsible executive in charge of personnel in a large machine shop was asked. "No, I don't," was his ready reply. "There's a man who's ground diameters on gears here for fifteen years and done nothing else. It's a fairly highly skilled job and takes more than six months to learn. But it's so endlessly monotonous! That man is dead, just dead! And there's a lot of others like him, and I don't know what to do for them." "What," asked the questioner, "do you think most of the men in the plant are working for?—to own a car, or a home, or just to keep their heads above water?" "They're just working. They don't know what for. They're just in a rut and keep on in it, doing the same monotonous work every day, and wondering when a slump will come and they will be laid off." "How much of the time are your thoughts on your job?" an alert young Middletown bench molder was asked. "As long as there happens to be any new problem about the casting I'm making, I'm thinking about it, but as soon as ever I get the hang of the thing there isn't 25 per cent, of me paying attention to the job." |
<----- View of the workers by their own manager <----- A worker saying that he's thinking about other thing besides working. |
“One tenth of 1 percent of the families at the top received as much income as 42 percent of the families at the bottom, according to a report of the Brookings Institution.”
Though the 1920s is also known as "The Roaring '20s", the problems among the lower class which are commonly refrained from mention indicate otherwise.
- Strikes among industrial worker
- Farm foreclosures
- Dangerous conditions because workers were forced to take jobs in areas with poor infrastructure