Zinn Chapter summaries
Zinn Chapter summaries
CH 15
In chapter 15 it talks about the end of World War I temporarily brought prosperity to the United States. With its influence growing in the world, the mixture of big business and government was increasingly looking to expand American power overseas. There was still dissatisfaction at home with the pace of reforms. The AFL and the IWW staged a general strike in Seattle in 1919 that resulted in 100,000 workers walking off the job. This strike was put down by violence despite the worker’s adherence to peaceful protest. Several prominent labor leaders were imprisoned and a mass lynching occurred
While the 1920’s saw an increase of prosperity at the top of the elite chain, there were more reversals for the working class. Socialists were imprisoned in large numbers. Communists failed to attract the general population to their cause of world-wide revolution. The stock market crash and the run on the banks that followed led the nation into the Great Depression. Some 15 % of the nation’s adult workforce was unemployed after 1931; leading to mass levels of homelessness, crime and mass migrations in search of work these desperate conditions brought huge scale demand for social reforms, which resulted in large scale victories for the Democratic Party who had absorbed much of the platform of the Populist Party of previous decades.
The Democrats, led by President Franklin Roosevelt, enacted the New Deal, which was aimed at increasing the social safety net for the working class. General welfare programs such as Social Security, Unemployment Insurance and federally subsidized housing came into being... Desperately needed at the time and welcomed by the majority of Americans, Sinn argues that these reforms were brought about by Roosevelt and the Democrats to save American capitalism rather than to replace it with a more worker-friendly system. While perhaps preserving order, the New Deal’s policies did not end the Depression.
CH 16
In chapter
CH 15
In chapter 15 it talks about the end of World War I temporarily brought prosperity to the United States. With its influence growing in the world, the mixture of big business and government was increasingly looking to expand American power overseas. There was still dissatisfaction at home with the pace of reforms. The AFL and the IWW staged a general strike in Seattle in 1919 that resulted in 100,000 workers walking off the job. This strike was put down by violence despite the worker’s adherence to peaceful protest. Several prominent labor leaders were imprisoned and a mass lynching occurred
While the 1920’s saw an increase of prosperity at the top of the elite chain, there were more reversals for the working class. Socialists were imprisoned in large numbers. Communists failed to attract the general population to their cause of world-wide revolution. The stock market crash and the run on the banks that followed led the nation into the Great Depression. Some 15 % of the nation’s adult workforce was unemployed after 1931; leading to mass levels of homelessness, crime and mass migrations in search of work these desperate conditions brought huge scale demand for social reforms, which resulted in large scale victories for the Democratic Party who had absorbed much of the platform of the Populist Party of previous decades.
The Democrats, led by President Franklin Roosevelt, enacted the New Deal, which was aimed at increasing the social safety net for the working class. General welfare programs such as Social Security, Unemployment Insurance and federally subsidized housing came into being... Desperately needed at the time and welcomed by the majority of Americans, Sinn argues that these reforms were brought about by Roosevelt and the Democrats to save American capitalism rather than to replace it with a more worker-friendly system. While perhaps preserving order, the New Deal’s policies did not end the Depression.
CH 16
In chapter