The Lean Years - by Irving Bernstein (Paperback)

About the Book

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 19

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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."

About the Author

Frances Fox Piven is faculty at the Graduate Center of CUNY. She is the author of several books on the social history of the Great Depression, including Regulating the Poor and Poor People's Movements, co-authored with Richard Cloward. More recently, she has written The War at Home, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America, and Keeping the Black Vote Down.