Season 1, Ep 1: Imagining a Safety Net

In 1929, the booming prosperity of the flapper era vanished in the wake of a catastrophic stock market crash. Banks failed, and millions of people lost their life’s savings. Poverty rates soared, and a ten-year depression crippled towns across the globe, setting the stage for the second world war. 

 

But what if poverty wasn’t just a result of sudden economic upheaval? Before the Great Depression, many Americans, including children, labored under grueling conditions for 12-15 hours a day. Work came with risks—threatening workers’ safety, and even their lives. At a time when debt could lead to a prison sentence, most people had little choice but to work to survive. 

 

What if the tale of poverty devouring Americans’ wealth overnight is a myth—or only half the story? In the first episode of the American Compassion podcast, we uncover the lives of the many Americans who never lived in avant-garde mansions or purchased opulent yachts. Most Americans didn’t lose the American dream in the Depression era, since it had always failed to catch them when they fell deeper into poverty.

 

Our story begins with Erine Gray’s inspiration to rebuild the American Safety Net. We’ll start in the early 2000s, before turning back the clock to the early 20th-century to explore how profound changes in technology, communication, farming, and industrialization reshaped the ways that people thought about wealth, poverty, and how to catch Americans in freefall. 

 

Brief Backstory

Americans born in the 1840s and 1850s would experience rapid changes in the course of their lives. During their lifetime, kerosene lamps replaced candles; and electric light bulbs replaced kerosene. Steam-powered locomotives, electric trolleys, and gasoline-powered automobiles replaced horsepower. And the Wright Brothers were hard at work on a flying machine. 

 

By 1900 cities became lit up with bright lights, films, and radio. Even time itself was changing. Americans were disengaging from seasonal work rhythms, exchanging nature’s cycles for factory schedules. As the Industrial Revolution grew, the telephone and telegraph revolutionized communication, and high-speed transit revolutionized Americans’ sense of geography. Both required a reevaluation of time in order to synchronize an increasingly connected world of industrial trade and transportation. In 1865, the US train system had 75 different time zones; by 1918, the government reduced American mainland time zones to four.

 

All along, the rich were getting a lot richer. John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust dominated the world's petroleum markets and soon controlled more than 90 percent of the nation's refinery capacity. And Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills earned him millions.

 

But desperation belied the affluence of the Gilded Age. While Rockefeller and Carnegie’s fortunes grew, a new definition of poverty was emerging. Workers were tied to their labor, including children as young as 8 years old. For some of the 15 million people who immigrated to America between 1910-1915, coming to the United States meant being able to determine their own destiny. Yet for others, like many who were born in America, it meant being shackled to life-threatening labor. 

 

Join executive producer Rebecca McInroy, historian H.W. Brands, historian, and journalist Marvin Olasky, and farmer, journalist, and agricultural writer Tom Philpott as we begin the story of the American Safety Net.

 

Resources 

T. R.: The Last Romantic by H.W. Brands

Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by H.W. Brands

Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It by Tom Philpott

The Tragedy of American Compassion by Marvin Olasky

The Global Transformation of Time: 1870–1950 by Vanessa Ogle

Recordings From The Dust Bowl

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