Whenever you think of the Great Depression era, you think poverty, bread lines, unemployment, and while this was the reality for a lot of people, what was it like for people who managed to retain their wealth? Did rich people in this era tend to live in similar areas, or was it often like one wealthy person living in their fortified house surrounded by poverty? Did class warfare exist in the political realm the same way it does today? What was it like being rich in a time of such extreme hardship?
Some insight into how rich people lived can be found in Benjamin Sopkin's life. Sopkin ran dressmaking factories (known as the "Sopkin Sweatshops") in the 1930s on Chicago's South Side where he employed mostly African American women. The communists helped the women organize a strike in 1933 and they eventually won. But during the strike, communists ran this article in the Daily Worker (the CPUSA's main organ) to ignite fury against Sopkin. It includes what he ate, how much he paid for golf, his custom-built Lincoln, and more. Take this as you will- it can probably be classified as communist propaganda, but it's interesting.
And again, this proves writing about my dissertation on Reddit is vastly more fun than actually writing my dissertation.
John F. Kennedy talked about this in an interview. Even though he was teenager during the Great Depression of the 1930s, he said in an interview with TIME that he "didn't really learn about the depression until [he] read about it at Harvard."
