I have read that it did just the opposite. I don’t know enough about the topic to answer your question, but I’d like to hear any answers on this and maybe this can be a jumping-off point.

In The Age of Acquiescence, the author (whose name I can’t remember) describes American culture from colonization to the end of the 19th century as imbibing this Protestant ethic of self-dependence. A person’s moral development required him (always him at this time) to take independent, personal responsibility for his subsistence. Working for someone else prevented this. Wage labor or apprenticeship was acceptable for a young man gaining experience, but working for someone else once you passed that stage of life was seen as emasculating and suspect.

This attitude continued into the Industrial Age and formed part of the implicit cultural background of the labor movements and agrarian populisms, with their reaction against urban finance and cartelized manufacturing that prevented people from personally controlling their economic situations. This led to a kind of sympathy for socialism, as a way to weaken these powers and restore the economic self-sufficiency of working communities.

It was only with the Great Depression that people became so desperate that they completely let go of these sensibilities and became more willing to do anything for a paycheck. They wanted jobs and government-guaranteed benefits, and they lost interest in contesting the basic terms of the relationship between labor and capital.

Arguably, the current situation extends from this. The author argues that the socialist demand for democracy in the workplace would have been much more sympathetic under the pre-Depression culture, and it was only the trauma of that time that made this type of demand seem so hopelessly utopian in the latter 20th century.

Is this broadly true or completely wrong?