ABSTRACT
The American dream tells us that individuals make themselves, by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, working hard and sacrificing, patient for those rare opportunities that come along. People congratulate themselves when things go right and blame themselves when things go wrong. These struggles were brilliantly captured by Studs Terkel in his oral histories of people who lived through the Great Depression. He also interviewed their children, including Diane, quoted in the epigraph. Terkel sums up a common theme of these interviews: “The suddenly idle hands blamed themselves, rather than society. True, there were hunger marches and protestations to City Hall and Washington, but the millions experienced a private kind of shame when the pink slip came. No matter that the others suffered the same fate, the inner voice whispered, ‘I’m a failure.’”1
