Social Security's implicit promise:

• Those who can't or shouldn't work will be supported if they worked while able.
• Who can't or shouldn't work?
• The disabled
• The retired
• Children
• Women

Ford's Assembly Line, c. 1915

River Rouge, 1941

Fordism: mass production brings

1. Technology: Mass Production and the assembly line
2. Labor Force: Relatively unskilled, routinized, boring jobs; little control
3. High wages that make mass consumption possible.

Fordism turns out to need the government.

1. Technology: Mass Production and the assembly line
2. Labor Force: Relatively unskilled, routinized, boring jobs; little control
3. High wages that make mass consumption possible.
4. Government enforcement of a pact between labor and capital.

Battle of Homestead

Labor's advantages in 1936

1. More cultural cohesion among workers.
2. New legal protections against courts ending strikes.
3. The Wagner act protecting unionization
4. Labor-friendly governors.
5. Like
6. Strong Labor leaders.

John Lewis

1923

1933

1936

1938

1946

1946, take 2

An Automotive die

Strikers, February 1937

John Lewis on his demands

The right to organize; shorter hours, the prohibition of child labor, equal pay for men and women doing substantially the same kind of work, [and] that all who are able to work and willing shall have the opportunity for steady employment.

Not a living wage! We ask more than that. We demand for the unskilled workers a wage that will enable them to maintain themselves and their families in health and modern comfort, to purchase their own homes, to enmable their children to obtain at least a high-school education and to provide against sickness, disability, and death.

The First World War was a test of country's political resilience.

The Second World War was determined by economic ability to win. so ended up being about economic

1941-12-07

P-51 Mustang test flight in California , October 1942

M-4 and M-3 tanks at Ft Knox, June 1942

Mark V Panther

Sherman tank

Fat Man: Atomic Bomb #2

Hiroshima, Nagasaki

Rosie the Motion Picture

Bracero program applicants in Mexico, 1956

Superman vs. the Axis

Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" in the State of the Union, 1941:

The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.

Manzanar