How Did Schweikart And Allen Portray The 1920s

How do Zinn and Schweikart and Allen portray the 1920s? Was it a decade of increasing prosperity and leisure or a decade of growing inequality and misery? What historical facts do they use to make their specific claim? Zinn portrays the 1920s as a decade of false prosperity, while Schweikart and Zinn characterize the 1920s as a time of growth and improvement. Zinn claims most of the wealth belonged to the upper class, and the elite made much more improvement than the lower class. To prove his point, he uses statistics such as: “one-tenth of one percent of the families at the top received as much income as 42 percent of the families at the bottom” (Zinn 382). Moreover, to show the dreadful state of the lower class, he recounts, “every year in the 1920s, about 25,000 workers were killed on the job and 100,000 permanently disabled. Two million people in New York City lived in tenements condemned as firetraps” (Zinn 382-383). In contrast, Schweikart and Zinn claim the economic deterioration was a myth and American industry

entered the war for personal gain and national power. On the other hand, Schweikart and Allen attribute it to the Pearl Harbor attack. Zinn reports, “Japan’s strike against the American naval base climaxed a long series of mutually antagonistic acts,” such as the threat against U.S. markets by Japan’s invasion of China, and the U.S.’s embargo on certain products (Zinn 410-411). He also says the U.S. declared war on Japan not because of the threat to American citizens, but because of “the Japanese attack on a link in the American Pacific Empire” (Zinn 410). Schweikart and Allen agree hostilities started long before the attack and led to it. Japan’s mail in December 1940 indicated they planned to attack the southwest, which was Singapore, the south, which was the Philippines, or the east, which was Pearl Harbor (Schweikart and Allen 617). However, they claim the attack was one of the sole reasons America declared