In 1935, Mrs. Olga Ferk wrote a letter to President Roosevelt in which she complained that she was mistreated at her relief station, that she was only $19 behind in her government HOLC mortgage payments, not three months as accused, and that her son's Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) paychecks were always late in arriving. “How long is this rotten condition going to last,” she demanded of the president. “I am at the end of the rope. The Rich get Richer and the poor can go to – H – that is what it looks like to me.… Let's have some results.” What is most striking about Mrs. Ferk's letter is that only a few years earlier, her expectation that the federal government should provide her with regular relief, a mortgage, and a job for her son and be efficient and fair about it would have been unimaginable. In the midst of the Great Depression, families like the Ferks were depending on the national government as once they had looked to their ethnic institutions and welfare capitalist employers.

Two years later, Sociology Professor Arthur W. Kornhauser and his assistants at the University of Chicago interviewed several thousand Chicago residents of diverse occupations to learn their opinions about the great controversies of the day.