"It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps."
— Martin Luther King Jr.
There was a time in this country when the dream of America was so strongly felt, so powerfully dreamt, and so completely believed that there were many who could not even begin to imagine that it might be a false dream. It was the dream that anyone could be a material success if only they worked hard enough. The dream that, that same material success indicated spiritual success. It was the dream that nothing separated the common man from the Rockefellers except a little luck to go with the aforementioned hard work. That at any moment one might rise above even the humblest of circumstances and "make something of oneself".
But then came the horrible awakening known as The Great Depression. A time that saw unbelievable numbers of people go from prosperity, to poverty, in one fell swoop.