Life in the 1920's
... as a result factories cut back production and laid off workers. By 1921 some 5 million workers were unemployed. Farmers had a crisis as well. The benefited from wartime markets in Europe, but after the war, prices dropped drastically. Hundreds of thousands of American farmers lost ownership of their land. In 1919, Americans struggled with rapidly rising prices so they asked for higher wages and shorter hours but management ignored the pleas. Thus, many workers walked off the job, in 1919 alone, unions called more than 3,600 strikes which involved more than 4 million workers. In January of 1919 the first strike occured in a shipyard in Seattle, Washington, which involved some 35,000 shipyard workers. The general srike began on February 6th at 10 A.M., 60,000 workers left their jobs. Alarmed at such a show of untiy, Seattle mewspapers blamed immigrants, calling the strikers ”muddle-headed foreigners” and “riffraff from Europe intent on terrorizing the community.” Nevertheless, the strikers came under increased public pressure to go back to work, well ...