Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Summary
Cohen's Making a New Deal argues that the debilitating effects of the Great Depression on ethnic institutions (stores, churches, associations, etc.) led workers to identity as a “working class” rather than their ethnic identity (*Gugliermo!) and thus were able to more successfully unionize and agitate the state for improved working conditions. “Mass culture and mass consumption in the 1920s had kept workers tied to, rather than unmooring them from, their ethnic and working-class communities and then, in the 1930s, had helped them build influential class-based political institutions.” Cohen argues that the social and cultural changes that took place during and after the depression – the rise of an activists welfare state, the consolidation of radio stations and chain stores, and the collective suffering of the depressing – changed the attitude of Chicago’s industrial workers, creating a working class identity that could make a higher commitment to unionization.