e than it succeeded. While real wages might have increased during the 1920s, the increase came from drops in prices (Cohen, 186). Workers, therefore, probably did not feel grateful to their employers. High unemployment and a series of economic rises and falls in the 1920s made welfare capitalism a failure for the most part. It succeeded slightly in that workers were finally convinced, and came to expect, that a fair employer was a paternalistic employer. That is, once employees had a taste of benefits provided by employers, they continued to expect the benefits from other employers when they switched jobs. What is more, by separating ethnic employees and intermingling them with non-foreigners, workers carried a renewed organizational ethic into the 1930s. Welfare capitalism, which was supposed to make the employee more dependent on the employer than on his community, backfired for the business community.The 1930s were infamously abysmal. Ethnic benefit societies, banks, and stores all failed everywhere. Local merchants, foreseeing bankruptcy, had no choice other than to limit or stop completely the use of credit (Cohen, 235). Restrictions on credit had to strain local ethnic bonds because ethnics now had to pay either weekly or immediately for their purchases. Churches, which were another source of linking ethnic residents to one another, had to cease most of their charitable programs; consequently, many people stopped attending church (Cohen, 227). All the institutions that seemed to keep the ethnic community tight-knit basically failed. There was no one else to turn to for assistance except the government.With Congress still controlled soundly by the Republicans, there had to be some structural changes before the government could become a friend of the worker. Prohibition laws, believed by ethnics to be discriminatory, aroused many new voters for the Democrats. Also, Chicago had a significant number of immigrants who felt as though th...
