re: FDR was an awful president and MacArthur was an awful general.

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Fact one f the matter they didn't before the social safety net. You can make an argument that the solution created its own set of intractable problems, but it's not like those people were being taken care of.

A woman in the 19th century whose husband died or ran off often became a prostitute out of necessity.

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The associational nature of American society in the 19th and early 20th century was an amazing phenomenon. The Marxist oriented historians that have ignored that fact in the last 40 years or so have been proven very wrong.

Your example would be an extreme outlying situation that could just as easily happen in 2021. Niall Ferguson's The Square and the Tower is one of many sources that cover how well private organizations helped the poor and needy.

Despite narrow narratives, that period of time saw the fastest growth of living standards for regular people within a certain area (Western Europe/North America) than at any other time in history.