Popular folklore of the Great Depression often celebrates how Americans, as individuals, coped with the greatest economic calamity in the nation's history, how they delayed planned marriages, sustained themselves with home gardens, and perhaps most notoriously, sold apples on street corners. But all too often these tales overlook the more political and collective responses many people made. During the 1930s, in an industrial city like Chicago, workers who rolled steel, packed meat, and built farm tractors not only found personal strategies to deal with hardship, they also joined together to undertake new kinds of political action. Men and women who had tried in vain to organize permanent unions in mass production factories before or had been raised on stories of failure now prided themselves on building viable unions at the long-time bastion of the open shop, U.S. Steel; in the meatpacking houses of Armour and Swift, nearly as wretched as Upton Sinclair had described them three decades earlier in his muckraking exposé, The Jungle; and in the farm implement plants of International Harvester, the Chicago-based manufacturer that symbolized the marriage of the industrial and agricultural Midwest. Workers in these companies and in others finally managed with the help of the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to wage the nationwide offensive that was necessary to win union recognition from their powerful, national-scale employers.