Excerpt from Herbert Hoover’s “American Individualism,” 1922
It is in maintenance of a society fluid to these human qualities that our individualism departs from the individualism of Europe. There can be no rise for the individual through the frozen strata of classes, or of castes, and no stratification can take place in a mass livened by the free stir of its particles. This guarding of our individualism against stratification insists not only in preserving in the social solution an equal opportunity for the able and ambitious to rise from the bottom; it also insists that the sons of the successful shall not by any mere right of birth or favor continue to occupy their fathers’ places of power against the rise of a new generation in process of coming up from the bottom. The pioneers of our American individualism had the good sense not to reward
Washington and Jefferson and Hamilton with hereditary dukedoms and fixtures in landed estates, as Great Britain rewarded Marlborough and Nelson. Otherwise our American fields of opportunity would have been clogged with long generations inheriting their fathers’ privileges without their fathers’ capacity for service. That high and increasing standards of living and comfort should be the first of considerations in public mind and in government needs no apology. We have long since realized that the basis of an advancing civilization must be a high and growing standard of living for all the people, not for a single class; that education, food, clothing, housing, and the spreading use of what we so often term non-essentials, are the real fertilizers of the soil from which spring the finer flowers of life. The economic development of the past fifty years has lifted the general standard of comfort far beyond the dreams of our forefathers. The only road to further advance in the standard of living is by greater invention, greater elimination of waste, greater production and better distribution of commodities and services, for by increasing their ratio to our numbers and dividing them justly we each will have more of them.
Use the excerpt from Herbert Hoover’s “American Individualism” to answer the question.
Which inequity of 1920s prosperity does Hoover’s assessment overlook?
A.
a stock market crash caused by risky investment practices and over-speculation
B.
a farmers’ depression caused by oversupply, low demand, and a drop in market prices
C.
a prolonged series of devastating dust storms caused by overfarming, soil erosion, and drought
D.
a worker shortage brought about by a shift in the national mood toward isolationism and nativism