Tough or kind or both

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-13-2025

Most days, I at least look at "Letter from an American" by the historian Heather Cox Richardson.  I don't read recent history much but she often writes about something I would like to understand better.  

I was born in 1939, the year that World War II started.  As I was growing up, I heard about Germany and the Nazis, but I also heard about the Great Depression. I guess that the idea of the individual was so strong that the notion of the US government actually helping its citizens was, and still is, strongly frowned on.  Photographs and writings about the Great Depression, 1929 to the start of WW II, made it clear that it was a hard time. t.ly/tQfti

The link at the top of the page leads to Richardson's statements about Frances Perkins, a woman who was in the center of the creation of the US Social Security, something that did not exist until 1935.  I have read about the struggle to deal with sources of energy other than human muscle and about the struggle to create factories and human schedules that involve showing up at a given time.