The year 1939 was not so very unlike this one. The United States was being torn apart by bitter political disagreements, and the unresolved social divisions and underlying disparities that had haunted the nation from birth were increasingly laid bare. Of these, racial inequality was perhaps most shameful: African American men, women, and children were forced to live a separate existence from that of their fellow citizens, whether due to de jure segregation in the South or the no less pernicious zoning ordinances that kept black families out of middle-class neighbourhoods in the North.

There were class divisions, too, that went deep and were deeply injurious. A decade into the Great Depression, ten million people remained unemployed. Factory workers in cities were reeling from a sudden rise in the cost of living and the looming prospect of homelessness. Rural communities groaned under the weight of intergenerational poverty and unmanageable debt, while migrant farmers on the West Coast eked out the barest and most meagre of livings – desperate existences forever memorialised in the photography of Dorothea Lange and John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath.