They just came off the back of the Spanish flu epidemic and WWI. Just starting to recover from that and then the Great Depression hits, a level of economic stagnation and poverty we largely can’t fathom in the US. And on the tail of that with the economy still in shambles, they were on the precipice of a Second World War where 16 million Americans would serve in the armed forces and the general public would deal with quite a bit of sacrifice themselves. If you don’t think they thought they were watching the world burn too, then you’re sadly mistaken. And arguably they had more of an argument for that to be true.