Blossom Sheed was born in 1909 in Memphis, Tennessee to a father whose parents had been abolitionists and a mother who came out of democratic agrarian Nebraska. They were literally the salt of the American earth, the kind of people who had fought cheerfully in the Revolution, bravely in the Civil War, and then, in the incredible Panics and Depressions brought on by the rise of the robber barons, had formed themselves into Worker and Farmer Alliances and become the American populists. They were land-bound, family-bound Americans who really believed that the American democracy was meant to serve them not exploit them, and time and time again were shocked to discover that the democracy was not theirs by right, that they would have to fight over and over again simply to survive in it.