Final Post

        I would like you to read my “C.P. Ellis and Andy Johnson” post and my “Jane Yoder, Tom Yoder, Peggy Terry, and Mary Owsley” post.  In my C.P. Ellis and Andy Johnson post, I talked about “What it means to be an American” This has been our central topic this year, and I was able to explore it though the readings of C.P. Ellis and Andy Johnson.  I also believe that C.P. Ellis had one of the most interesting stories.  He explained that people join the KKK not because they are racist, but because they need a place to belong.  I think that’s a very interesting concept that we should listen to today.  Today, people join gangs for the same reason.  They join gangs for a sense of belonging.  We need to create more support groups.  I would also like you to read my “Jane Yoder, Tom Yoder, Peggy Terry, and Mary Owsley” post as I connected their stories to “Just War.”  Like “What it means to be an American”, this has been a central topic this year.  I was able to come to a conclusion that World War 1 wasn’t Just after reading their stories.  We need to think twice when entering wars.

Heinemann and Dollinger

       Larry Heinemann was a Vietnam War veteran.  Larry Heinemann didn’t want to get drafted.  He tried everything to get out of it, such as staying in college.  He said, “I wasn’t willing to go to jail.  Nobody told me I could go to Canada.”  This reminded me of a book we have been reading in English.  We have been reading The Things They Carried , and this reminded me of the main character Tim O’Brian.  Both O’Brian and Heinemann didn’t want to fight in the war but fought anyways.  I don’ think it’s fair to make someone fight and risk their life in war.  I don’t think its ones duty.  I think that if America can’t get enough volunteer soldiers, then they shouldn’t be fighting the war.  If they can’t get enough volunteer soldiers than that means that there isn’t enough support for the war.  Guys should not have to risk their lives for something they don’t believe in. I chose to write about Larry Heinemann as we just studied the Vietnam War and I wanted to learn more.

Genora Johnson Dollinger took part in the first sit-down strike in 1937.  She writes about her memories of that first sit-down strike.  She provides an image that allows the reader to try to understand what it was like.  She said, “The police were using buckshots and rifles and tear gas and everything against us. The men were throwing back whatever they could get their hands on; nuts and bolts and hinges.  Any tear-gas bomb that came unexploded, they’d throw back into the ranks of the police.”  It is really hard for us to understand what the sit-ins were like.  By hearing what Dollinger had to say, the men and women who sat got abused.  Yet, they didn’t were asked to not fight back.  This took a lot of bravery and was an important moment in U.S history.  I chose to read Dollinger’s story as I was very interested when we talked about the sit-in movement.

Lefevre and Dante

Mike Lefevre was a steelworker.  He had a depressed attitude on life.  He said, “It’s hard to take pride in a bridge you’re never gonna cross, in a door you’re never gonna open. You’re mass-producing things and you never see the end result of it” (319) He feels that there is no end to his work.  He takes no pride in his work.  He simply does it to survive.  I think it is important that we do stuff with a purpose.  For example, when we read for English class, we shouldn’t read to get it done, but we should read to understand and get smarter.  Mike Lefevre couldn’t find the purpose in his job.  He couldn’t find the pride in his job.  He was only doing it to make money and support his family.  When we go grow up, we are going to have to get a job.  This should be a job where we can “take pride.”  It should be something we enjoy.  Mike Lefevre didn’t enjoy being a steelworker.  Hopefully, we will find jobs that we will enjoy in our future.

Dolores Dante was a waitress.  Like Lefevre, her job came to her as she needed money fast.  She didn’t have the luxury to pick the job she wanted.  She worked from 5:00P.M to 2:00A.M everyday.  She said, “I became a waitress because I needed money fast”  This made me think about how lucky we are to live in Deerfield.  In Deerfield, we get a top tier education.  We need to take advantage of this education and appreciate it.  I am sure Dolores would have loved to receive a Deerfield High School education, which would allow her to work normal hours in a job she wanted.  We need to appreciate our education and take advantage of it.  We need to work hard so in the future we can find a job with proper hours and a job we can enjoy.

Kearney and Malley

Tom Kearney was a cop.  He reflects on the memories of being a cop.  He talks a lot about blacks.  He mentions that some were trying to integrate with whites.  He also goes on to talk about many who feared to associate themselves with whites.  Tom Kearney said, “I wondered why there were so few colored in the crowd greeting the astronauts yesterday.”  He goes on to say that most people believed that it was that they didn’t care about the space race.  Kearney said, “I don’t think that’s true”  Kearney believed that it was not that blacks didn’t care about the great United States achievement, but that they were not at the parade due to their fear in whites.  The government, heavily white at the time, was in charge of the space program.  Many whites were following the space program and were at the parade.  With racial discrimination being a factor, it makes sense that blacks wouldn’t go to the parade.  This was in 1969.  It is amazing to think about how far we have come in about 40 years.  I believe that today blacks would attend the parade.  We have a black president today.  Today, blacks are just as involved as whites in the United States achievements.

George Malley was a blue collard worker.  He reflects on how society has changed.  He said, “Traditions of the past, there are some that I miss.  Chicago was a big city before and yet it was pretty much like a small town. Neighborhood after neighborhood, you know, were like small towns themselves.”  The end of the 1960’s was a lot like it is today.  Today, everyone lives really busy lives.  There is less family time and less community time.  People are constantly running around performing a million tasks at once.  I can’t remember the last time I went three days in a row having the whole family together eating a meal.  As George Malley pointed out, times changed.  When we think about the roaring 20’s, and why it was so “roaring”, it is because people weren’t living busy lives.  People spent more time outside with their family and friends.  While as George Malley points out, traditions will change, we can still remember the ways of the past.  I think as a society, we need to spend more time with our family and friends.

Ota and Hutchinson

Peter Ota reflected on the way Japanese Americans were treated during the war.  He remembers being treated like an animal, and him and the Japanese accepting it every day.  He later reflects “They couldn’t understand it.  They weren’t raised in our culture.  Today, I would definitely resist.  It was a different situation at that time.  This is what we tried to explain to our daughter.  Today if this happened, I think a majority of the Japanese would resist.”  At the time, no Japanese fought back.  This was because they didn’t understand what was going on.  They believed that America was the land of the free and the land of opportunity.  They couldn’t imagine being denied this opportunity just because of their race.  That goes against all American values.  If it happened a second time, as Ota pointed out, I think they would fight back.  People need to fight against unjust laws.  I don’t think America could single out a race again.  The minority would look back on the Japanese and fight back.  When we look back in time, we have to remember that the Japanese didn’t understand what was happening to them.  It wasn’t an act of fear that they didn’t rebel, but it was an act of confusion.

                Betty Hutchinson was a nurse.  She was a nurse because she felt she had to for her country.  After Pearl Harbor she said, “Immediately, I was going to become a nurse.  That was the fastest thing I could do to help our boys.  Here I was only one semester at Fresno State, and by February 5, I was out at the hospital as a registered nurse.”  This relates to what we learned about the home front in America during the war.  Americans felt that they had to do something.  If it wasn’t enrolling in the draft, it was helping out in other ways.  For Hutchinson, it was becoming a nurse.  The patriotic scene on U.S soil was a lot different than we see today.  Today, we are fighting in numerous countries.  Most American’s don’t even know what countries we are fighting in.  We don’t see it televised on the news.  Soldiers are dying, and Americans at home are living their normal lives.  I think as a country we need to appreciate our soldiers more and do more to help them overseas.

Terry and Sledge

Peggy Terry wrote about the stereotypes of the Japanese and Germans during World War II.  She wrote, “In all the movies we saw, the Germans were always tall and handsome.  There’d be one meanie, a little short dumpy bad Nazi.  But the main characters were good-lookin’ and they looked like us.  The Japanese were all evil”  As we learned, the United States made sure everyone knew that the Japanese were evil.  Their were posters all over the streets and cartoons that portrayed the Japanese as evil.  Also, as Peggy Terry wrote, movies also made the Japanese look evil.  This was opposite for the Germans.  In movies, Germans were not the bad guys.  Unlike the Japanese, the government didn’t make an effort to get the news out that the Germans were evil.  This was because the government didn’t want to go to war with Germany.  They wanted the people on their side, so stayed away from negatively portraying the Germans.  It seems as if on the home-front, the talk was about the Japanese rather than the Germans. 
            E.B Sledge was a soldier during World War II.  One quote struck me the most.  He said, “I was nineteen, a replacement in June of 1944.  Eighty percent of the division in the Guadalcanal campaign was less than twenty-one years of age.”  I’m 17 years old.  Guys fighting were 18 and 19 years old.  That is me in one to two years.  I can’t imagine being thrown into a battle.  I couldn’t handle it.  This shows how soldiers were tested.  They were too young to fight, but they had to fight anyways.  They had the responsibility of protecting their country at the age of 18!  These 17 to 18 year olds had to mature fast in order to protect their country.

Introduction and Rasmus

I will like to focus my attention on Robert Rasmus.  Robert Rasmus was a rifleman in World War II.  His life was on the line every single day.  I want to focus on a single quote.  Robert Rasmus said, “You saw those things in the movies, you saw the newsreels.  But you were of an age when your country wasn’t even in the war.  It seemed unreal.  All of a sudden, there you were right in the thick of it and people dying and you were scared out of your wits that you’d have your head blown off.”  This quote really made me think.  When I watch war movies, I always think about how brave the men must have been.  The thing is, I really don’t know how brave the men must have been.  As Rasmus said, you see battle scenes in movies, but one can’t relate until they actually go into battle.  I can’t imagine going into battle knowing that I have a 70 percent chance of dieing.  There is no way to know how you would feel unless you go into battle.  There is no way to prepare.  As Rasmus said, it happens so quickly.  You think its all fun and games and don’t understand it until your first battle.  The quote also made me think about many of the video games we play today.  We play games such as Call of Duty and get this vision that War is so much fun.  The difference between Call of Duty and real war is; in COD if you die you hit restart, in life, its over.  One can’t really imagine what war is like unless they are in the heart of battle.  Rasmus and other war veterans need to be even more respected.  Next veteran’s days, I’ll try my best to reflect on what Rasmus and other men had to go through in order to protect the United States.

Jane Yoder, Tom Yoder, Peggy Terry, Mary Owsley

The stories of Jane Yoder and Tom Yoder show how bad times were in a Great Depression.  These were kids who lived during the Great Depression.  This story really went into the details of how bad the depression was.  For example, Jane said, “The cold that I’ve known.  I never had boots.  I think when I got married, I had my first set of boots.”  Jane lived in Chicago, and we all know how brutal the temperature is.  The problem for Jane and many, they couldn’t buy the proper gear to defend themselves.  They had to go outside in sub-freezing temperatures without the proper clothes.  I can’t imagine leaving my house when it’s below 10 degrees without a hat, gloves, boots, and a winter coat.  This had a cost on Jane as it would get her sick.  When she got sick she said, “If we had a cold or we threw up, nobody ever took your temperature. We had no thermometer.”  During the depression, getting sick was a huge fear.  People, like Jane, didn’t have the money to treat their sickness.  When I’m sick I get annoyed, but I know that I can go to the doctor and be treated.  Jane and others during the Depression were not able to be treated.  Jane and Tom helped show me how bad times were during the Great Depression.

We discussed for many weeks if World War 1 was just.  I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t just due to what the soldiers went through.  After the war, many were shell shocked, and perhaps worse than that, they came home into a Depression.  Mary Owsley said about her husband, “He’d say them damn Germans gassed him in Germany.  And he come home and his own Government stooges gassed him and run him off the country up there with the water hose, half drowned him.”  After World War 1, soldiers came back home to a brutal life.  While they were happy to be out of war, it was just as bad to live in poverty not being able to support their families.  War veterans are our biggest heroes.  They are supposed to be provided with honor and wealth when they come back for war.  The problem was, the country wasn’t in the proper state to provide them with money for their bravery.  This made it very hard on a lot of soldiers.  This adds on the why the War wasn’t Just.  Not only did the soldiers suffer brutal conditions on the war front, but they also came home to brutal conditions.  There wasn’t a good enough reason to fight to back up what the soldiers went through.

Robertson and Paulsen

Robertson was a wealthy white man who lived during the depression.  Throughout his writing, he reflected on the Great Depression.  He said, “On Wall Street, the people walked around like zombies.  It was like Death Takes A holiday. It was very dark. You saw people who yesterday rode around in Cadillac’s lucky now to have carfare.”  The change in life was so dramatic for people.  You went to bed rich one night, and broke the next morning.  I can’t imagine what husbands of families told their kids.  They must have felt demoralized that they couldn’t support their wife and children.  Robertson was one of the lucky ones during the depression.  He lucked out on Bank Holiday.  He said, “About eight weeks before the bank closings, we decided to take every dollar out of the banks. We must have taken out close to a million dollars.”  That is a million dollars he could have lost if he left it in the bank.  A million dollars at that time was a fortune.  Many people were not as lucky as Robertson and lost all their money in the banks.  The depression changed the life styles of everyone, but some did get luckier then others, like Robertson. 

Unlike Robertson, Paulsen lost everything.  Ed Paulsen was a farmer and in a different social class than Robertson.  While Robertson still had money, Paulsen had no money and no job.  Paulsen recalled going to the waterfront in San Francisco to look for a job.  He said, “You know dang well there’s only three of four jobs… a thousand men would fight like a pack of Alaskan dogs to get through there.” Ed Paulsen and other unemployed men knew there were no jobs, but they still had to try to find one.  It was that or continuing to live without proper food and housing.  Today, the media says that we are in a recession.  I always wondered about the difference between a recession and a depression.  While America is in hard times now, it isn’t as bad as it was in the 30’s.  There aren’t as many Paulsen’s today as there were in the 30’s.  American’s need to work together to try to get America out of the current recession, so we don’t enter another depression.

The New Deal

                America was booming in the 20’s, until the stock market crashed, where then everyone was affected by one of the worst time periods in American History, the Great Depression.  The Great Depression caused much stress for everyone.  For example, janitor George had been saving 1,000 dollars in the bank for 40 years.  The bank later crashed and he never got his money.  He was so depressed that he committed suicide. In order to take America out of its hard times, Roosevelt created the “New Deal.”  With this deal, it was supposed to help all Americans survive the Great Depression.  The New Deal had many positives.  For example, it helped employ nearly 8.5 million people.  It also helped build 78,000 bridges, 116,000 buildings, and 651,000 miles of public road.  The Triborough Bridge was built in 1939.  It connected the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens.  This helped improve transportation.   While the New Deal had many goods, there were problems, as it didn’t help everyone.   The aid that the New Deal gave didn’t benefit blacks.  Due to the racism in the 1930’s, federal programs were often ran by racists, who denied blacks aid.  Also, the AAA gave white landowners cash for not growing crops, but didn’t give money to blacks, who were often the ones doing the farming.  Women also were left out.  The Economy Act prohibited the federal government from hiring members of the same family.  This hurt women, as their husbands often got first priority for the job. 

Even with the bad, ultimately, the legacy of the New Deal was that it saved the country.  America was in an awful depression in the 1930’s.  While some groups of people didn’t get the benefits that whites got, still, the New Deal was able to take America out of the depression.  The government had to intervene to save the government, and they did just that.  For example, the Emergency Banking Acts saved the banks, so tragedies like janitor George wouldn’t happen again.  Even with the racism and sexism, the New Deal will be remembered as a well-executed plan that saved the government.

C.P. Ellis and Andy Johnson

C.P. Ellis

My first thoughts are on how much I can appreciate a former KKK member.   When we think about the KKK, we think about racists.  This passage opened up a whole new thinking. C.P. Ellis grew up in poverty with a father who tried but couldn’t support the family.  It made it hard for Ellis, who grew up too fast and had four kids that he couldn’t support.  He said, “I began to say there’s somethin’ wrong with this country.  I worked my butt off and just never seemed to break even”  This relates to “What does it mean to be an American.”  People come to America thinking they will automatically get wealth and happiness.  The case is, for many, it doesn’t.  In America, if one is born in the wrong place, they won’t be giving happiness.  People need to work for wealth and happiness.  Ellis joined the Klan because he wasn’t living the “American dream” and needed a place to belong.  He said, “Boy, that was an opportunity I really looked forward to! To be part of something.’”  Ellis lived a poor life and never belonged to anything.  To join a group made him happy, and it didn’t matter what group it was.  He joined the Klan not because he was racist, but because he wanted a place to belong.  This is something that we often don’t think about.  It is something are U.S history text books don’t tell us.  We only hear about how racist everyone in the Klan is.  We don’t hear that they are often good men simply put in the wrong situation and made into bad men.  This raises the question on what we could do to stop people from joining hate groups.  As Ellis would argue, we should create positive groups for people to join.  We should create groups that people could be part of instead of joining hate groups such as the KKK. 

Andy Johnson

My first thoughts are that Andy Johnson had a different view on life from his arrival to thirty years later in the United States.  Andy Johnson was a Finnish immigrant.  When he first came to America, he was amazed like many other immigrants.  He thought he was going to live the “American Dream.”  He said, “Coming to America was like being transferred from one century to another: The change was so great.”  This is the way many immigrants thought when coming to the United States.  They were excited for change.  When things are bad, any type of change makes people excited.  As he lived his life in the United States, his thoughts began to change.  He later goes on say, “There’s jobs for those that have jobs, and there are a lot of people on welfare in this country.”  He believed that there really wasn’t the “American Dream” in America.  Not everyone was going to get a job, and many were going to live in poverty.  This is still true today.  The current unemployment rate is around 9 percent.  That means 9 out of every 100 people don’t have jobs.  So, while as a country we say this is the land of opportunity, as Johnson would argue, this isn’t the case for everyone.  To get a job one needs to work hard, and often get a little lucky.  In Johnson’s case, he was born into a family that didn’t give him the best opportunities.  He said, “I went to school altogether less than five winters.” In Johnson’s case, he wasn’t given the opportunity to live the “American Dream.”  As a country, we need to focus on getting the unemployment rate down.  To do this, we need to help immigrants get the proper schooling and adapt to the United States faster.