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.