Entry 3

        I read a story about Jane Yoder, a woman who lived during the great depression. People couldn’t afford anything during this time, not food, clothing, or housing. Boots were especially hard to come by. Yoder described her reaction to rich and how they live, “What is this thing?…some of the people that I know have thirty blouses. Oh, my God, I have no desire to think where I’d hang them. For what? I can’t even grasp it” (Terkel 128). Yoder couldn’t understand why some people are living the life of luxury and others are struggling to survive. This relates to the wedge that was driven into society during the industrial age; there were only two groups of people, those who existed above the wedge and those who existed below it.

        I also read a story about Peggy Terry, a woman who lived in Oklahoma during the dust bowl. Times were even harder for people living in the dust bowl; crops, buildings, and lives were destroyed. Terry described her experience, “These storms, when they would hit, you had to clean house from the attic to ground. Everything was covered in sand. Red sand, just full of oil” (Terkel 139). Resources were scarce. Terry recalls that there were several suicides because sand storms made living almost impossible. Terry’s husband went to Washington D.C., to support the bonus army because he was a WWI veteran. It would seem that people living in the dust bowl had a much harder time trying to survive, then people who lived in poverty in the cities.   

Leonel I. Castello

           This story was about Mexican immigration. The hard isn’t just getting across the border, it’s also managing to get a job and provide for your family. So many Mexicans are deported every day, but they still come back for more, over and over and over again. These Mexicans are trying to live the American dream, but they are denied it. The xenophobia on the border was crazy. In 1954, more than a million Mexicans were deported. “Sometimes they were people who merely looked Mexican. The violations of civil liberties were terrible” (Terkel 80). The deportations got so bad that American citizens were being pulled out of their homes and sent to Mexico, just because they looked Mexican. This is like the Alien and Sedition Acts, Americans closed the door to Mexican immigration.   

I read the story on C. P. Ellis. I found it interesting learning the reasoning behind the Klan’s hate. The narrator, Ellis; told his whole life story. His father was a Klansman, he earned a low income salary. When Ellis’s father died, Ellis was forced to leave school and start supporting his family. He got turned down by many employers but he noticed that blacks and other minorities were getting jobs. This is where he developed his hatred for minorities. “I had to hate somebody. Hatin’ America is hard to do because you can’t see it to hate it. You gotta have somethin’ to look at to hate” (Terkel 64). I agreed with this statement, people always want to blame someone else for their problems. Ellis joined the KKK. Later he began to realize that the problem wasn’t the blacks, it was business owners. Ellis believed that these CIO’s were purposely keeping racial barriers intact in order to keep the low income black and whites hating and fighting each other. Over time, he was able accept black people and work with them in order to make a better life for all. This was like Labor Unions forming to make better working conditions for laborers. Overall it was and interesting story, Ellis was the KKK member I’ve heard of that was able to overcome the racial norms of the time.