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.
Price- Your analysis of these stories is very accurate. The Great Depression really allowed people not to take anything for granted, forcing them to utilize all of their available resources to ensure their own survival. Perhaps it is wrong of Yoder to have looked at the lives of the wealthy in envy. As they say, "The grass is always greener on the other side."
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