Home Front 1941-45

      On Friday in class we watched a documentary called "Home Front 1941-45".  It talked about the American involvement in the war.  Roosevelt put together a draft and 15 million men ended up registering for the military.  The only problem with this number of men was that it would be hard to train all of them to fight against the well oiled armies of Germany.  

     The impression of Roosevelt at the time was a positive one.  He would be on the radio all the time talking to the people about the war.  The people felt close to him and regarded him as a beacon of hope.  He had the capacity to inspire and moving the citizens with only words.  The documentary then talked about the role of production in America.  At the time, the US was the mightiest production center on earth.  Every month they put out 4000 tanks and 4500 planes. Factories were working 24 hours a day, and in 9 months, the entire automobile industry shifted to producing war materials. Usually it took 1 year to produce a ship, but now it took just 17 days. This production got the country out of the Great Depression because of its boost to the economy. Since a lot  of the men were not home because they were at war, the women worked at the factories.  This changed the role of women in society forever.  

Since the Japanese had bombed pearl harbor, there was a lot of anti-Japanese propaganda showing them torturing the Chinese.  120,000 Japanese americans were sent to prison camps in the middle of the country.  This was knows as Executive Order 9066.  Most people nowadays call this one of the worst civil rights violation in the history of the United States.

US Position

Today we talked the United States' position on the developing conflict with Germany that eventually lead up to WWII.  The US declared themselves neutral as conflict starting happening and so had to follow the Neutrality Acts, meaning that they couldn't trade with anyone in war.  Even though the US was "neutral" roosevelt wrote a letter to Hitler and Mussolini asking them to stop taking over so many countries.  This did nothing to stop them.  Afterwards, Roosevelt asked for money for defensive measures to be made, but he was limited on how he could help the allies because the neutrality acts restricted trade.  In addition there wasn't enough support from the people to join the war.  This changed slightly when Germany invaded Poland.  Congress amended the neutrality acts by saying that other countries in war could trade with the US if they paid in cash and came to America.  This wasn't very helpful though because it was hard for them to come all the way there.  Finally when France fell to Germany, Roosevelt made more anti-neutrality actions.  Congress passed a National Defense Tax Bill which raised 49 billion dollars for the war effort.  Then the US directly traded with Britain, breaking the neutrality acts, and also made a draft.  16 million men were registered in the draft and Roosevelt started talking about war strategies.

"Over the Edge"

Today we finished watching "Over the Edge".  This video is about the leading up to WWII.  It started out talking about the use of the Summer Olympics by the Germans.  With everyone watching their country, they tried to project an image of the new German, one who was successful and proud.  The only problem that Hitler encountered throughout the olympics was the winning of a black runner from America.  When he won, Hitler got up and left the arena.  This was because of his strong anti - semitism.  In Germany at the time, Hitler was using mass media to brainwash the people of Germany into thinking that Germany was a great place and that they should follow him and his ideas.  He did this by putting radios everywhere even in the streets so everyone would hear what was being broadcasted.  In 1938 Hitler was threatening to take over Czechoslovakia.  Chamberlin, the British prime minister, flew to Germany to have a meeting with Hitler.  He ended up making a deal with him that after Czech, he couldn't take over any other areas.  Chamberlin was celebrated greatly because of this since nobody wanted anther war.  But Hitler didn't carry through with this agreement.  Even so, other countries didn't take any military actions soon after because nobody wanted another war just 20 years after WWI.  So they kept giving Hitler what he wanted.  Eventually, war seemed inevitable. Soon after the people of America started to realize how big of a problem the anti-Jew attitude had become.  One Jewish boy shot a German official, and as a result the people of Germany lit on fire dozens of synagogues in Germany.  It was sort of like a wake up call to Americans, but it still wasn't motivation enough to get directly involved.  Though, America did lend and lease arms to the countries fighting Germany.  There was an incident the movie talked about where a ship called the Sy. Louis, filled with Jewish Germans, landed in America, but Roosevelt didn't let them come into America because he didn't want to spend money and time on them when he had bigger issues to deal with.  As a result they had to go back to Europe and 600 out of 900 were killed.   Finally, America made a peace time draft and started training soldiers to fight.  At the time though America's military was very weak and didn't have that much money so they trained with wooden guns and fake tanks. And that was where the documentary ended.  Do you think that the European nations should have appeased Hitler so much, or should they have taken military action?

Stormy Weather Video Continued

           On Friday, we finished watching the rest of video of the stormy weather. In the video there was a man named Huey Long and he was a demagogue. He was a man who believed that for people to be able to be equal they had to have the same amount of money, His idea was that he was going to get money from the rich people and give the poor an amount of 5000 dollars each month so that they could buy a house, car, food and clothes. But the thing was that even if he wanted to give poor people the money that he got from the rich was impossible because poor people would only be getting about 400 dollars. There wasn't enough money for everyone to have 5000 dollars a month. President Roosevelt didn't like Huey Long because he thought that he was a threat because he thought that his job as a president was going to go away because he thought that people were going to vote for Huey Long for president. Then president Roosevelt started to change the American Perception about the role of government by giving people jobs and he made people think that that was a revolutionary era. When Roosevelt decided to run for president again he won by 583 to 8 people. Every state voted for him except one and he got 60 percent of the votes. Not only in America was there depression going on, almost every country was going through a depression too, especially Germany but Hitler has promised people jobs and that made Germany escape the Depression. The jobs that he gave the Germans were making weapons for World War 2 but the Germans didn't know.

Great Depression; The stormy weather

      Today, in class we watched a video named "1929-1936: Stormy Weather". The video was about what was happening during the depression. America lost a lot of its money. There was an army named bonus army and they were a group of people who were promised extra money but when they wanted their money, America wasn't able to pay them because they were running out of money. The depression wasn't only in America but it was all around the world. Depression didn't just hit people with money, it hit everyone even ordinary people. In the video the person who was talking said "more people with less money". That was true because people had to sell everything they had to pay bills and get money for food. There was refugees where they gave them food like soup. Thousands of people went and they got soup and others had too much pride that they didn't get free soup. With the bank failing, 9 million peoples saving were gone. The bank crushed hundred thousands of peoples lives and people had to sell items they had. People started to blame themselves for the depression because as a person they thought that they failed to America and that was what started the depression. Some people were really scared to end up in the streets and so they started to move to California for more opportunities. Even though America was in depression, they still did things to be entertained and forget the depression that they were experiencing, they made theater where you only paid 15 cents to watch movies for 6-7 hours. They also did jazz dance and swing dance competitions to see who could last the longest dancing and at the end they would win a prize. Also they listened to people on the radio tell funny stories. As time passed, there was a person running for president, Roosevelt was the one that was running for president. He promised people that everything would get better if they made him president. He said that he would get jobs for people, rescue banks, and help farmers. He called this the 3 R's: rescue, reform, and recovery. In the second part of class we went online and saw acts and laws that were passed during the time that Roosevelt was president with the 3 R's.

Connections to the Great Depression

         Today in class we put in a Google document what we recorded examples from our articles that fit in the appropriate category. The categories were lack of economic diversity, income inequality, credit structure of economy, and international trade and debt. We discussed why some of the examples from our articles were the same but they were in different categories. In my group we discussed the income inequalities and how they affected people. We also discussed solutions to what we could do to fix these causes of causes that happened in the great depression. I heard a person say that for maldistribution of money, the bank could collect all the money from everyone and then distribute them to everyone equally but then that wouldn't be fair to the wealthier people. I researched the maldistibution of money today because from 1979 and 200, there was a very big gap in between the wealthier and the poor. I saw that this wont really change ever because if your born into a low income family then your most likely to be a low income person in the future because people don't usually get rich in one day.