Thursday, May 12
Learning Objective:
Students will demonstrate close read skills for informative text (RI
8.1-4) and collaborative discussion (SL 8.1).
Teaching Objective:
Students will work in small groups, to read the articles and complete the
handout.
Close Read Texts: "Digging
In", "Debts", "The New Deal"
Directions: In small
groups of three to four (do individually if absent), read the articles.
Complete the outline handout.
Upcoming:
Select a "disaster" that you will be able to research, do a
power point on, and present to the class. The disaster can be world-wide,
national, state wide/community. The same topic will be allowed only once,
so have more than one idea in mind.
Close Read Texts - The Great
Depression Disaster
Digging In
By Robert
J. Hastings
The closing of Old West Side Mine meant the end of anything resembling a steady
job for the next eight years. From 1930 on, it was a day’s work here and a
day’s work there, a coal order from the welfare office, a few days on WPA, a
garden in the back yard, and a few chickens and eggs.
We weathered the storm because of Dad’s willingness to take any job and Mom’s
ability to stretch every available dollar. It was not so much a matter of
finding a job as of filling in with odd jobs wherever and whenever you could,
and most of the “jobs” were those you made for yourself.
My diary shows that Dad sold iron cords door to door, “worked a day in the
hay,” bought a horse to break gardens, rented an extra lot for a garden on the
shares, picked peaches, raised sweet potato slips, traded an occasional dozen
of eggs at the grocery, hung wallpaper, “painted Don Albright’s house for $5,”
picked up a day or two’s work at the strip mines, guarded the fence at the
county fairgrounds, cut hair for boys in the neighborhood, sold coal orders,
and when he had to and could, worked intermittently on WPA.
With no dependable income, we cut back on everything possible. We stopped the
evening paper, turned off the city water and cleaned out our well, sold our
four-door Model T touring car with the snap-on side curtains and isinglass,
stopped ice and milk delivery, and disconnected our gas range for all but the
three hot summer months. There was no telephone to disconnect, as we didn’t
have one to start with!
We did keep up regular payments on two Metropolitan Life Insurance
policies. Page after page of old receipt books show entries of 10 cents
per week on one policy and 69 cents a month on another. As long as we could, we
made house payments to the Marion Building and Loan, but a day came when we had
to let those go, too.
Fortunately, we were able to save our house from foreclosure. When so many
borrowers defaulted, the Marion Building and Loan went bankrupt. Creditors were
allowed to pay just about any amount to satisfy the receivers. But that was the
catch – who had “just about any amount” to pay? A house behind ours sold for
$25. Many good houses in Marion sold for $5 to $100 and were torn down and
moved to nearby towns. We settled with the loan company for $125, or ten cents
on the dollar for our $1250 mortgage. I’ll never forget the day Dad cleared it
all up, making two or three trips to town to bring papers home for Mom to sign.
He was able to borrow the $125 from his aunt, Dialtha James, who as the widow
of a Spanish-American war veteran had a small pension.
Looking back, I find it amazing what we did without. A partial list would
include toothpaste (we used soda), toilet paper (we used the catalog),
newspaper or magazine subscriptions, soft drinks, potato chips and snacks,
bakery goods except bread and an occasional dozen of doughnuts, paper clips, rubber
bands and restaurant meals. We had no water bill, sewer bill, telephone
bill, no car expenses – gasoline, tires, batteries, licenses, insurance,
repairs – no laundry service, no dry cleaning (we pressed woolens up with a hot
iron and wet cloth), no bank service charge (no bank account), no sales or
income tax. We sent no greeting cards except maybe half a dozen at Christmas…
Typical of the simple economies Mom practiced was keeping the electric bill to
$1 a month and the gas bill to $1 a month in June, July, and August….Since our
only appliance was an electric iron, the chief use of electricity was for
lighting. With only a single bulb suspended by a cord from the ceiling of each
room, there weren’t many lights to burn…On winter evenings, Mom would turn on
the kitchen light while she cooked supper. If I had lessons I brought them to
the kitchen table or sprawled on the floor between the kitchen and dining room.
After supper we “turned off the light in the kitchen” and moved to the
dining-sitting room, where another light was switched on. If we wanted to read
on winter afternoons, we sat as near a window as possible, with the curtains
pinned back, to save the lights until it was nearly dark…
Dad had some old-fashioned shoe lasts, and he would buy stick-‘em-on soles at
the dime store to patch our shoes in winter. With simple barber tools he cut my
hair and that of other kids in the neighborhood, for maybe ten cents a head. In
cold, wet weather, when he worked outdoors on WPA, he often cut strips of
cardboard to stuff in the soles of his shoes and keep his feet warm.
We took care of what we had. Every cotton cloth was used over as a dish cloth,
wash cloth, dust cloth, shoe-shining cloth, window-washing cloth, to scrub and
wax floors, make bandages, make quilt pieces, make kite tails, or to tie boxes
and papers together. The cotton bags from flour, salt, and cracked
chicken feed were washed, bleached, and cut into dish cloths and towels. Some
neighbors made curtains or even dresses from feed sacks. Every paper bag was
saved for lunches or cut and used for wrapping paper. String was wound into
balls for later use.
Each August Mom would find someone who was a year ahead of me in school, and
buy his used books. One exception was a spelling book used in all eight grades.
Since it was to be used for eight years, we decided it would be a wise
investment to buy a new one when I started first grade. In the seventh
grade, I dropped that speller in the snow. I thought Mom was unfair when she
sent me all the way back to school, retracing my steps to look for the book…
Before the Depression, we hung a four-cornered black-and-white cardboard sign
in the front window each morning. The figures in the corners told the iceman
how many pounds to bring – 25, 50, 75, or 100. But ice was one of the
casualties of the Depression, although we managed a small piece two or three
times a week for iced tea. About eleven in the morning I would pull a little
wagon, filled with a gunny sack and assorted old quilts and tarpaulins, down to
the neighborhood ice house to buy a “nickel’s worth of ice,” which was half of
a 25-pound chunk. By wrapping it carefully and storing it in a cool, damp spot
under the house, we could stretch that piece of ice for two or three days. In
rainy, cool weather, maybe four days! It was our glistening prize, and any left
over from tea was emptied back into a pitcher of ice water, or used for
lemonade that afternoon. So as not to waste any, we chipped only what was
needed, with much of the same care used by a diamond cutter.
Whatever was free was our recreation. This may have included playing
records on our wind-up Victrola or listening to the radio. You might watch a
parachute jump at the airport or a free ball game at the city park, with
perhaps a free band concert afterwards…the band concerts survived only the
first two years of the Depression…
We liked music, and one of my earliest memories is of Dad singing to me:
Two arms that hold me tight,
Two lips that kiss goodnight;
To me he’ll always be,
That little boy of mine.
No one can ever know,
Just what his coming has meant:
He’s something heaven has sent,
That little boy of mine.
Debts
By Karen
Hesse – March 1943
Daddy is
thinking
of taking a
loan from Mr. Roosevelt and his men,
to get some
new wheat planted
where the
winter crop has spindled out and died.
Mr.
Roosevelt promises
Daddy won’t
have to pay a dime
till the
crop comes in.
Daddy says,
“I can turn
the fields over,
start
again.
It’s sure
to rain soon.
Wheat’s
sure to grow.”
Ma says,
“What if it doesn’t?”
Daddy takes
off his hat,
roughs up
his hair,
puts the
hat back on.
“Course
it’ll rain,” he says.
Ma says,
“Bay,
it hasn’t
rained enough to grow wheat in
three
years.”
Daddy looks
like a fight brewing.
He takes
that red face of his out to the barn,
To keep
from feuding with my pregnant ma.
I ask Ma
how, after
all this time,
Daddy still
believes in rain.
“Well, it
rains enough,” Ma says,
“now and
again,
to keep a
person hoping.
But even if
it didn’t
your daddy
would have to believe.
It’s coming
on spring,
and he’s a
farmer.”
The New Deal
In
1932 Franklin Delano
Roosevelt was elected overwhelmingly on a campaign promising a New
Deal for the American people. Roosevelt worked quickly upon his election to
deliver the New Deal, an unprecedented number of reforms addressing the
catastrophic effects of the Great Depression. Unlike his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, who felt
that the public should support the government and not the other way around,
Roosevelt felt it was the federal government’s duty to help the American people
weather these bad times.
Together
with his “brain trust,” a group of university scholars and liberal theorists,
Roosevelt sought the best course of action for the struggling nation. A
desperate Congress gave him carte blanche and rubber-stamped his proposals in
order to expedite the reforms. During the first 100 days of his presidency, a
never-ending stream of bills was passed, to relieve poverty, reduce
unemployment, and speed economic recovery.
His first
act as president was to declare a four-day bank holiday, during which time
Congress drafted the Emergency Banking Bill of 1933, which stabilized the
banking system and restored the public’s faith in the banking industry by
putting the federal government behind it. Three months later, he signed the
Glass-Steagall Act which created the FDIC, federally insuring deposits
The Civil Conservation
Corps was one of the New Deal’s most successful programs. It
addressed the pressing problem of unemployment by sending 3 million single men
from age 17 to 23 to the nations’ forests to work. Living in camps in the
forests, the men dug ditches, built reservoirs and planted trees. The men, all
volunteers, were paid $30 a month, with two thirds being sent home. The Works
Progress Administration, Roosevelt’s major work relief program, would
employ more than 8.5 million people to build bridges, roads, public buildings,
parks and airports.
The
National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and the National Recovery
Administration (NRA) were designed to address unemployment by regulating the
number of hours worked per week and banning child labor. The Federal Emergency
Relief Administration (FERA), created in 1933, gave $3 billion to states for
work relief programs. The Agricultural Adjustment Act subsidized farmers for
reducing crops and provided loans for farmers facing bankruptcy. The Home
Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) helped people save their homes from
foreclosure.
While they
did not end the Depression, the New Deal’s experimental programs helped the
American people immeasurably by taking care of their basic needs and giving
them the dignity of work and hope.
Used by permission of PBS
Disaster Unit - Close Read Outline
Handout: (three points per section - total: 15)
Learning Objective:
Students will demonstrate close read skills for informative text (RI
8.1-4) and collaborative discussion (SL 8.1).
Teaching Objective:
Students will work in small groups, to read the articles and complete the
handout. Once you finish one text, return it to me and get the next one,
and so on.
Topic: What Effect Did the
Great Depression Have on People Who Lived It?
Name(s)___________________________________________________________________
Hour ___ Date _________
Directions: Use the three texts
provided (Digging In, The New Deal, and Debts), to fill in the body of
the information on the handout. Using information provided in the texts, write
an effective introduction and conclusion, which could be used to begin an essay
on the topic stated.
Introduction: Needs to be attention
grabbing - something that would "hook" the reader. Examples:
quotes, anecdotes, startling statement, fact or statistic etc.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Text Title #1: Digging In
Main Idea:
__________________________________________________________________________________
Supporting Detail/evidence
#1:_______________________________________________________________
Supporting Detail/evidence #2:
______________________________________________________________
Supporting Detail/evidence #3:
______________________________________________________________
Text Title #2: The New
Deal
Main Idea:
_________________________________________________________________________________
Supporting Detail/evidence
#1:_______________________________________________________________
Supporting Detail/evidence #2:
______________________________________________________________
Supporting Detail/evidence #3:
______________________________________________________________
Text Title #3: Debts
Main Idea:
_________________________________________________________________________________
Supporting Detail/evidence
#1:_______________________________________________________________
Supporting Detail/evidence #2: ______________________________________________________________
Supporting Detail/evidence #3:
______________________________________________________________
Conclusion: Tie it all
together with a strong ending - leave the reader with something to think
about.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
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