Go to the link for the The Great Depression. Choose a passage from this website and write it out and interpret it and explain why you chose this passage. Also choose a picture or painting and explain the content of piece and how it relates to class.
The Passage I chose is from Roosevelt's second bill of rights. The passage reads as follows: I do not think that any of us Americans can be content with mere survival. Sacrifices that we and our allies are making impose upon us all a sacred obligation to see to it that out of this war we and our children will gain something better than mere survival.
I think Roosevelt is trying to say that survival is not the only thing to be gained out of this war and due to all the sacrifices made by our own people and allies we need to gain more than just survival to justify the lives we have lost.
I chose this passage because I liked the way It sounded as a motivation piece and I think it greatly complies with the status of the war they needed to have moral victories as much as physical ones.
The passage I chose from the great depression website is as follows: Almost all nations sought to protect their domestic production by imposing tariffs, raising existing ones, and setting quotas on foreign imports. The effect of these restrictive measures was to greatly reduce the volume of international trade: by 1932 the total value of world trade had fallen by more than half as country after country took measures against the importation of foreign goods.
This passage is very straight forward and to me and because of the economic failing foreign trade was ceased and so the revenue generated from foreign trade would also die out. I chose this passage because I found it interesting because I feel that foreign trade would help keep the economy more stable but apparently the same was not thought back then.
This picture shows of the struggle of trying to secure a job during the time of the great depression. I choose this picture because to me it relates to class by showing a piece of the time period and the economy has its roots in politics somehow someway which is what this class is about
I think another way to loo at what Roosevelt is saying is that merely surviving is not really living. The whole point in coming together to form a community or society is to improve the quality of life so that we have time to do more than just survive. We have art, music philosophy and recreation because we have the level comfort needed to not always be worried about life or death. The picture you chose is also very relevant to this topic because it shows men in a desperate state struggling to just survive. In better conditions people can choose how they want to earn a living but in a more "survival of the fittest" environment people had to take what they could get.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with the previous comment. I think Roosevelt was implying that merely surviving isn't living there has to be another way of living and by everyone coming together it's suppose to enhance the resources we are all given.
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