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How Great was the Great Depression?

 

            In 1929, James San Jule's father was a successful businessman in Tulsa, Oklahoma. San Jule graduated from Tulsa Central High School and had been accepted at Amherst College in Massachusetts and planned to go on to Harvard Law School after that. Because he was quite young, his father wanted him to wait a year and arranged for him to work as an office boy in the Exchange National Bank at Tulsa. "I didn't think much of money in those days. It was just something we had," said San Jule. "My father was probably a millionaire. We owned fancy cars, a fancy house, fancy everything. I led the ordinary life of a wealthy kid, nothing spectacular." He was working in the bank in October 1929, when the debacle began.
             "Of course, you didn't believe it. 'This is something that happens,' you thought. 'It will pass.' ".
             The Crash of 1929 wiped out San Jule's father financially and physically. "It was a horrible, horrible period, about which I understood little. What's a kid to do? You have no worries about anything. You're going to Amherst and Harvard. All of sudden your life is blasted out of existence. It felt like being de-princed.".
             In the winter of 1930, San Jule ran away from home - not quite sure where he was going or even why he was leaving. It just seemed the thing to do. Between 1929 and 1941, 4,000,000 Americans desperate for food and lodging roamed the land. Of this number, 250,000 were teenagers who rode the rails and grew up fast in speeding boxcars, living in hobo jungles, begging on the streets and running from the police and club-wielding railroad guards.
             Reaction .
             I chose this document because it really showed how the Great Depression changed people's lives. It was crazy to read how the San Jule family had it all, an extremely wealthy family would become poor within months. When you find out that James was going to Harvard then the depression hit and his goals were shattered, you can't help but feel really bad for him.


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