Entry #2 Robertson and Paulsen

            One thing Robertson said stuck out to me.  He said, “In 1929, it was strictly a gambling casino with loaded dice.  The few sharks taking advantage of the multitude of suckers.”  Robertson was talking about how a few very wealthy people made a fortune off of the stock market, while the rest of the people were making nothing but thought they were going to get rich.  For normal people, it would be nearly impossible to come out ahead.  So many people were buying stocks with money they didn’t have, so it was inevitable that they would lose money.  Hearing Robertson’s story was interesting because when you hear about the depression you assume everyone was completely impoverished, but he and others were financially stable.  He said many brokers made money during the depression while their customers became poor.  In the mid-thirties, Robertson still had hundreds of thousands of dollars to loan to friends.  He attributed some of his good fortune to sheer luck, but it’s still true that some people simply knew how to operate a business during periods of economic downfall.

             Ed Paulsen was an unemployed young man during the depression who rode in train cars.  He explained how ordinary people felt about President Roosevelt and the New Deal by saying, “It was split thing.  They were cursing Roosevelt for the intrusion into their lives.  At the same time, they were living off it.”  Roosevelt made many programs to help unemployed and suffering people, and some would argue that he was interfering with the economy and the lives of Americans.  Paulsen insisted that the suffering people who benefitted from the New Deal still criticized it.  This is interesting because when I did the webquest about the New Deal I thought Roosevelt was becoming too involved in American society and was overstepping his authority as president, yet his programs did offer relief to many people.  The only thing that can be agreed upon is that Roosevelt was trying to solve an unsolvable problem, and the depression might have been even worse if he hadn’t intervened.  Paulsen experienced both sides of the argument surrounding the New Deal.  He was an unemployed person who didn’t understand price fixing and why food should be destroyed when there were hungry people, but he also benefitted from a job with the National Youth Administration.  Over all, Paulsen understood the futility of the depression.