Robertson and Paulsen

Robertson was a wealthy white man who lived during the depression.  Throughout his writing, he reflected on the Great Depression.  He said, “On Wall Street, the people walked around like zombies.  It was like Death Takes A holiday. It was very dark. You saw people who yesterday rode around in Cadillac’s lucky now to have carfare.”  The change in life was so dramatic for people.  You went to bed rich one night, and broke the next morning.  I can’t imagine what husbands of families told their kids.  They must have felt demoralized that they couldn’t support their wife and children.  Robertson was one of the lucky ones during the depression.  He lucked out on Bank Holiday.  He said, “About eight weeks before the bank closings, we decided to take every dollar out of the banks. We must have taken out close to a million dollars.”  That is a million dollars he could have lost if he left it in the bank.  A million dollars at that time was a fortune.  Many people were not as lucky as Robertson and lost all their money in the banks.  The depression changed the life styles of everyone, but some did get luckier then others, like Robertson. 

Unlike Robertson, Paulsen lost everything.  Ed Paulsen was a farmer and in a different social class than Robertson.  While Robertson still had money, Paulsen had no money and no job.  Paulsen recalled going to the waterfront in San Francisco to look for a job.  He said, “You know dang well there’s only three of four jobs… a thousand men would fight like a pack of Alaskan dogs to get through there.” Ed Paulsen and other unemployed men knew there were no jobs, but they still had to try to find one.  It was that or continuing to live without proper food and housing.  Today, the media says that we are in a recession.  I always wondered about the difference between a recession and a depression.  While America is in hard times now, it isn’t as bad as it was in the 30’s.  There aren’t as many Paulsen’s today as there were in the 30’s.  American’s need to work together to try to get America out of the current recession, so we don’t enter another depression.