Ed Paulson & Arthur A Robertson

Ed Paulson, Freight-train Rider
Paulson did not have much money and demanded work, shelter and groceries which were necessities for him and his family. He talked about a parade where people were protesting for different rights and the police came in and became very violent and killed many people. This reminded me of the times during the civil rights movements where people would come together and protest for their beliefs. Multiple times the police would get involved and started beating people because they did not like the reason behind their protests. Paulson said, "It’s a tough world and you had to be born into it." He thought that the world was very hard and people had to work to be respected and live a good life. He ran into Upton Sinclair in 1934 and learned about his idea to relate unemployed to the resources not being used. This idea appealed to Paulson because he thought that there were many places that the unemployed could be working at, but it just was not happening at that time. He also talked about transient camps which were made by the federal government to look after everyone who was a charged criminal.

Arthur A Robertson:
This man talked about how the depression caused disasters because people did not have money. He explained that banks were losing a lot of people’s money and were unable to pay the customers back. This event made the customers furious because all of the money that they saved in the bank was all gone and they couldn’t do anything to get it back. From the lack of money, many people committed suicide. This event affected almost everyone except brokers who did not lose their money. “They made fortunes on commissions while their customers went broke.” Today, this would never happen because there is bank insurance so customers are insured that their money is safe with the bank.