Arthur A Robertson & Clifford Burke (Hard Times)

It was really interesting for me to read two different accounts of the Great Depression, one from a white man and one from a black man. From the Robertson's prospective, who was white, the Great Depression was the worst time of his entire life. Lots of people who were close to Robertson were completely ruined by the Great Depression. Robertson explained, "October 29, 1929, yeah. A frenzy. I must have gotten calls from a dozen and a half friends who were desperate...suicides, left and right, made a terrific impression on me, of course. People I knew. It was heartbreaking. One day you saw the prices at a hundred, the next day at $20, at $15..." Robertson was an extremely wealthy man who had wealthy friends and family, and when he responded to how he was affected by the Great Depression, he naturally focused on how prices of stocks had dropped by 70 or 80 percent. He focused on the fact that friends and family who had everything invested in the stock market now had nothing, and began calling him frantically asking for cash loans to help them out. Another story that Robertson focused on when describing how he was affected by the Great Depression was his story about Jesse Livermore. Livermore was one of his acquaintances, who at one point was valued to be worth anywhere between 400 and 500 million dollars. At one point, he was quoted saying, "Young man, what's the use of having ten million if you can't have big money?" He talked about ten million dollars like it was pocket change. After the market crashed, he was one of the desperate people who came running to Robertson for a 5,000 dollar loan. He had lost everything in the stock market crash. Days later, he was found dead in the bathroom of a restaurant after shooting himself. For white men like Robertson who was able to have a great job and able to work the stock market, the biggest way the stock market affected him was his rich friends and family losing everything they had. But, for a black man like Clifford Burke, the stock market crash had virtually no affect on his life. He claimed, "The negro was born in depression. It didn't mean too much to him, the Great American Depression. There was no such thing. The best he could be is a janitor or a porter or a shoeshine boy...If you can tell me the difference between the depression today and the depression of 1932 for a black man, I'd like to know it..." When we study and learn about the great depression, we always focus on how the depression hit the upper and middle class of the country because that is who the depression clearly had the greatest affect on. The upper and middle class of people are the ones who invested in the stock market, and therefore are the ones who were affected the most. It's interesting to hear about the depression from a black man's prospective because back in 1929, blacks in America were still facing extreme racism and it was rare for a black man not to be apart of the lower class. So, for blacks in the country at that time, life basically couldn't get any worse. They were already the poorest in society. They held the worst jobs and lived in the worst neighborhoods, and they made the lowest incomes. So from a black man's point of view, blacks were already in poverty, and the only thing the great depression actually did was bring whites down to their economic level. Burke explained, "It was a rarity to hear a Negro killing himself over a financial situation. He might have killed himself over some woman. Or getting in a fight. But when it came to the financial end of it, there were few who had anything..." It was interesting to see how for a wealthy white man like Arthur A Robertson, he was affected so greatly because people he knew and were friends with him ended up committing suicide because their lives were so bad. But for a black man, committing suicide over a financial situation was a "rarity". When we study the great depression, we usually fail to study how the African American community was affected simply because they weren't affected at all. The fact that African Americans were not even affected by the worst financial crisis in American history just shows how terrible life was for them in the decades before the stock market crashed.