It scares me to know that police were collaborating with Doc Graham, one of the most powerful gangsters of his time. He said, “Oh, many policemen in that era were thieves. Legal thieves. I accepted it as such and performed accordingly. We didn’t have no problems. It was an era where there was no bread on the table by my endeavor or they put the bread? I performed with a hundred policemen in my time” (110). The individuals who were supposed to be protecting the public from men like Doc Graham were instead working with him in order to survive. This shows how truly desperate citizens were if they were willing to risk their jobs and even their lives in order to put food on the table. It was sad to know that many honest, hardworking citizens were struggling to survive while troublesome gangsters were living the high life. Doc Graham said, “I lived from the bottom to the top. I lived as good as you could live. I run the gamut of having a butler and a chauffeur to a flop joint, into an open car over night” (112). Doc Graham was cheating members of society when people had little to spare. Their limited funds went toward supporting his expensive lifestyle.
Arthur A. Robertson discussed how he watched the richest men crumble to pieces. He and those he associated himself with used to count millions like an average citizen counted pennies. For instance, a man named Jesse Livermore used to say, “Young man, what’s the use of having ten million if you can’t have big money!” (102). People of this social standing were so greedy while the rest of the country was suffering from poverty. Nothing was ever enough, and they set out to make more and more money. However, when they crashed, they hit rock bottom much harder than the average citizens. In fact, Livermore commit suicide after going bankrupt. This shows how difficult it was for people to accept their bad fate and deal with the situation at hand. People didn’t know where their next meal was coming from or what the future held. Some, like Livermore, thought it would be much easier to just leave the world in order to make all of their problems go away.
The story of Doc Graham is actually a very upsetting one. You highlight how wrong it was of him to take advantage of others during such a hard time in American history. People were struggling to make ends meet and Graham was using corrupt strategies to gain wealth at a time where there was little to go around. You present these ideas very well and make a strong statement about how wrong his actions were.
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