vampireLOREN wrote:
As much as it pains me, she is pretty close to the truth here. Charles Arthur Floyd was no gangster, as much as the FBI would like to paint him as such and yes he took the mortgages and he burnt them. He had the touch of a Robin Hood about him. 150,000...maybe more attended his funeral, his brother was voted Sheriff in their home town for 30 years.
The main difference was he helped farmers who wanted to pay and couldn't . Charles was a thief and a rogue......but a good lad too!.
It's back to that finding the wrong solutions to genuine concerns again.
That era was in many ways the perfect storm for many who saw their lives changed forever by an unforeseeable aggregation of disasters and failures that lead to desperate times for many and a loss of faith in the system that left a vacuum for many ideas and ideologies to compete in.
It doesn't exonerate some of the people or events of the era, but mitigates them to a degree and helps us to understand better some of the choices they made, and their motivations for making them.
It is the somewhat smaller storms, financial scandals, austerity measures, etc of recent times that has created a similar loss of faith, and vacuum , that these freeman are trying to exploit, playing on fears and concerns to manipulate the vulnerable and easily lead.