Long Boy Moses Pray and Addie did ONE piece of "legitimate" business in the book: selling framed likenesses of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. They made decent money. So why'd they stop?
Addie:
"...It was hard work. ...I was so tired and my feet ached so that I hardly ate any supper...Besides, it was hot, and Long Boy and I both had worn holes in our fingers..."
Long Boy:
"...That's the trouble doin' business legitimate. There jus' ain't enough profit for the work involved. There ain't no sense people killin' themselves when they can make jus' as much money easy as fallin' off'n a log."
Addie Pray is set "a few years before and after Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected President for the first time", so ~1929-1934. The Depression. Even survival was hard. Workers in "legitimate" businesses, like U.S. Steel, barely survived working. FDR lowered the maximum work week to 44 hours and then to 40. Exploitative labor, long hours, little pay, brutality and death the consequence of striking.
Ethics: Working for a living in a "legitimate" occupation to survive, the boss gives you money for working you to the bone. Save yourself by stealing to survive.
Ethical problem: Long Boy and Addie didn't steal from the rich boss man and didn't steal to survive, they stole from the poor and stole to get rich.
Yeah, so that's not ethical.
But young Addie had a different motivation:
"...I had been thinking. He didn't mention it, so I didn't either, but as far as I was concerned the worst thing about doing business legitimate was that there was no excitement to it. I think I could have stood the drudgery if selling a picture of Franklin D. Roosevelt gave me the same kind of tingle I felt when I did other kinds of business."
"Why was that so good?"
"Because it was illegal."
The Breaking Bad couple who had sex in their car in the high school parking lot.
Does that happen in real life or just in fiction? I don't know but I spent my working life immersed in the crime world (as a lawyer) and I never saw that.
Why did the Breaking Bad guy give up teaching high school chemistry for making meth? He made a lot of money, but I don't remember him changing the material circumstances of his and his family's life. And he killed a lot of people. Now that's a real ethical problem. And he lost his own life. Exciting enough for you, man? The excitement of crime however was, to my memory, the "excitement", the "tingle" of the illegal, as he experienced in the car with his wife, contrasted with the "drudgery" of teaching high school.
Did Breaking Bad, or anything like it, ever happen? Was there ever a guy like the Breaking Bad guy in reality? Not in my experience or to my knowledge. Nor was there a crime couple like Long Boy and Addie Pray in Alabama and throughout the South during the Depression.
But it makes a good story.
