A Review: Conquest Of A Continent by Madison Grant
August 4, 2008
A Review
Conquest Of A Continent
by
Madison Grant
Madison Grant
Review by R.E. Prindle
Texts:
Grant, Madison, Conquest Of A Continent, Liberty Bell Publications, 2004. Reprint of 1933 Edition
Fischer, David Hackett, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways In America, Oxford, 1991
Higham, John, Strangers In The Land: Patterns Of American Nativism 1860-1925 Rutgers U. Press 1955
Myers, Gustavus, History Of Bigotry In The United States, Random House, 1943
Wittke, Carl, We Who Built America: The Saga Of The Immigrant, Case Western Reserve, 1939
In the immediacy of the moment one frequently overlooks or forgets the history leading up to the moment. One might think for instance that the current flap over Diversity and Multi-Culturalism is a recent occurrence. While the two terms are of recent provenance the argument under different names goes back much farther while the protagonists are essentially the same.
The story of immigration into America is almost always told from the point of view of the immigrant. Few books tell the tale from the Nativist point of view and they are universally and viciously derided as a tale told by bigoted idiots. While charity is demanded from the Nativists none is to be expected from the immigrationists.
Thus we get volumes like Strangers In The Land by John Higham and Carl Wittke’s We Who Built America that distort the issue in favor of immigrants while deprecating the Natives.
Qustavus Myers’ History Of Bigotry In The United States on the other hand appears to be a willful misunderstanding of the nature of the relative status between immigrant and native resulting in a slanderous approach like that of the contemporary Greil Marcus.
Conquest Of A Continent has been placed on the Jewish Index Of Anti-Semitic Books. Based on that I expected a detailed derogatory examination of the Jews from their entry into America perhaps being the conquerors referred to. The President of the American Jewish Committee sent a letter to every Jewish publisher in the United States demanding that they refrain from either reviewing the book or noticing it at all. Dynamic silence was to prevail.
After reading Conquest I can only conclude that the AJC was hyper sensitive to a degree. Since his 1916 Passing Of The Great Race Mr. Grant had learned that ‘You Don’t Mess With Rohan’ to quote Adam Sandler. Grant all but ignores the Jews in his volume. No, his offense, according to the AJC was even more egregious, he uses the world Nordic and dares to imply that they are ‘the Great Race’ rather than the AJC’s own Semites.
The other volumes mentioned and, indeed, all writing in this genre which is pretty extensive, defers to the Jews as ‘the Great Race’ probably genetically superior to all others.
So Madison Grant is interested in telling the story of how the Nordic race conquered the continent. This approach can only be considered as a sin by non-Nordics. Grant then tells the story of how the US and Canada were occupied by peoples other than the native Indians.
He begins early referring to twelfth century attempts to settle by Scandinavians. In the 1100s the firece native Indians were able to exterminate the invaders and may well have been able to exterminate the Puritan settlers but for the fact that a small pox epidemic shortly before the Puritan arrival had reduced the native population by as much as half while weakening them concomitantly. Such is the luck of the draw.
Grant thus traces immingration back to its origins colony by colony and then State by State as the Nordics moved Westward.
David Fischer in his excellent Albion’s Seed retraces the same ground fifty years after Grant with much addional detail concerning the places of origin and their activities once in the US.
Grant’s approach is in some ways superior to that of Fischer since as an unabashed Nordic advocate he is interested in detailing the exact racial content of the occupation of the various states and provinces. If you aren’t aware of the progress of settlement and by whom there are numerous surprises. My own notions were certainly vaguer before I read Grant.
I was surprised at the seeming numerical superiority of Southern migrants in the Westward movement. It seems that Whites did not like to live in the South where they were compelled to compete with slave labor while being despised by both the plantation owners and their slaves. Thus there was a constant stream of the best and brightest of the South moving into the North and West. As Grant notes, Virginia was the mother of States.
Then too some of Grant’s population statistics are of interest also. At the 1790 census before the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 there were less than a million Africans in the United States. Seventy years later as the Civil War began the number had increased to four and a half million. Thus natural increase was out of the question. It follows then that between 1800 and 1860 more Africans were brought to the US than there were before 1800. As a result the slave trade fluorished more than ever.
Prior to 1800 Alabama and Mississippi had no settlers so that in 1860 these two States were still rough frontier States still in a state of organization.
There is much good background here as to how the US came under settlement. The continent was accupied in its entirely when the truly major immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe began to accelerate in the 1870s and 1880s changing the basic Nordic institutions of the country. The change in Grant’s eyes was much for the worse.
Carl Wittke’s We Who Built America published in 1939 was undoubtedly in response to Grant’s Conquest Of A Continet. Wittke, was published by Case Western Reserve University. Grant explains the meaning of The Western Reserve which has always puzzled me. The Western Reserve was three million acres set aside as a concession to the State of Connecticut for giving up other territorial rights.
Wittke made a great impression with his his volume, his opinions being taken as overriding fact. I remember my sixth grade teacher in Michigan lauding the book to the skies. I finally read it a couple years ago. Not so much.
As is usual with books and writers of this type Wittke overstates his case and underproves his facts. A contribution to the dialogue at best.
Grant’s book should prove useful to any unbiased reader. If his attitude of Nordic superiority offends you, ignore it. His history as history is sound. For those of you reared on Myer’s History of Bigory attitude you will probably be surprised to find that there is another point of view. Bigotry is not a matter solely of American destestation of immigrants as the program of Diversity and Multi-Culturalism indicates, bigotry is a red herring and not the issue. The issue is who will be Top Race. The contestants for the Top Spot have turned out to be the Africans, Semites (both Jews and Arab Moslems) Hispanics, Chinese and Euro-Americans. (Grant’s Nordics) As you can see race has replaced nationalism.
The contest is real and ongoing. Peace is merely another form of war. The prize will go to who wants it the most. If you don’t see the contest in these terms I suggest you remove your rose colored glasses.
Reconstruction, Tourgee And Dixon
June 9, 2008
A Review
Reconstruction:
Albion Winegar Tourgee And Thomas Dixon Jr.
by
R.E. Prindle
The conflict between the North and South is the central conflit of United States history. Whether the Civil War was fought to preserve the Union or over slavery the African issue was the central problem of the country. The aftermath of Reconstruction was and has been devastating to US history. Mark Sullivan comments the Reconstruction period in Our Times, Vol. III. He is writing c. 1930:
Hardly to this day has any unbiassed summation been made of the destruction that the North visited upon the South. Rarely has any conqueror in history been so ruthless- by comparison, the treatment of Germany by the Allies was the rebuke of a complaisant parent to a naughty child. The North, by abolishing slavery, wiped out five billion dollars’ worth of the South’s property. That was but the beginning. Abolition of slavery was the complete destruction of the South’s economic system, land in the South was made valueless. Then the North, by conferring suffrage on the negro, set the former slave in power over his recent master, and for ten years maintained him there by arms. The very aorta of civilization in the South was more near to being completely severed than historians have commonly realized. In the University of South Carolina, a State institution authority over which rested the legislature, a corn-field negro, barefooted, illiterate, sat in the chair and drew the salary of the Professor of Greek. Over a period of forty years, including war, reconstruction (ironic word!) and the aftermath of both, the lamp of education in the South was saved from complete extinction only by the devotion and patience of half a dozen men. With the other consequences went a discouragement which accepted the physical deterioration, through disease, of large portions of the rural South, as merely one detail of a fate it was useless to resist.
The excuse of the North was that Southern Whites had enslaved the African. For some reason the New England States made Southern slavery an issue although those states, as Bible pounders, were not opposed to slavery in principle. Shortly after the Civil War certain New England citizens established themselves in the Hawaiian Islands where they began to grow staple agricultural crops. Farm labor therefore became as big a problem for them as it had been in the South. They were not averse to establishng a contract labor system which was a form of wage slavery. The New Englanders, some of them churchmen, saw the Chinese as inferior coolie laborers not unlike the African. Learning from the Reconstruction African situation in the South they were reluctant to import the Chinese as permanent residents.
Thus the contracts of the Chinese specified that the Chinese return to China after the termination of their contracts. This the Chinese saw no reason to do staying on as permanent residents. Reluctant to import more Chinese the New England planters cast about for another alternative. They settled on the Japanese. Thus a ship sailed into Tokyo Bay and the Planters forcefully abducted, kidnapped, a hundred odd Japanese from Yokohama taking them back to Hawaii where they were put to work.
So we may assume that the New Englanders were not entirely sincere in their objection to Southern slavery.
In addition during the Grant administration while Reconstruction was in progress the annexation of San Domingo or Haiti was proposed. Under the French administration of the area using African slave labor San Domingo was the richest and most productive colony in the world. It could be made so again under American administration. How they proposed to farm the land without African labor remains a mystery. It could only have been achieved by some compulsive means.
As the Africans have never worked the land of this richest of areas without compulsion one would be amused to learn the proposed solution to this pressing problem of labor.
One can only conclude that as no region of the US objected to forced labor that truly the Union was the reason for the Civil War. The reason for Reconstruction has to be explained otherwise.
The next problem is the nature of the African. Nowhere in the world without an overawing show of force were the Africans docile. The history of Africa is perpetual genocidal, tribal warfare. The Africans had the very reasonable attitude that the way to treat an enemy was to stamp them flat. Exterminate them.
The attitude is apparent everywhere in Africa today most obivious at the moment in Zimbabwe and South Africa.
In Haiti at the end of the eighteenth century the small number of French planters proved unable to control the overwhelming number of Africans, the latter rising up and defeating their owners. In this action known as the San Domingo Moment the White males were exterminated to the man while the females were given the option of sex slavery or rape and death.
One might say this was race hatred but I say no. The response was no different than any other tribal conflict in Africa; the difference in Haiti being merely that the French were White.
In the US the White Planters managed the Africans by the threat of slightly superior numbers while overawing the Africans into if not total submission something very nearly so. Thus the character the North gave the Africans in the South was at complete variance with the worldwide reality.
The North took the forced submission of the African in the South that produced a seemingly submissive inoffensive, harmless type of being the actual nature of the African. Tourgee refers to Africans as ‘poor innocents.’ Northerners believed that the lack of apparent intellectual capability was due to ill treatment and the lack of opportunity for education. So the real question is who was right about the relative capability of the African to the Caucasian? The North or the South? This problem is important and has to be dealt with.
We are told that the African was first to evolve as a Homo Sapiens from the Last Hominid Predecessor. That was c. 150,000 years ago. Had the African not been disturbed by outside peoples he would be living today as he was when he evolved so long ago. Many peoples have visited sub-Saharan Africa, that is to say, Black Africa, over the last few millennia. Phoenicians and Carthaginians visited sub-Saharan Africa both overland and on voyages around the coasts. Greek traders visited the source of the Nile, identifying the Mountains of the Moon while Romans established trade routes across the Sahara. The Arabs established contact beginning in the seventh century at least while Malays from Indonesia established themselves on Madagascar while penetrating into the continent itself making settlements about the year +1000.
All influences were absorbed by the Africans without any serious changes to their intellectual or social organization. Europeans established stronger settlements in Africa ruling Africa for a hundred years or more. They have been or are being expelled from Africa while most notably in Zimbabwe and South Africa Africans are destroying any traces of European civilization and reverting to their ancestral ways. Only a liberal could deny these obvious facts.
The African capability for civilization was fixed one hundred fifty thousand years ago. The African mind is incapable of permanently adjusting to any higher level of civilization.
The Southern Planters in daily contact with Africans had this fact impressed upon them continuously. The mind is not so elastic that it can escape its evolutionary limitations.
As an example I quote Rudyard Kipling from his American Notes of 1889:
The Americans once having made them (the Africans) citizens cannot unmake them. He says, in his newspaper, they ought to be elevated by education. He is trying this; but it is like to be a long job, because black blood is more adhesive than white, and throws back with annoying persistence. When the negro gets a religion he returns directly as a hiving bee, to the first instincts of his people. Just now a wave of religion is sweeping over some of the Southern States. Up to the present two Messiahs and a Daniel have appeared and several human sacrifices have been offered up to these incarnations. The Daniel managed to get three young men, who he insisted were Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, to walk into a blast furnace; guaranteeing non-combustion. They did not return. I have seen nothing of this kind, but I have attended a negro church. The congregation were moved by the spirit to groans and tears, and one of them danced up the aisle to the mourners bench. The motive may have been genuine. The movements of the shaken body were those of Zanzibar stick dancers, such as you see at Aden on the coal boats; and even as I watched the people, the links that bound them to the white man snapped one by one and I saw before me- the Hubsha (the Woolly One) praying to a god he did not understand. Those neatly dressed folk on the benches, the gray-headed elder by the window, were savages- neither more nor less. What will the American do with the negro? The South will not consort with him….The North is every year less and less in need of his services. And yet he will not disappear. His friends will urge that he is as good as a white man. His enemies…it is not good to be a negro in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Of course the Liberal will say that Kipling does not observe accurately and that HE is a ‘bigot.’ Nevertheless if one looks at locales in the United States where the African dominates such as Mississippi, Detroit, Pontiac, Flint, Saginaw, Chicago, New Orleans, what does he find? A replica of Lagos or Zimbabwe. A return to ancestral ways.
I’m not one to quote IQ scores because they only prove what is obvious to the naked eye. Genetic studies prove that as Homo Sapiens continues to evolve, the African who, as a species, is fully evolved, will only continue to fall further and further behind. This may not be his fault but it remains a fact.
To counter these facts the Liberal merely says that a hundred fifty thousand years isn’t enough time to make an accurate assessment; we must be patient.
Thus when the Civil War ended and Reconstruction began Albion Winegar Tourgee went South with his prejudices as a carpetbagger to try to place the African over the Southern White.
Tourgee was an honest man who sincerely believed that he was doing right by punishing the White while trying to impose the African on him. Tourgee moved back North after Reconstruction and took up his pen to become a successful novelist. Among his works were two novels recounting his experiences and opinions during Reconstruction. The novels are: A Fool’s Errand by One Of The Fools and Bricks Without Straw. They are both reasonably good novels although the latter is more or less a strike off of the former but for my tastes a better story and novel.
It is in A Fool’s Errand that Tourgee tackles the problem more head on. Completely disrgarding the character of the African in Africa or Haiti he takes the paternalistic Liberal approach that he is dealing with innocent little children who need his protection. This attitude is actually only a variant on the Southern. His is a good Northern Charlie compared to the bad Southern Charlie.
His anlysis of the Southern attitude is quite accurate and well thought out; his solutions are faulty. A Fool’s Errand is well worth reading to contrast the two viewpoints. His own pretensions of innocence and superiority to the Souterners is revolting. He should have known of Grant’s plans to annex Haiti that should have given him an intimation of the vulnerability of Northern pretensions. I’m sure he probably wasn’t aware of Puritan doings in Hawaii and Japan.
Slavery is detestable, I myself have no problems with that although firms like Nestle’s and Starbuck’s are accused of benefiting from slave labor in the chocolate and coffee businesses. That means that you and I enjoy the fruits of slave labor with our coffee and chocolate. Those big screen TVs we all covet so much are made by slave labor in China. Tourgee if he had thought about it would have noticed that the African franchise he was attempting to force on Southern Whites was denied Africans in his home State of Michigan and nearly universally among all parts of the Northland and West. Kipling writing a few years later than Tourgee was speaking accurately.
Tourgee was indignant at what, as he puts it, the Southern Planter had done to the African. He says quite plainly that there was no punishment too severe for the Southern White nor should it end quickly. He virtually proclaims the need to boil the Southern White in oil. This seems extreme in a world where slavery was rife most especially on the African continent. He might have put just a little of the blame on those greedy African chiefs who sold their people into bondage for filthy lucre.
He might also have noted the Israelite Solomon who when he ran short of money to finance his temple to his god gathered together numbers of His people and sold them into slavery to get on with the building of the House Of The Lord.
Tourgee’s novels went unanswered while selling well for a decade or two. But then Thomas Dixon Jr. took up the cudgels on the behalf of the South and told their version of Reconstruction in his trilogy of The Leopard’s Spots, The Clansman and The Traitor. Of course Liberals who control the seminaries of their religious system sometimes referred to as the American University System, dismiss Dixon as a stone cold bigot and ‘racist.’ One suspects without ever having read him which is of no consquence as they pay no attention to the other side of the story once their minds are made up.
As Dixon points out, those Puritan sea captains made a fortune or two out of the slave trade, the profits of which returned North to finance Puritan bigotry and possibly large bequests to Harvard University. Puritan cotton mills processed the cheap slave produced crop without worrying too much about its provenance. Dixon gives numerous examples of the hypocrisy of the New Englanders.
Slavery of any sort past or present cannot be justified but it was that very cotton that caused slavery to blossom and extend into Alabama and Mississippi. The institution then ran into the unique State of Louisiana.
Louisiana and more specifically New Orleans had a history dating back to the French Caribbean plantations, in fact, New Orleans was part of the French circle but a remote outpost in relation to the British colonies of the East Coast. As on Haiti and other French islands freed Africans were allowed full citizenship privileges including owning slaves. Thus, as the American settlers moved West after 1793 and the invention of the cotton gin becoming mere frontiersmen the closer they got to Louisiana, where the African, French and mixed races already were. Louisiana Africans, as in Haiti, were slave owners.
As W.E.B. Du Bois points out but gives no reasons for it, slavery in Louisiana where Africans were influential was of a different character than in the East. The East was as benevolent a form of slavery as is possible while in Louisiana as Du Bois himself points out the African owners preferred to work slaves to death, fhen buy replacements. This in turn created a market for slave breeders who arose in Kentucky.
The breeding of Africans for slaves was especially repellent to American sensibilities but had slavery continued public opinion would have gotten used to it as it gets used to every other perversion. It can however be no coincidence that slave breeding occurred just up river from the slave consuming States of Mississippi and Louisiana.
I mention this matter only to show that the subject of slavery is not monolithic but much more complex than normally discussed.
Both Tourgee and Dixon write about affairs in North Carolina on the East Coast. This differentiation should not go unnoticed. I suspect that a very large proportion of the illegal importation of slaves that occurred after 1800 was done through ports in Louisiana and Texas far from the central authority. If that should be true then the character of slaves fresh from Africa between, say, 1850 and 1860 would be much different than those Tourgee was familiar on the settled East Coast.
Tourgee, convinced that the Africans were gentle, innocent people, was blind to the outrages committed by both carpetbaggers and the more truculent Africans many of whom wore the Union uniform with the full backing of the Federal government which was bent on persecuting Whites.
Dixon then whose credibility the Liberals wish to destroy writing twenty years or so after Tourgee and probably in reaction to him wishes to give the Southern side of the Reconstruction story. He is much more realistic and sympathetic than Tourgee. The latter writes both his novels with nary a reference to the radical reconstruction of the insane abolitionists in Congress like Stevens and Stanton who quite literally wished to see Southern Whites exterminated ‘root and branch’ a la the San Domingo Moment and the entire South given over to the Africans. As Tourgee himself said, they believed there was no punishment too severe for the Whites.
One need not wonder how Tourgee would view the White genocide occurring in Zimbabwe and South Africa today as his current Liberal counterparts applaud lustily. In that light one shudders to think what will happen in the US if these Liberal assassins are not displaced before they seize the government in the Stalinist style and initiate the genocide of Whites they are currently advocating which one assumes will include themselves.
To understand the problem, the attitude among both Liberals and Africans from the Civil War/Reconstruction period that persist through today a reading of Tourgee, especially A Fool’s Errand, and Thomas Dixon would be some time well spent.
Finis
Our Times, Mark Sullivan And Edgar Rice Burroughs
June 6, 2008
Our Times, Mark Sullivan And Edgar Rice Burroughs
by
R.E. Prindle
Mark Sullivan doesn’t show up in ERB’s library although one wonders why not. Sullivan’s Our Times is a history of America from 1900-1925 as it might have been gleaned from newspapers. This is history as seen from the point of view of newspaper readers. Sullivan himself was a journalist. He was also almost an exact contemporary of Burroughs, born in 1874 died in 1952, so we can be can be certain that Burroughs was infuenced by all the events that Sullivan cherishes. Cherishes is the right word because Sullivan is also writing his own intellectual biography through his perception of the world he lived in. These events formed the warp and woof of his life. A life he obviously loved.
He was present at many of the events while knowing such men as Teddy Rooselt reasonably well. Others he was able to interview and failing that, as many of these participant in some really astounding events were still alive as he began writing Our Times in the twenties, he was able to get written impressions from such as Orville Wright and Thomas Edison among a great many others. Altogether the six volumes of Our Times are a unique, vastly interesting, entertaining and altogether charming record of the times. Of course Sullivan would have had a more intimate knowledge of matters than mere newspaper readers but these are the stories Burroughs saw, observed and experienced hence forming the warp and woof of his own life.
We are fortunate then to have a record that actually forms the background of ERB’s life as he might have seen it as selected and lovingly recounted by Sullivan.
Sullivan gives a good background to race relations that throws light on how Burroughs himself perceived them. At least from 1900 to 1920 the lingering effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction were quite strong heavily influencing if not dominating the thought of the times. There was a strong party that wanted to go on punishing Southeners both as rebels and as former slave owners. On the other hand there was also a strong party that wanted to reconcile the Whites of North and South healing the rift and bringing the two factions together into one nation. The former might be called the Tourgee school and the latter the Dixon school.
Sullivan was of the latter group as well as Burroughs and their hero Theodore Roosevelt. Sullivan recounts how Roosevelt worked very hard to bring the Southeners back into a respectable political condition only to blow his efforts away by inviting a Negro to lunch with him in the White House. That Negro was Booker T. Washington.
It was against this backdrop that Thomas Dixon was writing his Reconstruction novels The Leopard’s Spots, The Clansman and The Traitor. His trilogy was made was made into the movie The Birth Of A Nation in 1915. The movie was meant to be a seal on the healing process. From the inception of the United States the country was divided into two nations. The North and the South with two approaches to civilization. The Civil War began over the separation of those two civilizations while the subsequent period was devoted to uniting the two approaches into one people hence the title of the movie- The Birth Of A Nation. In other words Southern and Northern Whites combined into one people with one ideology.
The clinker in the coal pile was the African. No matter the relation between the two White peoples the problem was what to do about the African. Thus Sullivan, Burroughs and Roosevelt while wishing to unite the Northeners and Southeners had still to deal with the Africans. Obviously the introduction of the Africans into the equation as social equals was an impossibility for all concerned. They weren’t wanted.
Booker Washington’s response to the issue was not to try to socialize with the Whites but to live independent lives while trying to equal the White man’s achievement. The approach was correct but impossible for the Africans.
There was no racial animosity as such on the part of Sullivan, Burroughs and Roosevelt but there was no solution to the racial differences then as there are none now. Somewhat presciently Burroughs in his Martian trilogy had the Black First Born attack and demolish the White citadel thus conquering and eliminating them. This is along the lines of what is happening today where White males have been legally emasculated while White females are encouraged to seek Black males. Thus potentially without violence genocide would be committed on the Whites.
What was clear to all participants was that Whites and Blacks were not of equal capabilities. Whatever Sullivan and Roosevelt may have thought it is clear that Burroughs believed that Africans were not as evolutionarily developed as Whites.
From 1900 to 1920 this was the prevailing attitude in the country but then began to change as immigration changes began to disintegrate the social fabric. Circa 1900 the conflict was three way between the Liberals, the Reconcilers and the Africans being manageable to the Africans disadvantage. Just before 1920 the great racial organizations of the of the Jews – ADL and AJC-, the Africans- the NAACP-, the Italians- the Mafia- and the Whites- the second Ku Klux Klan- took shape that managed to spinter the forces along several racial lines with all except the KKK working against the Whites. Thus post-war America and post-war Burroughs developed in a different way than The Birth Of A Nation proposed.
Sullivan also lovingly chronicles the rise of popular music that began to take definite shape in the last years of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth as Tin Pan Alley came into existence. While Emma was trained as a formal singer ERB loved the pop tunes. He even went so far as to take a portable record player on their cross country trip in 1916. Of course electricity was not needed to play records as the players were wind up. The amplification was minimal as the needle translates the grooves through a large bell or horn. ERB’s record tastes were somewhat along the lines of his interest in boxing. Emma, I am sure, would have called his tastes vulgar.
Sullivan gives great coverage of the heavy weight boxing championship of the African, Jack Johnson. Johnson’s victory was one of the most traumatic events of the first two decades for White psychology. Burroughs himself was deeply chagrined resulting in the boxing story of The Mucker. The Mucker, Billy Byrne, became in essence a literary Great White Hope.
There is no indication that I have found that Burroughs read Our Times although Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen published near the same time dealing with the Twenties in the same way as Sullivan is found in his library. So, the approach was interesting to Burroughs and in some ways he also incorporated a lot of current events into his writing. Read between the lines his is a history of his times. Nearly every story can be related to something or things happening in his society. This approach goes back to his earliest writing long before Sullivan conceived Our Times.
Certainly ERB would have known of both Sullivan and Our Times. As an inveterate magazine and newspaper reader there is probably very little that escaped ERB’s notice.
The point of this essay is to recommend Our Times as background to the events that would have had great influence on Burroughs both before he began writing and as he wrote incorporating events such as Jack Johnson or the Mexican scare of 1915 and Pancho Villa into his writing.
Not only will the volumes of Our Times provide a social and political backdrop to ERB’s development but they will be a very enjoyable read with a lot of interesting pictures and cartoons to make the pages turn especially fast.
Analysis, Critical Theory And Greil Marcus
May 29, 2008
Analysis, Critical Theory And Greil Marcus
by
R.E. Prindle
Through the moral and political rhetoric of John Winthrop, the Declaration Of Independence and the Constitution, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, America explained itself to itself as a field of promises so vast they could only be betrayed. The attempt to keep the promises- of community, liberty, jutice, and equality for all, because once let loose the genie could never be put back in the bottle- in face of the betrayal became the engine of American history and the template for our national story.
-Greil Marcus
http://.powells.com/ink/marcus.html
The problem I have with Mr. Marcus’ writing is that it is all skewed. His vision is distorted by his ideologies. Mr. Marcus purports to write about the US using terms like ‘our’ when he is in fact an Israeli citizen and places the interests of Israel above those of the United States. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that he is an adherent of the Jewish Critical Theory or Frankfurt School while being a leader of the Situationist Internation. Both organizations are subversiive of the ideals and goals of the United States seeking to supplant those goals with those of Israel or, in another word, Judaism.
Mr Marcus is not clear and honest in his intentions, seeking to mislead his readers into believing that he is objectively analyzing America rather than denouncing it in favor of the Israeli point of view. He refuses to admit that his intent is the supremacy of Israeli/Jewish interests. I find this both dishonest and offensive.
Further in his zeal to demonstrate that the United States is a failed society he refuses to take into account any social or scientific developments since, essentially, John Winthrop of the seventeenth century.
Winthrop is essentially a religious bigot who because of his historical era was necessarily devoid of any scientific knowledge. His spoutings originate in the ignorance of the Jewish Bible written some two thousand or so years before his present which he takes as the literal truth and the word of ‘God.’
While his views may be of interest to explain his times and while his views were influential in forming New England with its inherent bigotry they in no way reflect the views of Jefferson and others who were responsible for the formulations of the DOI and Constitution. There were worlds of difference between the East Anglian Puritans and Cavaliers of both the South of England and the US. Further Jefferson was a Revolutionary and Freemason learning his Freemasonry in the France of the Revolution. Whether he was a Jacobin I can’t say but he has been so accused.
While the Framers of the founding documents used the same words such as equality that we use today they undoubtedly did not undersand them as we do today. To refuse to understand and take that into account is willful obtuseness on Mr. Marcus’ part. The phrase ‘all men are created equal’ was gainsaid by their counting Negroes as only three-fifths of a man. Quite obviously they did not actually believe that all men were created equal. Whether ‘all men’ is meant to include women is also conjectural as women were denied the attributes of citizenship being considered appendages of men as per the Biblical creation myth. So clearly the Founders understanding of equality is quite different from that of, at least, Mr. Marcus. On that basis his views can’t help but be skewed.
The African in America was an insoluble problem to the society then as it is to society today. While counting Negro men as three-fifths of a human certainly sounds ridiculous yet modern evolutionary science has proven what was evident to observation then that the Africans as the first Homo Sapiens to evolve from the Last Hominid Predecessor was necessarily left behind by future evolutionary species of Homo Sapiens or sub-species if you prefer. Mr. Marcus and his fellow Liberals insist that equality of Blacks and Whites is denied solely on the basis of skin color. This is nonsense.
If Africans were equal or superior to Whites, Semites and Mongolids there could be and would be no denying the status of the African. Furthermore such superiority would be self-evident as it must. Instead of the so-called White Skin Privilege there would be Black Skin Privilege and then black skin would indicate superiority and be desirable. There isn’t and the reason why is because that while equality is a fine sounding ideal it does not exist in fact in either the macro or micro example. It cannot be made to exist by legislattion so long as differences between the five human species exist.
So, I would object to Mr. Marcus’ characterization of ideals as promises, they are two different things, that have been betrayed. There has been no betrayal. Mr. Marcus misleads us with his approach of Critical Theory. The Founding Fathers set high ideals to live up to, perhaps impossibly high ideals but ideals worth striving to realize nevertheless. The problem now has been complicated by the scientific reallization of the incompatible differences between the species so that the original meaning of equal of the DOI seems to be the correct one.
The Negro problem, bedeviling America from its origins, was the rock on which those ideals first foundered resulting in the Civil War between Whites, Reconstruction and the current New Abolitionist Movement proclaiming the need to exterminate Whites by any means necessary. So, over the hundred fifty years since the Civil War Africans and their Liberal and Israeli/Jewish handlers are in a position to realize the goals of post-war Radical Reconstruction which was the elimination of Southern Whites by Africans in a larger version of the San Domingo Moment.
As the Whites struggled to come to some resolution of the Negro Problem that has always bedeviled American history large, even huge, numbers of Southern and East European immigrants flooded the country. It is useless to use racial arguments and say that antipathy to these peoples was somehow racial when there was no difference in color which is the only thing Liberals recognize as a barrier to assimiltion.
Rather these peoples were culturally unable to understand the ideals that underlay the American attitude, disdained them and sought to replace them with their own. Thus we have a tremendous criminal underworld led by Sicilians and Israelis while the Israelis seek to subvert the ideals Mr. Marcus notes as ‘promises’ to replace them with a State resembling that of Israel in which the Israelis are paramount while all others are denied humanity much as Mr. Marcus accuses the Europeans of the US in relation to the Blacks.
One therefore has to believe that as an Israel citizen Mr. Marcus is hypocritical in his criticism of American ‘racism’ and the ‘betrayal’ of the the ideal of equality.
Unless Mr. Marcus can reconcile his ostensible beilief with actual Israeli actions I, for one, find it impossible to take him seriously. Critical Theory and the SI are antipathetic to the ideals he seems to be espousing.
I too believe that we have fallen short of the ideals expressed in the Founding Documents but for different reasons than those mentioned by Mr. Marcus. I find no betrayal of those ideals but rather the sabotage of them by competing social systems such as the Sicilian, the Israeli and the African.
Mr. Marcus may be an expert in Critical Theory but he is no analyst. Analysis is Science; Critical Theory is religion. Oil and water and the two don’t mix while Science trumps Critical Theory every time.
Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Lost Cause
May 4, 2008
Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Lost Cause
by
R.E. Prindle
Edgar Rice Burroughs was a man of his times. He was a concientious observer and interpreter with a prodigious memory. He seems to have had the remarkable faculty of being able to compartmentalize nearly everything he learned in his mind. When he writes his sources are nearly transparent when you know the sources. Of course the more you’ve read the novels the easier it is to see his influences.
Underlying, perhaps, its whole intellectual structure is his understanding of the Civil War and Reconstruction. His father was a veteran of the GAR. One imagines that his father sometimes talked to him of his experiences although not necessarily so. How he integrates this understanding into his personal psychology is interesting. I have attempted to point out in my last few essays that Burroughs felt as though his early expectations in life of what was to be were destroyed at some point in his youth changing the direction of his life from success to failure. The story of his subsequent life then was the attempt to regain this lost status.
In the terms of the Civil War the triumphant North represented his personal defeat while the defeated South with their Lost Cause represented his life after the loss of his expectations.
He is fairly open about this mentioning his three favorite books The Prince And The Pauper by Mark Twain, Little Lord Fauntleroy by Frances Hodgson Burnett and The Virginian by Owen Wister.
Prince begins as Burroughs began. Then in a sort of nightmare the Pauper who is a twin of the Prince shows up and the two identical lads exchange places, the Prince becomes the Pauper and the Pauper become the Prince. In the end the Prince regains his rightful position. The attempt to regain that position is the story of Burroughs’ life. Twinning also become an important part of the plotting of the Tarzan books.
In Fauntleroy the Prince lives a humble life after his father dies but then come back into his own.
The Virginian, of course, must have been part of the Slaveocracy dispossessed by the Civil War then trying to find his place in the world
While slavery enters into the issue it is not part and parcel of the Lost Cause. The South today stil talks of Southern civilization as opposed to Northern civilization. Both civilizations thought of the Negro in the same way but in adopting Negro slavery the slave owner thought of the Negro as another form of livestock intermediate between an animal and Homo Sapiens. To put it bluntly the Planter saw the Negro as an intelligent ape. Hence there was no more guilt to be associated with working the Negro than there was in working a mule. They were both livestock.
Thus while the North was commercially rude and crude the Southerner- The Virginian- was courtly and mannered. The Negro livestock created a situation for such a civilization to exist. The Civil War destroyed this situation so very pleasant for the Slaveocracy.
So what was lost by the emancipation of the slaves was not only so much livestock but a whole conception of life. This conception of life was the Lost Cause. Thus Burroughs having also been deprived of his early paradisical expectations was able to identify with the Lost Cause but not necessarily with the freed Negro.
With emancipation the whole relationship to the Negro changed. He was no longer something of value that had to be understood and used but a competitor who had to be baffled. The Southern Planter like John Carter and Tarzan was clearly the superior White man in pre-Civil War times and he retained that status during Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era because of his superior talents- what today would be called White Skin Privilege.
Tarzan was an alter ego of Burroughs but John Carter was not although he may have had some relationship to ERB. It is more likely that Carter was based on Burroughs’ ideal of what his father might have been. It is noteworthy that Carter loses his preeminence in the Martian novels after 1913 and the death of Burroughs’ father.
Ronnie Faulkner in his recent article in Erbzine Volume 2177 makes the comment:
When Burrughs’ heroes brought change its purpose was conservative- “to restore a lost order, to put a rightful prince back on the throne.”
This is a perceptive observation but the purpose wasn’t conservative in the political sense. The purpose was to right a Lost Cause or in other words “to restore a lost order”, that order that existed in Burroughs’ childhood, “to put a rightful prince back on the throne’, that is, Burroughs himself. The whole corpus is saturated with the Prince and the Pauper theme.
The problem of the Negro remains.
In the God Of Mars the Holy Therns who are White undoubtedly represent the Planters of the slaveocracy. In American politics from the early days the South was dominant in politics. This was aided by the slaves being counted as three-fifths of a voter but with votes being voted by the Planters. Not the Whites but the Whites who were Planters. The Planters were but a very small portion of the Southern population with the Blacks and poor Whites or White Trash as we were unkindly spoken of by both the Planters and the Negroes while being equally controlled by the Planters. We po’ White Trash were forced to fight and die in the Planter’s war.
In the same way the Therns from their center in the South of Barsoom controlled both the North by religious means and the Black First Born. As in the popular representation of the Civil War the Blacks were the cause of the destruction of Joel Chandler Harris paradise, the wonder land of Disney’s Song Of The South.
The First Born of Barsoom or the Southern Negroes successfully took on the Holy Therns and destroyed their hold over them and the people of Northern Helium.
As in the South where Planters were compelled to accept their defeat and mingle with the Negroes they did the same on Barsoom.
Emancipation solved one problem but created a few others. The North sought by Reconstruction to place the Negro over the White. While slavery was wrong the placing of the White above the Negro was seen as right. That Burroughs so believed is prove by both John Carter and Tarzan. John Carter became the Warlord of Barsoom or Supreme Commander while Tarzan was the Lord Of The Jungle, the arbiter of African fates.
Whatever one thinks of Thomas Dixon Jr. he was the spokesman for the Lost Cause. He wasn’t the only one who wrote Reconstruction novels. Equally successful was a writer by the name of A.W. Tourgee. Tourgee wrote, among others, two very successful novels: A Fool’s Errand By One Of The Fools and Bricks Without Straw. He wrote from a carpetbagger and Northern point of view; the Negroes were poor benighted heathen while the Whites were merely benighted but the Negroes were superior in most respects to the Whites. Tourgee was a successful carpetbagger. Writing beginning in 1880, three years after Reconstruction ended he preceded Dixon by a few years. Dixon most likely was writing in reaction to Tourgee.
Tourgee’s novels enjoyed a longish vogue so that Dixon’s and Tourgee’s would have been competing for the popular favor. The war was over and different sentiments took precedence favoring the point of view of Dixon.
While the North rather hypocritically tried to force Negro equality or even supremacy on the South they maintained separateness of the species in the North. While the Negro was given the franchise in the South he was unable to vote in the North. So that while there seemed to be sympathy for the Negro species there was little or none for the Black individual.
This was more or less the reverse of Burroughs’ dilemma. He honored the manhood of the Black individual but he denied it to the African species. I don’t believe there can be any denying of this; thus Tarzan is The Lord Of The Jungle, a jungle god, the Big Bwana, the arbiter of African destinies. It is important that Tarzan was seen as a god compared to the Africans.
So in real life Burroughs chose Dixon over Tourgee. I’m sure he knew of both. While the carpetbagger pushed the superiority of the Negro in a society that no longer cared about Blacks, the war being over, Dixon advanced the interest of the White species against the African species while the Lost Cause resonated in Burroughs’ soul as it does today in any person who feels that they have been deprived of their birthright in life.
Oddly Burroughs had only the third volume of Dixon’s Reconstruction trilogy – The Traitor- in his library. Perhaps because John Carter’s tomb seems to be based on the tomb in the The Traitor. There can be little doubt that the latter was the inspiration for the former.
In The Traitor the tomb had been sealed from the ouside but there was a secret entrance to the tomb and once inside the tomb an underground passage led from the tomb to the old manse. Of course, Carter’s tomb was sealed with the latch being on the inside.
In 1907 William A. Dunning published his Reconstruction: Politcal and Economic which furthered the Lost Cause view and set the tone for scholarship until Du Bois published in 1935.
So, in a way the South had risen again as the Southern view of the struggle gained preeminence. The high water mark for the attitude was the filming of Dixon’s trilogy as The Birth Of The Nation by D.W. Griffith in 1915. Political winds then turned in favor of the Blacks again. A last salvo was fired by Claude Bowers in 1929 in his successful Reconstruction history, The Tragic Era. Bowers’ book dealt not so much with Reconstruction as with the politics of the era that Mark Twain depicted as The Gilded Age of which Reconstruction was a part.
Bowers book was answered in 1935 by W.E.B. Du Bois in his Black Reconstruction In America 1860-1880. This book successfully downed the Dunning hypothesis. The racial tide now swung in favor of the Blacks with any critics discredited and silenced as bigots. Just as Dixon and Dunning were successfully attacked during the twenties and thirties suffering total defeat at the end of the latter decade so were any dissident voices.
The pro-Negro point of view continued to gain strength as the century advanced. In 1988 Eric Foner published his Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution that has become the standard view. Today Reconstruction as the unfinished revolution is expected to be completed by the next Presidential election. Thus it is believed that the Lost Cause will disappear forever while according to Ronnie Faulkner Burroughs will become the apostle racial integration.
A Review: Reconstruction: Foner, Du Bois, Bowers
April 30, 2008
A Review
Reconstruction:
Foner, Du Bois, Bowers
by
R.E. Prindle
Bowers, Claude: The Tragic Era, 1929
Du Bois: Black Reconstruction In America: 1860-1880, 1935
Foner, Eric: Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1988
While race, or species, is the cental problem of Reconstruction none of the above writers bothers to really examine the issue.
On the one hand the United States was settled by the highest exemplars of human development at that time. The evolutionary nature of the European settlers was unfolding at a rapid rate that was to blossom in the nineteenth century although still at a relatively low stage of development.
Added to his species of Homo Sapiens was the infusion of diverse African populations fresh from the jungles of Africa. The African peoples are believed to be the first Homo Sapiens to evolve. they had been in Africa for 150,000 years and had attained no indigenous level of civilization.
Not all African peoples are the same age. For instance, the Bantu peoples who came into existence in the Sahel near Ubang-Chari are an obvious Negro-Arab hybrid. The hybrid developed about 1000AD spreading South and East across the continent. The Bantus drove the indigenous Bushmen before them eventually forcing the remnant into the Kalihari.
The West Africans may be tha stock on which the Arab was grafted. Now, the anthropologists tell us that at some point the hominid strain evolved into Homo Sapiens I, which is to say the Black African. But, they don’t tell us, nor are they capable of it, exactly what separates the Last Hominid Predecessor from Homo Sapiens. We don’t know what those indicators are. Either the Last Hominid Predecessor has disappeared without a trace or the Bushmen may be the LHP or even the West African. Certainly there are marked differences between the African and the Semite, Caucasian and Mongolid. The difference is of an intellectual character as well as a number of physical ones, which is to say, genetic.
No one will deny the physical differences, they are maintained as merely cosmetic. It is in the intellectual field we encounter resistance.
Science has given ample proof that there is a difference in mental capacity between Africans and Caucasians, Mongolids and Semites. There is an emotional problem with the Biblically oriented because the bible says God created man and The Declaration Of Independence of the United States says that: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…’
So we have the statements of men against the scientific evidence of nature. I opt for science.
The European discovered Ameica and invaded it or settled it depending on how you choose to see it. Following the scientific approach of Darwin I understand that the Europeans invaded the continent driving the earlier settlers before it in the exact same way that one species of bird, for insance, supplants another.
The Europeans had not yet developed the notion of free labor the way they would in the nineteenth century so they brought indentured White ‘servants’ over who were in fact, slaves. Shortly thereafter a sea captain unloaded a cargo of Africans as laborers who also became slaves. Over a period of decades the Africans displaced the Europeans as slaves but not before extensive interbreeding as both species were used as field hands.
In Darwinian terns then, as a competing human species Europeans displaced the Native Americans, or Indians, while at the same time introducing the African species which by the time of Reconstruction would enter into competition with the Caucasians for possession of the the continent. The difference in species was an irreconcilable difference, an either-or situation. This is the tragedy of the United States of America and the Western Hemisphere.
Africans were always a signficant portion of the population of the United States, moreso in the South but they were not inknown in the North where they were treated little differently than in the South. Edgar Allan Poe recors an instance of Negro slavery in Pennsylvania that was not all that unusual.
Prior to 1793 the ratio of Black to White was much smaller but in that year Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. This invention opened the black lands across the South from the coast through Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas to Texas to cotton cultivation. Black lands does not refer to Negroes but to the soil.
Thus from 1793 to 1860 the importation of Africans increased greatly. The African population skyrocketed. At the time of the Civil War Du Bois estimates that 10% were African born. That is one in ten. The percentage born to mothers from from Africa and first Generation Africans must therefore represent a full 25% of the African population. Thus, at the time of Emancipation at least one in four can be said to be African in culture.
Indeed, Mark Sullivan (1874-1952) in his wonderful multi-volume popular American history, Our Times, recalls the charm of the Africanisms of the Negro that had disappeared by the turn of the century.
Contrary to common belief the number of slaveholders in the South was relatively small. Non-slaveholders outnumbered slaveholder by a considerable margin. Also contrary to common belief Whites, Blacks and Indians all owned slaves. As one progressed from East to West conditions became more barbarous. Relatively benign in the East by the time one reached Louisiana where the majority of Black slave owners domiciled according to Du Bois slaves were actually worked to death, the owners then buying replacements. Although it was denied and covered up Kentucky bred Africans for sale to the Deep South.
There are those who say that slavery was a dying institution that would have disappeared on its own. Whether it would have or not I see little to indicate such a development.
The plantations could huge affairs of a hundred thousand acres or more; self-contained cotton growing duchies. Having the economic power the Planters controlled politics. The much larger non-slave owning White majority was despised by both Planters aand Blacks while being bent to the will of the Planters. It is interesting to watch Du Bois twist and turn trying to explain why it was right for the slaves to despise the ‘po’ white trash.’
The Planters built up a very pleasant situation for themselves on the backs of both Blacks and Whites. ‘Oh, Darkies, how my heart grows weary’, Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Fox and that sort of thing. Disney’s Song Of The South really cranked out the Blacks. The Planter-Black alliance against the Southern Whites has evolved today into the Liberal-Black alliance against ‘Whiteness.’
At the time the Planters had abundant opportunity to study the Blacks. They came to the conclusion, without using the term, that the Africans were a different species, since corroborated by science.
Thus, when Reconstruction began we had a two species competing for the same territory. The species were inherently unequal. Equality of intellect could only be obtained by education, if at all. In addition, as I noted, fully 25^ or, one in four, had but recently been removed from the African jungles. The remaining three quarters had been in the state of slavery for generations. They were thoroughly cowed. Any hope of freedom they had was hundreds of years old. They were in a body illiterate. Indeed, it was against the law to school them.
As Du Bois points out because of its hitorical relation to the French Caribbean Louisiana had the largest group of educated and cultured Blacks. Indeed, the early cultural history of New Orleans is worth of study. There were things going on there that weren’t going on in other places.
At one stroke then in 1863 the bonds of the community were broken apart and this Black population nearly equal in size to the Whites, in some places exceeding it, was placed on a political parity by Northern bayonets. Truly a secon Civil War in the South between Blacks and Whites was the only possible result. The first result as Eric Foner says was the Unifinished American Revolution.
2.
The argument of Du Bois depends on the character of the Negro. That it is both wrong to enslave another and that the introduction of the Negro into the Americas as the greatest error of all goes without saying. The point is that we have two Homo Sapiens species competing for the same land. The dirrerences are irreconciable and can only be solved by the elimination of one or the other. The problem as an evolutionary one is beyond reason. No amount of good will can resolve it. Tor those who haven’t thought this situation through the statement may sound strong but the current New Abolitionist movement is dedicated to the genocide of Whites. That simple fact cannot be denied.
Du Bois, who writes as a Black apologist and not an historian, has , or ast least displays absolutely no psychological understanding of the participants. He believes he is an excellent historian but I’m not prepared to allow him that without a grasp of psychology.
In his view which he shares with Liberals the Negro is by nature an inoffensive, happy-go-lucky fellow who wouldn’t harm a fly. Why, during the war didn’t he stand by the Missus and the kids while the menfolk were off shooting the Negroes who had joined the Yankee war machine and made it work? According to Du Bois the war couldn’t have been won if those Negro soldiers hadn’t joined up.
Supposing that Blacks in the heart of the South did remain quiescent? Does that mean it was because they were happy and contented or does it mean they were waiting for the results before stirring? Actually the Southern states were the only place Africans in the world were so quiescent so we have to look for other reasons than good natured loyalty.
Earlier in the century when a majority population of Africans revolted against a small minority of Whites in Haiti the Africans slaughtered the White males while retaining the White females as sex slaves.
In Jamaica where the small minority of Whites couldn’t control the large majority of Africans, Africans escaped to the hinterlands where they formed their own district and carried on guerilla warfare from there.
Their earlier African heritage had been no different than the Africans of the South. Tribal wars of extermination were the sole constant of African life. Tribal centers rose and fell. Livingstone and others discovered burnt over ruin after burnt over ruin, formerly populous lands entirely deserted.
In today’s Africa Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has completely demolished the civilization Whites had built up. One of his first acts upon taking office was to attempt the extermination of the Matabele Zulu over a hundred and fifty year old grievance.
Now that the Africans in South Africa have been granted power over the Whites they are committing genocide against them while dismantling the civilization the Whites built up. They simply cannot sustain it.
In the United States today the Blacks of New Abolitionism are calling for the disappearance of Whiteness now that the United States’ unfinished revolution, as Foner expresses it, is rushing to its conclusion. Unless the Whites of America wake up Whiteness will disappear and the unfinished revolution conclude in their destruction. In other words, in the Darwinian sense the African species of Homo Sapiens in competition with the White Homo Sapiens species will eliminate them completely. Human abilities to speak and reason mean nothing compared to the forces of nature, especially when those forces go unrecognized.
Thus the major weakness of Du Bois’ thesis is that he fails to understand, at least state, the causes of irreconcilable differences. African people are not as he discribes them. Nor are Whites.
Bowers makes it more clear that from the White point of view the battle between Whites was the great tragedy. From that point of view the whole purpose of Reconstruction was to reconcile the Whites without any reference to Africans. The Africans were an unpleasant reality that cvould be disposed of in only one way and extermination was too horrible for the Whites to contemplate while, as we have seen, it wasn’t for the Africans of Haiti and isn’t for the Africans of today not only in Zimbabwe and South africa but in the United States of America. New Abolitionism means the genocide of Whites.
Bowers wrote in 1929 with popular success so that Du Bois’ volume seems to have been conceived in answer to Bowers. Bowers takes a pessimistic view of the capabilities of Africans while Du Bois stoutly defends their abilities. One is led to believe that there was no public edcuation in the South before the war while the bulk of the Whites were as illiterate as the Africans by Du Bois. The Africans in their desire for learning then organized the entire public school system generously including Whites who promptly segregated the schools.
A.W. Tourgee in his novel Bricks Without Straw that Du Bois refers to constantly has an interesting passage in which this notion apparently began and persists to this day. Bricks Without Straw p. 127:
As they rode away the two representatives of antipodal thought discussed the scenes they had witnessed that day, which were equally new to them both, and naturally enough drew from them entirely different conclusions. The Northern man enthusiastically prophesied the rapid rise and miraculous development of the colored race under the impetus of free schools and free thought. The Southern man only saw in it a prospect of more “sassy niggers,” like Nimbus, who was “a good enough nigger, but mighty aggravating to the white folks.”
With regard to the teachers, he ventured only this comment: “Captain, it’s a mighty pity them gals are teaching a nigger school. They’re too likely for such work- too likely by half.”
The man whom he addressed only gave a low, quiet laugh at this remark, which the other found it difficult to interpret.
Over the succeeding century and a half the Africans seem to have lost their zeal for education while being less cpable of it than the Northern man thought. No miraculous development of Africans has ocurred. The facts seem to be that the average intelligence as measured by IQ testing of the African species is fifteen or twenty points below that of the Whites while being even higher in Africa where the Africans have not come into direct contact with Western Civilization.
That this fact is true can be seen by the institution of Affirmative Action. Blacks have access to equal education but in order to get ‘equalization of results’ the Liberal reactionaries have essentially given Africans a fifteen to twenty point handicap and the declared results equal.
I wonder what Tiger Wood would thing about Affirmative Action in golf where his oppoents where given a ten or fifteen point handicap?
The Liberals tacitly acknowledge the unbridgable gap in intellectual capabilites between the two species by the institution of Affirmative Action.
Thus following the defeat of the South, Northern troops were garrisoned in the South to establish equality on the point of a bayonet which was the only way it could be done.
Both Bowers and Du Bois point out the hyprocrisy of the North forcing recial equality on the South when they denied such equality to Africans in the North. The hypocrisy was stifling. While the North insisted on the enfranchisement of the Africans in the South there were very, very few places in the North where Africans were allowed to vote.
Du Bois repeatedly refers to Tourgee’s (with a soft G) Bricks Without Straw in corroboration of his view. I have since read Bricks Without Straw which I found a good novel and historically valuable but my reading of the story doesn’t produce the same results as does that of Du Bois. It seems that there is more than one way to approach the story.
Tourgee was a carpetbagger who went South to make his fortune. While I have faith that his representation is accurate he still describes two different species, as in the above quote, competing for the same space within the framework of the recent past. If he is speaking his own thoughts through the mouth of the Captain then if he were alive today he would have to admit his error.
The Africans were still a freed people with a two hundred year history of subjection. There was no way they could function in a free society. The situation was impossible. Ante-bellum laws had made it a crime to school slaves so that according to Tourgee not one African in a thousand could read or write. Du Bois in his depiction of the African’s eagerness for education places the figure much higher. It is difficult in the circumstances to understand how the millions of African in the black belt of the Cotton Kingdom could have gotten even a smidgeon of education. It was against the law. Laws are wonderful things, watch out for them.
Even freed it is impossible to believe that many adults could learn to read or write. Education requires the pliable minds of the yung. It takes real determination to learn to read and write as an adult which very few have. To be law abiding can be criminal under certain laws. Witness the lawful Naze society.
Bowers gives a feel for the conflict between the species with atrocities on either side. Du Bois takes theposition of the poor suffering amiable negro who was harassed and brutalized by the Whjites while patiently relying on the courts for justice. Remember he believes this the Negro nature.
Bowers is closer to the truth but that is irrelevant. As Foner says this was the beginning of America’s unfinished revolution. Reconstruction was the first phase followed by the counter revolution of the Jim Crow period. That period ended, to use a convenient date in 1954 with the Supreme Court decision in Brown Vs. The Board Of Education.
Thus the African revolt began into the present time. The candadicy of Barry Dunham-Obama signifies the completion of Foner’s unfinished revolution. If elected the Liberal-African combine will begin in earnest to eliminate Whiteness in America. The genocide of Whites which has already commenced and is fairly well advanced will be prosecuted in earnest.
Open your eyes and actually see what is happening.
A Review Of The Traitor By Thomas Dixon Jr.
March 15, 2008
A Contribution To The ERB Library Project
A Review of
THE TRAITOR
by
Thomas F. Dixon Jr.
Thomas F. Dixon, Jr.
Review by R.E. Prindle
Of Thomas Dixon’s Reconstruction Trilogy- The Leopard’s Spots, The Clansman and The Traitor- only the last is found in ERB’s library. It would seem reasonably sure that he read the other two also. As The Traitor was published in 1907 it seems certain that the trilogy was read before ERB put pen to paper so that Dixon was influential on the whole of ERB’s career.
This is no small influence as the Civil War and Reconstruction are central to ERB’s works. Once again, one is amazed at how ERB could absorb so many influences and keep each nearly discrete. Further on I will postulate the possible influence of Alexandre Dumas’ French Revolution series.
Of interest to ERB’s reading habits Bill Hillman recently posted a list of books in ERBzine of ERB’s post WWII reading list that Burroughs described as a few of the books he’d read. As the list was substantial the complete list must have been enormous. The list mainly consisted of books in the areas of crime and other topics which certain minds share. As I happen to be one of those minds based on the internal evidence of the novels and shared intellectual direction I feel a fair amount of confidence in my speculations concerning his reading although I leave room for error.
I am also of the opinion now that he could have read from 500 to 750 books from, say, fifteen to thirty-five when he began writing. His consumption from 1911 to 1940 must have been enormous. Fortunately we can get a pretty good fix on the type of books he preferred from his library.
Thomas Dixon Jr. lived from 1864 to 1946. Reconstruction was in effect from 1865 to 1877 when the last occupation troops were withdrawn. Dixon grew up in Shelby, North Carolina where his father was an important figure in the first Ku Klux Klan. The Traitor is apparently based on his father’s career. It is said that because of corruption in the Klan his father was instrumental in disbanding it.
Dixon although young would then have had first hand experience with both Reconstruction and the Clan.
Dixon believed, and I second him, that Reconstruction was one of the most brutal crimes in history. It certainly ranks in the same category as the French Revolution’s criminal acts in The Vendee and Hitler and Stalin’s actions from 1925 to 1945. One should not underestimate the horrors of Reconstruction. Liberals, for their own reasons, have attempted to excise the period from US history while sanitizing what little is taught. One is certain than an inquiring mind like Burroughs sought out the true and whole story.
Liberals have blackened Dixon’s name as they have that of Dixon’s fellow Southerner, D.W. Griffith, who produced the Dixon trilogy as the most amazing movie of its time- The Birth Of A Nation. In 1915.
While both Griffith and Dixon have been defamed as racists in today’s multi-cultural society they must no longer be seen as racists merely as representatives of an anti-Liberal segment of White culture.
Dixon was one of the most popular American writers of the period to at least until the aftermath of the Russian Revolution when he and writers like him, including Burroughs, came under attack from the Communists. With the exception of Burroughs all have been defamed into oblivion today.
As we know Burroughs’ father, George T., served in the Union Army during the Civil War. His father’s more admirable attributes seem to have gone into the character of John Carter, the hero of the first three Martian stories. He seems to have been combined with a Confederate Officer of Virginia stock as well as a character of the nature of Count Caliogstro of the pre-French Revolution period.
Here the problem of Alexandre Dumas and his Revolutionary romances enters. John Carter’s tomb in Connecticut is probably based on Graham’s tomb in The Traitor. The similarity is striking. Carter’s longevity may be based in part on Dumas’ description of the charlatanry of Cagliostro who claimed to be as old as the Great Historical Bum while rationalizing his ability to survive much as the thousand year old Martians did.
The Great Alexandre Dumas
The Martians were in fact deathless as was Cagliostro’s claim unless they were killed by some sort of physical accident. Dumas’ Caliogstro describes his situation in these exact terms. The novels in Dumas’ roman a fleuve are the Memoirs Of A Physician, Joseph Balsamo, The Queen’s Necklace, Ange Pitou, The Countess Of Charny, The Chevalier Of The Maison Rouge and The Blue And The White. I can recommend them highly. We know that Burroughs read The Three Musketeers and probably The Count Of Monte Cristo. He may have read one, two or more of the Revolution series also.
There is an interesting passage in the Physician in which an ignorant country boy teaches himself to write both printed and cursive letters after a very rudimentary instruction in reading. The passage bears comparison to Tarzan’s teaching himself to read and write. The point being that Burrough’s imagination was probably fired by this series.
Now, we know that Burroughs was always opposed to the Revolution. Dumas would have introduced him to conspiracy theory. I would guess that ERB read Dumas before 1900 but that is just a guess. Also bear in mind what we consider ‘classical’ literature was current in Burroughs’ youth. All these books would have been new and therefore doubly exiting. As David Adams noted to me concerning Baum’s Oz series the books would have been equivalent to a new Beatles record in the sixties when people rushed to stores at the earliest possible moment to get their copy. Knowing this stuff would have made one a very hep cat.
We also know that prior to 1911 Burroughs associated with several knowing people among which were Sweetser and Dr. Stace. These buys are always into conspiracy theory as, indeed, am I . As I have said as Burroughs and I share the same reading tastes I think it less than pure speculation that Burroughs also knew something about the Revolutionary conspiracy. Difficult to tell what.
It doesn’t appear that ERB was ever a Freemason. The Revolution was attributed to the Masons. The lodges then would have been thought Communist then by their opponents. Communist and Illuminated. The Illuminati are, of course, central to any conspiracy theory.
In theory and certainly in fact the lodges were instrumental in the overthrow of the French monarchy. I have even read that Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans were involved with the Rosicrucians, hence the Freemasons and hence the Masonic revolution against thrones. While I don’t find the idea improbable I haven’t got enough evidence to speculate one way or the other. I find it interesting though to see that John Adams was thought to be Illuminated. It is certain that Revolutionary cadres in the form of Libertines were active in England during the seventeenth century and were certainly instrumental in the destruction of London’s Newgate Prison some few years before the destruction of the Bastille.
It is also certain that Adam Weishaupt’s Illuminati infiltrated the French Freemasons some few years before 1789 and that the Jacobins arose from them. It is also clear that the Illuminatti infiltrated American Freemasons at least by 1799. There are those who believe with good evidence that Thomas Jefferson was Illuminated. Indeed, the Communists of the twenties called Jefferson one of their own. It seemed ridiculous until one looks a little further. Whether Lincoln was one of the Communists’ own along with Jefferson as they claim seems preposterous on the surface of it.
However an illuminated Mason by the name of Morgan was about to publish a book exposing the Masonic plot in 1843 when he was abducted and murdered. A symbol of the Illuminatti was the Phrygian Cap. The Union enlisted cap is nothing less than the Phrygian Cap with the front knob truncated and replaced by a flat board. So, shall we say that the Illuminatti took a prominent but disguised role in the Civil War.
If this Jacobin-Illuminatti attitude was in the Northern attitude then it must have been represented in the Abolitionist attitude. Their hatred always directed against authority was the directed against the Southern Whites and in favor of the Negroes. And in fact it was attempted to make Whites slaves to the Negroes. Just as in France the hatred was directed against not only Aristocracy but against peasants or anyone who resisted the Jacobin or Liberal will. In the Vendee of France which remained loyalist genocide was carried out on the Vendeans. I have no doubt out and out genocide would have been committed against Southerners if it had been possible. In that respect perhaps Sherman’s antecedents should be examined to determine unrecognized motives for the march from Atlanta to the sea.
There is no question that a great many of the post-Civil War immigrants were Communists or socialists and that they refused to accept a non-socialist America. Many if not most of the 48ers who fled Europe after the failure of the Revolution of 1848 were socialist while there is no reason to suppose that a large number of those were Jacobins or Illuminated.
Burroughs first contact with these people was as a child or teenager when he saw them parading through Chicago under the Red banner. It seems very unlikely that he wouldn’t have picked up a lot of anti-Socialist information. At any rate his hatred of German and things German began at that time developing into a near mania during the Great War and a firmest attitude by WWII.
I can’t guarantee that he read Dumas’ Revolutionary novels but there are enough seeming contact points in the novels to indicate that he may have. Thus John Carter’s longevity may be based on Dumas’ portrayal of Cagliostro. This input Burroughs combined then combined with his readings of The Virginian and the positive aspects of his father to create John Carter. It is probably significant that Carter was the main character in only the first three Martian novels before ERB’s father died. When George T. died John Carter ceased being the dominant character being replaced by his son Carthoris in the next novel, Thuvia, Maid Of Mars. Burroughs may not have been able to divide his own alter-ego between Carthoris and Tarzan as the former disappears being replaced by a number of different personae.
However ERB understood the Civil War and Reconstruction the two events were a significant part of his mental makeup.
Pioneering Filmmaker, D.W. Griffith
The three Dixon novels were formative before he began to wirte while the Dixon scripted The Birth Of A Nation filmed by D.W. Griffith and released in 1915 had a terrific impact on Burroughs as well as the Nation.
The movie would have revived all his emotions on the two topics. I have read the novels of the subsequent years with this thought in mind but echoes may be there.
Over the following decades Liberals have succeeded in characterizing Birth Of A Nation as ‘racist’ which it is not. The story may be culturally centered on the White side of the story rather than the Black but this fact doesn’t make the movie any more racist than if it had been culturally centered on the Black aspect. The issue of race simply cannot be avoided.
The movie misunderstands the breach between the two White viewpoints of the North and the South. While the movie is plea for Whites to never do this again and to reunite as one people, the bigots of the North wished only for the destruction of Southern Whites. As the Jewish historian Eric Foner writes, Reconstruction is the unfinished Revolution that is still going on today and will culminate in the election of Barry Dunham-Obama and its sequel.
Eric Foner
Eric Foner is part of the Foner dynasty of Communist historians. His uncle Phil Foner wrote distorted labor chronicles while his Pappy Jack was dismissed from his academic position in the ‘50s as a Communist.
The movie was the most successful of its time providing the funds for the MGM empire. Louis B. Mayer who was a theatre operator at the time made enough from the movie to go to Hollywood and establish the Mayer studios which Loews later combined into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer when they crushed William Fox of Fox Studios which then was combined with Twentieth Century to become Twentieth-Century Fox.
The movie certainly was not considered racist at the time except by the Jacobin faction who were not as influential then as they have become today. The Democratic president of the time, Woodrow Wilson, thought it a superb movie.
Interestingly both Wilson (1856-1924) and Dixon were together at Johns Hopkins University with Dixon being a champion of Wilson. D.W. Griffith, from the South as was Wilson, was Burroughs nearly exact contemporary. Griffith was born in Louisville, Kentucky also in 1875 dying in 1948 two years before Burroughs. Griffith was another who was marginalized by the Communists.
Thus the essential Edgar Rice Burroughs was taking its final form in the years from 1900-1911. I would like to organize those years as part of his early married years. This is not easy. As we are aware when he and Emma returned to Chicago from Idaho and Salt Lake City in 1904 ERB was suffering from the excruciating headaches that lasted half a day incurred from his beating in Toronto.
His sojourn in Salt Lake must also be included as part of his education as with his innate anthropological curiosity he would have investigated the absurdities of that religion. Once again he was much closer to the origins of the religion as it had only about sixty years of history to deal with rather than one hundred and sixty.
Even on the train trip back to Chicago ERB would have traveled through an entirely different landscape along approximately the Mormon Trail than today. The geographic changes have been enormous. The earlier geography would have influenced Mormon memories and stories that he would have heard. As an example of a feature that has been completely destroyed is a description from a book titled: The Mormon Trail: Voyage Of Discovery, The Story Behind The Scenery by Stanley B. and Violet Kimball. Page 35:
Weary teamsters and tired oxen struggled onward despite the difficult, rocky terrain. Many journals commented on the hordes of grasshoppers that had helped deplete the area of grass. Still, the optimism remained high in camp for they knew the Sweetwater River was just around the bend. The ground here proved to be miry, “smelled bad”, was swampy and many oxen got “buried in the mud.” Mosquitoes and “Gad flies” were numerous, and both oxen and humans were plagued for miles. The water along this route was so bad that even the cattle refused to drink. Most of the time they had to use sage for firewood here because buffalo chips were scarce and so was wood.Among the several landmarks along this part of the Trail were the Avenue Of Rocks and The Devil’s Backbone. Today the quarter-mile-long Avenue Of Rocks is gone, a victim of road widening.
That’s how little Americans care for their environment. Possibly the Avenue of Rocks was used by Fennimore Cooper as a locale in his novel The Prairie that Burroughs was certain to have read.
The Mormons would have made the trip a scant thirty or so years before so Burroughs would have been regaled with stories by those who had made the trip, probably before Buffalo Bill cleared the prairie of buffalo. Certainly before the tremendous network of reservoirs that now cover the area.
Having returned to Chicago Burroughs had to get down to some serious living; something he wasn’t good at. One would imagine that his father with a long history in business in Chicago could have gotten him a decent job to start but for some reason of which we are not informed he seemed to be in disrepute. ERB literally started at the bottom taking jobs for which there were few applicants.
Burroughs ran through an odd assortment of jobs over the next seven or nine years. After all it was only seven years from 1904 to 1911. Short enough in the telling but the equivalent of several lifetimes in the living. I won’t do a recital of the jobs as I’ve done it before while everyone is familiar with the story.
Intellectually these were stimulating times for Burroughs. L. Frank Baum’s Oz books began at the turn of the century, Baum trying to end the series in 1910. The Oz stories had a great influence on ERB. Jack London began publishing whose hobo experiences probably rekindled Burroughs interest in that life find expression in the trilogy of novel involving Billy Byrne that began in 1913 shortly after ERB began writing.
Owen Wister published The Virginian that would be so influential on Burroughs’ writing going into the character of John Carter. The Graustark novels of George Barr McCutcheon also began appearing the memory of which ERB would cherish to his dying day.
And of course ERB had his relationship with Dr. Stace. Now, Porges gives us very little information on this period in ERB’s life. However John Dos Passos in his USA trilogy includes a character who closely resembles Burroughs. This is in the third volume, The Big Money. Dos Passos was a vicious little man. At the time he was an open Red. Somewhat later in life he supposedly became a ‘conservative.’ As Reds go becoming ‘conservative’ in my opinion merely means getting old. I don’t see how anyone who has based their life on Communist principles can ever embrace opposite principles but many people can, or at least, they allow themselves to think they can.
It would be absurd to think that there would be no stories circulating about one of the most successful writers in the world. Dos Passos was actually from Chicago although absent most of his life, still he undoubtedly picked up some stories on Burroughs who would have been thought of, at the very least, as a colorful character. Thus writing in the thirties Dos Passos may very well have picked up stories from people like Frank Martin himself. Can’t be sure at this time of course…but if you look…
John Dos Passos
Dos Passos carefully describes the type of businessman ERB was. There apparently was a type of scrabbler who while not being able to afford an office of their own would rent space for a desk in someone else’s office so they could have an address. Sort of like the mail box addresses existing today. As an independent businessman Burroughs was of this type. In this capacity Dos Passos has his character turn up with a patent medicine type who go through Michigan trying to sell their wares. Dos Passos details of the foray are unimportant and probably highly imaginative but definitely derogatory. But then his whole corpus is of a mocking nature.
The point is Porges describes about this time, 1907 or so, that Burroughs sent Emma a note from South Bend, Indiana lauding the town saying that he would be back home soon. Porges doesn’t say what he was doing in South Bend. We are left to guess.
I would imagine it was something along the lines that Dos Passos describes. Or perhaps this was about the time the Feds cracked down on the Patent Medicine business and Burroughs and Stace may have found it convenient to absent themselves from the Windy City. I haven’t been able to find a reference to such a trip in the corpus as yet.
More to follow.
Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Early Married Years
November 18, 2007
Edgar Rice Burroughs:
The Early Married Years
by
R.E. Prindle
First published in Burroughs Bulletin
#60 Fall 2004
Why am I stumbling down the highway
When I should be rolling ‘cross the skyway?
– Donovan
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
-Edgar Rice Burroughs
1.
The marriage to Emma on January 31, 1900 was the definite turning point in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ life. He wasn’t ready for marriage and he didn’t want it. Up to this point his life had had no direction; it was leading nowhere, the guy was just drifting. ERB had no clear cut goals and if had had one he had no plan in place to attain it.
Beyond a vague interest in art and literature he had no career ideas. Judging from the evidence between his brief and unsatisfactory stint at the Chicago Art Institue at which he refused to subject himself to discipline and the commencement of his literary career, his mind was always tending or drifting to some such end. However at the beginning of 1900, with a new wife and the attendant responsibilites he had to find some way to end his rough and rowdy ways and succeed in business, to make his pile before he was thirty.
Striking it rich before he was thirty was important to him. That desire may have influenced him to head West in 1903 to join his brothers in their gold dredging business. Perhaps he thought he might get in on a major find. Finding a pile of gold or precious stones would be a dominating theme in his Tarzan novels. Tarzan was an extension of his primary personality facet.
But now, as his own life entered the second phase, the country was entering the second of the three distinct phases it would embrace during Burroughs’ lifetime. The first phase we have already covered in depicting Burroughs’ first twenty-five years. The transition from Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone and the Wild Frontier to modern industrial America was completed in such a bewilderingly rapid manner that one wonders that anyone kept his sanity. The world you lived in today was literally gone tomorrow.
The life of George T. Burroughs spanned this transition from conestoga wagons to the Model T. From the invention of the telegraph and Morse Code to the long distance telephone lines with a phone in the living room. From Virgin forests and unbroken sod to cutover wastelands and McCormickReapers cutting over immense fields of golden wheat.
The world of Fennimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo in the The Prairie had disappeared almost before it was seen. there was barely time to write about it. Right behind Bumppo the skyscrapers of Chicago were thrust into the air while the conflict between the White City and the Black City erupted into industrial warfare. Out of the smoke and flames of burning railway carriages the twentieth century was born.
The streamlined Twentieth Century Limited took the place of purpose built looking locomotives. the might ten-wheel drive ushered in the new era. My god, it takes your breath away just to think about it! What had happened almost wasn’t even a beginning it was just a foretaste of things to come.
One wonders how it affected Edgar Rice Burroughs. Perhaps it was happening too fast to register on the conscious mind. I don’t know if anyone alive has ingested and digested the changes since the great convulsion of 1789. God knows I have tried and failed miserably, as this pitiful effort shows, yet I do honestly believe that I have succeeded better than a very few.
Perhaps in his way Edgar Rice Burroughs made the attempt with his Martian chronicles representing science and the future, with the Tarzan novels dealing with his contemporary life, while the Pellucidar series may possible have represented the unspoiled vistas of primordial Cooperesque America. It’s not an unattractive notion, but I don’t know how true it might be.
By 1900 America was ‘won’. Won and lost. Many plunged fearlessly into the furture while others dragged their feet trying to reclaim that which, while it could still be seen, was no longer there. The Vanished Frontier had a profound effect on American life. It spawned a whole new class of men or at least defined their manifestation. They were men and a way of life which had a profound effect on the mind of Burroughs. While he would never join them, he fantasized the life and if one looks closely wrote a great deal about them. These men were the hoboes, tramps and bums, the inveterate roamers who made Chicago the main stem of their transient empire.
In Chicago their main stem or gathering place was on Madison Avenue, the street on which the battery factory was located. Young Burroughs must have marveled at the phenomenon every spring as the hoboes cleared out of Chicago to spread over the mid-west to help in the sowing and harvesting of the great crops of grain. Every fall they poured out of the boxcars to return to winter in the Windy City.
All they needed was a stake of thirty dollars to get them through the whole winter. Thirty dollars for six months! That’s all it took in those days. When one hears ERB plead poverty when he was earning two thousand or more a year one wonders whether his claims were real or only answered a psychological need.
Nor were these mere down-and-out men as they are pictured in the imagination. As Robert Service was to picture them, these were ‘The Men Who Don’t Fit In’; men who made an ideology of their roaming which was given political form and organization beginning in the first decade of the twentieth century. As Burroughs identified with hoboes as an aspect of his Animus or personality given him by his encounter with John the Bully, I would like to take some space to describe the Hobo phenomenon.
Hoboes are perhaps the most amazing and unique of historical phenomena. They were born of the railroad and are inseparable from it. As we all know, the Golden Spike uniting the East and West coasts was driven on Promontory Point in Utah immediately after the end of the Civil War. The line was audaciously laid through unconquered Indian territory and buffalo wallows. We all remember movie scenes of Indians attacking the Iron Horse with bows and arrows and ‘hunters’ shooting buffalo from train cars dragged behind locomotives belching smoke and flames.
Before the Civil War trains were an innovation in world history arriving in America only in the mid-1830s. After the War Between The States, rail lines proliferated with amazing speed so that by the time of ERB and Emma’s wedding there were literally hundreds of thousands of miles of rail lines crisscrossing the country from North to South and East to West. Passenger trains which are not particularly well suited for hoboing formed a very small percentage of trains, while freight trains formed the bulk of the cars. Box cars were deadheaded or shuttled back and forth empty, no freight. These were the preferred hobo mode of conveyance; they were dry, out of the weather and comparatively warm and comfortable.
Like any other war, the Civil War produced a legion or two of men whose nerves had been so disorganized by the excitement of war that they found it difficult to reintegrate themselves into society. Many of them took to working on the railroads, building the lines here and there. Tansportation was provided by boxcar so, I suppose, they got used to riding in boxcars.
As the lines spread and proliferated, it became possible to just hop a train and ride. As the hobo songwriter Jimmie Rodgers put it:
When a woman gets the blues
She hangs her little head and cries;
When a woman gets the blues
She hangs her little head and cries;
When a man get the blues
He hops a train and rides.
Before the Civil War that wasn’t possible.
Thus, as time passed and the first generation of hoboes left the road, anyone who was restless, adventurous, didn’t want to work or just didn’t fit in could take to a life of roaming. The roaming life was a romantic ideal that had its charms.
Not unsurprisingly a body of literature developed espousing the ideals that motivated hoboing. These took the forms of songs and poems, all narratives are suspect, the Hobo mind falling to rhyme. Large amounts of the literature are anonymous probably growing to fruition around campfires in the hobo jungles as their gathering sites were known. Hence the line from the song ‘Wabash Cannoball’: You’re riding through the jungles on the Wabash Cannonball.
However there were also poets who composed for their audience. The Wobbly Joe Hill wrote one of the most famous songs: ‘Hallelujah, I’m A Bum.’ Perhaps the currently most famous of the Hobo poets is Woody Guthrie. His Grand Coulee Dam and Roll On Columbia are noteworthy songs for any genre. One of his songs which has become an anthem for the disaffected only makes real sense when it is placed in the context of hobo ideology. That was:
This land is your land,
This land is my land,
From California,
To the New York Island.
Guthrie means that this land is the true possession of the wandering hobo and not businessmen or straights like you and me.
For a thumbnail sketch of the Hobo of Burroughs’ time and his ideals, let’s read a song which has retained some currency down to this day. There are apparently innumerable verses and variations on verses that were concocted around the jungle fires but his is the recension printed in The Oxford Book of American Verse (Oxford University Press, 1927) It’s probably cleaned up a little for academic tastes but it still has a nice breezy quality.
The Big Rock Candy Mountain
Introduction
On a summer day in the month of May,
A burly little bum come a hikin’,
He was travelin’ down that lonesome road.
A lookin’ for his likin’.
He was headed for a land that’s far away,
Beside those crystal fountains,
I’ll see you all, this comin’ fall
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
1.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
You never change your socks,
And the little streams of alkyhol
Come a tricklin’ down the rocks.
Where the shacks all have to tip their hats,
And the railroad bulls are blind.
There’s a lake of stew, and whiskey too,
And you can paddle all around ’em
In your big canoe,
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
Chorus: O…the buzzin’ of the bees
In the cigarette trees,
Round the soda water fountains,
Next to the lemonade springs,
Where the wangdoodle sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
2.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
There’s a land that fair and bright
Where the handouts grow on bushes,
And you sleep out every night,
Where the boxcars all are empty
And the sun shines every day,
O I’m bound to go where there ain’t no snow,
Where the rain don’t fall and the wind don’t blow,
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
(Chorus)
3.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
The jails are made of tin,
And you can bust right out again
As soon as you get in.
The farmers trees are full of fruit,
The barns are full of hay,
I’m going to stay where you sleep all day,
Where they boiled in oil the inventory of toil,
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains. (Chorus)
Now there’s a utopia in a parallel universe worthy of the pen of H.G. Wells.
The poem does not refer to the dreams of a defeated man but rather a defiant one, one who has rejected the motivations of the ordinary man who does work for a living. This man is going to pluck the labor of other men for his own benefit- the farmers trees are full of fruit- while using another’s toil for his own benefit- the barns are full of hay. the Hobo is going to a place where they ‘boiled in oil the man who invented toil.’ The Hobo won’t work.
In another poem he says: ‘I could be a banker if I wanted to be. But the thought of an iron cage is too suggestive to me. Now, I could be a broker without the slightest excuse. But look at 1929 and tell me what’s the use.’
As can be seen, the Hobo equates himself with the executive class but to reach his true position in society he would have to apply himself or ‘toil’ against which alternative he adamantly sets his face.
He would rather lament a fate that has inexplicably denied him his birthright, his true place in society.
As another of the great hobo songwriters, Jimmie Rodgers (1897-1933) put it in his ‘Hobo’s Meditation’.
Tonight as I lay on the boxcar
Just waiting for a train to pass by,
What will become of the hobo
When their time comes to die.
Has the Master up there in heaven
Got a place we might call a home
Will we have to work for a living
Or can we continue to roam?
Will there be any freight trains in heaven
Any boxcars in which we might hide
Will there be any tough cops or brakemen
Will they tell us that we cannot ride?
Will the hobo chum with the rich man
Will he always have money to spare
Will they have respect for a hobo
In the land that is hidden up there?
The ‘land that is hidden up there’ is the same as the Big Rock Candy Mountain where the rich man will admit the hobo to equality and respect, by which the hobo means supremacy. For make no mistake, the hobo as H.H. Knibbs indicates has the true vision of life:
We are the true nobility!
Sons of rest and the outdoor air!
Knights of the tie and rail are we,
Lightly wandering everywhere.
Having no gold we have no care,
As over the crust of world we go,
Stepping in time to this ditty rare:
Take up your bundle and beat it, ‘Bo.
That’s almost a political agenda to match the ideology. Knibbs say in his ‘The Grand Old Privilege.:
Folks say we got no morals- that they all fell in the soup,
And no conscience- so the would-be goodies say.
And perhaps our good intentions did just up and flew the coop,
While we stood around and watched them fade away.
But there’s one thing that we’re loving more than money, grub or booze,
Or even the decent folks that speaks us fair,
And that’s the grand old privilege and chuck our luck and choose
Any road at any time anywhere.
Well, that’s a fine impatience with any state of affairs.
So it’s best ‘Bo, while your feet are mates;
Take a look at the whole United States.
Oh the fire and a pal and a smoke at night,
And up again in the morning bright,
With nothing but road and sky in sight!
And nothing to do but go.
I love the sound of it myself, but if you look behind the glitter of Knibbs you’ll see a man with alternatives talking. Knibbs is kind of your Fifth Avenue penthouse hobo talking. Henry Herbert Knibbs (1874-1945), who had such a profound effect on Edgar Rice Burroughs, was a year older while dying a few years earlier.
He came from a well-to-do family where he developed a feeling of romance for cowboys and bums back East, although he never really belonged to either. He may even have chosen the road for a couple years experience, for something to write about, as he intended to write being an English major in college. He certainly became prosperous enough writing for the slicks like The Saturday Evening Post, The American and even breaking into H.L. Mencken’s Smart Set, none of which his chum Edgar Rice Burroughs could ever break into.
Yes, so it’s up ‘Bo for a trip from Barstow to old Berdoo and back to LA for a hot bath and bottle of scotch. That’s my kind of life on the road.
Ta, ta, I’m getting away from myself.
Knibbs and Rodgers and Guthrie actually came after the peak of the phenomenon which was ending by 1903 when the ‘Boes and Tramps and Bums were organizing into their supreme effort to create the Big Rock Candy Mountain right here on earth; when they made their supreme attempt to snatch supremacy from those snooty executives who wouldn’t chum with them; yes, damn them, we’ll combine in the I.W.W. and then we’ll see.
For, don’t you see, the West is dead.
What path is left for you to tread
When hunger wolves are slinking near
Do you not know the West is dead?
The ‘blanket stiff’ now packs his bed
Along the trail of yesteryear
What path is left for you to tread?
Your fathers gold sunsets led
To virgin prairies wide and clear
Do you not know the West is dead?
Now dismal cities rise instead
And freedom is not there nor here
What path is left for you to tread?
Your father’s world, for which they bled,
Is fenced and settled far and near
Do you not know the West is dead?
Your fathers gained a crust of bread
Their bones bleach on the lost frontier,
What path is left for you to tread
Do you not know the West is dead?
Anon. As quoted by Ralph Chaplin (1887-1961) in his autobiography , Wobbly: The Rough And Tumble Story Of An American Radical (University of Chicago Press, 1948)
So that was the problem the bindle stiffs faced, it was work or die, no place to move on to, and which they began to attempt to resolve. Burroughs was stuck in the middle, he couldn’t become a bum which he romantically would have liked nor could he realistically aspire to a seat on the board. Nature’s gold was all taken so he could only aspire to the gold in his mind.
While he might have yearned to be the hobo Bridge of his ‘Out There Somewhere; when he married, he had to abandon that hope, although nearly twenty years later he wrote ‘Tarzan The Untamed’ which can be read as ‘Burroughs the Untamed’. He still yearned after his rough and rowdy ways.
The End.
Greil Marcus The Shape Of Things To Come
July 14, 2007
Notes To A Review Of
Greil Marcus’
The Shape Of Things To Come
by
R.E. Prindle
Marcus, Greil, The Shape Of Things To Come, 2006, New York.
‘The Shape Of Things To Come’ a title borrowed from the mentor of today’s left, H.G. Wells, is Greil Marcus latest attempt at a prophecy of blood, guts and the doom of the United States. The price of Black slavery he prophesies will be blood flowing in the streets. ‘Trouble coming every day.’ as Frank Zappa put it. As to that point I am compelled to agree with him although to understand the reason why doesn’t require the religious ecstasy or possession he seems to believe he has.
I have already examined this problem in my essay The Deconstruction Of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America that appeared on http://www.erbzine.com and in this blog in which without the rather specious gift of prophecy from De Lawd I projected by scientific reasoning that a Negro reaction to slavery is unavoidable.
I fear that the bloodshed Mr. Marcus prophesies may be upon us by the next Presidential election if there is one. I fear that there is a chance that President Bush may cancel the election continuing in power. Barring that possibility I fear days of bloodshed will arrive with the election of Barack Obama.
Thanks to a very large extent to the efforts of Mr. Marcus’ Jewish culture the American electorate has been debased to the point where it seems to be unable to deliberate on such matters of vital importance with any degree of intelligence.
In the first place the Black people have been in open rebellion since at least the 1965 Watts revolt, or riots as it is presently known.
The opening volley was undoubtedly the Supreme Court Brown decision of 1954 that slowly built into the violent eruption of 1965-69. Since then the direction has changed into a series of escalating acts of violence against individual Whites of which the recent sadistic violence against a White man and woman in Tennessee is the most detestable example. The Cutts murder in Ohio is another. Both murders have been passed over in silence by the Liberal confederates of the Blacks in the media.
The time is now ripe for the election of a Black President while Barack Obama who is totally unqualified appers as a bland and innocuous Black candidate. Personally as attractive as a Black Jack Kennedy and twice as dangerous and that saying a whole bunch. I fear that he will be nominated and elected out of White guilt for the slavery Greil Marcus loves to dwell on.
To this point I have heard no one inquire as to who might be Mr. Obama’s appointees to his Cabinet. Key posts such as Secretary Of State or Attorney General. After the slate of incompetent non-entities of the Bush administration I think the public has a right to know exactly who the friends of Mr. Obama or any other candidate for that matter are. In my opinion they are running as a slate of candidates.
Will we, for instance, have the Reverend Jesse Jackson fulminating from the pulpit of the Department of State? The Reverend Al Sharpton as Attorney General? Just who is going to serve with Mr. Obama? He is certainly going to have to satisfy his Black constituency at the expense of the White majority.
Can such a state of affairs be tolerated? Mr. Marcus obviously thinks not. As he prophesies the Black rebellion will break open and the streets will run red with blood.
Already in the State of Mississippi where in certain districts Blacks have seized the government they have denied Whites their Constitutional rights which has required Federal intervention to redress the situation. Whether the situation will be redressed without violence remains to be seen. With the possible or probable election of Mr. Obama I see the situation spreading from Mississippi throughout the South and unltimately the nation. The only possible result as Mr. Marcus foresees is civil war.
Any open warfare between Blacks and Whites will quickly inflame Mexican and Moslem passions so that within say four years the whole United States will be in flames.
Thus Mr. Marcus and his Jewish culture will once again have destroyed another civilization, culture and people. As if the Amalekites weren’t enough the Jewish culture disrupted Spain culminating in their expulsion in 1492. Attacking the whole of Europe that civilization was reduced to rubble between 1914 and 1945.
The Jews then moved on the Middle East where that area has been in turmoil since their arrival in 1948 and is now being reduced to rubble by them and on their behalf. That leaves only the United States which I fear will soon be their next victim to be reduced to rubble.
Even a casual reading of Greil Marcus’ Shape Of Things To Come will indicate that such destruction is something he and one presumes his culture gleefully anticipate.
With the election of Mr. Barack Obama I have no doupt Mr. Marcus’ hopes, dreams and wishes are in the bag.
End Of Review
The Deconstruction Of
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America
Part II
Organizing The Unorganizable
Don’t you leave me here,
No, don’t you leave me here.
If you must go, Sweet Pollyanne,
Well, leave a dime for beer.
Trad.
There has at present been no good history of America written. All histories have been written by partisan Liberals with no real attempt to deal with multi-culturalism in an objective manner. While I offer no comprehensive history here I do attempt to get at some underlying cultural motives of what was and is actually being attemped by the various cultures and the ends they pursue.
The key problem for American history is why the Civil War was fought. Contrary to propaganda it wasn’t over the issue of Black slavery. None of the cultures involved had ever been opposed to slavery historically or on principle, although the moral issue did evolve in Europe and the United States leading to the abolition of the slave trade at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The cultural roots of the conflict do not being in the US but go back to the conquest of England by the Norman, William The Conquerer, in 1066. Nor do either of the cultures involved talk about the real issue; they project a false or surrogate issue. The issue is not the issue and seldom is. Underline that: The issue is not the issue.
The conflict began when the conquering Normans enslaved the Anglo-Saxons, especially those of East Anglia. The issue then is that like the biblical Hebrews the Anglo-Saxons objected to their ill treatment only. None of the cultures objected to slavery per se. The Hebrews not only held slave but in order to finance the building of Solomon’s Temple Solomon sold his countrymen into slavery. The Normans held English slaves until within a hundred years of the regicide of Charles I. The East Anglians themselves under Cromwell expatriated tens of thousand of Irish to the Caribbean Ilands as slaves to work cheek by jowl with the Negro slaves, no distinctions because of race or species. In addition, the South took no part in the procurement of Negro slaves. The slave trade was run in part by New England Puritan seamen who took the profits from the trade. Thus both the Puritans of New England and the Cavaliers of Virginia had no particular aversion in principle to slavery. The true issue was not whether but who.
page 1.
The scepter of the chosen people had been literally transferred from the Hebrews to their successors the inhabitants of England in the years following the conquest of 1066. This is a fact. The substance of the story of how the transfer was made can be found in the Lancelot-Grail. The complete Lancelot-Grail. The monarch of England are annointed according to the Jewish rites of David as administered by the high priest Zadok.
When printing made inexpensive bibles possible the East Anglians immediately associated themselves with the Israelites who according to the bible had been slaves in Egypt. Already of the new chosen people of England the East Anglians identified completely with the Hebrews of the bible becoming, if not in fact, at least as a mental projection the same. They adopted Hebrew customs, or attempted to, to the letter.
As stiff-necked as the originals they made themselves as unpopular among the other colonials who despised them and even ran them out of their communities from time to time. Their arch enemies the Norman Cavaliers of the southern counties of England followed the East Anglians to the New World when Charles I was beheaded and Cromwell and the Puritans seized power. They established themselves in Virginia and the South. The East Anglians glared at them over the barrier of the Middle Colonies. And then at some point they found a casus bellus in Negro slavery.
Negro slaves were not the issue- they were the good reason; the former enslavement of the East Anglians was the real issue. Othrs might fight for the former reason but not the latter.
I doubt if few Westerners can be found to defend slavery yet slavery was the natural order of things. If you are a Liberal your view of slavery will be very narrow concentrating on the Atlantic trade. Facts don’t matter the religious mind and Liberalism is a religion but they do to the Scientific mind. Thus slavery was endemic to Africa. Every African was a slave and possession of their king who could and did dispose of their bodies in any way he chose. It was also just as natural for the African to enslave any other people who came in his way who were not strong enough to maintain their freedom. Thus while African slaves poured out of Africa, having been sold by their chiefs, into the Atlantic trade other millions if not tens of millions gushed from Africa to the Semitic East destined for Arabia, Iran and India. The Semites paid for nothing; they merely shot up the tribes and took what they wanted.
While Africans were leaving Africa, Africans raided the shores of Europe abducting Europeans to endure worse treatment than Africans ever did in the South. Needless to say the Africans paid for nothing. If any reparations are due they are due from Africa to Europe.
Yes, slavery is wrong, is bad, but there are absolutely no innocents. All, all are guilty of the same crime against humanity. Now that we’ve got that straight we can deal with the attitude of the East Angians toward the Cavaliers of the South during the period called Reconstruction that ran in its first form from 1865 to 1877. Edgar Rice Burroughs was two years old when Reconstruction ended.
The term chosen for this period is instructive. What changes were to be made? How was the South to be reconstructed and according to whose vision? Why, according to the whims and fancies of the South’s arch enemy the East Anglians of New England- read New East Anglia. If 1865 these people had been souring their intellects on the Hebrew writings for four hundred years or so. Let that fact sink in. For four hundred years- that’s a long time- these people had been chanting refrains like- the Lord shall deliver mine enemy to me and I shall smite him hip and thigh. Take a moment to dwell on this bitter, dare I say evil, doctrine of the hateful Anglians. I grew up with this horrid doctrine and maybe you did too. Well, the Cavaliers could expect no mercy from these deep dyed bigots and they didn’t get any.
At the same time the Anglians were self-righteous, that is to say, dis-honest. They considered themselves the most virtuous of men and women just as did their fellow biblicals, the Hebrew Children. You have to remember that nearly everyone believed that God literally rescued the Hebrew Children from the fiery furnace. The Puritan was a justified sinner, wrong in their hands became right by virtue of their sanctity. They had united the will of God with their own. What they chose to believe was just; there could be no other oinion, no reasonable objection. The essence of bigotry.
page 2.
At this precise psychological moment American Liberalism came into existence. Liberalism was equated with virtue; opposition to as evil. It is that simple. In the classic mode: If you’re not with ’em, you’re against ’em. If you’re against ’em then you have to be destroyed. In order for Liberals to believe this false religion no one can be allowed to call them on it, so opinion must be strictly controlled; no dissenting allowed. Anyone thinking other wise must be demonized. Thus the conflict that will run throughout American history.
The Anglians had their enemy where they wanted them. Left to their own untrammeled desires I have no doubt that they would have annihilated every White person, that is to say, Norman Cavalier, in the South. Genocide runs like a red thread through the Liberal left from La Vendee throught the European aftermath of the Great War through the Hitler/Stalin genocidal programs to Mao, Pol Pot and beyond. It must be remembered that members of theFDR administration pressed for the genocide of German after WWII. Genocide is part of the Liberal mentality.
But the more placid people of the Middle Colonies limited Anglian hopes for a genuine holocaust. If the Anglians had been able to succeed in their ‘reconstruction’ plans the crime against humanity would have exceeded anything that happened up to 1950, or after, even exceeding the Liberal atrocities of Chairman Mao.
The reconstructed society would have reversed the pre-war situation dispossessing the Southern Whites while making them the virtual slaves of the Blacks. You see, if slavery was the issue it wasn’t Black slavery but how to impose slavery on the descendants of the Normans of the latter had imposed slavery on the Anglians hundreds of year before.
As with all Leftists the Anglians were unscrupulous disregarding all conventions and rules. That they didn’t disregard the Law was only because they were able to make the laws to serve their purposes. Hitler who had studied the period fairly closely probably learned a lot from them. Quite simply, right was equated with their desires, wrong with anything that refused to follow them. You can see the making of the Old Testament Hebrew based reliigion slowly displacing that of the Founding Fathers. As I have said before, religion equals bigotry, which is what religion must be.
The Anglian program was so unjust and transparent that reasonable men in the country instinctively opposed it while the men of the South who were directly affected took up cover armed resistance as they ought to have and must have. Just as we will have to soon.
Liberal denial of their program began with their defeat while the true horrors of this genocidal holocaust have been sswept under the rug and never discussed historically. Quite similar to the Armenian Holocaust and the Hungarian Holocaust. The Liberals, however, did not give up the war because they lost this battle. They continued to vilify the South and Southerners. One has only to look at how the South has been portrayed in movies of the last eighty years or so to understand the slander. Much of the trouble in the South today is the result of the implacable hatred of the Anglians now converted to the arrogant hatred known as Liberalism. The Second Reconstruction goes on today under the Leftist understanding of multi-culturalism. You can read Left Multi-Culturalism as the Second Reconstruction. This program calls for the abolitionof the entire ‘white race.’
The enemy of the Liberal religion became, just as with the Hebrew bible, anyone who refused to endorse and follow the program.
Prominent among these was a man of the generation of the 1850s who was revered by the people of his and the next couple generations. The tumultuous times of the twentieth century took their toll on this man who attempted to live the ‘strenuous life,’ Theodore Roosevelt. Too close to the men and the times to see it clearly, this man led such a full life, inreflected in his too short autobiography, to remember to tell all that much about it.
page 3.
Born in 1859 TR had seen America during Reconstruction and before the vast influx of immigration that began in the 1870s. He had seen the America of legend and even took part in it. He had been a rancher in the Dakotas when the West was still unwon. He had been the Police Commissioner of New York City at the height of its corruption in that most wide open town where anything went and did. I tis only by some strange myopia that untrammeled vice in the major cities of the United Sates is not recognized for far exceeding whatever vice has gone on before. Very peculiar. De Sade could have learned something from Hollywood. TR had been President of the United States from 1900 through 1908 riding in on the coattails of the assassinated President McKinley whose VP he was.
These were tumultuous times, sure, when weren’t they, as America sought to adjust to rapid changes, assimilating the Western conquests of the nineteenth century, trying to absorb scientific, technological and economic changes occurring with bewildering rapidity, while trying to reconcile differences in a rapidly growing immigration of diverse cultures.
Everyone who came to America seemed to be nursing a centuries or millennia old grudge they couldn’t give up against someone and possibly everyone. They call it multi-culturalism. The East Anglians had a half millennium old grudge against the Norman Cavaliers. The Irish had an even longer grudge against all the English. The Sicilians had a grudge that went on no one knows howlong against whomever. Perhaps the grudge was antediluvian going backt to when the sunny Mediterranean was unflooded. Probably even before the Sicels were known as Sicels. And then there was the paragon of grudge holders going back four millennia against all mankind, the Jews. Not to mention the Negroes who had only begun to to nurse their grudge against the Whites of America. The United States became a seething cauldron of hate with all these haters joining forces with the Liberals to form a coalition to Reconstruct anyone who disagreed with any of their programs out of existence. The coalition was coming together during TR’s presidency.
While Tr might have run for president in 1908 he instead ‘appointed’ a successor he believed ould continue his policies then went off to shoot lions and tigers in Africa. (Oops, did I say tigers? Everyone knows there are no tigers in Africa.) By the time he came back and realized his error he wanted to be President again. Rejected by the Republican Party he foolishly decided to run on a third party Progressive, or Bull Moose, ticket. Disastrously splitting the Republican vote he allowed the ineffably destruction Woodrow Wilson to become the first Liberal or, even Red President. At this point democracy in America began to deconstruct.
He threw himself into ineffective oppostion although too late. When the War began in 1914 he was for immediate intervention on the side of England and France in a European struggle that could have no real influence on the United States. The status quo would have assumed a different temporary form, that is all. If the Soviets couldn’t impose their will on subject Europeans for more than a very few decades how then could have the Germans? The consequences of the War would have had to have been dealt with one way or another, that’s all. When the US did enter how effective was the Liberal Wilson’s intervention? The next twenty-five years tell the story. More tens of millions of deaths. Furious with Wilson for staying out TR vociferously berated him. Quite violent language.
When war came to America, inflaming the American population, so diverse and multi-cultural, questions of loyalty arose. TR, who like so many had never examined the motives of the immigrants but expected them to embrace ‘American’ iceals, asked whether America was no more than an international boarding house. And he might have added, nothing more than something to be merely plundered.
And then in 1919 he died.
Backing TR all the way was that writer in Chicago. He’d been writing away furiously. His best selling Tarzan Of The Apes was followed by numerous other books as well as a steady stream of Tarzan sequels. In 1919 when TR pulled up stakes and left the planet Edgar Rice Burroughs pulled up his Chicago roots heading for LA to begin his second or was it his third, lifeteem. He was riding a crest of popularity as his creation, Tarzan had become a household word.
Burroughs had always been an admirer of TR. He had even tried to join the Rough Riders during the Spanish American War. Growing up in the eighties and nineties as he did, TR and his generation made an impact on his own development. The Wild West was real to him. The memory of the Wild West was a major influence on America through my youth until Hollywood began to demythologize American culture in favor of Post-WWII Jewish influences drifting away from the moral and heroic model to cringing guilt and angst.
During Burroughs’ early Hollywood years real Western badmen and lawmen, real cowboys men who had been there when it was happening, so rapidly the West came and went, served as advisors and consultants for Western movies. An important fact too easily glossed over is that Edgar Rice Burroughs experienced that West. He had seen it first hand. First in the midst of the Johnson County War in 1891 and in 1896-7 during his brief stint in Arizona when he took part in suppressing the Apache raids.
I don’t know if Burroughs scholars have yet related his first stay in Idaho with the Johnson County War going on in Wyoming. There is a good chance that the murderer Burroughs talks of having known at that time was a fugitive from Wyoming’s Johnson County.
Burroughs was a great admirer of Owen Wister reading his Virginian six or seven times. That book was about the Johnson County War in which the big ranchers tried to squeeze the little ranchers out. It was a shooting war. In Wister’s book the big ranchers purseued a member of the small ranchers into Idaho and lynched him as a ‘murderer’. Of course Wister and TR were great friends.
Then too, Burroughs would have been familiar with the fabulous career of Buffalo Bill. What a live Buffalo Bill led. A showman capitalizing on his career in the West before Little Big Horn in 1876, he returned to the West the next year to serve in the punitive campaign engaging and killing a Dioux cheif by the name of Yellow Hand in hand to hand combat then displaying the fancy clothes he had worn in the fight in his show. Mind blowing. Bill reenacted the Little Big Horn with the real Sitting Bull as an actor. How mindblowing must that have been to a seventeen year old Edgar Rice Burroughs watching the show at the Columbian Expo in 1893 with all the intenseness of youth. One imagines Burroughs hanging around the show hoping to get a glimpse of the hero up close and personal, perhaps even brushing past him with a shy, “Hello, Bill.”
So this vision of what Greil Marcus is pleased to call Bad Old America was deeply graven on the character of Edgar Rice Burroughs, nor did he consider it Bad Old America. That was the immigrant experience surfacing in Marcus.
At the same time, as a cross current, while he lived in Chicago he was to witness the tremendous immigrant invasion that took place from 1870 until the Great War did what no agitation could. It stopped immigration. Burroughs witnessed the beginnings of the conflict between Marcus’ Bad Old America and the American Cesspool since created by the culture that Marcus apprently believes is the Good New America. He may be surprised that there are dissenters to his opinion.
As a young boy at the time of the Haymarket Riot Burroughs watched immigrants, German in memory, marching throught the Chicago streets waving red flags and shouting: Down with America. He visited the tremendous Jewish community of Halsted and Maxwell streets in which people were piled on top of people to create the most densely populated location on the face of the earth in an attempt to prevent the dilution of their culture.
One need only read Upton Sinclair’s novel of the stockyards, The Jungle, to get an idea of what sights, sounds and smells seared the consciousness of a young man growing up in what was then considered the freest and and greatest nation in the world; and it was regardless of what a legion of Greil Marcuses might think. It was the Bad Old America that Greil Marcus ancestors considered The Promised Land. How attitudes change with circumstances.
page 5.
It was the freest but these immigrant cultures who were to make the United States the most polyglot nation in the world were chronically dissatisfied. They brought their clotted politics with them projecting them on their new home before they even discovered what it was.
A conflict between the Western dream of TR, Wister and Burroughs and the immigrant projection of America took shape. There was still that conflict within in the ranks of oldtime Americans however.
After Reconstruction was terminated, Liberals, who still projected the destruction of their Southern enemies, began to align themselves with the incoming discontented and hateful cultures to form a strange vision of utopia. A fantastic dream that disregarded all reality. The Liberals asked: What if apples were oranges? And then decided they could be.
Perhaps H.G. Wells writing his 1921 effort The Salvaging Of Civilization, the title displays his own personal angst, expressed the essence of the fantasy. P. 14.
Quote:
It is, if people will but think steadfastly, inconceivable that there should be any world control without the a merger of sovereignty, but the framers of these early tentatives toward world unity have lacked the courage of frankness in this respect. They have been afraid of bawling outbreaks of patriotism, and they had tried to believe, that they contemplate nothing more than a league of nations, when in reality they contemplate a subordination of nations and administration to one common rule and law.
Unquote.
Wells here presents a masterly example of the studied disingenuous of the Liberal or in Orwellian terms, doublethink. Wells doesn’t explain to which one common rule of law we are all to submit ourselves. In point of fact the nationality the Liberals claim to despise did not disappear. They merely changed the name to multi-culturalism. Thus each culture is trying to impose its law on all the others. Thus the Jews, thus the Moslems, thus the Africans. But there is and will be no actual synthesis.
The Liberal always denies his real intent preferring subterfuge to honest discussion. In point of fact no Liberal objective will stand up to examination so, convinced of their rightness, or rather preferring their pleasant daydream of their vision of a utopia they feel the need to mislead and deny.
In this quote Wells is actuall admitting that Liberals are lieing about their objectives, further it is perfectly obvious they are lieing. As Wells admits here it is inconceivable that there should be any world control without a merger of sovereignty. But what does he mean by a merger of sovereignty. That the rest of the world shall submit to Jewish or Moslem rule? Is that a merger? Disbelievers have called the Liberals on this issue. Liberals have been lieing says Wells. Why? Because they have been afraid of ‘bawling outbreaks of patriotism.’
Here, with consummate skill Wells defames those who disagree with him as irrational dissenters mired in a ‘superstition’ of the past. Their objections are not reasonable nor presented in a rational manner but are ‘bawling outbreaks’, hysterical, shrieking objections, one might say, of ‘patriotism.’ Patriotism we have all been informed elsewhere is ‘the last refuge of the scoundrel.’ Samuel Johnson, if I remember correctly. Thus Wells characterizes any dissenters as irrational hysterical scoundrels. When you can’t convice, defame. The old ad hominem. Wells might as have come right out and called the dissenters ‘anti-Semites’ and gotten it over with.
Wells and his ilk, and I know he didn’t honestly believe this, assume not only that all people are equal but that they are at the same level of civilization and psychology. What is clear to anyone with a grain of sense is that they aren’t. The Asia psychology is incompatibleto the Western and the African. The Africans first made contact with more than a stone age culture, come into real contact with higher civilization only about one hundred fifty years ago. They still have no concept of civilization as is evidenced by Zimbabwe and the congeries of tribes in South Africa who when they have committed genocide against the Whites will renew the old tribal conflicts.
The only way to merge cultures is to the lowest denominator and that is the African.
Wells assumes that all people see the problem as he and his Euroamerican Liberals see it. They don’t. China has always considered itself the Middle Kingdom- that is the country around which all others revolve. And it always has been except for the last couple hundred years. Currently it is using economic means to reestablish that position. I’ll put it before you as plainly as I can. People with that attitude don’t merge with anybody; they assume overlordship of subservients.
page 6.
The same is true of the Semites who believe they have a mandate from god to rule mankind. These are facts no one can dispute, you just have to apply them.
On top of that each bears grudges against the others that they are unwilling to either forgive or forget. Do the Liberals really believe the Africans don’t want to avenge the ignominy of subjection to White, and White is the key problem, Euroamericans? Five hundred years of resentment against the Normans by the Anglians led to the bloodiest war of all time and it isn’t over yet. Are the Liberals really so naive as to believe that Africans are going to forgive or forget a mere hundred years after the fact? They are mad, obtuse, crazy projectors.
And then there’s the question of the Law. Wells and Liberals apparently assume that Western Law will prevail. Well, they forgot to ask the Moslems abut that, who since their declaration of war against the world in the seventh century will accept nothing less than their barbaric Sharia code. How smart do you have to be to figure that one out? Lothrop Stoddard had no difficulty.
The Jews work quietly to overturn Western Law in favor of the Talmudic. The Chinese certainly favor authoritarian rule and African notions of Law are real howlers.
Is the recognition of these problems an outbreak of ‘bawling patriotism’? I don’t think so. Unless Wells and his Liberals are will to defame intelligence itself. Bad enough to defame another simply because they disagree with your blather.
Immigration was a mistake from the beginning. By what mode of reasoning men like Theodore Roosevelt believed that dozens of cultures could be mingled with their own without conflict is a mystery. There was and is no possibility that such cultures with no attempt to define and understand them or even with it can be introduced without changing the dominant culture. When TR asks is America just an international boarding house one has to regard him with some surprise. Why, of course, how could it be otherwise?
Even a population monster like China which discourages immigration for obvious reasons is finding it must give way to militant Moslemism. Even while ti seeks to destroy a number of other relitions it is accommodating Moslems. Strange isn’t it? Must be some kind of consanguinity in outlook.
Thus Americans really surrendered their country when Red President Wilson assumed the presidency. That was when the Liberal Coalition took over. A settlement house mentality of government where the superior Liberals looked after the not inferior but permanently less capable Negroes and immigrants. The Libereals didn’t yet think in terms of multi-culturalism, ne nationalism, that was an immigrant Jewish invention, but they gave preference to Negroes and immigrants over Bad Old Americans who couldn’t quite agree with them. All who disagreed were equivalent to the Southern Cavaliers.
In future years Liberals would pervert the Law, to isolate those not of their merry band and submerge them beneath the rest just as they attempted to do during Reconstruction: Affirmative Action = Reconstruction.
In latter days they constructed a ladder of minorities which included even a majority like women and sexual psychotics like homosexuals while isolating the non-Liberal heterosexual White male. These madmen poured out their hatred and scorn on these surrogates of the Norman invaders of 1066.
Little of this was clear at the time, however it suddenly dawned on some of the ‘advanced’ thinkers like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard that there was indeed a new direction to America that they didn’t like. A brief flurry of anti-immigration literature appeared from 1915 into the twenties but that was vigorously opposed by the Judaeo-Communist propagandists.
We can see how Wells and his Open Conspiracy functioned fairly clearly. Let us tuen now the more obscure Revolution
Go to Part III. Organizing The Revolution
I, Dynamo 