History Fantasy and Fact

Germinal, the thirteenth novel in Émile Zola's great Rougon-Macquart sequence, Germinal expresses outrage at the exploitation of the many by the few, but also shows humanity's capacity for compassion and hope.

Etienne Lantier, an unemployed 19-year-old railway worker, who has been a child laborer on the railroad, is very intelligent but uneducated. He had exhausted his money before setting out to walk many miles in the hope of finding work.  He didn't know when he would eat. Hearing of work in the mines, walking in the dark, he sees the belching flames of a steam-driven mine shaft lift and asks for work to keep from starving.  A father with young sons and one daughter, working the mine, takes him in. The mine is operated 24 hours a day, two twelve-hour shifts. Lantier, quickly realized the privation of the miners, who live near destitute lives, just short of starvation, in company shacks next to the mine, where only the women and the very young are spared the descent into the darkness, danger, and coal dust of the mine. The family's father was already suffering signs of black lung disease (although they didn't know what to call it back then). Many of the miners were ill; all were poorly nourished, kept in perpetual debt via the "company store," which exploited the isolation of the mine, charging prices that held the miners in endless hand to mouth, poverty, barely able to feed and clothe their families.

I will never forget reading the account of two child laborers, one male, one female, twelve and fourteen years old, caught in the mine as it flooded. The pumps had broken down, and before they realized what was happening, they were caught in an air pocket, unable to get to an escape shaft, as the water rose and oxygen gave out. This may have been technically fiction, but such horrors have happened many hundreds of times, cave-ins, floods, methane gas explosions in improperly ventilated mines, claiming tens of thousands of victims over the history of the "industrial revolution" that is modern, underground mining.

Just yesterday in Siberia-Russia, over fifty were killed in a methane explosion in a mine where less than two decades ago, the owner and managers of the same mine were imprisoned for violation of safety laws, the result of a similar event. Let me tell you a little secret, neglectful mine owners in America, whose actions have killed many thousands, never go to prison, they are sued, and their insurance brokers pay; sometimes, they may lose their property, but that is extremely rare. Many times they "transfer ownership" to the next nameless, faceless corporation who will operate the mine, business as usual.  I can give many, many examples in the course of just my life time. 

Some may say, but Emile Zola was a radical!  No, he was just a truth-teller who wrote of both the reality of the suffering of ordinary people, and two, of hope, of nobility, of heroes.  Yes, he is a naturalist, and even his book about a miracle at the famous healing shrine of Lourdes gives a naturalistic explanation of the wonder of healing.  So when I read Zola, I know that he has the perspective of a naturalist.  In the same way, when I read Howard Zinn's histories, that some say are fictional, and they most certainly are not, I understand that his perspective is as a Secularist - another name for Naturalist - and that he has a love for the ideals of Carl Marx.  Which is in its simplest explanation is a egalitarian or more descriptive is the word, equalitarian, (now archaic) utopian vision of human society. "From each according to his talents, to each according to his needs."  The premise is a pipe dream and fantasy, since the reality is that whomever is place in control of the collection and redistribution of wealth then is all powerful and totalitarianism is the inevitable result.

Now, on the other hand, if you believe in unrestricted Capitalism, you end up with the wealthy collecting all the wealth and being all powerful and creating totalitarianism, this result of also inevitable and our present state.  Every measure of economics proves this.  And "normies" like that spikey-headed dude, Rod Dreher, get this, as he outlined in his book, "Live Not By Lies."   When I posted this meme:

my friend Winston Smith said, "But the slavery has become dangerous, even deadly, and we are being exterminated at will."  I think it was when Mr. Dreher realized that the Globalist/Capitalist were not benevolent, mommy and daddy, and in fact were killers, that he sprung to action giving advice as to how to survive the Globalist Death Cult. 


So when I say, Howard Zinn, in his history, puts a rightful "class spin" on his view of history where he highlights the suffering of the ordinary people at the hands of "the government that worked on behalf of the wealthy capitalists and robber barons," etc, I am not endorsing Zinn's fondness of Marx, any more than when I suggest Rod Dreher's book, I was endorsing his not yet fully awake and "normie" vision of our circumstances.  But in both cases, true things they state have TRUTHFUL WORTH. Whether you want to admit that ugly history Zinn recounts or not, it is a legitimate perspective, purchased by much human suffering. It is not the only perspective, but it is a real and truthful perspective.  Does that mean that I believe slant he give, every spin he takes is Truth, certainly not.  I have to as I said, remember his fantasy that somehow, the Secularist/Atheist Karl Marx's had the answer. The answer is quite different than the analysis, and Zinn's analysis is truthful. 


I can understand people who have lived sheltered or privileged lives, who have no perspective to understand the gruesomeness and suffering of the poor and working classes at various periods of our history. Suppose you have never suffered discrimination or injustice at the hands of the government/corporation duopoly. In that case, such a view may seem merely carping or just sour grapes for not being rich. What if you, yourself, had suffered injustice at the hands of the government/corporation duopoly, which was mild but real, compared to your father who was exploited as a child laborer, going to work on the Georgia railroad as a pipefitter's apprentice just after his tenth birthday, claiming that he was twelve. He attended elementary school, graduating the third grade, with the skills of reading, writing, adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing; that was the extent of his formal education. When he was laid off the railroad in 1929, he had almost twenty years of seniority. Twenty years on many dangerous jobs like policeman, fireman, and military service in the last half of the 20th and the first part of the 21st century garnered your retirement and pension. After his twenty years he was really just beginning his career. His job had been dangerous repairing massive steam locomotives. Working 12 hour days, seven days a week, for more than 19 years, he learned basic mechanics, the principles of a steam engine, and many other skills required for his work. The Stock Market crash, which was the Great Depression in 1929, cost him his job. Hundreds, maybe thousands of great locomotives were stored or left in the open to rust.

Dad was forced to do day-labor trying to support a wife and two small children. They lived in a cabin, they called it, but it really wasn't a cabin; it was a shack that later became a divided his and her outhouse, then plumbed and heated becoming the men's and women's restrooms, on the grounds of a "camp meeting" summer facility that was attached to what is now Beulah Height University, at the time Beulah Heights Bible Institute, which was in its first decade of operation. They could not afford poison, and rats lived in the upstairs. At night they could hear the rats coming down to search for scraps. Both my mother and father told me that it sounded like a person walking down the wooden steps.

Day work was a dollar a day. Yet, with three dollars, they could buy subsistence food, heavy enough that it was all they could do to carry it from the trolley line to the shack. The idea of owning an automobile was a pipedream. I wish I could recall the exact items that my father recited to me more than once. I remember at least part of it; a sack of flour, tin of lard, two-pound bag of sugar only sometimes, kerosene for the lamps, coffee, fatback for seasoning the beans and dried beans, and sometimes rice. Milk for the children was delivered every other day since there was no refrigeration, only an icebox. Twice a week the Iceman, dropped off two blocks of ice to keep the milk cold. They occasionally bought bones with some flesh remaining and the marrow, embarrassed to say it was for soup for their children, and would hint it was for a stray dog. Mom, being from the farm knew how to harvest the eatable wild plants, like dandelions and poke-salad, and some other wild plants now lost to my memory.

In 1930 the day work was drying up because the population that could afford odd jobs had shrunk to very few, construction was non-existent. Several days without work, and my mother, father, and two oldest siblings were going to go hungry the next day. They went to bed knowing there was nothing to feed the children in the morning. They were desperate.

The two slept in one bed with the two children between them to protect them from the rats. Huddled together, they prayed that night, using euphemisms the children would not understand, asking God not to allow their children to go hungry. At midnight, they were startled awake, saying that it sounded like the clanging of bells on the dressing table. Ten times a clang cut through the silence. They did not get up, but they saw something shiny on the dressing table at first light. When they inspected, it was ten newly minted Morgan Silver Dollars, which were last minted in 1921. Even in 1930, they were worth more than face value. That gave my father a break from everyday scratching for subsistence money, so he could take the time to search for more permanent employment. He was hired by Atlanta's first Auto Alignment and frame straightening business, Treadwell Auto Alignment Company, at two dollars a day, which was a huge step up. He and his brothers, knowing how to live frugally, a skill his entire life had taught them, started saving money to start their own business. In the early 1930s, in the most gruesome years of the Great Depression, they started their own automobile alignment and frame straightening business. They rented a vacant lot, dug an earthen pit, started aligning automobiles, and straightening frames. My cousin still owns the very first half-rack they purchased from the BEAR company. By the late 1940s, their "shop" was the largest automobile repair facility in the South Eastern United States, holding contracts for the City of Atlanta, police and fire departments, and the Georgia State Patrol, plus a ton of private customers.

Now you see, I have just acknowledge the horrible life shortening poverty my father and older siblings endured and also told a story of intelligent hard work and reward in the American Free Enterprise System. Today, the monopoly corporations hold such a stranglehold on everything, such start ups are impossible unless they are cutouts for the CIA. What I've described is a very dark time, then a time filled with hope, then a new more dangerous very dark time.

Born on a farm between Buchanan and Tallapoosa, Georgia, my mother lived a more wholesome life of hard work, play, sunshine, trips to town and church. She told the story of how all the children, from the oldest boy, already grown to the youngest girl, got straw hats for Christmas when she was eight years old. The boys' hats were plain, but the girls' hats had big bows to wear to Church on Sunday. They were not to wear their fancy hats except for Sunday dress-up. All went well until warm weather, and she realized that her straw hat was cooler in the sun than her bonnet, So when her father was in the far fields or in town, she would wear her hat for play. They decided to go skinny dipping in the Tallapoosa River, which bordered their farm. Not wanting to get the bow dirty, she left the hat on a fence post, where Daisy the Cow soon ate it. Come Sunday evening, her father spanked her for disobedience. That was a rare thing for him to do.

The ugly backdrop of her wholesome life was that her father was a gambler. Gambling was, of course, illegal, but the biggest poker game was run by the county sheriff and the town's mayor. He won big one night, winning a two-thousand-acre track of land in Alabama, which allowed their transition to the city without extreme hardship. It was God looking out for them, but the family would not leave Tallapoosa un-scarred.

A white girl who allowed her virtue to slip had to have an excuse to her father; she claimed that a certain young black man had raped her. As happened, my uncle and the young black man, the same age, late teens, were pole fishing on the river, running trotlines from early afternoon and all night, camping on the river bank. The next day, Joe Joe, the black boy, was arrested for the rape, which happened while he and Aubrey were miles away, on the river. The county sheriff had to fight off a Klan lynch mob to keep Joe Joe from being lynched. The trial happened quickly, and Aubrey testified for Joe Joe, and the jury believed Aubrey, who the Klan quickly named "nigger-lover," and vowed revenge for the poor white girl who lost her virginity to her white lover.

Aubrey was caught by the Klan, beaten to within an inch of his life, and in the middle of the night, his limp half-dead body was delivered to my grandfather's front porch by a gang of torch-bearing, white-robed Klansmen on horseback. They were told to "get out" or the Seab the older brother was next.

Years later, I met the very white and friendly store owner in Tallapoosa who was the product of the supposed rape. I was in my thirties, and he was in his late fifties, and he knew the story well and wasn't embarrassed at all to talk about it. It would take a book to describe the strength of my grandfather, the long recovery of Aubrey, whose chest was permanently caved in, the family almost swept away trying to ford the Tallapoosa river to go to church, when the river was just a little too high for fording, the rabid dog biting my grandfather and my Aunt Irene, the doctor delivering the rabies shots, and teaching Bose, my grandfather to administer the shots to Irene and himself, shots in the stomach for the prescribed number of days. All this while Aubrey lay fighting for his life, without any of the modern niceties, like IV fluids and nutrition or an orthopedic surgeon to wire his ribs back in place. The doctor was so frightened of the Klan that he made the family swear that he had never been there when he delivered the rabies shots. He had previously refused to come to treat Aubrey, the nigger-lover. The doctor was surprised to see Aubry awake and talking. He had assumed Aubrey had already died.

Two thousand acres of scrub-pine land in Alabama and 150 acres of agricultural land on the Tallapoosa River purchased a house and a store in Atlanta. The place was a block from the Bible Institute I previously mentioned. The store was in the Mill Village two miles away, next to the old Fulton Bag Cotton Mill, which today is a yuppy's paradise, mill village homes, and fancy condos, in the Old Mill structure.

I could tell another heart-rending story about the monster who owned that Mill and several others, who made his money on the backs of child laborers. He was a pedophile and gave his young child laborers a yearly vacation. Several attractive children would be selected to spend a week at his two-thousand-acre estate on the Chattahoochee River, then a day's ride away. He raped a 13 year old, who became my dear friend decades later. Her boy died a toddler; she was left barren. She was one of the sweetest people I've ever known but was left entirely alone in her old age. I became the son she lost. I took care of her in her extreme old age, and every penny I spent on her came from the widow, children, and grandchildren of the man that raped her. The widow was herself in her teens when the old "industrialist" married her. He was pushing sixty. Still, they lived nearly thirty years together, on an estate, with a team of black servants. She loved my piano playing, and in her dying days, she twice requested that I come and play for her. I played for her and prayed with her. I don't think she had a clue who she had lived with for almost thirty years.


So I would ask those who are critical of Howard Zinn's history, were they ever reduced to day labor, and in the case of my parents and two oldest siblings, did they ever live in a shack with cracks in the floor. Were they ever saved from hunger, only by wonder and mercy of God? My parents wondered for a few hours, who had crept into their cabin and tossed the brand new/nine-year-old silver dollars on their dressing table, one clanging coin at a time. Then they realized that sleeping lightly because of the very young children and the rats; no one could have opened the creaking cabin door without them knowing it.

There is nothing wrong with Russians crowing about the heroes and sacrifices of the Great War (what they call world war two). They lost 54,000,000 people, which was nearly half the population of America at the time. (124,000,000). Western writers, and historians, for decades, not wanting to face the cost of Russian lives to beat Hitler, (something that might make Russia look sympathetic in the Cold War) claimed the number was only half a million Soviet Soldiers and 24,000,000 citizens. Modern Russian historians put the number at nearly nine million Russian military personnel alone. The 54 million total includes losses in the Soviet Bloc, not just Russia proper. So they have paid the price to crow about the heroism and suffering of their Great War. But it is not being subversive or unkind, or the mark of a leftist or any other political bent to honestly talk about the Holodomor's 15 -30 million dead or the several million dead from exposure, abuse and disease in the labor camp system. The Gulags were not Auschwitz, but they were not summer camps either. It is not anti-Russian to talk about the extermination of the entire Kulak class; or the low standard of living of the previous centuries' peasantry and their lack of freedom, unable to travel to solicit better jobs in other locations, or the Czar's support payment to the landed estate owners so much per peasant's head. Even without changing their location or station in life, their ownership was traded between merchants collecting money for peasants they did not employ, house, or protect. It is not anti-Russian to name and explore these things.

However, when you start talking about the decimation and ethnic cleansing of the American Indians, or the underclass in America, like the White Irish Slaves, the Chinese near slaves, the Chinese workers were slaves, just not slaves to Americans, but to their Warlords back in China. Then here were the Negro Slaves, the English and other European indentured servants, the child labor sweatshops, and massive child labor factories, the Indians who owned black slaves; the total lack of voice and protection for the destitute, the old, the very young, the killing-fields that were Catholic and government orphanages, and the working poor, suddenly you are anti-American. In speaking, in writing, step off the Uncle Sam, Old Glory, Mom, and Apple Pie Plantation, and you are ipso-facto a screaming liberal or maybe even Marxist scum. But let me tell you a secret, my family history and people I have known, people who have shared their stories with me, gives me the right to view America's underbelly, and the evil heights and heartlessness of arrogant Oligarchs who care NOTHING for human beings except as property. Many who now have positively adopted Luciferian worship in the form of Fundamentalist Secularism, and as we came to know (kicking and screaming not to look) child sacrifice. They have turned ordinary people into property, so certain of their ownership that Globally they are presently culling the herd, and creating hybrids, transhuman chimeras.

I dare you to even claim that you can disprove anything I've said. And now they have despoiled and conquered the vast portion of Christendom, both the culture and the Western Church and are working in every devious way to make conquest of the part of Orthodox Christianity that is yet to fall. Rome is Fallen, the Great American Republic is Fallen, Western Protestantism is Fallen, the late great Evangelical Movement is not only fallen, ninety percent of it is a laughable joke, totally secularized and falsely mysticized, and they are waiting for the Rapture so the Jews of Israel can rule.

I suggest that you read Howard Zinn's book, The People's History of the United States. I just read the shorthand version, to refresh my memory, which is the same book, just dumbed down for ninth-graders. The simpler sentences make his unfair claims, leaning toward Marxism easier to spot. I would also suggest that you read, A True History of the United States by Daniel A Sjursen, who is a retired U S Army Major, who taught at the War College and the Military Academy at West Point. And I would also recommend that you read Mary Grabar's polemic attack on Zinn's work, “Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America.” Her work is tiring and pedantic and misses the point. I read Howard Zinn's “The People's History of the United States, in the early 1980s. I recognized the prejudice and still learned a lot. In fact, previously in the 1970s, I read cover to cover, almost 1500 pages, The People's Almanac by David Wallechinsky (born Wallace) and Irvin Wallace. It has a long chapter that is a year-by-year recount of the major events of each year of American history. There are no facts related in Zinn's book, not related in brief in “The People's Almanac.” Mary Grabar's slant is nothing more than anger that ugly things are exposed in a less than flattering way and that Zinn used some cheap shortcuts to tell a story that is basically TRUE.