Recurring Themes in American History

I read a great deal of history, Audible has become my go-to driving companion, and as someone who enjoys studying American Political History, that tends to be the topic which I am most well read in. Since graduating college and thus having more control over what I get to read, I have been branching out into more narrative biographies of Washington, Lincoln, Garfield, Teddy Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, FDR, and Lyndon Johnson. I've also taken up the study of the civil war and the two world wars which in many ways shaped the modern world. My goal is to one day have a complete picture of the history of our nation, from its founding to today without any of those glaring gaps, such as the often understudied "James Gap" The period of American History between James Monroe and James Buchannan. But as I have read, a few paragraphs have stuck in my mind, and I've made mental notes not to forget them. I recently decided to take a thought that has been nagging me, find those passages, and write out my thoughts. 

This passage, from page 228 of James M. McPherson's The Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, stuck out to me. It regards the state of the southern press on the eve of the Civil War.

"Stories of slave uprisings that followed the visits of mysterious Yankee strangers, reports of arson and rapes and poisonings by slaves crowded the southern press. Somehow these horrors never seemed to happen in one's own neighborhood. Many of them, in fact, were reported from faraway Texas. And curiously, only those newspapers backing Breckinridge for president seemed to carry such stories. Bell and Douglas newspapers even had the effrontery to accuse Breckinridge Democrats of getting up "false-hoods and sensation tales" to "arouse the passions of the people and drive them into the Southern Disunion movement."

Link to the book:

In 1942, rumors swirled in South Carolina about so-called "Eleanor Roosevelt Clubs" This excerpt, from South Carolina Encyclopedia has the details.

By the spring of 1942, the rumors of Eleanor Clubs had become so widespread and alarming that public officials, including Mrs. Roosevelt, called in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to see if they were true. South Carolina officials launched their own inquiry. Governor Richard Jeffries wrote each of the state’s forty-six sheriffs asking them to search for Eleanor Clubs. A Columbia lawman reported that he discovered an “Eleanor Society” in Cheraw, where at one meeting “cooks and nurses” decided that they “would not work for less than $6 per week.” But most people came to the same conclusion as a Dillon police officer, who said that while “there has been talk of the ‘Eleanor Roosevelt Society,’ after investigating, I find all of this to be just false rumors.” The editor of the Carolina Times, an African American newspaper, thought he knew the real source of these misleading and hysterical reports. “The ‘Eleanor Club’ issue,” he stated, “is a . . . dastardly attempt to besmirch the name of the devoted helpmate of our war-burdened president, both of whom are doing all they can to make the Negro feel his responsibility to his country by giving him an opportunity to share in the benefits of democracy and render his best service to the nation in one of its darkest hours.”

I hope to establish that, from the anti-racial-justice faction in America, the use of falsehood, lies, and fabrication, are established historical trends among the enemies of liberty.

So when I see this, I do not see a new wave of "Fake News" from the radical right,  I see the Southern disunionists of the 1860s, and I see the Segregationists of the 1940s. America is a young nation, and we tend to forget that. Men like Donald Trump were 20 when the civil rights act was passed. Steve Bannon was still in elementary school. These people grew up in a world where segregation was not only the norm but a cause worth fighting for. They are still around.

To say the history of racial injustice is under-represented in American Classrooms is a gross mischaracterization. It would be more apt to say that the study of Racial Injustice in America is American History. From the Revolution to now, I cannot read any credible book that covers American history without seeing how the thread of racial injustice snakes it was into the story.

It was the question of enumerating slaves in the founding of the nation. The tensions between The Slave and the Free States leading up to the civil war. It was reconstruction, Jim Crowe, and segregation. It was the fact that the French Army treated Black American Soldiers better than the Americans treated them. It was the gradual desegregation of the armed forces in WWII, the Civil Rights Era, and now.

No other single issue has come up throughout American History and worked to shape our character as a country. And I have one final point to make on this subject. History shows that we can go backward in this progress. Gains made in civil rights after the Civil War would be washed away by Jim Crow and segregation, and would not be seen again in the south for a hundred years. The Voting Rights Act has recently been gutted, allowing for the sort of voter suppression which is allowing a minority faction of radical conservatives to maintain governmental power.

This is an issue that deserves to be studied and is so often overlooked. Some of you reading this already know all of this and could add more to this conversation. I encourage you to do so. But for those who are surprised, or interested in learning more, than hopefully, you'll take this opportunity to do so.

2018: The Alcan

When I left Alaska the destination I had in mind was Denver, Colorado. I had a job lined up there with Grassroots Campaigns, a fundraising scheme with an insanely high turnover rate. Since leaving Alaska I have seen their ads everywhere and its become clear that their operation is basically a scam. I did not know this when I decided to bet my life on moving to a new city to take a job with them in order to support a new life, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The further up the road I travel the less familiar it is. I've traveled the road from Palmer to Glennallen countless times over my lifetime, and I have driven the road to Haines Junction once before, but by the end of the first day of uneventful driving, as I pulled into Haines Junction, I began down a road I had never seen before. I decided to stop for the night on a turnoff just outside of town. Having left home with only $500 to my name I was in no position to rent a hotel room, and opted instead to cover the windows in cardboard as a slapdash attempt at insulation, and curl up in the front seat under a blanket.

I could only sleep for an hour at a time before I would need to start up the engine and turn on the heat. it may have been April, but in rural Canada, April is still the dead of winter. With gas prices at around $6 a gallon, I had no interest in passing out with the engine running so I would set a five-minute timer before shutting off the key. After two hours of on again off again sleep, I decided to try and make it into White Horse.

I went inside and bought a map from the overnight clerk, Will. He showed me on the map which route I should take considering the time of year, and to look out for the wood bison that would be grazing near the highway further down the road. We got to talking, and before I knew it 6 am had rolled around and we had spent the whole night talking about politics, history, world wars, and the contrast between America and Canada. This reinforces one of the rules I have always striven to live up to, always talk to strangers.

Warnings of Wood Bison where accurate

The next morning I awoke in somebodies driveway, the cardboard box that I had cut up and used to insulate the cab had fallen from the windows and I could see my breath as I awoke. My nose was painfully cold from the air, and my hands numb. I started the engine and waited for the windows and my limbs to defrost. The sun was just beginning to poke over the mountains. I drove a few miles down the road until I found a small RV lodge where I grabbed breakfast and brushed my teeth.

During the course of this trip, I was progressively getting sicker, I had stocked up on the vape pens that I used to stave off my nicotine cravings. These pens were turning the back of my throat raw, and as a result, eating and drinking were becoming painful as the trip progressed. This made the trip seem to drag on endlessly. The next three days, with little in the way of landmarks save for the occasional settlement drove home the point that I was in the middle of nowhere.

Very pretty nowhere, mind you

Nothing of note would occur for the next two days of endless travel, which at this point has merged into a single long blur of winding roads and straight passes through the vast Canadian prairies. I remember the harsh cold at many of the gas stations, the stark beauty of the landscapes, and the time that I added a quart of oil to my engine and forgot to put the cap back on before starting up. This I, fortunately, caught within moments but did result in covering my engine in oil.

By the evening of the third day, I was sufficiently done with the endless road that I had driven as was ready to get back into the States and rest. I pulled into Cache Creek just a few minutes before sunset, grabbed a coffee, filled up the gas tank, and set off for the border.

This was a mistake.

After a few miles of relatively easy roads, my lack of sufficient headlight strength began to grate. Every car passing in the opposite direction blinded me, the road was invisible past only a few feet ahead of me, and traffic from behind was blinding me as well. the road between Cache Creek and the border is a narrow, twisting road with steep climbs and diving drops. on the left, sheer cliff, on the right, hundred foot drops into oblivion.

as I drove, a thick fog rolled into the pass, my only hope for finding my way through this twisty canyon was to stay on the tail of an eighteen wheeler that knew the route well. The good news was that I could navigate by the lights of his truck, the bad news was that in order to see those lights, I would need to be perilously close to a truck driver who knew this road well. He took those corners doing sixty miles an hour, forcing me to tighten my grip on the wheel as we plunged through another fog bank. He would turn a corner and disappear, and I would need to quickly catch up as to not get lost on the mountainside. We would turn a corner and plunge into a tunnel, a short respite from the madness that was the mountainside.

Tired and delirious, with a cough from the vape and sitting uncomfortably in three days of driving funk from a lack of showers on the Alcan, I was not prepared for this sort of driving. Around each corner, I could feel the back end of my car sliding out from underneath me. after what felt like an eternity on that road, we came out of the last fog bank and passed a gas station, I took the opportunity to pull off the road and catch some sleep. It was 4 in the morning by the time I was off that winding road, I had just done six hours of some of the most grueling driving I've ever faced.

I awoke the next morning at eight to the sound of a passing train. Exhausted, but awake, I drove the last few miles to the border. Crossing back into cell coverage, I called and texted everyone I could think of to let them know I had made it. I then proceeded to get very lost in northern Washington before finding the highway again and driving to Bellevue to meet up with my Mother.

2018: Prologue, January-April

I started 2018 with four clipboards in my hand desperately trying to get drunk people to sign an initiative to protect salmon and stick it to the government. In Anchorage, Alaska that shouldn't be a hard sell. but as the fireworks and the sound system by the stage echo over the frozen streets, it's hard to ask someone if they're registered to vote.

I returned to my apartment, tired and delirious from the cold, and read that not far from where I had been gathering signatures, the first murder of the new year had taken place. This, I felt, was an auspicious start to the new year. 2017 had not been kind to me. I had such high aspirations for what I was going to do. My crush from high school would be moving back to town, I would be graduating high school, I had an exciting job lined up for the spring, and I was preparing to graduate college. Within a matter of weeks, I realized that nothing was going to go according to plan. The job conflicted with my busy class schedule and I wasn't able to give either one the attention that they required. The very real possibility of failing to graduate hung over me and stung deeply.

By the time summer rolled around I had resigned from my job, crossed the graduation threshold by such a narrow margin that I hadn't invited anyone to my graduation out of fear of not being permitted to walk, and my relationship with the person who I genuinely thought I would spend the rest of my life with was irreversibly strained. 

I got a new job as a lobbyists assistant making more money than I felt I was worth, I rented an apartment knowing that if the job fell through it would be impossible to cover the rent in. I was never good at the job and started relying more on nicotine, alcohol, and weed to get by. by the time I lost my job, I was grateful. I had no confidence in anything that I was doing and mistakes were pilling up. I am still embarrassed at the magnitude of some of my screw ups. I regret few things more than my time working for that firm. 

I took a job gathering signatures for four different ballot initiatives, two for healthcare reform, one for salmon, and one that denied members of the state legislature their daily cost of living stipend should they fail to pass a budget before the deadline. I loved the work, even at $1 per signature I started out by making comparable money to what I had been making before. As someone who has always enjoyed talking to strangers and working sales, I dove into the work. Even though I was cold, and even though I was routinely getting the cops called on my by shop owners who didn't want me there (tough luck, I got rights) I thoroughly enjoyed the work.

Don't I look thrilled to be there?

On the morning of December 1st, I got the call that my grandmother had passed away. I tried to go to work that day, but it took the wind out of my sales. I sat in my car and sobbed uncontrollably before driving home for the day. When I returned from the funeral, I learned that half of our initiatives were being canceled, which reduced the potential earnings by half. 

I have distinct memories of standing outside the Safeway in Eagle River, freezing, watching the sun peak up from over the mountains near the start of my shift and then disappearing hours before I could go back home, all while singing the soundtrack to Jesus Christ Superstar in my head while dancing around to keep warm. It would snow, or sleet or the wind would blow. I took a few trips out to Wasilla, Big Lake, and south Anchorage looking for fresh turf, but the fact was I wasn't making money anymore.

When I laid down in the early morning hours of January 1st, I was physical, mentally, and emotionally exhausted from months of despair and dreed. I had enough money in my bank account to get me by, barely, until April, at which point I would have no money, no job, and no hope. By the middle of February, I was starting to crack. I do not have a lot of memories from January and February of this year, not a lot happened. My daily routine was to wake up, apply for some jobs, and keep refreshing my email and checking my phone hoping to hear from someone. 

By the middle of February, I had had it. I made my plans to leave the state. I was offered a job in Denver, Colorado working for Grassroots campaigns, an organization who's Glassdoor page reads like a horror film and whose Wikipedia page includes a dedicated section about their wage-theft settlements. But I was desperate to leave Alaska and after doing the signature gathering in the cold and going two months with no prospects I wasn't picky.

I found someone who could take over the lease on my apartment and moved into my aunt's house in March. I sat down with pen and paper and drafted a calendar, budget, lists upon lists, and accounted for every dollar I would need to spend, every gallon of fuel burned, every mile put on a vehicle which I swore was on its last leg. I replaced the tires on my car, changed the oil, added fluids, and crossed my fingers hoping that my rebuilt, 2007 ford focus to survive the four-day trek down the Alcan Highway. 

I was nervous about leaving Alaska, not only was it the only home I had ever known, but I also knew the dangers of what I was doing. The Alcan is a haul and takes a number on even the best vehicles. My Focus is not the best of vehicles. I had to pack six quarts of motor oil because of a leaky oil pan. My spare tire was just the best one of the four tires that I had to remove from my car because they were so thin. I packed everything I owned into a two-door sedan and prepared for my trip. The plan was simple. Drive down the Alcan, stop in Seattle for a few days and touch base with my parents, then drive on to Denver in time to start my new job.

On April 5th, I watched the sunrise over Matanuska Peak for the last time and set off on my journey.

And our story begins

Thanksgiving Prayer

Thanksgiving is one of the only, truly noble holidays. We gather together for a feast and give thanks for everything that we have done and experienced over the past year, we remember good times, and bad, we meet with friends and family, and we remember those who have passed on over the past year. Thanksgiving is also the day that marks our nations last day of collective sanity before the start of the hectic holiday madness, and so I cherish the holiday, a time where the focus is not on the presents, or a type of candy, or a tree, or drinking ( a lot), the focus is on family and friends, and a big damn bird