Meet MythAmerica: Series

Meet MythAmerica Series

A Meet MythAmerica Series is a
collection of related articles
giving an in-depth look at a broad, significant
—but often neglected or ignored—
American history topic.

It is a common mythconception among Americans that something has "changed" in America in recent decades-drastically for the worse-in the way businesses treat their workers. Hourly workers are often unable to make enough to support their families, underpaid and overworked and ignored. Big Box stores like WalMart come into communities, take all the business-and employees-away from local mom and pop stores, and then either abruptly decide to quit and leave the community devastated, or stay but pay practically slave labor wages to all their employees. And the way most of these big stores undercut the prices for goods charged by smaller stores is to fill their stores with items produced by sweat shop labor in countries with few restraints on factory working conditions. Oh, how far we have fallen as a society from the golden days of the proud American economy of a century ago, many think. If that's what you think, think again. The articles in this series chronicle a different historical American Business Ethic than you may be familiar with.

Uncle Sam’s Kids

Is your idea of what life was like for most American children in the early years of the 1900s primarily based on such visual sources as the cheery children romping in the Norman Rockwell paintings on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post? Or perhaps the sugar-coated stories in books of the era such as the Bobbsey Twins. Have you assumed it was a happy time of lazy days down by the old fishing hole in the summer for boys, or pretty little tea parties in the parlor for little girls and their dollies? If so, your mythconceptions are in for a rude awakening with this series about the history of Child Labor in the United States.

Not So Fabulous Fifties

It is a common gripe on Facebook and Internet forums, particularly among people of Baby Boomer age, that daily life in American society in the 21st century is so inferior to what it was like in the Good Old Days of the 1950s. As a Baby Boomer myself, I have to shake my head and wonder what sort of Mass Amnesia has afflicted many in my generation. But I suppose the glowing picture they paint of the Fabulous Fifties may even make younger people nostalgic for a period…that never was. This series chronicles many of the mythconceptions that abound about how sweet and wholesome and gentle that era was.

The Rise of Big Brother

A regularly occurring "meme" these days on the Web is that we are now living in a "Big Brother" kind of society, with Big Brother himself being Barak Obama. Or, just a very few years back, George W. Bush being Big Brother. Is it true, that we have never had a time when there was so much "government encroachment" on the daily living of its citizens? And should our greatest fears be some faceless individual or handful of individuals behind closed doors snooping on us and manipulating us? Or…might it help to take a step back and investigate what it was like to live in earlier US generations? What if the "spirit of Big Brother" has been around a lot longer than most Americans have been aware…and what if the "usual suspects" aren't really where we should focus our concerns?

Walk 1000 Miles in My Moccasins

I would suppose that a large number of Americans are familiar with the term "Trail of Tears," but I'm suspicious that their familiarity with what it refers to is often very sketchy. The story of the forced removal-on foot-of the Cherokee from their homelands in the Eastern US to reservations a thousand miles away in Oklahoma "Indian Territory" in the early 1800s seldom merited more than a sentence or two-if that-in basic grade school or high school American history books until recent times. Even my college-level American history classes in the late 1960s, designed to prepare future history teachers, totally neglected the topic. The Native American civil rights movement of the 1970s brought a bit of notoriety to the saga, including a few documentary books and a TV documentary, but those faded from view shortly after. This Meet MythAmerica series is dedicated to providing an in-depth look at the circumstances and events that led up to this shameful chapter in America's story, along with an overview of what the trek was like. And it concludes with an examination of the lessons that should be learned from both the event-and the way it was ignored for almost a century and a half in the standard American Narrative passed on to America's youth.

The United States of Lyncherdom

"The United States of Lyncherdom" was a scathing article written in 1901 by Mark Twain, about one of the most troubling phenomena of his time-the almost "ceremonial" torture and murder-frequently by burning to death-of people in the public squares of American cities. Witnessed by sometimes thousands of people, who all too often cheered on the ghoulish, fiendish perpetrators. I am convinced that most people in 21st century America are totally oblivious to this dark, demonic chapter that has been left out of the common "American Narrative" covered in our history books. I know I was, until very recently. And I am convinced that it is long past time to shine the light on these events that happened in the lifetime of my own grandparents. There are painful "civic lessons" that can only be learned when we are honest about our own nation's history.

Terrorism on American Soil

One of the biggest mythconceptions about American history that is abroad today is that acts of terrorism on American soil are some sort of "modern" phenomenon, perhaps starting with the 1995 domestic terror act in which the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was destroyed. No, acts of extreme violence and destruction designed to terrorize a large portion of the population long predate that event in America. . One of the most notable occurred over seventy years earlier-strangely enough, also in Oklahoma. In one 24-hour orgy of barbaric rage and mayhem in 1921, thousands of white citizens of Tulsa, Oklahoma, went on a racist rampage that destroyed the whole African American community of "Greenwood" on the edge of Tulsa. They burned businesses, public buildings, and hundreds upon hundreds of homes to the ground. Ten thousand people were left homeless, and hundreds were killed or injured. Although it made the national news at the time, within weeks a cloak of secrecy was pulled over the horrific record of events. And the white citizens of the city and state developed mass amnesia about the incident. Historical researchers in recent years have begun shining the light on this dark chapter in American history. But it still remains virtually unknown to the average American. I believe that it is of value for understanding current social problems to examine "how we got where we are today." The Greenwood Holocaust was not an isolated incident…it was a symptom of a widespread sickness in American society. A sickness that has not been healed to this day. This series examines the events of 1921 and puts them in perspective.