An Author's Surprise

Some of my research notebooks, Photo credit:  Lyn Fenwick

As I have explained in book talks and other sources, one of the challenges I faced in finding a publisher was my determination to research as if I were writing a scholarly book but to write for general readers so that it would read like a story.  Academics already know about the Populist Movement, but most of us (including me when I began), know little about the era of our nation's most successful third party movement, the People's Party.  I wanted to write for people who might never read a scholarly book but who would love the story of a bachelor homesteader and his community.

The generation who lived during that time are gone, as are their children and many of their grandchildren.  But, many other descendants are alive, unaware of the courage and hardships of their ancestors.  I wanted my book to be of value to scholars, but it was particularly for those descendants, as well as for general readers who love history, that I wrote "Prairie Bachelor, The Story of a Kansas Homesteader and the Populist Movement."  Bravo to the University Press of Kansas, and particularly to a wonderful editor named Bethany who understood my intensions and fought for them! 

I spent 11 months transcribing Isaac Werner's 480-page journal, but I also did an Ancestry.com search on every person mentioned in the journal, and particularly on the Werner family of which Isaac was a part.  The two books to the far left in the picture above, with the bright pink labels reading "Werner" and "Names" contain my Werner family records and the local friends and acquaintances mentioned in the journal.  The research documents on famous people mentioned in the journal are filed elsewhere.

This photograph shows some of the books I used in my research.  Because I researched and wrote over a period of ten years, there were many books, not including the travel, interviews, cemetery visits, and other conventional and unconventional sources I sought.  Blogs over the years have described many of those.  In the 1970s and 1980s several surrounding towns published Centennial books, which were very important to my research.  I also read many books written by the famous and once famous men and women of the Populist era.  Because Isaac Werner wrote in his journal about the books in his own library,  I read those, such as Caesar's Column by Ignatius Donnelly, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, William J. Bryan's memoir, The First Battle, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, and The Great Revolt and It's Leaders written by the son of the populist newspaper editor in Medicine Lodge.  As well as academic books, I read Shakespeare (whom Isaac loved), the business records of Andrew Carnegie's lawyer that were kept during the Homestead Strike, the records kept during the march to Washington by what came to be called "Coxy's Army," and so very many more reference sources that allowed me to better understand the era about which I was writing.

Photo credit:  Lyn Fenwick

Among those books was one titled Belpre, Kansas, The Story  of a Small Town, written by David M. Kearney, and published in 1978.  That particular book had belonged to my mother-in-law, along with several of the Centennial books I used.  For some reason I overlooked an author's note stating Kearney's age.  I assumed the book had been written by an old timer.

What a pleasant surprise when someone who attended one of my book talks recently informed me that Mr. Kearney is a living author.  I managed to locate him and we had a wonderful phone visit.  He was pleased to learn that he and his book are referenced in the Bibliography of  Prairie Bachelor, and  footnoted as well.

Here is what I hope:  I hope that someday children not yet born will discover Prairie Bachelor and will pick it up and begin reading.  Maybe they will discover an ancestor's name, or they might recognize the name of a place where ancestors homesteaded.  Maybe they will pick up the book and notice it was signed and wonder why their family had a signed book about a homesteader and the Populist Movement.  

Many living people today are descendants of homesteaders, and many more yet to be born will continue the line of descendants of homesteaders.  I hope they read my book and are proud of the heritage they discover.  Isaac Werner passed the heart of the story to me in his journal, and I hope I can pass the story to a few more generations.  As David Kearney can confirm, an author never can tell who might find his or her book and read it!

 

A History of Futuristic Prophesies

Donnelly's Caesar's Column

A recent post mentioned the futuristic novel published by Ignatius Donnelly in 1890, describing a world war in 1988 in which workers, debased and paid barely enough for survival, revolt against the wealthy, who control everything and live luxuriously.  Written during the Populist Movement, Caesar's Column, used the populist's political anger against Wall Street, Railroads, and Corporations to fictionalize a world in which the power of the wealthy is carried to such excess that laborers revolt with apocalyptic  violence that destroys the entire social structure.  Caesar's Column was in Isaac Beckley Werner's library.

However, Isaac's library also included the futuristic novel of Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, published in 1880.  In contrast to Donnelly's novel, Bellamy imagines a happier world, in which socialist ideals have been implemented to share the nation's wealth in a more equitable way.  Women are regarded as equals of men, in fact, having been given the equal right to propose marriage.  The novel describes a young narrator who is hypnotized in 1887 and awakens in 2000 to a changed world, which he initially dislikes but eventually accepts as better than the old world in which he had lived.  The ideas in Bellamy's book were so popular that Bellamy Clubs to discuss and propagate those social changes were established around the world in the late 1800s, including 162 such clubs in the United States.

Edward Bellamy

Obviously, novels projecting the future are nothing new, whether they describe the violent social destruction of Donnelly or the utopian social fiction of Bellamy.  Recently I read the bold predictions for our future discussed at a conference in Europe.  I thought it would be interesting to compare and contrast some of those predictions for the future with the late 1800s when Isaac B. Werner kept his journal.

Most of the predictions are related to the growing capacity for Artificial Intelligence to assist or replace human input in many ways, some that we will find welcome and others we may find to be a frightening displacement of human intelligence and a major disruption of social traditions.

Prediction:  AI is already helping nurses in diagnosing cancer and it is 4xs more accurate.

Isaac:  Isaac died of an undiagnosed illness that I was able to identify more than a century later from his symptoms and activities described in his diary that were medically unknown at that time.

Prediction:  AI legal advice for basic legal questions now available offers 90% accuracy as compared to 70% accuracy of a sampling of human lawyers, and it is predicted that in the future only specialists in the law will remain in practice.

Isaac:  Isaac had a friendly relationship with local attorneys, but Populists generally grouped lawyers with the rich and powerful men they distrusted.

Prediction:  Traditional automobile companies will go out of business and cars will become, basically, computers on wheels.

Isaac:  Isaac first went into debt to buy a horse, implements, and a wagon, the transportation of his time.

Prediction:  Because people can either work from home or work as they commute in their quieter electric cars, people will move away from cities for more pleasant surroundings, and cities will be quieter.

Isaac:  In Isaac's time, many people homesteaded to escape crowded, unsanitary conditions in the cities.

Prediction:  Desalination of salt water will make fresh drinking water readily available in many places now without fresh water.

Isaac:  Wells on the prairie were dug by hand, and Isaac was often hired for that chore, using the wench he owned.  Because wells frequently became "crickety," (fouled by crickets) they often had to be abandoned.

Prediction:  A medical devise that works with your phone will take retina scans,, blood samples, and measure your breath to identify nearly any disease, giving access to medical analysis in remote places.

Isaac:  As a druggist in Rossville, IL before coming to Kansas, Isaac often dispensed medicine, including liquor for 'medical' purposes. 

Prediction:  3-D scanning devices on phones will allow shoes to be produced precisely for each individual's feet and printed at home.

Isaac:  At Isaac's estate sale, a man named Hainline bought all of Isaac's shoes and boots, apparently a size that fit him perfectly.

Prediction:  Robots will replace humans in fields, and a $100 robot will be available for even farmers in third-world countries.

Isaac:  In the beginning, before Isaac went into debt for a horse of his own to break more sod, he walked his fields with a hand planter, and after acquiring a horse to pull implements, he was still plowing and planting one row at a time.

Several of these predictions are already tested, and the issue is not whether they are possible, but rather, whether they will actually be implemented and when.  Predictions are nothing new, and they do not always come true.  But, it is certain that Artificial Intelligence has already changed the world and will continue to do so. 

These predictions were posted by Udo Gollub from Berlin, Germany from a summit he referenced. 

Back to School

The Emerson school Isaac helped build

Now that the school year 2015-2016 is back in session, I thought it was a good time to reflect on the earliest schools on the prairie, and the ideals for education of populist writers.

The standards for educating children have been a political issue since the founding of America.  Today's politicians debate Common Core, but the involvement of politics in education is not new.  Populist writers that Isaac read who expressed views on education included Edward Bellamy.  Looking Backward, set in an imaginary future, contrasted 'modern' educational practices with education in Isaac's time, focusing particularly on the importance of educating all citizens, not just a privileged few.  "...[W]e should not consider life worth living if we had to be surrounded by a population of ignorant, boorish, coarse, wholly uncultivated men and women...No single thing is so important to every man as to have for neighbors intelligent, companionable persons.  There is nothing, therefore, which the nation can do for him that will enhance so much his own happiness as to educate his neighbors.  When it fails to do so, the value of his own education to him is reduced by half, and many of the tastes he has cultivated are made positive sources of pain."  Bellamy's ideal emphasized the importance of universal education:  "To put the matter in a nutshell, there are three main grounds on which our educational system rests:  first, the right of every man to the completest education the nation can give him on his own account, as necessary to his enjoyment of himself; second, the right of his fellow citizens to have him educated, as necessary to their enjoyment of his society; third, the right of the unborn to be guaranteed an intelligent and refined parentage."

The 'new' Emerson School in about 1920

The Progressives of Isaac's era disapproved of segregating students into public and private schools.  In another novel written during that era, Caesar's Column:  A story of the Twentieth Century, by author Ignatius Donnelly, an imaginary future is again used to describe how past ills have been corrected.  "We decreed, next, universal and compulsory education.  No one can vote who cannot read and write.  We believe that one man's ignorance is not only ruinous to the individual, but destructive to society.  It is an epidemic which scatters death everywhere.  Continuing:  We abolish all private schools, except the higher institutions and colleges.  We believe it to be essential to the peace and safety of the commonwealth that the children of all the people, rich and poor, should, during the period of growth, associate together.  In this way, race, sectarian and caste prejudices are obliterated, and the whole community grow up together as brethren.  Otherwise, in a generation or two, we shall have the people split up into hostile factions, fenced in by doctrinal bigotries, suspicious of one another, and antagonizing one another in politics, business and everything else."

Douglas Township, Stafford Co, KS school about 1917

Isaac was a member of the Farmers' Alliance in his community, and he contributed books from his own library to the local organization. Isaac had more confidence in educating farmers than in political activities, although he did support the People's Party of the progressive era.  

In Isaac's time parents were eager to have a school nearby for their children to attend, unlike some of today's parents who make the choice to home school.  While most of the schools in Isaac's old region are public, in urban areas, private and charter schools are numerous.  How best to teach children, and what to include in the curriculum remain disputed issues.  The educational ideals envisioned by progressive authors of Isaac's time for the 20th Century have not been implemented.  (See "Once There was a Community," 3-5-2015 and "A One-room School House Surprise," 7-12-2012 in the blog archives.)

Everyone wants what is best for the children, but deciding what is best remains the subject of rancorous debate!