Were the Literature & Art of the 1800s & 1900s Programming Devices? – Part 1 American Authors

In this new series, I am going to be focusing on how the famous authors and art of the 1800’s and 1900’s were used to shape the new and false historical narrative in our collective minds.

Many of these authors were required reading in secondary-school English classes, and many of their books were also turned into movies.

The following screenshots are from a page entitled “The Origin of Compulsory Education” on Foster Gamble’s Thrive website. As I recall, it was from his movie “Thrive” that I first learned that the Rockefellers were the originators of the American Educational System. When John D. Rockefeller established the General Education Board, it says the interest was in organizing children, and creating reliable, predictable, and obedient citizens, and not in producing critical thinkers.

Massachussetts passed the First Mandatory Attendance Law in 1852, which lines up with what I believe was the start of the new historical timeline in the year of 1850.

Even as early as 1914, the National Education Association expressed alarm at the activity of the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations, and their efforts to control the policies of State educational institutions, and everything related to the educational system.

To read more about this click on http://www.thrivemovement.com/follow-money-education.

I am going to start by taking a look at Jack London.

Jack London was born in San Francisco on January 12th, 1876. We are told he was one of the first writers to have worldwide fame, and great financial success.

One of his most famous novels is “Call of the Wild.”

It was first published in serialized form in the Saturday Evening Post in 1903.

Basically the story-line of “The Call of the Wild” was about a St. Bernard – Scotch shepherd mix dog named Buck…

… who was stolen from a happy life in California to be sold into service as a sled dog in Alaska, and terribly abused by most of the humans he came into contact with from there on. He ultimately became feral, and answered “The Call of the Wild” by the end of the book.

Not uplifting content at all! Very strange actually that it would have themes of animal theft and extreme animal abuse. Why? There is nothing socially-acceptable about this!

It was even made into a movie multiple times, starting in 1935.

He was also an advocate of socialism.

In 1908, he published the book “The Iron Heel,” which refers to the rise of an oligarchic tyranny in the United States.

An oligarchy is a form of power structure in which power rests with a small number of people.

The story-line emphasized future changes in society and politics, and not technological changes. It is called a dystopian novel, meaning characterized by mass poverty, public mistrust and suspicion, a police state or oppression.

Jack London was said to have had Marxist beliefs, espousing a progression from feudalism through capitalism, then socialism, and ending in a period without a state known as communism.

Also, it is interesting to note that in 1904 Jack London was elected to honorary membership in the private, San Francisco-based Bohemian Club, which utilizes Bohemian Grove.

Authors Mark Twain, Bret Harte and Ambrose Bierce were also members of the Bohemian Club. More on them shortly.

in 1905, Jack London purchased 1,000-acres, or 405-hectares, of ranch land on the eastern slope of Mount Sonoma in Glen Ellen, California, and called it the Beauty Ranch. He did not fare well as a rancher, as it was not an economic success…

…and we are told the 26-room mansion he and his wife were building on the ranch was said to have burned down two weeks prior to the day they were planning to move in. These are said to be the ruins of his home, called Wolf House, at Jack London State Historic Park.

Wolf House reminds me of the Castle at Ha Ha Tonka State Park at Central Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks…

…construction of which was supposed to have started in 1905 by a Kansas City businessman, and finished by his sons in the 1920s before the stock market crash. 

We are then told, after being used first as a seasonal home, and then as a hotel, it was destroyed by a fire in 1942.

Next I will be taking a look at Mark Twain, who was widely praised as a great humorist, and was considered by some to be the “Father of American Literature.”

He was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri on November 30th, 1845, shortly after an appearance of Halley’s Comet.

The family moved to a new home, pictured on the left side of Hill Street, in Hannibal, Missouri when he was 4.

Here is his boyhood home from another angle, and besides the gentle slope of the street and the nice stone-house in the left foreground…

…I can’t help but notice what is apparently a very high stone wall in the background. It really seems out-of-place!

Other sites in Hannibal include what was the Farmers & Merchants Bank, said to have been built in 1910…

…and houses the Bluff City Theater today.

The Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad was the first railroad to cross Missouri, starting in Hannibal in the northeast, and going to St. Joseph, Missouri, in the northwest.

Plans for the railroad were said to have formed in 1846 in a meeting at the Hannibal office of John Marshall Clemens, Samuel’s father, with construction of it starting in 1851.

His father, an attorney and judge, died of pneumonia in 1847, when Samuel was only 11-years-old, and shortly after that, he left school to become a printer’s apprentice, becoming a type-setter in 1851, around the age of 15.

Three years later, he was said to have left Hannibal, and worked as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati, educating himself along the way in public libraries.

This guy really got around!

Then after a stint learning how to become a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River between New Orleans and St. Louis, he moved to Virginia City, Nevada, when his brother Orion became Secretary of the Nevada Territory in 1861.

He was said to have first tried mining there and failed, so he became a reporter for the Virginia City newspaper, and this was the first time he used the pen name “Mark Twain.”

As journalist Mark Twain, he moved to San Francisco in 1864, where he met Bret Harte.

Bret Harte was a writer best-known for his short-stories featuring miners, gamblers, and other romantic figures of the California Gold Rush.

I speculated in a recent post concerning the San Francisco Fire of 1851 that the California Gold Rush of 1849 – 1851 was a cover story for a massive influx of workers into the Bay area needed to dig San Francisco out of mud. This is said to be a daguerrotype showing a panorama of San Francisco Harbor in 1851.

Where could the narrative we are taught about what happened during the Gold Rush have come from?

Interestingly, Bret Harte’s grandfather, Bernard Hart, was said to have been one of the founders of the New York Stock Exchange in 1792.

Ambrose Bierce, listed as a Bohemian Club member along with Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Jack London, was a short-story writer, journalist, poet, and Civil War Veteran.

Most of his works dealt with the American Civil War, like “Tales of Soldiers and Civilians…

…but he was also a pioneer of psychological horror stories, like “Fantastic Fables.”

He published “The Cynic’s Word Book” in 1906…

…and re-titled it “The Devil’s Dictionary” in 1911, which, we are told, was for some reason named as one of the “100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature” by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration.

Next, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, better known as F. Scott Fitzgerald, born in 1896, was an American fiction writer whose work, we are told, helped to illustrate the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age.

He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th-century, best known for his four novels, which were “This Side of Paradise,” about the lives and morality of post-World War I youth, published in 1920…

…”The Beautiful and Damned”published in 1922, about the New York cafe society and the American Eastern elite during the Jazz Age before and after World War I, and in the early 1920s…

…”The Great Gatsby,” published in 1925 about a cast of characters living in the fictional towns of East Egg and West Egg on Long Island in 1922…

…and “Tender is the Night,” first published in Scribner’s Magazine in four issues in 1934, written after his wife Zelda was hospitalized in Baltimore, Maryland, for schizophrenia in 1932. The novel was said to mirror the events of their lives during this time.

He was a frequent contributor to The Saturday Evening Post. This issue featured his well-known short-story “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” and the first with his name published on the cover.

The Saturday Evening Post was first published in Philadelphia in 1821, and grew to become the most widely circulated weekly magazine in America. It currently publishes six times a year.

Known for commissioning lavish illustrations and original works of fiction, each issue featured several original short stories written for mainstream tastes by popular writers.

The last American writer I want to bring forward is John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California in 1902. Many of his works are considered classics of western literature, and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.

He authored 33 books during his writing career.

His best-known works include “Of Mice and Men,” his 1937 book about migrant ranch workers in California during the Great Depression…

…and “The Grapes of Wrath,” which follows a family of tenant farmers driven for various reasons from their home in Oklahoma to California in the Great Depression during the Dust Bowl period of history.

Both of these novels were made into Hollywood movies, and both are required reading for English classes in high school, which was when I read them.

How was an ancient advanced worldwide civilization erased from our collective awareness so much so that we don’t even see the copious evidence of it in the environment around us?

Literature is a powerful tool with which to form our world view and the accompanying imagery of what has taken place historically, and we receive this information into our conscious-thought processes through different modalities, and into our subliminal processes as well.

We are thoroughly schooled in the new narrative from the moment we are born.

In my next post, I will be delving into famous European writers from the same time period.