Sometime around 1900, a young PR man who had recently been hired by GE in Schenectady realized that he had a problem. He had gotten his job through glowing promises about all the great press coverage he would get for the company. But his boss had called him in and announced that he had “a terrific front-page story” about a 60,000 kilowatt turbine generator that the company had just sold to Commonwealth Edison…and the PR man accurately realized that this story would get maybe a paragraph on the financial pages. Looking for ideas, he went to see GE’s legendary research genius, Charles Steinmetz.
Steinmetz did a little calculating…and determined that this one machine could do as much physical work as 5.4 million men. The slave population in the US on the eve of the Civil War had been 4.7 million. To the young PR man, Steinmetz said: “I suggest you send out a story that says we are building a single machine that, through the miracle of electricity, will each day do more work than the combined slave population of the nation at the time of the Civil War.”
Lincoln didn’t promise freed slaves forty acres and a mule. The war criminal Sherman did. It was a military field order enforced by bayonet in an area under his command. Of course it unraveled soon after he was gone. His field orders confer no enduring obligation by the nation nor do they override common law and property rights. Meanwhile it had ballooned into a widespread rumor that evolved into a myth of betrayal and entitlement.
Free and equal Black Americans would never have been present during the early years of our nation, since it was slavery that brought Black people here. So it is idle to speculate over what their fortunes would have been, had they existed.
Why did we have slavery? Read the book "1493" - Western African men were immune to Plasmodium Vivax - the most prevalent type of malaria. That disease devastated white people from the Mason Dixon Line South as well as Philadelphia. White people can harvest tobacco and pick cotton as well as anyone but only of they are alive. Had the slaves been from London or Berlin they would have died also.
Sometime around 1900, a young PR man who had recently been hired by GE in Schenectady realized that he had a problem. He had gotten his job through glowing promises about all the great press coverage he would get for the company. But his boss had called him in and announced that he had “a terrific front-page story” about a 60,000 kilowatt turbine generator that the company had just sold to Commonwealth Edison…and the PR man accurately realized that this story would get maybe a paragraph on the financial pages. Looking for ideas, he went to see GE’s legendary research genius, Charles Steinmetz.
Steinmetz did a little calculating…and determined that this one machine could do as much physical work as 5.4 million men. The slave population in the US on the eve of the Civil War had been 4.7 million. To the young PR man, Steinmetz said: “I suggest you send out a story that says we are building a single machine that, through the miracle of electricity, will each day do more work than the combined slave population of the nation at the time of the Civil War.”
See my post Of Energy and Slavery:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/42837.html
Lincoln didn’t promise freed slaves forty acres and a mule. The war criminal Sherman did. It was a military field order enforced by bayonet in an area under his command. Of course it unraveled soon after he was gone. His field orders confer no enduring obligation by the nation nor do they override common law and property rights. Meanwhile it had ballooned into a widespread rumor that evolved into a myth of betrayal and entitlement.
Slavery is bad for economy, progress and humanity.
Free and equal Black Americans would never have been present during the early years of our nation, since it was slavery that brought Black people here. So it is idle to speculate over what their fortunes would have been, had they existed.
Why did we have slavery? Read the book "1493" - Western African men were immune to Plasmodium Vivax - the most prevalent type of malaria. That disease devastated white people from the Mason Dixon Line South as well as Philadelphia. White people can harvest tobacco and pick cotton as well as anyone but only of they are alive. Had the slaves been from London or Berlin they would have died also.
Slavery is bad for economy
McCloskey is Queen :) !