Under the New Deal, a project was set up to employ writers. To find something to pay them for, young writers were sent South to talk to actual ex-slaves. This was actually useful, because almost all the real slaves had died out.

It is interesting to note that, with all the discussion of the Civil War and slavery, no one in the New York Union League Club or in New England had the slightest interest in how the SLAVES felt about it. This was strictly government make-work policy which could not possibly pay its way from any reader interest in it.

I haven’t seen this study mentioned anywhere popular. The results were enormously frustrating for the earnest young liberals doing it. If you published it outside the United States right now, you would probably go to prison.

I can explain why the blacks were so kind to slavery and their slave holders. But a person whose reaction to a study that comes out the wrong way is to militantly ignore it, is very weak on the realities of the world.

That, in fact, is one the major advantages of Mantra thought.

Slavery had ended say 75 years before this study was made. There were very few blacks who were actually slaves by then, and I would bet good money that far more than half of those interviewed were lying. But every one of the hundreds of interviewees had know a lot of people who had been actual slaves, and they probably repeated what they had been told.

So I am using this to review slavery, as everybody else on both sides does, but also to examine why slave days were given such an embarrassing boost that frustrated the writers.

First of all, the old slaves were talking about a time when they were young With 1930 medicine, even at its best, old age was MUCH worse then than it is now.

Also, most of the children in that slave group probably didn’t know what slavery WAS. I distinctly remember when my mother told me there had been a war between the North and the South. Slavery is not what they remembered, so what DID they remember?

A child remembers being energetic and healthy, but he also remembers HOME. In the 1850s, when abolitionist preachers were making huge salaries in New England, an Irish child of ten who was crippled in an accident, a very common thing, was left to starve or as a burden on his parents.

So why was this information produced? First, because the ex-slaves were no longer young. No one surveyed the old Irishmen who had worked as kids amidst the machinery that paid New England’s abolitionists’ handsome incomes

Second, this survey was conducted during the Depression.

–To Be Continued