Suggested Answers to the First Short Quiz

[johnkarls]

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Question 1

Do American History textbooks traditionally say that Georgia was the only one of the 13 American colonies that was a penal colony?

Answer 1

Yes.

Question 2

Were in fact the overwhelming majority of residents of all 13 American colonies criminals that England had dumped there (a policy called “transportation”), starting with the first boatload of human souls that formed the first permanent English colony at Plymouth Rock MA in 1620?

Answer 2

Yes.

Question 3

Did England continue “transporting” criminals to all of the 13 American colonies until America declared her independence in 1776?

Answer 3

Yes.

Question 4

Did England then “constipate” its jails for the next 12 years until 1778 on the assumption that it would be able to quell the American rebellion and resume “transporting” criminals to the 13 American colonies?

Answer 4

According to the classic The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding by Robert Hughes (Alfred A. Knopf 1986), the answer is yes.

Question 5

Digressing momentarily for an amusing historical tidbit why, after beginning in 1778 to “transport” its criminals to Australia, was England forced to terminate its “transportation” program in 1854?

Answer 5

Also according to The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes --

The discovery of gold in California in 1849 (in honor of which San Francisco’s NFL Franchise is named) was a magnet for wannabe somebodies from all over the world. Including several Aussies who arrived a bit late to the party, but immediately recognized that the topography of the California gold fields was virtually identical to the topography of the area of Australia that they had just left. So they returned and discovered more gold in Australia than has ever been discovered in California. This sparked another worldwide gold rush, this time to Australia. That gold rush was so large that every available spot on every available ship was taken for the foreseeable future. Sparking a crime wave in England as the wannabe somebodies resorted to committing crimes to which they immediately confessed so that they could be “transported” immediately as criminals to Australia!!! And England had no choice but to terminate its “transportation” program in order to halt the crime wave!!!

Question 6

Why do English barristers wear powdered wigs?

Answer 6

Until the 20th Century, society in England (like the rest of the world) was agrarian based.

Which meant that land represented power.

And you did NOT become powerful until you were elderly enough to inherit your land from your parents.

And then you RETAINED your power (i.e., land) until you died.

So the gray hair of age was closely associated with the appearance of a powerful person.

Though it is interesting that English barristers still continue to wear gray wigs in order to appear powerful!!!

BTW, the right to vote in the 13 American colonies was limited to male landowners, so that the vast majority of the population which comprised criminals “transported” or exiled from England, could not vote.

An unheralded Civil Rights Movement was the fight for non-landowners to have the right to vote, which paralleled virtually contemporaneously the Women’s Suffrage Movement.

Question 7

One of the Suggested Topics that was not voted at our Aug meeting as our Sep focus was “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America” by Nancy Isenberg which was described (together with our focus book “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis”) in an article in the September issue of The Atlantic Magazine which is posted under “Reference Materials” on http://www.ReadingLiberally-SaltLake.org -- does The Atlantic article say that Prof. Isenberg in fact focused on the American South rather than America as a whole?

Answer 7

Yes.

Question 8

Did the “White Trash” of the Ante-Bellum South suffer almost as much economically as the African-American slaves that worked the cotton plantations?

Answer 8

Yes.

Which makes sense in economic theory.

Because any “White Trash” worker who cost more than the cost of investing in buying a slave and the cost of maintaining the slave like the owner would a farm animal, would be replaced by a slave.

Question 9

Does James Michener’s “Mexico” describe how many, if not most, Southern plantation owners simply moved to Mexico after the American Civil War where they re-established cotton plantations that employed native Mexicans for starvation wages as de facto economic slaves?

Answer 9

Yes.

Question 10

Is it any wonder that the freed American slaves and “white trash” who remained in the American South as “share croppers” could not possibly compete effectively with the new Mexican cotton plantation economy?

Answer 10

Of course not!!!

Because in economic theory, the market value of the work of a “white trash” share cropper or a freed-slave share cropper could not exceed the cost of the Mexican de facto economic slave plus the cost of transporting the competing Mexican products back to the United States.

Question 11

Does the Atlantic Magazine article describe how our focus book “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” focuses on the dirt-poor “white trash” of Eastern Kentucky and their experience before and after moving to an Armco Steel-Rolling Mill town of Southwestern Ohio?

Answer 11

Yes.

Question 12

Does either of these books really describe what has happened to the so-called Rust Belt of Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania?

Answer 12

Absolutely not!!!

Question 13

Did Yours Truly grow up 1942-1960 in Saginaw MI, the northern-most General Motors town featuring a couple dozen GM plants (a zillion GM Steering Gear plants which also manufactured all the pollution-control equipment, Chevrolet Transmission, half a dozen foundries where worked all the African-Americans (and ONLY African-Americans) hired under GM’s so-called “equal opportunity employment” policy, and the GM Parts Plant where all the old tools/dies were sent so that additional obsolete parts could be manufactured periodically for old models that GM still supported)?

Answer 13

Yes.

Though we also had The Lufkin Rule Company which was the world’s largest manufacturer of measuring equipment and which also moved away.

Question 14

Has Yours Truly attended all 11 of the every-five-years full-weekend-immersion reunions for Arthur Hill High School’s 1960 class of 711, including our 55th last summer?

Answer 14

Yes.

Question 15

Would a sample size of 711 be considered by most polling organizations as large enough to portray accurately the entire nation, not just the State of Michigan where most of them still live?

Answer 15

711 is about half the size of the sample polled in each of the Presidential-election polls.

But the Official 2010 Census shows the populations of the “Rust Belt” states of Michigan as 9.88 million, Ohio as 11.54 million and Pennsylvania as 12.70 million.

For a total of 34.12 million, or only 11.07% of the total U.S. population in 2010 of 308.16 million.

So even if purists might quibble with whether the 711 members of the Saginaw Arthur Hill H.S. Class of 1960 are representative of all of the current and displaced manufacturing workers of Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, a statistically-valid random sample of such workers would probably be substantially smaller than 711.

And the 711 would certainly be much more representative than the close relatives of one individual from Kentucky.

Question 16

In addition to returning to Michigan every 5 years for his high school reunions, did Yours Truly have his family visit his parents for at least a week every year 1960-2001?

Answer 16

Yes.

Question 17

On those occasions, did Yours Truly always discuss at length conditions in Michigan with his father who was CEO of the local bank and who represented Michigan as an elected delegate to 13 consecutive Quadrennial Conferences governing the worldwide Methodist Church spanning more than 50 years (a worldwide record that still stands)? And with his mother who was many times selected Citizen of the Year for organizing many different groups that worked with unwed teenage mothers and with drug abusers, and for always “rolling up her sleeves” and “working in the trenches” as an ordinary volunteer in the groups she organized?

Answer 17

Yes. Yes.

Question 18

Was Yours Truly a member of the United Auto Workers Union during the summer of 1964 before starting law school, when he worked 3 drill presses on a graveyard-shift skeleton crew building up stock for the faster machines?

Answer 18

Yes.

Question 19

As a momentary digression, whenever Yours Truly spots an old Chevrolet in circumstances in which it is possible to lift the hood, does he still like to see whether it has one of the Valve Housings for the Booster System for the Chevrolet Power Steering which he worked to produce that summer?

Answer 19

Yes.

Question 20

Should Yours Truly apologize for Questions 13-19 belaboring the point that he probably knows more about the decline of America’s Rust Belt than either the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” or the author of “White Trash”?

Answer 20

Absolutely!!! Mea culpa!!!

Question 21

During the era from World War II through the 1980’s, was Detroit the wealthiest large city in America?

Answer 21

Yes, for reasons explained in Q&A-22.

Question 22

Was the American auto industry, at least through the 1970’s, still enjoying its worldwide near-monopoly on car production, following its status as “The Arsenal of Democracy” in World War II?

Answer 22

Yes, the American auto industry through the 1970’s enjoyed a worldwide near-monopoly on car production.

During World War II, the American auto industry was “The Arsenal of Democracy” as it switched to manufacturing virtually all of America’s military vehicles including tanks.

And even manufactured much, if not most, of America’s military aircraft.

For example, Ford Motor Co. produced more B-24 Liberator Heavy Bombers than Consolidated Aircraft which had designed the B-24. And there was always a lot of speculation that Ford’s private Willow Run Airport, sandwiched between Detroit and Ann Arbor, never had an airplane land since it was next to the Ford assembly lines and reputably only saw new-aircraft departures for the war zones.

Question 23

Did UAW members make more than the median American wage?

Answer 23

By far and away!!!

Question 24

Was it reasonable for someone graduating from high school in Michigan in the 1960’s and 1970’s to decide that the expense and effort of continuing on to college was not worthwhile, when he could support a family in style and enjoy the “good life” of Michigan’s “Water Wonderland” and “Winter Wonderland” as its license plates have alternatively trumpeted?

Answer 24

At that time the University of Michigan ranked among the top 3-4 universities in America because it was the university of the auto industry. Only 40 miles west of downtown Detroit, the auto companies preferred its convenience to the hassle of traveling to M.I.T. Indeed, most companies associated with the auto industry already had their R&D units located in Ann Arbor.

And all of the other components of the U/Mich fed off the wealth and needs of the auto industry and the society it supported. Making its admission standards for the 40% of the student body from out-of-state as high as Harvard’s.

And in 1960, in-state tuition was only $100/semester for a full-course load. Which, even on an inflation-adjusted basis, is less than $2,000/semester in 2016 dollars.

Nevertheless, a philosopher would ask: “Should human beings live to work, or work to live???”

Because philosophers, like many of my high school class of 711, chose to live in style and enjoy the “good life” of raising a family in a beautiful home with, typically, a lake-front weekend/vacation home as auto-industry factory workers like their fathers and grandfathers before them.

[NB: Unfortunately, the fortunes of the University of Michigan declined with the fortunes of the American auto industry so that today, it is little more than a “ho hum” member of the Big 10.]

Question 25

Is it any wonder that everyone who made such a decision upon graduating from high school in the 1960’s, 1970’s or 1980’s to live the “good life” as a factory worker in Michigan, Ohio or Pennsylvania would be upset over having their jobs exported to low-wage countries?

Answer 25

What do you think??? Let’s discuss!!!

Question 26

Haven’t we studied on many occasions how The Establishment has conducted a War on American Workers by Exporting American Jobs beginning with the so-called Free Trade Agreements of the 1990’s?

NB: Re Questions 26 and 27, have we always defined The Establishment as the billionaires who “own” virtually all the pols of both political parties as a result of campaign contributions and who “own” many members of the media and who “own” many members of academia.

Answer 26

Yes!!!

Question 27

And haven’t we concluded each time that The Establishment will continue to Export American Jobs until the wages of American blue-collar workers are driven down to third-world poverty levels, since impoverished third-world workers are the recipients of those American jobs?

Answer 27

Of course!!!

And the third-world countries in which the competing workers live typically do not even have child-labor laws, workplace-safety laws, or environmental-safety laws. Which, of course, makes American workers even more uncompetitive.

Question 28

And wouldn’t Yours Truly’s fellow undergraduate economics majors agree that it is impossible to base a prosperous economy on “selling hamburgers to each other”?

Answer 28

Yes and no.

Yes, they would certainly all agree with the concept.

However, I put quotation marks around “selling hamburgers to each other” three days ago when creating The First Short Quiz because I knew it was not original with me, but was only an elegant description of the concept that I had encountered somewhere and admired.

Upon Googling it a few minutes ago, it appears on p. 164 of “The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century” by NY Times OpEd Columnist Thomas Friedman (Ferrar, Straus & Giroux 2005).

However, Thomas Friedman himself has quotation marks around the phrase.

He attributes it to David Glass, Walmart CEO 1988-2000.

Friedman had just spent 7 pages describing David Glass as building Walmart into “the biggest and most profitable retailer on the planet” by forcing its suppliers to manufacturer their products in low-wage third-world countries so that Walmart could under-cut the prices of Walmart’s competitors -- on pain of being replaced as Walmart suppliers by their competitors who would manufacture products in low-wage third-world countries.

At the end of which Friedman quotes Glass as at least being honest enough to admit: “One of my concerns is that, with the manufacturing out of this country, we’ll all be selling hamburgers to each other.”