The New American Dialectic

So the question arises after taking a childhood dream and make it a reality –building and creating the fantasy railroad, why not end the book there? The answer is that in the journey that has proceeded over fifty years, I needed to make sense of the fantasy which was played out on real life stages of American history. The fantasy is informed by the context.

As a young man I fell in love with trains. As a Mid-westerner growing up in Chicago, the American history taught us was a slanted, distorted version. Plymouth was where the first colony was settled. Southerners were despised because of lynchings, slavery and ignorance particularly the negative stereotypes of southern red-necks. The movie Deliverance resonated among Northerners that confirmed their stereotype of a backward and violent South.

After serving in Peace Corps for two years in Colombia, I went to graduate school at Johns Hopkins in Washington, D.C. I got married, and we moved to Virginia. Not only was I now living in the South, but I was working in the South with the Office of Economic Opportunity. I worked on agrarian reform in rural Georgia, community economic development in Alabama; and setting up economic development corporations in Cleveland & New York, the forerunner of enterprise zones in major urban centers in the North.

In Chicago I was bitten with the railroad bug in my youth. In Peace Corps I needed the spiritual freedom of mountains, so when I came to Virginia I needed to find the Andes Mountains of Colombia in America. That started my journey that ultimately led me to Highland County. In this process I was exposed to a more complete America embracing both Northern and Southern traditions.

In our historical lexicon in Chicago the founding of America was at Plymouth Rock by the Pilgrims in 1620. The true historical record: Jamestown, Virginia was the first successful English settlement in America founded in 1607, thirteen years earlier than Plymouth, Massachusetts, and twenty three years after the original English attempt of colonizing America in 1587 at the lost colony on the island of Roanoke near Manteo, North Carolina which mysteriously disappeared within three years.

Out of these musings, it became clear to me that the history of America really starts with the history of the South. It’s been the pull and tug between these two different societies and regions that form the basis of our country today.

To understand the history of the United States, one needs go no further than the founding of the country. Just as we have seen in the Fantasy Section where the Native Americans once roamed the Eastern part of the U.S., so too starts the American journey.

In the beginning, there was the bounty of the Chesapeake Bay —the pristine estuaries, rivers, waterways, and fertile soils that produced forests abounding with birds, deer, buffalo, bear, elk.

So prior to the original failed attempt of colonizing America in 1597, at the settlement of Manteo, the continent was inhabited by the first peoples. There were skirmishes and wars between native tribes to establish dominance, but this was a red country. All of these tribes once coexisted independently or in alliances, but there was also the culling effect of the tribes that battled and dominated, the outcome producing Darwin’s social survival of the fittest.