Broadcasting stations - there were a few (and probably still are, although fewer people listen to AM, what with niche FM, satellite, and Internet) that were well known as “clear channel” stations - they owned the frequency pretty much nationwide. WLS (Chicago), WBZ (Boston), CKLW (Windsor, ON), KOMA (OKC), and plenty more - all could be heard for huge distances at night. It was something of a game to hide under the covers with your transistor radio and see who you could hear. If it was a Top 40 station it was interesting to see what was on their playlist vs what was playing locally.
I’m sure most have seen the multi-antenna arrays (three in a row, a square, etc). Those were required for smaller AM stations to “shape” their signal to a target area. Oftimes you could listen to the local station during the day, but if you were in the wrong area, you could not hear that same station at night… Turn down the transmit power and switch in the full array at sundown…
No, Larry, I did not have a transistor radio (they had not been invented yet); I had a radio that I had put together, primarily from military surplus parts, and used a pillow speaker. It was was too big to take under the covers. Except for the rectifier (5 volt filament or mercury vapor tube), the tubes had 6 volt heaters.
Everybody just remember, it’s fiction. Norris may have talked to a few locals, but he wrote fiction.
For example, Norris turned the railroad’s land sale policy on its head to make up his story. It was SP’s policy to sell the land as soon as possible to people who would live on the land and work it for agricultural production. They did not want large, absentee land owners. They wanted stable communities whoes people had an ownership stake in the development of the community.
SP was not about to give the land away. But they priced it to sell. Norris has the railroad holding on to land in order to get a better price for the land. This is the exact opposite of what acctually happened.
The railroad was interested in making money from hauling the production of the land and the supplies to the producers. Making the maxium money from land sales was not their policy.
The Octopus is a work of fiction and should be treated as such. Disclosure: I have not read The Octopus and I do not intend to. I don’t read much fiction.
Don’t knock fiction. Upton Sinclair’s fiction brought about changes in the meat packing industry. Jack London, George Orwell and others also wrote powerful fact based fiction that was intended to bring about social change. And you would probably prefer Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” over her protege’s hugely boring tome on the merits of Objectivism.
Nope, I never finished Ms. Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. I had/have no interest in even starting “The Fountainhead”. I found Tom Clancy’s early novels interesting and entertaining. But aside from that I read very little, if any, fiction. I find reality much more interesting.
I have nothing against fiction. Whatever floats your boat. The problem I see comes about when people start treating fiction as actual historical fact. That certainly has been done with “The Octopus”. It seems “The Jungle” by Sinclair, another work of fiction, is also questionable as to its accuracy. The authors were: 1) out to sell books and, 2) out to promote a political point of view. (at least in Sinclair’s case.) Those two things in a work of fiction can produce a distorted picture of reality.
Not so fast. The precise treatment of the land grant parcel sales by the SP to settlers is disputed among historians. To baldly make your pronouncement above as gospel (on the basis of your reading of one rather one-sided revisionist history based on SP archives) is misleading at best. As I said before, Norris wrote a novel which was based on many interviews of the farmers who were at the center of the land controversy. Those were first hand accounts and oral history and interviews are the basis of much of our knowledge of the past. To smugly dismiss it as mere fiction (as though it were of the same ilk as some fantasy or dimestore novel) reveals your lack of understanding of literature, as well as the historiography of the period.
OK,who are these historians that dispute the SP’s treatment of land grant parcels? I’m more than willing to read what they say. If you’ll just be good enough to point them out and direct me to their writings.
I’m sorry. He did the interviews 20 years after the fact. Stories grow and get embellished over time. And which stories he used and which stories he ignored we’ll never know.
The Octopus is a work of fiction and should be seen in that context.
Try google scholar. But the difficulty is access to journals, since that is where most good research is.
Interviews with the settlers 20 years later are better than none at all. It is a source of inormation to be considered in context rather than dismissed. Corsi uses mostly records in SP archives. Valuable, but also one-sided. The best historians try to get as broad a picture as possible and draw conclusions, not have an preconceived agenda and cherry-pick for support.
I no longer have journal access (other than clinical psychology) and you won’t either in your library. However, several authors who write about California history come to mind: Bill Deverell and Kevin Starr at USC and the late Gerald Nash. You could even look up the classic by H. H. Bancroft: Hist. of CA(1888). Populism is treated in J.D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt.
Hope that helps. NU is great, and maybe the Transportation Library can get you access to the main library’s history journals and academic search engines.
Some works of fiction have driven government policy. If you read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Octupus or The Jungle you can obtain a deeper understanding of American history. Sinclair Lewis wrote the Jungle to advance the cause of Socialism. Instead his readers got sick and the Fed. pased the first regulations on food safety. The Octupus was taught in CA public schools as history not polemics. That just condems the quality of history instruction in CA. I wonder if they teach the Grapes of Wrath as history.
What’s the problem with that? I read “The Scarlet Letter” for high school US History, not American literature. My father thought that history class was an appropriate place for that book. Including these books on a reading list for history classes gives the student a better insight into the culture and ethos of that period. History is much more than a collection of facts and events.
Popular fiction is a way of seeing back into time, same as the Annals of Congress, letters, newspapers, etc… Perhaps the real reason some on here object is they do not agree with what the themes of the novels were? Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a major, anti-slavery influence in its time. I wonder what bobwilcox’s objection is to that?
I certainly do not agree with the theme of “The Octopus”. But that, in and of itself, is irrelevant. It’s a work of fiction and a fiction writer is certainly free to write as he/she desires.
What I object to is this fictional tale being treated as if it is a factual history. That, it is not.
I’ll read Deverell’s book when it arrives. If there are any differences with Orsi’s book I’ll say so.
Orsi and Deverell are PhD historians. Norris, of The Octopus, was a fiction writer. Big difference.
The Octopus and similar works may give us insight in to the popular mood of the day. But that was then, this is now. We now can, and should, deal in factual information.
The Southern Pacific did significantly help make life in California (and other parts of the west) better. To see them fictionally vilified with that fiction being accecpted as unquestioned fact is disgusting.
I loose track as to where in this thread’s 2 pages or the several links I clicked or references I googled, but I see the railroad accused of both inserting its steel tentacles into land the heroic farmers developed and deciding to build on a different route than their original proposal and so make that same land worthless.