Rachel Carson

When Rachel Carson published her ground breaking work on the dangers of pesticides in 1962, Silent Spring, she was accused of being an “hysterical woman”, a fanatic follower of the “cult of nature” and a “communist”. What could engender such shrill verdicts from some of the most powerful media outlets in the world?
She had shed a glaring light onto a pervasive feature of industrial life that was as deadly as it was profitable: the manufacturing of chemicals to control the natural environment.

After world war II, these chemical poisons, derivatives of chemical warfare, were manufactured by powerful pertro-chemical industries like Monsanto and Montrose.
According to John Robbins, “Monsanto tried to destroy [Carson]. They mounted a tremendous advertising campaign to discredit her and invalidate her work. They wanted to ruin her in every possible way they could."

Carson was undeterred. In Silent Spring, she wrote "We allow the chemical death rain to fall as though there were no alternative, whereas in fact there are many, and our ingenuity could soon discover many more if given opportunity."
Carson's underlying philosophy was that humans are interdependent with nature. She argued that industrial activity was causing permanent damage to the Earth's ecosystems.

Ten years later, in 1972, DDT, one of the most dangerous pesticides from that post-war era, was finally banned, largely a result of Carson’s ground breaking work. Yet many poisons as dangerous or even more insidious are still used today.
Carson died in 1964, paradoxically from cancer that she fought, even as her ground breaking work was being published. Many say that she is the true mother of the modern environmental movement today.

Cinco de Mayo

Outside of being a great holiday, Cinco de Mayo celebrates the defeat of Napoleon’s army at the Batalla de Puebla in Mexico on the Fifth of May, 1862.

Although commonly believed to celebrate the Independence of Mexico, the battle was actually fought because Napoleon III wanted to install his relative, Archduke Maximilian of Austria, as ruler of Mexico. Using Mexico’s war debt as an excuse, France invaded the country.

Napoleon’s army landed at the gulf coast of Mexico along the state of Veracruz and began to march toward Mexico City. But on May 5th, 5,000 ill-equipped Mestizo and Zapotec Indians under the leadership of Mexican General Ignacio Zaragoza Seguin managed to defeat the French army at the height of its power. It was a glorious victory that served as a unifying moment for Mexican nationalism.

Although celebrated today, the battle was, unfortunately not a turning point. Napoleon III returned to Mexico a year later with 30,000 more troops. The French were eventually able take over Mexico City and install Maximilian, a Hapsburg, as the ruler of Mexico.

Maximilian’s rule was short lived. By 1867 a resupplied Mexican army was able to finally defeat the French and Maximlian was summarily executed.

His bullet riddled shirt is kept on public display in a museum in Mexico City.

Tune in for our Next Hidden History when we discuss the revolutionary efforts of another famous Mexican, Caesar Chavez.

KKK Part 2

The original Ku Klux Klan was disbanded in 1869, but loosely formed groups of Klansmen continued to operate throughout much of the South. Following a government crackdown many of these groups withered away. That is, until 1915 when a wave of nativism, helped along by D.W. Griffith’s brilliant and deeply racist movie, Birth of a Nation, saw America’s first terrorist organization, reborne.

The KKK was officially reincarnated in 1915 by Atlanta businessman William J. Simmons. Simmons was a preacher and Freemason, who was a member of dozen of fraternal groups and two churches. The day before thanksgiving in 1915, Simmons and 15 members of the Knights of Mary Phagan who had been instrumental in the lynching of Leo Frank, lit a cross on Stone Mountain, Georgia. Simmons called for this new program of the Klan to be "100% Americanism.", using terminology that might sound familiar to today’s anti-immigration movements.

Unfortunately, The Birth of a Nation became a recruiting tool for the revived Klan which grew large in part as a result of the popularity DW Griffith’s movie work. Griffith had put his considerable technical talent into the service of a deeply racist book entitled “The Clansmen.”

According to the author of the Clansman, a black is "a thick-lipped, flat nosed, spindle-shanked Negro, exuding his nauseous animal odor."

As a result of following such a book, the underlying assumptions of Griffith’s movie were spectacularly racist, as was the movie itself. Despite this, it was great financial success. When adjusted for inflation, it was one of the top grossing movies of all time. In fact. Woodrow Wilson as sitting president endorsed the movie, writing: "It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true."

His endorsement greatly helped Griffith to defend the movie against legal attack by the NAACP. And the endorsement certainly helped to legitimate the newest version of the Klan, which claimed some 5 million adherents by 1925. Nativist to the core, this new Klan not only opposed black equality but was also anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant.

Tune in for our Next Hidden History, when one of the most recent variations of the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans, loses everything they own to Beulah Mae Donald, the mother of one of their murder victims.

KKK, Part 1

Since 9/11, the word terrorism has been all the rage. You can’t watch an hour of television without hearing the term, but it might be instructive to consider America’s very first terrorist organization. Most folks would recognize its name, even though it’s been officially disbanded since 1987: the Ku Klux Klan- America’s very first terrorist organization.


The Ku Klux Klan, or KKK sometimes described as the “Invisible Empire”, was instrumental in the murder and intimidation of hundreds of thousands of afro Americans. And later, after its second incarnation, the intimidation of Jews, Catholics and immigrants throughout the nation.

The first Klan was founded in 1866 by veterans of the Confederate Army in Pulaski, Tennessee, as quasi-fraternal organization. They established whimisical names for their organization roles, like the Grand Cyclops or Grand Magi and held initiation ceremonies and ritual pledges. One of their fun activities taken up initially as a distraction was riding their horses in the middle of the night, outfitted in white sheets and ridiculously spiked pyramid type hats; presumably representing the ghost of the confederate dead.
But soon their “night riding” turned into hazing and frightening blacks and northern business men. Whippings were used first, but within months there were bloody clashes between Klansmen and blacks, Northerners who had come South, or Southern unionists.
In 1870 a Grand Jury reported that: " The Klan is inflicting summary vengeance on the colored citizens by breaking into their houses at the dead of night, dragging them from their beds, torturing them in the most inhuman manner, and in many instances murdering them."
As the Klan’s reputation spread, so did calls for their removal. Their Imperial Wizard, an ex-Confederate General, Nathan Forrest officially disbanded the Klan in January of 1869
But, as the Southern Poverty Law Center noted, “their terror had proven very effective at keeping black voters away from the polls. Some black officeholders were hanged and many more were brutally beaten. The result was a system of segregation which was the law of the land for more than 80 years afterwards:” Jim Crowe.
The Klan had done its work well.
Tune in for our next Hidden History about the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s thanks to DW Griffith’s film, Birth of a Nation-- when America’s first terrorist organization rides again.