Oregon Republican for Congress Prints Book Glorifying Slavery

[one...two...tree 2,762]

"the negroes on a well-ordered estate, under kind masters, were probably a happier class of people than the laborers upon any estate in Europe." -- from [2] George Alfred Henty's book With Lee in Virginia, currently printed, sold, and promoted by Republican Arthur B. Robinson's Robinson Books [3]. Art Robinson is campaigning [4] to represent Oregon's 4th Congressional District in Congress.

Improbably, the smackingly racist writing of 19th Century British author George Alfred Henty -- whose boys adventure novels had kind words for slavery, described Africans as having the intelligence of ten-year old children, and featured a comedic description of a slave being tortured with red hot irons (see quotes, below) -- may become an issue this year in an Oregon congressional race.

 "The Henty books provide training in history and in many of the highest aspects of human character... American young people should read not a few Henty books, but all 99 of them." -- Oregon Republican congressional candidate Arthur B. Robinson, from http://www.robinsoncurriculum.com [5]

"The intelligence of an average negro is about equal to that of a European child of ten years old. A few, a very few, go beyond this, but these are exceptions... They are absolutely without originality, absolutely without inventive power. Living among white men, their imitative faculties enable them to attain a considerable amount of civilization. Left alone to their own devices they retrograde into a state little above their native savagery." -- from [6] G. A. Henty's By Sheer Pluck, a Tale of the Ashanti War, printed and sold by Robinson Books [3]

"The negro struggled as the men approached him, and gave a terrific yell as the hot iron was applied to his sides. "I will tell you, sars--oh! have mercy upon me and I will tell you eberything!" " -- from [7] the G.A. Henty novel True To The Old Flag, printed and sold by Robinson Books [3]

"All [of the G.A. Henty novels] followed the same basic formula: A boy-hero, generally age 15, finds himself on his own as a result of family circumstances; he meets up with a great man in whose company he has an adventure; in the course of the historical crisis he meets and rescues a girl destined to be his wife; the crisis is resolved, the British triumph... To the modern reader, Henty's books are notable for their hearty imperialism, undisguised racism, and jingoistic patriotism." -- from PBS biography [8] of novelist George Alfred Henty

Backed by the Koch brothers-funded group Americans For Prosperity in his insurgent bid [4] to defeat longtime incumbent Democratic Representative Peter DeFazio [9] and represent Oregon's Fourth District in Congress, Republican Art Robinson doesn't just recommend G.A. Henty's boys novels, and he goes beyond merely including them in his homeschooling curriculum [10] - Robinson prints [3] and sells hardcover paper editions of all the 99 novels of G.A. Henty, whose zesty, militaristic tales of plucky boyish adventure celebrate British colonialism, depict darker-skinned peoples as stupid, savage and childlike, and romanticize slavery.

http://www.alternet.org/print/speakeasy/brucewilson/oregon-republican-congress-prints-book-glorifying-slavery

Edited September 20, 2012 by Commie Appeaser

[IR5FORMUMSIE 850]

"the negroes on a well-ordered estate, under kind masters, were probably a happier class of people than the laborers upon any estate in Europe." -- from [2] George Alfred Henty's book With Lee in Virginia, currently printed, sold, and promoted by Republican Arthur B. Robinson's Robinson Books [3]. Art Robinson is campaigning [4] to represent Oregon's 4th Congressional District in Congress.

Improbably, the smackingly racist writing of 19th Century British author George Alfred Henty -- whose boys adventure novels had kind words for slavery, described Africans as having the intelligence of ten-year old children, and featured a comedic description of a slave being tortured with red hot irons (see quotes, below) -- may become an issue this year in an Oregon congressional race.

"The Henty books provide training in history and in many of the highest aspects of human character... American young people should read not a few Henty books, but all 99 of them." -- Oregon Republican congressional candidate Arthur B. Robinson, from http://www.robinsoncurriculum.com [5]

"The intelligence of an average negro is about equal to that of a European child of ten years old. A few, a very few, go beyond this, but these are exceptions... They are absolutely without originality, absolutely without inventive power. Living among white men, their imitative faculties enable them to attain a considerable amount of civilization. Left alone to their own devices they retrograde into a state little above their native savagery." -- from [6] G. A. Henty's By Sheer Pluck, a Tale of the Ashanti War, printed and sold by Robinson Books [3]

"The negro struggled as the men approached him, and gave a terrific yell as the hot iron was applied to his sides. "I will tell you, sars--oh! have mercy upon me and I will tell you eberything!" " -- from [7] the G.A. Henty novel True To The Old Flag, printed and sold by Robinson Books [3]

"All [of the G.A. Henty novels] followed the same basic formula: A boy-hero, generally age 15, finds himself on his own as a result of family circumstances; he meets up with a great man in whose company he has an adventure; in the course of the historical crisis he meets and rescues a girl destined to be his wife; the crisis is resolved, the British triumph... To the modern reader, Henty's books are notable for their hearty imperialism, undisguised racism, and jingoistic patriotism." -- from PBS biography [8] of novelist George Alfred Henty

Backed by the Koch brothers-funded group Americans For Prosperity in his insurgent bid [4] to defeat longtime incumbent Democratic Representative Peter DeFazio [9] and represent Oregon's Fourth District in Congress, Republican Art Robinson doesn't just recommend G.A. Henty's boys novels, and he goes beyond merely including them in his homeschooling curriculum [10] - Robinson prints [3] and sells hardcover paper editions of all the 99 novels of G.A. Henty, whose zesty, militaristic tales of plucky boyish adventure celebrate British colonialism, depict darker-skinned peoples as stupid, savage and childlike, and romanticize slavery.

http://www.alternet....rifying-slavery

I'll get to reading it right right after I finish watching Birth of A Nation.

[lostinblue 1,989]

A boy's own storySteeped in imperialism, GA Henty's adventure tales reflected Victorian values and an heroic Englishness. Brian Thompson celebrates the prolific author on the centenary of his death

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The Guardian, Friday 6 December 2002 George Alfred Henty died aboard his ocean-racing yacht in Weymouth harbour 100 years ago last month. The local undertakers were pleased to discover the great Henty to be the man they had always imagined - a full-bearded giant, stern and wise, dressed like a warrior hero or - much the same thing - a Victorian gentleman with the whiff of gunpowder and the clash of sabres about him. He was two weeks off his 70th birthday.

Henty was not completely a soldier, though he had chased many wars. London clubland mourned him as a stout fellow with his share of domestic troubles and wondered idly what he was worth. More poignantly, news of his death was carried up to many a schoolroom with a sinking heart. All over the world there were tears at bedtime.

Henty, whose name shines today only for collectors, was the most prolific author of children's books - more narrowly, books for boys - ever published. William Blackie, for whose Glasgow firm he made a fortune, estimated there were 25m copies of Henty novels worldwide. Blackie's own company had printed 3.5m of this total, even though it had not been able to sign up the author until 1887.

What made Henty's novels so famous in their day was their unabashed glorification of English character. Wherever matters were to be settled by a few good men outfaced by fellows who were not the right sort, there could be found a young Henty hero, plucky as hell, utterly steadfast, wise beyond his years. A public-school background helped. In With Roberts to Pretoria, Cecil Rhodes appraises the hero, a young man called Locke. He interrupts the lad's attempt at a CV.

"So you were at Rugby!" his hearer broke in. "I am a public-school boy myself, you know, and there is always a fellow feeling among public-school boys, even if they were not at the same school." Rhodes, who died in the same year as Henty, was educated at Bishop's Stortford Grammar School, but the point held.

In At the Point of the Bayonet ("A Tale of the Mahratta War"), Harry Lindsay's parents are massacred and he is brought up by a faithful old ayah as a native. When he is old enough to take his revenge, the dye on his face does not for a moment fool the British Resident, who listens to his story with manly sympathy. "I can the more readily believe it, inasmuch as, despite your colour, I can perceive a certain likeness to Major Lindsay, whom I knew intimately." Good man, to see beyond the disguise to the heart of the matter.

George Henty was born at Trumpington, near Cambridge, the son of a stockbroker. As a child he was weedy and introspective, a condition he cured by taking up boxing and rowing at Westminster School. In effect, he reinvented himself in the image of what was to become the typical hero of his stories, a boy of preternatural self-composure wedded to awesome hidden strengths. Braininess was a lesser and more suspect virtue.

As happened so often in his fiction, war and a good school gave Henty his defining chance in life. At the end of his first year at Cambridge, he threw up his place at Caius college to join the hospital commissariat in the Crimea. His letters home from Sebastopol were published in the Morning Advertiser and for 10 years he was a roving correspondent of the Standard, going wherever there was trouble and reporting it in sturdy imperialist prose. Only ill health ended these adventures. As a substitute, he began his long gallery of books for boys, 80 of them, written at the rate of three a year.

His first wife died suddenly in 1865, after bearing four children - two of them boys. In 1889, he very unwisely married his housekeeper, Elizabeth Keylock. She was a querulous and bad-tempered country woman who was required to admire the hub of empire from the dispiriting vantage of a house in Lavender Gardens, at the top of Battersea Rise. It seems an unlikely address for the chairman of the Savage Club and a staunch dinner and smoking companion at the Whitefriars, the WigWam and Royal Thames Yacht Club.

There is much that is risible in Henty's books, though they ran with the grain of history teaching in Victorian schools and what vicars - and some bishops - liked to think about the world. They suffer from haste in composition. Their author was accustomed in later years to dictate 7,000 words at a sitting while the second Mrs Henty banged about in the back rooms of the house, raising hell with his unhappy sons. It was his practice to have a box of books sent across from the London Library, get the historical period fixed in his mind and then interpolate a boy-hero.

It was always the same boy. Henty was far too shrewd to alter a winning formula. But the staggering popularity of his books raises a more interesting question than his own xenophobia and its corresponding magnification of Englishness. Boys who read him believed in Henty heroism quite as passionately as he did himself. Today, all those Ralphs and Toms, Percys and Horaces strike us as the most appalling prigs: we have forgotten the world from which they sprang.

"I never meant to enter Chinese service. I may have been wanting in courtesy in not awaiting the Government's acceptance of my resignation... [but]... I looked on war as so detrimental to China and England that any effort I could make would be cheaply bought at any personal sacrifice."

This is not some youthful Henty hero speaking but Charles "Chinese" Gordon in 1880, when he was 47 years old. The hysteria that broke out on Gordon's death five years later, when the whole country was plunged into howling grief for a fallen hero (led from the top by a distraught Victoria) is the background to Henty's fiction. He did not invent imperialism for boys: it was already there in numerous schoolrooms as the Christian ideal of conduct. Oxford dons did more in a practical way to people the empire with good chaps who knew how to face down a fellow with an assegai or kukri in his hand. Such men might have been Henty readers in their childhood but they understood what he did not - that empire was a form of government and not a theatre for self-expression. In the end the paper-clip turned out to be mightier than the sword.

At his death, Henty left more than £6,000, a good sum in today's money (nearly £400,000) and a large one for any author. His work continued to be republished intermittently up to the age of the Beatles' first LP, when the redcoat tunics he so much admired were sold as ironic clouts in Carnaby Street. Thirty years ago, the incomparable George MacDonald Fraser began the Flashman Papers, going over much the same ground as Henty but with a poltroon as a hero. There's love and affection in the Flashman stories: in Henty there is only stern duty.

At book fairs all over the country, Henty first editions change hands at ridiculous prices. Nowadays these fairly artless books are seen as part of the pile of absurdity we think we have inherited from the 19th century, or silly and dangerous stories illustrating the worst part of who we used to be.

However, not all the adolescent longing Henty drew from his readers has dissipated completely. Reading any Henty novel today, there is a tiny thread that leads back to where in England the heart once beat. It is an unfashionable judgment to make and an uncomfortable one, but for anyone interested in Victoria's reign, the test of GA Henty is in the reading.

· Brian Thompson's most recent books are Imperial Vanities (HarperCollins, £17.99) and The Nightmare of a Victorian Bestseller (Short Books, £4.99)

Looks like the author is well thought of across the pond.

[Penny Lane 8,159]

TL;DR.

[Obama 2012 1,714]

I'm trying figure out why Steven has a problem with historical works?

[one...two...tree 2,762]

I'm trying figure out why Steven has a problem with historical works?

You need to brush up on your reading skills. Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn is a literary classic, but if someone was promoting the story as the way things should be, then that's different. Even Mein Kempf has historical relevance but going around and saying everyone should read Mein Kempf as a guide for living wouldn't get you into any literary book clubs.

[Obama 2012 1,714]

You need to brush up on your reading skills. Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn is a literary classic, but if someone was promoting the story as the way things should be, then that's different. Even Mein Kempf has historical relevance but going around and saying everyone should read Mein Kempf as a guide for living wouldn't get you into any literary book clubs.

Apparently I missed the part where the story says that people should live the way the books say life was? All I saw was that people should read the books for a perspective on the times... Nothing about how things should be today in the way we live our lives...

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Apparently I missed the part where the story says that people should live the way the books say life was? All I saw was that people should read the books for a perspective on the times... Nothing about how things should be today in the way we live our lives...

Again, reading skills.

"The Henty books provide training in history and in many of the highest aspects of human character... American young people should read not a few Henty books, but all 99 of them." -- Oregon Republican congressional candidate Arthur B. Robinson

The OP goes on to explain the central character and the values the author esteemed to. Good reading skills would help you to understand this isn't about the books, but about a man running for office who thinks the values in the books are something young people should be impressed upon.

[Obama 2012 1,714]

Again, reading skills.

The OP goes on to explain the central character and the values the author esteemed to. Good reading skills would help you to understand this isn't about the books, but about a man running for office who thinks the values in the books are something young people should be impressed upon.

Oh I read it, I just interpreted a bit differently.

Training in the highest apsects of human character is very true when you really think about it. I think you're over-analyzing what he said here. He's simply saying that it's great training to know/understand the different aspects of human characteristics. I can easily say to know everything about Hitler to understand the highest characteristics of human nature. If you understand anything about human nature, then you'd interpret that to mean to know how Hitler would think, to put yourself in those shoes and to understand. However if you read it for face value you, you might think I was trying to tell people to idolize and be like Hitler.

I think the author of the article is trying to bastardize the intent for political gain (as alternet likes to do). Nothing more, nothing less.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Oh I read it, I just interpreted a bit differently.

Training in the highest apsects of human character is very true when you really think about it. I think you're over-analyzing what he said here. He's simply saying that it's great training to know/understand the different aspects of human characteristics. I can easily say to know everything about Hitler to understand the highest characteristics of human nature. If you understand anything about human nature, then you'd interpret that to mean to know how Hitler would think, to put yourself in those shoes and to understand. However if you read it for face value you, you might think I was trying to tell people to idolize and be like Hitler.

I think the author of the article is trying to bastardize the intent for political gain (as alternet likes to do). Nothing more, nothing less.

Uh, yeah. It would be political suicide for any politician to come out and say that about Mein Kempf. You can interpret it the way you want, just don't expect most people to follow you down that rabbit hole.

[Obama 2012 1,714]

Uh, yeah. It would be political suicide for any politician to come out and say that about Mein Kempf. You can interpret it the way you want, just don't expect most people to follow you down that rabbit hole.

Don't expect insane people to follow me down that 'rabbit hole' you mean.

People are pretty damn insane the moment they take words and try to twist them for some racist meaning.

Of course being the left-leaning site that alternet is, this should surprise no one, as the left LOVE to point out race and worry about 'race' on everything. No one is an American to a leftist. They are all divided by skin color, economic status, sexual orientation, etc. Americans do not exist to the modern left. It's pretty damn pathetic.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Don't expect insane people to follow me down that 'rabbit hole' you mean.

People are pretty damn insane the moment they take words and try to twist them for some racist meaning.

Of course being the left-leaning site that alternet is, this should surprise no one, as the left LOVE to point out race and worry about 'race' on everything. No one is an American to a leftist. They are all divided by skin color, economic status, sexual orientation, etc. Americans do not exist to the modern left. It's pretty damn pathetic.

You struggle with context as well. Arthur Robinson is part of a movement toward homeschooling. He handpicked these books not for their literary value, but because the values exemplified by the fictional characters are values he believes all youth should learn from. So just what values are they suppose to magically extract from the other, not-so-nice values that the author aspires to? Even with Mark Twain, he was not trying to promote slavery nor did he think it was something good. George Alfred Hentry, on the other hand, thought slavery was a good thing and set up a value system within his fictional work that thought of slavery as something positive. So either Arthur Robinson is ignoring the glaringly obvious distortions of historical truth - that slavery was wrong, or he espouses those values. It doesn't matter which way he goes with it, he's okay with books that promote it.

[lostinblue 1,989]

Liberals Indoctrinate Children to Control Society. This is what the Steve is upset with. The children are missing out on this.They will not grow up to be good kenyan supporters.

[Penny Lane 8,159]

Kenyan supporters ... Just another day in the crazy house.

[mawilson 2,133]

Again, reading skills.

"The Henty books provide training in history and in many of the highest aspects of human character..

He's probably referring to the strength of character of the slaves.