This is an interesting reminder of what life used to be like

[Target_For_Exterm]

in the US. We have made progress. And stories like these are incentives for why we should NOT allow Republicans to turn the clock back to lawless free-for-all.

"In 1878, not long after Reconstruction ended, Memphis appeared likely to emerge from the ashes of Confederate defeat as one of the regal cities of the New South. Her population had doubled during the 1860s in spite of war and occupation, and by 1878 it had reached nearly 48,000. She lay almost midway between New Orleans and St. Louis and had rail and river connections to all the major cities and growing markets of the South. Her experienced merchants, bankers, and warehousemen were ready to collect and sell cotton and other commodities produced in the rich hinterlands of western Tennessee and northern Mississippi and Alabama.

Moreover, she had something special for a resolutely Southern city sitting on the Chickasaw bluffs—a touch of cosmopolitanism. Of the 25,000 white Memphians in 1870, some 7,000 were foreign-born. The biggest group was Irish, and the next German, but there were sprinklings of Italians and French, a few Chinese residents, and enough Jews to sustain a Hebrew Benevolent Society.

But in 1878 the future of Memphis was broken and reshaped by ten weeks of epidemic. An existing community faded into memoir and album, and a new urban society appeared—one with lowered expectations, a different population mix, and a new political stance, part Progressive and part Old South. This overnight transformation was brought by a plague of mosquitoes.

THE STORY OFFENDS our modern sense of how history works. We like to believe that social and economic creations hatch slowly and comprehensibly. True, we know that our cities of today can vanish overnight if war comes, but the threat is of man-made storms of rage. Our late-twentieth-century view does not encompass what the Old Testament calls the “pestilence that walketh in darkness.” Yet it struck in America in 1878, when our great-grandparents were alive, when the telephone and the internal-combustion engine were already invented and the germ theory of disease had been formulated."

http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1984/6/1984_6_57.shtml

This story makes me thankful for all the progress we've made, and reminds me of all the reasons why we need to continue to fight to move FORWARD and not BACKWARD. It's also evidence that the poor have been paying the highest price for a very, very long time...

[pnwmom]

1. Looking at what happened in N.O., it's hard to believe

much progress has been made.

[Target_For_Exterm]

2. Folks of the same ilk in charge.

I noticed when I read this article that the people who screwed everything up sounded like today's Republicans (don't spend money to avert an epidemic, give crooked contracts to your pals, etc.). The "conservatives" in the article sounded like today's progressives - they implemented a large number of projects that cleaned up the town and eliminated the epidemics.

I hang the disgrace of the aftermath of Katrina firmly around Bush's neck.

And I think my point was that allowing Republicans to turn the clock back to lawless free for all (which is kinda what we saw after Katrina) doesn't benefit our country. Those who don't learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

I prefer a government that works.

[pnwmom]

4. You're right. They're trying to turn back the clock

to the bad old days.

:shrug:

[grasswire]

3. very interesting read, thanks

(eom)

[applegrove]

5. Great Post. And so true. You need to fight every generation for a great

democracy and good times. It doesn't just happen. You & your government need to work for it every day.