New and very distinct in the evolution of the story we are telling. Distinct becomes a beginning of the way america thinks of itself in the world in a very different way. Look, if you want to understand the 20th century, if you want to understand the roles of the United States assumes for itself and plays in the 20th century, the 190s is the place to start. The transformationalist and transformation is seen among the people and their attitudes in the 190s is little short of kind of amazing. Remember this. Remember that as far back as you want to go in American History, the idea has been that the United States, and before that, the american colonies. We are over here, and the rest of the world is the rest of the world. There is this purposeful sense that we are us, and the rest of the world can do whatever it wants, whatever it takes. Whatever it is going to do, it is not going to affect us. I am dancing around the world isolation because that has got a lot of baggage around it, but thats part of it. We were an isolated country. Or if not isolated, if you dont want to use isolation,ing we could pick and choose however much involvement we wanted, and we usually didnt want any involvement. But then all of a sudden in the 1890s, one after the other, all these things started impinging on american society. It is not that the government changes, it is that in my opinion, your opinions and everybody in the publics vision of what the United States is going to be starts to evolve. All right . And theres a bunch of Different Reasons for it. Listen, i cant think of anybody who is going to be affected by all the reasons. There are a bunch of Different Reasons. One person, you are not going to be affected by all of them, but i guarantee you that you will be affect the by one of them. All right . So what i want to do is sort of run down these reasons one by one and show you what they are. And then almost by the end of the decade we wind up fighting a war in large part that is informed by all these changes that we have been through. Does that make sense . I think the place to start is probably the fact that in 1893 we wind up with a really big economic crash. It is the biggest one in a very long time. It triggers a depression that lasts for years that probably would be known as the Great Depression had the 1930 as not happened. The panic of 1893 is a huge stock market selloff, and it triggers some soul searching among businesses. And the question has got to be why is this happening . What has caused this . Why suddenly are all the factories having to lay off workers . Why is it the case that the Union Pacific and the central pacific, and the southern pacific and all the big railroads, why are they all having to declare bankruptcy . Something has gone wrong. Now listen, there is one idea that starts sort of creeping to the forefront of people who think about business. If you dont think about business, this is not going to go affect you is not going to affect you. But if you are a leader of the business community, you are thinking why is this happening and what do we have to do to fix it . And gradually all of the focus begins to settle on one particular word, and that word is overproduction. Overproduction. Do you ns is that remember how efficient american factories have become. They had produced and produced and produced, and they made more and more and more and more stuff. No matter what it was, they made more of it. And finally they have reached the point this is the way this is being thought out. We have hit the point where the American Market cant absorb all of the stuff that we are producing. That is what overproduction means. The American Market is only so big, and you have sears catalogs going out to the four corners of the country, and you have farmers buying multiple shirts. At some point people are going to say i dont need anymore shirts. At some point they are going to say i have bought all there is to buy. And that becomes a problem because youve got all these factories still churning out stuff left and right as fast as they can. What winds up happening is surpluses Start Building up. And when surpluses build up, the price begins to drop, profits begin to drop, and youve got a recession. All right . Well, the question would be how do you fix that . What do you do . If you have a warehouse full of stuff that the american productive capacity has brought forth, and there is no place to put it . Well, companies today have to deal with this, too, right . If you are a cell phone if , what do you do once everybody buys a cell phone, what do they do . I mean today what they have got to do is they have got to equips you that your cell phone is now crummy and outdated, and you have to buy the new one. They didnt do that back then. That is a little bit too modern. We have got to find other places to sell our stuff. We have got to find other markets to get into. We have got to find places that dont have the domestic productive capacity that weve got here and then unload our stuff there. That is the way to do it. Find new markets. If overproduction is the problem, find new markets. Now, listen, the United States has always been an exporter. The United States has exported stuff since the beginning. But almost all of the stuff at the u. S. Used to export was Agricultural Products like cotton, grain, and dairy and whatever. All the corn farmers of the midwest, all the wheat farmers of the ohio valley. There are a lot of exports. But and i guess this is probably you probably saw this coming, right . With the productivity of american factories, you start to think exporting manufactured goods may be the future. It is true that over the course of the 1890s American Manufacturing exports are going to go through the roof all of a sudden, and the United States becomes a very aggressive exporter of manufactured goods. But that is sort of almost like the mid point of the story i am telling. Right now we dont in 1890 to 1893, we have to open some new markets. The market that everybody hought of, sort of the utopian market was china, just like it had been in the days of columbus. If we can get into the china markets with our sewing machines or our railroad locomotives or whatever it is, that would be the end of the epression, and it would be rosie times from now on. The china market is huge. China was a very, very commercial society, a lot of buying, a lot of selling. But it wasnt industrialized. If we cant get into the china market. But there is always a but, right . The problem with that is that china is kind of in a mess in the 1890es. China is really at risk of being carved up among european powers, and russia, and japan. China is a the Central Government of china was weak, and the british, the french, the germans, italians, japanese and the russians all started to carve out spheres of interest along the chinese coasts and set up basically you know, it is probably not a stretch almost to call them colonies ithin china. Nd in 1893 or 1894 there is no guarantee, honestly, that china is going to make it. The continent of africa is being carved up at the same time among all these different very an powers into exclusionary zones of economics. The germans want to trade in the german zone, the british want to trade in the british zone, and the french in the french zone, and they dont want anybody else in their zone. So where this goes very naturally, if you are a Business Leader thinking about we need to ket, open up championship and keep it open open up china and keep it open. We need the state department to do something about this, to circulate notes between the other countries and make them keep china open for us. This happens without you even realizing it, but think about that a second. If you are Andrew Carnegie and you are worried burr steel business and thinking about the stapleton opening china, about the state Department Opening china, you have a rad chie different idea about what the United States should be doing in the world. It happens that easily and suddenly. You are thinking wow, the state Department Needs to get off its tail and fix this. And it has never had to do that before. You have just sort of stumbled into imagining a fundamentally different role for the United States to play within the ommunity of nations. Does that make sense . And this doesnt affect a whole lot of people. I mean people in waco, texas, in 1893 are probably not sitting around thinking we need to open up new markets. But the people who are thinking this are proit important, pretty powerful, pretty influential. It is curious because youve got a handful youve got a couple of impulses that will influence just a small group, but a really influential group. And then you have got a couple of impulses that come along that will influence a whole bunch of people, noninflupings noninfluential people but numbers. This is the first sort of economic impulse to look outward. Find new markets. Be energetic with your foreign policy. And thats what it is going to take. Was the world is being carved up, and it is happening as we watch, and this is the point at which americans start to think we are going to be left out of this unless we are a little bit more i hate this word proactive. I just want to say active. But proactive. So far, so good . Is is going to sort of blend pretty easily into the writing f this guy, alfred thayermahan. s navy officer. He came out of the Naval Academy late in the 50s, early 60s, Something Like that, and he served during the civil war. He found that he hated to be on a ship, which is not what you really want in a naval officer. He got seasick easily. He was much more bookish than the normal naval officer. He wanted to teach. He wanted to write books. He wanted to lecture. He had ideas. He winds up getting brought up to newport, rhode island, at a new School Called the neifial war college that was 84. Blished in the purposes of the Naval War College was to Train Navy Officers in a more strategic way, to think about something other than saling and moving ships. How do you move fleets, what do you do with ships, that sort of stuff. He really thrived with that, and he taught there for a while. And then he started to realize more. Could actually do he could reach bigger audiences. He tried to he writes this book called the influence of sea power upon history. It comes out of his lectures. It comes out of his vision of how the world is today and the previous centuries inform it, how what has happened over millennia of the make us what we are today. Specifically, the influence of sea power on history. He says look, you go back to the days of the row mans and what made romans great, what made the roman empire feasible. It wasnt the legions, the trade routes, the nad aytonor, the shield and all that business. It was the fact that the romans controlled the mediterranean. They could use the mediterranean any way they wanted to. They could move troops and goods, and that is what made the roman empire great. He says if you look through time since the days of the omans, there has always been like one nation, it seems, that was the leader in sea power, and that one nation who commanded the sea always was able to be economically powerful and influential. He brings this all the way up to like the 1700s and great britain. He it is look at great britain. They are a tiny island. It is small. It has a small population compared to russia or to france or any place like that. But they have got the biggest empire in the world. The sun never sets on the British Empire because it is all over the place. Why . Because they have command of the sea. And if the United States now he doesnt flatout say this, but this is sort of what he is getting into. If the United States wants to its t and influential, going to need a navy. It is going to need a navy better than what we have got. Its going to need a navy that is built to and here is a phrase i want you to file away because this is a phrase that the 20th century is going to be filled with. We need a navy that can brogdon ject power project power. We need to think of our navy as not being something that just sits at our shore and waits to be attacked. Need a navy that can go out and champion our interests, right . Away from the coasts of north america, because that is where our interests will ultimately lie. Got it . What i want you to be able to do right now, what i want you to be able to do is start to see wait a minute, i see a connection between this and overproduction. Ecause if we are going to make markets open, we are going to have to be able to project power. I mean we are not going to be able in a world of power politics, you are not going to be able to go up to green bay and say would you open your market for us . Especially if you dont have anything behind that. And mahan thought it. If we have a navy that can project power, we will be able to project influence, and we will be able to get done what we want to do. A lot of influential people read this book, a whole lot. Especially people in the senate, people in the government, people in the Navy Department obviously ate it up because they had been waiting for years for somebody to say Something Like this. Future president Theodore Roosevelt reads this and goes nuts no it and becomes one of mahans champions. Now mahan also decides i want to write for the public as well, and i think this is the point at which he becomes sort of even more important. He starts writing essays for s like the ne atlantic. I can think of one article that he wrote in the atlantic in december of 1890, and the atlantic, you can go to barnes and noble and get the thantic today. Wrote this article in the december of 190 issue of the thaptic called the united tates looking outward. And that was an eyeopener to a lot of people. The title is perfectly chosen, the United States looking outward. It is not this. We have been focused here, right . We have been focused domestically since the decoration of independence, and we have had this challenge and that challenge, and we have done this, and we have done that, and we have done a bunch of different history stuff, but it has always been here, has always been us, right . Mahan says the world is a big place, and we need to be a player in it. Let me mention this word real quick. Imperialism. This is an era of imperialism, and that concept, that term is. Ehind a lot of stuff there were a lot of people in the United States who watched other great powers carve up the. Orld in empeerlist fashion in imperialist fashion. I dont know if you could be neutral about this. I dont know, maybe you could. People can be neutral about all sorts of position. But in general, your reaction would be we need to get in on this, or this is bad, and we need to know why it is bad, and we need to speak out against it. Listen, the thing about that is that both of those options, both of those impulses are oing to make you look outward. Ether you are a wanna be imperialist or whether you think it is a terrible thing and people should notice, both those things will make you Pay Attention to something other han your backyard. You know, when we have a bunch f stuff, when you have the world in your cell phone pocket , you have the world in your cell phone and the cell phone is in your pocket, where it should stay, by the way, during. Ass, you can get in a bubble and nobody went around talking like this in the 1890s, i dont think. Maybe we should get out of the bubble. Maybe we should Pay Attention to what is happening in the world. Of the should be aware plight of china. Maybe we should be aware that africa is being carved up by imperial powers. Maybe we should be upset by it. Maybe we should get in on it. Doesnt matter. You are suddenly looking outward. That is something that everybody can do. Any questions so far . So i think if you are looking for sort of a neat way to neat as in tidy, not neat as in a military maybe impulse to look outward, although i am not really happy with describing it that way. Clearly this is an economic impulse. This is sort of a military impulse. By the way, when the 1890s start, the United States has, depending on how you count, the United States has Something Like the 13th largest navy in the world, which means there are 12 above also. I will spot you the first five. But then i am going to bet you would have trouble thinking about who else. Pigger ean navy was than ours was bigger than ours. So far, so good. You get this fleet built up in the 90s that can project power, that can project power to do things like keep china the state ure that department in treaties to other country have a little muscle behind them. So far so good . Ok, look, shift gears. This guy, Frederick Jackson turner. Frederick Jackson Turner is a historian, a historic historian. He taught i think at the university of wisconsin but i am not 100 sure. I think so. He was an american historian. He looked over big trends. By the way, remember darwin . Remember the immy occasions behind the way darwin looked at the world . The big, long story that unfolds. Turner is going to be doctor all of this stuff sort of fits in with car winism. All these people think like darwin. We are at the tip of a big long story that is going to continue forward, and we have got a long history behind us. That is darwinistic in that it takes in the whole sweep of history. Frederick Jackson Turner thinks that way too. Let me tell you what he says in this ganbusterer article called the significance of the frontier on history. I am going to describe this and tell us why this fires people up. Then what i want to you do is cook up some label for this. I usually call this philosophical, but i am not really happy with. That it is not really philosophical, i dont think. But it is eaten up with darwinism and social darwinism too. What turner says is that if you look back through American History from the very beginning, from the puritan days, if you look back throughout American History, and you sort of look at a map ere people live, there has always been a frontier line between what people thought of as civilization and what people of the f as the wilds world. There has always been a line of demarcation between civilization, boston, philly, pittsburgh, whatever, and the frontier. And people knew it. People knew where it was. It was always there, ok . And the thing about it was it represented something formative in the american character. , the esence of a frontier presence of the frontier determined american characters throughout time because the frontier did sort of two things. The frontier was where you could go to start over again. If everything went wrong, if everything just fell apart, you could go to the frontier and remake yourself. There are a bunch of stories sort of wrapped up with like Andrew Jackson is sort of replete with this. He is born in north carolina, and he winds up going to tennessee and making his fortune. The same way with andrew johnson. Born in rawley, and then he runs off to tennessee and he becomes a political figure in tennessee. The frontier was always thispresent place that if you screwed everything up royally, i could go out there. It doesnt matter if i think this is right or not. People then thought it was spot on accurate. It made us more willing to take risks. The other thing is, and i have mentioned this a couple of times. This has to do with social darwinism. The presence of the frontier made us rugged and tough. The frontier was where you could go to prove yourself. The frontier was where you could go to get away from the luxuries of life in 1824. You could go to the frontier and chop out trees, no one would do it for you. If you went to the frontier you better take care of yourself or you will be in a world of trouble. You have to go out there and chop down trees and build a log cabin. You have to wrestle bears or whatever. Tough or you be will be destroyed on the frontier. Remember the bit about rugged individualism . Turner says this is where we learned as a society to value rugged individualism. You dont learn to be tough and rugged in a drawing room in philadelphia. That is not tough. Daniel boone, davey crockett, these frontier people. Give them that. This is good. Given that turner begins looking at census data, he says that every 10 years the u. S. Does the census. Every 10 years they could plot on a map where people live. Every 10 years you could see just as clear as day probably on a map that is bigger than this, you could see a frontier line. The frontier is not just an abstraction, it is a line, it is on a map. You go to here and say if i take one step over i am crossing the frontier. It goes west every year. Remember dime novels and westerns . This plays into that. Then, the census of 1890 happens. I will talk about two different years in the census when we are in here together. Not today. Today is 1890. The other bigshot census is 1920. This is the first one. Turner says the census of 1890 shows there is not a frontier line anymore. This is a really big deal. There is not a frontier line anymore. You could now get on the train in boston and you could go all the way across the continent and you could get off the train in San Francisco and you have never crossed the frontier. It will be telegraph lines the whole way. It will be steel rails the whole way. It will be General Stores the whole way. He says the frontier has closed. It is gone, it has disappeared. It cannot come back. Listen to this. With the closing of the frontier, a chapter of the a chapter in American History has ended. Then you think ok, what next . And turner says, i dont know what next. What i do know is this, this is when the angst starts to build up if you are listening to him talk. I know that are you listening . Are which made us what we is gone. That which made us tough, rugged individuals, that is gone. What do we do . That is for you to worry about. He says, i am a historian, not a futurist. Prophet. All i know is what i could see from history. I will tell you what. If you are a social darwinist, you will sort of be upset by this. If you are somebody who has been looking for a chance to kick back and put your feet up then you are ok. If you are one who says send me says hand me ao bag of potato chips. Up. Your feet if there is not a frontier line it absolves you from doing a bunch of stuff. I would go to the frontier, but there is not one anymore. I missed it. Too bad. This is when somebody like Theodore Roosevelt comes into the picture. Theodore roosevelt would read turners idea. He would say weve got to find a new frontier. We have to find a new frontier. We cant kick it back and be lazy now. If you remember the competitive nature of social darwinism. The world works that way, too. Nations are socially darwinistic. There was a speech he gave in 1899. It is like he read turner and went to give this speech. He says, the 20th century looms before us large with the space of many nations. Seek stand idly by, if we for ourselves merely slothful moreand ignoble peace, the energetic of the worlds nations will pass us by and sees for and see for themselves the mantle of true greatness. There is a long sort of story in here about luxury and selfgovernment and the strenuous life. You could go back in history. You could read people like james madison, a little bit of thomas jefferson. Every once in a while, you would pick up worries about luxury and selfgovernment not being compatible with each other. Luxuriousand us ness, laziness which bred complacency. You cease to be interested in the way the world works. You cease to be interested in how things are happening. I know you cannot imagine this all. We need a new frontier because that frontier is why we are who we are. Got it . If you know cultural history frontier,ase, a new rings through American History like a bell. John kennedy used it at some point and got a lot of traction, we need a new frontier. You dont have to be specific what it is. We need a frontier, where . I dont know, alaska maybe. Nobody has gone to alaska yet. Bears, the there are frontier. Space, the final frontier. The human heart, the depths of the ocean, we need a frontier, why . That is what shapes us. That is what shapes us. Right . That is what he is saying. This sort of forces our hand, right . If i am right about this, you have got to look someplace else. The future has to be out there. The hand in the back of the room is saying you are going to need the navy. [laughter] then you have Andrew Carnegie saying we could sell things on the new frontier. It all flows together. So far, so good . Going back to the navy, would that help the economy at all because they have something to produce . Prof. Smith that is a good question. Would a new navy help the economy . Absolutely. It will especially help the steel industry. The kind of ships we are going to build in the new navy are very different. They are steel ships. A while, the worry was there werent any steel factories that could make the steel the navy needed for armored ships. The first few ships of the new navy were steel but they were not armored. A lot of the people in the Navy Department said we really cant sure thentil we can be u. S. Steel industry can keep up with what we want. The u. S. Steel industry said you order the ships and we will keep up with it. That is such a good question. That is such a good way of tying these things together. The construction of the new navy was an economic boom for a lot of places. Jake . Student does that affect the stock market crash . Is that helping or hurting that . Helpingith it is not that yet. The stock market moved a little bit more slowly back then. The moves werent as big as they have been recently. Ultimately, it will. Ultimately it will help the Steel Companies be more secure and be a better investment and people will invest in the stock market. We will come back it will come back up again. By the end of the decade, the depression is over and it has rebounded and the economy is growing for a couple of reasons we can talk about later. So far, so good . Anything else . Ok. Shift gears entirely. The people we have been talking about, chances are would not have read the book by josiah butng called our country, a lot of people did. He wrote this doozy in 1885. Theres a lot in this book that you would read today and think of a not. Guy is kind it is a diagnosis of what is wrong and 1885. Theres too much money, too much greed, too much labor unions. You name it. Too much whiskey. Hes against a lot of stuff. I cant think of a book that is more different than mahan. This reason the look at history. Our country is this panic about the country is falling apart. Weve got to fix it. But tied up in it, if you could manage to get to the end of it and read one of the last chapters, he talks about the spread of christianity in the world. Think, thisit, you is coming. I know where he is going with this. Basically his penultimate chapter says that if you look back over history, there has always been one people that carried the christian gospel to the world. And now, it has fallen to the it. Icans to do kind of a big deal. The british did it for a while. Iss is this whole, the torch being passed to a new carrier kind of thing. And strong, who is convinced ist the lack of godliness behind a lot of troubles, says more s need to become what would the world be . Evangelical. Americans need to go and spread the gospel now. The british have done all that they could do. There is a little bit of a darwinistic trajectory in this. This coincides with a flowering of missionary work in american churches. Especially American Protestant churches like baptist and methodist. They go all into missionary work in the 1890s. One of the things that has happened, and i am not a medical person so i cant get into the way this really evolves, but one of the things that has happened is they are getting close to a cure to a treatment if not a cure for some pretty ravaging diseases that were considered tropical. Yellow fever, malaria. They are getting close to out how to treat it, so going to the tropics is no longer seen as a death sentence to people who are not from the tropics. The notion is you could go to places like equatorial africa or south asia, or south america and the caribbean and hope to live to tell the tale. And then came christian missionaries. I think this is probably the movement that influences the greatest number of people. Purefewer numbers just numbers. You know why i think that, in part . Because you can go to almost any Little Church in any midsize house that was around in dig1890s and you could through their records and find pictures of missionaries that look just like you. You could be looking through the old scrapbook with yellowed pages and pull out the back and white photograph of a guy in a nice suit. Williams, missionary to rhodesia. Student [indiscernible] prof. Smith really . I have been waiting for you for 30 years. [laughter] 1970, is that right . He was a descendent of these people. Im glad you told me that. I have been using that for decades as an example and no one has ever said anything about it. I could hang it up now. Maybe i will pick a new country. Anyway, imagine this. Imagine you are sitting in a pew at First Baptist waco. You are there every sunday and you sit in the same place because that is the way you do it. Then you notice that nice young couple who used to sit at the other end of the pew you havent , seen them for a while. You wonder what happened to them. Did the husband get kicked by a cow or whatever . You work up the nerve to ask what happened to those nice people that sat at the end of the row . She wore the green dress and he was a nice guy. They became missionaries . Really, where . Rhodesia. [laughter] what was his name, edgar . Edgar and betty, rhodesia. When you are told that after the closing hymn on sunday morning, you are thinking about where you are going to lunch, and you answer it, rhodesia. Yeah, rhodesia. What you do after lunch, you run home what was it . Rhodesia. Good god, it is in africa they are in africa . Africa. And then guess what . You know know somebody in africa. And of course bob and what are their names . Edgar and betty. They become best friends, i have best friends in africa. Then from the pulpit, and from sunday school we have to pray for our missionaries in rhodesia. What were their names . We dont remember but they were that nice couple. We got a letter from them last week. This is all going down at a Little Church in a little town in the middle of texas. Right . Suddenly, everybody in this congregation knows somebody in southCentral Africa. And the world gets that much smaller. The little kids in sunday schools, they save their pennies , they take up mission offerings for our missionaries in rhodesia. They grow up thinking Central Africa is not that far away because people from our church go there. Cures orlike the treatments to people who needed it . Prof. Smith no, not really. I guess if we couldve equipped them with vials of malaria serum, they would have gladly taken them, but that might have been a little bit beyond our capability. If they get sick, yes. They are taking the gospel. They are sharing the gospel. That is what it is. Missionary work tended to be a little more gospel centered, bible centered, then humanitarian centered. We will get to humanitarians in a minute. That is a good question. Anybody else . Now you know somebody in rhodesia. What happens after they have ,een gone a year or 18 months if you are in a church, you know this. They come by and have a bunch of stories to tell. You have dinner on wednesday night and you listen to them. It goes on and on, and they have a Powerpoint Presentation or the 1890s version of a Powerpoint Presentation. Here is a sketch i made of the village. Then, you could be a missionary, too. They still need help. This is going on all over the country. Suddenly you have i dont hundredw the number, thousand, one Million People who are thinking about what americans can do in southCentral Africa. It is hard to get across the magnitude of this today. Because the thing is, if i ask how many of you have been to africa, i wouldnt be surprised if half of you raise your hands. In theyou asked that 1890s or 1880s, nobody wouldve. I could probably find it on a map. That is good but maps make things alien. Being there or knowing somebody who has been there makes it real. The whole phrase make the world death, has been done to but that is what it was like in the 1890s. And if the world is smaller, you care about it more. You are more interested in it. You can imagine the roles you could play in it. That changes the way americans look at their place in the world. That is looking outward. And then and you sort of hinted at this what if you are not necessarily religious . What if you just want to do good . What if you want to spread messes and spread medicine . What if you just want to take the blessings of modern society to places that are without the blessings of modern society . You are reading that book about electricity, what about electricity . The light . We are always a little bit hesitant. We dont like to talk about primitive and advanced, we dont like to put things on that kind of spectrum. But in the 1890s, people didnt have any hesitation to do that. And they talked about the obligation. And i dont know if this exists, but i know they meant it. The obligation advanced societies have to help primitive societies. Electricity and sound,aphs, recorded nickelodeons take them dime novels slide intoily you that . We have this great stuff. We need to help people. We need to go forth like nonreligious missionary work. A lot of this went on. And as you could imagine, the Christian Missionary impulse enervating a lot of people and really getting them fired up. This humanitarian impulse affects other people too. If you are not interested in evangelicalism, what about medicine . What about cocacola . You had this, this gazing upon a map, imagining people you can help. Right . Exploitation, sorrow, trouble that you could alleviate. And look, if you are against this, im talking to you. Because you could help people. Student had the economy already gotten better . I imagine it would be expensive to go to africa, and with everyone losing jobs. Prof. Smith thats a good question. If everybody at the church is unemployed, they will not send you to africa. I dont know. All i know is it must not have been that big of the barrier, because i know what happened. Whether the economy is rebounding to allow this to happen or whether or not the depression was i dont know how many people in waco felt the depression of the 1890s. I know the Big Companies did but i dont know if the people here did. I know there was enough to send missionaries to places like that. That is a good question. I will see if i can come across the answer, if you remind me at some point. So far, so good . If you want to help, if you want to do good, if you are looking for people that need american assistance, you dont have to look very far. You only have to look 90 miles off the coast of florida. You only have to look down to the island of cuba in the caribbean to find people who are under the heel of an imperialist power. There has been a Cuban RevolutionaryIndependence Movement firing up in cuba off and on for a while now. Cuba is part of spain. Part of the spanish empire. It is part of the spanish empire it used to go from Northern California all the way to sierra dell fuego. That is a lot of land. Over the centuries that has shrunk and shrunk until now it is cuba and puerto rico. And spain does not want to let them go. The cuban revolution would flare up and the spanish army would come to cuba and crush it. A couple years later it would flare up again and the spanish would crush it. They started to put into effect these relocation camps. They would gather people from the countryside and put them in camps to isolate them from the rebels. Then the newspapers in america started covering this really diligently. They found out there was a readership in new york especially that was fascinated. You wind up with a particular kind of journalism that came out of this, a journalism that is comfortably labeled yellow journalism